GROWING UP CATHOLIC
Saint Cecilia’s Parish is a vibrant Roman Catholic community that has been witnessing to the Faith on French Hill since 1900. Our towering gothic Church is the largest in Worcester County. It was built by Canadian immigrants during the Great Depression and was completed in 1933. Its towers reach 227 feet and can be seen for miles around.
(from St. Cecilia’s website)
When I grew up in the fifties, in a very French Canadian and very Catholic neighborhood in Leominster, Mass., there was no gnashing of teeth about whether or not there was a God. We took it to be. On blind faith. The first question and answer in the Baltimore Catechism was: “Who made us?” Answer: “God made us.” As sure as the sun would rise in the morning, we all went to Mass on Sunday. We received the sacraments, from baptism to the last rites. We confessed our sins once a month, refrained from eating meat on Friday, and walked around with smudged cross-marked foreheads on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.
Our enormous cathedral-sized church, St. Cecilia’s, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, was built on the nickels and dimes of our parents and grandparents. It was packed every Sunday, every Mass, men in coats and ties, women in obligatory hats or veils, and children wearing their freshly polished Sunday shoes. Masses were in Latin; the gospel and homily delivered in French. Midnight Mass, on Christmas Eve, was standing room only.
We attended the parish school, K through Eight. Thirty to fifty kids per class, taught by The Daughters of the Holy Ghost (later changed to The Daughters of the Holy Spirit).
On the first day of school, I was utterly terrified and incredulous that my mother would submit —no, abandon— me to this foreign experience known as school. I thought, “What have I done to deserve this?” Forced from the comfort and safety of my home, thrust into a crowded room of fifty or so other children whom I did not know, led by a nun in a white habit accented by a thick black belt from which hung a rope of grape-size rosary beads nearly touching the floor. The kindergarten classroom was in the dark foreboding convent. I suspect the house Anthony Perkins's character occupied in the movie Psycho was modeled after the convent. It stood apart from the yellow brick building housing the upper-grade students. Slate blackboards covering two sides of the room did not help brighten the cheerless setting. For reasons I still don’t understand, the rows of freshly varnished wood desks and chairs on black steel legs, firmly bolted to the creaky oak floor, were in pairs, butted together side by side. As I think about it, it might have been to accommodate the large number of students in a room that was smaller than the upper-level classes. I don’t know why I remember that or what the significance of that detail is, other than every other class in the upper-level school had rows of similar desks lined up single file.
I found the whole concept of being crowded together with a pack of strange kids totally perverse. Mid-morning they finally sprung us from that prison of a classroom, and I couldn’t get home fast enough—back to the safety of a familiar setting.
In those days it wasn’t unusual for kids, five-year-olds included, to walk to school, three blocks away. The problem was that I did not yet understand the concept of recess, so it was with some alarm that my father (home since he worked nights) greeted me as I happily walked through the front door. “What are you doing home?” queried he. “School is over. They let us out.” I replied, with the smile of a prisoner released after serving a multi-year sentence. Despite my protest, he marched me back to finish out the day.
I hated school for reasons I don’t quite understand. Was it a frightening, unwelcoming environment? Was I so attached to my mother that I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving her side? I am often told by (obviously jealous) older sisters that my mother did spoil me. I do remember her delight when, as a toddler, I promised I would marry only her when I grew up.
Every morning, I cried and threw tantrums, to the dismay of my siblings, as I was sent off kicking and screaming to the convent on the far end of Third Street. I don’t ever remember enjoying school. It would be easy to blame it on intimidating nuns, The Daughters of the Holy Ghost, but they were not much different from how a cross-section of lay teachers might have been at that time in history.
One deep scar I carry to this day I attribute to my abject failure at the Palmer Method, a popular tool used to teach penmanship and cursive writing in the first half of the 20th century. There were strict instructions on how to hold a pen, a position that felt unfamiliar and unnatural.
From Wikipedia: “Palmer’s method involved "muscle motion" in which the more proximal muscles of the arm were used for movement, rather than allowing the fingers to move in writing.”
Along with a black wooden pen and a pointed steel nib, we were issued a bottle of one of the most terrifying liquids known to mothers responsible for cleaning school wardrobes: a desperately dark, indelible blue-black ink. I remember the nuns would roll up the sleeves of their pristine white habits to avoid stains while writing with the ink.
We were drilled in endless, joyless exercises. With wrist ordered locked, we pumped our pens up and down, piston-like, to create an interconnected mass of vertical lines across the width of the page. Then on the line below, we used a circular motion to lay down overlapping O’s—the first resembling a cross-section of man’s 1950s crew cut; and the latter, resembling coils of barbed wire atop a prison wall.
Too much ink on the nib produced small blobs that grew larger as they fell upon the cheap, absorbent paper. Or, too much pressure on the page, and the point would snag, producing a ragged tear. My efforts never measured up to the examples we followed, much to the displeasure of the sister looking over my shoulder, admonishing me to lock my wrist and stop using my fingers to move the pen.
Also from Wikipedia: “To educators, the method's advocates emphasized regimentation, and that the method would thus be useful in schools to increase discipline and character, and could even reform delinquents.”
Well, the Method may have saved me from reform school but, to this day, I tense up, barely able to control spasms in my writing hand, when asked to sign, say, a document or a copy of some imagined book while someone looks on.
The school had two paved schoolyards, one for boys and one for girls. A riot of play erupted in each yard. For the boys, it was swirling teams of Tag, You’re It, baseball card flipping, wooden tops being tossed and spun, and yo-yo-ing. For the girls, it was jump rope, patty cake, and more civilized group activities. Recess came to an end when a large brass bell in the hand of a nun clanged for all to freeze in place. A second sounding of the bell was the signal to form two lines, boys and girls for each class, no talking, at which point we would obediently file into our classrooms.
We held classroom fundraisers to save pagan babies. Boys vs. girls, prominently marked by two columns on a blackboard at the front of the class. First ones to raise five dollars won, along with the privilege of naming the adopted pagan baby. (One telling of this story I read said that when a group of boys won, they requested the baby be named Trigger, after Roy Rogers’ horse.)
My best friends, Bobby and Denis, lived across the street from us in a four-family house that their parents owned. Theirs was another staunchly French Catholic family, and it was a grave misstep to visit during the nightly radio broadcast of the rosary recited by Boston’s legendary Cardinal Cushing. I made the mistake once or twice of interrupting to ask if the boys could come out to play. I was invited—no, ordered—to join the ritual. The entire family—live-in grandmother, parents, and a gaggle of children—knelt around the kitchen table, hands folded, elbows resting heavily on the seats of kitchen chairs as they recited the rosary led by the unmistakable nasally monotone that was the voice of Cardinal Cushing. On a warm summer night, it was excruciating to be trapped in this sacramental hell. Time stood still; How many Hail Mary’s to go? Knees aching, eyes on the no nonsense mother of the house as her fingers marked her place on the beads of her rosary divided into five sets of ten. The Cardinal croaked out “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” And we, along with an unseen chorus of nuns on the radio, replied, “Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” As I write it now, it surprises me how short the prayer is, but to a ten-year-old it was agony, repeated fifty times, interspersed with five Our Fathers and a few other prayers delineating each set of ten Hail Marys. Repeated one after another, after another, causing time to seemingly stand still. Finally, the full rosary completed, we were allowed to go outside to play. You can bet that I never made that mistake again!
At seven years of age, we prepared for our First Communion. But before receiving communion, one had to be without sin and in a state of grace. So, we also prepared for our first confession, where we would tell our sins and receive a penance of several prayers for forgiveness. We learned there are two kinds of sins: venial and mortal. “You go to hell if you die with an unconfessed mortal sin on your soul.” That’s what Sister Lidwin, our first-grade teacher, said. Missing mass on Sunday, or killing someone, were mortal sins. I was in the clear on both counts there. Venial sins were a different matter. Talking back to your parents? Oh yeah, at least three times a week. Lying? Check. Just the other day, I had lied to my mother saying my homework was done so I could go out to play. Taking the Lord’s name in vain? Uh-huh. When a playmate refused to die while playing cowboys and Indians last week, I blurted out, “Jesus, Tommy, I got you, you’re dead!” Then there was the puzzling sin of touching oneself impurely. That one was a mystery until puberty set in.
A week before our First Communion, we marched into church as a class, took our place in two pews, and waited our turn to go into the confessional. The smell of burning votive candles and a faint remnant of incense permeated the air. The soaring cathedral columns, dimly lit by the pale light that shone through the gothic amber glass windows, dwarfed us. (Stained glass was not yet affordable to our blue-collar parishioners.) There was a wood door to the booth the priest occupied, framed on either side by heavy velour-curtained confessionals. While waiting my turn, I could hear faint, indistinguishable murmurs coming from the confessors and the priest. It was a rhythm of sounds and movement, a door sliding closed followed by one sliding open. An emerging confessor prompted us to slide down the bench as a replacement filled the empty confessional. My heartbeat quickened the closer I got to the end of the pew. I practiced the opening and closing prayers over and over in my head. “I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father, that I have sinned. This is my first confession.”
I had my litany of sins all lined up: “I disobeyed my parents, three times. I took the Lord’s name in vain, one time. I lied to my mother, one time.” A repentant confessor emerged, and another took her place. Like a ball sliding down the rack of an arcade Skee-Ball game I slid closer to the end of the bench. Remember the closing prayer: “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You. And umm? I detest all my sins because I dread the loss of Heaven and the pains of hell.” Another kid stepped out. “But most of all because they offend You, my God, Who are all good and deserving of all my—” Hey, Was that Richard Meunier? He was in and out in a flash. And I know he had plenty of sins to confess. “Who are all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of Your grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasions of sin. Amen."
Finally, the moment arrived. I pulled back the heavy drape, stepped inside, and knelt. All was dark but for a sliver of light creeping around the edge of the curtain. I could hear the muffled sounds of the priest talking, then a muted sound of the door sliding shut on the other confessor and the very clear, crisp sound of the door sliding open to my side. Through a heavy screen I could see a dim profile of the priest, chin propped on his left hand, leaning towards me to hear my confession. And. I. Froze. For the life of me, I could not remember what to say. My mind was as dark as the musty-smelling booth in which I knelt. Time stood still. The priest, Father H (I remember his name six decades later), grew impatient and growled at me to begin. My heart pounded—mouth opened, but no sound came out. When Father H got no response, he flung open his door, rushed out, and whipped open the curtain of the confessional angrily yelling, “What is wrong with you? Are you stupid?”
That’s where my memory of the trauma fizzles out. But I need a better ending. How about my recent fantasy response while lying awake one night recounting the terror and humiliation as my classmates, waiting their turn, looked on? “Hey Father, why don’t you stop acting like a bully and help a poor kid out?”