Blue Sky Dream (10 page)

Yes, but could the same Catholic God be found if one lived in prefabricated paradise? Would the same Catholic God be there?

That was a popular question in 1960, the year my mother set about answering it, the year we moved to the Valley of Heart’s Delight. There were, for example, the intellectuals who assumed God dead, murdered by scientific rationalism. They wondered if anyone as modern as an aerospace family could go on believing in Him. And, too, there was the Catholic leadership, whose American Church had thrived in the cities’ ethnic enclaves. They nervously watched to see if suburban soil would prove as fertile. All of them were very interested in my mother, the Catholic daughter of Rock Island who had gone and married a Protestant Lockheed engineer and now was moving into a brand-new subdivision in Northern California. Could her God withstand the pleasant weather, the booming economy, the faith in progress, the willed rootlessness that drew a generation like her to such places?

My mother, for one, did not see why not.

She did not see why her children could not be raised to be believing Catholics in a space-age cul-de-sac, could not be taught
to say without hesitation:
God is everywhere. Even here. Especially here.

T
he Monsignor Irvin A. DeBlanc, who was at the time the director of the Family Life Bureau of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, had a word for the threat posed by my mother’s marriage to a Methodist. “Leakage,” was his term for what too often came of such unions, the dilution, the drying up of the Catholic way of life. Catholics marrying non-Catholics represented an outflow “much greater than the adult converts we are making every year,” Monsignor DeBlanc warned attenders of the Catholic Family Life Convention in San Antonio, Texas. His words found their way to our blue sky suburb via
The Monitor
, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, sold in foyers of churches throughout the region. On July 1, 1960, the day Monsignor DeBlanc’s thoughts on leakage appeared,
The Monitor
gave them its boldest headline: “Expert Sees U.S. ‘A Generation from Paganism.’ ”

If my mother saw that headline staring from a newspaper rack, she would have been in the foyer not of a church but of a gymnasium, for that is where she was attending Masses at the time, in the gym of Mother Butler Catholic High School for Girls in San Jose, California. The pews were folding chairs, the altar a linen-covered cafeteria table. The congregation of hundreds was made up, for the most part, of people like my mother, young Catholics following the future West. The local Mass was this one because a Catholic church to serve the area was still on the drawing boards, its intended site a plum orchard.

As soon as she and my father (with me three years old in the back seat) pulled into town in the green, tail-finned Ford that brought us from Springdale, Ohio, before the pictures of the Grand Canyon taken along the way were developed and even before the moving van showed up in the driveway of our rented
ranch house, my mother asked neighbors where a Catholic Mass could be found. She prayed in the gymnasium, that first Sunday, with me on her lap and her Protestant husband by her side.

This was in keeping with the understanding my mother had reached with my father as a condition of their marriage. The children would be raised Catholic; my mother, therefore, would head up the spiritual affairs of the household. My father, while unwilling to convert to Catholicism, otherwise had no quarrel. Already, he had let his Methodist inheritance lapse, preferring to place his faith in the provable methods that made jets fly and satellites orbit. “I don’t go to any church, anyway,” my mother remembers him saying, “so what difference does it make?” My mother saw in his words nothing to suggest the threat of leakage. She believed she had sealed an agreement to bring into this world more Catholics. She intended to introduce her children, however many there might be, to the Catholic God she worshipped.

This God was not the same as the scowlingly gothic God whose priests threatened hell to a working-class girl in Rock Island. That gothic God had not been much interested in worldly striving toward modernity.
Contemptus mundi
was a phrase He had enjoyed hearing his supplicants say since the Middle Ages. In Rock Island’s old Catholic churches, as it had been forever, He spoke through a hierarchy of chosen men whom He dressed in lace and gold filigree, priests who whispered the Mass with their faces to the wall while those in the pews looked on, silently mindful of their place at the bottom of the eternal chain of command.

My mother learned as a girl all the many rules laid down by the gothic God, the categories of sins to confess, the fastings at Lent and before every Holy Communion, the fact that a bad thought is recorded in heaven just as surely as an evil deed. My mother came to know the age-old Catholic lesson of complicity, the inescapableness of guilt. Guilt was the voice that said, “If you do this thing for yourself, you are not acting in service to others. You are selfish.” Guilt was the reminder that every selfish act sets
off a ripple of pain that connects somehow to all the misery on the planet, a ripple that reaches and pains and angers God Himself. Guilt, as wielded by a gothic God with contempt for this world, might well have prevented my mother from imagining herself raising a Catholic family with a Protestant husband on the California frontier.

She preferred, instead, to see her California life as an
answer
to her prayers, a blessing bestowed by a God shedding his gothic temperament in favor of the optimism of the times. It was my grandmother who provided her the first glimpse of this blue sky God. My grandmother, says my mother, differed from the official voice of the priests in that she was “a lighthearted Catholic,” the kind of Catholic who would burst out giggling in the middle of saying the Rosary with neighbors, who found it easier to give her faith to a merciful God with a sense of humor. My grandmother was a school teacher who spent many evenings tutoring an illiterate Italian couple down the street and many more evenings guiding her husband through the correspondence courses that finally earned him a high school diploma when a middle-aged father of three. In action and prayer, my grandmother made my mother imagine a God with a loving eagerness to see His children enjoy success in this world. This God, when my mother was eighteen, resided in a place called Marycrest, the new women’s college that stood on a bluff across the Mississippi overlooking Rock Island’s old churches. My mother was given a scholarship to attend Marycrest and learn from the Sisters of Humility the science of biology.

“We were serious,” says my mother about her best friends among the several hundred Marycrest students. “We thought we could do anything. And we were anxious to leave Rock Island for some place warmer.” She did not feel guilty about such aspirations, did not consider them selfishness, because the Sisters of Humility would not let her. They were “brilliant women” who believed in the freedom that education afforded women, a freedom that allowed my mother to graduate with her biology degree
and use it to land a hospital job in Corpus Christi where there were parties around swimming pools thrown by naval aviators with exciting prospects.

In the years just after moving to California, remembers my mother, she read
The Monitor
faithfully and for a time subscribed. (“A MUST in every Catholic home,” was the paper’s slogan.) Wanting a sense of what my mother would have heard the Church saying to her, I have gone to archived editions of
The Monitor
from those times. I have found on some pages the voice of the gothic God, the voice of a Monsignor DeBlanc. But far more often I find a Church advancing its claim on blue sky optimism.

Headline for June 17, 1960: “Catholic ‘Role’ Grows.” A sociologist at the University of Utah, reports
The Monitor
, finds that Catholics “are moving up into” what he calls “the ‘upper middle class,’ progress made possible because college training has replaced money ‘as the chief avenue of social mobility,’ because ethnic identification is becoming relatively unimportant and ‘spiritual ghettos’ are coming to an end.” That is why the “next 30 years will see Catholics taking larger and more important roles in U.S. life.”

Headline for July 29, 1960: “Vast Building Program Within Archdiocese.” The expansion of the Catholic infrastructure, “new churches, schools, convents, rectories and hospitals” makes for a list of names (St. This and Our Lady of That) taking up thirty column inches. My mother is in the company of so many fellow Catholics in this, one of the nation’s fastest growing regions, that church construction is of “staggering proportions.”

Headline for September 23, 1960: “Church Given Higher Rating For Efficiency.” Out of an optimal efficiency rating of 10,000 points, the American Institute of Management has awarded the Catholic Church 9010, up from five years before. The latest pope, John XXIII, is judged to have brought “ ‘a completely new spirit’ to the management of the Church,” combining strong leadership with an up-to-date belief in “the principles of delegation and decentralization.… All down the line there
has been a noticeable improvement in placing the right man in the right position of authority.”

Headline for August 19, 1960: “Polaris.” Beneath runs the opinion of a
Monitor
columnist who endorses the work of men like the one my mother has married, makers of blue sky weapons. “The story of such a weapon—the Navy’s Polaris missile—will be told this Sunday on ‘Our Catholic Heritage’ at 10:30
A
.
M
. over KGO-TV (Channel 7).… This column has pointed out before that a steady diet of ‘Red superiority’ propaganda can sap the American will to resist.… The world knows now—and especially the Communist world—that the Polaris weapons system is an unclenched fist about the throat of a would be aggressor. One move by him and the fist contracts instantly.”

Appearing in the July 1, 1960, edition, running in the left-hand column hard against the headline “Expert Sees U.S. ‘A Generation from Paganism,’ ” there is this other headline: “Democrats Will Pick Their Man.” Below are pictures of several well-known politicians, including John F. Kennedy, the handsome, young, and energetic Irish Catholic who will seek the presidential nomination later in the month.

In the May 11, 1962, edition, I find what I find in the back pages of most editions: pictures of new schools and churches rising in the suburbs. One of the pictures this time is of the just completed Queen of Apostles, the church that will be my mother’s and her family’s. The architecture is aggressively Modernist. Temples of all faiths being built in the region at the time tended to be aggressively Modernist, constructed, Corbusier might have said, as machines for worshipping in. Queen of Apostles is unpainted cinder blocks and red roof tiles, a stripped-down echo of Spanish mission with a cross-topped needle rising high above it. Inside, beams of laminated wood sweep up to support a wide, open ceiling of knotty pine. Behind the altar rises a rock wall and a huge crucified Christ. There are no stained-glass windows, no banks of votive candles, no grottoes with statues. The architects, according to
The Monitor
, say the genre of Queen of Apostles is “modern gothic.”

When the Valley’s ongoing aerospace invasion made another Catholic church necessary not many years later, the “gothic” was dropped altogether. The church erected a few miles from Queen of Apostles was round and filled with sunlight and abstract religious sculpture. It looked like a flying saucer and it was named Church of the Ascension.

N
ot long after Queen of Apostles opened its doors, my mother called its pastor, the Reverend Elwood Geary, to say, “Father, I can see the top of your steeple from my dining nook window.” Not long after that, Father Geary arrived at our doorstep to bless our tract home with sprinkles of holy water. A few years later, Queen of Apostles Grammar School opened for business with just over a hundred students, grades one through three, the other grades to be added, one per year, until there were eight. My mother made sure that I was among the first enrolled, a second grader in red sweater and clip-on tie and polished leather shoes, learning from nuns in black habits all the prayers my mother had learned as a child.

“O my God I am heartily sorry …” I would mumble as I paced the orange shag carpet in our living room, groping through the Act of Contrition the nuns had assigned me to memorize.

“For …?” Dad would prod from the couch, scanning the dittoed blue text, just as foreign to him, that I’d brought home.

“O my God I am heartily sorry for, uh, uhhhh … uh, oh.”

“For having offended Thee. From the top …”

Only when my father was satisfied that I would not embarrass the two of us was it time for me to recite the prayer to my mother, who would nod encouragingly as she ironed shirts or folded diapers or snapped Tupperware lids over leftovers. The next week it would be the Act of Faith or perhaps the Apostles’ Creed.

My mother assumed the task of making us not merely Catholic,
but Irish Catholic. Although at least half a dozen other European bloods mixed within us, she decided her children would be Irish like her dead father because, I think, all of the up sides to Irishness appealed to her. In inventing an ethnicity for us, she selected only Irish positives, giving us to understand that we were genetically impish and fun-loving, not unlike the leprechauns who lurked in the oleanders she’d just planted along our backyard fence. She made Patrick my middle name, although everyone in the family, by dint of our willed Irishness, was supposedly on special terms with the good St. Pat. Somewhere deep in her closet my mother kept a stash of green shamrocks and
Kiss Me! I’m Irish!
buttons that came out on St. Patrick’s Day; no child left for school without one pinned to his or her sweater. Like our Catholicness, this was an Irishness free from the scold of the Old World. Ethnicity need not bind one to outmoded tradition. Ethnicity, in this place scrubbed of cultures, was a flexible tool for the enhancement of personal identity.