Living Out Loud (24 page)

D
ominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo
. These are my bona fides: a word, a phrase, a sentence in a language no one speaks anymore.
Kyrie eleison. Confiteor dei
. I am a Catholic. Once at a nursing home for retired clergy, I ate lunch with a ninety-year-old priest, a man who still muttered the Latin throughout the English Mass and ate fish on Fridays. When he learned how old I was, he said with some satisfaction, “You were a Catholic when being a Catholic still meant something.”

What does it mean now? For myself, I cannot truly say. Since the issue became material to me, I have not followed the church’s teaching on birth control. I disagree with its stand on abortion. I believe its resistance to the ordination of women as priests is a manifestation of a misogyny that has been with us much longer than the church has. Yet it would never have occurred to my husband and me not to be married in a Catholic church, not to have our children baptized.
On hospital forms and in political polls, while others leave the space blank or say “none of your business,” I have no hesitation about giving my religion.

We are cultural Catholics. I once sneered at that expression, used by Jewish friends at college, only because I was not introspective enough to understand how well it applied to me. Catholicism is to us now not so much a system of beliefs or a set of laws but a shared history. It is not so much our faith as our past. The tenets of the church which I learned as a child have ever since been at war with the facts of my adult life. The Virgin Birth. The Trinity. The Resurrection. Why did God make me? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next. I could recite parts of the Baltimore Catechism in my sleep. Do I believe those words? I don’t know. What I do believe are those guidelines that do not vary from faith to faith, that are as true of Judaism or Methodism as they are of Catholicism: that people should be kind to one another, that they should help those in need, that they should respect others as they wish to be respected.

And I believe in my own past. I was educated by nuns, given absolution by priests. My parents were married in a Catholic church, my grandparents and mother buried from one. Saturday afternoons kneeling on Leatherette pads in the dim light of the confessional, listening for the sound of the priest sliding back the grille on his side. Sunday mornings kneeling with my face in my hands, the Communion wafer stuck to the roof of my dry mouth. These are my history. I could no more say I am not Catholic than say I am not Irish, not Italian. Yet I have never been to Ireland or Italy.

Some of our Jewish friends have returned to the ways of their past, to Shabbat without automobiles and elevators, to dietary laws and the study of Hebrew. We cannot do the same. There is no longer a Latin Mass, no Communion fast from midnight
on. Even the inn is gone from the Bible; now Mary and Joseph are turned away from “the place where travelers lodged.”

The first time my husband and I went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve in our parish church, we arrived a half-hour early so we would get a seat. When the bells sounded twelve and the priest came down the center aisle, his small acolytes in their child-size cassocks walking before him, the pews were still half empty. We were thinking of a different time, when the churches were packed, when missing Mass was a sin, when we still believed that that sort of sin existed—sins against rules, victimless sins.

There are more families coming to that church now, families like us with very small children who often have to leave before the Gospel because of tears, fatigue, temper tantrums. (I remember that, when I was growing up, my family’s parish church was shaped like a cross, and one of the short arms was for the women with babies. It had a sheet of glass walling it off and was soundproof. And through the glass you could see the babies, as though in a movie with no audio, their little mouths round, their faces red. Inside that room, the noise was dreadful. But missing Mass was a sin.)

I think perhaps those families are people like us, people who believe in something, although they are not sure what, people who feel that in a world of precious little history or tradition, this is theirs. We will pass down the story to our children: There was a woman named Mary who was visited by an angel. And the angel said, “Do not be afraid” and told her that though she was a virgin she would have a child. And He was named Jesus and was the Son of God and He rose from the dead. Everything else our children learn in America in the late twentieth century will make this sound like a fairy tale, like tales of the potato famines in Ireland and the little ramshackle houses with grape arbors on hillsides in Italy. But these are my fairy tales, and so, whether or not they are fact, they are true.

I was born a Catholic and I think I will die one. I will ask for a priest to give me Extreme Unction, as it was given to my mother, and to her mother before her. At the end, as in the beginning, I will ask for the assistance of the church, which is some fundamental part of my identity. I am a Catholic.

T
he most compelling question of my girlhood was whether nuns had hair. Occasionally, when we were taken by Mother Thérèse to the yard beside the school, as we eddied about her long black legless skirts in our duffle coats and saddle shoes, a strong wind would lift the heavy black serge of her veil, and one of us—that day’s celebrity—would glimpse a strand or two at the nape of her neck. For days we would conjecture whether it was merely the popular pixie cut under there, or whether her entire scalp had been shaved and what we had seen was just an oversight. A few girls of a Jesuitical turn of mind suggested that perhaps she had hair just like ours and that it was braided or pinned up. No one ever took them very seriously.

The nuns were, with the exception of my family and one or two fast friends, the most important force in my formative years. It is popular
now to think of them as a joke or an anachronism, to suggest that the nuns taught little more than that a well-placed ruler hurt like the dickens and that boys were only after one thing, but that was not what I learned from them at all. I learned that women were smart and capable, could live in community together without men, and in fact did not need men much.

I am sure that being under the constant sway of human beings living in a state of enforced employment and chastity must have had some blacker reverberations, and I know the nuns attached too much value to our being well behaved, to sitting with backs straight and hands folded. But today it is the good things I remember. I suspect, deep down, that some of those women turned me into a feminist. I wonder what they would think of that? For the nuns were intelligent, most of them, and they seemed in charge. The place where they lived smelled of furniture polish and horsehair-stuffed brocade and reeked of order, and if in the morning there was chalk on their simple yet majestic habits, by afternoon it was gone.

I attended Catholic school just as the sovereignty of the church over the lives of its citizens was beginning, very slowly, to crumble. It was still a time when the Roman Catholic son who chose the priesthood beat the one who went to medical school hands down, when a Catholic daughter chose habitual pregnancy or the convent. Often it was the brightest and the most ambitious who took the latter course, which offered, in some orders, the opportunity for education and advancement. But it must have also seemed an attractive life when faced with the alternatives. I know that what I found most seductive about the convent was the place itself. Growing up in and among families where children—in various stages of undress, distress, and toilet training—outnumbered adults, I thought it was a
place of wonderful peace and quiet. There were no fingerprints on the mahogany table tops.

My recollection is that the woman who founded the order that taught me, a somewhat upper-crusty group that ran private rather than mere parochial schools, had even been a wife and mother and had thrown it over for the convent. The story was that her husband decided he had a calling for the priesthood and somehow got a dispensation to follow it despite a sizable family, and his wife then decided to enter religious life. He changed his mind—that’s men for you—but she refused to change hers. When I was a schoolgirl, the founder was being pushed very heavily for sainthood. No mixed messages in that story. The religious life was a higher way.

Nuns seemed sure of themselves. Perhaps, in order to style oneself a bride of Christ, self-confidence must be part of the costume. It was not their supremacy but their vulnerability that we found most disturbing. On those rare occasions when Mother Thérèse wept, it seemed to me that a certain surety in life disappeared. It occurs to me now, of course, that she was high-strung, quite young, and very pretty, and that seventh grade combined with poverty, chastity, and obedience must have been heavy going. And we often gave her good reason to cry.

I never heard a word about sex from the nuns. I learned that clunker about patent-leather shoes reflecting up from a fat girl who had older sisters when both of us were in fifth grade. There were only two kinds of men I ever saw the sisters with: the priests, upon whom they danced attendance with an air both deferential and slightly flirtatious, and our fathers, who were either hangdog and very proper, or embarrassingly jovial and jokey. I know now that the sisters were in masculine thrall, both to Rome and to various philanthropists, relying on one for the rules by which they lived and the other for the money and
the clothes and the house in which to do the living. But it seemed to me that they took good care of themselves.

I always thought the nuns were somehow sterner and less warm with the boys than with the girls, although my husband says he had a teacher who thought the girls were second-rate because they could never become priests. And there was always one—I remember mine as vividly as if she were glaring over the top of this page, hissing, “Miss Quindlen, is that you whispering in the back of my classroom?”—who was mean and angry and sadistic. But most of them were like Sister Mary Luke, tall, pale, her enfolding embrace exaggerated by her uniform capelet, who was wonderful with playground spills and played a mean game of volleyball; or Mother Mary Ephrem, who made me learn a new, arcane word from the dictionary every day of eighth grade so that someday I would be doing precisely what I am doing now.