10
IT WAS MY mother who decided I would be a priest. I heard this starting early in my childhood. It was the greatest vocation one could hope for in life. There was no greater glory for a mother than to “give her son to the Church.” There was a mother in our congregation at St. Patrick’s, Mrs. Wuellner, who had given two sons to the Church, Fathers Frank and George, and these two good men came once to visit us at our home, possibly to inspire me.
My father, raised as a Lutheran, attended St. Patrick’s only on such occasions as midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. I remember sitting in a front pew with my First Communion class and noticing Father McGinn glancing toward the back of the church. I became convinced that my father was sitting down when he should be standing up, or otherwise indulging in disgraceful non-Catholic behavior, and I wanted to turn around but didn’t dare.
My father stayed out of it. On most Sundays he stayed at home. He explained this gave him a chance to read the Sunday funnies before I wanted them. That seemed to me an excellent reason for staying home. There was also the problem that he would lose his immortal soul, having been offered the opportunity for salvation through the Church and renouncing it. I remember an occasion when my mother, briefing me in the kitchen, deployed me into the living room to pray on my knees beside his chair, beseeching heaven for his conversion. My father was a good sport about this and thanked me. He said he needed some time to think it over.
In my childhood the Church arched high over everything. I was awed by its ceremonies. Years later I agreed with Pauline Kael when she said that the three greatest American directors of the 1970s—Scorsese, Altman, and Coppola—had derived much of their artistic richness from having grown up in the pre–Vatican II era of Latin, incense, mortal sins, indulgences, dire sufferings in hell, Gregorian chant, and so on. Jews likewise had inspiring ceremonies. Protestants were victims of sensory deprivation.
The parish priest was the greatest man in the town. Our priest was Father J. W. McGinn, who was a good and kind man and not given to issuing fiery declarations from the pulpit. Of course in Catholic grade school I took the classes for altar boys. We learned by heart all the Latin of the Mass, and I believe I could serve Mass to this day. There was something satisfying about the sound of Latin.
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Ad Deum qui laitificat juventutem meum.
“I will go to the altar of God. The God who gives joy to my youth.” There was a “thunk” to the syllables, measured and confident, said aloud the way they looked. We learned in our altar boy classes when you stood during the Mass. When you knelt. When you sat during the reading of scripture and the sermon. When you rang the bell, when you brought the water and wine. How to carefully hold the paten under the chins of communicants so a fragment of Holy Eucharist would not go astray. Later, there were dress rehearsals at the St. Pat’s altar.
For years I served early Mass one morning a week, riding my bike to church and then onward to St. Mary’s for the start of the school day. On First Fridays, the Altar and Rosary Society supplied coffee, hot chocolate, and sweet rolls in the basement of the rectory. When you served at a wedding, the best man was expected to tip you fifty cents. When you served at a funeral you kept a very straight face. During Lent there were the stations of the cross, the priest and servers moving around the church to pause in front of artworks depicting Christ’s progress toward Calvary. Walking from one station to the next, we intoned the verses of a dirge.
At the cross, her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,
Close to Jesus to the last.
I enjoyed the procession around the walls of the church, the sweet smell of the incense smoking in the censer as I swung it. Out of the corners of my eyes I could survey everyone in the church and exchange furtive grins with my pals, although I was supposed to be attending our symbolic progress through Christ’s sufferings.
I was never abused in any way by any priest or nun. One incident remains vivid to this day. When I was perhaps eight years old and new to serving Mass, my mind emptied one morning and I made a mess of it. When we returned to the sacristy, I burst into tears. “I’m sorry, Father!” I sobbed, and Father McGinn sat down and took me on his lap and comforted me, telling me that God understood and so did he. Today, tragically, the idea of an altar boy on a priest’s lap has only alarming connotations. On that day Father McGinn was only being kind, and I felt forgiven.
My mother continued with her assumption that I would become a priest. There were times when I wondered if she had only given me birth for the high purpose of “giving me to the Church.” When I was thirteen, I was sent for a three- or four-day retreat at a seminary run by the Diocese of Peoria. We boys were to be given a glimpse of the training ahead of us. I remember two things in particular: A fiery version of a sermon I believe was then known to all Catholic boys, with a lurid description of the unimaginable torments of infinite duration awaiting any boy who committed the sin of impurity. And then an interlude after lunch where we sat on the grass and chatted with actual seminarians, who were older and casually smoked as they discussed vocations, ours and theirs.
I was already a little smartass, and asked my seminarian: “If hell is the way they describe it, how can the punishment for impurity be worse than the punishment for anything else?” The seminarian smiled condescendingly. “The notion of levels of hell comes from Dante,” he said. “He was a great poet but an amateur theologian. See, that’s the sort of thing we study.” I remember the sermon, the conversation with the seminarian, and only one more detail from my life as a seminarian: I came down with some insignificant complaint, maybe a fever, and spent a night in the infirmary listening to my portable radio and hearing Patti Page sing “Tennessee Waltz.” It must have been June. The light lasted long, the windows stood open, a lazy breeze drifted in, I was in the only occupied bed, I was in early adolescence, and the song summoned confused feelings of regret for experiences I stood on the brink of having. Patti Page sang of a song that took her sweetheart from her. I was that sweetheart.
I was a voracious reader in grade school and early on began to question the logic of the faith. To be informed it was necessary for me to just simply believe was not satisfactory. Some things just didn’t make any sense. If God was perfect, I reasoned, how could he create anything that contradicted his creation? This conclusion, reached in grade school, was later to lead me like an arrow to the wonderful theory of evolution. We were not taught creationism in grade school, and I learned that the Church was quite content to get along with Darwin. The questions that plagued me didn’t have to do with science but with fairness. If you committed a mortal sin, it might depend on sheer chance whether you would get the opportunity to confess it before you died. Why had God, who was all-powerful, devised this merciless moral mechanism for his creatures? He created paradise and in no time at all his very first humans, Adam and Eve, did something that made perfect sense to me. I would have eaten the apple myself. Now humankind was condemned forever to the prospect of hell. Did hell even exist before there were people to occupy it? If only the fallen angels lived there, why didn’t God in his infinite mercy choose to keep us someplace handy where he could encourage our rehabilitation? And who dreamed up the system of indulgences, even plenary indulgences, which reminded me uneasily of Get Out of Jail Free cards? The Church began to resemble a house of cards; remove only one and the walls fell.
At some point soon after my discovery of Playboy magazine I began to live in a state of sin, because I simply could not bring myself to confess certain transgressions to a priest who knew me and could see me perfectly well through the grid of the confessional. Logically I was choosing eternal torment over a minute’s embarrassment. This choice was easy for me. When I saw Harvey Keitel placing his hand in the flame in Mean Streets, I identified with him. The difference between us was that long before I reached the age of Charlie in the film, I had lost my faith. It didn’t make sense to me any longer. There was no crisis of conscience. It simply all fell away. I remained a cultural Catholic, which I interpret as believing in the Social Contract and the Corporal Works of Mercy. I didn’t believe then, and don’t believe now, that it is easy to subscribe to the teachings of the Church and not consider yourself a liberal.
I got my driving license and my first car at sixteen. By then I was working for the News-Gazette and came home at two a.m. after helping put the Sunday paper to bed and stopping off with Hal Holmes and Bill Lyon at Mel Root’s restaurant across from the courthouse in Urbana. This was my excuse to sleep late and go to a later Mass than my mother. What I did instead was buy the Chicago papers and read them while parked in my car in Crystal Lake Park.
In high school, I was taking Latin at my mother’s insistence. She said I would need it when I eventually got my vocation. Mrs. Link, our Latin teacher, was a cutie who wore smart tailored suits and high heels, and her classes were elegant performances. In diction and wit, she was like a crisp movie star, and we regarded her with wonder. I never told my mother I wouldn’t become a priest, but she got the idea. Even after starting work in Chicago, I never found the nerve, when we were visiting, to not attend Sunday Mass with her. She knew well enough those were the only times I went to church. What I was doing, I suppose, was going through the motions to respect a tradition that was more important to her than to me. She believed in the faith until the hour of her death. She was buried from St. Patrick Church, and I tipped the altar boys.