SEVEN
Having been raised a part-time Roman Catholic as a child, when I have reason to visit a church, I must always deliberate, do I betray familiarity with custom or act as one ignorant
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Father So-and-So, who is now listed on the Bishop Accountability website of sex abusers, "Clergy Of Yakima Diocese Accused Of Abuse Of Minors During Ministry In Diocese (Abuse Considered To Be Substantiated)”.
Father. Bishop. Diocese. Churches are complex structures hierarchically. In the Roman Catholic Church, priests and deacons serve the bishops, who claim a transmission of power and authority through continuous apostolic succession from the original apostles of Jesus Christ who were sent out to preach the Jesus gospel to the world. A bishop serves a diocese and the diocese is further broken up into parishes, each served by a priest or priests who serve the bishop and the laity, “laity” being a word derived from the Greek for “the common people”, and though its use appears to date back to St. Clement and the first century, it’s a little more complex than that, as always, so I’ll just add that the only known “extant” literature left behind by Clement is one in which he affirms the principle of apostolic succession, then he was martyred by being tied to an anchor and thrown in the Black Sea, which is why he’s shown holding an anchor, and yet he is the patron of blacksmiths, because blacksmiths forge chains and anchors. A deacon can preside over the ritual of the Mass but is low tier Holy Order and can’t perform the sacramental rites of which there are seven: one’s initiation into the church, which is Baptism; Communion, which is the sharing of the bread and wine Holy Eucharist; the sealing of one to the church with the anointing of holy oil, which is Confirmation; Reconciliation, which is confessing all one’s sins and receiving absolution also called confession; the Anointing of the Sick, which used to be reserved for the dying but is now for very sick people as well so perhaps when the priest shows up at your bedside with the holy oil you won’t think, “There it is, I am certainly dead within the half hour”; Holy Orders, which is the sacred rite of ordination of bishops, priests, and deacons; and Marriage, which means you now have the divine stamp of approval on the having of sex and children, the nuptial blessing has sealed your consent to a love union or political alliance, whichever the case may be. However, unless both individuals have been baptized the marriage is not recognized as being a sacrament and if one of the parties is not Christian then a special dispensation must be granted in order to receive the blessing, yet if both are married in what is called the “natural” rather than “sacramental” state, neither being baptized or Christian, the couple and state cannot dissolve the marriage, that power only belongs to the Catholic Church. If a person’s not cockeyed by that last bit they’re not paying attention.
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May as well dip now into sexuality and the church. The RC would like us to know that sexual intercourse, which can only be had unsinfully in marriage, is not believed by the church to be only for the procreation of children, that it operates also as an expression of conjugal love, two become one flesh, which is symbolic of the love between God and all his children. But, while sexual intercourse is not sinful within marriage, it is sinful and forbidden to practice birth control or to sexually engage in any way apart from sexual intercourse between a man and woman, because to do so “frustrates” the natural expectation of procreation inherent in the act of intercourse, for which reason every act of non-procreative sex is sinful, such as masturbation, and contraceptives are unnatural and sinful, even coitus interruptus, because these assert the human will for non-generative sex over God’s will for procreation, and yet it is okay to confine sexual intercourse to when fertility is unlikely as it is a God-willed natural part of a woman’s cycle, and sexual intercourse after menopause is all right, and infertile people can have sex within marriage as it is unitive, an expression of love. Perhaps the reasoning behind some of this is the Biblical story of Sarah and Abraham, and that if Sarah could become pregnant when she was ninety years of age, when she and Abraham despaired of her ever conceiving, then sexual intercourse is always an act signifying God’s will toward procreation even when seemingly impossible and that God-ordained purpose is not to be thwarted, or wasted, thus onanism is evil, which we know because God said Onan was evil for having practiced coitus interruptus and so God killed him. I don’t know.
The offices of priests, deacons and bishops have been pretty well set since about the second century CE, predating the Nicene Creed of 325 (“We believe…”) that codified the essential elements of Christianity after Constantine (“the Great”, Roman emperor from 306 to 337) granted Christians the right to worship openly and freely in 312 CE. The set-in-stone version of the Apostles’ Creed (“I believe…”) that likely began in the first or second centuries as a brief statement of belief, was recorded as the Roman Creed in 341, forty years before Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, then found its slightly longer modern form sometime during the fifth century, crafted for the general public, lacking the theological nuances of the Nicene Creed yet influenced by it. Neither creed tells one how to live. They don’t instruct on what is sinful, they say nothing about sex (except that Mary was a virgin). Instead, the Apostles’ Creed is an easily memorized outline of belief in Jesus Christ, how he was the Son of God, conceived by the Holy Spirit upon a mortal woman, he died and rose from the dead and will return and be the one who judges the living and dead when all are resurrected. If a Christian only had this little nucleus of belief then you might be fuzzy on the details but at least you were assured there was a God, this was your confession of faith upon which you could spend a lifetime meditating on exactly what it meant, but confident you would not be lost to the dreadful incomprehensibles of the infinite, you would survive death, be reunited with your Christian loved ones, and continue being you in some manner or another except things would be better, they’d even be heavenly, and you’d be happy. If one cried in Heaven they were tears of joy. Cue David Lynch’s Eraserhead, the Lady in the Radiator singing, “In Heaven, everything is fine, you’ve got your good things, and I’ve got mine…you’ve got your good things, and you’ve got mine.” Let’s say you were a peasant and you lived miles
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and miles of mountains and rivers and bogs away from the civilized world, you didn’t have religious instruction as you didn’t have a church, if you caught a parchment in a bottle it wouldn’t enlighten you as you didn’t even know how to read, but a priest manages to reach your area and tells you about the one true God who commands and demands your belief, then moves on never to be seen again as your plot of earth isn’t a promising location for a monastery. A memorized Apostles’ or Nicene Creed would be all you needed to be a Christian in good stead. Plus baptism. We will assume the priest baptized you.
More than several lifetimes ago, when I was seven I knew by heart the Apostles’ Creed, and I knew by heart the Nicene Creed (of 325, amended in 381 at the First Council of Constantinople), of course I did, I was a child eager for literature, religion was stories, I don’t remember exerting myself to memorize the words, just as I only needed to hear Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious one time and I was singing the opening chorus over-and-over again, ad nauseum, even though I’d not seen the movie yet, the nonsense word not a stumbling block, to understand wasn’t required, which is often how it was with what we were tasked with memorizing when young, we weren’t called upon to comprehend the words, instead the primary idea they expressed. But I was perplexed with pledging allegiance to a flag, and I was confounded by the trinitarian definition of the Godhead when I was taught Christianity was monotheistic, there was One God, whereas deluded pagans had multiple lower-case gods and gods begetting gods. Every Sunday I would be reminded of and wonder at the puzzle that was the Lord Jesus Christ as “begotten not made” consubstantial with the Father God, and the Holy Spirit that was “the Lord, the giver of life,” proceeding from the Father and Son, being the channel by which God became incarnate as the son of a virgin, each a thing apart yet one, and the Virgin Mary being obviously a major part of the equation yet spurned by the Godhead, she had no part in it. I knew nothing about the Nicene Council of 325, the disorder in the early church over meaning, what was being worshiped, and their modifications upon modifications. Pondering the 3 in 1 (if you are seven-years-of-age, proudly brandish your three-leaf clover, but take care it’s not the “leaves of three, let it be” poison ivy) and how the Holy Spirit was a separate entity from God’s spirit, usually happened when I was in church on Sunday. This was the Roman Catholic Church in Richland. My eyes would pull up to the right as if to examine the vaulted ceiling of the church, when instead I looked there because it was a vacant area, which was necessary for contemplation of so confusing a question, so I turned my eyes away from the iconography and the focal point of the altar up front, to the blank slate. It would have been no use asking my parents for clarification. My parents took no part in my religious education. My mother, when we were later in Augusta, once mentioned how she had gone in to tuck me into bed one night when I was seven, I said I needed to say my prayers first, she had thought there would be one and instead I went through one prayer after another until finally she told me that was enough for her and left me to finish them on my own, though she did remark (I remember) that she didn’t think I needed to say them all. What that informs is that I was very rarely tucked into bed at night. As for my reciting so many prayers, I was in my first year of catechism class, preparing for my First Communion. I was uncertain what prayers might stand a better chance of
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catching God’s ear, so when I went to bed I employed all that I learned (plus it helped to run through them daily so I’d not forget them). There was also that problem of my having had twin brothers who had died when I was sixteen months old, which left me feeling that life was not firmly anchored to the earth, as if the thread that tethered the soul to the body was so fragile it could be tripped over in one’s sleep and undone, so now that I’d been given magic words to ensure my safe transition to whatever the afterlife was, then it was now on me to use them. I was entreating the If-There-Is-A-God to notice little me, to hear my voice, that I existed, and not let my spirit slip between the cracks if that spirit forgot where it should be while I slept or my body forgot to breathe.
One Saturday after catechism class, when I asked a nun about the complex nature of the Three-in-One-God, she scolded it was a mystery, that God had wished it to be so, and it was sinful to question what the perfect God had made in His perfection. She may have said that if we are good and we merit it then when we die we are granted understanding, because I remember envisioning a great curtain, opaque white yet gossamer so the blue sky of eternity shimmered through it from beyond, a curtain larger than the sky, it was in two sections like a window curtain, this heavenly veil that separated me from the nature of God that was aware I questioned, it began to open, its surface disturbed from within in the way the surface of water gesticulates to suggest the presence of an unseen fish, but the opening of the curtain was halted so nothing was revealed, not even my incomprehension, for I knew that if the curtain opened further I would see nothing, and I felt uncomfortable. For a little while after, when the curtain came to mind and began to open, I hurriedly stopped it because what if it kept opening and I did accidentally see what was hidden, wouldn’t I die?
The powers of priests and deacons have been addressed but we have only partly covered the role of the bishop. A bishop is a member of the College of Bishops, which is considered a successor to the College of the Apostles, which is in communion with the pope. Above the bishop is the archbishop who oversees the archdiocese which is a collection of dioceses which is a collection of smaller parishes. As the supreme head, the pope is the representative of God on earth, and has the right to be infallible, with limitations, as per the doctrine of infallibility as set out by the First Vatican Council of 1869-1870, the Vatican Council of 1962-1965 affirming that infallibility was enjoyed by the pope when speaking ex cathedra (which means speaking “from the chair”, with the full authority of the office) as shepherd and teacher, which leaves people confused as to what officially emanates from the pope is infallible and what is not, such as are papal bulls infallible, several of which made it obligatory to seize everything possessed by heathen populations in the so-called New World, and Africa, permission granted as well to enslave and murder them for Christ (see Pope Nicholas V’s Dum Diversas of 1452, his Romanus Pontifex of 1455, and Pope Alexander VI’s Inter caetera of 1493, which is the papal bull known as The Doctrine of Discovery). The pope, the bishop of Rome, has a number of titles that both denote and connote his supreme legitimacy to lay down the law: Vicar of Jesus Christ, which means he has the authority of Christ; Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, which means he is directly descended from the rock upon which the church was built who was St. Peter;
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Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, which means he is the very highest of the high priests and is the link between the universal church and God; Patriarch of the Latin Church, which means he is the Bishop of Rome; Primate of Italy, which means he is the tip-top of the Italian bishops; Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, which means he is tip-top of the tip-top over the diocese of the province of Rome; Sovereign of the Vatican City State, which rather means he is the king of the sovereign country that is Vatican City; Servant of the servants of God, which means he is all these eminent things but in them selflessly serves the church. To assist and advise him, because it is a big job being the minister over all living souls, the over-burdened pope appoints men who wear bright red, the regal color of preparedness to sacrifice oneself for the church, as granted them the right by Pope Innocent IV in 1244 or 1245, and are the princes of the church, typically important bishops, who are then part of the College of Cardinals.
The Holy Roman Church. The Church of Rome. Clergy, monastics, laity. What it comes down to is this, when you are laity you are the lowest of the low in your ability to get in touch with deity or make decisions for yourself. God likes a bureaucracy. If one steps into a church and doesn’t immediately feel generations of hierarchy lording it over one, such as if the church one has stepped into is poor and small, that hierarchy is still there, it is the foundation of that church, and the church sends its tribute to Vatican City, which is its own nation, of which the official religion is the Roman Catholic Church which is worth between one and hundreds of billions of dollars, depending on who attempts to do the calculating of what Wikipedia says is incalculable due to the church’s organization. We should assume if anyone is blessed with minds that possess financial genius on the how-tos of handling and making the most of money and assets it’s the Vatican, stronghold of papal kings, a nation of which its GNP is its official religion, however the CIA World Factbook states the economy is sustained by tourism, commemorative stamps and coins, while its industries include worldwide banking and financial. If that “financial” seems an ambiguous and confusing descriptor, fault the CIA as that’s a direct quote. Most estimates on how well the Stato della Città del Vaticano is doing financially are likely an underestimation. On a crime show, a detective may say to a suspect, “Then you were the last person to see the deceased alive,” and the suspect sometimes responds, “Except for the murderer.” In much the same way, no one knows the finances of the Roman Catholic Church, and it would be difficult to put a price on its many treasures, its holdings of art and antiquities and jewels and manuscripts that are too numerous to list. Nero’s massive bathtub alone is estimated to be worth two-and-a-half billion dollars (circa 2023), made of Imperial Porphyry marble, prized for its purple being like that of the Tyrian purple stripe that graced the robes of Roman senators, a color so exclusive, so associated with power and wealth due the cost of its manufacture from the excretions of certain Mediterranean mollusks, the Bolinus brandaris and Hexaplex trunculus, previously commonly known as murex, up to 250,000 sacrificed for every ounce of the fade-resistant dye, that the Romans would codify its use, the emperors would claim the right of a full garb of purple for themselves alone, and when the production formula for it was released Nero made it a capital offense for anyone but him to be adorned in Tyrian purple, valued for its supreme complexity, sometimes
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appearing as clotted blood, blackish yet shining, iridescent. The red dedicated to the use of the cardinals was formerly Tyrian purple but in 1464 Pope Paul II decreed they would now be adorned in kermes red, made of insects, with the fall of Constantinople and the end of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453 the secret for the production of Tyrian dye was lost, Constantinople having been a major center for the production of the dye, also the mollusks had been made nearly extinct. Which says something about how quickly knowledge can perish. While how to process Tyrian purple has been rediscovered, the number of mollusk shells required is so great, 10,000 for one gram, that it’s prohibitive. That said, Kremer Pigmente sells twenty-five mg of genuine Tyrian purple for $117.90, if you want to take twenty-five mg of Tyrian purple in hand and meditate on its history, how it was more precious than gold, how in the hell it was discovered and the process of its making refined, how ingenious are humans, and how many snails then went into distinguishing the royals as being that bloody more important than the rest of us. Synthetics are now available that replicate Tyrian purple, but I can well imagine the desire to hold a bit of the real deal and contemplate what it is as versus what it meant and means.
If you’re wondering how the Vatican came to possess Nero’s bathtub, I read it was taken from Nero’s Domus Aurea, the Golden House, after he committed suicide in 68 CE. Even as he was being declared a public enemy by the Senate, waking to find his palace abandoned, “Have I neither friend nor foe?” Nero had lamented when no one responded to his plea for a gladiator, Godot, anyone except the Senate to help him out of his thirty years of life, because his first biographer, Suetonius, born the year after Nero died, informs us no one remained in the palace except for those who were not considered appropriate suiciders of Nero but who would have served as witnesses, else Suetonius, who puts together a very entertaining read, would not have known exactly what Nero said, how he ran outside to throw himself in the Tiber River then decided that wasn’t suitable, disguised himself and fled to the home of the imperial freedman, Phaon, where he forced his private secretary, Epaphroditus, to commit the deed that we call Nero’s suicide. But not until he had asked for a volunteer to provide him an example and courage by committing suicide first, which didn’t happen. Elsewhere I read that instead the big bathtub was found in the fifteenth century at the then recently rediscovered ruins of the pavilion of Domus Aurea (the story is a boy fell into a hole about 1480 and reported finding “painted caves”) and taken directly from Esquiline Hill to the Vatican. Because, after all, the bathtub of Nero had belonged to the emperor who came to be called Rome’s antichrist—its marble so prestigious and rare, a color associated with Tyrian purple, that from Diocletian on it decorated royal burials, and was used to tile chambers in which imperial babes were born—of course the Vatican would claim it, a symbol of their victory over the heathen Roman Empire and an expression of the royal power of an institution that didn’t produce holy heirs by birth. But does that great bathtub belong to the whole body of the church or to the earlobe or the foot of the body of the church, for it belongs to the Vatican which belongs to the Holy See, and does the church belong to the Holy See or the Holy See to the church, for there’s the Holy See which is the Pope’s holy chair which is the episcopal (which means government by bishops) jurisdiction of the church in Rome of which Vatican City is considered its
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vassal territory, and then there is the church outside the Vatican which is a separate situation, every diocese is a separate corporation and administratively independent, which means the buildings and land of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church don’t belong to the Vatican, I guess kind of like how the fast food empire of McDonald’s is a franchise and not all its restaurants are owned by McDonald’s they instead are licensed to use the brand and sell goods and services under the business name of the supreme franchise. The Holy See was, as of 2022, sixty-three percent supported by the donations that come from dioceses, twenty-two percent from foundations, nine percent from the faithful, and a little less than four percent from the religious orders of the church, and, yes, I’m going to list them all without describing them: Dominican Order, Jesuits, Benedictines, Carmelites, Carthusians, Order of Saint Augustine, Order of Friars Minor, Franciscans, Salesians of Don Bosco, Premonstratensians, Missionaries of Charity, Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, Cistercians, Trappists, Discalced Carmelites, Barnabites, Third Order Regular of Saint Francis of Penance, Trinitarians, Canons Regular of the Order of the Holy Cross, Theatines, Camillians, Piarists, Order of Friars Minor Conventual, Order of the Blessed Virgin of Mercy, Augustinian Canons, Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit, Order of Augustinian Recollects, Discalced Augustinians, Hieronymites, Order of Minims, Somaschi Fathers, Teutonic Order, Clerics Regular Minor, Brothers Hospitallers of Saint John of God, Order of Bethlehemite Brothers, Hermits of Camaldoli of Mont Corona, Knights of the Cross with the Red Star, Servite Order, Catholic Order, Legionaries of Christ, Redemptorists, Paulist Fathers, Congregation of Holy Cross, Canons Regular of the Holy Cross of Coimbra, Society of the Sacred Heart, Resurrectionist Congregation, Montfort Brothers of St. Gabriel, Society of the Atonement, Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, and the Maryknoll Society.
Some might wonder what it means to be discalced as there are two orders so specifically designated. To be discalced means one doesn’t wear shoes, one wears sandals or goes barefoot as a representation of one’s poverty and reliance upon God for all one’s needs. Diocesan priests don’t take a vow of poverty but are supposed to live simply. Some religious orders do require their priests to take vows of poverty, such as the Franciscans, the Jesuits, and Dominicans. Monks and friars need not be priests but priests can be monks, which is to be a part of a monastic community, or they can be a friar, which is to be a part of a mendicant religious order which means that one lives by begging. How you get your living as a monk or friar is up to the order to which you belong.
Diocesan Roman Catholic priests receive a salary reflecting the years they’ve served the church. Looking at the archdiocese of Atlanta, Georgia, which has uploaded the remuneration plan for 2021-2022, salaries range from a beginning one of nearly $30,000 a year to over $40,000 a year when one has served forty years and up, and as priests are considered self-employed they receive as well money for self-employment tax. On top of this they receive also health insurance that covers prescription, dental, and vision, a food allowance, an automobile allowance, pension plan, a retirement plan to which they can contribute, long-term care plan, life insurance, personal insurance, housing with internet and television, laundry and dry cleaning, thirty days
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of vacation a year with four weekends off as well, costs covered for a yearly annual retreat, every seven years they have a three- to six-month sabbatical for which they receive $10,000, and if they need treatment for alcoholism or drug addiction they receive 100 percent of their salary the first six months. If one doesn’t ever want to marry, is fine with being celibate, has no other plans, and prizes the comforting reassurance of long-term stability, even if one is not religiously inclined I can see how a person might talk themselves into believing, or being fine with pretending to believe. I’m not arguing against housing, health and food security, not when I’m of the opinion they should be available to everyone, but it becomes awkward when the church is better off than a number of its parishioners.
Before we move on from the nation that is the Vatican, I’m fascinated by the CIA’s World Factbook page on this hill ruled by the last absolute monarchy in the world. As of 2022, the population is given as 1000 souls, another site stating that women composed about five percent of the population in 2020, and that half of the population worked outside the city-state in diplomatic service. The land area is given as 0.44 sq km while its total area is given as 0 sq km, which I don’t understand, but that’s all right. NA (not available or not applicable?) is given for “Age structure”, as with Birth rate, Death rate, Contraceptive prevalence rate, Sanitation facility access, Current health expenditure, Education expenditures, and Literacy. By the way, I’m currently being entertained, as I write, by its national anthem, the “Hymn and Pontifical March”, composed by Charles Francois Gounod in 1869 for the golden jubilee of Pope Pius IX’s priestly ordination. Declared an anthem in 1949 by Pope Pius XII, it replaced the more fanciful “Marcia Tironfale”, by Victorian Hallmayer, which in 1857 had celebrated the entry of Pope Pius IX into Bologna, and in 1929 was the music that marked the celebration of the signing of the Lateran Treaty between the papacy and the Kingdom of Italy. The “Marcia Tironfale” conjures every Luciano Visconti movie that showcased the nineteenth century with visions of regals and elites swirling about grand ballrooms, and has a circusy streak appropriate for the enthrallment of Ludwig I of Bavaria with the performer and dancer Lola Montez, a woman whose history was shady because she was one of those individuals who are born again by making up a new biography for themselves and walk right into that persona, abandoning their past. The “Hymn and Pontifical March” isn’t dance music. It opens with a theme suitable for striding the red carpet, then moves on to music appropriate for watching the pope blessing the masses from his balcony, then back to the red carpet, which is perhaps the exit music.
Nero’s bath. Would this great marble bowl be as valuable if it was named Nero’s cistern? Swimming pool? Reservoir? Nero’s fountain? A reason the bath is valuable is it is reported to be the largest single intact piece of this rare porphyry marble that currently exists, and it exists because it is an expression of wealth, specifically Nero’s, which was subsequently valued by the Vatican, and is housed in the Pio Clementino Museum, in its Round Hall, the design of which was inspired by the Pantheon, a Roman pagan temple that is now the Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs. The famous architectural feature of the Pantheon is its great concrete dome, at the grand and beautiful peak of which is an oculus that accesses the heavens. It’s difficult for me
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not to imagine some relationship between the Round Hall’s heavenly dome and the great basin of Nero’s that rests directly beneath it within a round of ancient mosaics that represent the battle in which the Lapiths conquered the animalistic Centaurs, both descended of Apollo and the river nymph Stilbe. While the Centaurs sprang from the union of their ancestor, Centaurus, with a horse, the king of the Lapiths, Pirithous, had not only a father who was mortal, but an immortal one, Zeus, who had only assumed the shape of a horse when mating with Pirithous’ mother. The Lapiths excelled at horsemanship and used the Dionysian gift of wine in a civilized manner, diluting it with water, while the Centaurs were intemperate. When the Centaurs, drunk, threatened with rape and abductions the peace of the royal wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia (Tamer of Horses), at which they were guests, they were driven out of the country with the help of Theseus, best known for slaying the Minotaur.
It seems fitting that the first time I drank, when I was fourteen, and discovered I had no off switch, was at an Episcopalian church function as a youth server. Most people can drink. Harvard Health reported in 2014 that one-third of Americans drink heavily and that ten percent of those heavy drinkers may be alcoholic, which is now called alcohol use disorder. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism reported in 2023 that ten point five percent of Americans twelve years of age and older had AUD in the past year. Those statistics seem to be based on people who are still drinking. What about the individuals who don’t drink because they can’t? Where are they in these statistics? I don’t know. Thirty percent of Americans don’t drink alcohol (2017 statistic) so I suppose alcoholics who abstain are included among non-drinkers. The Pew Research Center reports that sixty-two percent of Americans drink and of these about twenty percent say they “sometimes drink more than they think they should”. This doesn’t tell me anything about those who are alcoholics because sometimes drinking more than you think you should isn’t the same thing. The Pew Research Center reports that of the thirty-eight percent of Americans who don’t drink there are thirteen percent who state they don’t drink as they are afraid of the consequences. But that may include people who never drank, might be able to drink, but don’t because they have had relatives who were alcoholics. Another study from 2023 states twenty-eight percent of Americans who are twenty-one and older don’t drink, but the reason they don’t drink isn’t stated. Another study states that one in eight Americans struggles with alcohol abuse.
When I contemplate Nero’s prized bath in the Pantheon-styled room of the Vatican’s museum, said to be the most valuable possession of the Vatican, I think of the rite of baptism and how Nero’s bathtub symbolizes the Christian church taking over the heathen Roman Empire to form the Holy Roman Empire. I think of the rite of the Eucharist and how the crater is also one that holds blood and how Nero’s bathtub might symbolize that in Christian proprietary aesthetics. I think of what parts of Christianity are distinctly Dionysian yet Christianity is also Apollonian. Chaos and order. I think of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana, just as Dionysus could turn water into wine. At his Last Supper, Jesus went a step further when he transformed bread into his flesh and wine into his blood, of which he
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commanded every one of his followers should eat and drink in remembrance of him. I think of the basics like this and how they relate to Nero’s royal tub that is now the Vatican’s very expensive royal tub.
I look up Esquiline Hill on Google Maps, where Nero’s bathtub was found according to some sources, and see in its public Parco del Colle Oppio an ancient piece of building protected by a green fence upon which are hanging to dry a towel, a skirt, tank top and t-shirt. I assume that the person to whom these articles belong is watching over them from somewhere nearby to ensure they aren’t stolen. Not too far away is a graffiti-covered concrete water fountain in which these clothes were perhaps washed. “You will always have the poor,” said Jesus to Judas, who had protested the anointing of Jesus with expensive perfume because Judas would have preferred the money go to the group’s treasury which he used for his own personal gain.
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The history of looking to a community holy person for spiritual succor and guidance is probably as ancient as rudimentary society. Can you tell me what all of this means, why we live and suffer and die? Can you see what comes after this, do we survive the deaths of our bodies or become only as dust and ash? How do I get God to turn his opinion of me to one that’s more favorable when all I’m granted is bad luck?
“My infants died soon after they were born, heal my soul.”
Of course my mother went to the place that, at the time, taught that all infants who died before they were baptized into the Roman Catholic Church went to Limbo, which was the edge of Hell, to which they were doomed as they were born in the state of original sin caused by the fall of Adam and Eve from their state of grace that is thus the inheritance of all homo homo sapiens, a disorder of guilt-conceived spirit and flesh that is washed away with the flowing water of baptism, one’s essential second spiritual birth. One might call it the first epigenetic trauma. Such souls who went to Limbo were not there for punishment, but because a state of salvation was beyond them as sacramental baptism is taught by the church as necessary for salvation. When a church tells you your unbaptized children will never reside in the presence of God, and you believe in God and want Heaven for them, then it doesn’t seem sensible to receive instruction and baptism into that church with the hope of consolation, and one wonders at the logic of taking refuge in it. Christ the King in Richland had nuns, which are or were de rigueur, no Roman Catholic diocese of the time was properly equipped without a few women dressed in medieval Roman Catholic fashion, at least one or two delighting in being the bad cop (some were likely OK, I just didn’t have contact with any who were memorably compassionate), and one of those nuns told me, when I was seven, that the twins went to Limbo and would never go to Heaven no matter what because they weren’t baptized. I brought this up to my mother when I was receiving instruction for my First Communion. It seemed reasonable to get her take on the church’s teaching on the matter as she had already been baptized and become a communicant in Seattle, as had my father, both having gone through their instruction there, also called catechism. To catechize means to instruct by word of mouth, so one had to attend class in person, one couldn’t become a Roman Catholic by mail (there are now, however, catechism classes online). I thought certainly this
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idea of the twins going to Limbo was concocted by humans. As an adult, I entertain myself imagining priests getting together to fantasize a tourist guide book for Heaven and Hell because people like to know where they’re going plus a good horror story sells well. As a child I imagined that this was a scary fairy tale and my mother would be in agreement with me and tell me so. Instead, she accelerated from 0 to 1000 in an instant as she exploded, “Do you like torturing me? You must love torturing me! Why do you always torture me?!” And she broke down in the car on Long Avenue right outside of Christ the King’s school where she was bringing me for my weekly catechism class, yelling at me to get out, get out, get out.
When you’re a child and a parent forcefully claims that you enjoy torturing them, as that is the perception of the parent you are apt to stand back and wonder at yourself, how you are a torturer, what was wrong with me that I dared to pose to my mother that problem presented me by the nun, was there a secret part of me that wanted to torture her, or had I truly wanted her beliefs on the matter and so had let her know what I was being taught in case she wasn’t aware of it, which was what I’d believed I was doing. I was aware the twins were a sensitive issue for my mother, so shouldn’t I have known better than to bring this subject up to her and she was thus right that I tortured her, yet it was because they were a sensitive issue that I would come to her with this report of what the church was teaching me about the twins, because they were one of the central wheels around which our lives turned. My mother talked about the twins often, but usually in bitter attacks against people she felt hadn’t supported her as they should have when they died, almost always without tears, so I was very surprised when she yelled at me for speaking of them.
While the teaching on Limbo’s children has never been absolutely defined by the Magisterium, which is the official teaching authority of the church, the pope, and the bishops in union with him, the basis for the “common doctrine” instruction of unbaptized children going to Limbo is to be found in several papal missives. In Pope John XXII’s 21 November 1321 Nequaquam sine dolore, “Not at All Without Pain”, we are told, “…the souls of those who depart in mortal sin or with only original sin, descend immediately to Hell, nevertheless to be punished with different punishments and in disparate locations: the souls of children, without a doubt, are burdened in Limbo with the pain of loss, but with the pain of sense.” We are given a glimpse of Limbo in the original Latin of the above quote, for the part following the colon is “nimirum puerorum animas poena damni, non sensus, in Limbo afficiendas”. Then there’s Pope Eugenius IV’s 6 July 1439 Papal Bull of Union with the Greeks, Laetenteur Caeli, or “Let the Heavens Rejoice!”, in which it’s stated, “As for the souls of those who die in actual mortal sin or with original sin only, they go down immediately to Hell, to be punished, however, with different punishments. We also define that the holy apostolic see and the Roman pontiff holds the primacy over the whole world and the Roman pontiff is the successor of blessed Peter prince of the apostles, and that he is the true vicar of Christ, the head of the whole church and the father and teacher of all Christians, and to him was committed in blessed Peter the full power of tending, ruling and governing the whole church, as is contained also in the acts of ecumenical councils and in the sacred canons.” According to Wikipedia, that latter part was the first formal conciliar definition of papal primacy. In 1870, Vatican I asserted in its constitution that there was no higher authority than the pope in judicial supremacy. It’s the pope as mom and dad telling one in no uncertain terms to not question their judgments that stand as unimpeachable, “Because I said so!”
As a child, I wondered how the Pope knew God was speaking to him, how was he confident he wasn’t speaking with himself. If he got just one thing wrong, it concerned not only him but everyone. If he got even one thing wrong, how could you believe him on anything.
I couldn’t imagine Limbo. I don’t know what I might have believed then, but I can
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recollect when we first lived in Richland, when I was about two or three, comprehending deity as all light, and my soul in a former state of being had been a part of that light and separated from it, that’s when “I” came to be, and then I was born. Whether I came up with this on my own or picked up the idea from another, I don’t know, but staring at the white surface of my bedroom door I meditated on it at length and imagined I could remember the moment when I separated from that light, and it wasn’t frightening, nor the prospect of one day returning to it. At the age of seven, I couldn’t picture this state of Limbo in which the twins resided on the very edge of Hell, whatever that meant, wherever it was. I could only comprehend Limbo as being a very lonely place for infant souls, whatever Limbo was, if it was, and didn’t believe it was. Perhaps related to this, around that time I was also in the process of being terrorized by eternity, trying to comprehend it from my mortal perspective and wondering how humans remained sane in the face of being and non-being within the eternal, this was true horror and kept me awake for hours at night as I failed to fend off heart-racing panic attacks. What I was confident of was the nun who told me the twins were in Limbo wanted to hurt me. A week previous to my raising the question to my mother, the nun had taught on the concept of Limbo in catechism class—though not a concept for the nun, instead a place of physical reality—and how the unbaptized went to Limbo and would never see the face of God. After class I had approached her and told her I had twin brothers who died right after they were born, before being baptized, which wasn’t their fault, and when she asserted their final destination was Limbo, forever separated from God, I could hear in her voice how she wanted me to experience the pain of the bad that was not having always been Roman Catholic and not abiding by rules that one didn’t even know existed when one wasn’t Roman Catholic. I reasoned the greater portion of humanity now existing, and all those before the advent of Roman Catholicism, were in the same quandary of not knowing these rules, so how could these rules apply to them. If there was a God like what the Roman Catholic Church taught, why would it create a situation that destined to Limbo or Hell everyone who lived outside the social geography and time of the Roman Church and its instruction, people who hadn’t heard and rejected their teachings but instead had never had access? I understood this perspective as I had grown up outside the church, had been one of the great unwashed, and now I was tasked with growing up inside the church and being informed of all these rules and regulations that outlined the life and death of one’s soul. I don’t know if I fully comprehended yet that, in the case of those already Roman Catholic, harsh rules might scare one into obedience and make the church a sticky essential, as in if I don’t do as I’m told then all hope is lost for me and my loved ones. As someone who came in from the outside, I understood that just because there were rules didn’t make them legitimate and real.
Out of the several years I went to catechism class, there remain only a few moments I remember in a classroom at Christ the King, and this is one of them, when I approached the nun to ask about the twins. As I walked up to her, I could sense already it was a question I ought not to ask, that it was an invitation for cruelty, but I hoped otherwise, that the nun would instead assure that though this might be an official teaching it wasn’t believed by humans.
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Why did my mother decide upon the Roman Catholic Church for spiritual succor when it couldn’t assure her the twins were okay, were with God, which is what she wanted, instead it would tell her they were in Limbo? Was she really there so that she could be healed of the loss of the twins, which is how she often presented the case for our becoming Roman Catholic. My take on it, even as a child, was that my mother had chosen Roman Catholicism because it had better music, the attraction of ritual, and priests. She was looking for both a replacement father for her bad father, and someone with whom she could safely flirt, as diocesan priests make a promise of celibacy and members of a religious order take a vow of celibacy, which are equivalent, the promise and the vow, but if one says that diocesan priests take a vow then someone may be standing nearby who will leap to let you know they don’t, they make a promise instead, though if one questions then what is the difference the casual answer is that they mean pretty much the same thing and are equally solemn but a vow is a promise to God whereas a promise that is not a vow is for sake of the Kingdom and the Church. I read that the promise of celibacy is not mandatory, and yet it is obligatory, the word mandatory not used by the church as it would frame the promise negatively rather than celibacy being offered by the priest as a gift. A promise of celibacy is not the same as a vow of chastity. Some religious orders require a member to make a vow of chastity as well, while the diocesan priest is instead expected to live chastely just as all individuals are expected to be chaste, and as having sex outside of marriage is forbidden then priests abide by this rule as it is universal within the church. Diocesan priests don’t vow to do anything, they promise to be celibate and obedient, while those in holy orders take vows. The diocesan priest is obligated to their diocese, which is fixed in place, whereas the “religious” priest is obligated to their order, in other words a religious congregation that isn’t limited to a diocese. This rule of attachment is incardination and prevents a problem of wandering clerics who aren’t accountable to any one bishop.
There are priests who are allowed to be married, such as those who are accepted in from the Eastern Catholic Church, and former Episcopalians, but they are very few, and that pretty much covers the matter, I’m just trying to give a picture of a bit of the legalese as well as the hierarchical structure of the church, to which even many Roman Catholics are oblivious as they are born into it and that’s all that matters the rest is up to the hierarchy to wrestle over in the nooks and crannies, the highways and byways and research labs of the Vatican.
3
My parents were another thing and then decided to become Roman Catholic. This change of ecclesiastical venue and acceptance into its fold doesn’t happen just by walking in through a church door. One has to become a member, be prepped on what that denomination specifically believes, pay your dues literally and figuratively, even Unitarian-Universalists have to go through this process so their congregants will understand the seven principles by which they abide, and if you’re going to go through the problem of changing venues that must mean you’re for some reason not
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satisfied with the venue to which you already belong. As far as I’m aware, my father was not baptized as a child and didn’t belong to a church before he met my mother, but I could be wrong about that as his parents were members of a Methodist church, even though they weren’t believers, and they may have had their two children baptized for sake of expectations of family and community. My mother’s parents were Presbyterian (her father did go to the Methodist church as a young man), just as their parents were Presbyterian. She would have grown up Presbyterian, unless they changed churches, and would have been baptized Presbyterian at some point in her youth, I don’t know when, perhaps her parents had her baptized when she was an infant, which would have been by sprinkling water on my mother’s head. Through blood you are born into this world, through water are you born into the Kingdom of God. I don’t remember being baptized Methodist and I don’t know when it was done but I was told it had been and I don’t know when. My parents were married in a Methodist church in Lawrence, Kansas, and perhaps I was baptized there as a baby. When the twins died, my parents relied on a United Protestant minister in Richland to officiate. I recollect our later briefly going to a Presbyterian church in Seattle and my standing at its baptismal font and being sprinkled, which would have been when I was four or five years of age. When I was a child we used to joke about how many times I’d been baptized and to my knowledge the Roman Catholic Church baptism, which was done when I was seven, made it three times. It was familial knowledge and a good laugh that I’d been thrice baptized and was three times assured of going to Heaven. However, it gets confusing if one examines the theology of baptism as the Presbyterian Church does not believe in rebaptism, nor do Methodists. Once you have been baptized, you have been baptized, it took, whether you were an adult who made a conscious decision to be baptized or an infant or child who had no idea, it took because the act of baptism was less you than it was an act of God, and God having acted upon you and accepted you into the community of Christian believers was a done deal, which is why one can’t be rebaptized. If I’d been baptized Methodist and had to be baptized Presbyterian it may be my parents didn’t tell the church in Seattle I’d been baptized or that some kind of confirmation of that baptism was required and couldn’t be supplied or my parents weren’t interested in bothering with that part or even simply standing as witnesses as I read that two witnesses are sufficient evidence, I have no idea, and it really doesn’t matter what the “should” of the matter was, for whatever reason I was rebaptized Presbyterian, which meant my parents had joined a Presbyterian church and had at that time decided to join me to it as well. Yet the reality was that they were still shopping around, which was why, by the time I was six, based on my experiences with my parents dropping in on various churches, I reasoned that religion was a construct of humans because everywhere we went was different and it seemed to me as different churches had different rules about whether one was properly accepted by God or not meant that no one really knew anything for certain they were making stuff up and you made your choice of a denomination based on whether you agreed with how they thought of things.
Because Presbyterians didn’t believe in rebaptism I shouldn’t have been rebaptized Presbyterian, but it was a different matter for the Roman Catholic Church. When I became Roman Catholic, I needed to be baptized because in the 1960s the Roman
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Catholic Church, which also doesn’t believe in rebaptism, didn’t yet accept you were truly baptized if your baptism happened outside the Roman Catholic Church. It was a few decades later that the Roman Catholic Church recognized baptism outside the Roman Catholic Church as legitimate as long as it was both by water and Trinitarian (in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost), which was a big deal between the churches. In 2010 the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops ratified a Common Agreement on Mutual Recognition of Baptism with several ecclesial communities of the Reformed tradition, and in 2014 an agreement was signed by the U.S. Roman Catholic Church with the Presbyterian Church of the USA, the Christian Reformed Church of North America, The Reformed Church of America, and the United Church of Christ, the Roman Catholic Church recognizing their baptisms. What is a reformed church? That would be referring to the Protestant Reform that is Calvinist Christianity, different from the Lutheran Protestants as Calvinists believe in predestination whereas Lutherans don’t and Lutherans believe in Eucharistic consubstantiation. Whereas Lutherans believe Christ’s death on the cross saved all who have faith, Calvinism holds that God has predestined those who will be saved. Whereas Calvinists believe that the communal sharing of the blood and body of Christ is symbolized in the wine and wafer, Lutherans believe that the substance of the communal bread and wine coexists with Christ’s body and blood. Which is not the same as the transubstantiation of the Roman Catholics in which the communal bread and wine miraculously become in reality the body and blood of Christ. I don’t know when the Roman Catholic Church began accepting Lutheran baptisms but now it has a long list of churches that it recognizes as offering official baptisms rather than fake baptisms. The specifics as far as dates of agreements with the various churches, when they each recognized one another’s baptisms, eludes me. I don’t find a decent timeline.
When exactly do the bread and wine, during Mass, become the body and blood of Christ. During the Institution Narrative, also called the Eucharistic Prayer, when the priest says, “Take this, all of you, and eat it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you…Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.”
If I had spent my early elementary school years in the Protestant church, I wouldn’t have had to bother about transubstantiation and anamnesis, as Protestants, or most of them, consider the Eucharist to be symbolic, a memorial of the Last Supper.
Why am I going into all this? Because I’m trying to get all the stories straight about where I came from which means questioning everything. We don’t always understand the complexities and histories of our cultural inheritances, it’s usually not gone into, we just know that different churches believe in different things and are vague on how they are similar and dissimilar, and as I was baptized several times that accentuated the dissimilarity as well as tells me my parents couldn’t pull it together to say “We both witnessed her Methodist baptism” which was apparently all it would have taken for me to become Presbyterian. Which now begs the question of what is the difference between Methodists and Presbyterians, in order to look at why my parents
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decided to switch from Methodism to the Presbyterian denomination.
Martin Luther, who was German, began the Protestant Reformation in 1517 with his Ninety-Five Theses, which got him excommunicated from the RCC, but the first Protestant church is widely accepted as having been the Moravian, established about 1457 but founded upon a movement begun by Jan Hus, born in the Kingdom of Bohemia now the Czech Republic, who was burned at the stake in 1415 in Germany. Breaking from Rome, King Henry VIII was declared the Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1534. The Presbyterian Church, begun in 1560 by John Knox, Scottish, formerly a Roman Catholic priest, is rooted in Calvinism. John Calvin, born in France, died in Switzerland, was another Protestant reformer who in 1530 broke from the church but was so eager to prove he was a good guy, not against Christian Orthodoxy, that he aided in the persecution of humanist and Protestant Reformer, Michael Servetus, a Spaniard, which resulted in Servetus being burned at the stake in Switzerland in 1553 for Nontrinitarianism and being against infant baptism, both inarguably excellent reasons at the time to tie a person to a piece of wood and set them on fire. The Methodists came about in 1739 thanks to John Wesley who broke with the Anglican church that had been formed by King Henry VIII, the Methodists determining that faith was represented by “deeds not creeds” whereas the Presbyterians relied on predestination. The Methodist Church, over the course of two centuries, developed many flavors of Methodism, but only a minor one that was Calvinist, so the big difference was that the majority of Methodists didn’t believe the will of mortals was not free.
The mystery of a name. The Methodists called themselves Methodists because they believed their approach methodical. The Presbyterians called themselves Presbyterians as they take their name from a presbyterian form of church government by representatives chosen and elected, of assemblies of elders, presbyter meaning an elder in the church, and a presbyter government thus differing from one of bishops.
My mother wouldn’t have cared what a church believed. That’s not why she would have switched from Presbyterian to Methodist to Presbyterian and then eventually to the RCC (Roman Catholic Church), and even later to Episcopalian (that’s where her psychiatrist of the time went so she got to see him on Sundays as well), and I don’t know what after that. Except for a continued flirtation with the Roman Catholic Church for a while after I left home (my mother, I’m aware, was making demands on a priest for attention but that’s all I know), at some point they stopped going to church, but I don’t know when that was as it was after I left the home. If one asked my mother about Lutheranism and Calvinism and Methodism and Presbyterianism and what were the differences she would have said she didn’t know or care, as would many, that inability to define the differences didn’t make her exceptional or even a faulty human. If one asked my father, I don’t know if he could have talked about the differences, he was in it for the ride because he was married to my mother and if my mother wanted to become Roman Catholic then so be it. If my mother had wanted to ride the rapids down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon, I don’t think he would have been up for that, he would have put his foot down, riding down the Colorado River rapids was
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out of the question, but he was good with the Roman Catholic Church and agreeing to whatever it wanted them to agree to spiritually because saying “yes” while believing “no” was fine and good as long as the outward observances weren’t overly strenuous. Rafting the Colorado River, on the other hand, was more demanding.
For all I know my mother became angry with a minister at whatever the Presbyterian church was where they were briefly members in Seattle, and that’s why she went looking again elsewhere for a church home. But what she would have been principally interested in were the aesthetics of place and music, and availability of the clergy. Roman Catholic priests have no wives or children, the church is their family, and that made them more attractive than ministers who weren’t wholly dedicated and therefore not as sacred, not as divorced from the secular world. My mother decided the Roman Catholic Church was the place to be in the pre-Vatican II world, when the mass was still in Latin, the altar faced away from the congregation, and one ate fish on Friday because it was a form of fasting to honor Christ’s death on that day, one was to abstain from red blood and cold-blooded fish were said to not be bloody. In the pre-Vatican II world the primitive force that was woman was required to cover her hair, even if that cover was only a Kleenex deployed as a substitute mantilla if one was passing a church, felt compelled to go in and light a candle, and one’s real mantilla wasn’t on hand as it was at home in one’s top dresser drawer rather than in the glove compartment. In the pre-Vatican II world the church didn’t prioritize the Bible and my mother wasn’t a Bible Christian. She didn’t know anything about the Bible except that she didn’t have to read it because she said my father knew what was in it and he told her there was no reason for her to read it because he had read it and the Bible was a bad book with had bad things in it such as people killing people, but this was more an excuse than an objection on my mother’s part. She didn’t want to read it but needed an excuse not to do so and relied on my father to comply and give her one, which he would always do, my father was great at giving my mother all the excuses she wanted and needed. My mother was instead a Classical Music Catholic, which meant she was the kind of Christian who didn’t really have to believe anything or want anything out of the church except her kind of great music. She wouldn’t have believed in transubstantiation because she wouldn’t have bothered to learn what it was in the catechism instruction she received. She didn’t believe in anything except singing the Mass in Latin, and that priests in cassocks and Roman collars were going to be good potential father figures and men for whom she must come first and could come first as they didn’t have wives. A man with a wife was devoted to his wife. A Roman Catholic priest was devoted to everyone, but mostly her. A good priest was there to listen to her, not to teach her the way of the Bible or tell her she should herself investigate the Bible to learn about the Christianity into which she’d elected to be baptized as a Roman Catholic, and into which she’d been originally baptized as a Protestant through the decision of her parents. She wasn’t interested in the evangelical aspects of Christianity, she didn’t want to win people to the church, she wanted to win the priests to her. And it’s not so different in churches that aren’t Roman Catholic, ministers everywhere are expected by their congregations to be at their beck and call, to protect and guide them not only en masse but individually through the hard and soft difficulties of life, because sacrificing themselves for the needs of church and congregation is in the very large print of the job application. But
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Roman Catholic priests weren’t allowed to marry, and my mother needed her spiritual advisor and counselor and the ear that bent itself to listen to her not to be married. She’s not that unusual in that respect either. A lot of people have believed their Roman Catholic priests should be celibate and not married so they could devote their lives to their church family, and many still do, while many also don’t.
Pope Benedict VIII, in the eleventh century, prohibited children of priests from inheriting property, because it seemed there was a financial problem with such children claiming church property as their own. Or what the church determined should be church property. I don’t know. Pope Gregory VII, in 1074, excommunicated married priests. Then in 1139, at the Second Lateran Council, called by Pope Innocent II, a rule was passed that priests shouldn’t marry, which was reaffirmed in 1563 by the Council of Trent, which had been prompted by the Protestant Reformation.
The Lateran Councils were so called as they were at the Lateran palace, once occupied by the Laterani family, administrators for several emperors, until Plautius Lateranus was accused of being a conspirator in a plot to kill Nero, for which he was executed in CE 65, and his properties confiscated. About 313, Constantine the Great, having kind-of converted to Christianity (not baptized until 337, at his death) gave the palace to the Bishop of Rome, which became the official residence of the pope for about a thousand years. Then mumble something about bad problems with France led to the Avignonese Captivity, also dubbed the Babylonian Captivity, and and seven popes resided in Avignon instead of Rome, from 1309 to 1376, there were some bad fires at the Lateran palace during that time and though the palace was rebuilt it was over and done with as a papal residence.
Backing up a moment to fish on Friday, fish do have blood, red blood, so the primary lore may be that they were okay to eat on the day of the sacrifice of Christ’s flesh as they weren’t bloody, but the lore doesn’t quite fit the facts. One could argue fish are not bloody in the way that a cow’s flesh is bloody, but I remain skeptical. Why not just ban animal flesh altogether on Fridays if one is intended to avoid blood? Fishmongers and cooks, dealing with fresh fish rather than supermarket filets, would be aware that fish have blood, though their blood hasn’t as much hemoglobin so it is more maroon (so I read). If one backs up to Pope Nicholas I’s 866 declaration on the fast, it is sometimes related he stated that one should abstain from the flesh of warm-blooded animals, therefore fish were permitted as they were cold-blooded. However, if I go directly to “The Responses of Pope Nicholas I to the Bulgars A.D. 866” letter, I find instead that he makes in it no distinction between what was warm-blooded or cold-blooded, instead only stating of meat, “But on the sixth day of every week and on all vigils of famous feasts one should cease from eating meat and should apply oneself to fasting, so that one may truly be able to say with the writer of the Psalms: Weeping shall last the night, but in the morning shall come happiness. Also, “But on the sixth day of the week our sense of taste should be kept from the feasts and fat of all flesh as we recall the Lord's passion and the sorrow of the apostles.” One might wonder, or I do, what if any ancient linkage there might be between abstaining from bloody flesh and what is “kosher”, the ritual slaughter that is shechita, and Orthodox Jewish rules that blood may never be consumed from meat, for which reason it was soaked and
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salted. Perhaps none. When I was a child I used to wonder “Why fish?” and I thought one was maybe able to eat fish on Friday because of Jonah and the whale and the association of the fish with rebirth, the resurrection. And I thought about how fish never closed their eyes, so it was like they were always awake, though they did somehow sleep anyway, which was creepy.
It’s proposed by some that eating fish may hint at a victory over Leviathan of the Bible (which is where my adult mind goes), the gigantic sea dragon that represented chaos and would be destroyed at the end of time, Leviathan’s wife already salted and put away for the righteous to dine upon. Leviathan is the same as the Gnostic Ouroboros that enveloped the physical world. I can think of few creatures with as many meditative possibilities for poetic pondering as Leviathan.
Except for the vivid and mysterious American Indian Thunderbird. And the trickster raven.
And the Hindu Ganesha, which has an elephant head.
Dagon, the ancient fish god, father of all gods.
Mythologies concerning the sphinx and Minotaur.
I need to take that back. Many religions or spiritual practices and mythologies offer a number of animal-like creatures that are fascinating to ponder, above are only a few. I got rash, brash, and stupidly absurd for a moment there, my telescope zoomed in on one thing so I momentarily lost the rest.
At any rate, one day we couldn’t eat meat on Friday, and we could probably have just had macaroni and cheese but for some reason we ate salmon cakes or various concoctions of tuna fish at home and at school, school was good about making sure we who were following our religious fast also had food, and then suddenly it was no longer sinful to eat meat on Friday, though if you were hard-core you could continue to eat salmon-cakes, most didn’t, and you know it was a crushing blow to the fish industry, I go through the bother of finding a piece of evidence and U.S. Fish prices did reportedly plummet according to “The Pope and the Price of Fish” in the December 1968 issue of The American Economic Review.
If I’ve only been associating ministerial roles with men it’s because my mother wouldn’t have been interested in a female minister, and because at the time female ministers were rare, the United Methodist Church began ordaining women in 1956, the United Presbyterian Church first ordained a woman in 1965, and the Roman Catholic Church still doesn’t permit a woman to officiate the sacraments. In the Roman Catholic Church, women can’t even become deacons who can’t officiate the sacraments. Why? Ostensibly because Christ didn’t select any women to be among his apostles, and the church is modeling itself on Christ’s example, but we all know it’s because of patriarchal demands for a woman to be subservient to men, because Eve, in league with the serpent, tempted man with knowledge which meant expulsion from Eden. The mother of all was the mother of sorrow, Mary, whose tears were as
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the salty waters of the sea (in which swam all those fish, and the fish shape was also supposed to recall the sacred vulva of the universe). A woman was the mother of Christ but that didn’t place her in the Holy Trinity, she was the debased mortal that united with God in the creation of the Man-God. She was death that was defeated by the resurrection. A woman can become a humble nun, but my mother didn’t care about nuns and wouldn’t have wanted to talk to one. A nun didn’t have the authoritative edge of the priest. A nun was also a woman. A nun had a vagina and my mother only wanted to counsel with penises.
My mother, for the most part, didn’t have much use for women, though she always had a few women friends in her life, people who were confusing to me as they were real, they existed, but the way she spoke about them was so spare as to be cryptic, from what I could gather they were typically women who were in serial problematic romantic and marital relationships, always women who didn’t have the privileges my mother had, often but not always women who were what was considered to be spiritually off-beat, like women who were New Age but believed in enough Christianity still that they were more New Age Christians, they would be friends then enemies then would be again friends. She liked men better and once told me that she didn’t understand women who bashed men because all the men she’d met in her life had been great with her, so kind, always wanting to do things for her. We were on the phone when she’d said that, and thinking of all the bad experiences I’ve had with men, that an abundance of women have had with men, I replied that may have been so for her (which I knew it wasn’t for she hated her father) but it wasn’t that way for everyone. Both men and women can suck. This was during our last period of contact. I was in my late fifties and my mother brusquely retorted, “How do you know about men? You don’t know anything about men. You’ve never been around men.” I was blown away by this assertion because of course I’ve spent my entire life around men—not to mention my first experience with men being in my family. From the time I was born of course I was around men everywhere, in general society, in schools, in church, in work, in the arts. Of course I had spent my life around men in all my daily interactions. Not to mention I’m married to a man and I have a son. I knew that this was one of those bizarre (as always) arguments I would not win, so all I said was, “I have lived my life around men.” My mother huffed and puffed and said she didn’t know anything about that, that I didn’t tell her anything about my life so how was she to know I’d been around men, but men had always been wonderful with her and taken good care of her. I was so stunned by her assertion that I’d never known any men and so couldn’t offer an opinion on men that I’m confident whatever remained of that “conversation” I spent mulling over what was going on in her brain that led her to state this, what was the picture she was formulating of me, had formulated of me that was this. I would have wondered at the outrageous limits to which she went in her weird attempts at defining my world. I would have wondered again at how she had never any interest in my personal experience, when I should have instead been wondering why she would want to convince me and have me agree that she had experience with men and I did not.
One will ask, “Why in the world would you continue to talk with her?”
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All I can plead is that it was during our final spell of contact and I was trying to get along for sake of family, my father had first contacted me on the pretext that my mother was physically ill (she won’t live forever implication being won’t live sooner than later), then when I learned she had no terminal illness, I continued contact because I had been through cutting them off twice before and didn’t want to go through the hell of harassment that I believed might follow if I cut them off again, I was hopeful of maybe developing rapport with my siblings, and because I imagined either of my parents were of an age to die at any time and now that we were in contact again I had the slim thread of “daughter” binding me. They weren’t mom and dad, they weren’t even mother and father, yet I was still “daughter”.
My mother and men. My mother had hated her father, but now all men had been good to her. My mother had fallings out with men, there were men she didn’t like, primarily caregivers, physicians, she would love them then hate them, but suddenly men had treated her well all her life.
She wouldn’t have been content with a female priest just like she would never have put up with a female doctor, not because she would have considered them incompetent, but because they weren’t men. She could inveigle men, not women. My mother needed men to pay attention to her and she wanted this at church as well, which was a reason she signed up to be Roman Catholic, though not the only reason.
What music is “better” is a matter of personal preference, but my mother listened to old school “classical” Bach (Baroque), Beethoven (bridged the Classical and Romantic periods), Brahms (Romantic), and Masses. That was her “better”. She wasn’t going to stand up and sing “The Old Rugged Cross”, the 1912 Methodist hymn by George Bernard who was a Salvation Army brigade leader before becoming a Methodist evangelist. My mother wanted the structure of the Roman Catholic Mass, which for her wasn’t a theological structure, it was a classical music structure. Though she grew up Methodist, Methodism wasn’t her original church home, instead it was the Bach Mass in B Minor. I may sound like I’m being wholesale critical on every point of the whys and wherefores of my mother’s relationship to the church, but I also grew up in the church home of the Bach Mass in B Minor, and then in the Roman Catholic Church, and while I understand other forms of church service, if I were a Christian I’d be in it for the music and the ritual of the relatively ancient Order of the Mass, but unlike my mother I’d also be in it for the Jewish mysticism and how it had echoes of the antique Mystery Religions and Euripides and theater. My mother’s thoughts on religion never went so far as to question whether Jesus Christ was really a historical personage or not because that would have been too tasking, she took it for granted he was because that was convenient, and she wasn’t interested in the history of the Christian church and how it came to be through decisions made by men and the long history of the ecumenical councils that wrestled over what was to be canon and what would get one burned at the stake. She did however play with the idea that Jesus Christ, who she believed had to have existed, he was just so prevalent in Western culture that he couldn’t be a myth, but he might have just been a man who did good deeds, that was the substance of Christianity, though a man who simply does good deeds has nothing to do with the Mass which was the only reason she ever went to
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church, for the rite of the Mass. She believed in Mary as the mother of Jesus, but a Mary isolated from the troubles of theology, a divine mother who understood tears and suffering, but whose relationship with God, as defined by various branches of Christianity, was too much to try to understand, my mother just liked the mother as holy aspect and personally identified with it in that she emotionally, at heart, believed the ordained by biology role of all women was to mother, to advance from girlhood to queen motherhood. At least, that’s how she saw herself. My mother’s body mothered and because of that she was sacred and she didn’t have to do much else but be sacred through her body having mothered. My mother was one of the many who identified themselves as Christian who didn’t know anything about Christianity, a Christian for whom the Nicene Creed, which laid out the belief structure, adopted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 (yes, here we are again), which was the first ecumenical council or worldwide council of the church, prior councils or synods having been local or regional, then amended at the First Council of Constantinople in 381, was a lot of incomprehensible ideas and words, and so at root she was more a pagan who liked the Mass for its music, and because one didn’t get much sermonizing, and at least for a time she looked for therapy in the church. Plus she liked that the Roman Catholic Church was very into mothering and the sacred Mary Mother, and we soon had statuettes of Mother Mary around the house, which I didn’t mind when I was eight and nine because I needed a mother and a silent statue of Mary felt more compassionate than the mother I had drawn from life’s cards.
That really was true for a while, when I needed a mother when I was eight and nine I’d go to my room and speak to a six-inch-tall porcelain figurine of Mary that had a prominent home on a lace doily on my dresser. There was another, similar, larger blue statue of Mary that had a home in the living room but was for display rather than being a focus for prayer. My statue was white and glossy porcelain, whereas the larger statue had a matte finish, both figures of a type that I’m not finding online, Mary wholly veiled except for her face, rocket ship streamlined in shape, hands not spread out in welcome but held before her chest in a pose of prayer as with Our Lady of Guadalupe, so nearly featureless that she shared more stylistically with an abstract Brancusi sculpture than other icons. I’m not sure when exactly that larger statue of Mary disappeared from the home but I’ve no memory of it being on prominent display after we left Richland. My devotion to Mary also fell away when we left Richland.
The Virgin Mary having exited the conversation when we moved from Richland to Augusta, to my surprise my mother came bouncing into the kitchen one morning when I was seventeen, catching me at breakfast, to excitedly regale me with how she had been painfully constipated but then she thought of praying to Mary and whoosh Mary immediately relieved her of her constipation, so if anyone was constipated they should pray to Mary who would immediately take care of that, because anything that was true for my mother must be true for everyone else.
My mother always argued if your experience was different from her own, because my mother’s experience should be everyone’s. Her mother, my mother often claimed, told her she had experienced permanent physical damage from childbearing that impacted her daily life, but my mother experienced no physical damage from
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childbearing so she would insist to me that no woman experienced damage from childbearing and her mother was a liar. Of course some women experience lasting damage from childbearing. I did. But I didn’t reveal this to my mother or argue the point because I wasn’t going to discuss personal matters with her. While we’re on the subject, it occurs to me to look up the hard data and what the World Health Organization reports is that more than a third of women experience lasting problems after childbirth.
Wondering if I was right about the blue Madonna, I looked in vain through the very few pictures I have of Augusta to confirm if the blue Madonna was no longer on display after our move, and while I didn’t see it (which actually proves nothing), a Polaroid of the Augusta fireplace mantle dressed up with Christmas stockings for my siblings reminds me we had a medium-sized crucifix hanging over the fireplace, several votive candles on the mantle beneath, I’d completely forgotten about this, I only remembered a mother-of-pearl crucifix, about four inches long, I kept in my bedroom. And as a teenager I always wore a crucifix on a necklace but it would difficult for me to analyze the why of this other than they represented an effort to find meaning in the problem of suffering and death. The crucifix above the fireplace in the Polaroid has a figure of Christ so small that it near disappears against a streamlined brown cross outlined in white that wasn’t overlarge despite dwarfing his form, and below it was an ordinary white porcelain Madonna I’d forgotten about that was larger than the one I kept in my room in Richland but smaller than the blue Madonna. This white Madonna is what makes me think the blue Madonna was gone. Maybe it had broken. After I left home and my parents moved to Martinez, they acquired a dark, shellacked copy of an Eastern Orthodox painting of a praying Madonna on a moulded wood panel that was hung on the suburban wood-paneled wall above the sofa, which is perhaps because they had gotten to know someone who had become a Greek Orthodox priest, which I know nothing about, I don’t know who it was or how they knew each other, but makes sense as my mother earlier wasn’t interested in anything other than sculptural representations. I like Byzantine iconography but the wood paneling overwhelmed the icon that had the appearance of decoupage, and the overall impression was of a Christmas card tacked to the wall and forgotten.
One of the only things I managed to hold onto after I left home was the Botonee crucifix, a silvered Christ on a budded, mother-of-pearl cross, until a few years ago when I opened the small box in which it was stored with other sundries, took a good hard long look at it and decided I’d kept it long enough, it had never held religious meaning for me, I had never displayed it after leaving home, instead it was a glyph of the pain and despair that was my childhood and adolescence as well the immaterial bits and pieces I collected magpie style that were an incoherent grasping at hope and a future outside of that prison.
Our son, when he first saw a crucifix in such a way that led him to ask me about it, wondered at what kind of a strange totem pole it was, and I rather felt like I’d done my job in keeping Christianity distant from him, though I recognized it was time to explain the basics. What I said, I don’t recollect, but it would have been something
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about how in that religion the cross represented death and rebirth and that the person on it was called Jesus Christ—though all one sees in the crucifix is suffering unto death, which I wouldn’t have gone into, the agony of its solitude, how the hope of resurrection wouldn’t be guessed if one wasn’t acquainted with the rest of the story, and as for the simple cross it is can represent any combination of opposites and the point of their union. This was also during the few years in which we were in contact with my family. One of my siblings, whose family we met with a few times, was devoutly Roman Catholic and profoundly conservative, so that their religion completely informed how they saw the world, and a Christian could respond to my above description of the crucifix that it is wrong, that it instead displays how the Son of God died on the cross for the sins of humankind, in order to cleanse them, and that is a teaching but is something one can’t deduce from looking at the crucifix, and I preferred to go the hope for rebirth route. After a visit with his cousins, AK had asked me about the crucifix, and I don’t recall if it it was after the same visit or another one that AK asked about his cousins calling him a heathen, telling him he was going to hell, and I don’t know everything that was said to him while they played, but one day when we were in a natural history museum for a traveling exhibit on gold and he saw a painting of Christ on the cross he blurted out, “Why did the Jews kill Jesus?” Stunned, having never dreamed I’d hear him voice these words, wondering what he might have been told when playing with his cousins, I quieted him in such a way where he wouldn’t feel scolded, as he had no clue what he was talking about, while my spouse’s mother, who was with us, beamed to hear her grandson finally ask about Jesus, oblivious to the near two thousand years of anti-semitism in that question, though not herself anti-semitic, she proceeded to explain something something about Christ dying on the cross for us all and was either thankfully brief or I redirected to another part of the exhibit which was, as I’ve noted, on the history of gold. The painting of Jesus was there because gold had been used on it, this was an example of the use of gold in sacred art. For some reason a model of the pyramids was shown, perhaps because of the capstone of the Great Pyramid having been gilt in gold, I don’t remember, that’s my best guess, and when my mother-in-law told AK how the Jews had been enslaved to build the pyramids, I reluctantly said no that wasn’t the case, modern history showed they weren’t built by Jews, and she looked unconvinced, like she wasn’t sure if this was atheistically-biased revisionist history. When the exhibition crossed the Atlantic Ocean with Columbus, on the Spaniards pursuit of gold, I believe I augmented with how brutal was Columbus’ hunger for gold, but kept the bloody facts of his treatment of the indigenous Taino to a minimum as I could tell my annotations were wearing thin, so that by the time we stood before the part on the discovery of gold in the Black Hills, and I saw how there was no mention of how this resulted in the United States breaking the Fort Laramie Treaty with the Sioux in order to dispossess them of the metal, I limply, quietly remarked, “I don’t know how they could leave out how…,” etcetera, because I was well aware of how I was the bad, wet blanket, no one likes a bad, wet blanket, this was supposed to be simple fun, but I was also confounded by the exhibit, everything it had left out, and had to say something, though a person like my mother-in-law, because of the brand of Southern etiquette on which she was raised, even though she’s socially aware and horrified by conservative politics, would take my criticism of the exhibit, in its presence, as impolite.
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Facting where I can, my spouse remembers well the “my cousins are saying I’m a heathen and going to Hell” episode, as well the totem pole, but he says AK asked, before his grandmother, “Why are the Jews killing that man?” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, saying “that man” instead of “Jesus” and that I was wandering elsewhere, whereas I remember this at happening the gold exhibit at Fernbank and that I was there and my jaw dropped, just as MK says his mouth had dropped in horror, so either he’s wrong and it was only at the gold exhibit, or there were two separate incidents, or I’m wrong and it happened in New York only I was present for it. I swear it happened at Atlanta’s own museum of natural history, but I could be wrong. I find I did make mention of visiting the exhibit in a 2009 blogpost in which I addressed a couple of the issues, relating, “We went to the gold exhibit at Fernbank today, organized by the American Museum of Natural History. Indeed, there were some lovely things on display, the most impressive being perhaps examples of natural formations of gold and quartz. If you are anxious to see old ingots lost in shipwrecks, purchase pirate hats and pan for gold for about $5 in the gift shop, you’ll not leave disappointed. What ended up being interesting to me was the history on gold that was omitted. For example, in the section on the Black Hills gold rush, I pointed out to AK that they made no mention of the Black Hills gold find resulting in the bringing in of troops and theft of land confirmed as Dakota, Lakota, Nakota in the 1868 Treaty of Ft. Laramie. A paragraph was given on the 1874 Custer Expedition but nothing as to meaning, absolutely no historical context. Instead, a yard away there was a little fake bridge with a slab of plexiglass in the middle through which one could look down and see a fake stream bed with a few gold sparkles glimmering.Yet in the Georgia Gold Room they did have history on the Georgia gold rush and the dispossession of Cherokee land, a long film there flatly speaking of the stealing of the land. This room was put together by Fernbank. So, I left questioning why Fernbank made this allowance but the American Museum of Natural History didn’t even begin to approach the real history of gold.” Anyway, if you’re going to talk about the history of gold in America that means pointing out how Americans brutalized the indigenous for it otherwise it’s not honest history.
4
My mother and my father became Roman Catholic in Seattle, and I think it had much to do also with the aesthetics of place, of the Blessed Sacrament Church on the University of Washington campus, which is the church we went to, built about 1910, run by Dominican friars, a tribute to all things medieval Gothic but in brick, inside as well as out for the interior was never finished with the planned plaster, so surrounded by all that brick one felt one was outside but in. I wholeheartedly recommend it as a great building, and if I were in Seattle I’d show up for a Mass just to experience as an adult the structure serving as the stage for which it was designed. The style is more specifically Late Gothic Revival architecture, the interior dressed up with pointed arches running up and down defining aisles left and right of the seating, lots of stained glass peering down from inside those side aisles which were also the realm of
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the confessionals and nooks for statues and paintings of divines and subsidiary divines with many candles hallowing. Above the rise of the rust-blood red-painted octagonal concrete columns that support and resolve in these brick pointed arches is another row of highly ornamental window tracery that helps furnish with light the interior, which is Perpendicular Gothic Style, a lot of verticality drawing the eye up to a high high vault of wood that protects the space from the elements, but the height of the arches of the side aisles not being near so high causes a split focus so that the eye can either wander to the more personable grottos and the secretive doors of the confessionals, the fourteen images of the Stations of the Cross above, and the stained glass colorful brights above these, or soar up above the arches to the higher windows and the bare wooden bones of the ceiling. For one of the seriously faithful a blessed quonset hut of a church is no less precious, but if you need a theater in which to host productions of the Mass then in Seattle the Blessed Sacrament Church is the next best thing to the really big deal cathedral downtown, and somehow even better in its own way (the primitive interest of all that brick) than the grandeur of Seattle’s St. James. If one is impressed as an adult, imagine the impact on a child of five and six years of age. A child is short and that made the perpendicular that much more staggeringly perpendicular and awesome.
I was also confused. Perhaps the first time I went to the Blessed Sacrament Church, observing a woman in the row ahead rise and enter a door near us in the right aisle, I wondered what she was doing and was told she was going into the confessional now shush. I understood something about confession and penance, or I thought I did, for I comprehended punishment was involved, but for some reason I firmly believed that door led down to a small adjoining underground chapel where was a kind of devil who would abuse her, and I wondered why anyone would willingly subject themselves to this. I was confounded, anxious for the woman. I watched and watched that mysterious door waiting for the woman to emerge, but she didn’t, or I could have sworn that she hadn’t, and I worried for her physical safety. Maybe in part I simply reasoned that where there was a door to God, as was this body of the church conceived as being, there must also be a door to Hell. I don’t know.
To further complicate matters, I believed the woman who went into the confessional was Jewish. I don’t know if I’d heard that Jesus Christ was King of the Jews, so I believed Jews would also be in attendance. All my Jewish friends were later in my youth, I don’t even remember knowing any Jews at that age, but I may have and I’ve forgotten. At that age I would mix up Jews with people of Italian heritage.
My very first experience of church, that I can recall, was when I was about three in Richland and was the result of when I saw on a neighbor’s kitchen wall a framed portrait of a long-haired man. Obvious to me was that the man must be important to the people of the house, else he wouldn’t be displayed on their wall, and I wondered if he was perhaps a relative, which was confusing as he had long hair and looked rather odd, he didn’t belong to 1960, but I was new to the world, I knew that, and that I didn’t understand a lot of things yet. I asked and it turned out he was not a relation of theirs but some man-god named Jesus who had lived many years beforehand, which to me at three years of age meant a vast unwieldy stretch of time before the early 1900s, the
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time of World War I, my world having been somehow already chopped up so it was measured by wars. When I was three years of age, way back when meant to me anything before WWI and the shortening of women’s hemlines. These people asked me if I wanted to go to church with them that Sunday, and I said yes because it would be an adventure, something new, in fact I was eager to go, they said it was fun. Fun sounded great. When I returned home and told my mother, she was surprised I’d want to go to a church as I’d not been churched, we were not a church family, and I affirmed that yes I did want to go that Sunday with the neighbors. Looking forward to what interesting new thing this would be, I rode with the neighbors in their car to I don’t know what church it was in Richland but I well remember sitting up front near the stage with its podium and an altar that I didn’t know was an altar. I didn’t know what to expect with that visit, but I hadn’t anticipated being bound by obligation to a very hard church bench for the duration, listening to the monotonous drone of speakers. I sat very still, as I knew was expected, I was a polite little thing and I didn’t want to disappoint my hosts and be a bad guest. My leg fell asleep for the first time ever, which was more painful than frightening, and I must have broken silence to ask about this because that would be how I learned my leg had fallen asleep and would be alright, wait a moment and feeling would return. How could my leg fall asleep when the rest of me wasn’t? Feeling did return along with pins and needles pain, which wasn’t frightening but was intensely unpleasant. A mystery. What was happening inside of that leg? Sitting on that bench for so long made me less spiritually meditative than possessed by knowledge of my body and the increasing discomfort and heaviness that was it. When I was older and we were going to church, it often had a way of making me less connected with my soul than more uncomfortably mindful of my body. That first foray, I quickly became bored and weary and had to struggle to not forget my manners and lie down on the bench. I kept waiting for the fun part to begin and after a while I realized it never would. I reasoned that the neighbors hadn’t likely knowingly lied to me, but that their idea of fun was different from mine. I knew I didn’t want to ever do this again.
My parents weren’t then going to church. Though they’d married Methodist, I know from the death announcement of the twins that a United Protestant minister officiated over their burial, and I find that minister was the minister of the Central United Protestant church which was located right across from Christ the King. I wasn’t raised, from a tot, on a diet of Jesus, of the need for salvation, of one’s earthly existence circulating around the church. I wasn’t raised on a diet of church until I suddenly was, the more involved part beginning when I was seven, after we’d returned to Richland, were attending Christ the King, and now was my turn to be catechized and baptized into Roman Catholicism. I knew the reason for my baptism was because I had to be baptized in order to have my First Communion, which took place the in the spring when I was seven. Somehow it had slipped everyone’s notice, though I was taking classes for my First Communion, that I hadn’t yet been baptized Roman Catholic, and then the church and priests realized it and that meant a quickie baptism so I would be able to officially go to the altar and receive the blood and body of Christ, which felt like being married to the church the way we were dressed up in white with white veils. Then my mother gave birth to my sister, A, the following June,
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and soon thereafter she was baptized in a long white gown, and the couple who served as her godparents drove down from Seattle to attend and hold her at the baptism, people we never saw again.
This was the spring and summer of a red-striped dress that I loved, but not as much as another red-striped dress that I loved a little later. There are photos of us seated on the front stoop of the house on Everest, blue sky above, tan desert across the street, our Kodak color Instamatic group images that were that year’s record of Easter, our first ever record of Easter to be made, and the second to the last record of Easter to be made. We are shown in various arrangements of my mother and brothers seated on the concrete stoop, me standing or sitting beside them, and then there are a couple of photos of my father embracing both my brothers while I stand to the side. It was the spring following the autumn release of Disney’s Mary Poppins, and every child in reach of a movie theater singing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious over and over and all the adults asking, “How do you remember that word?” We remembered because our thirsty little child brains were built to automatically absorb and remember such nonsensical things as essential information. The scene in which that song is sung, a visit to a horse race track, has Julie Andrews dancing in a happy animated fantasy land, dressed in a white Edwardian dress with a full petticoat skirt finessed with tidbits of red, and a bright red corset and red bows on her bodice, while her partner Dick Van Dyke wears a red-and-white candy cane-striped jacket and white trousers. My Easter outfit was a cotton dress with a white sleeveless bodice and a full red-and-white striped candy cane skirt, and a red-and-white striped short jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves that was of the same cloth as the skirt. Hats were still in fashion for women and girls, and my Easter hat, to cover my Roman Catholic head in church, was white with a broad brim lined in red grosgrain ribbon. I felt like I could have crossed over into the land of Disney’s Mary Poppins, though my dress was not Edwardian, it was just red-and-white striped. But I’m not so interested in those photos because I’m uncomfortable looking at myself in them, as I am with most of my childhood photos. My hair was in a bright copper phase and looking at them I feel not just adult-sized, I feel too awkwardly me. I almost always emotionally feel myself as adult-sized in childhood photos. In these, as in a number of others, I feel also simply too big for a child, even though my gaining inches slowed to a crawl at five and I became the smallest in my class for some years. In the photos I don’t look like I feel gawky and awkward, though I remember going through an intense period of feeling that way earlier in the year, confused by my body like I’d been jammed into a new one and didn’t know how to cope with it. I’m smiling and happily showing off my dress, with which I was very pleased. I’m posing. I’m genuinely happy in that dress that connected me with the fantasy land of Mary Poppins. Children everywhere, even those with good parents, wished they had a magic-making Mary Poppins for a nanny.
That same spring, here are photos of me in my white First Communion outfit with its little white veil. It was somewhere during that time my mother tried to run off to California and landed in the hospital, and I’m not even sure she was at my First Communion because I remember getting me attired for First Communion becoming a crisis the day beforehand with suddenly having to find a veil and dress which hadn’t
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even been thought about until the last minute. It was always that way, my parents didn’t attend to things, they paid no attention to what was going on in school or in our other activities, but especially so when my mother was in the hospital for long stays, such as when I was twelve, we were in Georgia, and I needed my dress for a learn to waltz and foxtrot thing I’d been taking called “Social”. Social was a kind of ritual in the South that I didn’t know anything about but I’d let myself be talked into it by my best friend who wanted me to be in the same Social class with her, then at the end of the year my mother was in the hospital and no one had paid any attention to my need for a fancy dress for the special year-end dance though the cotillion was the big event where the twelve-year-old girls and boys displayed the fact they’d learned to do some basic ballroom dancing together, very stiffly in awkward speechless politeness. My parents had known a long dress-up dress for the cotillion was part of the deal, my mother was in the hospital and my father paid no attention whenever I reminded him I needed a dress, then at the last minute, the day before, he said “That’s just too bad, isn’t it” no a dress for the cotillion wasn’t going to happen, it wasn’t any concern of his. The day of the dance I was rescued by the very put-out and exasperated mother of the boy who was my social partner, the boy with whom I learned to fox trot and waltz, she huffed and puffed and complained to me about my parents very irresponsibly not doing anything they should be doing which stood to ruin the whole thing for her son and the afternoon of the dance brought over for me a dress her daughter had worn some years before for her own cotillion and weren’t we lucky it happened to kind-of fit. To take social you had to have a partner of the opposite sex, and the boy I ended up going with was Deep South Southern. It wasn’t a childhood romance that paired us up, a friend of his was going to take social with my friend who wanted me to go as well, the first year the girl asked the boy, and as no one had asked him yet I asked and he and his mother said yes. This surprised me as I was from the North and I expected to not be approved by his very Deep South mother. As I had been his dance partner for the year (or season, however long the lessons lasted) he would have ended up without one for the year-end dance if I wasn’t able to go, not having a dress. So his mother was outraged and took it out on me, as if I had any control over the situation. While everyone else was dressed up in new finery, I wore his big sister’s dress that was not only years out of fashion, it had yellowed, both the ankle-length white skirt and the lavender bodice, and it limply hung like all it wanted to do was return to the closet and remain a fading memory. Frustrated with my hair, his mother undertook trying to cope with its frizzy-curly unwieldiness, and finally pulled part of it back on top and the sides and tied it up with a slim ribbon decorated with daisies that I’d unearthed for her from my little sister’s things. Not only did I feel like an ugly, forlorn leftover, the wrath of the boy’s mother, falling on me as it had, made the whole affair distressing. I was also grateful that she had dug up the dress and hurried over to help me get ready, and very embarrassed that the year would end with this chaos. The boy’s mother must have had more feelings for me than just fury and exasperation, because she intuited that if no adult in my family was going to get me a dress or help me get ready, then no one in my family was going to be taking photos of me in my dress, and she brought over her camera and took a photo of me from every angle, left side, right side, front and back, so that I would remember how I looked on that big day.
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The reason I suspect my mother may have been in the hospital when suddenly I needed to find in a day the outfit for my First Communion was because of the chaos over the veil in particular. The dress was last minute, purchased the morning beforehand, and the veil even more last minute, for when we got the dress we were informed I would need a veil. Long before the event we’d been given a printout of what we would need, which I gave my parents, but this was ignored as usual. The shop had pulled the dress out of the back of the store, saying it was the last one and we were lucky it was my size, but they were out of veils and it was unlikely we’d find one because everything had already been purchased by others who’d prepared for First Communion weeks in advance, they said, so there was that humiliation as well, that everyone else had taken care to prepare their outfits in advance. They were cleaned out because First Communion was a once-a-year event and they explained they didn’t immediately replenish the merchandise as there wouldn’t be demand for it until the next year. Such-and-such shop in Pasco, they said, was the only other place they knew to try but it was likely they wouldn’t have any veils left either. Loud noises were made by my father about how I was just going to have to do without the veil if the second shop didn’t have it, and if the church insisted on my having a veil (which was mandatory until a change in the 1983 Code of Canon Law) I would not be having my First Communion. It wasn’t that I was distressed about not having my First Communion, instead it would have felt like a failure because I had gone through the classes with all these other children and it was kind of like graduating with your class. But the shop in Pasco did have one last unwanted veil stuffed in a flattened, somewhat mangled transparent plastic envelope.
It’s because of the furor over the veil, and because I’m the only family member in these First Communion photos, which leads me to think my mother was in the hospital and my father took a few photographs as a record so she could see me in my First Communion dress. With my First Communion, there are several pictures of me lined up on the walk outside the church with all the other little girls my age who were having their First Communion. All the other girls were not simply dressed in white, as was I, they had dresses that were enveloped in lace, and I felt plain in comparison, not that anyone looking at the photos from this distance in time might notice and make a comparison, though when I check the internet for the current styles I find they are very wedding-like, often full-length gowns, adult-styled with peek-a-boo naked backs and off-the-shoulder styles, they are extravaganzas of fancy lace and tulle and brocades and pearl beading and cost hundreds of dollars. Even the dresses offered at the more industrial website called “Catholic Supply” are veiled in organza and lace, excepting a lone sweet little number that has a smocked bodice, is cotton instead of polyester or satin, and the only lace is a bit of trim at the hem of the skirt and wrists of the sleeves. I look back at my First Communion photos and see even then I’m the only one in just a plain white dress, no lace or tulle, which is not a big deal except that I was well aware other parents had given attention to the attire of their children, it showed, whereas my outfit had been pulled together at the last second and it was only by luck I had a dress or veil. The photos on the walk outside the church with the other girls are followed by photos that were taken of me in our yard, desert in the background, me displaying my First Communion certificate. Again, during this time
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period my hair is in a very copper phase of red, it’s not just the film or developing or the aging of the photos because my youngest brother’s hair is blond and light brown in the Easter photos while mine is red. I stand before the willow tree that was in our front yard and was big enough that it was a tree that would have been already there when the neighborhood of the Richland Village addition was constructed and they opted to preserve it.
There are no photos of my baptism but, as I’ve said, I remember a bit of turmoil around that when it was realized I’d not already been baptized Roman Catholic and that this had to be done and out of the way before my First Communion. It was like an emergency baptism.
Before my baptism I dreamt that I was among some adults who were invited to go down to the church at midnight for something special that was going to happen. I went down there with them and we were standing around the baptismal font in the middle of which the priest had placed a metal bandaid box. Promptly at midnight, the box opened and a little red devil jumped out. He grew and grew, which was terrifying to me, and then he said, “Come to me and I will baptize you into the Kingdom of Hell.” Everyone went to him like they were hypnotized which was confusing and horrifying to me. Distraught, I ran, and eventually help came, I had made it outside and Superman swooped in out of the night with Lois Lane, but it was too late, there was a black gap of lapse of memory in the dream and I realized, Superman and Lois Lane landing, that I had already been baptized into Hell during that black gap of time.
These were among my most horrifying nightmares, had every couple of years, I would be desperate, attempting to escape someone who was after me, they’d catch me, everything would go black, I would come to in the dream in the future, perhaps I’d happen to see my reflection and the realization would horribly dawn on me that though I’d imagined I’d escaped, I’d not escaped, I’d been caught and made to forget. I would wake myself up screaming.
The only memory I have of my baptism is that my brother, B, was baptized then as well. My youngest brother, W, may have been already baptized Roman Catholic in Seattle, as an infant, and if he was instead baptized in Richland then this is lost among the memory shards. The emergency baptism happened in such close proximity to my First Communion that my mother may have been in the hospital while that was going on as well, which could be a reason I don’t remember it.
I remember the day my mother first went into the hospital, when I came home from second-grade and the next-door neighbor, a woman with two young boys, showed up and took me over to her home, where I stayed for a night with my brothers and immersed myself in drawing a very detailed picture of our weeping willow tree as a present for the woman and in order to distract myself from the disorder. I remember being entranced by their big bronze metal clock that had rays like the sun, and the pussy willows kept in a vase on a table next their front door. Then one Saturday morning my mother was walking out to the car with me and my father and she said they had a surprise for me, for having been such a big girl and so responsible all that
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time she was in the hospital. I was disoriented by this and a little alarmed because at first I had no idea what she was talking about. She’d been in the hospital, yes, I remembered this, but that it had been for an extended period had disappeared from my head. I realized I had bits and pieces but an overarching memory of that period of time was gone. I puzzled and tried to remember and nodded my head and pretended I knew what was going on but it was a big blank hole into which that time had sunk except that I vaguely remembered having been promised a present and I’d wondered what I’d want. Then my mother and father opened the car’s trunk and gave me my big surprise, which was a violin, for which I’d never asked, I didn’t even know violins existed. Later my mother would tell me she’d always wanted to be a violinist, thus my big reward for being a big girl was the violin which was later revealed to be also my birthday present, my mother explained I couldn’t expect a birthday present as well so soon after having got the violin which was too expensive for me to expect another present.
It still disturbs me a little, returning to that moment on the sidewalk when I was seven and realized something had gone wrong with my memory of her hospitalization. I had been such a big girl, so competent, I knew that. I was also so lost.
Now it’s summer, my sister’s turn for her baptism, an infant dressed in her long white baptismal dress, and this was recorded with photos while other baptisms were not. In one photo I am standing in front of Father Dolan at Christ the King Church in Richland, Washington, witnessing the baptism of my infant sister. I am glad that I have this as in this photo I look very different to me than in the Easter and First Communion photos. Standing in front of Father Dolan, I am my right size, a small child size. I don’t look at myself and feel or see myself as being big-little adult. I’m wearing the dress with the red-and-white stripe skirt and the white bodice and don’t have on the little jacket as it was summer and hot. My hair is pulled back, and I wear my white hat with the wide brim and red grosgrain ribbon edging because we’re in the church, but the hat is pushed back a little on my head so my face is fully visible for the camera. My father stands behind the baptismal font, my mother in a hot pink sleeveless sheath dress and white straw hat screen left in front of the font, Father Dolan is screen right before the font, and I stand before him, mouth turned down, not smiling, not looking at the camera for which everyone else has made their half-smiles, my eyes are turned away to screen right, not meeting the camera’s gaze. Standing alongside Father Dolan, instead of my parents, I look like a little eight year old, my shoulder coming up to a little below his waist. He’s shorter than my father, who back behind the font is still taller than him, but it’s with this picture of me in front of Father Dolan that I can see myself as the small vulnerable child I was whereas in photos with my parents, with my siblings, or isolated, I always see myself as a short adult. With the exception of one other photo, from when I was five, and another from when I’m nine, it’s the only photo I have from my youth in which I don’t see myself as an awkward oversized adult kid, instead I’m a pretty little girl.
So I can discover who were my godparents, I decide to write to Christ the King Church, where I was baptized at seven, and request a copy of my baptismal certificate, saying a simple image emailed will suffice. As if there is a test to be passed,
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the secretary responds wanting to know why I want the certificate. My reply is it’s for sentimental reasons, hoping that is sufficient cause, though I feel like what’s it their business. I feel I own the certificate by right of my being the one who was baptized, sprinkled, probably by Father Dolan, and what is it their business that I want to see whatever beatific illustration the church chose to picture or not on all their baptismal certificates of that era, I want to see the printed script, what type of typographic font was used, probably flourished with gold, I want to see the date and the signatures scribed on that date and the names of those who stood up as my godparents as I don’t remember anyone doing so. It takes a few weeks but I finally receive a PDF of the certificate. What I am sent isn’t a copy of the original, but is instead a copy of a new document based on the old. My mother’s name is misspelled. I don’t care if it was misspelled, I’m just surprised that it was. I have no idea who the godparents are, but the name is vaguely familiar, and then I realize, oh, this was a cousin of my mother’s and the cousin’s husband, people who lived in Texas (I located fairly recent obituaries and and some old society news articles) and we had nothing to do with them ever, no phone calls, and I never met them, Christmas cards weren’t even exchanged. I check back on emails to locate where my mother had mentioned this cousin who, the story went, after the death of her mother when she was a preteen, had been placed in a Roman Catholic boarding school (I’d assumed her father was RC but it seems he was Presbyterian), then had lived for a while with my mother’s family in Chicago. I find the email and how my mother had stated after that time she “never heard from her again” but knew she’d married and lived in Texas. From what I am able to gather from society news articles, after her graduation from college, it was while the young woman was doing social work in Chicago that she stayed with them, when my mother was about eleven, then had gone on to Los Angeles where she also did social work and was married a year later. I realize, if what my mother says is true, that the two had no personal communication after 1944, this means my godparents weren’t aware they were made my godparents twenty-one years later. My mother must have drawn their names out of the air as she was aware that this cousin was a Roman Catholic. A photo accompanies the obituary, and the resemblance between my not-really-a-godmother, in her elder years, is so close to my mother’s mother they could almost pass as doubles, despite their not having resembled one another much as young women. She looks more like my maternal grandmother than my mother or her sisters. In her youth, she had an approachable glamour, as did her older sister, who instead was a double for the actress Norma Shearer.
I find I was correct about my baptism happening as an emergency in close proximity to my First Communion. Attached to the PDF of the baptismal record is the date of my First Communion. These events took place the same day, on March 14, two weeks and a day before Easter. Father Dolan, as I’d remembered, had performed the baptism, which would have been immediately before I went outside to stand on the sidewalk with the others ready to make their entry for their First Holy Communion mass.
One Saturday morning in Richland, I had the wherewithal and determination to start going through the little metal directory (made by Bates, I see many like it on Etsy) of phone numbers of friends, acquaintances and relatives kept by my parents and started calling individuals, beginning with the A's, to ask why I was being sent to the
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Roman Catholic Church where I said I was learning frightening things. Determined that I must send out a plea for help, I reasoned the phone was a quick and accessible option, and the little directory was the way to find adults I would recognize as not being associated with the church, who might not automatically be on the defensive, and I hoped I'd happen upon someone who would understand that if I, a young child, was seeking help from outside then I was very serious and that they needed to pay attention. So, I settled my nerves about making these cold calls, and began, imagining I was very smart to come up with this idea. When some numbers just rang, I realized people were probably out doing Saturday morning shopping chores. One person who answered told me I should talk to my parents, and I didn't understand why they didn't get that the reason I was making these calls was because that wasn't an option for me, I couldn’t talk to my parents about this, they wouldn’t pay attention. I don’t believe I’d gotten very far into my project when I had to pause, perhaps to take care of a sibling, during that pause the phone rang and my parents learned from the caller what I was doing. And that was the end of that.
I have long reasoned that I was likely seven years of age when I did this, that it was probably before my First Communion, when we were living on Everest Avenue, but I also have always remembered how I secretively made the calls while sitting on the floor of the dining room on Mahan Avenue, using the phone that was on the white desk opposite the dining table, next the entrance to the living room, my siblings in the living room watching cartoons, my parents still in bed. Which means I was actually well into my eighth year, because we moved to Mahan after my third grade had started. The newspaper shows that the house we moved into was advertised from September twelfth to the fifteenth in 1965. I don’t know how long it would have taken my parents to close and pack and move but it may be were in the new house some time in October. Perhaps because it later seemed most reasonable to me that I’d made those calls before my First Communion, I had somehow transposed them to a time months beforehand when we were on Everest. I don’t know why I didn’t recognize the conflict until recently because the kitchens were two very different layouts. On Everest the living room didn’t open onto the dining room but onto the 1950s kitchen that was like a little hall, at the rear of which was a small dining area just large enough for the dining table and chairs. On Mahan, the kitchen was larger, modern, and beyond the dining area which was where was the white desk, opposite a new dining table with white legs and formica top, and next the entrance to the living room. The desk was not located in the kitchen on Everest as there was no room, I don’t believe we even had it then. Whatever it was had made me so anxious that I resorted to calling people in my parents’ phone directory—seeking answers to why I was being sent to this place, hoping someone outside would realize my fears were serious else I’d not take this extraordinary measure of making these secret calls looking for help—I don’t remember.
It was a replay of when I was three years of age and tried to run away, asking for help. The adult who one approaches, from whom one asks help, passes the child back to the parents, never mind that the child has reached outside the home where there is no help for them. It was pointless to ever seek help.
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It occurs to me that the catechism book used when I was seven might be in the Internet Archive. The Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, had meant big changes observable to ritual-loving congregants. The altar was staged so the priest could stand behind it facing the congregation and while some of the Mass was still in Latin the majority was now in English. What had been a dramatic and formal theater was now intended to be viewed as accessible and immediate, much to the chagrin of traditionalists, for whom the former version had also been accessible and communicated the gravitas of the sacred. The altar rail was to be removed, and with its absence people stood while receiving communion rather than kneeling, but Richland kept the rail and the practice of kneeling while receiving the eucharist and wine. There were other changes as well which necessitated the publication of a new catechism study, so the Baltimore Catechism, which had educated four generations of Catholics, was replaced with The New Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism, as explained by Father Bennett. The pink and red cover, upon which Jesus Christ holds a lamb, looking lovingly at it, an outline of St. Peter’s basilica in the background, white on pink. “Most up to date” and “clearly explained” reads the cover. The copy I’m looking at on the Internet Archive once belonged to a Gianna Romano who was in the eighth grade. Immediately inside is the Prayer to the Holy Spirit, and the promise that if one recites it daily for a month that one is granted an indulgence of five years, which means the number of years cut off the time you would stay in Purgatory for the cleansing of your sins. The dedication was to Saint Joseph, Foster Father of Jesus “First Teacher of these truths.” After the introduction and contents were the “Prayers for Every Day”, which included The Sign of the Cross (three years indulgence), The Lord’s Prayer, The Hail Mary, Glory Be to the Father, The Apostles’ Creed, The Confiteor, An Act of Faith (three years indulgence), An Act of Hope (three years indulgence), An Act of Contrition (three years indulgence), the Morning Offering, Another Morning Offering, The Angelus (ten years of indulgence if recited at dawn, noon and eventide), Hail, Holy Queen (five years indulgence), the Blessing Before Meals (five years indulgence), Grace After Meals (300 days indulgence), and Ejaculations (300 days for each). There are a number of pictures that depict Christ and his sheep. The first chapter, on “The Creed”, shows God as an old man with a full white beard, a white triangle behind his head, beneath which is the Holy Spirit represented as a haloed dove, and Jesus Christ below this with a four-rayed peppermint candy halo behind him, a lamb set on his shoulders, his hair and shorter beard yet to lose their melanin. The second chapter is “God and His Perfections”, in which we are told we can’t see the all-knowing Supreme Being that is God. The third chapter tackles “The Unity and Trinity of God” as best it can, acknowledging that while we can’t understand the three Persons in One God, we must believe it as Jesus told us that’s how it is, and that when we “reach Heaven” we will finally know what it all means. Following chapters deal with an education on angels, the fall of man through Adam and Eve which resulted in original sin, actual sin, the Incarnation (birth of Jesus Christ), Redemption, the Grace of the Holy Spirit, Virtues and Gifts of the Holy Spirit, the Catholic Church, and so on for 193 pages, with copious illustrations.
Another book that was likely used in our First Communion catechism class was The New Saint Joseph First Communion Catechism of 1963, written for first and second
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graders, also with illustrations, full color, and simplified explanations delivered in eleven lessons on how we were made by God, how God is great, the Blessed Trinity, The First Sins, Our Own Sins, The Son of God Becomes Man, Jesus Opens Heaven For Us, Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, Sacrament of Penance, How to Make a Good Confession, The Holy Eucharist, and sections on The Holy Mass, Holy Days of Obligation, Various Prayers, Night and Other Prayers. The chapter on the Blessed Trinity hammers it in that there is only one God but there are the three Persons in one God that are the Father who is God, the Son who is God and the Holy Ghost which is God. This is not given as an inexplicable mystery that will not be understood until our death. Instead they are represented as a loving family. “They never fight, they always agree, they are always happy.” Indulgences are nowhere mentioned on its 68 pages. What I wondered was who was getting the word back from Purgatory, and with such exact bookkeeping specificity, as to how much time one would get off from the afterlife’s spiritual sanitarium for the reciting of different prayers, or rather I knew these were flat-out lies, suspect speculations at best if approached in good faith, and wondered at how the church was able to get away with passing all this off as hard fact. I didn’t know their first appearance was in 1095, Pope Urban II remitting the penance of all who joined in on the Crusades as well as confessing their sins, later becoming indulgences in exchange for “cash” when one was physically unable to go on a Crusade. John Tetzel, a 1517 vendor of indulgences offered by Albert of Brandenberg for funds to complete the building of St. Peter’s Roman Basilica, would parade a procession of dignitaries through towns, bearing a cross displaying the papal arms, the papal bull of indulgence ported on a velvet cushion, beckoning all to “Listen to the voices of your dear dead relatives and friends beseeching you and saying, Pity us, pity us. We are in dire torment from which you can redeem us for a pittance.” He encouraged, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.”
What did I think I was experiencing with my First Communion? The Saint Joseph First Communion Catechism is explicit that when the priest says “This is my body,” the bread is changed into Christ’s body, and that when he says, “This is my blood,” is when the wine is changed into Christ’s blood. As The Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism explains, what remains is the appearance of bread and wine, but the substance is Jesus Christ. “The appearances of anything are the things we can see, touch, and taste. The substance of anything is what it is.” What the teaching meant to me, I’m not certain, whether I thought of the eucharist as literally or symbolically the body of Christ. The priests and nuns soundly impressed upon us that this was very emphatically sacred and you must not be thinking anything but sacred thoughts during this part of the Mass, but the catechism lessons were a rushed litany with no opportunity for “why”, the “because, God says” built in to cut questions off at the pass, and I don’t think they wanted seven-year-old children getting a picturesque grasp of it all, making a leap from bread and wine to body and blood to meat, forging a link with cannibalism and rebelling. The catechism gave no option for interpretation of the bread and wine as the harvest of the earth being the body of God as not only creator of all things, sustainer of our lives, but thus also our food, which would be pantheism. Because the delicate wafers were specifically made for the eucharist I thought of them already as reserved-for-Mass and thus sacred, so that if you were
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starving and no other food was available then you probably were forbidden from eating them because they were technically not bread, occupying a liminal territory. Even though I wasn’t a believer, when I was fourteen and visited a Roman Catholic Church with a friend, my prior experience was so imprinted on me, guiding what I thought was “right” eucharist, that I was aesthetically horrified their eucharist bread was wafers of shredded wheat rather than smart little flat rounds of communion bread stamped with a cross. As for in the remembrance of Christ, not simply a memory but an anamnesis event—while Christ was present in as much that I was thinking about him, in as much as I was thinking about all the pictures and iconography I’d seen of Christ, in as much as I was thinking of the problem of Christ as the Son of God, part of the Holy Trinity, the Three-in-One-God—though I attempted to make myself a vessel ready for holy thoughts and experience, I was, in a sense, a point where numerous ambitions intersected. There was uttermost the ambition of the church in relationship to its congregants, then the ambition of me, a congregant, in response to the ambition (or instruction, expectation) of the church. The church environment, to me, animated Christ, or was an area in which one was given an opportunity to feel Christ who, with the Father, was the supposed owner of this building, His/Their home. Whether the homeowner was there or we were archaeologists exploring his effects didn’t make much difference to me, because of the building’s devotion. Outside we were free to make noise, to talk, to play. Inside we had to be reverent, silent. When we entered, we anointed ourselves with holy water into which we dipped a finger then made the sign of the cross from head to sternum and shoulder to shoulder, which marked the transition from secular to sacred. So I didn’t think ever of Christ being exterior the building, and when inside the building I hoped I was acknowledged as polite, respectful, endeavoring to participate in the proper mindset and thus create a place for potentially experiencing or meeting with the Roman Catholic Triune God. To read the stories and meditate on the actions in the Stations of the Cross and the faces of the icons, was that to meet and experience the Roman Catholic God? I didn’t know. At my First Communion, having been reminded to think only holy thoughts, as I went up to the railing where I would kneel and receive the wafer and wine, I struggled to not think of the priests without their robes, nude men with penises, sexual beings. Here I’d gone through all these catechism classes, had learned my prayers, and all that had to be said was, “Think holy thoughts,” and what I’d studied was swept away as the priests garments suddenly disappeared, my mind sabotaging me so that sacred intentions became sacred pretentions.
If I remember correctly, the wafers used in the mass at Christ the King in Richland were made by the nuns, but perhaps instead of being the resident nuns they were mass-produced by elsewhere nuns. Now they are big business. Communion wafers are readily available online for purchase, 1000 “breads” for $13.49, plug in your credit card number and an address for delivery and—holy snacks! Low gluten hosts, and whole wheat hosts are available, but not hosts made out of rice flour (for those allergic to wheat) because the church says Jesus Christ used wheat bread at the Last Supper, and therefore the host must be wheat. Any other grain is considered invalid. If one can’t tolerate wheat flour then one can receive the Eucharist in only the form of
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the sacramental wine. What if one is an alcoholic, can the wine be replaced with grape juice? A resounding no with one exception, in 2003 then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict, XVI decided that mustum was valid, grape juice that was fresh or preserved in such a way that fermentation was suspended “without altering its nature”. Good information to have so one doesn’t accidentally have time added on to one’s stay in Purgatory for this or that infraction you didn’t even know were sins.
So transubstantiation and anamnesis are only possible with wheat and wine, or mustum (plus a priest) that can be readily purchased by not only churches but interested seculars. In fact, one can easily buy every item one might find in a Roman Catholic church and set up one’s home to mimic a church, even purchase a deconsecrated church and reside in an environment that is theatrically Roman Catholic with all the trimmings but not the real deal as it hasn’t been spiritually fumigated, dedicated to God, blessed, christened, anointed.
While my relationship with the church was fraught from the beginning, I did also take some solace in it when my mother was in the hospital, several times I rode down on my bicycle to go in the church and light a candle for her, also hoping that maybe there was indeed a deity who might pay attention and notice I was by myself in the empty church and sending out a little appeal for help with my little candle light for which I’d dropped a bit of change in the metal box built into the wrought iron frame that held the rows of votive candles before the icon to whom one was sending a prayer. Clatter of the coin in the box, whiff of the sulphur of the lit match that set aflame the fresh wick, the candle’s glass glowing red or blue, kneeling on the narrow cushion before the stand of votive candles I’d lean back to settle on on my heels, hands clasped in my lap, and gaze up at the beneficent and serene face of the Virgin to whom I was making my call without a phone. No matter the lit candles, prayers didn’t change things. What I enjoyed about church was the art and the sculpture, what there was of it, never mind that it was all religious, because nowhere else in Richland did one see art and sculpture on display. We didn’t have anything like an art museum, I didn’t even know art museums existed, but I needed art in my life and the church supplied it. Those indulgences the church used to sell, money paid to help get relatives our of purgatory or wipe a personal slate clean of sin, even future sins, made such good money that they financed not only luxuries for the clergy elite but glorious extras such as Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel. Perhaps the church used to sell indulgences to rescue unbaptized, infant children from Limbo.
Church, I understood even then, also supplied identity. I knew it was hard at work wanting to supply me an identity based on my relationship to the organization. I didn’t think of it as being like fans who identify with a sports team who are supplied an identity by it, or graduates of a university with which comes a sense of identity that comes of being an alumni of a specific school. There were so many particulars that made one a special member of the club. The sign of the cross that we’d make, our having a crucifix instead of a plain cross, our statuettes of Mary, our rosaries in their little rosary bags, the lighting of votive candles before the icons, how we said the Lord’s Prayer in a way different from the Protestant version, how we knew to behave
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in church crossing ourselves with blessed water as we entered and genuflecting toward the tabernacle or bowing toward the altar when we approached or passed it. Both inside and outside of the church these were markers of our identity as Roman Catholics, which set us apart in a special community. I knew this was happening, and I kind of liked it. I liked the “special” aspect of it outside the church, the automatic sense of identity that came of the community to which I belonged, and there was a sense of bonded specialness inside the church as well because it was all natural to us, no questions asked, I resided in the rites and signs like we had been born to them rather than our being relatively new Roman Catholics, and we were treated like we were resident Roman Catholics from birth, not like we’d moved to a new neighborhood or school and would never belong. Having been baptized and received instruction and Holy Communion we were as good as those baptized Roman Catholic the moment they popped out of the womb. A difference was, however, that I’d not been born into this, and though I understood the teachings and signs and rites that bound us together, I wore them like a second skin, it wasn’t a thing that had adhered itself to me from birth and would thus be almost impossible to peel away because its fabric was enmeshed with my cells.
I was inside but I was also outside the church. I was inside and could do the church things but I watched it as one who was brought in from the outside.
5
“This is my body, given for you, do this in remembrance of me.”
Father Dolan was a popular priest, serving the Christ the King church with Monsignor Sweeney and Fr. Peter P. Hagel. Checking the Tri-City Herald, I find Dolan read Gaelic poetry in a study of poetic rhythm in the Fireside Lounge at the Columbia Basin College, hosted by the Mid-Columbia Writers Group and the Columbia Basin College. He was an honored guest at a dinner given by the Young Ladies Institute at Christ the King School when they presented a check to the bishop for the benefit of the Saint Peter the Apostle Seminary. At a meeting of the Beta Iota, he was the guest speaker, his topic being “Self Analysis”. He was presented with a chalice by a widow of a late Richland fire chief who was a fourth-degree knight in the Knights of Columbus. He served as an official CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) moderator at the 1965 annual Richland CYO March of Dimes benefit boxing program at Christ the King. Speaking at the Kadlec Methodist Hospital Auxiliary’s Christmas Party in 1966, he regaled and a little chastised all with stories of how Christmas in Ireland was far less commercial than in America, and related how in Ireland Christmas pudding was made several months ahead of the holiday and was hung from the ceiling to age. In 1965 he put together a group of youth wanting to write servicemen in South Vietnam. He was a special guest at the annual Bishop’s Tea hosted by the Altar Society of Christ the King Church at Richland’s Desert Inn in 1966, the spring motif being birds and butterflies and entertainment provided by the dance students of Mrs. A. J. Waligura. He was the first listed in the panelists who selected the Richland Altrusa (community service
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organization) Girl-of-the-Year in 1966. He was a guest speaker for the celebration of the Altrusa Girl-of-the-year in 1967, having been on the panel that selected her as the December Girl-of-the-Month outstanding high school senior. He did not participate after that year. He officiated over many weddings in Richland from 1965 to 1967, then news of him in the Tri-City Herald dries up until he officiates at a funeral in Pasco in 1972.
The Bishop Accountability website gives this information on Fr. Breen, who served St. Paul Cathedral in Yakima with Fr. Dolan: “Fr. Christopher Breen. Ordained 1960. Diocese of Yakima, WA. From Ireland. Arrived in Yakima immediately after ordination. A woman filed a civil suit in 9/08 alleging that Breen abused her 1968 to 1972, when she was a teen and parishioner of St. Paul Cathedral. She had gone to him for counseling. He also taught at the diocesan high school. Took leave of absence in 1978; never returned. Left the priesthood and later married. Suit settled 3/11 for $287.5K. Named in second suit in 11/10 as having knowledge of abuse by Rev. Sean Dolan and doing nothing. On the diocese’s list 7/9/19. It notes multiple claims and lawsuits settled.” His assignments included St. Paul’s Cathedral in Yakima, the Yakima Central High School, St. Peter, Cowiche, and the seminary of St. Peter in Cowiche.
The Bishop Accountability website gives this information on Fr. Dolan: “Fr. Sean Dolan. Ordained 1966. Diocese of Yakima WA. Ordained in Ireland. Worked in Yakima diocese until mid-1970s when he left the priesthood. Two women filed suit 11/10 alleging abuse by Dolan between 1967 and 1975 at St. Paul Cathedral when they were about 16 years old. Both had gone to Dolan for counseling. He died in 2007. Suit also named the parish pastor, Rev. Christopher Breen—also later accused—as having known of the abuse and doing nothing. On the diocese’s list 7/9/19. It notes multiple claims and lawsuits settled.”
There’s no photo of Dolan. I could donate one. The very clear one of his standing behind me when my sister was baptized, but I think, “He had children, I hate to do that, what about his children.” I think, “I shouldn’t name Dolan here, he had children, I shouldn’t do that to his grieving wife and children.” I feel guilty. Let it rest for sake of his sons. I don’t want them to be hurt.
Fr. Dolan’s assignments are given on the Bishop Accountability website as having been at Christ the King and St. Paul Cathedral in the Yakima diocese. St. Paul’s Cathedral in Yakima is about an hour and fifteen minutes drive from Richland, not the kind of trip to be taken regularly. It seems that Dolan left Christ the King about 1967 and was reassigned to the cathedral, where was also Christopher Breen, another abuser who was aware of Dolan’s abuse. This must be the case, that he’d been reassigned. The Roman Catholic paper, The Catholic Northwest Progress, only records him from 1971 to 1975 at the cathedral.
St. Paul’s cathedral, built in 1926 in the Spanish Colonial Revival style, has the kind of romantic architecture that begs preservation. If it looks vaguely familiar, that’s because it was based on the Mission Dolores in San Francisco, the oldest building in San Francisco and the one to which James Stewart follows Kim Novak in Alfred
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Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where she visits the grave of Carlotta Valdez, the ancestor who is supposedly in the process of possessing her. Christ the King, in comparison, built in 1944, was a box of a church constructed of wood, painted white, the importance of which was magnified by sitting up a slight hill above the V formed by the intersection of Stevens Drive with Long Avenue. Its sense of presence was also increased by being next to its private Christ the King school, a building of 1950s institutional pedagogical modern style, in light tan-red brick, two stories, the view from the main approach on Long Avenue showing only one level from the street, the second story, but if you walked up to the building you’d see as well the front of the first story sitting below street level, its classrooms staring into the dug-out hill, while from behind the school the whole two levels were on display, viewed from Stevens Drive, the first floor classrooms directly accessing a concrete playground behind, and to the left a great box of an attached building making an L shape of the complex. Largely windowless, the great box held the gym and cafeteria.
If I’m to take a walk around the Christ the King Church it has to be in memory as it was torn down in 1980 and replaced with a far bigger building and there are only a few pictures on the internet of the old Christ the King. What bothers me, what I can’t absolutely fix in an imaginary walk-around way is where exactly was the community hall where the church parties were held, like the St. Patrick’s Day celebration. I remember it as being like a basement where Father Dolan would pull out his little flask. A couple of old photos from before my time there, probably from the 1950s, show a few girls in a Girl Scout group using equipment in the church’s minimalist basement kitchen to bake a cake. I believe the cafeteria at the adjoining school was however used for the meeting hall for parties and gatherings, and for whatever reason I only had the impression in memory that it was a basement. In memory, I see Father Dolan standing beside a white support pillar talking about how Ireland’s color isn’t only green it is also orange, the green being the Roman Catholic Ireland and the orange being the northern Protestants affiliated with England, I’m facing toward a concrete block wall and there are no windows to the right, left or before me, but I have the feeling that if I turn around then the glass windows that look onto the playground will come into view. Though I spent a considerable amount of time at CCD, Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, attending every Saturday, I don’t remember very well the schoolrooms either. They’re fuzzy. I only remember one classroom from that time the nun told me about the twins being in Limbo, otherwise they’re a blank. When I check out the website of the school, I find photos of what may be the cafeteria and they match my memory of Father Dolan at the St. Patrick’s Day party. There is the support pillar. There are the three walls with no windows. There is the wall with a bank of windows that looks over where was the playground in the 1960s.
The confessional was near the main entrance doors of the church. “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been one week since my last confession…” I started going to confession at the age of seven, because you start going to confession at the time of your First Communion. Going to confession before communion made you a spiritually clean receptacle for communion, and in CCD we were taught to go weekly, which for me was a bike ride over to the church early Saturday evening, I didn’t notice that my
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father never went and my mother rarely if ever went but they still took communion. The confessional booth has compartments for the priest and the confessor. The two are separated by a screen that gives the impression of privacy, of the confessor and the priest not knowing one another, which is impossible in a small church because you recognize one another’s voices, but the idea is that you’re confessing to God and the church rather than a specific priest and the priest is impersonally listening to a member of the flock and not specifically so-and-so. It’s not a session with a psychologist. Your side of the booth is unlit and when you enter it the small screen before which you kneel is sealed on the priest’s side by a sliding door which he draws aside after a moment, and the priest’s booth is faintly illuminated so he’s not much more than a dim silhouette seated on the other side of the screen. I remember when Father Dolan called me by my name in the confessional, and it was a visceral shock, it felt like the confessional had been violated, this was not how it was supposed to be. I was confessing to Christ and church not Father Dolan and I was supposed to be anonymous. Or was it okay with Father Dolan? “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of thy just punishments, but most of all because they offend Thee, my God, who art all good and deserving of all my love…” After the initial jolt of Father Dolan speaking to me by my name in the confessional, I considered long and hard about this, as I left the confessional and walked to the pew to kneel and say my penance I was in a profound state of confusion. Did it make me feel a little special to have Father Dolan use my name in the confessional? Was it okay to be personal if the priest made it personal? I reasoned it must be that the priest must be able to bend the rules if he wanted.
The New Saint Joseph First Communion Catechism of 1963, in its chapter on “How to Make a Good Confession”, has an illustration of a priest hearing confession with the title, “The Priest Takes Christ’s Place”. Christ was always depicted as a God friendly with children, personable, and if Christ was on the other side of the screen I wouldn’t protest his calling my name, and yet confession was supposed to be anonymous, or in the spirit of anonymity, for both confessor and priest, or so I’d thought.
Father Dolan was one of those priests people loved. He was Irish, born and bred. People loved that he was Irish because that meant he almost had the approving hand of the pope on him. People loved that he had an Irish accent. He was generally gregarious, charismatic, told stories. He was more accessible than Monsignor Sweeney who was, as I remember it, more severe, and I seem to remember Sweeney exhibiting impatience with my parents, though I could be wrong. Sweeney wasn’t as personable, but I knew he was well liked. He didn’t entertain and Father Dolan did. Dolan was young and people loved that he was young. Dolan was what would be considered good-looking, and people liked that as well. At the age of seven, I knew people wanted a sexually attractive priest with whom to relate. The Sound of Music came out in 1965, and though it was about a not-yet-nun who decided not to become a nun, there was a kind of revival of everyone thinking it was great to devote one's life to others through being a priest or nun of the Roman Catholic Church. As far as I could tell, this meant that teen girls who had been brought up only to think of themselves as self-sacrificing caretakers were being taken dismal advantage of.
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Among the adolescent caretakers I had in Richland while my mother was hospitalized, one of them was such a girl. By the time I had misgivings about her devotion, I was nearly ten. The adult women would talk about how wonderful she was and how she would make a wonderful nun, she had made the decision to enter a convent and would be going off soon, when she turned eighteen, to become a novitiate. I remember Father Dolan talking about her with my mother and the wonderful thing of youth making this commitment to the church and God. I knew everyone thought this was wonderful because she was a good babysitter and so of course she must devote herself and become a self-sacrificing nun. I remember wondering why people didn't get that this girl was doing this because of Father Dolan and that he was taking advantage of a girl aspiring to please, and to please meant denying oneself and taking care of others. I didn't know if he was sexually involved with her, but I knew grooming, and thought it amazing that everyone was helping him groom and had no idea what they were doing. I also knew that I was considered one of those good caretaking girls, who had shouldered a lot of responsibility caring for siblings, and during one of Father Dolan's visits to the household I remember contemplating how Father Dolan had groomed me which meant grooming the family as well.
They were drunk. Father Dolan liked to drink. He carried a flask with him. I knew his mode of operation was to flirt and joke with women he visited at home, women who were vulnerable, like my mother, I knew he focused on our family because it was vulnerable, a family that was in bad trouble because of things going on in it. Even though I was only ten, I had become knowledgable this gave him an easy base for operation. My mother and father were only focused on themselves, they weren’t going to be looking out for Father Dolan’s real interest, which wasn’t my mother. I remember my mother seated on the couch and her friend Joyce seated with her, I don’t remember why but Joyce was there as well, who had a daughter about my age, I think she went to the Roman Catholic school, and I always felt guilty because I didn’t like her in as much as we had nothing in common, she was nice enough but I didn’t like baton twirling and accordion playing, which were her hobbies, I readily acknowledged she was good at them, but beyond them she exhibited no personality in my presence. She must not have cared for me either for even though they only lived a couple streets over we were around each other only when thrown together, which was just a few times, we didn’t seek each other out. She wasn’t there that day, she never came over except maybe a couple of times and never on her own, on her own initiative. Joyce and my mother were laughing, Father Dolan was laughing, my mother had already been drinking beer with Joyce, and Father Dolan kept oiling them up so they were breathless laughing and drunker and they hadn’t a clue he was using them. I was only ten but I knew how Father Dolan worked, and I knew what was going on, and I watched from across the living room.
I remember hating my mother and Joyce for this. I hated them for being so blind, for thinking it was all about them, that they imagined Father Dolan was sexually attracted to them and flirting with them. I hated them for not realizing he was using them, that he was getting them smashed and looking for a moment’s opportunity. He was drunk, he smelled of alcohol, but he wasn’t drunk like they were. They were oblivious happy drunk, entertained at getting tipsy with the handsome Father Dolan. He was a little
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drunk but not past the point of manipulating and keeping his eye on things.
I knew he would pull out his slim silver flask down in the community hall at church and take hits off of it. He smelled of alcohol down there as well, or I could smell it when I was close to him.
I stood there watching Dolan watching them, and I hated them, while I wasn’t sure how I should feel about Father Dolan. I knew he was a predator. I knew he had targeted us because my mother was years into having psychiatric problems and everything in our family was about her and no one was going to be paying attention to anything else but that. And while I hated my mother for being so stupid, even intentionally blind, because she wanted to flirt and get drunk with Father Dolan, I didn’t hate him. Father Dolan was simply doing what he did. This was what he was. And, as with the teen girl who I knew felt special with his focusing upon her and telling her how great she’d be as a nun, I knew he manipulated by making me feel special as well, twisting that vulnerability, how no one else was watching out for me, but he was, he was attentive to me whereas my parents weren’t and that sick twist, his even pointing out to me my vulnerability, how I had a lot on my shoulders, how I was abused and unappreciated at home, was his way into making me feel special. I struggled with that. I didn’t know if I wanted to feel special to him. I didn’t want to, but I did, and I didn’t. He was right about my parents not paying any attention to me, I knew that. He was right about my parents not thinking about anyone but themselves, I knew that as well. He voiced my vulnerabilities to me. And I didn’t know what to think about his using my vulnerabilities, telling me about them, using these truths to get to me, to make me feel like I was special, that he recognized how special I was.
We left Richland in 1967 when I was ten, and from then on I waited to hear what might become of Father Dolan. When he might get into trouble. When my mother would speak with Joyce on the phone, or receive a letter from her, I'd ask, “Did she say anything about Father Dolan?" My mother thought I was fond of Father Dolan. Instead I was waiting for the news of his being a sexual predator to come out, waiting for their expressions of shock. Oh, how I longed to see my mother’s face contort with that shock. In the mid-70s, we learned from Joyce that that he had left the church. All that I was told was maybe he had fallen in love with a nun and they had both left the church. Priests and nuns were now commonly in the news for leaving the church, wanting a secular life, and the story seemed to fit him in with that group of progressives who were still devoted to the faith. I didn’t know if what my mother was told by Joyce was true or a rumor that was being passed around, but they took for granted this was the truth about Father Dolan. Even if he had married, I took for granted he had left the church for another reason. I believed he’d finally been caught and there’d been trouble enough that he’d had to leave the church and it was being covered up. I find that in 1977 he married a young woman from Richland who was not a nun and was teaching junior high in Seattle. She was Lutheran, born in 1952. Dolan was born in 1939. I don’t know how they met, but when he was abusing teens at St. Paul’s in Yakima, he was 28 and his eventual wife, back in Richland, was 14. Their wedding was celebrated at the cathedral in Seattle. After leaving the church, he became a junior high school counselor. His obituary reads that he was a man of faith,
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hope, and love, inspiring those qualities in all he met, and in the end, he always loved the craic, a word with which I was familiar in Richland and which I assumed meant getting soused on beer or alcohol, but instead can mean gossip or simply having a good time socially.
Enter the age of the internet, when I didn’t know yet anything about Father Dolan after he’d left the church but was confidant that one day his name would officially make an appearance as a child predator, and I would search periodically to see if there was anything yet about Father Dolan that had come out. The Bishops Accountability website came online in 2003, and I began checking it, waiting for Father Dolan who had been at Christ the King to appear on it. I'd search but could find no information, but I reasoned it must and would eventually happen. Finally, in 2016, an article hit about how the Yakima Diocese was considering listing names of clergy with credible sexual abuse claims against them. In 2019, the diocese published the list and Father Dolan’s name appeared on the Bishops Accountability website. Just as I knew it one day would. It took 52 years of my waiting but it had finally happened.
Two girls who Father Dolan abused had coincidentally come forward independent of one another about 2010, and the Yakima Herald-Republic had published a story on this in November of 2010 but I had somehow missed it in my searches. Their abuse had happened back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it hadn’t been reported then. They were both abused as teens. Each reported going down to the basement of the parish rectory of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the church where he then was after leaving Christ the King, which is where he would get them drunk and molest them. Both said they’d sought his help for emotional problems, and what began as counseling relationships became sexual. One had been distraught over the death of a relative. He made her feel special. Their meetings moved on to his sharing cigarettes and scotch in the basement, then sex. Because these girls didn’t report until decades later, I still imagine there is trouble that hasn’t been yet revealed, which was the reason for his leaving the church in 1975 or not long thereafter.
Why was I so confident that Father Dolan would eventually make news? Why had I, from the age of ten, looked out for news about Father Dolan. Why was I still looking decades later, regularly checking out the Bishops Accountability website, certain that one day his name would appear there.
When I read of Dolan’s basement sessions with the girls and the scotch I felt a little jolt, like yeah that was Father Dolan, convivial and understanding then seriously intimate Father Dolan who smells and tastes of Scotch.
Both my mother and Joyce well and happily soused and laughing, I remember Father Dolan taking his opportunity to excuse himself, leaving the women laughing together, both of them now also bleary eyed and wearying from alcohol and all that happy hilarity. I remember my turning and walking into the dining room ahead of him, he following me in, the same dining area where I’d made the phone calls less than two years before, pleading to be told why I was being sent to this place, Christ the King, where I was being taught terrible things. I don’t remember exactly, in relation to this,
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when I’d learned we were going to be leaving Richland. In fact, my mother spent much of the summer of 1967 in a hospital in Seattle, and she wasn’t even home when I learned that we would be moving. But I remember, standing in the dining area, wondering if I should feel grateful we were likely leaving Richland, because I would be away from Father Dolan, or was I instead going to feel sorry about leaving behind Father Dolan who said what a special, intelligent and compassionate girl I was, ignored by her parents. I wondered if I instead wanted to stay there because of Father Dolan, and then thought, no, this was a bad thing with Father Dolan and I needed to be away from Father Dolan. I should be glad we were leaving because it would get me away from him. I knew that despite Father Dolan making me feel special, I needed to be out of reach of Father Dolan.
I was torn because I half-liked being called special by Father Dolan, because of the attention, because I wanted to feel special, to be wanted, but I also hated him for it, I knew it was dangerous for me, I knew what he meant by our being on the road of having an ever-deepening relationship, the end goal of which he rather dangled before me like it was a prize I should much desire, I knew I didn’t want to leave Richland because of how Father Dolan prized me, but it was good I was going away because of what all that meant.
I’m nearing the end of this chapter and I’m reluctant to leave it because I still don’t know how it was that I was so attuned to Father Dolan and his silver flask, and why from the time I was ten, from 1967 to 2019, for fifty-two years, I kept checking for when the news of his being a sexual predator would come out. No one was talking about priests abusing children back in 1967.
It dawns on me what I haven’t voiced yet here is how, in the dining area slash kitchen, as I stood facing him, his back to the kitchen, we were about ten feet from the entrance to the living room, I wasn’t thinking about what I felt, but of my sense of the situation in respect of how I perceived his feelings guiding his actions. In this way, I knew how he had, that day, waited for this opportunity, which I had expected to happen at some point, when my mother and her friend were drunk enough and paying no attention, in the dining room slash kitchen I felt him self-conscious of his restraint, the acuity of risk, my mother and her friend in the next room, and that he was touching me in a way that if anyone walked in it would simply look like the parish priest being companionably intimate, which was a kind of touch otherwise absent in my life. The caring embrace, gentle stroking of my hair, touching my face, holding me by the shoulders, the longer it went on there was a point where I thought he was coming perilously close to going further, despite my mother being in the next room, I just limply stood there waiting to see what the risk of the moment would be or would he decide to satisfy himself with affectionately fondling me while telling me how good and grown-up and responsible and spiritually special I was. I wondered if it was alright for me to wish that he take the risk and go further and be unambiguously caught. I wanted him to be caught. Then I heard the front door open, my father home from work, and I knew Dolan was surprised, I was surprised, he pulled himself upright and went in to make his goodbyes and quickly left. Dolan didn’t know we were probably leaving Richland or else he wouldn’t have said some of things he did to me, and as Dolan walked out the front door that day, though it wasn’t my choice whether
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we stayed or moved, I felt as if I had to make for myself the decision of whether I wanted to stay in Richland or not, for if we stayed I would be accessible to him and if I wanted to stay because of Father Dolan that would make me emotionally connected to him though I was living elsewhere. I had to correctly organize my emotions and understanding of the situation so I knew I must not feel regret over leaving and no longer being special to Father Dolan, I had to leave with a clear understanding within myself that he was a predator and user, that this was a good thing that I would be far away from him, because if we stayed it would only get worse, Father Dolan had told me how I was young to be so spiritually advanced, that I was quickly growing up, beyond my years, and we would become even closer than we were, and I knew what that meant and that I wasn’t actually special, that this was a trap, though a part of me hoped I was a little bit special. I wanted to be special. It was like an emotional reckoning that I knew had to take place on my part, as he walked out the door, that he was bad for me and as this move removed me from him I could psychically cauterize every bond he’d formed between us. I knew if we stayed there I would be completely helpless against Father Dolan, it never occurred to me I could say no, like it was being caught in the thorny magic of the church’s hierarchy.
Everything about that day suggests a prior history between Dolan and myself of at least grooming, but I remember nothing about it. Though no one was talking about abuser priests in 1967, I knew what he was. I already had an intense hatred for him, because even that day I was so very eager waiting for him to be caught. When I say I didn’t hate him, I can’t say I felt any affection for him, my feelings around him were more akin to being wrapped up in an enthrallment he spun as mutual, when instead I felt paralyzed, which is why I was anxious for him to be indiscrete and be caught, because for some reason I couldn’t personally extricate myself.
It wasn’t until 1985, according to Wikipedia, when a priest’s sexual abuse of a child was first publicized with the conviction of a priest in Louisiana who had abused eleven boys. It wasn’t until 1998 that the Diocese of Dallas settled with twelve victims of a priest in the form of monetary restitution. It wasn’t until 2002 that The Boston Globe brought national attention to the issue with a Pulitzer Prize winning article. After this, the settlements kept coming. In 2003, the Archdiocese of Louisville, and the Archdiocese of Boston. In 2004 the Diocese of Orange. In 2007 the Archdiocese of Portland, the Archdiocese of Seattle, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and the Diocese of San Diego. In 2008 the Archdiocese of Denver. And so on. In 1967, no one was talking about priests sexually abusing children. For that matter, I wasn’t talking about it either. I was silently waiting for Father Dolan to be caught and to relish the surprised expressions of all. When his name appeared on the Bishops Accountability website, I felt vindicated for my faith that he would one day be outed. And I felt sorry for his family. After all, his wife and children weren’t responsible for any of this, and as I didn’t want to somehow someway cause them any pain,
6
It’s 1985, I’m twenty-seven and in a twelve-step program recovering from alcohol and
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drug abuse, four years sober by then, and am thinking about returning to some church that has ritual for spiritual contemplation, mostly a sense of community, but not the Roman Catholic Church, I don’t want a redo of that, I can’t subject myself to the pope and church laws in which I don’t believe, I’m not even a Christian, I’m not aspiring to be Christian, at a remove of many years from when I was in the RC as a child I am interested however in experiencing the Mass again, as an adult, the psyche of it, the mysticism of the wine and grain as the blood and flesh of God, though I will abstain from the wine. My spouse and I decide to try out a small Episcopal church that is just half a block from where I’m working because it’s old school Anglo-Catholic with all the trimmings. Because it’s old school it could be naturally inclined to swing to the conservative, which we don’t want, but to our surprise it has a very loyal congregation of all ages and quite a number of progressive gay men who are openly proud gay men (the area has a significant density of gay men to support businesses that cater to them), they give their all for this church and are counted as having been a rejuvenating faction. This is what makes us want to join, plus the presence of some others around our age, we reason the church may be progressive as it is welcoming to gays and creating an environment of assisting the community, there’s a lot of hunger and homelessness in Atlanta already, we see it every day, and they are committed to opening a soup kitchen. We are in the fourth year of the AIDs epidemic, which was first named as AIDs in 1983, but President Ronald Reagan has yet to publicly discuss AIDs. People are terrified, there’s a lot of misinformation. This is the 1980s and homosexuals still have no federal protection from discrimination. It’s a small church, intimate, we are used to progressive, inclusive environments and it’s good to be in what we feel is a progressive, inclusive church. We have only been attending about a month when a secretarial position opens up. It has a certain amount of flexibility, good for leaving room for my writing and being married to a gigging musician, and it’s time I move on from the job I’ve held about two years, working in an antique store for a woman I knew who was largely absent, but she and her spouse have recently divorced and he has left his old job in order to devote himself wholly to what is now his antique business. He’s alright but he is always pressuring me to make up stories about furniture that has no history, I tell him I can’t do that, he says the customer doesn’t care if it’s true they just want a story, I keep telling him I can’t do that, and I sense he’s getting fed up with me, that it’s time for me to leave (but I painted a couple of pieces of large sign art that remained on the store for years, long after I was gone). I tell the church’s priest I’m interested in the secretarial job and immediately get the position, which is the only office position there is, almost no questions asked. I like the older women who volunteer, who have been there for years, one of whom is nearly every day in the office with me and is good company, the kind of person who makes one feel safe. I like the gay men who regularly come in eager to be involved, to lend a hand in some operation of the church and with renovations that were ongoing. The priest is new, he arrived in 1984, the one before him having been in place thirty-nine years. I don’t know this church’s history, but from what I gather the divide between the old and new congregation is marked by the new priest, a married man
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who has just turned fifty, and the new priest is credited with moving the church in a more progressive, inclusive direction. Then one day, toward the end of my brief time employed there, we are alone at that moment as the older woman volunteer has left, as he’s exiting the church office he says something that sounds like he’s mocking his gay parishioners, he was stepping out the door when he said it then was gone before I could begin to fully absorb his remark (which I don’t recollect), and as I stand there I wonder if I’ve heard right, no I know I’ve heard right, which startles me, I think this is their church, they belong here, they are a significant part of the congregation, I am distressed about his using them to reinvigorate the congregation, to help with renovations, when he has disrespected them in private, but as he behaves respectfully toward them in their presence, agreeable with and eager for their participation, I think maybe the remark was some old prejudice slipping through in a moment of irritation, the attitude communicated by the church is entirely different, so counter to what he’s said that it’s difficult to reconcile, so what’s truer must be how things have seemed to be. Because of what he said, however, I’m now alert, waiting and wondering if it will be a one time slip or if it will turn out to be more than that. Then another time when I ask him a question about his schedule red flags fly when he tells me that I need to be in sync with him, he expects me to know what he’s thinking before he says it. Again, he and I happen to be alone, the volunteer not present, and again he is on his way out the door so that he is gone as soon as he’s made the remark. And I’m taken aback. I’ve heard this before. This sounds like predator talk to me. This sounds like people who use and abuse, who say there is a psychic and spiritual bond and use that as a means of manipulation. But he’s been in no way suggestive and I decide it’s nothing to worry about, I reason I’m overly sensitive because of past experience, and that he’s just an example of bosses who expect their employees to anticipate their needs for them. (Wondering about advances made in recognition of work boundaries, I search on the internet and find a Forbes article from 2022 that’s titled, “Clever Ways to Anticipate the Needs of Your Boss Before They Ask For It”, which gives tips on how to mind-read your boss and help achieve the goals of the organization.) Not in the meanwhile but shortly after I begin working at the church, my paternal grandmother dies and I attend the funeral out in Missouri. The trip was fraught. Flying into Tulsa on TWA, my brother and I had to circle the airport forever as the lights didn’t come on showing the landing gear had descended, something something then another plane said it appeared the gear was down, so we landed with some suspense, the pilot had come out to talk to us and tell us what was going on and that he was confident we didn’t have anything to worry about but we needed to know just in case, after we landed everyone on the plane had cheered the pilot and crew when we were safely on the ground. We rented a car and drove the rest of the way, and as soon as we arrived, as we walked in the door my sibling learned his wife had been in an automobile accident and he immediately left to drive back to Tulsa and get a return flight home to Georgia. The next day I badly injured my ankle, then the day following I had an attack of crippling abdominal pain that went on for hours. On my return trip, I was on a small plane to Tulsa, and we were in a near miss. There was one
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other passenger and as we flew into Tulsa, he reached across the aisle and hit my arm, directing me to look out his window and I saw flying by only the letters TWA, the pilots began yelling and cursing, then turned and saw us staring at them and slammed the cockpit door shut. They landed and the pilots were immediately off the plane, gone, without speaking to us. We were on our own. There was no flight attendant. It was bizarre to have a near miss and the pilots flee the plane without a word afterward, so the man and I sat and waited to see what was happening, then realized we were on our own no one was going to tell us it was OK to deboard there would be no briefing on how we had been in a near miss and had survived go and be grateful live fully. I return to work and feel moderately not well, which I interpret as allergies, I’m allergic to everything, but I feel too as if there’s something spiritually, psychologically wrong, perhaps to do with processing my grandmother’s death. After a couple of months of this I make an appointment with the priest to talk with him because I’m suddenly feeling desperate, like I’m actually on the threshold of dying and I need hope. He sits on his side of his big desk, I am sitting on the other side. I tell him, “Something’s wrong. I feel like I’m dying and I need a reason to live, something to hang onto.” I say that because that’s exactly how I feel, like I need a lifeline or I will die. He replies, “Have you ever stood in front of a mirror naked and looked at yourself?” These were his exact words. I’m so taken aback I am left speechless, plus I’m not feeling well. I was looking for a spiritual rope to hang onto and instead I wonder is he making a play for me. He asks if I’ve ever had an affair. I say no. He asks why. I tell him I love my spouse, we made commitments to one another, and I take commitments seriously, trust is important to me. He tells me, “That’s your problem, you take things too seriously, you need a good roll in the hay”. This was how he actually phrases it, he says “a roll in the hay”. What a ridiculous way of speaking, that was as well a surprise to me. I’m shocked, trying to figure out what’s going on, to rationalize it, because of my history I was not then one who was openly affectionate, in public I wasn’t even openly affectionate with my own spouse, I was not a hugger except for the occasional single arm side-hug with people I trusted, I had hard boundaries and especially so with men, though I was friendly enough, always interested in people, but I didn’t talk about myself and that was part of my distancing with both men and women. I was trying to rationalize why this priest has said this and I feel chastised. I’m so stunned by the direction in which this request for counsel immediately went that I’m uncertain if I even know what has happened. This is so bizarre, I wonder if I’ve misinterpreted things. I know what I’ve heard, but have I leaped to the wrong conclusions? I even wonder if this is some weird psychic shock therapy? He then rises, he’s going out of town, he says we should have more counseling together, he thinks it would do me good, he’ll give me time to think about it and when he’s back I can tell him if I want to continue our sessions. He leaves. I’m thinking I haven’t misconstrued, he has propositioned me, very blatantly but not directly so I can’t go to anyone and say, “He propositioned me”, but I’m also wondering what if I’m wrong because I don’t want to blame him for something he didn’t do. A couple of days later I’m in the hospital, on morphine, near dead with peritonitis.
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My appendix has already ruptured but they won’t discover that until later, when I’m stabilized they do a barium test x-ray, and the doctor asks me if I’d had my appendix already removed as they didn’t see it on the x-ray and I’m flabbergasted that he couldn’t tell that I still have my appendix. Having survived the peritonitis, I’m sent home and am told maybe at a later date a decision can be made about my appendix. At home, despite the fact they released me, I know I’m dying, I can feel the weight of death in me with every step I take. After several days, I call the doctor and tell him I know I’m dying and am still running a low grade fever. He says to come in now and they’ll operate. Ten days after my first admission to the hospital, they remove my appendix which had already ruptured at the time of my initial admission, it had been the cause of the peritonitis. The explanation for my survival is that my other organs had closed around the ruptured appendix and had thus contained the poison in a pocket, preventing the poison from spreading and killing me, and was also the reason why they didn’t see my appendix when they did the barium X-ray. When I wake up after surgery, the assisting doctor is there and he very excitedly tells me about all this in the manner of having just witnessed the best baseball game he’s ever seen, enthused and gesturing broadly. Amazing, he keeps saying, it was amazing, and that I have very healthy organs or else I’d be dead. The day after is the Peachtree Road Race, July fourth, and my hospital room looks out over the course, I’m told I have a great view if I can get out of bed and take a look, or maybe they only tell my spouse there’s a great view if he wants to watch, I’m too ill still to do anything but sleep and wanly smile at people when I wake up because I’m lucky to be alive you’re alive so you smile, but it’s like a foot of mine is still over the threshold of not being there and I don’t understand how I got lucky. The priest drops by with the older woman volunteer I really like, I can barely lift my head and just look at him half-smiling because I’m alive, of course on my mind too is what in the hell happened with that so-called counseling session in his office, I wonder if he’s thinking about what he said, how I told him I needed a reason to live to tether me to here because I felt like I was dying and he had asked if I’d looked at myself nude in the mirror said I needed a good roll in the hay, I wonder if he’s uncomfortable remembering that, and after a couple of minutes he stands and says he hates hospitals and has to leave.
I don’t return to the church after the day of the proposition. When I’m out of the hospital, I phone and say I won’t be back, that I’m quitting, and the priest says he didn’t expect me to return. He doesn’t say why he didn’t expect me to return. I don’t ask why. When my spouse and I go to the church to pick up my last paycheck, my spouse goes in to get it for me while I remain outside as I don’t want to see the priest. The elder woman volunteer I’d enjoyed comes out to talk to me and I’m sad that I’ll not see her again. As it turns out, the priest wasn’t there so I needn’t have worried about running into him.
Originally, I wrote almost all the following in present tense, but am shifting it to the past.
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Having nearly died, should have died, I was terrified. I was thankful to be alive and not ready to think about much of anything else but that. Things get really basic yet complex when you should be dead but are alive. A few people told me God saved me and I said no, every day there are people who die who want to live, people who shouldn’t have died, accidents that don’t give a person a chance to think about life or death, sick people who beg God to live and their relatives and friends have desperately prayed for them to live, why shouldn’t they be alive, I wasn’t alive because God decided I should live and left someone else to die. People want reasons, they want answers. I was alive because. That’s all. There was no answer and one has to live with no answers. I should have been dead but was alive because my body managed to survive for those ten days, I didn’t know why, and that was frightening.
I felt like I was a fucking fool for being in my twenties and having been taken in by a predator priest and wondered how many others he had done this to, because it wasn’t going to have been just me. I felt empty-handed that I couldn’t lodge a complaint about the priest because nothing happened, he didn’t make a physical move on me, there was just that bizarre conversation and his invitation for me to tell him when he got back from his trip if I wanted to meet again for counseling, which I interpreted as being as a sexual proposition. I may have still struggled with wondering if I could have misinterpreted the situation, but I wasn’t going to put myself in the position of being around him again.
Trust. Almost. Fucking. No one. That’s what I was thinking. When would I learn that. Of course, I thought of Father Dolan. And a particularly disastrous betrayal of trust by a professor when I was in college. I considered some would suggest I was unconsciously attracting these betrayals, but refused to accept that. I didn’t flirt. I don’t like flirtatiousness. Others could do it, but I didn’t. I was very arm’s length and cautious. I didn’t even care for walking arm-in-arm with my spouse as I didn’t do public displays of affection, displays of affection were meant to be private. This would change when I had my son, like a switch was flipped and I couldn’t help but hug and touch and be affectionate, I would use terms of endearment which I’d never before done, and this would weirdly spread out to my interactions with others so that I would naturally hug friends. But that was years in the future. At that time, I was still rigorously self protective. If I was in situations where I was around men (other than my spouse) I felt I should trust, I might become nervous and shaky, that was just my physical reaction. Whether they realized it, I didn’t know, I did my best to hide it. And otherwise, as far as I knew, I intentionally repelled. I’d developed a force field to give me more than enough safe space and MK joked about how I could stop a person cold with a glance from across a room, which was useful when I was in bars and performance venues watching him play. The one thing I knew I couldn’t appear to be was vulnerable. Feeling no animosity, I had once looked up when a man was approaching my table in a bar and he one had put his arms up, said, “Whoa,” and backed up like he’d been held at gunpoint, another time when a man had approached me in a train station, when I looked at him he had taken a step back, and laughed,
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“You know how to take care of yourself,” and that was the end of that encounter. And I wasn’t even being consciously wary or defensive. I relied on a certain ever-present way of being to keep me safe. It wasn’t safe to be vulnerable. I realized the Anglican priest knew that, he said I was too serious and needed to loosen up. He used my being serious and distant as his way to challenge me. But I didn’t understand at all his attempt to shame me for being committed to my relationship with my spouse, for valuing trust. He was a priest, how could he not understand the profundity of a vow.
No, don’t be that stupid I tell myself. It wasn’t some kind of shock therapy. It was shocking but it wasn’t shock therapy. The priest and I had hugged once, during a church ritual in which one was hugged by the priest, I don’t now recall what it was, but when it was my turn I had permitted a real hug in the name of religion, thinking of the hug as being a part of being at home there I gave into it, but had felt uncomfortable afterward, self-reproving, for relaxing. It was supposed to be a trust builder, that hug. Religious rituals, like cult practices, have intention behind them, how they’re supposed to psychologically impact, and that was a trust and intimacy binder, you were at home in the church, it was your family, and it likely had helped me think I was safe enough to go to the priest and say help, I feel like I’m dying, give me a spiritual truth that will be my lifeline. I thought back on that hug and wondered if I had been at fault there, if I had been too receptive with the hug, if I had hugged too long. Did I bring this on myself with that hug? When I read this section to my spouse, he tells me that I’d already had misgivings about the character of the priest before the proposition. He is likely right and I’ve forgotten them. He also says that I only related to him piecemeal the priest’s proposition, that at first I only told him about the question about the mirror, which he says is typical for me, that it takes a while for me to get around to disclosing a story in full. He’s not wrong about this. It’s as if I have to break it down into manageable pieces, I can’t deal with it all in one go, I need to get used to telling a story with which I’m uncomfortable, and also because I feel I’m betraying the person, I’m betraying the priest who hadn’t openly come onto me, he’d done it in a subverted fashion, nothing had happened, I can’t go to the bishop and say, “The priest propositioned me,” because he hadn’t openly done so. Also, I’m scared of being told that I had misinterpreted things. What if I had?
Would I have gone to the bishop if he’d made an open invitation? Yes, I believe I would have. If it had happened to another, I’d have told them to go to the bishop.
The priest, I find now, was only at that church four years. He left it and the Episcopal church to become a Roman Catholic priest, one of those few Roman Catholic priests who is married because he was married before he was accepted into the Roman Catholic fold. I worked for a number of men over the years, some of whom I felt I didn’t have to worry about, some I didn’t trust so much and I would try to not be stuck in situations that I felt could be unsafe. Nothing ever happened. The priest was the only employer who ever overstepped boundaries.
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The way we receive the eucharist, or what was my normal experience, not all churches are the same, one goes up to the altar rail and kneels, hands prayerfully clasped together because the idea is you are not holy enough to touch anything to do with the eucharist, I am not worthy, have mercy, heal me, you open your mouth and tip your head up to the priest who with his fingers places the wafer on your tongue, the uniting body of Christ, which is so sacred one does not chew it, not even a tiny bit, you don’t chew on Christ, the wafer must melt in the mouth, followed by the bloody wine, tip the head up to receive from the communal chalice the blood that unites the body of Christ, and your hands remain clasped because you aren’t fit to touch the cup. Who else feeds you like this? One’s parents before one can hold a spoon and fork, a relationship of dependency and trust. One may be fed like this when one is elderly, as life draws to a close, and one is again physically dependent. One may be fed like this, dependent on another, when one is very ill. All instances mean trust and dependency. One leaves the altar rail and returns to one’s seat with a sense of communal participation at the hand of the priest, the church, which can also forbid you receiving communion, at Christ the King as a child when I took communion I’d always glance over at a woman who had divorced and remarried, she always remained in her seat, unable to receive communion, but still she came to church. It’s during communion that it becomes very apparent who is not in the fullest good graces with the church, which doesn’t make you feel like you are better than the person who can’t take communion, but you are aware of that ostracism, how you are included but they aren’t.
The sacred and the profane, power and obedience. If the wafer takes a while to melt in your mouth and has for some reason become positioned uncomfortably, you can’t touch it to rearrange it because you are profane and it is sacred. You can’t touch the eucharist or any part of the paraphernalia to do with it. You wouldn’t dare go beyond the altar rail to approach the altar, that is sacred ground. It’s years since I’ve been in a church and if I visit a Roman Catholic church for purely historical, tourist reasons I remain a little appalled by those who walk beyond the altar rail, entirely oblivious, casually treating the space like it’s one’s family room. Every place has their hierarchies of power and who is permitted to touch this and that or to be in areas forbidden others, and some of this is practical and good. A person who doesn’t know how to drive a car shouldn’t be driving a car. Art in a museum would be soon trashed if everyone handled it. If you don’t know the dangers of mercury and how to handle it then it will kill you and others, there are rules to be learned and honored in respect of safe boundaries. Then there are rules that would argue they ask respectful deference but are or become about power dressing itself up as power, setting a stage of power that rules with its own definition of inviolate boundaries. In the case of the church, even if one doesn’t believe, the etiquette of sanctity is still drilled in and the psychology that goes along with it, one doesn’t have to believe and the assertion of sanctity can still psychologically influence. As a matter of etiquette and not wanting to offend, one pays reverence to institutionalized boundaries and enters the stage
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and play as an already plotted character that the Other has defined, and in which you have no say. The church is holy, the priest is the hand of God, and you are nothing, served but subservient. Unless you have studied everything one is surrounded by mystery, which increases the sense of power on the side of the church, that they know and you don’t. The robes that are worn by the clergy are mysterious, why this color and then why another color for another mass, what is the amice, the alb or surplice, the cincture, the maniple, the stole, the chasuble? What is the cope? What is a thurifer and what is a thurible and how many times do you swing it and why? On the mystery of the altar, what is the cibarium, the pall, the paten, the corporal, the purificator, the lavabo? What are those images around the church that are called the Stations of the Cross? What is the narthex of the church, the nave, the transept, the chancel, the apse? What is the gospel side of the church and what is the epistle and why does the gospel side have the pulpit and the epistle side have the lectern? What is the sanctuary, the sanctuary lamp, the tabernacle, the ambo? What is the secret that is the sacristy? What is the Paschal candle? The ambry for holy oils? Knowing the answers doesn’t necessarily mean a disinvestiture of power and mystery. There exist a wealth of coloring books that define for children the stage trappings of the church, which is an absorption of knowledge that reinforces the powers-that-be and what is the place of one’s character in the play.
Power enjoys the privilege of being more elevated than, privilege enjoys the same, and the church is bad about this, a lack of humility that profits from being on the side of the sacred and the right possessor of the answers. It is the same us versus them superior mentality that can infect any position of power and authority, such as in education, or politics, law enforcement, medicine and healing, the arts. Even secular positions of power can insinuate a near sacred profundity due their authority and assertion of knowledge, and often demand and depend upon not being bound by the same laws as the general public.
This was my damn job, and I liked the church because I’d liked the congregants. Though I’d felt my time at my previous job was drawing to a close, it remains that I had quit my other job to take this one. Now I was out of a job and I was out of a church to which I was going because though I might not be a Christian I loved the ritual and I liked the people and I liked the social programs they were talking about starting up. I liked having a church home just for the sense of community. And, well, fuck all that now. And fuck priests. And fuck me for being so stupid as to put myself in that position, that’s how I felt, ashamed, I should have known better. More shame piled on. I’d done nothing wrong, I knew that, and yet I also felt I somehow had done something wrong. I was horrified, confused by what had happened, and was also on repeat wondering if I’d overreacted, if I somehow read it all wrong and it wasn’t what it seemed. I didn’t want to err and fault the priest by misinterpreting the situation, didn’t want to accuse him wrongly even in private, in my mind. Maybe he hadn’t been propositioning me. Maybe that was me being too suspicious because of my past. No,
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what the fuck, I knew he was propositioning me, and I wondered at the audacity of it. He took away my ability to say he’d outright propositioned me by the creepy way it was done and by his saying he thought I would benefit with counseling and for me to think about it and tell him when he got back if I wanted to continue. I also argued with myself that we were both adults. I wasn’t a child, the propositioning wasn’t that kind of bad, but I still felt violated. I felt ashamed that he’d think to do this when I went in for a lifeline because I thought I was somehow dying. I felt ashamed. I’d said I felt like I was dying and I needed something to hold onto, to keep me on this earth. Now this was something else to put behind me, not talk about, I didn’t want people to know about this, how I made myself vulnerable and look what happened, my fault that part about making myself vulnerable, it’s not that big a deal anyway because nothing really happened, though I did believe it was an ethical problem, he was in a position of power, but that didn’t mean others would understand how it was a problem as there was no assault, so forget about it, forget. Besides which I’d almost died and was understandably terrified by that, grateful yet terrified it was a fluke of nature that I was alive, I should be dead and in the ground, that was another thing from which to run and I was more concerned with that.
This illness had the side effect of removing a barrier between me and my nightmares. I had found, in my early twenties, while it didn’t get rid of my nightmares completely, I was able to keep them under reasonable control by telling myself I wouldn’t dream or at least wouldn’t remember them upon waking. That protective wall broke when I was twenty-eight. The nightmares flooded in with a vengeance so I would wake up screaming several times a night, which went on for years. Sleep for forty-five minutes and wake screaming. Get back to sleep eventually and an hour or so later wake screaming again.
7
If I was on the outside looking in, based on my descriptions, I would assume the writer (me) was avoiding giving a detailed description of sexual abuse by the Roman Catholic Father Dolan, but that they had certainly been abused by Father Dolan. I don’t remember any such abuse. If I had concrete memory of any such abuse, I would have been one of those people who sought out representation and lodged a complaint against the church when people began flooding forward with complaints of abuse. When I was younger, before I knew Father Dolan, I was aware I’d been abused, and it may be that I was only highly sensitive to grooming behavior. What I was certain of, what I do concretely remember, was understanding what Dolan was leading me into, what his intention was, the way he spoke of deepening our relationship. I knew what he meant and he made it seem something special, a reward, an honor, which I knew it wasn’t because I knew I was being groomed and I hated him for this. I’ve been frank
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and as detailed as I can be in my descriptions, careful not to fictionalize, such as with the episode in the dining area next the kitchen when I felt so acutely that he may do something that would mean being unavoidably caught if anyone entered. What I so very powerfully felt that day was my anger for my mother and her friend being unaware of Dolan’s focus being me, that he was a predator and they were being manipulated, how I was targeted because I was in a vulnerable situation, also my struggle to sort out how I felt about Father Dolan because he secretly gave me attention and intimate, approving affection, personal, confidential, saying I was a good, caring person, strong, he made me feel seen valued. Even though he was a predator and I was his target, even though I was confident I was not the only one and was aware of two other older girls I believed were likely victims, I was still special just in being his target, he made me feel special that he’d chosen me, I even felt special that he trusted me to not say anything. And I knew I desperately needed to get out of his reach because I was powerless to stop what was happening with him.
8
I sent in my photo of Dolan to the Bishops Accountability website because they didn’t have a photo of him and they stress the utility of having pictures to accompany the profiles of abusers. It was my way of acknowledging fifty-plus years of watching and waiting for him to be revealed as a predator.
NOTE: Names are changed except for Father Dolan's and some members of my family.