“Nuns on bicycles, two by two. The Pope in the Vatican, the miracles at Lourdes. The self-righteous mien of the worshipping hordes.”---Apologies to Roger Miller
Don’t get me wrong---some of my best friends are Catholics. My sweetiepie sister Kathleen is a practicing Catholic as is my grouchier sister, Alice (the Republican). I, myself, was baptized at St. Patrick’s Church in Lawrence, Massachusetts, made my Confirmation there and was rewarded for my brilliant scholastic career with a helpful scholarship from the sainted Monsignor Daley, who looked and acted a lot like God. If Monsignor Daley said the moon was blue, you could bet your rosary it was and those white-moon believers were heretics.
When we were kids, Catholicism was everywhere. We went to St. Patrick’s School in St. Patrick’s Parish, one of a kazillion Catholic parishes in Lawrence, which was at least 80% Fish. We were taught by the habited Sisters of Charity, an odd breed of women who considered themselves married to Jesus the Bigamist. If any of us were careless enough to show the slightest interest in the priesthood or sisterhood, the nuns considered our moment of weakness to be “a vocation,” a calling to the religious life, even though we were like, ten years old and hadn’t even kissed a member of the opposite sex yet (an occasion which might reorient any kid thinking of the priesthood). A member of Alice’s crew was seduced, and naturally she had to be the prettiest one. And I’m still ticked off about Delores Hart.
Our Catechisms were like The Rule Book, the Word of Law for Catholic children. They had a lot of pretty pictures in there of angels with harps and saints with glowing haloes wrapped around their heads. They also had pictures of what your soul might look like. At first, of course, when you were too dumb to have any fun, your soul was a pristine white color, but each sin was a dark smudge on the soul. The Catechism illustrated a sad example of a troubled soul with smudges everywhere. It made a worried camper wonder what his soul might look like. Because, as we all knew, if you happened to be careless enough to die with a disfigured soul you might very well end up in….you know….that place down there. Which was was even worse than being a New York Yankees fan.
Do You Believe In Miracles?
Sure. Without miracles, how do you explain the 2004 Red Sox, who came from down three games to none to dispatch the Yankees in the AL championship series? How do you account for Doug Flutie’s 1984 Hail Mary pass, widely known as the Miracle in Miami, to beat the favored UM Hurricanes on the last play of the game for Boston College. Aided by mysterious forces, the ball traveled 63 yards into a 30 mph wind. Without a Miracle on Ice, a ragtag band of American hockey players would never have beaten a highly-skilled Russian juggernaut in the 1980 Winter Olympics. Those were some serious miracles.
Alas, the word has suffered through the years, often being demoted to adjective status, as in Miracle-Gro, Miracle Whip and even the dreadful Anointed Miracle Soap, for which God allegedly provided the recipe.
Ever walk down the Miracle Mile in Coral Gables? Not so miraculous, right? How about all those miracle babies? If you weigh one pound or less at birth and survive, are you automatically a miracle baby? Maybe you’re just a little skinny. But we have to be reasonably liberal about these miracles because you can’t be anointed a saint in the Catholic Church without a few of the critters in your rucksack. And at last count, there were over 10,000 saints recognized by the Catholic Church.
The Church just loves miracles, so you can only imagine how they feel about Lourdes, where the things are a dime a dozen. Lourdes is a town in Southwestern France in the foothills of the Pyrenees, known for the Sanctuaires Notre Dame de Lourdes, a major Catholic pilgrimage site. In 1858, the Virgin Mary was spotted there near a spring in the Grotto of Massabielle in the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes by a local teenager who immediately dropped her shopping bags and went running through the streets alerting the villagers.
Well, one thing led to another and pretty soon Catholics from everywhere were traipsing over to Lourdes to bathe in and/or drink the spring water. It was only a matter of time until a couple of them claimed to be miraculously cured by the sacred waters. Now, over one hundred people insist their ailments have been totally removed by the healing waters of Lourdes. The Church, itself, never one to run amok, has conservatively certified only 70 miracles. Come on, guys….in for a dime, in for a dollar. Impressive though it may be, however, Lourdes is small potatoes compared to the Super Bowl of Miracles which happened at Fatima.
Okay, this one’s a biggie. When we were kids, the nuns told us about a famous miracle in Fatima, Portugal, which began in 1917 when three children (ages 7, 9 and 10) claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary gadding about while they were tending their sheep. Mary must be a little like Melania, with nothing much on her schedule, thus occasionally takes a flier to one place or another to give the locals a start. “Wait til they get a load of this!” she’s probably thinking.
Lucia, the oldest girl, was the only one who spoke to the vision. Mary told her she’d be back on the 13th day of each of the next 6 months, then disappeared. The children told their parents, who soon spread the word through the countryside and people started showing up on the designated dates to see the Virgin. No luck, except for Lucia, who described her conversations to the crowds.
It was Mary’s final appearance on October 13, 1917, that became ultra-famous. An estimated 70,000 people attended, anticipating big fireworks, and they got them. As everyone gazed upwards, the sun began dancing around the heavens, then zoomed toward Earth on a zigzag course. Brilliant colors spun out of the sun in an early-day psychedelic pinwheel and thousands gasped. Thousands of others didn’t see anything at all, however. The entire event took a mere ten minutes and has since been known as the Miracle of the Sun.
Doubters suggest the crowd might have seen a sundog, a patch of light which sometimes appears beside the sun, but sundogs do not zoom. Others noted that if you look at the sun too long, you get the illusion the orb is moving as the eye muscles tire. In any case, the Virgin Mary also told Lucia a secret not to be revealed for decades, supposedly of a colossal world event. This led to a raft of idle speculation, dimwit prognostications and even doomsday cults, certain the world would someday soon be turning to jelly. Simple kids that we were, we wondered.
What was the real secret? Was it even possible the world could end? Could a tidal wave make it all the way to South Lawrence? Would the Virgin Mary show up at a Red Sox-Yankees game and haul Joe DiMaggio off to heaven (we were hoping)? Was some entrepreneur going to build an Adventure Car Hop in Methuen? We fascinated kids held our collective breath but we never found out. Either Mary dropped the ball or Lucia was a terrific con artist. In either case, it soured the lot of us on miracles. We were left with meager hopes for an early retirement for DiMaggio.
Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done
….on Earth as it is in heaven. Which meant we schoolkids would be paying a lot of dues. Mass every Sunday, regular Confession and Communion, Religion classes daily and unpaid overtime during Lent. When the school bell rang at 3:00 during Lent, we marched down to the church for the weekly installment of the Stations of the Cross.
The Stations experience could best be described as a slow slog through quicksand with depressing musical accompaniment. A priest and an unfortunate gaggle of altar boys marched forlornly around the building, stopping at 14 statues which recalled Jesus’ bad day on Golgotha, while we pitiful observers moaned the same sad song between Stations. It was enough to hook a kid on uppers if we knew where to get any. Protestant kids like Jackie Fournier played catch outside the church just to rub it in.
In third grade, Sister Mary Albert, a very scary old nun who looked like the ovenkeeper in Hansel & Gretel, asked the class who would be signing up to be choir boys. These were the poor fools who later ended up being altar boys and had little free time for important things like baseball and screwing around. Everybody put their hands up but me. Sister M.A. was stupefied. “William Killeen---why do you not want to join the choir?” she asked incredulously, as if I were turning down a trip to Waikiki.
“I would rather play baseball after school,” I said, honestly. The nun took this as a personal challenge to her autonomy. “I’m giving you this note for your mother and father,” she sniffed. “Have it signed and returned.”
Now, nobody likes bringing home a note from a nun to one’s parents. My mother was chastened by this bolt from the blue and said I should comply. My father, however, had been around the block a few times and was not intimidated by nuns. He was also a big baseball fan. “Who do they think they are telling a kid what to do after school?” he wanted to know. “Billy, you go play ball if you want to.” As with most things, when my father spoke, that was the end of that. When I went back to school after the big ruckus, the other kids looked at me enviously. “How did you get out of it?” they wanted to know. “My father wants me to play for the Red Sox,” I told them. “He says you’ve got to start early.”
Latter Day Sinner
We bade adieu to the Sisters of Charity when we moved on to high school, but there was little satisfaction to that because now we inherited Marist Brothers, younger and tougher teachers with just as much conviction. I argued with them in Religion period while the other kids cringed.
“Why is it a sin to kiss a girl, that seems dumb?” I asked. Brother Francis, a friendly enough fellow, smiled wanly. “It’s not a sin to kiss a girl, Mr. Killeen, it’s a sin to kiss a girl passionately.” The class snickered.
“Well, why do we feel like doing it all the time? How come God didn’t focus our minds elsewhere?”
“Ah!” replied the Brother. “Because God gives us free will.”
“Yeah, but then we exercise our free will and it’s a sin. For kissing somebody! It’s not like we’re shooting up a bank.”
“Sit down, Mr. Killeen, we’re moving on.”
One day, Brother Robert Eugene, who looked like a rassler with a permanent five-o’clock shadow, was talking about cause and effect. There had to be a cause for everything, and that all went back to God, of course.
I tried to be as respectful as possible because Brother Robert was a mean hombre. “So if everything has to have a cause, what caused God?” I asked. The teacher heaved a long sigh, as if he’d been here before. “God is the Uncaused Cause,” he pontificated.
“Whoa! That’s not fair! You emphasized that everything had to have a cause and now you’re saying God doesn’t. I don’t get it.” I wisely refrained from calling anyone a big hypocrite because just the previous day Brother Robert had thrown a football player through a fence.
“Sit down, Mr. Killeen, we’re moving on.”
Later on, another Brother put it a little better. “William, you’ve just got to have faith. Some things are beyond explanation.” Now, I knew that one was absolutely true. Otherwise, how to understand why the Yankees always beat the Sox to the American League pennant? Sometimes there are no answers, only mysteries.
That’s all, folks….
