The Annals of the Rod and God Club--"Doubt"

(The kind of nun I wish I had had, Sr. Pat Thro, Maryville University of  St. Louis, 2002)

My wife and I rented and watched the Meryl Streep - Philip Seymour Hoffman film "Doubt" over the weekend.  I recommend it highly to lapsed and recovering Catholics alike. It's a wonderfully complex portrayal of the psychological tension those who struggle to believe must feel. But the film resonated with me on another, more personal level.
     "Doubt" is set in 1964, roughly the time of my Catholic school  experience.  I transferred to the school I call "Holy Name" in the the 7th grade, in the fall of 1959.  The early Sixties, I've come to realize, were a pivotal time for the Church in America.  Some of our parents were still fervently committed to their fatih, but the majority of them, it seemed to me, just went along as a matter of form.  Baptisms, First Holy Communions, Confirmations--even Church weddings and funerals--these were the things that working-class Catholics did in my day in order to keep up appearances.  (As I've elsewhere recounted, they weren't even naming all their children after saints, much less encouraging them to become priests or nuns.)  The Church's rites of passage were social obligations as much as, if not more than, religious duties.  And for those working-class parents struggling to support the children they already had the Church's authority ended at the bedroom door.
      Even the Church's rhetoric seemed curiously dated and comically naive in those days.  By the seventh grade, for instance, I knew that in the American lexicon an "ejaculation" was not a short, sponntaneous prayer.  I had to repress a smirk every time I heard a priest or nun encourage us to devote our free time to our "ejaculations."
      My generation was definitely pulling away.  Young people would soon begin "tuning in, turning on, and dropping out."  Questioning authority and pushing back boundaries were the new virtues.  While our secular-minded peers were ushering in an era of free love, we were still expected to be guilt-ridden over "impure thoughts."
       Into this era, and into my life, rode the nun I've already written about in my "Annals of the Rod and God Club."  She was already middle-aged when our paths crossed, and I've since come to understand something of how she must have felt.  She had made, to her way of thinking, an irrevocable commitment to a world that was dying, and she couldn't fit in to the one just then being born and which she couldn't understand.  Like the nun Meryl Streep plays, my 7th- and 8th-grade nun (I had the same one for both grades) must have been struggling with primal doubts.
     Sister, I now realize, was more to be pitied than censured.  But, sadly, early adolescent boys are not known for their capacity for empathy and sympathy.  --EFP

The Annals of the Rod and God Club: The Lives of the Saints

(The original cathedral bells, destroyed by allied bombing in World War II, Lubeck, Germany, July 2004)

Today’s young people, I find, simply cannot relate to the degree of sexual repression we endured in the Catholic schools of my youth.   When I teach James Joyce’s story “Araby,” for instance, I find that most students are thrown by the mention of Mangan’s sister going to a convent school.   They assume she is going to become a nun.   They don’t realize that single-sex education was the norm in Joyce’s Ireland, much less do they appreciate the cult of chastity or the ascetic impulses behind such norms.   In an effort to put the story in cultural perspective, I tell my students how co-education was only grudgingly accepted in my own Catholic school, some sixty years after the period Joyce was describing and presumably set in a less inhibited and more progressive country.

For instance, I tell them how our playground had a white line painted straight down the middle of it.   Girls were to stay on one side, boys on the other, and the nun who had playground duty on any given day walked the line like a sentry.   It was her solemn duty to make sure that never the twain should meet.   Similarly, our classrooms were divided, boys on one side, girls on the other.    And, while I don’t remember the girls ever being cautioned about the dangers of patent leather shoes, I do remember Sister worrying out loud about the prospect of our being invited to mixed parties where there might not be enough seats.   She told us that, in such a case, it might be all right for a girl to sit on a boy’s lap, so long as they put a phonebook between them. Somehow, I think that worry said more about Sister than it did about us.  

But the important thing was that, by the time that I got to the Marine Corps, I was already fairly comfortable with places and things, and even categories of people, being placed “Off Limits.”  I say that because an additional source of religious anxiety for us turned out to be one of the universal rituals of Catholic school life in those days, the daily reading from The Lives of the Saints.  

That book, as I remember it, was a marvel.   Submitted for our edification and emulation—assuming we all grooved on gruesome accounts of martyrdom and that we were all into the mortification of the flesh—were brief biographies of 365 saints.   There was one for each day of the year.   After all these years, I must confess, our daily accounts of welcome pain and persecution, cheerfully endured in His Name’s sake, have pretty much run together in my mind, leaving me with a welter of images not unlike the vision of hell painted by Hieronymous Bosch.   One day and that day’s featured saint, however, do still stand out in my mind.   

The day had to have been February 5, the feast day of Saint Agatha of Sicily, the Martyr. Each day, Sister would choose one of us to read that day’s saintly life aloud.   Maybe Sister did have, if not a sense of humor, a sense of irony or of poetic justice.   Maybe not.   But, for whatever reason, on this day she chose a girl I’ll call Gracie Moriarity.  

            Gracie, at all of 13 years of age, already saw herself, to borrow a phrase from Shakepeare, as a “thing enskied and sainted.”    She was one of only two girls in our class who had professed to hear the calling to enter the convent after the eighth grade.  (To her credit, the other aspirant didn’t seem to take herself or her vocation nearly as seriously.)  None of the boys were aiming toward the priesthood, and with only two girls hoping to become nuns, our class had fallen woefully short of God’s quota, or so Sister thought. At least once a week she would have us put our heads down on our desks and command us to meditate on the question of “whether I have a vocation.”    “In a class this size, there should be at least five vocations,” she would warn.  “Some of you are hearing but not heeding the call.    And if that’s the case, you’ll never be happy!” she would predict.   From what I could see, Sister certainly didn’t seem to be ecstatically happy in her vocation.   I decided I’d pass.   Still, I was tempted to tell her that I was hearing the “call,” just to shock and confuse her, but I never quite got up the nerve.  

            Gracie, as I remember her, was priggishly self-righteous and even pharisaical in her displays of religious devotion.   While the rest of us mumbled and murmured our way through the Lord’s Prayer and other mandatory displays of devotion, Gracie’s voice always rang out, loud and clear as a bell. She wanted Sister and the rest of us to know that she believed.  

The devil of it was that she was also good looking. And she was good at everything. If only she hadn’t been such an arrogant, precocious little prig!  I only saw her lose her composure twice.  That first instance can wait.  This is the story of the day Gracie got to read the account of St. Agatha’s life to us.

            In the version we heard that day, St. Agatha was a fetching but saintly lass of 15 whose misfortune it was to excite the lust of an evil Roman governor.    When she spurned his advances, he had her stripped naked and whipped, after which he ordered her breasts cruelly crushed and then cut off.   Later that night, however, the Apostle Peter was said to have appeared to her in a vision and to have restored her breasts to her.   Discovering that miraculous restoration, the governor, who at this point was no longer fooling around, had her rolled naked across hot coals and broken bits of pottery.    Somehow, she emerged from that ordeal uncut and unburned.    Stumped about what to try next, I suppose, the governor put her in prison, where she did soon oblige him by dying.         

            Again, you have to remember that we boys were thirteen and in the throes of puberty.     Women may not be able to relate, but those were the days when an errant daydream--an "impure thought,' to borrow from Sister's lexicon--could make it incredibly embarrassing to be called to the front of the class to recite or to work a problem on the board—although, in the latter instance, you could at least try to keep your back turned to the class for as long as possible.  My own strategy was to try thinking of Sister.   Usually, that would relieve the pressure in fairly short order.   But that would work for only a little while.   I mean, visions of naked nymphets naturally dance in a boy’s head at that age.  (Oh, would that those days would come again!)   

You have to understand as well that the tone of the accounts of these saintly lives was always weirdly at odds with the imagery.   The reputed intent was inspirational.   We were supposed to admire these heroic martyrs and, like them, to view suffering for one’s faith as the highest privilege and reward that God can bestow in recognition of a righteous life.  Maybe we had already given ourselves over to the world, the flesh, and the devil, but these “rewards” just didn’t seem all that rewarding to us.   The main thing, however, is that the victims always seemed too eager to embrace their fates and even to ask for more.  

The horrors were likewise painted in too much detail and dwelled on too lovingly, suggesting that the writer at least took a sadomasochistic pleasure in the account.    Even the euphemistic accounts tended toward the psycho-sexual and were suggestive of sublimation—as in the “passion” of Saint So and So.  As a friend of mine has since observed, human sexuality ultimately brooks no repression; it comes bubbling up somewhere, somehow.   People committed to the vow of chastity are not immune, much less thirteen-year-old boys.    Try to remember what it was like to be that age.   Then picture a lovely young girl cheerfully rolling naked across hot coals and emerging unscathed, not to mention enthusiastically offering up her breasts for magic tricks, and perhaps you can understand why the scene struck us as downright kinky.

            In all fairness, much of the erotic effect depended on the incongruity between the teller and the tale.  Here was Gracie—a virginal young thing and a stiff-necked prude who, now that I think about it, looked and carried herself a lot like Dr. Lilith Crane, the character Bebe Neuwirth used to play on “Cheers”—talking dirty to us.   Gracie, of all people, was reading aloud, uttering words we had never expected to hear from her lips—words like “breasts” and “naked.” It was too much really, especially since Gracie, who was slow to recognize anything erotic or humorous in St. Agatha’s ordeal, was doing her level best to read fluently and to enunciate clearly.   To our credit, there were only occasional, repressed sniggers until Gracie got to the part about St. Peter’s kindness in restoring Agatha’s breasts to her.   A student I’ll call Billy Decker, always a wonderful mimic, reached up with both hands, making ratcheting motions and noises, as if he were Peter engaged in screwing the poor girl’s breasts back on.    I suppose that in Billy’s imagination the right breast was reverse threaded, as he was screwing counter-clockwise with his left hand and clockwise with his right.  Four or five other guys joined in.

            We lost it, most of the girls included.   Gracie bravely tried to soldier on, through a chorus of raucous laughter.   In mid-sentence, the images must have gotten to her, as she reddened and was clearly fighting to hold back either laughter or tears.   It took a screaming fit on Sister’s part to get us calmed down to the point at which Gracie could resume.    Our forced composure, however, didn’t last long.   Gracie got to the part about rolling Agatha naked over hot coals and pottery shards, and we were off again.    Sister finally had to break it off, lecturing us once more on the theme of how Polish children would never dare to treat her in such a manner, much less make light of the horrible ordeal and blissful death of a heroic martyr. 

            I wonder if Gracie indeed went on to become a nun.

            There are a million stories associated with the Rod and God Club of my day.  This has been one of them.  --EFP 

The Annals of the Rod and God Club: The Rosary Society

I confess it:  I was never a good Catholic.  When I was growing up, my idea of the mystery of the Trinity was how South Philadelphia could ever have produced the likes of Frankie Avalon, Fabian, and Bobby Rydell.  But the fact of the matter is you just can’t beat the comic relief of a Catholic school education.

     The all-male Catholic high school I went to, the Salesianum School for Boys, was widely known and respected throughout northern Delaware for three things:  a no-holds barred approach to discipline, a winning football team, and its Saturday night dances.  Public- and private-school kids of all creeds used to flock to those dances.  (I would say of all races and colors too, except that I would be lying.  Delaware was still largely segregated in those days.)  “Sallies” dances were especially popular among the girls of Ursuline and Padua Academies, the principal all-girls Catholic schools in the area.  Like us, after a long week of being harangued about the dangers of entertaining impure thoughts, they were eager to engage in some coeducational imitations of immorality.

     I say “imitations” because Billy Joel’s lyric is only half right:  It wasn’t just the Catholic girls who started “much too late” in those days.  It was still an age of “nice girls” and “tramps” (and for all the hype, the tramps seemed to be in short supply).  This was before the pill was widely available, abortions were illegal, and the social stigma of unwed pregnancy helped to keep us in check.  Girls didn’t just give it away.  You had to lay siege to it.  But that made it all the more special when the walls finally came tumbling down.  Frankly, I don’t know whether to envy or feel sorry for today’s kids, so many of whom are already jaded by the age of 16. 

     Sadly, a good friend and classmate of mine, whom I’ll call “Ralph Dumbrowski,” was barred from the dances.  His was the good fortune or misfortune—depending on your point of view—of having devoutly Catholic parents intent on keeping Ralph from the “occasions of sin.”  As I understood it, they had already had one child go wrong, Ralph’s older sister—a “sadder but wiser girl” who had gotten pregnant out of wedlock.  Ralph’s parents were bound and determined that Ralph would not bring further disgrace to the family.  Hence, he was forbidden to attend the dances.

     Compared to the rest of our gang, Ralph had been sheltered, and he could seem painfully naïve and irredeemably square.  I remember that, when we first met, Ralph was seriously trying to be a good Catholic.  One of his heroes was St. Ignatius.  I suppose I bear much of the responsibility for corrupting or liberating him—again depending on your point of view.   

     Ralph’s most notable characteristics were a nearly constant smile and an irrepressibly cheerful tone of voice.  Nothing seemed to get him down.  He was also tall and a bit gangly in those days.   Among guys at least, all this made for an unfortunate first impression.  In talking to and interacting with Ralph, you couldn’t help but think of probably the most popular cartoon character in those days, Bullwinkle J. Moose, of “Rocky and His Friends.”  Underneath that seemingly slow and unassuming exterior, however, lay an unusually imaginative and resourceful mind perceptive enough to exploit his parents’ one blind spot—their devotion to the Church.

     A word about Ralph’s parents may be in order:  Ralph’s father was an imposing figure.  A former seminarian, he had enlisted in the Marine Corps at the outbreak of World War II and saw combat in the Pacific.  Ralph maintained that his father had risen to the rank of sergeant major before the end of the war.  I could believe it.  There was an intensity about him. He never said a cross word to or in front of me, but I could tell that he was clearly not a man to be trifled with.  His one interest in life seemed to be the life of his parish.  Church suppers, bazaars, bingo, whatever—he was always there, helping. 

     Ralph’s mother always impressed me as kind and gentle and much more affable than her husband.  But she too was committed to the church.  This was an age when other Catholics were beginning to question Papal authority and to think for themselves.  But not Ralph’s parents.  They were not ones to half-step; they really tried to live their faith.      

     As for Ralph—not so much, at least not once he fell in with bad company.

     The truth of the matter is that I always underestimated Ralph.   Bound and determined to court and enjoy the occasions of sin, Ralph told his parents that he had joined the Rosary Society, a club whose mission it was to repair old Rosaries to send to the missions.  (The missions can’t ever get enough Rosaries, I suppose.)  Ralph further told his parents that the Rosary Society was meant to be a devotional alternative to the dances and that it met at the same time—from 8:00 to 11:00 p.m. on Saturday nights.  While the dances were being held in the gym, this mythical Rosary Society allegedly met in a classroom at the other end of the school building. 

     Ralph’s parents were so pleased with this turn of events that they wouldn’t hear of letting Ralph take the bus to Rosary Society meetings.  His father insisted on driving him.   He would drop Ralph off at the rectory end of the building at 8:00 and pick him up there promptly at 11:00.  Ralph, of course, would wait until his father had driven safely off and then walk through the school to the gym. 

     One of the circumstances that worked greatly to Ralph’s advantage was that we were supposedly emulating St. Francis de Sales, the “gentleman saint.”  We were all expected to be “Sallies gentlemen,” externally as well as internally.  We were required to wear coats and ties, not just for school but for all school events and activities, football games and dances included.  Hence, Ralph was turned out for dancing as well as for repairing Rosaries on school grounds.     

      It also helped that Ralph was tall (6’3” or 6’4”) and slim with blond hair and blue eyes.  He was Sallies’ answer to Troy Donahue, yet he was unassuming and supremely unselfconscious.  To say he was well-received at the dances would be an understatement.

     One of the great themes of Elizabethan tragedy is that evil inevitably overreaches.  Ralph got away with his subterfuge for fully three months.  But even Shakespeare’s Iago couldn’t think of everything.  The one thing Ralph didn’t count on, and couldn’t control, was his increasing popularity. 

     In Ralph’s defense, I should remind readers that these were still the days in which nice girls didn’t call boys.   They were supposed to wait for boys to call them (although it was permissible for a girl to get a friend to let a boy know that she was interested and would welcome a call).   Apparently so smitten that she threw over the rules, one of Ralph’s dance partners just had to know if Ralph would be at the dance on Saturday, so she called him—at home.  (Teenagers having their own cell phones would have been inconceivable to us in that time and place.)  The problem was that Ralph wasn’t home at the time, and his father answered. 

     The actual pleasantries that passed between this young lady and Mr. Dumbrowski are lost to posterity.  But as Ralph would later learn, much to his chagrin, this girl asked if Ralph would be at the dance that Saturday night. 

     Mr. Dumbrowski worked as an accountant for DuPont, but he must have had the mind of a lawyer.  He knew that direct evidence was superior to circumstantial.  He said nothing to Ralph about the call.  He told only his wife, who initially refused to believe that her good Catholic son would dissemble about a matter of faith and morals.  She agreed to set a trap that would either clear or convict Ralph.

     Come Saturday night, Ralph thought nothing of it when his mother decided to ride along with his father in taking him to his Rosary Society meeting.  They dropped Ralph off as if nothing were wrong.  But, instead of heading home, they drove around the corner and waited 15 minutes before heading back to the building. 

Again, as Ralph would later learn, his mother went in first.  She was intent on finding the Rosary Society meeting and vindicating her son.  

     After a few minutes of wandering around the deserted halls—with rock and roll music echoing through them from the gym, no doubt—she encountered a priest and asked where the Rosary Society was meeting.  This priest must have been perplexed at first, but he reassured Mrs. Dumbrowski that there was no such meeting that night, nor was there any such society affiliated with Salesianum. 

     What came next deserves to live on in the annals of adolescent embarrassment.  There is a memorable scene in the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank in which a determined and menacing-looking Lee Marvin (himself a former Marine) walks toward the camera along a seemingly endless corridor, his leather heels clicking rhythmically.  His body language and expression both seem to be saying, “I dare anyone to try to stop me.”  I like to imagine that Mr. Dumbrowski looked like that in striding into and through the gym on a mission to find his son.   

     Picture it:  there is Ralph, in the zone, slow-dancing and oblivious to everything but the young woman with her head, and forbidden parts of her body, pressed against his chest, even her hips occasionally touching his, when he feels a tap on his shoulder.  Expecting it to be one of us, just one of his friends, wanting to cut in, Ralph turns around, only to find his father standing there and staring at him.  

     Rather than try to make himself heard over the din of the music, with the same finger he had used to tap Ralph on the shoulder, Mr. Dumbrowski gestured to follow him, and out they went, with Ralph getting some inkling of what it must feel like to walk that fabled “last mile.”

     The problem, as I now see it, is that Ralph was living under the authority of people with no sense of irony, much less an appreciation for imagination and resourcefulness.  We didn’t see much of Ralph outside of school after that—not for a long time.  But Ralph won out in the end.  He finished that academic year with two Fs, which meant that he couldn’t continue at Salesianum.  He transferred to the local public high school, where I have to believe the girls didn’t start quite so late.

     There are a million stories associated with the Rod and God Club of my day.  This has been one of them.

--Palm the Apostate