On occasion, I would invite my sister Ree into this jerry-rigged tabernacle to evaluate my growing expertise in the field of prepubescent Christian alchemy. But because she had already detected a reasonably direct link between the Church’s obsession with retribution and my father’s brutality, she was not terribly interested. Not wishing to be accused of impiety—a lynching offense in our house—she soft-pedaled her burgeoning alienation from the faith whenever she was in his presence. To me, though, her feelings were clear. She was going off organized religion early.
How I knew that I wanted to be a priest at such a tender age is beyond me. Today, this unoccasioned pronunciamento seems more like a clever gambit designed to temper my father’s rage by shielding myself behind the aegis of the supernatural, rather than a practical objective. A stripling unversed in the ways of the world, I perhaps believed at the time that if God were truly all-seeing and all-knowing and was actually keeping a meticulous record of all human transgressions, He would eventually corner my father in a dark alley somewhere and see to it that he got what was coming to him.
I was initially attracted to the Church because of the theatrics. I loved the smell of incense, the euphony of such phrases as “Domine, non sum dignus,” “Kyrie Eleison,” and “Venite adoremus.” I reveled in the pomp, the circumstance, the costumes, the paraphernalia. A glimpse of a jewel-encrusted chalice took my breath away, and I could bend strangers’ ears for hours regarding the majesty of even the most commonplace monstrance. As for the ravishing beauty of the ciborium—be still, my heart. Even as a child, I was smitten by the prospect of gaining admission to the world’s oldest, largest secret-handshake society, the non-Wasp, non-homoerotic version of Skull and Bones. It was all so far removed from the dreary predictability of the communities I grew up in. In those neighborhoods, in that city, in that era, pronouncing words like “Septuagesima” was as close to bona fide glamour as any of us were ever likely to get. Quakers didn’t even get that far.
Years later, when I felt sufficiently emancipated from the Catholic Church to attend the occasional Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Lutheran service, I was astonished at how drab and businesslike they were. Filing into church back in the days of the Latin Vulgate, when the entire building reeked of incense, and the priests rained down fire and brimstone on the iniquitous, and one of the more gifted nuns hauled her weary bones up into the organ loft and got cracking on the keyboard, was like flying down to Mardi Gras or going to the circus. By comparison, attending a Protestant religious service was like going to a supper-club performance of
State Fair.
Revisiting my childhood today, I am amazed at how quickly I accelerated from daydreaming about a garden-variety clerical career to actively laying the groundwork for canonization. Even as a child, I had no trouble grasping the fundamental selling point of Christianity: Life is awful, so get it over with as quickly as possible. Don’t waste your time on all that rigmarole of becoming an ordained priest; proceed directly to sainthood. In olden times, before bureaucracy stripped the Catholic Church of its panache, it was possible to wander in right off the street and become a saint without having to endure any of the irksome preliminaries. Saint Francis of Assisi, before becoming a titan in Church history, worked in retail. Many future saints started out as peasants. Saint Martin of Tours, from whom I inherited my middle name—a Celtic favorite—was beatified after slicing his cloak in half and handing the chunkier portion to an unidentified beggar. This ensured him an eternity of peaceful slumber nestling in the bosom of the Lord. As Saint Martin at the time was a Roman centurion—and thus, a pagan who had no previous affiliation with the Church—there is some reason to suspect that his canonization may have been a contrived public-relations stunt designed to woo the lares and penates set.
Cast one’s thoughts all the way back to the first century and it quickly becomes apparent that Christ’s entourage was but a motley assortment of fishermen, masons, scribes, and general dogsbodies with no prior training in the sacerdotal arts. They were chosen because they were brave, resourceful, or charismatic; some because they could get things done (Saint Peter), some because they could inspire others to do so (Saint Paul). Church history abounds with tales of ordinary people who became saints without any formal tutelage, without having to submit to even the most cursory peer review. Of course, this was back in the days when Christianity was still a sect dominated by plucky amateurs.
As has been widely documented elsewhere, the easiest way to become a saint was to be murdered for one’s beliefs. Precociously self-destructive, I began contemplating martyrdom at an early date, when someone—a nun, a relative—told me the story of Saint John Bosco, who was ripped to pieces by infidels or Jews (the details were hazy) while carrying the concealed Sacred Host on his person. This took place at some point in the reign of Valerian, when municipal transportation of the Eucharist demanded a good deal of finesse and subterfuge, and go-getting Christian tykes were often recruited as mules. Bosco’s refusal to fork over the Most Precious Host to the marauding swine, even upon pain of death, earned him almost immediate canonization, and because he was one of the very few saints who had breathed his last while still in grade school, I unhesitatingly adopted him as my role model. Other boys wanted to grow up to strike out Willie Mays on a 3-2 heater in the bottom of the ninth just like Robin Roberts, the Phillies’ ace right-hander; I wanted to get torn to shreds by roving heathens a full decade before reaching adulthood. It was in homage to Bosco that I selected John as my confirmation name when, at age twelve, I underwent the rite officially welcoming me into the Church. (Until they have been confirmed in a splendid, first-class ritual requiring the mediation of a bishop, Catholic children are merely considered trainee soldiers of Christ, not the real thing.)
The advantage of worshipping a saint like Saint John Bosco was that, because he had been butchered while still a teen and would thus remain the exact same age until the Last Judgment—when he would be reunited with the missing portions of his body—he could conceivably appear to me, an aspiring martyr, in my dreams and show me the sanguinary ropes; whereas if I tried to emulate one of the twelve Apostles, all of whom died as adults, I might have to wait several more decades—perhaps as many as seven—before getting the opportunity to earn my eternal reward. In the interest of full disclosure, there is also some reason to believe that I selected Saint John Bosco as my patron saint because I was dazzled by the cloak-and-dagger elements surrounding his demise.
Years later, I found out that the child saint I had admired and envied for so many years was in fact Saint Tarcisius; Saint John Bosco lived in a completely different historical period and is the patron saint of something else entirely. From that point onward, whenever I was fed what sounded like a tall liturgical tale—such as Saint Isaac Jogues’s receiving a special papal dispensation to serve Holy Mass with the festering stumps that were all that remained of his fingers after the fiendish Iroquois munched them clean off—I would retreat to my upstairs sanctuary and verify the facts in
The Lives of the Saints
just to make sure that I was not being led on yet another wild-goose chase by some overly imaginative nun or misinformed relative. The story about Saint Isaac Jogues and the Iroquois, as luck would have it, is true.
My self-propulsion toward martyrdom got its biggest boost when, at the age of nine, I came into contact with the Maryknoll Fathers, a religious order that specialized in facilitating early departures from this vale of tears. The Maryknolls, officially the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, had been founded in 1911 as a missionary organization consisting of men who were not afraid to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty while toiling in unappealing foreign climes. Later, they would be joined by an order of Maryknoll nuns, who displayed a similarly cheerful orientation toward harsh manual labor and premature self-extinction. Maryknolls were tillers of soil, reapers of wheat, millers of soy: adept at building, damming, milking, farming, and midwiving goats. They also pulled teeth.
Maryknolls were anything but intellectual, certainly nothing like the dashing, cerebral Jesuits. They seemed to go out of their way to trumpet their anti-intellectual disposition, to the point of maintaining a subdivision of clerical helpmates called brothers, devout but oafish handyman types whose principal qualification for the job seemed to be that they didn’t have much on the ball. Still a youngster, but certainly not a sap, I had misgivings about what kind of a future I could expect in such an intellectually emaciated environment. Because I was bright and clever and curious—I had read a tot’s version of
The Iliad
twice by the age of eight—the Maryknolls did not seem like a religious order whose values would neatly dovetail with mine.
Had things turned out differently, had it had been possible for me to enter a Jesuit seminary after grade school, I am sure I would have become a Jesuit priest and today would be a very smug, very self-satisfied, stupefyingly reactionary prelate, perhaps even a ranking member of Opus Dei or some other stealthy ecclesiastical cabal. But the Jesuits did not accept candidates for the seminary until they had finished college, nor did most of the other orders. Only the Vincentians or the Dominicans—I forget which—ran a preparatory seminary for high school boys. Unfortunately, this formative institution was way out in the Midwest somewhere, and I had no desire to travel such a great distance from my mother, my sisters, and my friends. Nor did I have any burning ambition to abide among hayseeds. But I was desperate for status, freedom, and liberation from financial anxiety, and I wanted to get out of my father’s house in the worst way. So I began laying smooth the path for entering the Maryknoll Junior Seminary immediately after graduating from eighth grade.
No sooner had I expressed interest in joining the order than I began to receive regular Sunday visits from a well-turned-out, easygoing young priest who served as a sort of celestial recruiting officer. Much like college athletic programs, which dispatch duplicitous alumni, treacherous scouts, and ethically malleable assistant coaches all over the nation to pressure talented young athletes into attending this or that school, the Maryknolls stayed in close contact with me throughout my grade-school days, constantly checking in to make sure that my vocation was intact, my zeal undiminished. The priest, to my great surprise, was actually quite bright.
Sometimes I would be invited out to Maryknoll headquarters, way over on the other side of Philadelphia, where I would spend the afternoon learning more about what awaited me after ordination. There wasn’t much to learn: The Maryknolls built hospitals, operated farms, fed the poor, healed the sick. They were comfortable around water buffaloes and handy with yaks. They occasionally got themselves abducted and beheaded by communists masquerading as agricultural reformers. Their monthly magazine always featured photographs of sturdy young priests and hearty campesinos joining joists and mending roofs and planting yams and establishing a solid irrigational infrastructure, facilitating the cultivation of land in areas of the Third World where such marvels had previously seemed inconceivable. The priests also sometimes harvested papayas. The magazine, to its credit, did not downplay the decapitation angle, often running stories with titles such as “The Boyish Priest Who Was Beheaded” and “Priest Among Head Hunters.” The junior seminary was named after the French cleric Theophile Venard, who got his head chopped off by Indochinese heathens in 1861. None of this can-do, shoulder-to-the-wheel, plow-that-broke-the-plains roustabouting held any appeal for me, but if feigning passion for a career in manual labor was the price I had to pay to get out of my father’s house, I would pay it. If things didn’t work out in the seminary, I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.
Reassessing events now, it is amazing that I ever had any interest in entering the seminary, because the priests I came into contact with when I was growing up, almost without exception, possessed little personal magnetism, did not appear to enjoy their work, gave no appearance of being especially devout, and generally made poor role models for a trainee paragon of virtue. They did have nice cars, though: Buicks, Oldsmobiles, Caddies. The first of these clerics was Father Cartin, the Methuselahan, carbuncular pastor of Saint Bridget’s church, where I served as an altar boy from the fifth to the seventh grade while living in the housing project. Saint Bridget’s was a stately edifice that sat halfway up a gently sloping hill; from a distance it looked like a vest-pocket cathedral, though on the inside it had more the feel of an economy-sized mausoleum.
This was not an inappropriate environment, given the physical condition of the pastor. Much like my father’s perennially expiring uncle Joe, Father Cartin had been waging a decades-long delaying action against some kind of pulmonary disease, spewing his malignant breath everywhere, persistently threatening to kick the bucket without ever actually getting around to doing so. Rumor had it that he began wasting away midway through Roosevelt’s second term and kept wheezing toward the finish line straight through the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations. Yet, for some reason, he was incapable of putting the finishing touches on the job. Some parishioners thought he was deliberately prolonging the agony, fearing the earth-shattering reforms his brash young replacement would put in place once he was gone. Because of his infirmity, age, and overall lack of pep, it took him about an hour to say mass, easily twenty-five minutes more than most priests required. He spent the entire service staggering around the inner sanctuary, groaning and moaning, drooling all over the patens and cruets—not to mention his cassock and chasuble—and those of us who served as altar boys always gave him a wide berth, as we expected him to keel over and die any second and did not want to be in the line of fire when he did. But he never died, at least not while I was on the premises.