Oh, Beautiful: An American Family in the 20th Century (57 page)

So I escorted Mom down the aisle instead. It was quite possibly the most humiliating moment of her life. Her own husband had refused to attend the wedding of their own son, leaving her to walk down the aisle with all the knowing eyes of family and friends fixed on her. She felt like a pathetic wretch of a woman to have devoted her life to a man who could be so self-important that he could not even stand by her side.

It became painfully evident to her that his priorities had contradicted her own. Her priority, even if she couldn’t articulate it on certain occasions, had always been to keep the family together no matter what. For that reason, she couldn’t have been prouder of her son Joe, who had tried to stabilize Dad mentally, to protect the family financially, and to keep the family together physically in Westchester. Despite that valiant effort, Dad became so incensed with the moral turpitude of the Westchester household that he felt obligated to split the family apart.

“
That’s the thanks Joe got,” Mom thought.

She concluded that Dad could see things only his way—and that he was so determined to push his beliefs on others that he couldn’t see the pain he inflicted on others in the process. “That kind of moral righteousness is just plain wrong,” Mom reckoned. That kind of scrupulous conscience overlooked some very important scruples.

The whole thing made Mom sick to her stomach. She walked down the aisle with heartburn. Instead of smiling to those around her, she gritted her teeth between uneasy exhalations. Instead of waving to the guests, she gripped my arm firmly. On what should’ve been a joyous occasion to celebrate the marriage of Joe and Arlette, Mom felt like she was walking proof of the defective marriage of her own. And she alone had to parade down that aisle and then stand there in the front row as mute testimony.

Held in the sprawling back yard of the best man’s home in Torrance, the wedding was an opener of Mom’s primed and ready eyes. “A wedding ceremony is an outward symbol; it is only a form for what is really happening,” the celebrant began oddly. “Today, Arlette and Joe are making a sacred vow, establishing a personal union, which nature might reflect, the church might solemnize, and the state might declare legal, but which only love can create, and which only hard work and loyalty can fulfill.” Clearly, this was going to be a very different kind of wedding than anything Mom had ever seen.

The readers described a type of marriage that Mom had never known. A strong marriage, they kept asserting, is not one in which one person gets subsumed by the other. One woman quoted from
The Prophet
by Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese-American poet of the early 20th century whose verses had become commonplace at modern weddings. But the verses were anything but commonplace to Mom:

All those “nots” struck Mom like revelations from a different universe. If God was truly a part of marriage, then God was the space
between
the two people, the space that allowed both to breathe freely. There was nothing sacrilegious about that. There was nothing anti-Catholic about that. “Why hadn’t I thought about marriage like that before?” Mom wondered. She knew only that the idea was beyond the scope of her experience.

“
Marriage is not about becoming one,” the celebrant reiterated. He quoted from the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. The words were discordant music to Mom’s ears: “The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development.”

“
Have I been robbed?” Mom asked herself. She had been raised in a time in America when a woman knew her place. Back then, a woman was supposed to find her fulfillment in supporting her husband and raising his children. In return, the husband was supposed to fulfill his duty by providing for his wife and family. Mom had accomplished everything she had set out to do. She had succeeded spectacularly at raising a family.

“
I’m proud of everything I’ve achieved,” Mom answered herself, her heartburn cooling. “I’d never trade away my experience of raising my kids. Those were the best years of my life.” However, at the age of 68, she saw that there was another way of looking at life and living in love—if not in her past, then perhaps in her future.

The bride and groom lit candles, recited vows, and exchanged rings. The celebrant concluded the ceremony by telling the couple, “You have done what in truth neither the state nor the church can do. You have joined yourselves in a shared destiny. And I, on behalf of the state, the church, and everyone present, do declare what cannot be granted by anyone but yourselves: that you are now husband and wife.”

Mom meant it when she told people afterward that it was the most beautiful wedding she had ever seen, priest or no priest. “I never imagined there could be such a wedding,” she said. “I’m just happy that I could live to see this.”

“
We’re sorry your husband couldn’t join you,” some of the guests told Mom.

“
He really missed out,” she replied. “It’s too bad. But it doesn’t matter. It would’ve gone over his head,” she flung her hand behind her ear.

A year later, we heard that Father Ferraro, the closest thing to a family priest that we had ever known—the one who had steered Mom toward United Airlines, guided me through adolescence, presided over Joe’s first wedding, and given Dad a crash course in annulment law—had left the priesthood.

“
Oh, no, not him, too!” Mom moaned upon hearing the news. She presumed that he was just another gay priest who had finally come out of the collar. Regardless of the reason, the good and rare Italian priest who had done so much for the family for so many years had reportedly divorced the ultimate bride. Nothing seemed sacred anymore.

But Father Ferraro—henceforth, Doug—was guilty of neither offense. He was not gay. Nor had he divorced the ultimate bride.

He sacrificed a meteoric rise up the ranks of the clergy, because he became fed up with the “clericalism” of the church. By clericalism, he meant the “inordinate attention and money given by the church to its priests,” or clerics, he explained years afterward.

He himself had been named a monsignor, and he was in line to become an auxiliary bishop. But from his vantage point in the upper echelons of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s largest archdiocese, he discerned in the early 1990s that the church was spending so much time, money, and energy to resolve the psychological, emotional, sexual, and legal problems of the priests that there was little remaining to resolve the problems of the people. It was a foreshadowing of the scandals that would plague the Catholic Church in America in the decades to follow. “More and more,” Doug recalled, “I felt that the priests weren’t taking care of the people, but vice versa.” He believed that the self-serving clericalism defeated the whole point of being a cleric.

Of secondary importance to Doug, he resented the double standard of the gay subculture within the priesthood. “If a guy was in trouble with a woman, he was dealt with more harshly than those guys who were in trouble with men,” Doug revealed. “It was somehow less of a violation to have sex with men than with women.”

Sex with men was never discussed at retreats or continuing education courses, he continued. “Whenever the priests talked about celibacy, the examples always had to do with women.” In the priesthood, homosexual activity was so severely closeted that it was neither openly discussed nor equitably discouraged. Instead, it was assiduously ignored. Homosexuality was so taboo that it was weirdly safer to be gay than to be straight.

But what ultimately drove Doug from the priesthood was the self-absorption of priests with priests. “I came to dislike the priests,” he confessed. “I loved the work and the ministry, but being with priests became less fulfilling to me.”

He moved out of the cardinal’s house at the age of 44 in 1992 and worked at a string of management jobs in downtown Los Angeles. At one of those jobs, he met a woman and began to build a relationship with her. After a few years of dating, they became engaged.

The Catholic Church forbade Doug and his fiancée from marrying in the church. The church even forbade the fiancée from converting to Catholicism. In both cases, the reason was that Doug had refused to become “laicized.” In lay terms, he had refused to rescind his ordination to the priesthood and to rejoin the ranks of the laity.

In other words, he never officially left the priesthood. He just left the official priests. According to church law, he was still a priest. Therefore, he could never marry with the blessing of the church—and his fiancée could never be accepted as a member of the church—until he “annulled” his ordination.

“
It’ll never happen,” he said.

Another former priest married Doug and his bride at Forest Lawn Memorial Park.

Ironically, Doug left the clergy in hope of becoming a better priest. His personal principles of priesthood had clashed with the clerical practices of priesthood, and he felt morally obligated to choose between the two divergent paths. He concluded that it would’ve been dishonest for him as a priest to remain among the clergy.

“
Now my goal is to strengthen my relationship with my wife,” he reflected, “to be a person of integrity, and to be a person whom people come to for help.” He still considered himself to be Roman Catholic and to be sound in his spirituality. He still celebrated weddings for friends. He still felt that he belonged to the people of God, and he was seeking new ways to serve them. He would always think of himself as a priest. He would let nobody take that away from him.

Doug didn’t annul his ordination to the priesthood any more than Joe annulled his marriage to his first wife. But the similarities ended there.

In Joe’s case, he refused to annul his marriage because of his disillusionment with the bureaucratic paperwork. The church had lost its credibility with him. So for all practical purposes, he left the church, shifting his devotion to a professional community.

In Doug’s case, he refused to annul his ordination because of his abiding devotion to a better kind of priesthood in a healthier kind of church. The clergy had lost their credibility with him, but he didn’t equate them with the church. If anything, he viewed them as antithetical to the church. For Doug, the church had always been something deeper than the trappings of its clergy or its judiciary or its bureaucracy; the church had always been the people of God. He had taken a vow, and he refused to divorce himself from that spiritual community.

13. The Women’s Movement

Having grown up on Lehigh Row and having expanded her horizons a bit further in high school, Mom entered adulthood with only a sketchy outline of guiding principles. “I knew I was Catholic and that other people weren’t,” she recalled. “That was it.”

Like many children from immigrant families, she had inherited a belief system that was culturally rich, but her ability to express what the beliefs meant to her was comparatively poor. She could feel the values deeply, but she couldn’t define them clearly. Except for her summer catechism classes at the satellite church on Lehigh Row, she had never been given the vocabulary to define her values or to defend her beliefs. Nor had she been given the vocabulary to question her beliefs or those of others.

As an adult, she thought things through by talking things through with other people. She talked and listened and talked, and other people helped her put her own thoughts into new words. She was forever grateful for people to talk to.

But Mom could never compete in an argument with Dad.

He had the college degree, the organized thinking, and the steady focus. He could make a firm decision, pursue his objectives, and outline his arguments. In that order. He learned in his college logic class the importance of reasoning from the general to the specific—and not the other way around. So he committed himself to general principles of right and wrong and interpreted the details of life in accordance with those principles.

Mom’s logic went in the opposite direction. She went from the specific to the general, basing decisions on practical experiences rather than theoretical principles. As a result, her principles were subject to modification any time she experienced a moving experience unlike anything she had ever experienced before. She couldn’t argue with Dad over general principles, because hers were often in flux.

Most of the time, she didn’t rely on a formal system of logic at all. Instead, she followed her intuitions, just as she had learned to intuit the nonverbal messages sent to her as a child from her mother and father. She relied on an ethical kind of sixth sense that allowed her to “feel” if something was right or wrong.