Tell Them I'm Not Home - a memoir by Pete Byrne
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The Glory That Was Rome
In neighborhoods like Olney, people sorted themselves out along a variety of fault lines. Phillies fans versus those who allied themselves with Connie Mack’s pitiful Athletics, those with Lionel Electric trains against those with American Flyers, the cheaper Father and Son shoes against the pricier Flagg Brothers, Luckies or Camels, and on and on and on. But the defining separation among the people who populated the neighborhood of my childhood was the religious split between Catholics and the Protestants. Among Catholics like us, the prevailing interpretation of Protestantism encompassed anyone who wasn’t a Catholic.
The Catholicism of those years was reflexive, exclusionary and total. And it was Irish. It didn’t matter if your background was German, Italian or Polish, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was Irish in its soul, and the brand of Catholicism we experienced reflected all of the increasingly irrelevant strengths of a national church standing valiantly against the oppression of a hostile occupying power. Muscular American Catholicism in the late 1940’s had an almost xenophobic defensiveness, a distrust of and a wariness toward all things not its own. The Church seemed to grudgingly acknowledge that the Wars of Religion had indeed ended in the Seventeenth Century; but still, you couldn’t be too careful. You certainly wouldn’t want to let your guard down by doing something dangerous like attending a wedding at an Episcopal church. The Hungarian-born historian John Lukacs described Philadelphia upon his arrival in 1948 as a place where when an Irish boy from Frankford married a Polish girl from Bridesburg, it was considered a “mixed marriage.”
Catholics in Philadelphia were not encouraged to choose the church they would attend, and when moved to the 400 block of West Delphine Street in August 1945, we became de facto members of the parish of The Incarnation of Our Lord located at the corner of 5th Street and Lindley Avenue. There was only the formality of parish registration. My own first trip to Incarnation was not propitious. The Sunday after we moved into our new address, not yet eight years old and three days uprooted from everything familiar to me, I was sent to the 9:00 a.m. children’s Mass. The move from my aunt’s house in Wissinoming had left me feeling like Buck Rogers marooned on a distant asteroid. I dutifully went to the children’s Mass, asking an usher to point out the section reserved for the third-grade boys. Directed to a pew, I sat through Mass among what I thought were my peers. My shame and humiliation were total when meeting a cousin on the way out of church, I was told that I had been sitting among the youngsters in the second-grade section. I felt it was an embarrassment I would never get over.
To be enrolled in a Catholic school in the 1940’s was to be handed over to the care and authority of a uniformed organization of celibate women. At Incarnation, it was the Sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The good sisters of my experience were as devoted to the spiritual well-being of their charges as they were to the Savoir they had wed. Even among the least generous, the least broad-minded, and the most simplistically superstitious of the Order, they reflected the fact that they had offered their lives in the service of a higher calling. Considering the resources available to them, they did a much better job than could have been reasonably expected in imparting to us the civilizing educational and ethical values of a benign Christianity. A few of them I would say could have been, under any criteria, candidates for sainthood. That’s not to deny the victimization experienced by some of my contemporaries. Consideration for what we’ve come to call “learning disabilities” was noticeably absent. Some kids were OK; some were not. Some were smart; some were slow or even dumb. Some were bad, and often the lines got blurred. Little slack was granted to those who fell off the norm, even marginally. The nuns did beat kids. A boy from our street was so badly mistreated by a sixth-grade nun that his otherwise devout mother removed him from the Incarnation school and sent him to the local public school. He wasn’t the only one. Despite the justification of their cases, the kids who left were always looked at like the guys in the army who didn’t make it through basic training. By the time we reached puberty many of us, the boys anyway, were giving back as good or better than we got.
There is no discounting the horror stories recounted by adult Catholics and former Catholics of having been traumatized by what they remember as brutal nuns. What I do remember however was my own class of eighth-grade boys. At one end of the spectrum, we had among us the model Catholic boys; the altar boys, the kids who would go on to high school honors, to college and to graduate school. Also in our midst were more than a few my mother would have called “bad actors.” Most of us, caught up as we were in the demonic thrall of puberty, were highly excitable and borderline unmanageable. The majority smoked cigarettes and many were already regular beer drinkers. While I don’t recall any real thugs, there were several volatile types who required careful handling. Sister Mary Martin would prove to be no match for this crowd. I learned much later that she was only twenty-two years old and that we were just her second teaching assignment. From the very first day of class she had trouble extending her span of control beyond the first row of desks. The sharks smelled blood. Early in the school year Father Buckley had been brought over from the rectory to restore order. Examples were made and there were threats of expulsions. The matter seemed settled, but with Sister’s vulnerabilities exposed, the least civilized among us began a low intensity insurgency. The harder she tried to hold on to her authority, the worse things seemed to get. On many days we reduced Sister Mary Martin to tears. Our instinctive awareness that she had the full powers of the church behind her tempered some of our more outrageous impulses. But once we had her on the run, group solidarity or just the cowardly fear of being ridiculed by our peers kept some of us in the game long after we knew that she deserved better from us. I still get uneasy feelings about some of what went on in that classroom.
On another level, the recent revelations of horrendous sexual misconduct by members of a supposedly celibate male clergy lie beyond the denial of even the most ultra of Catholics. Yet with the exception of one genuinely harmless Christian Brother who exhibited an unseemly interest in young boys, I never encountered in all of my years of Catholic life, anything remotely like the evil and predatory clerical behavior that’s surfaced of late. You don’t have to be a church scholar to understand how and why so many sexually repressed or deformed people gravitated toward the priesthood. In my own time, boys as young as eleven or twelve years old were being identified for their piety and were spoken of as having a divinely inspired calling to the religious life.
One morning in the sixth-grade, Father Smith knocked on our classroom door. After some whispering in the hall, Sister Mary Gregory returned and announced for all to hear that I was to come to school the next day dressed appropriately for a visit to the seminary. All eyes in the class were on me. Whatever was going on, I certainly didn’t know. Unquestioningly, my mother sent me off the next day in my Sunday best. Just after the start of class, Father Smith came to the door and motioned me to come out into the hall. With him was a kid a year behind me, a fifth grader named Robert Groban, with whom several years later I was to have one of my very few fistfights. Father Smith was an old friend of my father’s, and at the time the most popular priest at Incarnation. Bing Crosby’s success a few years earlier in “Going My Way” and in “The Bells of Saint Mary’s” had put a premium on young, good-looking, regular-guy kinds of priests. That was Father Smith. He drove us out to Saint Charles Borremeo Seminary, on the grounds of a sprawling, wooded estate just off City Line Avenue. A ride in a car was a big enough deal for me. We were taken on a tour, told and shown what it was like to be a seminarian. By the end of the morning nothing had been clarified, but being a kid I went with the flow. I wasn’t all that impressed. Becoming a priest certainly didn’t measure up to being an Indian scout or a commando. Leaving the seminary, we drove into downtown Philadelphia for lunch at Bookbinders, a seafood house then regarded among Philadelphia’s best eating-places. I could count the number of times I’d been in a restaurant in single digits, and never anything on the scale of a Bookbinders. We were near the end of our lunch, my mother’s repeated warnings about me minding my table manners still playing in my head. The dessert I’d ordered, a gigantic chocolate éclair, had just arrived at the table. As I began to dive into the éclair, I must have said something to make Father Smith realize that a mix-up had taken place. I was not the sixth-grade boy he had been instructed to take to the seminary. I was not the boy that the nuns had reported as showing signs of having a vocation to the religious life. He had brought the wrong kid. To his credit, he burst out laughing, and I continued working away on my éclair. My other companion for the seminary tour, Robert Groban, if he ever had a vocation, soon got rid of it. The fistfight he and I had as paperboys several years later had to do with the affections of an eighth-grade girl.
My own seminary visit highlighted the pressures applied in a recruiting system that targeted young boys for a life of priestly celibacy. There were other pressures as well, mothers proud and pious, and nuns making a fuss over the religious devotion of such good boys. Small wonder some of these guys ended up confused; or worse, twisted. I would offer that no one should be allowed to consider becoming a celibate cleric until they’ve figured out their own lives, maybe not until they’ve passed the age of thirty or forty, if even then.
Too many memoirs of Catholic childhoods fall to either innocent comic nostalgia or to dark recountings of the wounds suffered at the hands of sadistic nuns and brothers. Like any larger reality, the truth is often more complex. The context of the archdiocesan educational system in Philadelphia in the late 1940’s was that it provided a basic education funded by the contributions, however meager, of its mostly working class parishioners. We had no gymnasiums, no science labs, no lunchrooms; nothing but the four fundamentals: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic and of course, Religion. As the product of twelve years of intensive religious education I remain confounded that the Conservative Right in America, a movement supposedly characterized by hardheaded realism, has devoted so much of its energies to the issue of school prayer. Like so many veterans of a religious education, I can bear witness to the doubtful efficacy of prayer in the classroom. Enforced piety often creates something very different than its intended results.
Catholics, as everyone seems to know, are or were required, on pain of mortal sin, to attend Mass on Sundays and on designated holy days of obligation. There is also the business of one’s “Easter Duty,” the specifics of which I no longer recall. What I do recall is that a preponderant amount of my time as a Catholic elementary school pupil was devoted to the prayers and rituals of the Faith, both in the classroom and in the church. I was never an altar boy. My daily afternoon newspaper route precluded the after-school Latin classes required of altar boys. Until my voice changed, I did spend a couple of years as a choirboy, a role that didn’t have quite the status of being on the altar. As a choirboy I was in church for all of the attendant command performances; singing at High Mass, at first mass on holy days, at funerals and at other forgotten liturgical functions. In addition I was, like all of my peers, required to attend children’s Mass on Sunday, mass on holy days, 7:00 a.m. Mass and communion on the first Friday of each month and Mass every day in October, something to do with the Blessed Mother. In December, there was pressure to go to Mass during Advent before Christmas, but that was like a pro team’s optional practice. If we didn’t have to do it, we slept in. And there was more, Mass every day during Lent, and more Blessed Mother stuff, Mass every day in May.
Attending Mass was not the end of it. There was confession on Saturday afternoon. And there were novenas and there were missions. Novenas were prayer sessions held over a period of several days and missions were conducted by visiting clergy, usually something exotic like Franciscans in brown robes with ropes around their waists. Missions were the only time I can recall the forbidden topic of sex coming up. Mid-week of the mission, there was the big night with separate sessions for the men and for the women of the parish. Usually it was Wednesday night and everybody knew that “you know what” was going to be the topic. While the mission priests were capable of thundering and shouting, their allusions to sex were always circumspect and veiled. The mission preachers relied on phrases like respect for the sanctity of life, and references to our bodies as temples of the Holy Ghost. With all references to sexual acts so sanitized, I could never quite understand what they talking about. Later at an all-boys high school, mission week sermons were more direct. We knew exactly what they were talking about; making out with girls and playing with yourself.
There were other things I never quite got the drift of. One was called Forty Hours and it took place in the Autumn, usually in November. Forty Hours was a series of evening services that, like most Catholic services, were wrapped up with Benediction. Benediction was a relatively short form ritual, with smoking incense, ringing bells, no sermons, and a couple of hymns that imbedded themselves forever in the psyche. “Oh Holy Gooooddd, we praise thy name. Lord of all…;” and “Tantum ergo sacramentum, vene remur cere nui.” A Momento Mori is in order. Lest anyone ever forget, the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church of my experience was conducted almost entirely in Latin. Virtually every utterance from the altar, everything other than the sermons and homilies, was in a language entirely incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of the congregation. We were told by one of our nuns that the Christmas Carol, “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” was of suspect, read Protestant, origins. If the song were to be sung, we should, as Good Catholics, be careful to sing it only in the Latin version of “Adeste Fidelis.”
In the Church of my childhood, forty days and forty nights didn’t reference the biblical flood, but rather the holy season of Lent. We were expected to offer up sacrifices in recognition of the coming Passion of Jesus Christ, not entirely a bad idea. Translating the spiritual concept of the mortification of the flesh into practice in our neighborhood usually came down to giving something up for Lent, something like not going to the movies or not eating candy or not drinking sodas. By eighth grade, we were trying to give up cigarettes for Lent. Lenten scorekeeping and rule bending took on Byzantine complexities. If you could break your pledge on Sundays in Lent, then what about holy days? Did St. Patrick’s Day count as a holy day, or St. Joseph’s Day? While the voluntary nature of Lenten sacrifice was conceded, good luck to you if the word got out that you’d been seen going into a matinee at the Colney or the Lindley on a Saturday afternoon during the Lenten season.
There were dietary rules that further complicated our lives. Friday’s of course were meatless. Fried flounder, codfish cakes and oyster stew were the Friday staples in our house. My father got the oysters and we got what was known as blind oyster stew, or the flavored broth, not that we would have eaten anything that looked like an oyster. During Lent, the rules on what could be eaten and when it could be eaten got problematic. Once in high school, when my mother ran out of lunchmeat and sent me off with a cheese sandwich, I was told it was the Octave of Donut Day, a day of fast and abstinence.
On top of having to attend Mass every day during Lent, there were the Stations of the Cross each Friday after school. By seventh grade, half of our class had Evening Bulletin newspaper routes and there would be trouble every week when we bagged Stations to serve papers. “Young man, what is more important, serving newspapers or the state of your immortal soul?” During Holy Week, the week ahead of Easter, the church functions reached a frenzy level that included having to visit three different Catholic churches on Holy Thursday. As a kid coerced into spending three hours in church on a Good Friday afternoon, I gained a fuller appreciation of the concept of agony.
In May, over half of our school days were spent in the church practicing for the parish equivalent of the Super Bowl, the May Procession. We practiced lining up by height and by class. We practiced walking the route around the parish property and inside the church. We stood and we knelt, and we practiced the hymns, over and over and over. The May Procession also incorporated the graduation for that year’s eighth-grade class, and one of the eighth-grade girls would be selected in advance by the nuns as May Queen. The May Queen would march in a long white gown, holding a large floral bouquet and wearing a crown. We were never informed of what the criteria were for the picking of the May Queen, but by the eighth-grade, we had our own picks for May Queen. Everyone in the parish held their breath hoping for good weather on the Sunday chosen for the procession. Women would make novenas, praying for a sunny Sunday.
A little known talent found among many Catholics of a certain age, lapsed or active, is an ability to zone out, to trip off into a dreamlike state while giving all the appearances of engagement and attentiveness. I know. As a veteran corporate bureaucrat, I cruised my way through endless rounds of mind-numbing meetings by employing the secret skills I’d honed as a Catholic schoolboy. Forced to sit through and chant the repetitive decades of the Rosary, I had learned to compartmentalize my mind. The call of “Hail Mary Full of Grace…” followed by the rote response of “Holy Mary, Mother of God…” quickly lost any semblance of meaning. A kind of imaginative multi-tasking took over during so many of those long mornings, evenings, and afternoons spent drifting along in a fog of incense and Latin. With the good nuns ever watchful for slackness, it took subtle adaptive skills to pass muster while you went off into your head to help Randolph Scott battle Comanches at a desert waterhole. Dreams of toys you knew you’d never get, of heroics you’d never perform, of revenge you’d never taste; the fantasies to be explored and manipulated were limitless. Once you’d mastered this Zen-like art and discipline of advanced day-dreaming under pressure, a universe of pleasure became yours. The risks of the endeavor only added to the pleasure. A shrill “Young man! What are you doing?” would jolt you awake to the moment. Or worse, a hard wallop upside the head that would snap you back to the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. It took skill and daring to pull off these escapes, but the rewards of spending the afternoon with Zorro fighting the evil Mexican soldiers seemed well worth the risks. It certainly beat the dreadful tedium of a drowsy classroom after lunch, being read a story about some pious kids in Latin America “who were known throughout the region for their devotion to the Blessed Virgin. One day the soldiers came for them and …”
In their zeal to make us saintly children of our Holy Father, the good sisters all too often made us complicit in our own sinfulness. “I’m sure that tonight, after dinner, when you kneel down in your living room with the rest of your good Catholic family to say the Rosary..." Say what? The only time my father ever got on his knees in our living room was to tack down an unruly carpet edge. Or, “I’m sure no one in this room has ever risked the immortal souls of their family by allowing a book to come into the house that didn’t contain the Imprimatur of our Holy Mother Church.” I looked across the aisle and caught the expression of incredulity on the face of Louie Carr. I doubt there were books of any sort in the Carr household. It got worse. Standing up at the end of 10:15 mass to take the Pledge of the Legion of Decency, promising I’d boycott all movies condemned by the Church, knowing even at the age of thirteen that I’d do no such thing. I never did see “The Moon is Blue,” a tame piece of fluff that precipitated the 1950’s clash between Hollywood and Rome. In fifth-grade, we had been told that we were not to attend the Lindley Theater on Saturday afternoons while it was running a fifteen-part serial called “The Curse of the Purple Phantom.” At this point, I’d seen the first four chapters. Each cheap, innocuous, twenty-minute episode that preceded the feature films would end with a cliffhanger designed to get you back in your seat for next week’s resolution. If you got your card punched for attending the first fourteen chapters, you’d get in for free for the final episode. Somehow someone had told someone that in some way this stuff was injurious to young minds, and Sister Mary Gregory issued a fatwa on “The Curse of the Purple Phantom.” Now it just so happened that during that very week, every afternoon when we returned to school from lunch, the same Sister Mary Gregory would read aloud to us for at least a half hour from a book on the sufferings of the North American Martyrs. While the Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, baloney sandwiches, milk and cookies of our lunches digested, we listened to detailed, grisly descriptions of the tortures and slow deaths inflicted by the savage Iroquois upon Saint Isaac Jogues and the Jesuit missionaries to the Hurons.
While there was pro-forma respect for and deference to the priests and the nuns, no one was exempt from being tagged by the parish wise guys. There were no dispensations for position. One of the priests at the rectory, a strange bird, gaunt and ascetic, almost devoid of people skills and given to stalking about the parish grounds in a pom-pommed baretta and a cape-like cloak, was known as “Black Bart.” The wonderfully gentle Mother Superior at the convent and principal of the parish school, all four feet, five inches of her, got nailed with the name of a diminutive Indian chief in the Red Ryder comic strip, “Little Moose.” The perennial terror of seventh grade boys, Sister Mary Agnes, was less creatively capped with “Aching Aggie.” For reasons I don’t recall, my seventh grade wasn’t assigned to get Aggie, although her replacement, Sister Mary Matthew was another intimidating bruiser.
Late on a warm September afternoon, early in the school year, with classroom windows open to the street, a passing Route “J” bus on Lindley Avenue delivered a chorus of adolescent male laughter and the chant of “Aching Aggie, stick your feet out the window.” As freshmen at Northeast Catholic High School for Boys, these imaginative young men believed they had finally moved beyond the authority of mere elementary school nuns. Every kid and every nun in the school heard the challenge gleefully blasted from the passing bus. The next day there was more of the same, but louder. By the third afternoon, everyone was waiting. Before the laughing and yelling had died down, the bus came to a sudden stop. Father Buckley, standing on the corner at Fourth and Lindley, had flagged the bus down, and stormed aboard. The culprits were marched off the bus and down Lindley Avenue to the school hall where Sister Mary Agnes awaited their arrival. I’m still not sure they all weren’t executed.
By seventh-grade, too many years of total immersion in mandatory religious rituals and practices coupled with the onset of puberty would create a volatile, combustible mix. For many of us, the routines of spirituality, the liturgy of transcendence had become an increasingly irrelevant background noise to the more pressing realities of our lives. We were long past hearing the message and we began to find ways, not always as passive as daydreaming, to get us through the tedium. In church, we’d try to steal glances at the girls across the aisle. A few of the more daring even laid out and read comic books on the seats of the pews in front of them. The most memorable, most spontaneous and most dangerous of our rebellions against the light was the great eight-o-clock Mass farting contest. It began with one slight buzz from Ray Feldmeyer that set off some stifled giggling. Then seconds later Bobby Yanks tilted to one side and ripped a moderately robust one. That produced audible guffaws reaching all the way back to the formidable seventh-grade boys nun, Sister Mary Matthew. She left her place, and marching up the aisle, cuffed a couple of the gigglers on their heads. For a few minutes, order was restored. Then “A-Bomb” Tommy Leary, so-named for his ability to fart on cue, fired a moist, rubbery arpeggio that sent even the devout Martin Ecsterowitz into a choking fit. As an outraged Sister again got to her feet, already swinging at the heads of the guys in the pew just in front of her, Eddie Quires then cut a killer. Sounding like the call of some large animal in heat, it bounced audibly off the hard wooden surface of the pew, echoing and reverberating against the stone arches and gothic balustrades of the sacristy. An old woman in an adjacent pew shook her beads at us and stage-whispered the word “sacrilege.” Even the priest at the altar seemed to realize that something was going on. Unable to identify the culprits, and on the verge of making a scandalous scene, Sister Mary Matthew ordered our entire class out of church and on to the 5th Street sidewalk. Those who continued to find the situation amusing were severely thrashed, and we were marched to the school auditorium where we were threatened with everything from school expulsion to eternal damnation. Father Boyle was brought over to read an ecclesiastical riot act. Since no one would or could admit to being the perpetrators, the entire class was punished collectively. I think we had to write out decades of the rosary and were told we’d be staying after school forever, or for weeks anyway. We were a disgrace to our parents, to the church and to respectable humankind. We knew we had crossed a line. At least some of us did.
After all those years of intensive religious education, I felt that I never really “got it.” That I went on to lose my faith or lapse wasn’t the case. I don’t remember ever having felt any of the things I was supposed to feel about God, about spirituality, about my eternal salvation. I just never understood it, never grasped it. Who’s to blame? Certainly not the system nor the people who did their very best to turn me into a good son of the church, certainly not my parents, who dutifully sent me off every day to be educated by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Blame isn’t even a consideration. At age seven, I made my First Holy Communion and thought, “O.K. Now what?” No bells, no clouds parting, nothing. Life went on the next day as it has every day since. Nothing or nobody I could call God has yet to reveal himself, herself, or itself in my life.
While the relevance of the church on my conscious mind seems to have been reduced to a level comparable to my choice of socks, I can remember the sense of betrayal that I felt when a guy I hardly knew changed his religious affiliation and anglicized his family name, all done to facilitate taking his place among those he seemed to believe were his betters. Why would someone ever do something like that? As a non-observant Jewish friend remarked in regard to his own identity, “who’s going to let me be anything else?” Imagine my shock, my repressed fury in the mid 1950’s, when as the first of my kind working in the heart of an old WASPy business establishment, I found myself being patronized not for who I was, but for what I was. It was the old business of, “you know you’re really O.K., not like some of the others that we wouldn’t want working here.” Now in what seems like the blink of an eye, the near infinity of distinctions that went with a name, face and a background like mine have disappeared. But like Popeye, “I yam what I yam” and I was what I was. Although there were times when I tried very hard not to be.
I often feel something like envy when I meet people who can believe they have a transcendent place and purpose in what appears to me a starkly indifferent universe. But irony abides. On some unconscious functional level, in some essential form, much of it did stick. No one could have entirely escaped the effects of twelve years of total and intensive indoctrination in a closed system that now seems utterly surreal; an arcane subculture of vestments, rituals, pagan babies, fish on Fridays and Bless me Father for I have sinned – In my first confession, I owned up to an overdue library book. Given everything and given even my utter incomprehension in the face of anything almighty, I do in fact remain, and will remain always, in the depth of my soul, in the marrow of my bones, an Irish-American, Roman Catholic, ever the product of my time and of my place.
all content copyright Pete Byrne 2011