I was about as perfect a little Catholic boy as one could find anywhere. I can say that now, in retrospect, although I had no awareness of this at the time. I prayed fervently, took Communion on Sundays, and gave my coins to the Missions (in exchange for time off in Purgatory, I must confess).
In fifth grade I learned the Latin Mass by rote and became an altar boy. Apparently even a star altar boy.
 I say so because in that first year in this elite young male crew I was selected to be one of the four boys serving at the Easter Sunday Midnight Mass. I was the only fifth grader on the altar with the older boys at one of the two most important and heavily attended masses of the year (the other being Christmas Midnight Mass).
I never felt closer to God than when serving on the altar in my altar boy garments: the black, floor-length cassock topped by the white surplice with the billowing sleeves. They even had a distinctive smell redolent–to me at least–of the Holy.
I imagined becoming a priest, and even a pope. The Church and its teachings had completely caught my imagination.
So much so that soon I experienced losing my mind.Â
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My elementary school years were full of religion and ritual. Mass every school day morning and, of course, on Sunday. First Confession and First Communion in First Grade. Confirmation in Fourth Grade. Religion class every school day for eight years, where I was introduced to the strict Baltimore Catechism as a five-year-old first grader.
And serving as an altar boy for four years. I served masses on weekdays and weekends. I served weddings and funerals. One busy Saturday I served early morning mass, a midday funeral mass, and a late afternoon wedding, the lone altar boy for each of these occasions. One Sunday I set my hair on fire while lighting the altar candles before mass. That brief little halo smelled to High Heaven and sent my fellow altar boy out at mid-mass, sick to his stomach. I soldiered through and completed my duties for the service.
But much of this time I spent under a cloud. The Church’s teachings in the Catechism, which–being so young–I absorbed without question, eventually came back to haunt me. From the first year we were taught that we were born with the Sin of Adam and Eve, that only Catholic Baptism could erase that stain. However, like Adam and Eve we were given to sin, which meant we must be constantly alert to the temptations of the Devil. And while lesser (venial) sins only put us at risk of temporary time in Purgatory after death, if we died with serious (mortal) sins on our souls, we were damned to eternal hell, never to bask in the love of God. Regular confession was the only way to cleanse ourselves of these sins and to assure us an early place in Heaven.
One day in sixth grade, while riding bikes with my friends, I had an epiphany, and not of the good kind. Out of nowhere, the thought entered my mind that I had committed a mortal sin, the kind that could earn me damnation to eternal hell. The thought rocked me so much that I immediately left my friends and rushed back home. I had to run this problem by my mother, who reassured me I had not committed a mortal sin.
But that single event initiated a long period in which thoughts of being damned for my sins haunted me. They would often overtake my mind and cripple me, making other activities impossible. This burden was especially disabling because, according to our lessons, one could commit sins of the mind, sins based simply on thinking about “evil” things.
I went to confession frequently to quiet the fears and the noise in my head. It was my first experience with OCD.  But as a young boy I did not understand that it was an illness, even when my parents took me to a child psychiatrist in a different city, which effort brought me only enhanced feelings of shame. I continued to spend a considerable amount of my own mental effort in trying to fight off the feeling that I was damned.
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The summer after sixth grade I had a much different religious experience, one that proved scary only in retrospect. My family of six took a two-week vacation, driving from our home outside Terre Haute, Indiana, to Massachusetts. There we rented a cottage in Manomet, a village in historic Plymouth. Our cottage sat atop a sandy bluff overlooking Cape Cod Sound, a mesmerizing setting, especially for a land-locked Midwestern boy.
The sandy beach below was our regular play place. There, one day we met a man who was staying in a nearby cottage. He was a Catholic priest of the Dominican Order, and he was there on a working vacation, writing a book on the place of God in higher educational institutions in the U.S. To my 11-year-old self, he seemed friendly and gentle. My parents especially seemed to enjoy his company on the beach as we kids played in the salty ocean water and built sand castles nearby.
We saw quite a lot of him on that beach during our stay, and I noticed something else. He appeared to have taken a special interest in me among my siblings. It wasn’t anything he said to me. I don’t recall him saying much to me at all. It was the way he gazed at me, for moments at a time, with a slight smile on his face. With my faith locked in place, I interpreted his silent gazing at me in the only way that I could: he saw something holy in me, perhaps a special soul, and he was pleased with it. For the time being, so was I.
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Two years later, while traveling the country on a tour for his newly released book, the priest wrote to my parents saying that he was passing through Indiana and would like to visit with us at our home. He came for dinner when he reached town, and the visit seemed a good one to me, with the adults engaged in conversation.
Many years later, recalling that visit my mother confided in me that the visit had not gone at all well. After the priest left, she said, my father said firmly to her that “that priest will never again enter our house!” My father had finally picked up on the priest’s silent admiration for me during the evening, much as had earlier occurred on the beach. Dad did not mistake it for holiness.
My mother also gave me this photograph that the priest had taken on that beach in Manomet in 1961. As you can see, it was centered on her, but with me partially in the frame, as if squeezed into the picture. That I am smiling at the camera while playing in the sand suggests that he called my name just before he snapped the photo.
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Despite its composition, I may well have been the intended subject of that photo. In 2003, 15 years after his death, the Diocese of Tucson (Arizona) determined that Father Richard Edmund Butler, O.P., had been credibly accused of sexual misconduct involving minors, including sexual molestation. The accusations involved the period of 1968 to 1974, when he was the chaplain-director of a Mexican mariachi band of boys between the ages of 13 and 17.
This revelation came on the heels of the pedophile priest scandal that the Boston Globe brought to light with a series of articles in 2002 on this tragedy in the Archdiocese of Boston. This led to the discovery of thousands of cases of sexual predation by priests in previous decades in the U.S., and of the routine coverup of their crimes by the Catholic religious hierarchy.
I learned all of this well after I had begun my journey away from the faith I had been taught. But this horrific pattern of behavior fit into my growing sense of discomfort with Church teaching and policies, discomfort that had begun years earlier.
My first awareness of my unease came to me just before I entered high school. I describe this turn, and later developments, in the forthcoming Part II of this essay.
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We had similar experiences with the Church. I was also the youngest altar boy to serve Easter and Christmas mass. The biggest deal for that was to serve at the chapel at Saint Mary’s Hospital, which was larger than most churches. The choir was made up of cloistered nuns. I too wanted to be a priest, helped along by a very Catholic dad. But when he died when I was 15…everything changed. I have always believed that the Roman Catholic Church was the best religion to become an atheist. Nothing has changed in over 60 years to change my view.
Thank you so much for your very thoughtful and self-reflective essay on your religious upbringing. I really look forward to reading parts 2 and 3. I know your words will help all of us to reflect on our own circumstances that are so life defining.
Thank you for writing this. I too had some strange things happen on a CYO Convention my freshman year in high school.
Peter, I am so glad you put all of this into words. I certainly shared your fears and remember well the focus on eternal hell beginning when I was in 3rd grade which the nuns seemed to relish. That was about the time I had the “privilege” of “getting out of class” to play the organ for very small weekday funeral Masses for elderly parishioners, often with only a couple of people in attendance. In order to prepare for these events, I frequently practiced the Requiem at home on the piano. I don’t think that our parents ever really understood that these experiences resulted in some significant trauma the results of which tend to hang around for a lifetime. Then, of course, your experience with Father Butler on top of all of that gave you a whole other perspective on the realities of the Catholic Church. I look forward to your next installments.