Frog in the Pot

The priest and I sat for an hour in his well-appointed office of the Catholic Chaplain at Yale University.  It was the Spring of 1981.  I was an assistant professor of sociology at Yale, and I was preparing to get married in August of that year.  I had asked for our meeting to see whether it would be possible for him to be the co-celebrant at the wedding.

I went into the meeting visualizing any number of barriers to his participation.  But I was doing due diligence on the possibility because I knew it would please my mother, a devoted Catholic.

The problems were several.  My fiancée was Jewish, as would be our co-celebrant.  I told the priest that I was no longer a practicing Catholic, and that I could not commit to bringing up any future children in the Catholic faith.  I kept waiting for him to draw the line against his participation at any one of these conditions, but he did not.  To my surprise, he kept indicating that he could work with them.  I was pleased because I knew my mother would be.

As I stood up, something off-script entered my mind, and, thinking it really irrelevant, I nonetheless thought I should double check.  Just in case.  I said, “Oh, Father, there’s one more thing–it’s probably unrelated.  My fiancée was married earlier and is now divorced.”  He was halfway out of his chair when my comment caused him to slump back into it.  “That’s a problem.” Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part III: Exit”

The first preadolescent thought that I had about my received Catholic faith’s relationship to the outside world was this:  Gee, my friends–Jeff, David, Don, Mark, Tim–are all going to hell when they die.

My family was the only Catholic family in my wooded country neighborhood among the corn fields and pastures outside of town.  I had learned that all of the several other families there were Protestant.  According to what I was being taught in my religion classes at St. Margaret Mary elementary school, since my friends had not been saved by Catholic baptism as babies, they were all condemned to an eternal afterlife of hellfire.  I was pretty sure that they did not know this.  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit, Part II: Discovery”

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.  Continue reading “How I Lost the Faith and Found the Spirit: Part I”