Burying The Pope

My immediate family was agnostic. Yet, my mother sang in the choir of a Catholic Church on Sundays a few times when she visited her brother, my Uncle Hugh, in the rural town of Mudgee, NSW, Aust. Hugh also sang in the choir. He married into a wealthy, Irish Australian, Catholic family, and converted. Just this minute, right now, did it occur to me that not once did I hear anyone mention how and when the conversion came about. Approximately 65 years later he included in a letter to me his observation that the Pope was a good man, but "misguided." He could say that then; his wife was dead. Helen was spectacularly beautiful, and gave birth to eleven splendid children. Not only was she beautiful, but she was also 'winning,' warm, quick to laugh, gracious, almost as if she had modelled herself on an image of Mary. As a child, before my father stupidly put his foot dawn, when I visited my country cousins I took an active role in saying the Rosary, and went to mass. On later visits, after my agnostic father denied permission, I had to stay at the house, alone, on Sunday mornings when I visited my cousins.

My Uncle, and my mother, both committed adultery with devastating results. My mother, after the event, and before my mother knew that I'd seen her on the dark livingroom couch with a man not my father, one of several 'other men' during the war while my father was overseas, said to me while she sat at her mirror, "It's alright what you do provided you don't hurt anyone." Not long afterward, maybe a month, I murmured in the kitchen that I was going to "Tell Dad." My mother said, ever so quietly, "That would be a very hurtful thing to do." Not only did I never tell Dad, I forgot all about it until, in America, I brought it up in therapy.

Hugh was found out, causing a whopping scandal. His wife went to South America, alone, for a year. The neighbor had to divorce, and move to the city 200 miles away, a broken woman when I met her some years later. She told me how much she loved Hugh. She actually used that old cliche, "I loved that man with every fibre of my being." She was plain and pedestrian compared to Helen, who went back with Hugh and made more babies. She forgave him. Her family did not.

I became Catholic while serving in the U.S. Army in Korea. No, it wasn't fear of dying in combat, it was fear of the negative 'rewards' of leading a too clever life getting by on not letting anyone find out what I'd done, or what I really wanted.

Another leap in time and I'm in confession in Los Angeles, Blessed Sacrament on Hollywood Boulevard. After talking for a while the impatient priest said to me. "That's enough of the sex stuff, have to cheated in business lately?" Shocked, I stuttered and stammered I'd been in tax trouble. He was even less interested in that than he was in my sex life. He instructed me to say ten Hail Marys and go in Peace. Wow, I was singing.

I hope and pray that with that sketchy outline of formative influences you'll understand, no matter your religious views, how it came about that I'm deeply moved by the present spotlight shining on the Catholic Church. Let us together enjoy a brief moratorium on criticism.

Barry