My mom has her Devo hat on in this picture. Looking back, I see she was very fashionable but at the time I resisted the white bucks she insisted we all wear. My brother Mark has my friend, John Abraham’s, hat on. John is looking over my right shoulder and I’m clutching my missal. I can see some holy cards sticking out of it. We used those as bookmarks and I still have quite a collection of them. We’re standing in front of our grammer school. The convent, where most of our teachers lived, is seen in the background and the church, where we had just celebrated my brother Tim’s First Communion, was next door. Tim’s wearing a white tie.
There were at least five Catholic churches in Irondequoit when we moved here. The two on Culver are both senior living facilities now and the parishes all united as one, named after the first Native American saint, Kateri. Church attendance has withered. Millions of people are confessing their secrets to spiritual chatbots now. And then there is organized religion’s attempt to shove credible sexual abuse allegations under the rug. That cost ourl diocese 246 million in a settlement that was finally distributed to the victims.
My mother was working for the diocese when she married my father just ten months before I was born. The office was located in the former Knights of Columbus building at 50 Chestnut Street. We took the bus down there after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays because Catholic schools didn’t have gyms. The CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) had a few gyms, an auditorium, a pool and even a candy counter as you came out of the locker room. The Diocesan offices were upstairs and the priests lived on the top floors. There was a sign on the corner of the building that read “If You Lived Here You Would Be Home By Now.” I was never sure why that merited the effort. Garth Fagan Dance occupies some of this space today.
My mother would tell stories about how the priests she for were forever chasing the girls around the office. I would laugh at the thought and she would say, “No, they were bad!”
We went to both a high school reunion and a family reunion over the weekend. At the first my former teammates were still digesting the fact that our soccer coach is serving life in prison for sexual abuse. When the first allegation was made by a teammate our school, just like the church, quietly transferred him to another school where other allegations were addressed. At the family reunion my cousin told me he received his portion of the settlement from the church. Some consolation. I have two cousins who were nuns. One left the order with her partner. The other is still a nun with partner and still fighting the church hierarchy for more meaningful roles for women. What kind of religion insists on an all male, unmarried priesthood? The job description itself attracts perpetrators.
1 Comment
It’s nice for the Catholics, but not so nice for the children sexually abused/raped at home. Young women (and maybe men, I don’t know, I have only heard of women) are actually going to the police and filing charges against their family. Unthinkable in my time. CONSEQUENCES!!