In my last post I wrote about my early Catholic
experiences up to the time I entered high school. That was not the end of the
story, however. Most of you know that some time later I embarked upon an
intense period of Catholicism, spending four years in the order of the Religious
Hospitalliers of St Joseph, or, the Hotel Dieu nuns as they were colloquially
known. In the intervening six years I dwelled in what I would characterize as a
mainly secular culture, one impacted by both Catholic and Protestant
influences.
Though my mother had become a Catholic four or five years after my
parents’ marriage, she at no time displayed the often fervent attributes of the
newly converted. Her experience of boarding with religious sisters during her
high school years gave her some knowledge and sympathy toward Catholicism. I
suspect that having us children attend church with our father alone would not
have sat well with her; she most likely came along. She then agreed to become a
Catholic if she could study it and accept it in her own mind. This conversion
was facilitated by a relatively young and interesting monsignor, resident in
our Belleville parish. My mother was never one to suffer fools with any
gladness whatsoever. She would not have welcomed a romanticized or devotional
Catholicism. The good monsignor must have been intelligent and wise enough to
pitch his teaching at a level that my mother could accept. I think that they
liked each other very much. In fact, my mother kept a photograph of him, on
horseback, for many years. So in this fashion we were transformed from a
mixed-marriage family to a fully Catholic one. But! You can take the girl out
of the Protestant faith but you can’t take the Protestant faith (read, culture)
out of the girl.
I think of our dual-culture family’s philosophical
approaches as something like this: the Catholic side – Don’t worry, be happy –
look at the lilies of the field – i.e., God provides; if you transgress in some
fashion, you can go to confession and you will be forgiven. The Protestant side
– work hard, don’t lie, don’t cheat; God helps those who help themselves; if
there are transgressions, keep them to yourself, certainly let no one know
outside the family: what would the neighbours think?!!! These values or
approaches only revealed themselves obliquely, to be sure. They were never
debated and rarely enunciated, certainly not by my dad, though periodically by
my mother. She would often comment, “My father could never abide a liar.” This
was an impressive statement if a rather unforgiving one. It imparted to us the
idea that certain sins, ones to which children were particularly liable, were egregiously
reprehensible.
Our family devotions consisted entirely in attendance at
Mass on Sundays and on Holy Days of Obligation, a degree of fasting and abstinence
during Lent, and the de rigueur fish on Fridays. We did not partake in other
devotions such as evening Benediction or Stations of the Cross, nor did we pray
together as a family. On Ash Wednesday we received the penitential ashes to the
forehead and on Good Friday we participated in the three hour liturgy commemorating
the agony and death of Jesus. I have no memory of these observances being
meaningful to me in themselves. They were simply what we did. We went to
church; we went to confession and to communion, simply because my parents took us
there. It was an unreflected upon part of our existence in that time and place,
without inner awareness of its historical or religious significance. As I
advanced in my teen years I grew less rather than more interested in being made
captive for these exercises. My greatest complaint (kept to myself as I recall)
related to the sermons given each Sunday during Mass. I have no idea what was
said that offended or perturbed me. I only remember that I developed an uncanny
ability to entirely tune out as soon as the priest began to speak. I would waft
away on my own thoughts, returning to the present only as he left the pulpit.
The rest of the service moved along and we were released.
In my last couple of years in Ottawa a new parish was established
by the Basilian Fathers. They opened a high school, starting with a grade nine class
and advancing each succeeding year until the school had a full five year
program. While the church was under construction, Mass was held in the auditorium
of my own school, Nepean High. In our last year there we attended the new
church. Years later I learned that Maurice, my first husband and the father of
our beautiful daughters, was also in attendance. At the time he was a Basilian
scholastic, sent before his ordination as a priest to teach a semester at the
new high school. We did not have the pleasure of meeting one another until a
further eight years had elapsed, and then not under the auspices of the Church,
but of that other community influential in our lives, Therafields. But that is
another story. In those intervening years there were other phases relative to my
engagement with Catholicism to which you, my intrepid readers, will no doubt be
made privy.
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