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I did not like Church. I did not like dressing for Church, going to Church, sitting in Church. I did not like the clothing I had to wear. I did not like the rush out the door with the bells ringing from down in the valley indicating we were running late. I certainly didn’t like the smell, the silence, the foreign language spoken once we arrived or the eerie organ music. I was horrified by the bloody, bearded scarecrow which hung above the altar.
I did not understand why Carl stood in the back of the church, or why the males on the altar wore women’s gowns and funny hats, or why I had to wear fishnet stockings and my black patent leather shoes and although I tried, I was never able to perform the calisthenics (Kneel – Sit – Stand – Kneel – Stand – Sit – Cross Yourself - Kneel – Stand) in the correct sequence. But I did understand and I do remember how I felt sitting on that wooden pew. Church gave me the creeps.
Many of the parishioners were somewhat familiar to me and I recognized a few of them from Queen Ave and a few more from my mother’s PTA meetings which she sometimes held in the living room, but they looked and acted differently on Sunday mornings.
There was Mrs. Mary Pappal. She lived a few miles away and always arrived at my mother’s PTA night with a bottle in a brown paper bag. “Now Darcy”, she would say insistently, “you know I can’t get through these silly meetings without a little good cheer” and then would add, “Now where do you keep the corkscrew?”
I once asked what good cheer was. My mother told me I would find out when I was an adult. I actually found out what good cheer was when I was thirteen, under a bridge by the mall with Kevin and Linda.
In church, Mrs. Pappal wore pale colored dresses which ran from right below her chin to well below her knees. She usually had matching pumps and a white handbag. Her matching hats were much smaller than her PTA hats, her breasts were almost invisible, and her face seemed much more pale. I recognized her voice, although it was much quieter on Sunday mornings than the voice I would hear from the top of my bedroom stairs on PTA nights. Often on those nights, and sometime after I had snuck back into bed, I would be awakened by a loud cackle from Mary Pappal which was a lot louder and a lot longer than the other laughter in the room. But in church she was reserved, and I was confused.
There was also the Ryan family. They always arrived early and he and his wife and their seven girls always sat aligned in the same pew, in the exact same order. Mr. then Mrs. then Patty, Pam, Pauline, Penelope, Polly, Priscilla and Page. All had various shades of brown, curly hair except Patty, the youngest. I loved blond haired, blue eyed five year old Patty and wondered if she also engaged in Sunday morning Shenanigans.
No one ever saw much of Mrs. Ryan outside of church. The backyard of their large, expanded ranch was surrounded by a very tall privacy fence which hid a large built in pool. I did hear her name mentioned once at a PTA meeting but didn’t really understand why she was considered poor or what she didn’t want anymore of.
“The poor woman”, someone said from the living room, “she doesn’t want anymore, but he’s determined to have a boy”.
“Oh what for”, another added in, “so he can send him off to war to have HIS arm blown off.”
In church, Mr. Ryan wore a nice black suit, white shirt and tie with shiny black shoes. The sleeve on the side of his missing arm was tucked neatly into his pocket and he smiled, talked politely and nodded at all who acknowledged him. I wasn’t afraid of him in church. I was afraid when I saw him yelling and flailing around on his front lawn.
“God damn it, get in the God damned house now,” he would yell while chasing after his children as they ducked and scattered. His good arm would be swinging and aiming for their heads as his other arm stub bounced and dangled from his tee shirt. If I were anywhere near their front lawn, he would start after me until he realized I lived a few houses down and wasn’t one of the seven. But in church, Mr. Ryan never yelled out God damn it or tried to whack any of his children in the head with his only good arm.
It took forever to exit the church grounds after mass. My mother would hold onto my hand tightly as we shuffled down the aisle and more often than not she would stop to chat on the way out. On occasion, I would start up with some more Shenanigans, but found that wetting my pants was a much more effective way to get home quickly. Sunday mornings would end with a late breakfast of fried dough, scrambled eggs, bacon and orange juice and was the official end of the Sunday morning ordeal.
I was fifty years old and shocked to find this poem my father had written on a piece of scrap paper. It was tucked under his collection of army medals in the bottom of his dresser drawer.
Every Sun Bet has the blues
The first thing she says is what dress shall I use.
It’s not the right color, it’s too long or too short.
I’m not gonna go, she says with a snort.
Her budgets not ready, her hair isn’t combed
And Dad says from now on, I’m going alone.
Soon the church bells start ringing 5 min to 9
But one way or other, we always make Mass on time.
I was shocked because it contained such levity and I don’t remember anything funny about Sunday mornings when I was six, nor do I remember his reaction to my Shenanigans being anything close to lighthearted.
By 1965, my Sunday morning behavior began to change. Carl and Darcy had weathered the storm, they would like to say, and attributed the change to my catechism classes and a new found understanding of God. I don’t remember any new found understanding of God but I do remember a new found feeling for Patty Ryan.
Report Details Abuses in Irish Reformatories
By SARAH LYALLPublished: May 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/europe/21ireland.html
LONDON — Tens of thousands of Irish children were sexually, physically and emotionally abused by nuns, priests and others over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools meant to care for the poor, the vulnerable and the unwanted, according to a report released in Dublin on Wednesday.
The 2,600-page report paints a picture of institutions run more like Dickensian orphanages than 20th-century schools, characterized by privation and cruelty that could be both casual and choreographed.
“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions,” the report says. In the boys’ schools, it says, sexual abuse was “endemic.” The report, by a state-appointed commission, took nine years to produce and was meant to help Ireland face and move on from one of the ugliest aspects of its recent history. But it has infuriated many victims’ groups because it does not name any of the hundreds of individuals accused of abuse and thus cannot be used as a basis for prosecutions.
It was delayed because of a lawsuit brought by the Christian Brothers, the religious order that ran many of the boys’ schools and that fought, ultimately successfully, to have the abusers’ names omitted. In 2003, the commission’s first chairwoman resigned, saying that Ireland’s Department of Education had refused to release crucial documents. The report covers a period from the 1930s to the 1990s, when the last of the institutions closed.
It exposes for the first time the scope of the problem in Ireland, as well as how the government and the church colluded in perpetuating an abusive system. The revelations have also had the effect of stripping the Catholic Church, which once set the agenda in Ireland, of much of its moral authority and political power.
The report singles out Ireland’s Department of Education, meant to regulate the schools, for running “toothless” inspections that overlooked glaring problems and deferred to church authority.
The report is based in part on old church records of unreported abuse cases and in part on the anonymous testimony of 1,060 former students from a variety of 216 mostly church-run institutions, including reformatories and so-called industrial schools, set up to tend to neglected, orphaned or abandoned children.
Most of the former students are now 50 to 80 years old.
