‘*My Catholic education taught me never to trust a priest — under or over 30. They had given up their lives in the service o f God, got up at five every morning to say Mass, wore lousy black gabardine slacks that itched, and had tossed their sex lives in the wastebasket.. . ” CATHOCK DIRTY TRICKS I. RANSOM ING PAGAN BABIES by Warren Hinckle The th re e is d i s s o a m dv e a t n h t i a n g g e s to o b f e C sa a i t d h o f l o ic r education, at least as it was in San Francisco of the logy, foggy fifties. For one thing, in grammar school I learned about ransoming pagan babies. We had to save our dimes to ransom the poor unbaptized creatures of China. To facilitate the financial aspect of this spiritual transaction, we purchased savings certificates — watermarked in the fuzzy purple of the nuns’ hectograph machine and resembling somewhat Blue Chip Stamps — which were popularly known as “ Pagan Baby Stamps.” When we had accumulated sufficient markers, we were assured that a yellow pagan of our choice would receive a Catholic baptism. We also got to name it, with a saint’s name, of course. It cost five dollars to ransom a boy, and three dollars for a girl. The good Sisters explained that girls came cheaper, since the Chinese routinely drowned girls at birth, like baby kittens, because there were so many of them. This led to considerable discussion about the relative value of boys and girls, and provoked a compromise, arranged by the nuns, which was widely considered a bargain: for ten dollars we could ransom one boy and two girls. 1he Catholic umbrella under wmcn I grew up shaded a vacuum-sealed, middle class and unflinchingly white ghetto. We all went to Catholic schools and our parents paid their dues and regularly received the sacraments, as did we kids, but is was more routine than a leap of faith. The Church seemed everywhere, Authority incarnate, yet it didn’t really connect. It was authority largely without terror. The Church I knew was not the Church of Savonarola, nor of James Joyce — it was too settled and comfortable to summon the fire and brimstone for Stephen Dedalus-type retreats. The priests who were stuck in the confessional box on Saturdays put on Pendleton sport shirts and went off to play golf at the Irish Catholic Olympic Club. Our confessors did scare us a little by warning we could lose our minds and maybe even our hair if we touched ourselves, but suggested that if we pulled hard on an :ar it would dispel temptation. Naturally we tugged our ears, but otherwise the operating principle was to accept everything the Church taught while paying as little attention to it as possible. Thus we went to Mass on Sundays and sinned on Mondays and went to confession on Saturdays so we could receive Communion on Sunday and be in a state of grace to sin again on Monday. I came to accept the Church for the tinsel, lazy, corrupt and at the same time appealing thing that it was. During those gray and quiet years, the Church was like some pervasive closed system dominating an endless science fiction novel, wherein it seemed the fate of the mutinous among us to do continuous, dubious battle against it; there was great fun in the Illustration by Bob Gardiner 19
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