CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY rum of rebellion, and we fought on in the not unpleasant expectation of losing. Changing the Church was no more real than changing the ocean. This background ill prepared me for the liberal Catholic reformers with whom I became involved in the early sixties. I was astonished to find that there were Catholics abroad who actually thought that unyielding institution was going to improve itself and thereby improve the world. Most of the reformers I encountered had not endured sixteen years of Catholic education as I had, but had escaped to prep schools and secular colleges far removed from the bad breath and pimples of the workaday Church. I found it difficult to believe that these earnest people were attempting to make a blushing bride of that fine old whore, the Church. While these reformers were shocked to discover how materialistic the Vatican really was, 1had learned in grammar school that profitable moneychanging was the natural condition of the priestly calling. Our pastor used to stand in front of the altar during collections at Christmas Mass and exhort the faithful to “ make it a green Christmas.” The reformers were freshly aglow with the illuminating theological proposition that the Church was as much human as divine; 1 knew that was the truth back in the third grade the first time 1 heard a nun fart. II. CATHOLIC REFORM SCHOOL My n C ev a e th r o to li c tr u e s d t u a c a p t r i i o e n s t— tau u g n h d t e r m o e r over 30. They became quite vicious if one threatened their sense of authority or in any way profaned their pride, which 1 was constantly doing. Here they had given up their lives in the service of God, got up at five every I later watched the priests cream these well-meaning liberals: Lions 14, Christians 0. The odds were lopsided from the start. Just as the tougher, peasant Stalin made a better revolutionary than the more bourgeois and intellectual bolsheviks, these starry- eyed Catholic reformers with their idealized view of the Church were no match for the crafty and possessive priest-Pachucos who gave out karate chops instead of blessings. Most of the young priests who rushed to the aid of the reformers were likewise clobbered and have long since left the Church, along with a goodly percentage of the reformers. They succeeded in vulgarizing the Mass and making some other niggling reforms, and then drifted off to various new enthusiasms — anglicism, agnosticism, even astrology — leaving confusion in their wake, like little kids taking apart some gigantic radio set to improve the reception, then tiring of the project but not knowing how to put the set back together. These thwarted reformers then became bitter at the Church for doing what came naturally to preserve the monolith. The difference in my expectations of the Church of Rome and that of many of the liberal intellectual Catholics of the early sixties was that of sixteen years in Catholic schools, which were susceptible to all the analogies of Stalag 17. morning to say Mass, and wore lousy black garbardine slacks that itched, and had tossed their sex lives in the wastebasket, and, goddamnit, they expected the laymen-serfs to click their heels and pay proper respect. My four years in Catholic high school were a boot camp in guerrilla w a re fa re ag a in s t overw een ing authority. 1 served my sentence at Riordan High School, a newish cement-walled institution that served as sort of a respectable Catholic reform school for the children of lower-middle-class San Francisco Italian and Irish families and was otherwise distinguished by having been named after an Archbiship who had been killed by a train. The student body was a monstrous assembly of truants who enjoyed committing battery on the men who had consecrated their bodies to God. The unenviable title of the worst of our bad lot was generally considered a tossup between myself and another student who had the unpleasant habit upon boarding a streetcar of unzipping his pants and urinating in the fare box. In the World War II epics popular at the time, John Wayne always painted tiny Japanese suns on the fuselage of his plane each time he bagged a Zero. Similarly, the lads at Riordan maintained a running box score on how many religions we were able to send down in flames. Our teachers were the Brothers of Mary, an uninspired religious order whose ranks held the usual number of failed hedonists and sexual malcontents. The brothers, who preferred double-breasted black business suits to the more traditional clerical robes, were on the spectrum of religious vocation between the full gray of the consecrated eunuch and the purple glory of the priesthood. In addition to the vows of poverty, chasity, and obedience, they took an additional vow, that of special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, an inamorata they referred to with some intimacy as the “ BVM.” The order was like a religious displaced persons camp for grade four and lower civil servants. The all-male Riordan student body was warned about the physical dangers of public high schools, not the least of which was the hazard of bloody Kotex that shamless Protestant and Jewish girls were said to drop carelessly on dark stairways. Our contact with the outside world was largely limited to mandatory special pleading to the Lord to free Cardinal Mindszenty from an atheistic holding cell in Hungary, and reading about contemporary events in the brown pages of a jejune publication called the Junior Catholic Messenger, which featured front page photos of the eminent Catholic junior Senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, buzzing about the Senate subway doing God’s work in Washington. Catholic high school proved an excellent place to learn the nature of bureaucracy and the fine art of bamboozling. I gained access to the school sherry supply and discovered the wonderful world of banquets and cocktail parties, the entrance to which could be gained by creating sundry committees, letterheads, and other artifacts of eleemosynary hoodwink- ery. I and my childhood buddy, a kindred musketeer named Gerry Davalos, got happily drunk every Saturday afternoon excepting Advent and Lent by putting on our good suits and walking into strange wedding receptions in the Catholic catering halls of the Sunset District, where we pretended that we were the groom’s relations to the bride’s people, and vice versa. While thus being educated, I discovered that I was a print junky. I made the school newspaper my personal fiefdom to indulge my insatiable craving for the joys of printing plants — clunking linotypes spitting out words of metal, Ludlow machines creating veritable milky ways of headlines in type fat and thin, hissing stereotype machines, ill-mannered printers cursihg instructively. For me, no secrets of science or metaphysics were comparable to that miraculous THREE LIONS 1133 SOUTHWEST MORRISON 224-9039 SARmA'S SHOPPCI 2001 SUU. 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