A trend worth thinking about

Catholics everywhere. Maureen Dowd, Gail Collins, both convent school girls (Immaculata and Seton Hall respectively, later The Catholic University and Marquette, then the largest Catholic University in the country), both of The New York Times, now Amy Coney Barrett, Soto-Major of the Supreme Court, and the Justice guys, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch both from Georgetown the same Jesuit prep school in DC; Samuel Alito, the Chief Justice John Roberts and the grandest of all, the Duck HunterintheBlind, Scalia el Serpiente.

How about Stephen Colbert, the wittiest Catholic since G. K. Chesterton? And wouldn’t he have made a great talk show host? Speaking of the Father Brown novels?

And Joe Biden, President-elect, who goes to Mass every Sunday at a grand-looking church, St. Anthony of Padua. St. Anthony, a saint of the people.  And a good pal of St. Francis, lover of animals. In West Cornwall, we have the Little Guild of St. Francis, from which many of us have adopted rescue dogs and cats.

The Church. Ah, the Church. Pope Francis seems to have known about scandals, plural, and has turned a blind eye. Francis, the Jesuit, S.J. The Society of Jesus. (I have six years of Jesuit university education.)

I was an altar boy in the ’50s in Chicago at St. Tarcissus on the northwest side. (Tarcissus was a 12-year-old boy who shielded the Holy Eucharist from those who would rip it from him and was martyred for his act.) I often served the earliest Mass, sometimes 5:30 a.m., when the mission priest visited. “Et in troibo ad altare Dei, ad Deum que laetificat juventutem meum.” I go unto the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth.

Christ said, Suffer the little children to come unto me. If anyone shall harm a hair of their head, let him have a millstone tied around his neck and be cast into the sea.

This was His teaching. O, that it had been followed.

But I will attest, as will my contemporary friends, that none of us were ever abused. And there was ample opportunity in those darkened sacristy dressing rooms before we entered to serve the Mass.

I have told this to many. Some say I am in denial. My ex-wife says, You were lucky.

And perhaps I was.

I suspect that right around that time, the Eisenhower years, it became all right, even attractive, for predators, and those who would become same, to study for the priesthood.

And the devil took the hindmost.

Why? I agonize over this, with the ever-increasing cases of abuse coming to light, but still have not a clue.  Blame it largely on celibacy?

Years ago I was doing a play in New York and one of the actresses had been a nun for nine years. She told of her experiences. The three vows? Poverty, she said, was not a problem for her because she had always been poor. Chastity?  The prospect of sex she found not that alluring. But obedience? That’s what got her. If she had a headache, she had to ask the Mother Superior if she could take an aspirin.

The Catholics are everywhere. Practicing, ex-, lapsed and everything in between. Rosary sales are at an all-time high.

A dear friend who has taken plane after plane and who calls himself an atheist takes his rosary which he clutches whenever he is in the air. No atheists in foxholes, indeed.

Ite missa est.

Lonnie Carter is a writer who lives in Falls Village.