The Strega Strikes Back
My mother has quit going to mass.
Two weeks ago, I paid a visit to the parish I once belonged to in Chicago. I put on my Facebook status that I was headed for mass, and my mother responded, “pray for me.” I found it odd, but she’s given to cantankerous outbursts. They run in the family. I didn’t think much of it, until she called me today to thank me for a Mother’s Day gift I had sent her. I asked her what she had planned for tomorrow: brunch with my sister and her man and going to the marina if the weather’s nice and then she added, “I’m not going to church anymore, so there’s one thing I won’t have to do.”
I was intrigued. “Well . . . what does that mean ‘I’m not going to church anymore?’”
This is a woman who dragged my siblings and me to church kicking and screaming, at least until she presented the dreaded option of going out to the car, which no one wanted because a sound spanking would follow as surely as night follows day. Her answer was, “I’m disgusted with it,” and nothing more.
I was not going to let that go. I availed myself of one of Thorn Coyle’s favorite lines, “Could you say a little more about that? Which part are you disgusted with?”
“The Church locally. The Church in Rome. All of it.”
At this point, I thought it might be some kind of Mothers Day put-on, and the thought of being on one of those radio call-in prank shows crossed my mind. “Why, Mom? What happened???”
Then she told me. There was a local scandal about a deacon at the cathedral in the diocese where she lives sexually harassing the openly gay church handyman. The diocese fired the handyman and the church secretary that witnessed the harassment and then reassigned the deacon and the pastor, who had denied all of it and had done their best to sweep it all under the rug. The Diocese of Saginaw denies the whole thing ever happened. She went on to mention the pre-schooler who was thrown out of a Catholic school in Colorado because her mothers were lesbians, the school for the deaf in Wisconsin, and then Ireland and Germany, all with the tacit approval of Benedict XVI himself. It was clear to her that the church had learned nothing at all from the scandals of a decade ago and hadn’t changed their policy at all. She just was not going to be a part of it any further.
She seems to have had her own Mothers Day present in mind for me. I am at a loss to explain the precise moment when my mother became a one-woman PFLAG chapter.
Happy Mother’s Day, strega, I’ll see you at circle.