My hometown was a Sorrowful Mystery. Like that dreaded litany of all the horrible shit that happened to Jesus, followed by a low-flying drone of Hail Marys, something bad was always happening somewhere. And not just to Jesus, who somehow managed to get himself spirited away from the garden of Gethsemane by a Judas-led mob. You can hear all about that, accompanied by ten Hail Marys and one Our Father. “Pray the Rosary” demanded the baby blue banner with a rosary in white hanging over the altar. There didn’t seem to be room to argue with it, and that was pretty much how I experienced Catholicism.
They used to joke about Dubuque that there was a Catholic church and a tavern on every corner. So you can bet someone somewhere was saying the Rosary, on a Tuesday or a Friday, contemplating the very bad things that happened to Jesus, while right across the street someone else was getting dead drunk in a bar decorated with glassy-eyed deer heads, getting oily enough to sock his wife or girlfriend. It was that kind of place, full of casual Catholicism and partner violence, where we laughed when a girl who broke up with her boyfriend got pelted by him with water balloons filled with garlic. Why was this vengeful attack funny to us?
You couldn’t get away from men, any more than you could get away from God. Put a young family with a tendency toward fanaticism into this mix and you have quite the crucible of a religious life. I was in Catholic School as well, so there was no escaping Jesus or praying the rosary or ritual playground violence.
St. Jude’s lay at the western edge of our sad little river town. It was a newish parish with a hot young priest and modern architecture—the congregation sat in a semi circle around the altar, and the whole church was round. Of course it still had the priest at the front and center of the hot Catholic action. Fr. Mark Ressler was the first young priest I’d ever met. All the other priests we’d dealt with were ancient, Cathedral priests—old men swinging censors of incense and intoning the Mass with bored but authoritative tones. Fr. Mark actually read the gospel with feeling. He clearly enjoyed saying Mass, which was a novelty I’d never seen before. In general, people having a good time in church freaks me out.
My first communion and confession—what they began calling “reconciliation” post Vatican II—were under Fr. Mark’s tutelage. I remember very little of our training for said sacraments. I remember nothing at all of receiving my first communication, though I do remember that we practiced with unconsecrated hosts and were warned not to let them stick to the roof of our mouths.
I also remember the picture of Fr. Mark and I post-communion—me in my white dress and veil, him with a fatherly arm around my skinny shoulder. I look so happy. It seems like a lie, given what was going on during the school day. I was so unhappy in those years, how could this not show up in my communion picture?
First Reconciliation was more memorable, I think in part because the sacrament itself made a greater impression on me. You could actually go into the confessional, tell the priest your sins, and be completely forgiven, the slate wiped clean? Sign up me up! I already knew enough about sin to be scared that one mortal one would send me straight to Hell. My parents had seen to that. But confession would be a kind of insurance policy against that fate, and I was more than eager to sign up.
You have to understand that I was a young believer, but also had inherited my parents’ anxiety about the state of sin. If there was a second chance to be had, a way to wipe the slate clean, I wanted in on the action. So my first reconciliation…I remember we did it as a class. In retrospect, this seems like a bad idea, but I’m sure it made sense for a class of Catholic students to go through the rituals together, our church rituals being reinforced by what we learned/were indoctrinated with in the classroom.
I remember going into the confessional, and there were two options—behind the screen, or face to face. At the time, face to face confessions were in vogue, I think because it was the 70s and it was the general atmosphere that things needed to open up and be more modern. Anyway, I chose face-to-face, never one to buck the prevailing Catholic winds, and gave Fr. Mark my confession. I had prepared for that moment for so many weeks, I even had my sin script memorized before I went in there. I wanted to do everything perfectly, to make a perfect confession. A perfect confession was when you were truly sorry for whatever it was you’d done. Of course, I went for the perfect confession, I was always driven to perform above and beyond the requirements, anxious (that being the operative word) to prove my piety.
The consensus of my classmates seemed to be that I was too loud in the confessional. I think I might have left the door open a crack, I was pretty nervous about doing everything just right. I came out so joyful that my sins were forgiven, it really did feel like I was in a state of grace.
But then those meddling kids! One or two people started it, and soon the rest of the class was talking about it in school—I was too loud, I forgot to shut the confessional door, I was so loud that they could hear everything. It really burst my bubble in a way that’s hard to explain.
I think it was the final nail in the coffin of everything that happened in church being subject to the context of school bullying. There was no safe place to explore my spirituality. If I showed enthusiasm, it would result in mockery. I learned early on to keep silent, in the hopes that I’d simply be overlooked and allowed to exist in peace. That was never to be, for the quieter I got, the more attention I seemed to draw. I was marked as a target, and there was nothing that was going to change that.
The playground was the place where most of my bullying happened. The teachers weren’t really supervising our play, so it had a Lord of the Flies aspect to it. I remember being told I couldn’t jump rope with the girls. I went over to the boys who were a kicking a ball around, and they didn’t seem that keen on my company either. So I tried to make myself invisible. I’d find a deserted corner of the parking lot cum playground and read a book, or write in a notebook. I wonder if anyone ever discovered my writing and if so, what had I written?
There was one time that I’d written a play that I wanted to cast with classmates. How I achieve the guts to pull such a thing together and actually try to talk to the popular kids remains a mystery to me. But I’d been briefly and conveniently befriended by one of the mid-range popular girls who’d agreed to star in the play and help me cast it, as long as I excluded a particular girl that she’d been feuding with. I agreed, sheep that I was. I think it was such a novelty to be the one excluding rather than the one excluded that I was giddy with my newfound power.
Of course, this particular girl—she had placid eyes, freckles, and a pink mouth perfectly shaped like a shell—was devastated and started to cry. One of the other girls broke away from my cast to comfort her. They walked around arm in arm, the rejected girl crying and her comrade soothing her. They came back to me at one point and asked if I’d reconsider. The popular girl who’d initiated the exclusion shook her head in warning at me. I feel horrible, but I figured it was the price to pay for my new reality, where I’d no longer be subject to the whims of the playground cohort. In this new reality, I’d write plays and cast them—I’d create the lines of dialogue and the stories, and then arrange girls into the parts.
It was part of an elaborate fantasy of control, and of course it was doomed to failure. The popular girls lost interest in my play and me, and the regularly scheduled bullying commenced. Meanwhile, the girl I’d excluded never forgave me, not that I can blame her. This is just one example of how I’d crumple under peer pressure if it meant I wouldn’t be the target of abuse, in stark contract to my fantasies of suffering on behalf of other people and sticking up for/saving the underdog. Apparently when the shit got real, I buckled and did what I was told.
I do remember telling a teacher that I was being bullied, or that I wasn’t allowed to play. I do not remember which teacher in particular, nor exactly what she said to the girls who’d excluded me, but I do remember that she apologized to me later for making things worse. Well, she didn’t exactly apologize, but essentially said, “I made things worse for you, didn’t I?” Yes! But I cannot for the life of me remember any details here, just that a teacher had made a halfhearted attempt to intervene that only resulted in more exclusion, more bullying. And even after she realized this, there was no hope for reconciling the situation—I would always be the victim, or be invisible. Needless to say, I preferred to be invisible.