Fortunate Timing: The Prequel to "My Story"

For me and my Catholicism, timing was key.  My family moved back to our home town of Houlton, Maine, when I was nearly ten and we younger kids were enrolled at St. Mary’s School.  All my new friends were Catholic; we mostly lived within walking distance of each other.  It was from Sister Gemma, my teacher in a combined fifth and sixth grade classroom, that I first heard of the primacy of conscience in making moral decisions.  At Sunday Mass, my family knew many of the other parishioners--we were actually related to a good number of them--and all my friends were there.  

Once I started high school, I made new friends, both Catholic and Protestant.  I attended Wednesday evening CCD classes.  One of the nuns at the Catholic hospital ran a sodality.  Each year, we conducted a May procession and crowned a statue of Mary on the back lawn.  We also volunteered in the hospital.  I didn’t expect to go to MYF functions or Rainbow ceremonies or any of the other youth programs sponsored by Protestants.  I was a Catholic.

In recent years, I have learned that for at least one of my Catholic classmates it was painful to be constrained from attending, let alone participating, in the religious or quasi-religious ceremonies of Protestant friends they had known since first grade in public school.  What for me was a feeling of Catholic solidarity was for my friend a cruel and meaningless split existence.

At my secular college, Professor Westervelt,a youngish, gnomish Classics professor, a married Catholic with a passel of kids, was thrilled about Vatican II.  Because I was Catholic and because he supposed me more sophisticated in my thinking than I actually was, he would engage me in conversation about the Council.  In a cover story, Time Magazine declared that the Catholic Church was not a monolith.  I became aware that decisions were being made after “dialogue”—a word associated with the spirit of Vatican II—and voting.  Our Church leaders did not always agree.  Pope John XXIII talked of “aggiornamento,” by which he meant coming to terms with the modern world and “ressourcement,” by which he meant a return to sources, such as the Bible and the early church fathers.  My Church seemed to be catching up with the Enlightenment and the Protestant Reformation.  Indeed, we began to call ourselves not just Catholics, but Christians.  We were Christians just like the Protestants.

I can’t pretend that at 19 or 20, I understood all this the way Westervelt did, but I caught the spirit of it, the tone of love, dialogue and openness, which was so different from the anathema and legalism that had  dogged the church through what John W. O’Malley in his book "What Happened at Vatican II" calls “The Long Nineteenth Century.”  (Yes, my look back is definitely colored by what I’m presently reading.)

Senior year, a story went around about a classmate of mine and his wife, who had two babies in quick succession.  They were approached by the priest at the downtown parish they attended who said to them, “I hope you’re going to do something to keep from having more babies!”  He obviously wasn't suggesting abstinence.  We assumed he meant artificial birth control.  Was this where the Church was heading? 

Three years later, in 1968, Humane Vitae astonished anyone paying attention by ruling out artificial birth control.  It's obvious looking back that the reaction of many couples in my generation was to ignore that directive--and not to talk about it to much of anyone else.  The topic of birth control, which growing up I had heard alluded to from the pulpit as a matter of "self control," seemed to drop out of sermons altogether.   

  

 A late bloomer, I married at 28.  For the past few years I had been attending Mass at NYU's Newman Center, a decidedly liberal environment. A story going around there was about a young woman who asked the chaplain whether she should sleep with her boyfriend.  He answered that that was a decision he couldn't very well make for her and that she should do whatever would help her become the person God was calling her to be.

In our brief pre-marriage interview, my hometown pastor in Maine said nothing about birth control.  In fact, no priest ever spoke directly to me on the matter—and I never asked for one to, although I knew from my reading what the Church taught.   My husband and I, in good conscience, had already made up our own minds on the matter.  

A couple of years ago, an old friend from St. Mary's School, who is spiritual but no longer a practicing Catholic, pronounced me a cafeteria Catholic.  At the time, I accepted that label, but after thinking about it I've concluded that what I am is a Vatican II Catholic.  I came of age during the council, I married five to ten years later than many of the people I grew up with.  (Not that my husband and I were spared the jolting, sped-up maturation process that marriage and parenthood entail.)  My husband, who is my age, had made a similar journey from a rules orientation to a humanist one, a journey that led many of our confreres to leave the Church.  So much that happens in life is a matter of timing.