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A priest drove me to the walls of the monastery—literally and figuratively. The priest who delivered me in his black Buick to the place in the Midwest where I would live three months as a postulant—one who proposes to enter monastic life—was the same priest who introduced me to some of the evils of the world a few years earlier. These evils were in the form of pornographic magazines with pictures of people fucking that he showed me when I was twelve, and training to be an altar boy. I entered the monastery for a whole host of reasons, but near the top of the list, surely, was to atone for the sins of the world. The priest was a big man, stout and red-faced. In the early 1950s, he had been assigned to our parish in northern Ohio to replace a beloved pastor who, though an Irishman, had made himself more Italian than the Italian immigrants who comprised most of his ministry. When the old priest died of a heart attack, the east end of our town, where his flock was concentrated, went into a mourning such as would have been seen only in Southern Italy. Though our town was on the outskirts of Cleveland, the east end of it might as well have been on the outskirts of Naples or Palermo. They draped his open casket with black silk worked with silver crosses and rosettes that they had brought from Italy. They cried, the men as well as the women. At the foot of the casket, they left baskets of food and bottles of homemade dago-red wine. The new man was an engine of German efficiency. He considered his parishioners backward and superstitious. He would put his hands on his hips and shake his head when he stood in the center isle of his empty church, looking into the gloomy side altars at the plaster statues of saints, some of them life-sized, with banks of candles flickering in front of them. The saint statues had been tokens of devotion for the faithful of this parish for half a century, but in his mind they were symbols of an old-fashioned and maybe even aberrant Catholicism — the very thing he believed he had been sent here to correct. One by one the saints began to disappear from the church — St. Christopher with the Christ Child on his back, St. Rose of Lima with her armful of red roses, St. John the Baptist cradling a lamb. When the people of the church confronted him about the loss of their saints, the priest scolded, “Your faith should be more centered on the Mass than on the emotional veneration of statues.” The people signed a petition and sent it to the bishop in Youngstown. A few days later, the bishop called the priest in, showed him the petition, and suggested that he take a lighter touch with this parish. True, it was a poor parish, but it’s modest weekly collections made an important contribution to the diocesan economy. The priest, his face flushed, returned to the church with his mind made up. He ordered the interior of the church be painted. To paint the high ceilings and the walls, all the statues had to be dislodged from their niches and removed. After three months of painting, the scaffolding came down, disclosing a church completely empty of saints. The saints never returned, and no one said anything. He had won the battle of the statues. The annual feast was another area of the priest’s concern. For decades the parish had celebrated the feast of the church’s patron, Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, in July with a procession through the streets of the east end of town with her statue. The priest decided to cancel the procession, and mark the feast with a special outdoor Mass, but such a clamor went up among the parishioners that he was forced to allow the procession. He himself would not march in it, however. Defiantly, he assembled the ranks of his altar boys—me among them— on the back of a flat board truck decorated with white and blue crepe paper, and led them in a marathon recitation of the rosary. The truck followed the statue of Our Lady, borne aloft on the shoulders of the men of the parish. The statue was draped in cream and brown ribbons, the colors of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, on which people from the sidelines ran to pin dollar bills. Our rosary float, rolling directly behind the statue decked out in blue and white ribbons, seemed like a sacred repudiation of the profane carryings-on up ahead. For the full article visit: Joseph Dispenza: The Monk’s Tale
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