Like
many of the twenty-five percent or so of the American people who would respond
with “Roman Catholic” when asked their religion in an emergency room, I am a
“cradle Catholic,” born into an Irish-American family in Detroit as a baby
boomer in 1952, baptized at St. Gabriel’s on the southwest side in the same
year. I first received the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ in second grade at St. Eugene’s parish in northwest
Detroit, for which the Sisters of Notre Dame DeNamur admirably prepared me. I
still stand amazed at the reverence instilled in the second-graders in the
black-and-white photos shot by my father, Don, that day. I was also confirmed
at St. Eugene’s parish in the fourth grade, after which my mother, Ann, took me
out for my favorite breakfast, strawberry pancakes, where I played “Fun, Fun,
Fun” by the Beach Boys at least twice. Since my return and faithful assent to
all that the Catholic Church teaches in 1995, I have been a regular communicant
and penitent.
My
first memory on this earth is as a baby, less than a year old, of being driven
by my parents to a funeral in Pennsylvania, an event my mother corroborated
years later as I described it. My favorite memory from childhood is one I frequently
think back on. It is one of observing from my pew prior to the 6:30 am Mass in
1958 the Sisters entering St. Eugene’s from the front-side entrance of the
Church, special to them for access from their one-room convent in the adjoining
school. It was winter, and the church was dimly-lit. They entered with
awe-inspiring reverence, processing in their full habits, the beads of their
waist-draped rosaries colliding gently, genuflecting and kneeling in silent
preparation for the soon to occur reenactment in a non-bloody manner of Our
Lord’s eternal sacrifice first offered on Calvary for our salvation, the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass. The latent aroma
of incense and the sight of fresh beeswax candles flickering on the altar,
together with the sisters’ silent reverence and obvious practice of what they
taught their first graders – the
importance of reverence in the House of God – is an impression which not only convinced me
that Jesus lived there in the Tabernacle, but was also an actual grace which I
believe, together with my baptismal grace and my Mom’s faith witness, was
instrumental in eventually leading me back into the fullness of Catholic
teaching. I do not know now what became of each Sister, but I am sure that
whatever their relationship with Our Lord today, they had no idea that one of their
first-graders was so inspired by their witness to the real Presence they gave
that winter morn.
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