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
One of my favorite memories is 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.
St. Eugene’s eventually closed in the Year of Our
Lord 1989 due to “white flight” and demographic changes after the 1967 riots in
Detroit, and with this came to an end the place where I spent some of the
holiest years of my life, years in which neither I nor my classmates were
ashamed to publicly give witness to our faith in Christ (yes, I too
dressed in sheets and played the priest in acting out the Mass with my
siblings).
I graduated from St. Eugene’s in 1966, when the
liturgical changes after the close of the council promulgated in Sacrosanctum
Concilium to the best of my memory had not yet been thoroughly
implemented. I journeyed off to Detroit Cathedral High School downtown, where
my experience of the presence of Christ in the Eucharist began to fade, as I no
longer was required (sadly, in retrospect) to attend daily Mass. To
be sure, in my adolescent years I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what was
happening in the Church in the United States after the Council, and, after
seeing a pretty, red-headed Sophomore on the bus on her way to Immaculata High
one day (in the end I proved too shy to sit next to her on the DSR bus...), I
confess I really never paid it much attention.
In the ensuing years I drifted further and further
away from the Church, the Body of Christ, in true “prodigal son” fashion, often
arguing with my mother over matters of faith. How Our Lord led me home is
outside the scope of this endeavor; suffice it to say that there are rough
parallels with St. Augustine.
When I did return to the Faith, I was unable to find
employment in my undergraduate major, so I began to volunteer teaching CCD in
my parish, hoping eventually to land a job there teaching history. This
required me to earn catechist certification offered by the Archdiocese of
Detroit, which I did in 1978. No sooner had I completed the requirements, when
a combination Religion/History opening occurred at Benedictine High School in
Detroit. I taught there for one year, after which I landed a job teaching
Scripture (for which I, by true Catholic standards, was woefully unprepared to
do) at St. Agatha, where I remained for one year. I then took a position at a
Catholic high school in a suburb of Detroit, where I have been ever since.
Since 1995, however, and my “reversion” (no doubt
through the prayers of my Mom) to the fullness of Catholic teaching, I have
made ten year study of the post-conciliar years in the United States, for which
my training in history and as a catechist at the St. John Bosco Institute for
Catechetics, as well as twenty-five years as a catechist in the Archdiocese of
Detroit have come in handy.
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