Learning the Rules

From: " A Piece of the Banner"

From: “ A Piece of the Banner.”

                   Learning the Rules

The parish priest who inducted us into these various ceremonies in our community was a figure to be reckoned with. He was the unquestioned arbiter of the moral code that ruled our daily lives. He was the top banana of a tight knit Catholic community. If he put the finger on you, you were in for it good. You could count on a pretty fiery sermon the following Sunday at Mass, detailing the particular infraction involved. You also squirmed like hell in your seat praying that he wouldn’t name names. It was a very real and much feared threat.

       One Sunday at Mass, I and several other miscreants sat fidgeting in our seats. The cops had broken up a crap game at the city line bus shelter a few days before. Though most of us had melted into the crowds and escaped, several had been detained by the local police. Father Coyle, our parish priest, had stepped in and asked that the errant lads be released into his custody. The cops had better things to do and released the boys to Father Coyle. Of course, that wasn’t the end of the incident. The calls home had wreaked a terrible havoc amongst the lads. All were serving some kind of temporal penance at home with much sorer seats in their pants.

       And now we had to sit and listen to a replay of the incident before an entire congregation of friends and neighbors. Luckily for us, Father Coyle’s wrath that day omitted mentioning names. We left the church much chastened. We had dodged a very real bullet that would have been lethal in a small community like this.

       The nuns and priests loomed rather large in our young lives. They did care for us however, and spent their lives in relative poverty, looking after the well-being of other people’s children. They were special people.

       You learned early on however, how to con the religious community. Contributing your paper route money to the Catholic Charity’s drive at school and selling a bunch of subscriptions to the local diocesan newspaper were good ploys for openers. Then, you would try to sell as many fund-raising raffle tickets and candy bars as you could to defenseless relatives and friends of the family. After that, you could get away with almost anything, short of skipping Mass and Communion. Throw in support for a few pagan babies in the far missionary stations of that religious order for insurance, and you were practically untouchable.

       It wasn’t really bribery in the worst sense of the word. Like my brother Eddie before me, we had just figured out early that our actions could be viewed through a different prism when one’s frequent acts of charity were the lens on that filter. The Lord never worked in mysterious ways to us. You just had to figure out how to help Him and His representatives reach certain conclusions, is the reasoning that we adopted. It was an important primer for me in local politics.

       A lot of the slack you got at school depended upon the amount your parents kicked into the weekly collection or whether or not they helped out at the weekly bingo sessions. If you were covered on those ends, the road to heaven was illuminated with plenary indulgences, dispensed locally. Overall, it gave you a pretty fair understanding that whoever paid the piper called the tune.

                             -30-

                          (568 words)

                      Joseph Xavier Martin