Obama is wishy-washy about abortion, a stance not good enough for the extremists among the right and the Catholic church. They want our elected leaders to equate abortion with the Holocaust and the genocide of Indians in the Americas, something Obama won't do. Of course, there are probably quite a few who are a lot less agitated about the latter two issues than the first.
I'll make one pronouncement about this whole tempest before I go on to the meat of the post. I'm all for people hollering their fool heads off about Obama's invitation. I hope they protest, stage prayer-ins, and wave placards as passionately as if an ND quarterback had been jobbed out of the Heisman. That's the strength of the United States - our freedom to tell the President to his face that he's full of shit.
I only wonder if these same right-to-lifers were as outraged when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush spoke at Notre Dame commencements months after their elections, considering their giddy infatuation with capital punishment, a practice the Church considers as evil as abortion. I think I know the answer already.
Anyway, I was raised Roman Catholic. My parents sent me to St. Giles elementary school and then Fenwick High School, both in Oak Park. My parents and I attended church every Sunday at St. Giles.
The mass lasted an hour, which to my seven-year-old brain was the equivalent of the Holocene Epoch. I spent that near-eternity resisting the urge to giggle, enduring one or more waves of nausea induced by a nearby worshipper's excessive perfume or body odor, kicking my legs, staring at the pew back in front of me, and waiting for the blessed end of the ordeal.
That was signaled by the glorious moment wherein the priest would announce, "The mass is ended, go in peace," to which the proscribed response was, "Thanks be to god." Sometimes I'd be sitting within yards of my school chum Albert DiPrima. The two of us after a while started responding Thanks be to god in loud voices of dramatic relief, after which we'd giggle surreptitiously to each other. One day, though, we must have gone too far because I received a sharp rap on top of my cranium from my father's knuckle and Albert's father led him out of church by the ear.
After mass, we'd come home, Dad and I would strip out of our jackets and ties and Ma would shed her girdle and begin frying up bacon and eggs. My brother Joey would join us for breakfast. He'd reached the age allowing him to skip mass, a passage I anticipated as deliciously as receiving my first drivers license.
We'd sit around the kitchen table as Ma served up the grub, my father busy buttering four slices of homemade bread, one of which I'd invariably snatch away from him, which - now that I look back on it - must have been his plan all along. Those breakfasts were among the fondest of my childhood memories mainly because the torture of church was over at least for another week.
I never could figure out this religion business. The nuns at St. Giles taught me in catechism class that my first duty as a Catholic was to love god. Hmm, love god - what the hell did that mean?
I'd seen pictures of Michelangelo's fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel portraying god and various other hallucinations. So I adopted that image of the old bird. I was still left with the question, How do I love him? I tried hard to make it happen when I went to bed at night and said my prayers. I didn't exactly know which prayers to say so I silently repeated the mantra, I love you god, I love you god, all the while imagining I was kissing the cheeks of Michelangelo's deity.
One day, the St. Giles principal, Sister James Mary (don't ask me why she'd adopted a male saint's name - suffice it to say that catholics are just whacked when it comes to sex), visited our catechism class and informed us that loving god was the greatest feeling we'd ever experience. This was at odds with my own empirical observations based on my tentative forays into more immediate gratifications under the covers.
That moment completed a process that had begun a few years earlier when Sister Jerome (another gender-ambiguous nun - it's a wonder I'm not even more sexually fucked up than I am) ordered us never to watch or listen to the Beatles because, well, just because.
I knew that Sr. Jerome had to be wrong because the Beatles with their long hair and Beatle boots and cool suits were, well, cool. And if Sr. Jerome was wrong about the Beatles, what else could she be wrong about?
So, by the time I was 12, I'd quit the party, er, the church. Thank Michelangelo's deity I did, otherwise I might be one of those blowhards hollering about Barack Obama's invitation to speak to the Notre Dame graduates.
