The Religion and the Church

I attended a Roman Catholic elementary school in Connecticut. It was a bit rigid. The teachers were nuns and they were inclined to act as though they believed punishments would extinguish bad behavior. I only attended until the fourth grade. I have always been appreciative of my early introduction to the stories from the Bible and the basic ideas of the Christian religion. Later, I learned from friends how they coped with the strict rules in a Roman Catholic high school: they broke the rules but didn’t get caught. They got better at this skill as they matured. Research performed by sociologists and psychologists has upheld this same conclusion, as a scientific conclusion: punishment does not reliably extinguish an unwanted behavior. Those who want to engage in the bad behavior learn how and when to pursue it without being subject to punishment. In the more serious cases, those who want to engage in behavior that is illegal find the time and place and cohorts with whom to share the experience of committing a crime and getting away with it, until.

I took the religion and the church very seriously into my teens, but by the time I was fifteen I had four experiences that caused me to lose interest in the church while continuing an intense interest in the teaching and meaning of Christianity.

First, somewhere around age eleven, I went to an initial practice to serve as an altar boy. I recall standing behind and to the right of the priest before the practice altar, and then being called, in a soft voice, by the priest to read a passage printed on a decorative card in a kind of gothic print. I read the words, which were printed in Latin, as best as I could, but knew I was reciting sounds that were based on English letters and words, not Latin. I knew my Latin was poor, but the priest did not say anything about the quality of my Latin. I asked, “What does it mean.” He responded, not harshly, but coldly authoritative without any hint that the issue was open for discussion: “You don’t have to know what it means. You just have to say it.”

Second, a couple of years older, I was praying rather regularly, day and night, and thought I would like to visit the church, during a weekday, to sit in the sanctuary and use it as a special place, holy perhaps, but certainly protected as a place for quiet meditation. The door was locked. At this time the rise of “convenience stores” was on, and both these new franchise versions of old local “mom and pop” stores as well as supermarkets were open seven days a week, and some were open twenty-four hours each day. But not the church. The church was afraid of something. Was it theft? Or did the church simply not know what it was supposed to be? If they had thought of themselves as being in the religion business, they might have made the same calculation other businesses had: our fixed costs are nearly the same whether we are open only eight hours a day or twenty-four hours a day. If we are open more hours we serve more customers. But the church was closed. One might consider the argument that the reason church membership declined during the second half of the twentieth century is because the churches were not open for business.

Third, at age fourteen, I told Father Dunn of the Church of the Holy Family that I wanted to read the Bible before making a personal decision as to whether I would pursue Holy Orders (become a priest). I asked the cost. He said six dollars (it may have been three dollars). I earned the money and returned. When I offered the payment, he handed me the Bible and said, "The Bible is free." I knew instantly that he had only tested me so that I (and he) would know the measure of my interest. I also remember distinctly leaving the rectory that day, with my Bible in hand, believing that the truth in the Bible was for me priceless and therefore free. Many years later I inquired as to the welfare of Father Dunn. I was told that he had moved to another state and married a nun. Upon hearing of his life's path, I believed that I got my Bible from the right man. I did not become a priest because after reading the Gospels I concluded that Jesus recommended the practice of morality in the marketplace, not behind the walls of a fortress.

Four, while still wanting the prayer and ritual of the church, in my mid-teens, after I had read the Bible, I went to the performance of the Stations of the Cross at Holy Family Church. The priest moving from station to station (there are fourteen) and reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and the Hail Mary’s, and the identification of each station (telling the story of the trial and torture and crucifixion) was not the parish priest. He was on duty for the stations, and he prayed as though he would rather be hanging from the cross instead of doing what he was doing. His words came fast, hurried, monotonous, monotone. He was not inspired, not inspiring. What I heard in his voice became the voice of my own mind. The rituals of the church are dull, tedious, boring. Confession is followed by Communion, followed by sin, petty sexual sins, obsessions, bad habits, concepts that persistently elevated average human behavior to psycho-spiritual melodrama. It all seemed so ineffectual. We are not supposed to confess, eat God, and then repeat. If we have really sinned, we are supposed to stop. The challenge Jesus offered to us, with his invitation, was not to be a sin junkie, or a confession junkie, but to be hooked on social justice and self-improvement. Later I would pursue the meaning of “enlightenment” in Buddhism, and that concept promptly impressed me as exactly what Jesus recommended.

So, this is my experience of the Christian religion and the church. Putting Christianity in the Roman Catholic Church is like carrying diamonds in a wet paper bag.

John M. Medeiros, July 2, 2009

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