Reflective > Open Your Eyes to the History of the Catholic Church

Open Your Eyes to the History of the Catholic Church
Author: Eleanor Cowan
Published in The Senior Times, Montreal, Qc,
July/Aug 2004 Vol. XV111 No 9.

As I turn on to Wellington St., in Verdun, I eye yet another of the Roman Catholic Annual Collect posters of a Renaissance painting of the child Jesus, tucked lovingly into the warm embrace of his beloved mother, yet Virgin, Mary. Their eyes serenely closed, mother and child enjoy deep bonding. The advertisement requests money and reads: “The Catholic Church – keeping the family alive.”

What is wrong with this picture, displayed all over Montreal, in terms of Catholicism and family life?

The art might fit in the dining room of a priest’s residence but how does it relate to the history of ‘The Family’ vis-à-vis The Catholic Church? I walk on feeling both angry and sad.

Suddenly, I imagine myself sponging wet glue over the offending poster and slapping on, instead, a photograph of my Roman Catholic Irish mother, Agnes, from Pointe St. Charles, QC., taken in the 1960’s.

This sorry photo would detail a truthful witness of the relationship between the Church and The Family: her sagging breasts and stomach, her twelve children crowding round her in various states of lostness, my mother’s frightened eyes, staring open and straight ahead ask “How are we going to pay the bills this month?” Unable to stretch Dad’s decent dollar far enough, Mother is not smiling nor are her children. My parents tithed to the Church even then.

As a little girl, there was something else I thought odd, although I soon learned to silence myself, to subdue such insight. One evening after mother dished up the dinner she’d cooked throughout the afternoon in the two giant pots she used so well, she whipped down the hall, grabbed her coat and hastened to the door.

“Where are you going, Ma?” I asked

“One of Delores’ brood is still sick so I’m going over to fix Father Rick his dinner again tonight.”

“But Ma, why doesn’t Father go over and help Delores instead? Isn’t it his turn?”

“That’s a joke” said Ma. Very Funny. Har dee har har” she said, mimicking her beloved Jackie Gleason of The Honeymooners as she closed the door behind her. Those two comedians, Art Carney and Jackie Gleason, sewer cleaner and bus driver, married to Alice and Trixie, women who emphatically speak up, brought my mother more genuine laughter and hope every Saturday night than ever she knew with the authoritarian Roman middlemen who ruled her life.

I recall mother telling me, back in 1959, that her parish priest once leaned over and whispered to her, “Agnes, how old would your youngest be now?” Translated, that meant, ‘Get cracking – time to make another soul for God.’ Many years later, Mother said that if a priest ever spent so much as five minutes on a labor table, giving birth would soon become a mortal sin.

Unlike the sensitive Madonna cuddling her only child, my mother had no time for us. She truly had so many children that she did not, like the woman in the shoe, know what to do. A fear-based person, she served her Church unfailingly and died at 52. If she’d had the one child featured in the poster chosen by the church to represent ‘family’ she would have lived.

On my way to work on the metro, I am again faced with the serene Virgin, her eyes demurely closed, and in deep embrace with her only child. I sadly reflect on the hugs my angry and exhausted mother never had time to give me nor any of the youngest of her enormous gang. This neglect caused terrible problems. I also note that the artwork chosen to represent The Family lacks the presence of a second partner. Yes indeed, it is true that in working much overtime to feed us all, Dad was largely absent.

Might the Catholic Church reflect for a moment on the pain this beautiful but ever so ill-chosen painting evokes in the adult children of all the Catholic women who bore child after unwanted child to avoid the eternal condemnation they were threatened with it they didn’t?

Might the Catholic Church feature at least one of these grotesquely large families that instead of remaining together got dogmatically torn apart? Finally, perhaps the funds gathered can be used for Women and Men’s Shelters or drug and alcohol detox centers, where the youngest daughters and sons of neglectful Catholic families often reside.