My very first Holy Communion was without family, veil, or fanfare. Perhaps my not actually being
Catholic may have had something to do with it. The priest, dressed in cream vestments and a crocus-
colored stole, placed the host upon my twelve-year-old tongue.
“The body of Christ,” he said in monotone.
“Amen,” sealed the deal, as I concentrated on crossing myself, running the cheat sheet version in my
head: spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. My conversion to Catholicism, having started on the
twenty-minute bike ride to the church with my girlfriends, was complete.
They were the ones who gave me the crib notes and tried to save my soul.
“C’mon, nobody’ll know,” thirteen-year-old Jennifer had said, as we settled into folding chairs in the
unfinished chapel of the newly-constructed St. John of the Cross Catholic Church in Western Springs,
Illinois.
“But I’m Presbyterian. What if somebody sees me? We’ll get in trouble,” I whispered, as a guitarist
near the altar started playing something Peter, Paul, and Mary-ish. It was the casual mass and we
were dressed in our best shorts. The Presbyterians would have frowned on the dress code, an
argument in itself for my conversion.
“It will be good for you. It is the body and blood of Christ, for God’s sake,” fourteen- year-old Lori,
the pragmatist, said. Our kick-the-can game had been interrupted only forty minutes earlier when
Lori’s and Jennifer’s mothers insisted they get to the five o’clock Saturday mass.
I loved these girls. Older and wiser than me, they had fourteen siblings between them including a
number of very cute brothers. I was from a relatively barren Protestant family with only a sister eight
years my senior. This relegated me to an indigent “only child” status as far as my girlfriends were
concerned.
Sex, sin, and Jesus were typical topics of our conversations. I knew only about Jesus. Somehow their
stories of him were more cinematic, with better lighting and sound, than what I knew from Sunday
school. They pointed out the darkening skies to me, one Holy Thursday, and remarked ominously
that God was sad because of what we had done to his son. They balked, when I told them that the
Protestants called it Maundy Thursday.
“Monday Thursday?” Lori raised a blonde eyebrow.
“No, M-a-u-n-d-y. Don’t ask me why but everyone says it. It’s in the church bulletin.” I had become
an apologist for the Presbyterians, with little knowledge to back it up.
The girls taught me about birth control as we snuck into Lori’s parents’ bedroom one humid August
afternoon, the constant shree of crickets drowning out our giggles. Lori perused her mother’s dresser
drawers to see if she was as pious as she purported to be. I wasn’t exactly sure what “the pill” looked
like but I assumed, because of its singularity, it would have to be big, like a giant anti-fertility salt lick
propped in a corner somewhere. In hindsight, the eight children in the family might have been a clue
that our search would be fruitless. Besides, I was more interested in seeing if she owned tampons.
“Don’t ever use tampons, they will steal your virginity,” Lori’s mother had warned us one day, as she
nursed Lori’s new baby brother and yelled at her eldest son to clean out the car he borrowed the night
before. I blanched at the warning, knowing my virginity had been stolen when I used my first
tampon at age eleven in order to participate in a summer swim league. My mother had even
equipped me with a mirror and jar of Vaseline and coached me through the bathroom door. She had
been my accomplice. We were pagans.
I left the communion line, the body of Christ stuck to the roof of my mouth since the blood of Christ
had been unable to dislodge it. I glanced at the woman kneeling next to me, whispering to herself.
Her veined, unadorned hands ran through the beaded decades of the rosary. The light from a stained
glass window caught the sway of the strand and threw rainbow fractions on the back of the chair in
front of her. I imagined each bead to be a tiny aurora borealis that magnetically trapped years of
hopes and prayers within each sphere. The body of Christ was still adhered to my soft palate and a
touch of claustrophobia set in. Would it eventually melt or would my finger need to intervene? I
glanced at an older man who had remained rooted to his chair during communion and concluded
that he was one of the fallen Catholics, who was no longer allowed to partake in the celebration. The
girls had warned me about people like him.
My smugness quickly faded back home, when my mother found out what I had done and yelled at
me. I countered by calling her a lesbian-a word I had recently added to my vocabulary, thanks to the
girls. It was apparent I had used it in the wrong context. My mother’s light blue eyes turned dark as
she pointed to the stairs leading to my bedroom, and simply said, “Go!”
My first communion in the Catholic Church was my last until twenty years later. During the hiatus, I
was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church but disappointed our minister prior to the ceremony, when
I told him I was still interested in exploring other religious options like Catholicism and Judaism (just
to really throw him).
“Well, I hope you will remain a Christian,” he huffed.
I wanted to tell him that I liked glowing rosaries and statues of Mary dressed in blue, and the smell of
waxy candles and cute Catholic boys - especially the boys. Instead, I assured him I would remain
Christian, because I was fourteen and he was old and I didn’t know what else to say except “Christ”
under my breath as I left his office with my head down.
During high school and college, all formal religion fell by the wayside in lieu of studying, drinking,
and dating. I prayed before, during and after hard tests but only to Mary, because “the boys” of the
trinity seemed remote. I had a stormy relationship with God, especially when my beautiful mother
suffered a massive stroke after open heart surgery. I was eighteen, and she was never the same. I lost
touch with the girls when I moved to the Southwest, but heard that Lori’s youngest sister had given
birth to a baby at sixteen and her mother was helping to raise it.
I was married in the Unitarian church as it seemed the least offensive to everyone involved, including
the Catholics on my husband’s side and the Protestant soup on my side, as well as to our gay friends.
At thirty, with the birth of our first child, I realized that there was something much bigger than me.
My former-alter-boy-now-agnostic husband and I were trying to decide what school our newborn
baby should attend, given that we had a mere five years before kindergarten registration., I had a
sudden need to baptize him in the Catholic Church; to keep him safe in any way I could. This need to
protect also took the form of a statue of Buddha on his bureau, some quartz crystals under his crib,
and a copy of The Naked Ape on his bedroom book shelf. This might have been the result of post-
partum psychosis, or just an attempt to hedge my religious bets.
Our local public school was not well ranked, but the local Catholic school was a glorious bastion of
learning according to our Catholic friends. Small and safe, it would provide a moral compass during
the formative years. I decided to take the plunge and enrolled him in the Right of Initiation of
Christian Adults so that I, too, could become Catholic. The program was time consuming but very
educational, and I continued my strong affinity with the Virgin Mary, which I had lacked with either
God or Jesus. Perhaps it was because the Presbyterians had downplayed her role that my relationship
with her seemed almost illicit in its strength.
Maybe my expectations of the Church were unrealistic and seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old
girl. My family full of educators spoke of the Jesuits in hushed Protestant whispers about how great
their schools were, in spite of being papists. My mother and father, who had been raised Episcopalian
and Lutheran only to raise their daughters Presbyterian, said little about my decision but were
supportive nevertheless.
Although I sometimes felt like a poser, ignoring some tenants of the faith while embracing others. I
loved the Catholic Church and school that our son, and eventually our daughter, attended. I loved
the community that grew around and within these two edifices, and I became familiar with many of
the families through my volunteer work. But this Eden-like existence was doomed. My children
reached the age of reason, and I finally looked up from my parenting to see the ripe, low-slung apples
of choice and civil rights that hung from the tree of knowledge.
My disillusionment began when, because of his clinical background, my husband was asked to teach
the sixth grade boys sex education. He carefully studied the Jesuit pedagogy to ensure he did not
overstep the bounds of the curriculum. But all the preparation could not prepare him for the boys’
questions, some sophisticated and others sophomoric. His hands were tied. He could not discuss
birth control, even though these boys wanted and needed to hear about it. We eventually laughed
about it and regaled friends with “stories from the sixth grade” but it bothered both of us, knowing
that the girls would be just as ignorant in protecting themselves as the boys. I wondered what Lori’s
mother would have thought.
Then our bishop was found to have committed a hit-and-run accident, killing a two- hundred-fifty-
pound man who had crossed illegally on a busy street in Phoenix. His defense was he thought it was
a dog and yes, he had been drinking but only the sacramental wine at a Mass he had performed
earlier in the evening. He was eventually replaced, and required to perform community service that
included performing more masses and drinking more sacramental wine. Imagine my surprise when
he officiated at my son’s confirmation Mass.
I struggled with the rampant pedophilia that gripped the Church, and watched as my church and all
the other churches in the diocese re-organized their “business model” so that each would stand alone
relative to finances. This was a defensive move to help protect assets from the lawsuits filed by
victims. Business trumped the social justice that was the backbone of Jesuit teaching.
Our son entered the prestigious Jesuit all boys’ Catholic high school next to his Jesuit grade school
several years later. We faced commando fundraising tactics from the priest who presided over the
school, on top of rip-roaring tuition fees. I was very involved in the parents’ association. However, I
could not seem to get my emails or phone calls answered in a timely manner as I reached out to the
mostly male faculty when we observed our son struggling with a learning disability. I found it odd
that when my husband made the same efforts his male name at the bottom of the email, or his male
voice on voicemail, seemed to evoke a much faster response. The educational experience, we were
told, would make our son “a man for others” and prep him for college like no other school could.
Contrary to this point I observed the preferential treatment of athletes, who were given “gentlemen C’
s” when they failed classes during their sports season. In addition, the state-of-the-art personal
computers that each student was required to buy enabled rampant cheating and pornographic
material in the classroom. Two years, and roughly forty thousand dollars later, my son transferred to
a public high school that helped him to regain his academic footing and retool his withered self-
esteem.
Then came the catalog from the local Catholic girls’ high school that had a picture of hundreds of
miniature white crosses their student body had placed on a grassy knoll of the campus. It was a
recruitment tool aimed at my eighth grade daughter. The crosses represented the thousands of souls
that had been aborted in the last year, according to the caption. I could not raise a daughter, whose
grandmother’s generation had fought for her rights, and not support her right to choose. She would
join her brother at the public high school.
The final straw was when the new bishop of the diocese, who replaced the hit-and-run-it-was-only-a-
dog bishop, donated fifty thousand dollars of church money to the state of Maine to block a bill
allowing same sex-marriage. So much for the separation of church and state. My church was
officially against the civil rights of a group of people, two of whom were family members.
I now have something besides the body of Christ stuck in my craw. I believe there are wonderful
people, both lay and religious, who serve within the Church, unfortunately most are not in positions
of power. The Church is dying by a thousand cuts, mostly self-inflicted. There is irony in a church
that marginalizes women, when a woman is at the center of their founding story. Celibacy is
antiquated, and serves to distance those in power from the intricacies and nuances of families and
children and all things maternal. I am convinced that had there been female priests in charge,
pedophilia would never have become institutionalized but routed out at the moment it presented
itself. I still love Mary and struggle less with God and Jesus; however, I can no longer participate in
their Catholic fan club - for God’s sake.
Catholic may have had something to do with it. The priest, dressed in cream vestments and a crocus-
colored stole, placed the host upon my twelve-year-old tongue.
“The body of Christ,” he said in monotone.
“Amen,” sealed the deal, as I concentrated on crossing myself, running the cheat sheet version in my
head: spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. My conversion to Catholicism, having started on the
twenty-minute bike ride to the church with my girlfriends, was complete.
They were the ones who gave me the crib notes and tried to save my soul.
“C’mon, nobody’ll know,” thirteen-year-old Jennifer had said, as we settled into folding chairs in the
unfinished chapel of the newly-constructed St. John of the Cross Catholic Church in Western Springs,
Illinois.
“But I’m Presbyterian. What if somebody sees me? We’ll get in trouble,” I whispered, as a guitarist
near the altar started playing something Peter, Paul, and Mary-ish. It was the casual mass and we
were dressed in our best shorts. The Presbyterians would have frowned on the dress code, an
argument in itself for my conversion.
“It will be good for you. It is the body and blood of Christ, for God’s sake,” fourteen- year-old Lori,
the pragmatist, said. Our kick-the-can game had been interrupted only forty minutes earlier when
Lori’s and Jennifer’s mothers insisted they get to the five o’clock Saturday mass.
I loved these girls. Older and wiser than me, they had fourteen siblings between them including a
number of very cute brothers. I was from a relatively barren Protestant family with only a sister eight
years my senior. This relegated me to an indigent “only child” status as far as my girlfriends were
concerned.
Sex, sin, and Jesus were typical topics of our conversations. I knew only about Jesus. Somehow their
stories of him were more cinematic, with better lighting and sound, than what I knew from Sunday
school. They pointed out the darkening skies to me, one Holy Thursday, and remarked ominously
that God was sad because of what we had done to his son. They balked, when I told them that the
Protestants called it Maundy Thursday.
“Monday Thursday?” Lori raised a blonde eyebrow.
“No, M-a-u-n-d-y. Don’t ask me why but everyone says it. It’s in the church bulletin.” I had become
an apologist for the Presbyterians, with little knowledge to back it up.
The girls taught me about birth control as we snuck into Lori’s parents’ bedroom one humid August
afternoon, the constant shree of crickets drowning out our giggles. Lori perused her mother’s dresser
drawers to see if she was as pious as she purported to be. I wasn’t exactly sure what “the pill” looked
like but I assumed, because of its singularity, it would have to be big, like a giant anti-fertility salt lick
propped in a corner somewhere. In hindsight, the eight children in the family might have been a clue
that our search would be fruitless. Besides, I was more interested in seeing if she owned tampons.
“Don’t ever use tampons, they will steal your virginity,” Lori’s mother had warned us one day, as she
nursed Lori’s new baby brother and yelled at her eldest son to clean out the car he borrowed the night
before. I blanched at the warning, knowing my virginity had been stolen when I used my first
tampon at age eleven in order to participate in a summer swim league. My mother had even
equipped me with a mirror and jar of Vaseline and coached me through the bathroom door. She had
been my accomplice. We were pagans.
I left the communion line, the body of Christ stuck to the roof of my mouth since the blood of Christ
had been unable to dislodge it. I glanced at the woman kneeling next to me, whispering to herself.
Her veined, unadorned hands ran through the beaded decades of the rosary. The light from a stained
glass window caught the sway of the strand and threw rainbow fractions on the back of the chair in
front of her. I imagined each bead to be a tiny aurora borealis that magnetically trapped years of
hopes and prayers within each sphere. The body of Christ was still adhered to my soft palate and a
touch of claustrophobia set in. Would it eventually melt or would my finger need to intervene? I
glanced at an older man who had remained rooted to his chair during communion and concluded
that he was one of the fallen Catholics, who was no longer allowed to partake in the celebration. The
girls had warned me about people like him.
My smugness quickly faded back home, when my mother found out what I had done and yelled at
me. I countered by calling her a lesbian-a word I had recently added to my vocabulary, thanks to the
girls. It was apparent I had used it in the wrong context. My mother’s light blue eyes turned dark as
she pointed to the stairs leading to my bedroom, and simply said, “Go!”
My first communion in the Catholic Church was my last until twenty years later. During the hiatus, I
was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church but disappointed our minister prior to the ceremony, when
I told him I was still interested in exploring other religious options like Catholicism and Judaism (just
to really throw him).
“Well, I hope you will remain a Christian,” he huffed.
I wanted to tell him that I liked glowing rosaries and statues of Mary dressed in blue, and the smell of
waxy candles and cute Catholic boys - especially the boys. Instead, I assured him I would remain
Christian, because I was fourteen and he was old and I didn’t know what else to say except “Christ”
under my breath as I left his office with my head down.
During high school and college, all formal religion fell by the wayside in lieu of studying, drinking,
and dating. I prayed before, during and after hard tests but only to Mary, because “the boys” of the
trinity seemed remote. I had a stormy relationship with God, especially when my beautiful mother
suffered a massive stroke after open heart surgery. I was eighteen, and she was never the same. I lost
touch with the girls when I moved to the Southwest, but heard that Lori’s youngest sister had given
birth to a baby at sixteen and her mother was helping to raise it.
I was married in the Unitarian church as it seemed the least offensive to everyone involved, including
the Catholics on my husband’s side and the Protestant soup on my side, as well as to our gay friends.
At thirty, with the birth of our first child, I realized that there was something much bigger than me.
My former-alter-boy-now-agnostic husband and I were trying to decide what school our newborn
baby should attend, given that we had a mere five years before kindergarten registration., I had a
sudden need to baptize him in the Catholic Church; to keep him safe in any way I could. This need to
protect also took the form of a statue of Buddha on his bureau, some quartz crystals under his crib,
and a copy of The Naked Ape on his bedroom book shelf. This might have been the result of post-
partum psychosis, or just an attempt to hedge my religious bets.
Our local public school was not well ranked, but the local Catholic school was a glorious bastion of
learning according to our Catholic friends. Small and safe, it would provide a moral compass during
the formative years. I decided to take the plunge and enrolled him in the Right of Initiation of
Christian Adults so that I, too, could become Catholic. The program was time consuming but very
educational, and I continued my strong affinity with the Virgin Mary, which I had lacked with either
God or Jesus. Perhaps it was because the Presbyterians had downplayed her role that my relationship
with her seemed almost illicit in its strength.
Maybe my expectations of the Church were unrealistic and seen through the eyes of a twelve-year-old
girl. My family full of educators spoke of the Jesuits in hushed Protestant whispers about how great
their schools were, in spite of being papists. My mother and father, who had been raised Episcopalian
and Lutheran only to raise their daughters Presbyterian, said little about my decision but were
supportive nevertheless.
Although I sometimes felt like a poser, ignoring some tenants of the faith while embracing others. I
loved the Catholic Church and school that our son, and eventually our daughter, attended. I loved
the community that grew around and within these two edifices, and I became familiar with many of
the families through my volunteer work. But this Eden-like existence was doomed. My children
reached the age of reason, and I finally looked up from my parenting to see the ripe, low-slung apples
of choice and civil rights that hung from the tree of knowledge.
My disillusionment began when, because of his clinical background, my husband was asked to teach
the sixth grade boys sex education. He carefully studied the Jesuit pedagogy to ensure he did not
overstep the bounds of the curriculum. But all the preparation could not prepare him for the boys’
questions, some sophisticated and others sophomoric. His hands were tied. He could not discuss
birth control, even though these boys wanted and needed to hear about it. We eventually laughed
about it and regaled friends with “stories from the sixth grade” but it bothered both of us, knowing
that the girls would be just as ignorant in protecting themselves as the boys. I wondered what Lori’s
mother would have thought.
Then our bishop was found to have committed a hit-and-run accident, killing a two- hundred-fifty-
pound man who had crossed illegally on a busy street in Phoenix. His defense was he thought it was
a dog and yes, he had been drinking but only the sacramental wine at a Mass he had performed
earlier in the evening. He was eventually replaced, and required to perform community service that
included performing more masses and drinking more sacramental wine. Imagine my surprise when
he officiated at my son’s confirmation Mass.
I struggled with the rampant pedophilia that gripped the Church, and watched as my church and all
the other churches in the diocese re-organized their “business model” so that each would stand alone
relative to finances. This was a defensive move to help protect assets from the lawsuits filed by
victims. Business trumped the social justice that was the backbone of Jesuit teaching.
Our son entered the prestigious Jesuit all boys’ Catholic high school next to his Jesuit grade school
several years later. We faced commando fundraising tactics from the priest who presided over the
school, on top of rip-roaring tuition fees. I was very involved in the parents’ association. However, I
could not seem to get my emails or phone calls answered in a timely manner as I reached out to the
mostly male faculty when we observed our son struggling with a learning disability. I found it odd
that when my husband made the same efforts his male name at the bottom of the email, or his male
voice on voicemail, seemed to evoke a much faster response. The educational experience, we were
told, would make our son “a man for others” and prep him for college like no other school could.
Contrary to this point I observed the preferential treatment of athletes, who were given “gentlemen C’
s” when they failed classes during their sports season. In addition, the state-of-the-art personal
computers that each student was required to buy enabled rampant cheating and pornographic
material in the classroom. Two years, and roughly forty thousand dollars later, my son transferred to
a public high school that helped him to regain his academic footing and retool his withered self-
esteem.
Then came the catalog from the local Catholic girls’ high school that had a picture of hundreds of
miniature white crosses their student body had placed on a grassy knoll of the campus. It was a
recruitment tool aimed at my eighth grade daughter. The crosses represented the thousands of souls
that had been aborted in the last year, according to the caption. I could not raise a daughter, whose
grandmother’s generation had fought for her rights, and not support her right to choose. She would
join her brother at the public high school.
The final straw was when the new bishop of the diocese, who replaced the hit-and-run-it-was-only-a-
dog bishop, donated fifty thousand dollars of church money to the state of Maine to block a bill
allowing same sex-marriage. So much for the separation of church and state. My church was
officially against the civil rights of a group of people, two of whom were family members.
I now have something besides the body of Christ stuck in my craw. I believe there are wonderful
people, both lay and religious, who serve within the Church, unfortunately most are not in positions
of power. The Church is dying by a thousand cuts, mostly self-inflicted. There is irony in a church
that marginalizes women, when a woman is at the center of their founding story. Celibacy is
antiquated, and serves to distance those in power from the intricacies and nuances of families and
children and all things maternal. I am convinced that had there been female priests in charge,
pedophilia would never have become institutionalized but routed out at the moment it presented
itself. I still love Mary and struggle less with God and Jesus; however, I can no longer participate in
their Catholic fan club - for God’s sake.
| For God's Sake by Suzanne Berndt Williams |
| Copyright © 2010 |
Quiet Mountain Essays
| Contributor's Notes... |
Suzanne Berndt Williams is a recovering hospital administrator with an undergraduate degree from the University
of Michigan and a graduate degree from Arizona State University. She has completed marathons with her
husband in Los Angeles and Dublin, Ireland, and decided not to follow through on her thoughts of divorce at mile
eighteen and mile twenty-two, respectively. When not herding teenagers, she can be found spinning - on a bike
and sometimes in her head.
of Michigan and a graduate degree from Arizona State University. She has completed marathons with her
husband in Los Angeles and Dublin, Ireland, and decided not to follow through on her thoughts of divorce at mile
eighteen and mile twenty-two, respectively. When not herding teenagers, she can be found spinning - on a bike
and sometimes in her head.
