I just lost a 3/4 written attempt to update thanks, not, to the WordPress iPad app. Fuck you to those who gave me a false security in computer code.

Other than that, I started the day on Facebook and ended up reading this interesting ‘blog post from Barry Crimmins.

Now Barry and I go way back, although he wouldn’t know it or likely remember me. During the first war for oil, waged by the first President George Bush, the Herbert Walker one, I watched Barry at an anti-war rally. It was actually an ill-fated date, in which after the day of protest my would be suitor opted for the pulchritude of my apolitical roommate over our shared political affinity.

Barry was also the force majeure behind comedy at Cambridge’s Ding Ho restaurant, a legendary show that laid the groundwork for the Comedy Studio, my home away from home when Cambridge was my home. I got to work with Barry a couple of times there and afterwards shoot the shit about comedy, politics and upstate New York, where he grew up and I got a college degree.

I’ve always liked his writing. His call for his own excommunication and people to turn their backs on a church whose leadership was at the very least complicit in not stopping child molestation struck a particular chord.

I feel fortunate that not only was I allowed to be a lapsed Catholic, arguably I was raised anti-church. Condemning the bad behavior of priests and the hierarchy that protects itself at all costs is second nature to me.

One thing that Barry’s essay has me reconsidering is my attitude toward the parishioners. I’ve always taken a wide berth in questioning the religious choices of others as none of my business. But I think he is correct in asking people to reconsider supporting an institution with a fetid history and the corruption to let the worst of human behavior continue and, until very recently, unchecked.

To understand my attitude to the church, you have to know my mother.

Two essential things, I think, set Pat apart in my memories: (1) as a mother of five and a schoolteacher, she was a ferocious defender of kids, and (2) she had little patience with phonies and hypocrites. Combine the two, and no doubt if she hadn’t walked away from the church years before, she would have been on cathedral steps with signs and shouts for justice the minute the first molestation scandals broke.

She died condemning the archdiocese of Boston for not outing the pedophiles in it’s ranks and treating them as the felons they are.

Pat’s break with church started well before the scandals, and as the youngest in our family I got the easiest ride where Sunday mass was concerned. Unlike some of my siblings, I never sat in parochial school or had to prove I attended mass by producing from my pocket a copy of the weekly church bulletin. All of my holy sacraments were performed in intimate gatherings among friends in family homes.

I think it started when my dad died. No, i think it started before. As an adult, I once asked my mother if she had anything critical to say about him, because what little she did speak of him was hushed and glowing praise. She smiled and told me that if anything he was “too religious.”

Apart from occasionally wanting to sleep in on Sunday, I think she never bought into the unassailable nature of the men who ran the church and the notion that those mere mortals should be worshipped too. Ironically, she married a man who left the seminary after he enlisted during World War 2.

I learned the word “chippy” from her, as the only noun I ever heard her use for women she remembered from her childhood. It was reserved for the women who accompanied the priests visiting her family’s seaside cottage each summer. As the niece of the coastal area’s Monsignor, she got to see a vacationing side of the men who came to visit him.

Maybe it was one of those memories kids have that aren’t totally accurate, and maybe some of the priests she met were good men who keep their vows. It colored her belief in the leaders, I suspect, though, even if she stuck with the church for many more years.

Later, when she became a widow, her disappointment in the established order of the church further crumbled, when without a man beside her she became an outsider. I don’t know the details of what and when and who exactly, but she remained bitter about her newfound status and unchristian treatment.

As a kid, I was lucky. When the local parish became unbearably reactionary and stodgy in the face of the turmoil of the 70s, a group of families rented space (from Protestants) and arranged for their own folk masses (newfangled service with guitars and pita bread, instead of organs and communion wafers). A round robin was formed where each week a different family or two worked on the theme and arranged for the communion gifts. A Jesuit from Boston College High School drove to the suburbs to say the mass.

Among our neighbors, in an offbeat, mildly revolutionary act, I think Pat found some of the religion and sense of community she craved. Where our parish church was pro-Vietnam and anti-women wearing slacks, this group leaned proudly left and may have been the most sincere Catholics I have ever met. I still remember the fervor and powerful grip of Mr. Boyce’s three-fingered handshake during the sign of peace. The prayers called out and the collection for a sister community in the Ozarks or Appalachia were heartfelt.

For me, it was fun. Where my older brothers and sister were brought up in the formal church, I had my First Holy Communion in a purple dress in my friend Janice’s living room. Penance, or what the cool kids now call Reconciliation, was eye-to-eye with a priest in the Morrissey’s den, cleared of toys and games for the solemn occasion.

It couldn’t last. Shortly after sanctioning the group and threatening to tell Rome, the church called us all back and brought in a hip, young priest who was meant to be more in touch with the community. He wasn’t. My mother stopped going just in time to allow me to refuse Confirmation, the sacrament where I would reaffirm my faith and be seen as an adult by the church.

I remain unconfirmed and unrepentant.

In young adulthood, I became more aware of Pat’s enmity to the church in general and priests specifically. I think my favorite episode came in the aftermath of my cousin’s Holy Communion. A schoolteacher to her last, over coffee and cake, she took exception to the age appropriateness of the priest’s asking a group of seven year olds to describe when they had last felt the savior’s presence in their lives.

The argument on early childhood development versus the lord was epic and ended in an exasperated priest telling her to seek psychiatric and spiritual counseling.

I’ve told the story before of how I learned from my aunt that my mother was pro-choice. If not for the arrogance of ao Catholic doctor at a well-established Catholic hospital booking a legal and routine D and C without asking my mother or explaining why, beyond his decision she shouldn’t have more children, I would never have been born into the hands of a Jewish obstetrician at a city hospital. Thank you, Pat, for exercising your right to choose and refusing that blessed abortion.

Late in life, she talked about Pope John Paul II and how his church was involved with the Nazis. She felt that by virtue of Jewish people being eradicated from Poland there was no way the Catholics couldn’t have known what was going on or downright sympathized with the Nazis. Her head would have exploded when former Hitler youth, Pope Benedict XVI grabbed his throne.

So, today, I sit reading about the church’s marketing campaign to have us lost sheep “come home.” I’ve read what Barry has written, and I appreciate the gift Pat gave me of not taking any of it at face value. I’m comfortably agnostic with atheist leanings, and I try to walk a secular human path of decency.

I have dear friends who believe, and maybe they are right to believe in Jesus, his teachings, the Virgin Mary, and a supreme deity. I honestly don’t know, and i suspect will never have the conviction in my lack of faith like Dawkins or Hitchens.

However, the acts of man, the church with it’s money and corrupt self preservation, I do not believe in them. No manner of explanation or prayer would ever convince me other than it is completely evil to allow a young kid to get raped. Letting it happen again, and again, and again is unconscionable.