UNITED STATES
Bloomberg
August 16, 2018
By Joe Nocera
One woman’s crisis of faith shows why dioceses across the U.S. are struggling.
My mother, Rosalie, grew up Irish Catholic in Providence, Rhode Island — with the emphasis on Catholic. She went to parochial grade school and Catholic high school. She never missed Sunday Mass. She said the rosary, memorized her catechism and prayed every night before bed. She was very devout.
Her own mother believed that if her children entered a religious order, God’s grace would shine down on her family. So after high school my mother dutifully entered the convent. It didn’t take her long to realize that she was ill-suited to being a nun, and that there were other ways to serve God. (When her parents drove her home from the convent, her mother told her to put her head down so the neighbors wouldn’t see her.)
My mother then got a job answering phones at the Providence Journal. There she found other religious-minded women, who became her lifelong friends. She met my father, who had recently left the monastery, at a meeting of something called the Third Order of St. Dominic, an organization for laypeople who were drawn to the teachings of the Dominican friars. For their honeymoon, my parents stayed at the Trapp Family Lodge 1 in Vermont. They went on to have nine children in 12 years. (Talk about God’s grace!) We Nocera kids also went to Catholic grade school, and on Sundays our family would march into St. Pius church two by two for the 10:15 Mass. The first two rows were unofficially reserved for us.
My father never stopped being devout. Late in his life, with his legs in bad shape, he still limped every day to the bus stop so he could get to a midday Mass downtown.
But Catholicism’s hold on my mother loosened over the years, the combination of reading Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and becoming a full-time college student at the age of 37, when my youngest brother was 11 months old. Still, she kept believing, even if she became more casual about practicing her religion.
Until, that is, 2002, when the Boston Globe published its extraordinary expose of the sexual abuse by priests, which had run rampant in the Boston archdiocese for decades. The horrendous tales of abuse, which wrecked the lives of so many people; the way predatory priests were quietly moved from parish to parish, where they found new victims; the complicity of Bernard Law, the archbishop, in covering it all up — my mother wasn’t just upset or disillusioned when she read the Globe’s stories. She felt utterly betrayed. One of the foundations of her life had been ripped away. How could she believe in anything a bishop or a priest said anymore? She couldn’t. From that point forward, she was done with Catholicism. Even worse, she was done with God.
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