Foreign Correspondence Read Online Free PDF Page B

young knees, leaving angry red indentations on the unprotected flesh of bare legs.
    St. Mary’s Church was a huge faux-baroque folly: elements of Bernini’s St. Peter’s basilica scaled down and reinterpreted by a designer of suburban shopping malls. There was a gaudy lushness to it: tons of pink marble, acres of stained glass, pounds of gilt and enough graven images to trigger a new Reformation.
    But within this idolaters’ extravaganza the service itself had become as banal as the bingo games held in the adjacent church hall. I could just remember the Latin Mass of my early childhood; the murmured words, the priest with his back turned, doing his sacred work at the altar, the bells, the incense, the atmosphere of a divine mystery from which ordinary people were excluded.
    Words like mea culpa and agnus dei and spiritus sanctus had sounded like a magician’s chant; hocus-pocus, abracadabra. There was no such magic in the lawyerly English liturgy, muttered with the sigh of weary housewives and restless children longing to be outdoors.
The Lord be with you.
AND ALSO WITH YOU.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
IT IS RIGHT AND FITTING TO DO SO.
    Concord was a large parish and its priests were on the fast track to becoming bishops if they ran things right. Consequently, the men assigned there tended to be a worldly, striving lot, tough men in whom Aussie bluntness had replaced the Irish blarney. They were unabashedly political: conservative anti-Communists, disdainful of women, even though it was women’s devotion that propped up the parish. Rather than offering spiritual uplift, they used their weekly sermons either to harangue us on the importance of wearing hats to Mass and obeying husbandsat home, or to complain about the state of the building fund and the size of the haul from the “plate.”
    Each week, I waited for the priest to intone the words, “Go in peace, the Mass is ended.” To which I made my only heartfelt response of the morning: “THANKS BE TO GOD.”
    The routine of Sunday Mass followed by Sunday roast was so firmly fixed in our family that I thought an enormous baked dinner was a religious obligation of Catholicism. Its ritual feel was heightened because it was the only meal we ate all together around the dining-room table. We sat down to succulent lamb fragrant with vinegary mint sauce, mounds of roasted onions, potatoes and pumpkin slices glistening with fat, big bowls of buttery green beans, peas and grated cabbage.
    I watched, fascinated, as my father forked his already grease-drenched potatoes into a soft concave mush and anointed it with lashings of butter that would melt in the depression and form a little yellow lake. Then he piled a Matterhorn of salt at the edge of his plate and dipped each mouthful into it.
    Like most families in meat-rich Australia, we enjoyed a household diet that would give a cardiologist a heart attack: lamb chops and fried eggs for breakfast; cold cuts in the lunchbox; for dinner, fat-rimmed rump steaks, thick sausages or “lamb’s fry”—liver with bacon and gravy. Fridays, religion ordered us to give the meat a rest, but our fish was deep-fried in crunchy batter. Between meals, there were yummy snacks: bread and “dripping”—lamb fat spooned out of the enamel bowl that caught the drainings from the Sunday roasting pan; or, for a sweet tooth, toffee bubbling like lava until it reached stick-jaw consistency; ice-cold butter balls rolled in a crust of sugar. Now, living in the world of watery tofu and austere dribbles of cold-pressed, extra-virgin olive oil, I miss the heedless lusciousness of that food.
    By the time we returned from Mass, my father would have read both newspapers cover to cover. At the table, he would share the highlights with us. He particularly admired the writing of Ross Campbell, a columnist who never split an infinitive or dangled a participle. Campbell was unusual in those days because his voice was authentically Australian at a