The Confession Read Online Free PDF Page B

complete, and they appeared uncomfortably before us in secular clothing and mannish hairdos. We never knew how this affected their spiritual lives, but it could not have been any less jarring for them than it was for us. Those stiff cornettes must have been uncomfortable to wear, but they symbolized the nuns’ sacred purpose, and to me at least they were the most glamorous of fashion statements.
    If our nuns were inscrutable, our priests were omnipresent. You couldn’t ride your bike down Roosevelt Avenue in Carteret without spotting one of them going about his daily ministrations. Priests, especially old Father Patrick Lyons, were regular visitors to our home, occasionally at mealtime. Father Lyons was a man of great humility and, to me, the model ofdecency. He believed that children should be taught to pray, just as they should be taught to read, and he gave us the skills to discover our faith. “Don’t pray to God only when you need something,” he told me. “Tell God you love him. Talk to him the way you talk to your best friend. Share your life with God, and he’ll share his grace with you in return.”
    When Father Lyons was nearing the end of his life, he asked my sister Sharon to pray for him so that when he died and arrived in purgatory, her prayers would form a basket that would lift him to Heaven. “And when I reach Heaven,” he promised, “I will then pray for you and begin to weave a basket that will be waiting for you in purgatory.”
    The Dolans were among our most prominent family friends in Jersey City, and they had two priests in the family: Father Charles and Father James. When they visited we would discuss everything from the state of the world to Mrs. So-and-So’s many illnesses; after dinner, if he was in the mood, Father James would linger in the living room singing “Danny Boy” and “This House” well into the evening. What a talented man he was. In Carteret there was a saying: “The three major occupations for Irishmen are the priesthood, politics, and poetry.” Father James practiced them all.
    In matters of the Church, I wanted to succeed. I was determined to demonstrate to Father Anthony Gaydos, our stocky parish priest, that I deserved his support and recognition. I wanted him to recognize that my performance was not just conscientious but downright godly. That was the highest measure of significance in our world: godliness. There was an old Irish maxim we heard a lot as children, lifted from the hymn called “St. Patrick’s Breastplate”: “Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.” Everything you do, in other words, should be Christ-centered; that’s how we were expected to behave, and that’s what I believed, as I still do today.
    I prayed every day as instructed, anxious to be the best Catholic I could be. I wanted the priests to understand my fealty to the Church, my knowledge of doctrine, and my willingness to be a soldier for Christ. Consciouslyand deliberately, I tailored my actions in ways I knew would meet the approval of the priests, the pastor, and the nuns—a policy that, you can imagine, didn’t exactly endear me to some of my peers. I was not popular with the other kids. In church and school, they tended to leave me alone. I never doubted why. From the time I was seven, I had a sense of myself as being different. No matter how much I tried, I just didn’t fit in. Even before I had any words to describe it, I remember concluding that there was something about what I was, not just about what I was doing, that set me permanently apart.
    My faith, and the encouragement I received from church leaders, held me together through