Catholic is the air I breathe, the prompt for my impromptu prayers and my belief in miracles. It is the joy in hymns of praise and the muffled mutterings of the creed and the wail of a baby being dipped into a baptismal font. It is the family faith passed on from one generation to the next; my spiritual inheritance, a work in progress, as I age and hold on to the things I know to be true. True for me.
It was my grandmother’s insistence on saying 10 decades of the rosary before I retired, exhausted by devotion, to sleep under a picture of the Sacred Heart. A pious child, I wondered about all those poor banished children of Eve and the extravagant descriptors of the Blessed Mother in the Litany of Loreto.
FEAST AND SAINTS DAYS
It was feast days and saints days and a tribute posy or lavender soap for Reverend Mother. It was processions around the school stopping at the grotto to see a kneeling Bernadette gaze at the apparition of the Virgin Mary. In later life, it was visiting Lourdes, and singing Ave Maria under the purple sky in the Pyrenees and knowing that this was my home crowd, my tribe, where I belonged.
It was St Patrick’s Cathedral for the richness of ceremony and St Francis’ to light a candle in the Ladye Chapel. It was school visits to the sanctified gloom of the chapel with its plaster cast statues of Our Lady and St Joseph and the gold tabernacle with its implacable red light. It was the minor mortification of ‘giving up’ lollies for Lent and putting small coins into the Project Compassion box.
It was the incomprehension of the Latin Mass and the glee of seeing other large families at Mass on Sundays, all of us dragooned into attendance with a child as altar server or in the choir or trying to look after the whimpering baby. It was learning that God loved me and that I was always forgiven for my grubby little venalities if I was truly contrite.
It was my father doling out 20 cent pieces to each of the seven kids for the plate, putting the boys to Xavier and the girls to Genazzano, reading The Advocate after Mass and sending money to the missions in India. It was singing at rock masses in the 1970s and knowing Jesus before he was a superstar. It was school where the nuns ruled in their black habits and the devil’s job was to tempt us at every turn.
PENANCE AND FORGIVENESS
It was my mother’s devotion to St Gerard Majella and St Jude and St Anthony and running us up to church for the confession of pinching a sister or four. It was three Hail Marys and a Glory Be as penance. It was the swapping of holy pictures on the asphalt at lunchtime and learning my catechism by heart and wondering about the short stature of the Infant of Prague. It was Mary as mother and model as I gazed at a copy of Murillo’s Immaculate Conception and saw how she floated on a flotilla of chubby cherubs. It was singing Soul of My Saviour and We Stand for God with Crusader-child fervour pledging our life and service.
It has been the joy of learning about different charisms; the Faithful Companions of Jesus, the Good Samaritans and the Dominicans and the pilgrimages to France and Spain to visit places significant in founding stories. It has been retreats and reflection days and further study and the counsel of wise friends whose depth of goodness and spiritual insight leaves me feeling privileged to be in their company. It is my belief in the power and energy of the Holy Spirit; the answer my friend, blowing in the wind.
Catholic is the language of my world with its particular lexicon of devotion and doctrine, its sense of community, its saints and its sins, its magisterial tradition and its people in the pews. It is where I stand for God.
Ann Rennie is a Melbourne writer, teacher and former REC. She believes in the Good News and the power of words to change the world.