In this week’s episode, we begin a multi-part series about my off-again, on-again relationship with God and the Catholic Church. I’m not trying to evangelize anyone or be a preacher. I’m just here to tell my story which I hope is entertaining and informative.

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Hello, this is Chris Young, and welcome to episode #6 of “Contemplating Life”.

In my first episode, I promised that we would cover a variety of topics among them disability, religion, politics, entertainment, and whatever else I felt like talking about. In the first five episodes, we talked about my experiences living with a lifelong disability and some of the issues related to that disability. Today we are going to begin a multi-part series on my off-again, on-again relationship with God and the Catholic Church.

Let me reiterate my disclaimer from the first episode. When I discuss religion, I’m not specifically trying to evangelize or proselytize anyone. I’m just sharing my views and experiences and perhaps explaining a little Catholic theology along the way. I hope that it’s entertaining and informative. If by chance, you find it sparking something in your own faith journey that’s fine also.

My mother was raised Catholic and practiced the faith her entire life. She attended Cathedral Grade School and St. Agnes Academy which was the all-girls counterpart to the all-boys Cathedral High School.

My father came from a mostly nonpracticing Christian family. He rarely if ever attended church growing up although he had fond memories of attending a church-sponsored summer camp one summer.

When my parents were married in 1954, you had to jump through a lot of hoops to have a mixed-faith marriage in the Catholic Church. My dad had to attend a series of about a half-dozen instruction classes with the priest. He also had to formally agree that his children would be raised Catholic. He had no objection.

I was born eight months and two weeks after they were married. When I was old enough to do the math, Mom insisted that I was two weeks premature. After me, she had five premature babies that she only carried for about six months each. None of them survived more than 48 hours. She also had a number of other miscarriages. The explanation that I was two weeks early seems completely credible. And so what if the folks jumped the gun a little bit?

If you are watching the YouTube version of this podcast you can see the 8 mm color home movies that my dad took of me outside my grandmother’s house on the day of my baptism. I was dressed in a long white baptismal gown that made me look like a girl. Years later we transferred the film to VHS and later DVD and now YouTube. There is no footage of the actual baptism because home movie cameras require a great deal of light. I doubt that the priest would have allowed filming using an awkward, intensely bright, and annoying light bar.

Although it doesn’t have anything to do with my faith journey, I might as well recount the few early childhood memories that I have.

From the time they were married until I was nearly 4 years old, my parents and I lived in a small one-bedroom duplex on W. 34th St. on the near west side of Indianapolis, near the canal. I only have a couple of vague memories of living in that house. I remember going next door to the other half of the duplex and sitting on the floor playing with the neighbor’s daughter who was about my age. She had a small toy iron and an ironing board. I used it to smooth out a tiny doll’s tablecloth while the girl prepared a tea party. I don’t know why I was so fascinated with the process of ironing and why I retain that memory so vividly. Perhaps it was that it creates order out of chaos.

I remember sitting in my dad’s lap on a lounge chair on the front porch while my dad was cleaning his 22 caliber hunting rifle. His friend George Brake was sitting in the other chair and they were planning a hunting trip. He had a book called, “The Shooter’s Bible” which was a reference book with photos of hundreds of different kinds of firearms. My dad was in no way what you might describe as a gun enthusiast. He had that 22 rifle and a 22 pistol but only went on a couple of hunting trips when I was very young. The only other time I ever recall him using a gun years later was to dispose of a possum that had infiltrated our garage.

I recall a TV repair man coming to fix our TV at that house. I thought TVs were magic so he must’ve been the smartest person in the world if he could repair it.

I recall a deliveryman delivering a set of dresser drawers and my mom telling me that that was going to be furniture in my bedroom when we moved to the new house. I continued to use that dresser until I was about 30.

In May 1959, just before I turned four years old in July, we moved to a newly built home on Cossell Dr. in the Eagledale neighborhood on the northwest side of Indianapolis, just north of Speedway. I still live in that same home 63 years later.

At the time, we were in the geographic area of St. Christopher Parrish on Lyndhurst Dr. in Speedway about five minutes away. However, my earliest recollections of attending church were at St. Bridget’s Church on the corner of West St. and St. Clair Ave. I remember being carried into the side door of the church by my mother and/or my grandmother on a couple of occasions. Inside the door was a tiny vestibule featuring a rack of votive candles. There was a small wicker basket to drop in donations when you lit a candle. I distinctly remember asking what the candles were for and why there was a basket with small change in it.

I also recall one time attempts to carry me in my wheelchair up the steps of the side entrance. That meant I had to be at least five years old because that is when I got my first wheelchair. Why did we attend St. Bridget’s when St. Christopher was much closer? St. Bridget’s held the distinction of having the latest start time of any Catholic Mass anywhere in Indianapolis at 12:10 PM each Sunday. I never understood why 12:10 and not perhaps high noon. I’m not certain, but I think I was baptized at St.Bridget’s Church.

St. Bridget’s Church was closed by the archdiocese in 1994 citing financial difficulties, a decaying structure, and high crime in the neighborhood. The building was briefly used as a Newman Center for IUPUI but was torn down in 2000. A new apartment complex now sits on the site.

One of my earliest memories of being Catholic revolved around a conversation I had with a neighbor boy. I’m guessing I was about four years old and it was shortly after we had moved into the neighborhood. My parents and his parents had gotten together for some sort of gathering on a Saturday night and we were playing in his bedroom. I mentioned that I had to go to church the next day. He asked why.

“Because we are Catholic”, I explained.

“We go to church sometimes. What is Catholic?” he inquired.

“I don’t know exactly. I just know we have to go to church EVERY Sunday.”

He deduced, “Well, I guess I’m not Catholic then.”

As I reached school age and as it became too difficult to carry me up the steps in a wheelchair, my mother and I began attending our home parish, St. Christopher’s Church. They operate an elementary school and my mom attempted to enroll me there. Although she carried some emotional baggage from her 12 years of Catholic education, she remained committed to Catholic schools. She had been indoctrinated to believe that in order to be a “good Catholic” you had to send your kids to Catholic school no matter the financial burden.

When she approached the priest about enrolling me, he politely said that they were not in any way capable of dealing with my special needs. It wasn’t quite the confrontational scene we talked about last week from the movie Mask in which Cher portrayed the mother of a son with a disfiguring medical condition. In this particular case, the priest was correct that the school was not equipped to handle a student like me. It was just the sad truth.

When my mother inquired, “How is he going to learn religion in a public school?”

The priest replied, “Religion is taught in the home.”

She didn’t accept that answer even though he kept repeating it over and over again. Eventually, she persuaded him to give me private one-on-one instructions in what Catholics refer to as “CCD classes”. More on the phrase CCD later.

Years later, her commitment to Catholic schools evaporated. She grew to see the school as a drain on the parish’s resources and a financial burden on families who could not afford it. While she respected parents who chose to send their children to private Catholic schools if they could afford it, she often wondered if we were a church supporting a school or a school with a church attached.

I don’t know which of the three priests at St. Christopher’s Parish mom argued with over my education. But the task of giving me religious instruction fell to the youngest of the three, Father Paul Rehart. Once a week, mom would take me to the rectory (the house where the priests reside) and I would sit in his office and get religious education one-on-one.

First-graders curriculum for Catholic education was from a little blue book known as the Baltimore Catechism. A Catholic organization known as the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine a.k.a. CCD based in Baltimore, MD was responsible for creating the book and educational materials in the form of worksheets that would go with the catechism.

A major part of the indoctrination was that you had to memorize the exact answers to a series of numbered questions. The teacher, in my case the priest, would ask the question and you had to recite the answer 100% verbatim. I still recall the first four questions. I promise you I did not need to refresh my recollection several years ago when I purchased a copy of the Baltimore Catechism on eBay. These questions were burned into my brain.

Question 1: Who made you?

Answer: God made me.

Question 2: Who is God?

Answer: God is the Supreme Being who made all things.

Question 3: Why did God make you?

Answer: God made me to show forth his goodness and to share with us His everlasting life.

Question 4: What must we do to share in His everlasting life?

Answer: To share in God’s everlasting life we must know him, love him, and serve him.

Those questions bring to mind one of my favorite Catholic jokes.

A young nun was teaching first-grade kids from the Baltimore Catechism. Each day she would ask questions in order. Unfortunately, she always started with the kid in the front row and went from child to child in the same order every day. The kids soon realized they only had to memorize one question each. One day, the boy in the front row was absent. She asked the next child, “Who made you?” The child couldn’t answer. She asks the next, and the next, and none of them could answer the first question. She became highly agitated. She thought they had been doing so well. Finally, a little boy in the back of the room raised his hand. With great enthusiasm, she called on him. He explained, “Sister…The little boy that God made isn’t here today.”

Years later, when I began teaching the Catholic faith to adult converts, I began to have a deeper appreciation of the brilliant wisdom and deep theology contained in those first four questions from the Baltimore Catechism. I was reminded of the book titled, “Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”. I concluded that everything I needed to know about Catholic theology was summarized in those first four questions of the Baltimore Catechism.

It gives us the essentials of who is God and what our relationship is with him. In some respects, it explains the meaning of life. The purpose of our creation was to spend eternity in paradise with God. And it gives us a complete outline of everything we need to fulfill that goal

It begins with knowledge. We must acquire a deep understanding of God, his message, his role in our lives, his plan for the building of the Kingdom, his unconditional love, and the forgiveness of our sins that is there for the asking.

Having a deep knowledge of God, the obvious result is that we will come to love God.

Knowing what we do about God and having a love for him as a response to his love for us, the natural consequence is that we will attempt to do His Will by serving him. For the most part that service is to our fellow human beings who are also Children of God as are we.

While our Protestant friends were memorizing Bible verses, we were cutting through all of the confusing symbolism in Scripture and getting straight to the heavy-duty theology without having to argue over whether or not God actually created the earth in 6 days of 24 hours each and what was so sinful about eating an apple. It didn’t matter how long it took God to create us and everything else. It didn’t matter how He did it. We are God’s children, part of his master plan, and our destiny was eternal life in heaven.

It’s brilliant in simplicity yet it is so deep, one can easily spend a lifetime coming to understand all of the ramifications of those first four questions.

Naturally, I like most Catholic children, thought the whole idea of memorizing answers to questions was a ridiculous waste of time. Yet I still remember those questions decades later. It took me a long time to appreciate what it all really meant.

As a student in those one-on-one sessions, I was probably a royal pain in the ass. I had lots of questions of my own. The church portrayed itself as the absolute authority with the answers to every question. So, often I would sling some pretty tough ones at the poor unsuspecting young priest.

I swear to God… These are things I really asked the priest at about age 6 or 7.

I was taught that we had a serious obligation to attend Mass every Sunday. To miss Mass without a good reason was a serious sin. So I posed the following hypothetical…

I’m on a cruise ship in the Pacific Ocean and it’s Sunday. There is a priest on board and he has scheduled Mass in the ship’s chapel. I’m on my way there ready and willing to fulfill my solemn Sunday obligation. Suddenly the captain comes on the PA and announces, “Congratulations everyone. We have just crossed the International Date Line. It is no longer Sunday. It’s suddenly Monday.” Before I can persuade the captain to turn the ship around and take us back to Sunday to save our mortal souls, the ship hit an iceberg as the Titanic did. The ship sinks and we all die with this horrible sin on our souls. Would we go to hell?

I was a real shit, wasn’t I?

But wait… there is more. Riddle me this Batman!

They said that when the priest says the words, “This is my body” the ordinary bread on the altar magically turns into the Body of Christ. Similarly, when the priest says “This is my blood” the wine in the cup magically becomes the Blood of Christ. Anyone who receives the Body and Blood unworthily or who is non-Catholic commits a terrible sin.

So, a priest walks into a bakery and is standing next to a huge case of freshly baked loaves of bread. Someone walks by not watching where they are going and bumps into him violently. Without thinking, the priest says, “Hey… watch where you’re going. This is my body.”

Or similarly, a priest walks into a liquor store to pick up a bottle of wine. As he takes it from the shelf, someone else bumps into him, he drops the bottle and it breaks. As he is picking up the pieces of broken glass, he cuts his finger and wipes it on his shirt. The store clerk comes with a bucket and a mop to clean up the mess. He notices a red stain on the priest’s clothing and asks, “Did you get wine on your shirt?” To which the priest answers, “No. This is my blood.”

Does every piece of baked good in the bakery become the Body of Christ including doughnuts or does the bread alone become the Body? And similarly, do all the alcoholic beverages in the liquor store become the Sacred Blood or only the wine? What is the radius of influence of the words of consecration?

Inquiring minds want to know. I wasn’t satisfied with the answers the priest gave me. I think in the case of the sinking ship he said it was just so unlikely to happen that God would understand. In the case of accidental consecration at the bakery and the liquor store, he just said, “Priests have to be careful what they say.”

It was now time to prepare me for the Sacraments. At about age 6, Catholic children receive their First Holy Communion. Boys dress up in suits and ties. Girls wear fancy white dresses and lace veils. All of your Catholic relatives turnout and a few of your non-Catholic relatives might show also. They make a pretty big deal out of it.

Prior to First Communion, you have to do First Confession. In the six years since your Baptism, you might have committed some sins that you need to confess so that you are worthy to receive Communion.

In the early 1960s, it was still the practice that confession took place in a confessional booth. Unfortunately, those facilities were not wheelchair accessible. So I had to do my confession in some private space face-to-face with the priest. We had a small enclosed area in the back corner of the church called “the cry room.” It had glass windows in the front and a small speaker from the PA system. Parents would take crying babies and unruly toddlers into that room. For me, it was the confessional. I would meet with the priest either before or after Mass and he would hear my confession there.

It wasn’t until the reforms of Vatican II that it became normal for everyone to use a Reconciliation Chapel and do Confession face-to-face. So, I was ahead of my time. Eventually, that cry room became the official Reconciliation Chapel for everyone to use although we still retained a slightly remodeled confessional booth as an option.

The Second Vatican Council, a.k.a. Vatican II was a meeting called by Pope John XXIII that lasted from 1961 through 1965. All of the bishops of the world were called together for a series of four sessions in which they produced documents intended to help make the church more relevant in the 20th century and beyond. Among the obvious reforms which came out of that Council was that the celebration of the Catholic Mass would no longer be in Latin. It would be the language of wherever you resided.

They also made changes to some of the rules of discipline. For example, it was a practice that Catholics were supposed to abstain from eating meat on Friday. The theory behind it, which nobody understood as it was never taught, was that you were supposed to take the money that you saved by not eating meat and give it to the poor. So, if rather than having a 15-cent hamburger, you went out and ate a big fancy expensive lobster dinner, you had fulfilled the letter of the law but had missed the point. As I said, that reasoning wasn’t taught. All we were taught was, “It’s a rule and if you don’t follow it, it’s a sin.” Another aspect of the practice was that it was practicing self-discipline.

Similarly stricter rules about fasting during the season of Lent were also about denying oneself little things so as to have the spiritual strength to deny temptation in more important things.

Throughout the 1960s as the Vatican II reforms were promulgated, the rules kept changing. I didn’t have to abstain from meat until I was seven because young children were exempt. Then about the time I was eight or nine, they changed it to 14 so I was able to eat meat on Friday again. By the time I turned 14, they got rid of the rule altogether except during Lent.

Before they changed the rules, the requirement to abstain from meat on Fridays was a source of great consternation for my mother. Because I attended public school, she couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t serve me meet for lunch on Fridays. She had a long conversation with the priest in which he convinced her it was okay. She and the other Catholic moms at the public special education school traded notes on how to have that conversation with their pastor.

My only memory of violating the rule was on my eighth birthday. Mom was in the hospital dealing with maternity issues. Grandma Young, from my non-Catholic side of the family, was taking care of me and fixed me a hot dog for lunch. Perhaps I will burn in hell.

Legend has it that during Vatican II when they decided to relax the rules regarding abstaining from meat on Friday someone asked, “What then of all of the souls burning in hell for eating meat on Friday?” The reply was, “Just because we sentenced them to eternal damnation doesn’t mean that God actually carried out the sentence.” So, maybe I’ve still got a chance. I’m pretty sure I brought it up at my next confession.

In our next episode, I will continue to discuss the reformer of Vatican II and the effect it had on me and my struggles to accept the teachings of the Church.

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I’ll see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe.