News item: A new study by the University of Chicago found that the percentage of Americans describing themselves as religious has declined from 62 percent to 54 percent since 2006, while the number of people who pray is on the rise.
I had never felt such pain.
I lay in bed, legs on fire, as though slashed with a piece of broken glass. Yet there was no attacker, no weapon. No one to beg for help.
In tears, I had to endure everything in silence. For I was divinely gifted with the stigmata, the same wounds that Jesus had suffered during his crucifixion.
I mean, what the heck else could it be? It was Easter Week in 1963. I was a 13-year-old Catholic schoolboy. And the stigmata, I thought, was the extreme culmination to everything I’d suffered since Lent began five weeks earlier.
The worst was the Stations of the Cross. Every Friday at 3 p.m., instead of going home for a two-day vacation from the nuns and the priests, we were marched in silence to St. Bernadette Church.
We would stand and wait in the pews until Father O’Brien came out in a purple robe to read the first of the 14 detailed steps leading to Jesus’ execution. Then we’d wait some more until he walked to the second of 14 wall plaques encircling the church walls.
“The second station — Jesus carries the cross,” said O’Brien, who then commenced reading a full page about the heavy wooden cross that Jesus must haul up the mountain.
When he stopped reading, we recited a series of prayers. Then on to the third station when Jesus fell in the dirt, his face soaked in sweat, blood dripping from where the crown of thorns stuck in his skull. More reading and more prayers.
I was ghoulishly mesmerized the first time I attended the Stations — the same feeling I often had while watching horror movies on TV’s “Shock Theater.”
But hours of those agonizing descriptions repeated every Friday afternoon, week after week, and it’s no wonder we kids howled like coyotes when it ended — pulling off our school ties and sprinting out the church’s double doors as fast as we could run.
I’d always felt guilty about hollering for joy while Jesus remained stuck in church.
Back then, Lent also involved fasting on the weekdays and giving up the things we treasured such as potato chips and cartoons. And we had to save every dime and nickel in special cardboard banks that we handed over to Father O’Brien on Easter Sunday.
The torment would peak during Easter week, with interminable ceremonies and torturous kneeling, which I can still feel in my back.
Years later, I recognized that my “stigmata” had actually been my first-ever leg cramps, likely brought on from Pony League baseball tryouts.
And as much as I hated Lent, I had to hand it to Father O’Brien and the church leaders because I finally understood that the strategy to compel suffering for your church leads to lifelong devotion and financial support of the clergy. It’s the same psychology behind Stockholm syndrome, in which kidnap victims become loyal and loving to their cruel captors, long after being freed.
It’s the same kind of dogged commitment to Catholic doctrine as evidenced by many long-suffering married couples remaining miserable until death because of the church’s prohibition on divorce.
The same quasi-militaristic Catholicism that led my otherwise kind and compassionate relatives to ostracize whole other segments of the population for their sexual orientation, cultural or religious affiliation, or even their political inclination, if it didn’t conform to Roman Catholic prescriptions.
The same blind faith of congregations in some major U.S. cities and in Ireland that would lead bishops to think it was easy, child’s play, to shuffle and hide pedophile priests with impunity.
The same guilt-laden upbringing that necessitated sleepless nights for me and a prodigious effort of will to skip my first Sunday Mass and repudiate my pastor, my parents and the only Lord I had ever known.
I felt profoundly alone for the first time in my life. And I could not even pray.
Ironically, I eventually drew relief from the Stations of the Cross. For there was one plaque I kept seeing in my head — the sixth station, when a woman wiped Jesus’ face with a cool clean cloth. It was the only one of the 14 paintings in which his face was not wracked in pain. Instead, his head was tilted slightly upward, his smile grateful, his eyes at peace.
Of course, it was just some unknown artist’s rendering. But it reminded me that Jesus was not to blame. Instead, it was those who hijacked his church and twisted his message from loving your neighbor to manifestos that suited their greed, pride, power and hypocrisy.
I can finally pray again if I want. But like so many others, I’m still all alone.
David McGrath, a former resident of Evergreen Park and Oak Forest, is an emeritus professor of English at the College of DuPage.
