The Cross And The Flag
It never was a walk in the park being a Catholic in
Connecticut – or, for that matter, anywhere in New England. Italian and Catholic
Irish “papists” in the post-Civil War period could routinely expect ill treatment,
and sometimes outright persecution.
In Boston, during the American Revolution, voices raised in
celebration of religious freedom were also turned, almost mechanically, against
orthodox Catholics. In a frequent celebration
reminiscent of Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, an effigy of the Pope seated on a chair
was carried through the streets of colonial Boston and liberally pelted with
rocks and rotten fruit by the anti-Catholic mob. Wealthy merchants, the River
Kings of the Connecticut Valley, joined in the fun, as did Boston ministers who
had conveniently put aside the central tenant of Christianity: Do unto others as you would have them do unto
you.
Following election to the presidency of John Kennedy – a Catholic
in chains who had to assure voters he was not an agent of the pope -- it was
thought that this many headed hydra had been disposed of, once and for all. But
anti-Catholicism runs deep. The historian Arthur Schlesinger, whose father was a Prussian Jew and whose mother was
an Austrian Catholic, wrote that anti-Catholicism was the oldest and most enduring
of American prejudices, a live option in both Jamestown and Plymouth Colony. Like
the underground river in the Yucatan Peninsula, considered the longest in the
world, prejudices run hidden from view and occasionally splash up to the
surface – which brings us to Saint Oronzo, the patron Saint of Lecce in
Southern Italy, located on the heel of Italy’s boot on the Adriatic facing
Albania.
What we know of Oronzo, the cultus of the Saint, comes to us
by way of a twelfth century manuscript. It is doubtful anyone in Windsor Locks
was familiar with this record, including the pastor of Saint Mary’s Church,
Father Finance – his real name.
According to the legend, Justus, a disciple of Saint Paul,
was on his way to Rome when he was shipwrecked on the beach of San Cataldo de
Lecce. During his stopover, Justus converted two citizens of Lecce, Orontius (Oronzo)
and his nephew Fortunatus. Fortune had smiled on Oronzo whose father, Publius,
had been treasurer during the reign of Emperor Nero.
. Oronzo had succeeded to his position
when his father died. In affirming Christianity, Oronzo had much to lose and
only a martyr’s crown to win.
Denounced as Christians, Oronzo and Fortuatus fled to
Corinth, where Oronzo met Saint Paul. He was confirmed as the first Bishop of
Lecce but shortly after was imprisoned along with his nephew by Nero’s
representative Antonius, who threatened to kill them both if they did not
reject their new religion. Nero, and other Caesars as well, were sticklers on
the point. The two converted Christians
refused and yet were released. After preaching at the Salento and at Bari, they
were again arrested by Antonius and executed by axe a short distance from Lecce
on August 26. Oronzo had earned his martyr’s crown. Justus was also martyred.
Nero, caught in a power struggle, later lost the backing of important senators and
was compelled to commit suicide following an all too frequent upsurge in
republican virtue -- very inconvenient to tyrants -- that occurred regularly
during the reigns of Suetonius’ twelve Caesars, nearly every one of whom was
mad as a hatter.
Father Finance, however, was not a fan.
The good father had been assigned to Windsor Locks to
increase contributions and so put the books of Saint Mary’s in balance. His
homilies were peppered with admonitions to accomplish this end: “Now, don’t you
bother putting coins in the basket this Sunday. The collectors are straining
under all that weight. Paper currency would be kinder, and more charitable
too.”
No one in Windsor Locks minded pocket book appeals.
Businesses, the townsfolk knew, needed money to grind along, and the church
was, among other things, a business. They were prepared to be generous. Father
Finance’s calls to repent and empty your pockets for the greater glory of God
and his church were kindly if not warmly received. His flock uncomplainingly acceded to Father
Finances’ pleas for more generous contributions. But there was something off-putting about
this priest. First of all: “Finance” – what sort of a name
was that? What country did the man hail from, and what town? Clearly, he was
not Italian. Was his name a nom de guerre? Why was he so thin?
Tapeworms? And those sharp elbows, what did they signify? And what was his beef
with Saint Oronzo? It could not have been the statue; the church was full of
them. The ceremony then? Could that be it? A priest who was averse to
ceremonies would be positively irreligious: The mass was a ceremony, and a
joyous one at that. To what private joy did Father Finance bend his knee? What
WAS his problem?
The town was, for the most part, sorrowful at
the passing of Father Finance. His obituary in the Windsor Locks Journal gave the priest his due, There was – Carlo the fox apart – little overt
anti-clericalism among Italians in the post-war world. Many of the old Italians
were rarely overt with anyone but Italians; and even here, one had to take care.
Prudence was nearly always the better part of valor, and Italians, when I was a
boy, did not want to stink in the nostrils of those prejudiced against them.
The Italians in the town – and, most especially, the carpetbaggers
who came from out of town – are not likely to remember the substance of Father Finance’s
homilies.
Father Finance often grew warm citing Mathew 6: 1-3: “Beware
of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise
you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. 2 So when you give to the
poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues
and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you,
they have their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the
poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,…”
Most likely, the priest’s tender sensibilities were bruised by the Oronzo ceremony, part of which involved a greasy pole climbing contest
at the park, where the festivities concluded with songs, some in Italian, wine drinking and …
the food! Women brought with them their favorite dishes. The poor here were not
fed crumbs from the table. Everyone feasted. Everyone noticed everyone. The
kind of humility recommended by Mathew was nowhere in evidence on Saint Oronzo’s
Day. The men played games. The women, veiled in the church, now
cast off their veils and paraded their finery. Oronzo’s green money-covered cloak was
returned to Father Finance – who, unfortunately, was indisposed.
The very moment the church doors had burst open -- Saint Oronzo
hoisted on the shoulders of the celebrants in his red cloak -- the doors of the
rectory were disgorging Father Finance, who appeared to be, to the crowd approaching
the Saint with fistfuls of dollars, rejoicing with the saints in Heaven. Later, after the festivities had been
concluded, word went round that Father Finance had breathed his last as
his body was being carried towards the ambulance under the very hand of the Saint, outstretched as if in benediction.
Carlo kept his own counsel. He had no confessor and rarely
visited Saint Mary’s Church. Nuns, in particular, set his soul spinning. Saint
Mary’s parochial school, to which he sent his children, was just off Center Street,
a short three minute walk from the homestead. The school’s nuns, the Sisters of
Saint Joseph, a teaching order, would pass his house in a clump on their
peregrinations. Outside tending his roses or pruning his fruit trees, The Old
Man, as we affectionately called him, could easily spot them flocking down the
hill, their black habits fluttering in a breeze like the broken arms of crows,
at which he would hustle into the house and, for all we knew, hide under his
bed. Something about the nuns stirred some deep antipathy in his psyche.
My brother, sister and I have often speculated about all
this. Had the nuns beat him when he was child in Costa Nescovato, Italy, a
small town only two miles from Castellania, where his wife, Louise Imperiali,
hailed from? His fear or repulsion was palpable, even a bit hysterical. There
was, according to my mother, some difficulty in Costa Nescovato. Carlo returned
to his hometown once and was badly beaten. My cousin Bill Mandrola (he spells
the family name differently) has done yeoman’s work unearthing data from old
ship manifests. Bill speculates that Louise, who came to Windsor Lock alone a
year or two before Carlo, may have expanded her age a bit on the manifest
sheet. A young woman traveling alone might have excited a good deal of
curiosity and interest, both of which were sometimes fatal to immigration
ambitions. She was, according to the ship’s manifest, unmarried; Carlo,
however, reported himself as married. Could they have married in Italy? Bill
concludes they likely married here.
In the absence of hard and reliable data, the imagination
runs riot.
“What was the problem in Italy?” I asked my mother.
“Don’t know. He visited once and came back badly beaten.”
A modest discretion at such moments is understandable: A beating at the hands of your friends or enemies is not the sort of trophy one puts on the shelf to entice the
admiration of family members.
There are various theories. A card game gone bad, brother
Jim speculated; certainly a possibility. But a romance gone bad, a craftily
arranged elopement, a sudden quarrel with toughs in the town, all might account
for the beating. Why did Carlo return to
Italy in the first place? He had already escaped the “difficulty,” why return
to it? Jim’s alternate theory was that Carlo fled Italy to America to escape the draft.
Perhaps he bumped into an engorged and patriotic Sergeant Macaroni on his
return to Costa Nescovato, which was not too far from Casalnoceto, where the
Pescis hunkered down.
Carlo treated nuns in particular as if they had been witches who might put a spell on him. It has become fashionable in our time to denigrate nuns and
priests, the whole lot of them, as – well, parochial, when in reality, they
were focused on their vocations. Not all but some of the nuns were brilliant and accomplished. Catholics who have had in their childhood an intimate and warm relation with nuns denigrate them later on to satisfy the neo-pagans who surround them in a de-Christianized culture. Growing away from the church rather than into it, they have become stunted Catholics. Is there anyone more destructive than a Catholic who has turned his face against his church? It was a nun who taught me how to draw. She
was herself an accomplished artist, and she tutored me because she saw in me
some raw talent that, with a little nurturing, might blossom into something
that would bring me joy. This nun, whose name I think was Sister Ursula, sang as she
drew, lovely melodies that sweetened the dull air of the school. I will never forget her flashing, encouraging smile. She had no reason
at all to favor me, a stupid and thoughtless boy, with her attentions.
“What would you like to draw?”
“I don’t know, sister.”
“Do you like birds?”
She deduced from my blank expression I had no great
affection for birds.
“Red birds! Glorious red birds! Not Robin Red Breasts. Do
you know the story of Robin Red Breast?”
I pleaded ignorance.
“I will tell you. When Jesus was hanging on the cross,
beaten and bloody, crowned with thorns, forsaken of all, but for the few
apostles who stood below him along with his dear weeping mother and other women, the Father in
Heaven, who forsakes no one, not even thieves and murderers, sent to his Son a
sparrow that sang to him a pretty song and pulled and pulled at the nails
fastening him to the cross. And what do you think? Blood from the Savior of all
men fell on the breast of the sparrow. And forever after and all, there were in
the world Robin Red Breasts, among the first birds to appear in the spring,
when winter has been frightened off by the great promise of new life. But
today…today, for you my child, we will draw THIS bird…”
And she pulled from behind her black habit a picture of a scarlet
cardinal sitting on a spring twig, its flaming red head turned in the direction
of a boy stricken with wild anticipation. It was as if I had never seen the
color red before.
Her eyes were wide, and her voice had in it the lilt of
Irish I had heard before in the voice of Mr. Shaw, an old man who swept with a
huge scythe the hill I climbed every day to reach Saint Mary’s, pausing every
so often to sharpen his blade with a whetstone. I sat in the tall grass, invisible
I thought, while he, swinging his great scythe, mowed down my cover. And there I was, caught hiding and seeking, his smile sweeping over me.
Together we painted the cardinal. Sister sang softly a quiet
tune. Decades later, when I hear the piercing whistle of a cardinal or
see a blast of red skittering through the trees, I almost remember the sister’s
song.
I can’t remember whether it was Donna or I who first
discovered that Santa Claus – not the real saint, but the chimney dropper whose
familiar image was penned by Thomas Nast, the anti-Catholic bigot – was what
Christian denialists have since come to call a “myth.”
It may have been Donna; she was my Christopher Columbus. I
can’t recall the date of the awful discovery either. The reality of Santa was
just one of those “white lies” you felt compelled to keep intact for the sake
of younger children. For this reason, the nuns at St. Mary’s would resort to permissible
subterfuge when they were asked by youngsters of a certain age whether Santa
was real. A white lie was, in common parlance, what Catholic theologians might
have called an evasion.
Catholic theologians will tell you that it is, on very
rare occasions, permissible to depart from the governing rule: Tell the truth
and shame the Devil. If a justa causa can
be established, a difficult barrier to surmount, four actions are then permitted:
a material but not a formal lie, an equivocation, an evasion, or silence.
Example: St. Augustine says that if a murderer stops you on a road and asks
which way his victim went, it’s permissible to mislead him. I do not know
whether the existence of the Clement Moore-Thomas Nast Santa falls into this
straight jacket of the permissible lie. I do know what a proper nun-like
response to the question “Is Santa real?” might be, because I put just that
question to Sister Immaculata. Her curt response was: “Ask your father.” I
suppose some Catholic theologians might regard the Santa white lie as a hybrid
equivocation-evasion. Boys when I was a boy were geniuses in evasive action; we
hated bald faced lies, but loved the loops that led us round inconvenient truths
to safe and pleasant harbors.
In my case, the arrival of Christmas was associated with things
other than gift-giving, among them the arrival of the Pertusi brothers from New
York, the good cheer that banged on the back door, both before and after the
Great Day, in the form of my boisterous uncles and their more quiet and subdued
wives, the plenteous feast laid out by my mother, Saint Mary’s Church,
garlanded and wreathed by religious women, rising like a prayer above the snow,
the story of the First Christmas, a mewling babe in a crib, pondered over by
shepherds and wise men from the East, the great joy and sorrow that intersect
like shining swords on this day when salvation opened its mothering arms to a
wounded world.
“Sit there,” my busy mother would say – “there” was the
bench that stretched the length of the kitchen window – while she puttered
about the kitchen, readying things for the following day, when she must accommodate
the crowd of family and visitors that would sit around the dining room table, brimming
with good cheer, chattering all at once, exploding in laughter, my uncles
provoking the sly joy poured out abundantly in the stories they told, in the
good natured ribbing they administered equitably to all but themselves.
And there I would sit, turned slightly, looking out the
window – waiting, waiting, waiting. So crisp was the snowfull day that everyone
walking down Suffield Street towards Main Street was preceded by semitransparent
balloons of breath that fogged white at the touch of air.
My line of sight was fixed on Pellegrini’s house across
North Main Street. There was a small clump of Maple trees that abutted the
Pelligrini house, until one merry Christmas, when Louie Peligrini had been given
his heart’s desire, an axe that fitted nicely into a holster that hung from his
scout’s belt, this lumberjack of the neighborhood rushed out, while his parents
were not at home, to do battle with the half dozen Maple trees and, plying his
axe to them, felled them all. His father, I believe, beat a good deal of sense
into Louie following this misadventure.
To the right of the Pelligrini house stood two tall twin
towers, a small house perched on top. Years later, Phil Lombardi and I would
summon up enough courage to climb the corkscrew stairs that led from the ground
to the house, wondering as we scaled them the purpose of the chute that
followed the same twisted path. It was, we discovered after sliding down it
several times, a coal chute no longer in use. The siloes on either side of the
stairs and chute, now empty, once held coal. We returned home that night at about seven
o’clock, the hour at which we did a good deal of our mischief, our backs
scarred with black soot, two very apologetic boys. My mother knew instantly
what had happened, sent me to the shower and burned my clothes. Lombardi’s
mother was less accommodating.
The train, arriving at the station, had already hooted a
warning to the cars crossing the metal framed bridge that connected Windsor
Locks with Warehouse Point, the oldest section of East Windsor, so called
because there, when Windsor itself was a colonial fort, strong men would ferry
trade across the Connecticut River on barges pushed forward with long poles,
carted up and down the river by horses. The metal bridge is now gone, replaced
by a Soviet styled concrete affair, unbeautiful, cold and eminently practical.
The one-sided Main Street that leant character to the town is gone, a victim of
the redevelopment fervor that struck Connecticut in the mid-1960’s. Gone is the
Realto Theatre, the Donut Kettle, Marconi’s and the many bars along Main Street
that filled the air with the odor of hops and whisky. All gone.
But let me call it back for a farewell kiss.
I was fourteen in 1957, seated at the kitchen window bench,
my eyes fixed on that point at which North Main Street disappeared at the foot
of what we boys called Bunker Hill. Every rise of hill in the town was at that
time a Bunker Hill for boys who cherished the honor and heroism of Connecticut
revolutionary soldiers, farmers like Israel Putman who dropped his plow when
told his countrymen had been fired upon in Boston and rushed with his comrades
to fight the redcoats. The train whistle had cracked the cold air. Beneath me I
could feel warm gusts arising from a hissing radiator that had to be bled every
so often – or it would explode and carry us through a hole in the kitchen wall,
dumping us, shocked but not seriously injured, into the piling snow. And I was
waiting, waiting, waiting…
And then, miraculously, the hill disgorged the Pertusi
brothers, John and Anthony.
I screamed, “They’re here.”
Now Christmas could begin.