Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: March 25, 2002
Latest Update: March 26, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

My Church

Painting by jeanne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photo by Richard Perry

Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, March 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

My painting was inspired by Richard Perry's New York Times photograph, in The Week in Review of the New York Times on Sunday, March 24, 2002. At p. WK 3. The photo accompanied Adam Liptak's commentary on sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Church and State: A Case That Grew in Shadows. Link added March 26, 2002.

I turned to the article on Sunday, expecting merely to note it in our files on religion. Richard Perry's photograph was a 4 x 6 in black and white, and it was arresting, but not alarming. It simply evoked all the Catholic churches of my childhood. Not the confessionals. I never got that far. Mother always yanked me out of school or church before that day came.

I was more intrigued by Adam Liptak's analysis of the effects of settlement on the prosecution of rape and child molestation. I had just posted another article on the effects of settlements in civil law suits against agencies. I was caught up in contemplating the complexities of discourse. It isn't simple, you know. And it was the complexity I wished to document as I turned to the online edition of the New York Times.

There I encountered the smaller color version of Richard Perry's photo. And there I stopped to paint.

A week or so ago, I read Cardinal Mahoney's letter to Catholics on the sexual abuse debacle currently of such concern. I read and calmly posted Cardinal Mahoney's letter and several other items pertaining to the case. And I was cool. I could calmly lecture on the situation, and answer student's concerns. I could handle this. And then I stared at Richard Perry's photo.

I wasn't cool. And I couldn't handle it well at all. I kept seeing the Archdiocese's form for reporting suspected cases of abuse. And I kept reminding myself that it was almost sixty years ago. I briefly toyed with the thought of reporting it. Very briefly. Not only was it sixty years ago, meaning that most of us involved were grown old or dead. The Archdiocese is thinking of now, the present, children now.

What good would it do? Now? All these years later? to speak of IT? It has no name in my memory. It's an IT. I never use her name, the nun involved, not even in my memories when they insist upon replaying, and that happens only rarely now. I do not name her in my memory, nor do I name the nun she later joined in the convent. That must be like the voodoo her aunt practiced; if I don't name it, it can't exist.

The magic of the South. The Blessing of the Virgin, who didn't get there in time. The hidden and terrifying guilt of it all behind those heavy velvet curtains of the confessionals. And not a single sane adult at hand. The teachings of the church. Indeed.

I was frightened for a long time. But disappearing worked. I had learned long ago how to hide from the adults I was afraid of. I was lucky. I was able to disappear. I had some agency of where and how I went, even as such a small child. And she was much older than I. We didn't go to the same school. Only families did we share.

Just a few years later, at seventeen, she entered the convent to join her lover. As the Bride of Christ. All the adults cried at the sacrifice she was making to expiate the sins of her mother, who had lived unwed with Dewey before she married him. Yes, he has a name, but maybe it isn't the right name. It was all so long ago, and I never really saw much of him except on solemn occasions such as this. I must be granting names only to those several degrees removed from the center of things.

Our mothers cried together at the thought of all she was doing to make our lives right and pure. I must have disappeared a lot. It didn't hurt, not to tell, not to speak of IT. Now, it just seems kind of funny, how self-deceived they all were. But after all the preparations and parties, I recall none of it. I think I must have wanted to see her become the bride. Diaz made me a bride doll for the occasion. But I can't recall the ceremony at all.

Years later I asked a psychiatrist how it could have happened. How they could not have known, how she could have managed the deceit. But I was thirty by then, and understood that the world is rarely what it seems.

Yes, Cardinal Mahoney, you do need to know. And you do need to reach the children. Some of us are not able to handle it, not so young as we were, and not so trusting as we still need to be. IT happened in another diocese many miles from here, in another culture, the culture of the South. But there should have been somewhere for me to go, an adult somewhere who didn't need the self-deception that I had to live with.

---

---