Coming up Catholic: a Woman's Evolving Experience of Religion

"When I was five, I remember going to church," recounts Reenie Mastrella, 56. "The most important part of the mass was the consecration of the Eucharist. It's a long period of kneeling during which the priest speaks and transubstantiation occurs... Back then, in the early 1960s, you knelt for what seemed to be at least fifteen minutes and, as a five year old, I think I must've been really bored." Transubstantiation, it should be made clear, is a term used by the Catholic Church to denote the supernatural transformation of the Eucharist—the bread and wine that is the sacrament and centerpiece of any Catholic mass—into the actual flesh and blood of Christ.

She goes on: "So during the part where the priest is naming the apostles and all the first popes and the angels and archangels I started speaking what the priest was saying. I said it out loud, in front of everyone. Well, my father talked to me after church but I did it again the following week. And he kept me home from church for a couple of weeks [because of that]."

Reenie is a lifelong Catholic, much her family, traced back to her grandmother, originally hailing from Sicily, a heavily Catholic region of Italy, itself one of the more religiously devout and traditionally Catholic European nations—what with Rome being its capital.

Reenie counts herself as a more "progressive" member of her church, as opposed to many Catholics who are otherwise conservative on any number of issues. (This perhaps being a more popular conception of the average Catholic by secular society.) She explains that, despite her now-strong sense of devotion, her journey through faith has been one that is, at times, bumpy. This is made especially clear by her experiences attending Catholic school in the '60s, during which time her instructor was a strict nun:

"Coincidentally, in Kindergarten, Sister Eymard, who must've been at least 80 years old [at that time]—because she taught some of my classmates' parents and even some of their grandparents—she told us that if you didn't go to church on Sunday you were breaking a [religious] commandment: a mortal sin for which you would go to hell. And, because I had been restricted from going to church [by my father], I went home for lunch that day and didn't go back to school because I was throwing up, I was so upset. I couldn't tell my mother or father why I was so upset. Thus began my first panic attack, at the age of five."

Reenie explains that Sister Eymard, taking fire-and-brimstone lessons for granted—mere facts of life which presented no concern for a pious sister of the Church—was unaware of the fact that she had induced so much terror in her student, assuming that the reason young Reenie never returned to school that day was because she had had an upset stomach:

"The next day I went to school: In the morning Sister Eymard asked me, "Are you better today?" and I said, "Yes."

She asked, "Did you vomit?" and because, as a Kindergartner, I didn't know what that word meant, I said, "I don't know." And she made me go sit on the "baby bench"—where you had to sit if you were naughty—for ten minutes."

It was never really made clear to Reenie what she had done to deserve the dreaded "baby bench", though she now assumes that Sister Eymard, not very discerning as an 80-something, thought her a liar.

"That was one of my first memories in regards to religion," she says. "It didn't turn me off, but it did scare me a bunch."

Penance is different for 5-to-7-year-olds, who naturally aren't as adept as adults—or nuns, for that matter—in repeating their Hail Marys. Perhaps the "baby bench" is harsh in the mind of a young child, but it certainly beats the hairshirts and whips of past (and current, albeit fringe) penitents. Now, that's not to deride the Catholic Church as wholly fanatical or "primitive" (what that term really means in the context of religion and culture is pretty ambiguous, anyway): Many Catholic schools have transformed in the past half century, evolving alongside their mother church into more progressive, socially- and religiously-liberal institutions, a transition which has left a number of traditionalist sub-groups of the Roman Catholic Church to retain older and more conservative doctrines.

Even though she admits that she doesn't really attend church, at least not regularly (and thus perhaps doesn't know Catholic-Christian doctrines as comprehensively as more frequent attendees might), and that readily disagrees with some of the Vatican's official dogma, at the end of the day, Reenie explains, she finds Catholicism a relatively inclusive faith—that absenteeism doesn't affect her sense of spirituality on an inner, experiential level:

"I still feel religious even though I don't go to church—I still feel Catholic—even though I don't agree with some of the policies of the Church today."

This, she says, despite some frightening first impressions:

"Every day [at Catholic school], in the morning, we did the Baltimore Catechism, which included questions that you had to answer:

""Who made the world?"

""God made the world."

""What are angels?"

""Angels are spirits with bodily eyes."

"... Except I was too scared to ask Sister Eymard what a "bodily eye" was."

To one unfamiliar with the Baltimore Catechism, which is the official children's catechism (a summary of Catholic doctrines) in the United States, the term "bodily eyes" may indeed sound disturbing. To be sure, something as simple as a church, all on its own, can be ominous for a child: The adult world, which often makes such sharp distinctions between the sacred and mundane, must appear quite strange to the most kids, who are often more concerned with things like bubbles or action figures than the destiny of humanity and the creator of the universe.

Yet, as with most things in life, repetition makes for acclimation. For the malleable mind of a Kindergartner, a few years of anything and it may very well become normalized. Hence religion, in whatever form, has been handed down generation after generation.

Granted, it helps when your religion itself changes, if not at least to spruce up its image and presentation:

"Every first Friday of the month we went to church. I had a hard time sitting still: I remember that. I think back then I was scared of God, although I kind of liked the mysticism—the sacredness. I almost thought of him (God) like the Wizard of Oz. [Still,] God was very scary. God seemed very far removed from me. But then, after I left Catholic school, when I went to public school, we just did Bible school. You know, "CCD", they call it. It was also the 70s, and there were guitar masses, and there seemed to be, like—this was after Vatican II—so it seemed like the Church was trying make God more friendly, more approachable."

To clarify, in an era and area of relatively rapid socio-cultural change (specifically the West in the 20th and 21st centuries—compare the rate of change in this region during these centuries to the same stretch of the world during the entire Medieval period, and you'll immediately notice the difference in pace), it helps a religion recruit more adherents to keep abreast of such transformation by making itself more dynamic, more malleable, and more accessible to the average person. Such modernization was the purpose of the Second Vatican Council—"Vatican II"—which convened in Rome in 1962 under the direction of Pope John XXIII, and by all estimates this worked out remarkably well. The changes brought on by Vatican II, perhaps most notably, included replacing the liturgical language of the Catholic Mass, Latin, with the vernacular language of any given area in which the mass was being celebrated: In other words, after nearly two thousand years (the Catholic Church's history stretches back to near the time of Christ) everyone could suddenly understand the mass, regardless of what language they spoke. If this doesn't count as an overhaul, I don't know what does.

For many Roman Catholics, Vatican II redefined their relationship with the Church. For some it even redefined their relationship with God himself, bringing him further "down to earth", and perhaps closer to the heart of the individual believer:

"I liked that God a bunch more," says Reenie. "So, I became more religious. And I still like the mystery and the sacredness—the mystical aspect—of going to church with candles and all that, but I also like God just being a pal."

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