In the Wake of the Scandals A SPECIAL SECTION

Joyce Kiefer A Life-long Catholic Examines Her Faith in the Wake of the Child-Molesting Scandals

WHY I GO TO MASS Joyce at Holy Communion at age seven

It's not the time to desert
a faith that sustains you

By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com

 

I was relaxing at home one evening when my son Dave, a newspaper reporter, called on his cell phone. “The Catholic Church is slime,” he told me breathlessly as he drove home through the maze-like traffic of his local freeway. He had just conducted a wrenching interview with a victim of priestly sexual abuse and couldn’t wait to share this thought with his mom.

My husband and I had raised him in the Church, just as we were raised.

Dave had a question for me: “How can you keep going to Mass? I want to know.”

Like our other two children, Dave stopped attending Mass once he went away to college. My husband has stopped going, too. Alone, I still show up every week. Neither my family nor my friends truly understand why, since I seem to have veered away from the Church in other ways. They attribute this habit to the unpredictability of my personality. Since I’m neither an evangelist nor an apologist, I leave it there.

But I have to answer my son. As I thought about what to say, I knew I’d have to take a close look at my own spiritual Odyssey. Perhaps there was no journey at all; perhaps I’ve simply stood still, feet firmly planted in loyalty and fear, not even moving to the outer reaches of a circle.

I learned loyalty early on as I made my way through the eight grades of St. Matthew’s School during the mid-40’s and early ‘50’s. Enemies have buffeted the church in the past, the nuns told us, they were doing it now, and they will continue to do so until Judgment Day.

For current event studies we brought in pictures from the papers and magazines of the tortured cardinals in Eastern Europe who were going through show trials by the Communist governments. By extension, the nuns said, our local parish priests were also heroes. Like the churchmen of Hungary and Poland, they sacrificed their lives to the Church. God Himself had set priests aside as “special.” At ordination He stamped the mark of Holy Orders on their souls. That meant that only they could work the central miracle of Mass–changing the bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ, just as Christ himself had done at the Last Supper. As Graham Greene showed in his novel “The Power and the Glory” a priest is forever, no matter how far he falls from grace. He can always perform his sacred duty. Therefore, he always belongs to God and the church.

Priests were also specially designated to hear confessions. This gave them the sacramental privilege of probing my soul. I feared that someday Father might recognize my voice behind the plastic panel in the confessional and tell me he’d heard the same sins of disobedience from me before. He would decide that I was not truly repentant and was therefore making a bad confession. I figured that a bad confession edged near blasphemy. Of course one could go to a different priest for each confession, but the nuns told us we should go to the same one to do it right.

For me, the best confessor was the one with the fastest-moving line.

My biggest source of fear was breaking church law. Doing so was a mortal sin which, unconfessed, would send me to hell. But what if I didn’t memorize all of them and broke one I didn’t know about? Was that culpable ignorance? I could understand going to hell for blasphemy or murder, but for eating meat on Fridays or more than once on Ember Days? That seemed a bit extreme.

You needed a liturgical calendar, handed out after Mass in January, to keep track of those capricious Ember Days. They were established in the 11th Century to ask God’s blessing on the seasons. Since they preceded seasonal feast days whose dates changed every year, you couldn’t predict their dates like Christmas. Ember Days occurred in clusters of three and were signified by a half-fish on the calendar, except the ones that fell on Friday which, like all Fridays, got a whole fish. The half-fish meant that you could eat meat only once that day and it had to be at the main meal which, in turn, had to equal more than sum total of the two other meals eaten that day if you were an adult. For them, Ember Days were also fast days. All kids had to do was watch out for baloney sandwiches.

If God had included specific rules about Fridays and Ember Days in the Ten Commandments, I could accept the hell fire. But how could rules invented by priests who didn’t have to plan their own menus have the same serious consequences as those made up by God? My overwrought imagination showed me wearing my St. Matthew’s middy blouse and pleated wool skirt while sweating out an eternal hot day, all because I screwed up an Ember Day. My companions would include Hitler, Catholics who divorced and remarried, teenagers who went “too far” in the back seat of a car and died before they got to confession, and Stalin. Salvation was pretty dicey.

I believed that one of the main services the clergy performed for us was to convey but mostly protect the truth down the ages from persecution and from those heretical Protestants, some who lived in our very neighborhood. I considered the inclusive “us” as a world-wide collection of those who attended Mass every week and who accepted without question the theology of the Church, its rules and its actions. Catholics who did not do these things were said to be “out of the church.” Figuratively, I was somewhere near the door because my family wasn’t Irish and I was an only child.

But really, some aspects of growing up Catholic were simply wonderful. They form part of the reason I still attend Mass. I loved the liturgy as it took us through Christ’s life each year in a beautifully sensuous way. The music, the colors, the incense, the very moods of the Masses and processions reflected this cyclical progression from birth through resurrection and beyond. These glorious ceremonies affirmed the basic fact that we were made to know, love and serve God in this world and be happy with Him in the next. That succinct line from the Baltimore Catechism, which we had to memorize, served to anchor my life with a sense of purpose. As for divine maintenance, I learned that God had a sense of design for my life. It was up to me to figure it out and to stay in close touch when things were rough and also when they went just fine. These lessons still serve me well.

At Mass we listened to the priest read portions of the epistles or the Old Testament. We stood up when he read the gospel. The nuns told us that reading the Bible on our own was fraught with danger. A priest should be on hand for interpretation, otherwise we would make the mistake of Protestants and spin off to create personal religions based on faulty understanding.

Years later I would hunger for this forbidden fruit and step into enemy territory to get it. By then ecumenism had erased the warlike demarcations between Catholics and Protestants. However, I’m still needled when some evangelicals do not consider Catholics to be Christians.

I was overjoyed to marry into the perfect Catholic family, although the Kiefers were of German extraction, not Irish. There were four children in my husband Bill’s family and multiples of that number in the families of aunts and uncles. As soon as Kiefer ancestors arrived from Europe, they organized and built churches. Bill’s parents and the kids said the rosary together almost every night and the kids attended daily Mass. I met my future in-laws when Bill’s brother Jerry was ordained a priest.

I had a hard time figuring out how to handle Jerry. It was enough of a new experience to have a brother, but one who was also a Father to me? He married us at St. Matthew’s in 1962. At the end of the ‘60’s–he was forced out of the priesthood because he himself wanted to marry and yet remain a priest. He had the support of his bishop.

If the design of the ‘60’s peace symbol looks a bit like a crossroads, it certainly became that for me at the time of Jerry’s bold step. A group of us became dissatisfied with our dictatorial pastor and moved en masse to another parish. Then we formed our own community and found supportive priests to offer Sunday Mass for us. Couples took turns planning the liturgy and working out a program for all our little kids. After a few years the enthusiasm faded and most of us returned to our parish. With the encouragement of our pastor we had our own Mass in the parish hall and continued to take charge of our liturgy. Finally the bishop stepped in and put a stop to the hall Mass but the revolution had already triumphed: Bill and I and our friends had come to realize that we, not the clergy, were the heart of the church.

Bill and I took an even bolder step. Through a friend of Bill we began to attend a Bible church. I was amazed at how personally these people took their lives as Christians. They studied Scripture with the kind of attention to the nuance, beauty, and insight into the human and divine condition that I had paid to literature when I was in college. For them this was personal: it was the story of their own salvation. And Christ–as in “Christian”--was their prime relationship. We both consider ourselves part of this church. I even co-lead a women’s Bible study, in awe of the wisdom and spiritual insights these women show me each time we meet.

This is Joyce's kindergarten class at St. Matthews Catholic School. Joyce is the cutie-pie in the front row, far left.

But I still go to Mass. A lot of the Mass has changed over the years–Latin is gone–but its heart is still an act of worship and sacrifice. I think we all need ceremony available to surround our deepest expressions and nobody does it better than the Catholic Church after 2,000 years of practice. I just look at the Church itself differently now. The foundation is right but the structure tilts seriously off-center.

Long before the current scandals I realized that priests should regard themselves as Christ-emulating servants who seek to protect others, not themselves. They should be accountable for their actions on an ongoing basis just as we were taught to be. Like my friends at the Bible church, they and all us Catholics should pay special attention to 1 Peter 2: 9, “You (meaning ANY believer) are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called out of darkness into His marvelous light.”

The explosion of stories about priestly sexual abuse and the systematic and heartless cover-up that so incensed my son hit me like 9/11. It erased a lingering naive and defensive respect for the clergy that has transmitted my faith and which has provided such a moving way to worship God. I won’t allow evil to triumph by causing me to leave behind what I cherished so deeply.

Sometimes at Mass in my diverse Silicon Valley pa