c o n t e n t s Introduction: A Story, Not an Argument vii

1 When All Was Right with the World 1

2 A Little Help from My Friends 27

3 In the Beginning 45

4 Travels with Luke 67

5 Here Comes the Sun 89

6 Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall 105

7 Visiting O’Toole’s Bar 125

8 Holy Ed and Other Eccentrics 151

9 Like a Bridge over Troubled Water 173

10 Amazing Grace 193

11 A Song for the Asking 219

12 The Great Life 245

13 The Only Living Boy in New York 269

14 The Tavern at the End of the World 289

Acknowledgments 302

[ ]

What is a mystery?

A mystery is a truth which we cannot fully understand.

The kid heading toward me had that seedy look. A line flashed

in my head, like something from an old Ray Chandler mys-

tery: “He could spit fear.” I don’t know what that meant exactly, but

it fit the moment.

I was out for an evening walk with the dog. I never thought

the time would come when I would consider a stroll through the

neighborhood exercise, but that’s what happens as the hair gets

grayer and the waistline stretches. All the exercise and all the fad

diets can’t combine to beat the years, though men in particular like

to think so. A diet to start next Monday, a few weeks of sit-ups and

[ c h a p t e r 1 ]

When All Was Right with the World

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W h e n a l l W a s r i g h t W i t h t h e W o r l d

we’ll be thirty again. Of such things great lies are built over a rare

steak and a cold beer.

The kid wore a baseball cap brim backward and a floppy old

jacket hanging low in the night drizzle. Baggy tan pants and black

sneakers finished the sartorial splendor. When he finally walked

past harmlessly, I let out a little breath and sucked the night air in

deeply.

What was that smell? When he went by, he left a brief but

very distinct odor, like a cigar burning in a mattress. No, it wasn’t

an illegal substance. It was something else. I racked my brain, the

memory triggered like hearing an old song on the radio. Something

from the past. As if to help the memory, my thighs began to itch

in sympathy.

And suddenly I was back. Twenty-four eleven-year-old boys sit-

ting on one side of the aisle of Christ the King Church in Yonkers,

New York. Thirty-two girls in blue jumpers and skirts are across

from us. It’s a rainy March morning and we have trekked in from

various parts of the neighborhood to begin a Lenten school day

with prayer and devotions. Nobody got a ride to school in 1959.

Buses were for the public-school kids. The Old Man had the car

anyway, and nobody was rich enough for two cars. If it rained you

were outfitted in hat and rubbers. Puddles formed under the pews,

mixing in with about a thousand coats of pine wax to create its own

unique aroma. But that wasn’t what I had just smelled.

Wet corduroy pants!

Take fifteen mangy mutts, soak, and they don’t smell nearly as

bad as one pair of wet corduroy pants. Our blue corduroy pants

were part of the school winter uniform, worn for extra warmth.

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W h e n a l l W a s r i g h t W i t h t h e W o r l d

The fall and spring pants were made of some thin faux substance

that tore in the knees if they got a whiff of the asphalt of a Catholic

school playground. But we took them any day over the corduroys

that introduced us to a lifetime of jock itch. Years later and we’re

still scratching. The blue pants went with the white shirts and

blue ties with the “CK” logo stitched on them in white, though by

March most of us would have colored that over in blue ink from our

fountain pens in an act of desperate boredom during arithmetic.

With the stench of corduroy overpowering the lingering smell

of incense, hundreds of us jammed into the pews, class by class, for

a Lenten prayer service during which we would be reminded that

each of our sins pressed a thorn deeper into the forehead of Christ.

That “told-a-lie-twice” that we rattled off in the confessional on

Saturday afternoons was not some small affair. It was part of an

eternal understanding. The knowledge that Christ died for our

sins was explained very personally. This was not sin in the abstract.

Christ did not suffer solely for what Hitler and Stalin had done;

He suffered because you clobbered your little brother for touching

your stuff and because you talked in line yesterday afternoon when

heading back to class after recess.

Bookshelves are filled with baby-boomer recollections of grow-

ing up in the postwar Catholic Church in the years prior to and just

after the Second Vatican Council. Some are funny, others are des-

perate. Most are cynical. It is a curiosity that, as far as I know, there

are no fictionalized memoirs of growing up in a public elementary

school at the same period. Stuff like Blackboard Jungle doesn’t count

because the theme was “juvenile delinquents” in high school, rather

than the allegedly stultifying atmosphere of elementary school.

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W h e n a l l W a s r i g h t W i t h t h e W o r l d

That was an age where every kid feared the neighborhood “JDs”

and we were warned that if we followed a certain disreputable path,

we would end up with “JD cards.” I never saw a JD card, though there

were more than enough juvenile delinquents where I hung around.

The difference, of course, between the public-school environ-

ment and the parochial schools was that central linking of faith and

education. Arithmetic was just arithmetic over at Public School

16 in my neighborhood. At Christ the King—and thousands of

Catholic grammar schools across the country—arithmetic was only

a part of the whole. There was a thread intertwining with spelling,

geography, history, and reading that held it all together. It was our

faith. Our Catholicism was never confined to the religion class

that usually started the morning’s education. It was not solely the

prayers that would mark the transition of one class to the next, the

Angelus at Noon (when kids would freeze in place at the sound of

the church bells: “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. And

she conceived of the Holy Ghost. Hail Mary, full of grace-.-.-. ”), the

saints days celebrated, the steady pace of the liturgical year from

September through June. The faith pervaded every moment of the

day, making phonics not merely a drudge of endless sounding-out,

but a part of the eternal cosmos: “When you see WH together,”

Sister explained, “it produces a ‘whe’ sound, as in whip. Like the

WHips that lashed Jesus on Good Friday.” Public school kids back

then were being introduced to a vague and flattened civic religion

that identified George Washington with a White Anglo-Saxon

Protestant culture, as bland as an Episcopalian box social. Even the

Jewish kids weren’t offended. It was a white-bread experience without

texture or taste that no one bothers to recall. Love it or hate it,

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W h e n a l l W a s r i g h t W i t h t h e W o r l d

accept it or reject it, praise it or blame it, no one who experienced

eight years of Catholic grammar school in the 1950s, 1960s, or

early 1970s could find it forgettable. I mean, their school was

named after a number. Our school was named Christ the King.

And that can be the essential problem. The grammar-school

experience of those three decades was so inextricably bound to the

faith that one is simply identified with the other. When the nun

told us that Jesus was disappointed that we spoke in class, she was

playing an ace to maintain her sanity, not trying to present the

Catholic faith. Too many of us have never much gone past it. Most

of what a generation or two identified with Catholicism was a nun’s

attempt to exercise crowd control over a bunch of kids more inter-

ested in being home watching Three Stooges reruns. It was a childish

presentation of the faith for childish minds. No harm done, except

if we never get past that.

That said, there was something clearly overwhelming in the faith

of our youth. And therein lies the contradiction. The faith some of

us avoid now has little to do with the faith as it is to be lived and

known as an adult. Yet, at the same time, that introduction to the

faith in the church of our childhood was powerful. It lingers with

us. Kenneth Woodward, religion editor at Newsweek for many

years, described Catholicism—and particularly the Catholicism

of a baby boomer’s youth—as a sensual religion. By that he didn’t

mean sexy. God forbid. When I graduated in 1963 from grammar

school, I couldn’t be screwed-up by sex. Sex hadn’t been invented

yet. Woodward meant that it was an experience that appealed to

each of the senses. As the smell of wet corduroy can put me back

in a cramped pew in Yonkers, New York, four decades earlier, there

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a faith for grown-ups

A Midlife Conversation about What Really Matters[ ]

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robert p. lockwood is director of communications for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. He was president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing and writes the popular “Catholic Journal” column in Our Sunday Visitor.

“[Lockwood helps] us to recognize what a truly adult Catholic faith looks like as we move into middle age and beyond.”

—Greg Erlandson, president, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing

“A delightful revisiting for baby boomers, a ‘faith-story’ as witnessed, and now explained, by one of its own.”

—Owen McGovern, executive director, Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada

religion/catholicism $17.95

In this call to a generation, Robert Lockwood argues that many middle-aged Americans with a Catholic upbringing are spiri-tually trapped. They experience adult religious longings, yet

they have a hard time taking the faith of their childhood seriously. Catholics of a certain age confuse the powerful imagery of a van-ished Catholic world of the 1950s and 1960s—nuns in long black habits, the crisp questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism, Saturday confession—with the Catholic faith itself.

With wit and keen understanding, in a narrative rich with anec-dotes, Lockwood invites disconnected and passive Catholics to encounter a faith for grown-ups: one that is richer, stronger, and more satisfying than the fleeting images of a bygone Catholic era. It is a faith rooted in the Jesus of the gospels, safeguarded by two thousand years of tradition and reflection—a faith with answers to the questions adults ask.

rob e r t p. l oc k wood