Called Out of Darkness Page 0,37

particular, were my focus. I had no conception that anyone might think these bohemians of New York and San Francisco were immoral. They were artists; they wrote poetry. For me, they held spiritual values. They did great things.

In the summer after my freshman year of high school, my mother finally died of the drink. Even now I remember the day with a palpable sense of horror. Her final drinking spell had been, perhaps, the longest ever, and when my younger sister came down with appendicitis, my father felt that we were needed at the hospital, and that my mother couldn't be left at home alone. My mother had sometimes fallen when she was drunk; and more than once she had dropped a cigarette and set a mattress on fire. My father called her closest cousins to come get her, and take care of her; and the last time I saw my mother, she was being led down the garden path to the gate, begging my father not to do this, not to give her over to this cousin; she didn't want her cousins to see her as she was.

Within a matter of hours the call came: she wasn't moving or speaking. The priest came rushing up our back steps, in his black cassock, beads rattling, and I had to head him off and send him to the car that was ready to take him to the cousin's house uptown. My mother was dead before he got there. Nevertheless he anointed her, gave her the Last Sacraments, as we called them, and assured everyone that no one knows precisely when the soul leaves the body. Perhaps she had been reached by the Saving Grace in time.

When the word reached me, I went to church. I remember going to the shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual Help and trying to talk to her. But I was numb. I was unable to form coherent words. I was relieved that my mother's long struggle was over. I was relieved that our long struggle was over. I was elated and yet speechless with a kind of terror. I knew that our lives would not be the same.

The ghastly moment at the funeral came when they closed the coffin. I began to cry uncontrollably. And I still remember standing over her grave in St. Joseph's Cemetery, surrounded by mourners, and thinking that all the world was gray, and that the daily light I'd once taken for granted would never return.

Two years later, in 1957, my family moved from New Orleans, and we might as well have been entering America for the first time when we arrived in Dallas, Texas.

My father's new wife was a Baptist who struggled to be Catholic for my father's sake, even though to marry her - a divorced woman - he had made a tragic break with his own church.

My faith was unchanged. Even a year in an extremely old-fashioned boarding school had not really tested it. And it proved as strong in a makeshift cafeteria church in Richardson, Texas, as it had been all along.

After all, the Catholic Church was supposed to be the same everywhere, and always and for everyone. And it seemed to me that it was. Even in a suburban school cafeteria, the Mass was in Latin, and at the moment of the Consecration, Christ was beneath our roof, and the sermons were very much the same. We had to remain the same.

I didn't know then that the Catholics of the early twentieth century were decidedly and deliberately and consciously anti-modern, that they had been told to be against the modern world by the pope.

I knew nothing of recent church history at all. As I mentioned earlier, I had a better sense of what the Middle Ages had been like, and what the great heresies of the early centuries might have been, than of any recent developments in the Catholic Church.

For all I knew there were no recent developments in the Catholic Church. That was certainly the illusion we were supposed to believe and support. The Catholic Church survived all attacks and all crises, all persecutions and all assaults.

The Protestant Reformation had not stopped it. Nothing ever would or could stop the church.

As Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen said in one of his Sunday evening broadcasts, "The church is a rock pitched into space." My entire universe was steeped in styles of church art that were rococo, baroque, and Romantic, and these styles seemed to flow from the Greek