Straying from the Flock

I attended Shrine of the Little Flower Elementary School at 12 Mile and Woodward in Royal Oak, Michigan, until I was 12. I wore the school uniform of navy pants, a white shirt and a clip-on navy tie. The principal and most of the teachers were nuns, the kind who dressed up like the Flying Nun with starched habits and dark robes, although a few women who dressed normally had managed to join the faculty.

I can’t remember if there were any male teachers, although I remember the priests at the beautiful round church across the street. The church, which included a massive tower featuring a 28-foot-tall figure of Jesus on the cross – a cross “the Ku Klux Klan couldn’t burn,” people said – had been the site of Father Charles Coughlin’s famous and controversial radio broadcasts back in the 1930s.

I was an average student but I could sing so I joined the choir and performed in all of the fundraising talent shows. (And I regularly sang along to my mom’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” album after school instead of doing homework.) I was an altar boy, too, which didn’t stop me from being paddled by Sister Patricia Marie, the principal, for misbehaving. My parents were married at that church, I think, although that marriage ended when I was 11 or so.

After sixth grade, we moved to Birmingham and I stopped going to Catholic Church. I attended Unitarian-Universalist churches for a while, and then pretty much only sat in pews for weddings and funerals and the occasional Christmas Eve mass.

I didn’t wake up one morning and decide I was no longer a believer; it was a gradual process. (I still remember being moved by Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie, “The Passion of the Christ.”) I couldn’t embrace the idea that women couldn’t be priests and needed to be subservient to their husbands. I was repulsed by the widespread sexual abuse of children and the cover-ups by church leaders. I couldn’t understand why there was so much suffering and pain and hardship and evil in the world if there was a loving, omnipotent, omniscient god floating on a cloud somewhere. I was turned off by hypocritical, politically-active preachers and congregants who didn’t pay taxes but wanted to tell me what could be done with mine and who urged me to be faithful to my marital vows even as they violated theirs with other women, men and children.

Then I heard that church leaders had moved to suppress the discovery of the Gospel of St. Thomas back in 1945 in Egypt. I was told that these were the words of Jesus himself and because they contradicted church teachings, the Big Dogs tried to squelch the discovery.

That was probably when my straying from the flock became complete.

I’m not comfortable saying I don’t believe in God. I am comfortable saying there’s a lot to suggest he was created by man and not the other way around.

The last time I was in Shrine of the Little Flower was in 2005. I attended Christmas Eve mass with my ultra-religious second wife, Alessandra. In keeping with family tradition, we subsequently divorced too.