MEMOIR:Warmth of a Florida church stands in sharp contrast to cold memories of Donegal
I AM sitting on a padded seat in the front-row pew of a beautiful yet simply designed octagonal church. I reflect on what brought me here – to St Ann’s Church in a town on the southwest coast of Florida.
Since I turned 16, I have rarely spent time inside a church. Dusty memories shape in my head of a distant St Patrick’s Day: the cold hard seats of the small local chapel in a Border town in Co Donegal. The freezing air, the harshness of the welcome, the roughness of the religion.
I found little to engage with then, little to warm too, little to like. Maybe it was that moment, at the age of seven, when singled out by the parish priest from the all-too-dominant pulpit for whispering giddily to my best friend about our upcoming Holy Communion. He spoke in Irish, identifying me as iníon an ardmháistir scoile (the headmaster’s daughter), demanding I leave the church.
Catholicism lost me on that grey day in 1960s Ireland but it would take nine years for me to separate finally. The following May, I made my Holy Communion in the dress posted some years earlier in the “American parcel” to our family – a dress that had several previous outings when worn by my sisters.
Over four decades later in this church on American soil the contrast is sharp.
There hangs the most striking sculpture of the crucified Christ I had ever seen. A floating wire-mesh, suspended on invisible wires, directly overhead the central altar. Its strength and beauty are powerful. Everything about the design is simple, humble and clean. There is great order. The all-male ushers are clad in white jackets and black trousers, the kind you might expect to see on Broadway. And in that same uniform there’s an unlikely soul with his grey locks scraped back in a ponytail, two earrings competing for space in the same earlobe. Possibly an old Harley Davidson biker?
My eye does not have far to shift to take in all around me, as this is theatre in the round. Two priests say the 11am Sunday mass. Dressed in Kelly green and gold chasubles, the principal celebrant is a warm-hearted man, looking like a cross between Friar Tuck and St Patrick. His sense of humour is as broad as his girth. I laugh out loud with the rest of the congregation at his self-deprecating humour. I wonder when I last laughed in a church? It’s a full house, with over 800 Catholics attending the Mass. I wonder when I was last in a full church for a Sunday morning Mass?
The celebrant is flanked by five young assistants, the all-boy altar brigade cloaked in simple white cassocks, hair gleaming and neatly cut, black shoes polished brightly, not a runner or a tracksuit bottom in sight. They raise their arms in praise and attend attentively to their duties. The irony of the next sequence is not lost on me.
Just before Communion, as if out of nowhere appears, circling the altar, a band of 11 women. They stand, heads bowed, ready to take up their role as Ministers of the Eucharist. I counted these 11 “apostles” and watch them step up in perfect synchronisation to the altar. A step up from the traditional cleaning of the church, I suppose.
This choreography prompts my male companion to whisper and mutter about the ludicrousness of not admitting women to the priesthood.
A trained female opera singer chants unfamiliar hymns, closer in tone to the sound of the Southern Baptist Church. We are in the southern States, and there’s an expressive demonstrative openness about the congregation’s commitments to their religion that belies the trauma suffered by followers of the Catholic Church.
MEMORY IS ONCE again back to the church of my childhood in the spring of the mid-1960s. Back to the smell of damp and incense. The smell of whiskey and staleness. The smell of fear. The Brylcream-pasted heads, shoulders a gathering shelf for dandruff, shirt collars held stiff by decades of dust and dirt, fingernails black from the bog, rosary beads knotted around each digit. Men of Woodbine-stained figures, one knee nestled into their caps, flanking the rear of the church. Eyes closed, lips moving at rapid speed as prayers are recited. Wives with black hats, held hat-pinned down, on grey hair-netted buns, support stockings safe in strong sturdy Sunday shoes.
In the intervening years, as I could not rest easily with the teachings or the politics of the Catholic Church, it was the wholesome friendship of three good disciples who held me safely in the distance.
There was a Mass concelebrated by Fr Brian D’Arcy, Fr Eugene Kennedy and Fr John Delaney in a hotel room in New York one St Patrick’s Day in the mid-1990s. We were gathered in the Big Apple to celebrate our music, our dance, our culture.
That family Mass was said in the hotel room of my aging parents. It was a poignant moment marking the return, for the first time in over 60 years, of my father, the ardmháistir, to the place of his birth, New York. During the Mass, that St Patrick’s Day I remembered my grandfathers, both named Patrick and my grandmothers, both named Bridget. Those men helped build the bridges and tunnels of New York along with many other men named Patrick, Pat, Paddy, Pádraig. Family lore would have it that grandfather Paddy Doherty single-handedly built the Brooklyn Bridge but my recent research shows that the bridge was formally opened before he was ever born!
IN THIS MONTH of March years later, as I leave the warmth of St Ann’s Catholic Church in southwest Florida, I am grateful to my three Irish priest friends for helping me to shape some sense of it all in the intervening decades.
Later, on this day, I smile, as I encounter a taxi driver from Haiti. His name is Patrick. His accent is strong, rich and round and he articulates the name Patrick with great pride. He does not know St Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland. He has never heard of Ireland. I wonder what Patrick from Haiti would make of the St Patrick’s Day parade in Main Street, Dungloe, Co Donegal?
As the pipe bands march past in the stiff March winds, skin blue with the cold as they beat, blow and bang their instruments, competing with pride, carrying the banner of their townland high: Arranmore, Annagry, Ardaghy, Gweedore, The Rosses, Derrydruel.
While onlookers huddle in doorways, eating bags of chips, lapels lopsided by withering clumps of shamrock.
Moya Doherty is travelling across the US working on a new stage project