The priests, the nuns and the people
Changes in the
church and religious life are reflected in the Bronx
neighborhood of 'Doubt'
Feb. 17, 2009
By JAMES FLANIGAN
·
Faith
& Parish
Sr. Margaret McEntee is
pictured in 1956 with her first-grade class at St. Anthony's School in the
Bronx section of New York.
McEntee's former religious name, Sister James, was
used by an old first-grade pupil of hers, writer-director John Patrick Shanley, for a character in the movie "Doubt."
(CNS)
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In the
recent film “Doubt,” set in 1964, Fr. Brendan Flynn, played by Philip Seymour
Hoffman, pastor of a parish in the Bronx,
wants to bring the church closer to the people. He tells Sr. Aloysius Beauvier, principal of the parish elementary school, that
“we [the clergy and nuns] are really just like them,” meaning the parishioners.
But Sr. Aloysius, played by Meryl Streep, protests vehemently, “We are not like them. We are
different, and we must be different. These working-class people depend on us”
to be different, to be above and apart from them, to guide them and to care for
their children whom they have entrusted to us.
Both were
right.
Fr. Flynn
reflects the thinking of the Second Vatican Council, which ran from 1962 to
1965. Sr. Aloysius accurately reflects the thinking of the Bronx
of the 1940s and 1950s and the neighborhoods of Irish immigrants and their
Irish-American offspring. These were the “working-class” people we see in the
movie, wearing their Sunday best to church, looking up reverently as the priest
gives the homily.
I grew up
in a Bronx neighborhood just like the one
depicted in “Doubt.” My neighborhood, west of Yankee Stadium, was named Highbridge for a footbridge over the Harlem
River that was built in the 1830s by Irish laborers who later
built the New York Central Railroad. The bridge was a registered landmark,
included in guidebooks of the American Institute of Architects. But few of the
Irish working people in the 1950s, grocery clerks and warehouse men, waitresses
and part-time domestics, policemen, firefighters and bartenders, knew about
architecture or any of the other arts.
They had
come with little formal education from small farms and towns in the west of Ireland, and
they were happy to have work. They were between two worlds. Their temporal
lives were hitched to the economy of the New York
metropolitan area, while their emotional lives remained back in Ireland, which
they always called “home.”
But their
spiritual lives, and most important, the guidance of their children, were cared
for by Sacred Heart Church,
which comforted the old and taught the young.
Its
school took their children, corrected the Irish brogues they brought from home,
and taught them of a new country and a wider world. It taught them the value of
their individual lives: “You are a temple of the Holy Ghost,” Sr. Jane Frances
de Chantal would say. “You are responsible for yourself and others.”
The
church protected them in practical ways also. If a young man stole a car, the
police didn’t book him but telephoned the pastor of Sacred Heart, then Msgr.
William Humphrey, who inevitably would “know the boy’s parents.” Msgr. Humphrey
would then ask the car’s owner (probably a non-Catholic) not to press charges,
assuring him that the car would be restored and any damages paid. The church
would pony up the money. The parents would pay it back, then
the boy would work it off. A police record was avoided, a productive life, perhaps,
saved.
If the
young fellow persisted in recalcitrant ways, as my friend, the rangy, wild
Bobby O’Toole, did, he would be sent to Lincoln Hall, a reform school in
then-rural Westchester County run by the New York archdiocese.
The
church was protector, but a distant one necessarily. Sr. Aloysius understood
that.
The
unlettered parents seldom if ever spoke to priests or to the nuns and Christian
Brothers who taught their children with anything other than bowed deference. A
mother trying to defend her truant son before Fr. Stanislaus Jablonski, the legendary dean of discipline at Cardinal
Hayes High School, might say that the boy had left for school but returned home
feeling ill because “he’s sick, Father.”
Whereupon
Fr. Jablonski, with courteous authority toward the
mother but scarcely an unnecessary glance at the son, would say, “He’s sick of
school, Mrs. O’Connor, that’s what he’s sick of.” And the mother would bow her
head and concede that, of course, Father was the better judge.
Yet the
religious and the people were embedded with each other.
First of
all, there were great numbers of religious. The absolute majority of the
teachers in the elementary schools and the nearby high schools -- All Hallows
and Cardinal Hayes for the boys, Cathedral High and the Ursuline Academy for the girls -- were brothers
and nuns. And they taught all day and into the night, drilling students in
evening sessions for interscholastic competitions in mental arithmetic and
spelling.
The nuns
guided the girls’ sodalities; the brothers coached the boys in basketball and
American football, forming intramural play as early as sixth grade. It was
called “American” football only because in that neighborhood, briefly, there
was a different kind. Some of the fathers tried to form teams for Gaelic
football. But the American version prevailed, of course.
The nuns
and brothers, often offspring of immigrants themselves, recognized that their
pupils were from different cultures. But they didn’t dwell on that. The
children’s homes might be filled with Irish music or perhaps Italian opera, but
the school dances introduced baritone saxophones, early rhythm and blues, and
the beginnings of rock. The teachers knew that their role was to bring their
charges into the new land and the new society, “secular” though it may be.
It is
poetic but accurate to say that the clergy and religious provided a passage to America for
those students.
And they
provided that passage at “steerage” rates. The elementary schools were
essentially free to the parents, the costs borne by the Sunday collection
plates and the archdiocese. The high schools were reasonable even for
working-class families.
Cardinal
Hayes, for example, charged $10 per month tuition if parents could pay it, $5
per month if they could not afford $10. The multitudes of religious -- bound by
vows of poverty, chastity and obedience -- made such bargains possible. Their
lives, their own skills and ambitions, were essentially an offering of service.
That was the difference that Sr. Aloysius understood.
But
things were changing in 1950s America.
The working class was moving up and moving on. High school graduates could get
office jobs in Manhattan
at the American Telephone & Telegraph Company or the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Company and in the emerging advertising and television industries.
Many things were changing. In my neighborhood, Patsy Devlin, the prettiest girl
in the eighth grade, was recruited by a modeling agency that turned her into a
leading figure for fashion magazines. We boys were puzzled by how skinny they
forced her to be.
The
church was changing. Their new flocks were no longer from an Irish village, but
moving on to Westchester County and Connecticut.
Having minds of their own, the people didn’t need protection. Nor did they
think to show the old deference. Fr. Flynn, and Vatican II, understood that.
And gradually the people and the clergy and religious did come to resemble each
other; they became “the same people,” as Fr. Flynn said.
Then,
quite suddenly it seemed, the clergy and religious seemed to vanish. Their
numbers dropped dramatically.
The
schools went on, but with many more lay teachers, at wages and benefits
appreciably higher than the old vow-of-poverty incomes. Costs went up, as did
tuitions. Today high school tuitions are above $5,000 a year. The schools get
help from charitable institutions and foundations, and they need it.
Yet the
work went on and goes on today, in Bronx and Manhattan neighborhoods.
The
students once again are the children of working-class people, mainly African
Americans and immigrants from Latin America
and their descendants. The teachers, with only a few priests and religious, but
many more dedicated lay personnel, still try to provide their charges with a
passage to America,
or more precisely to a fuller participation in American life, in the American
dream.
The
differences between the neighborhoods depicted in “Doubt” and those of today
are dramatic in appearance but perhaps not so great in substance.
The
essence of what happened then and is happening today is in the same great
tradition, captured best in a line of William Butler Yeats. “Education is not
the filling of a pail,” wrote the poet, “but the lighting of a fire.”
Fr. Flynn
would understand that. Sr. Aloysius would have no doubt of it as well.
James Flanigan is a business journalist whose book on the economy
and people of California, Smile, Southern California, You’re the
Center of the Universe, will be published in
March by Stanford
University Press.
Printed in the National Catholic Reporter, February 20,
2009.