Losing My Religion

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

Sister Mary Thecla was in hot pursuit and almost grabbed my collar as I started down the stairs of St. John's School. I lost my footing and tumbled forward—mercifully out of her reach, but down the hard marble steps. I struggled to my feet trembling with rage.

"You witch—you pushed me," I screamed "Wait till I tell my mother that you pushed me."

The old nun looked worried and said something that I didn't hear as I opened the door to the boy's school yard in one last act of defiance and ran as fast as I could away from the school. I slowed down when I reached the corner of St. Patrick and Markham Streets and sat on the curb.

I was probably in big trouble. Calling a nun a witch—especially an old one—was likely a mortal sin and my small soul was already burdened with numerous venial sins that included talking back to my parents, fighting with my sister, stealing my mother's poker pennies and swearing. I was only six so had not yet had impure thoughts. The parish priest asked me about impure thoughts every Friday afternoon in confession and seemed disappointed when I said I didn't know what he was talking about.

I wasn't exactly sure how my mother would react to my outburst. She was unreliable when it came to the Sisters. Sometimes she called them frustrated old hags and other times she took their side. Her sister Helen was a nun, and she ran hot and cold on her as well.

But I consoled myself by righteous conviction that Sister Mary Thecla had asked for it. As I sat there catching my breath, I thought back to how it all started. Less than an hour ago, I'd been sitting in class when her question had seemed innocent enough.

"Who in the class has a mother or father who is not Roman Catholic?"

My hand shot up out of habit. I liked to answer all the questions. I looked around the room and realized too late that it was a trick question. Attending a parochial school was a minefield full of do and don'ts—most of which did not make sense.

You see, my parent's marriage was "mixed" a union between a Catholic and a Protestant. In mid-20th-century Canada, the antagonism between Catholics and Protestants was defining. My mother's family was Irish Catholic and my father's family Protestant Orangemen. The young couple was not allowed to be married in the Catholic Church unless my father converted. My mother's mother refused to attend the wedding, spending the day instead crying in her bedroom hoping that my father would relent at the last minute and convert to Catholicism. My grandmother was a convert herself, having switched to marry my grandfather. There were none as rigid and unforgiving as converts, at least according to my mother.

My father allowed his children to be raised as Catholics, to go to Parochial school and attend church with my mother—concessions that alienated him from his own family who could think of nothing worse than having Papist connections. My strong-willed mother instilled in her children all her Irish Catholic biases. John A. MacDonald was a criminal, Louis Riel was a hero, and all things British, especially the Royal Family, were loathsome. At St. John's school, I was brainwashed by the nuns. Protestants were evil enemies and savages. They didn't believe in the Virgin Mary or the blessed Trinity, stole the land of the Irish and the Indians, and ate meat on Fridays.

Even before my public humiliation at the hands of Sister Mary Thecla, I worried about my father's soul. I had raised the issue with Dad one day when we were walking in the woods on one of the many rural properties we visited on weekends, trying to find an affordable place to buy so we could, in my father's words, "escape the city".

"Are you going to go to hell Daddy?"

My father laughed long and hard at that one.

"But you're not Catholic and you don't go to church".

My father threw his hands up to the sky.

"This is better than church," he said, "This is the real church."

My father's beliefs or lack thereof made far more sense to me than the twisted catechism lessons that I dutifully memorized but never understood. I believed in my father and I believed my father.

So when Sister Mary Thecla looked at me with what seemed like sympathy and asked, "What is your father's name child?"

"Hubert Gardiner Dunlop." I belted out his name proudly.

"Well children let's all bow our heads and pray for Mary Kathryn's father because he is going to hell"

I was an impulsive child, who today would likely be diagnosed as ADHD. In those days children like me were more likely to just be called brats.

"You're the one who's going to hell not my father. He's way better than you."

With that I ran out of the room.

Later that afternoon, I circled around and took the long way home and waited on the corner of my street until I realized it was the end of the school day and saw children coming home with their lunch buckets and books. My mother was waiting on the porch for me.

"I just had an interesting phone call from Sister Mary Thecla".

Damn I was hoping to get my side of the story out first.

"She told me to tell you she is sorry and that she will apologize to you in person tomorrow morning in class. What's that all about?"

"Nothing much," I told my mother. And I meant it.