Sunday, June 27, 2010

Quote of the Day (James Zazzali, on Growing Up Catholic in the ‘40s)


“Those Sisters of Charity, appropriately named, dedicated their lives to us. They lived in a decrepit convent and taught in a decaying school with as many as 98 in the first grade classroom. They labored to give us the basics, pounding the ‘three Rs’ into us for eight years. With that same dedication, they taught the fourth ‘R’ — Religion. They did not whisper superstitions or the patent leather shoe ‘nunsense’ that popular culture suggests. Rather, they taught us to respect a moral code premised on Judeo-Christian values. Those Old and New Testament lessons and stories kept most of us out of trouble for a lifetime.”—James J. Zazzali, “Remembering Bygone Days at Sacred Heart,” The Newark Star-Ledger, June 25, 2010

This guest column for the Star-Ledger by James Zazzali, a former chief justice of the New Jersey State Supreme Court, struck a chord, I’m sure, with many Catholics of a certain age about the pre-Vatican II Church—one that, the author makes plain, scared the crap out of congregants even as priests and nuns gave of themselves unstintingly to keep their students on the straight and narrow.

Also striking a chord, I think, will be this post by blogger L. Craig Schoonmaker, detailing how Zazzali’s church, Sacred Heart, of the Vailsburg neighborhood of Newark, came to be closed. The story—of how church officials decided on the whole thing several years ago, then sprang it as a fait acompli before appalled parishioners had a chance to come up with alternatives—is all too familiar by now to thousands of Catholics across the country who’ve seen their churches and schools summarily closed.

No matter what their faults (at times, considerable), the hierarchy of earlier days at least had the foresight to look out for its heavily immigrant flock (including those like my grandparents on my mother’s side). In a time when the sexual-abuse scandals are testing parishioners’ faith as never before, Church leaders would be well advised not to close a church with the same cold-bloodedness as, say, Blockbuster Video shuts down a particular location.

Otherwise, they’ll find enough less good will than they have right now the next time another crisis like the sexual-abuse scandal arrives.

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