Why My Mother Reared Me In The Episcopal Church

My mother, Regina Stephanie Zajfert, attended catechism classes in preparation for her First Communion in the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago in 1927.  There were two things that stood out in Mother's mind for the rest of her life whenever she spoke about those classes.

The first was that Mother felt treated like a second-class Catholic by the nuns because she attended Chicago Public Schools rather than a parochial school.  On one hand, maybe the nuns just knew the children from the parish school better and were less reserved with them.  On the other hand, even if my grandparents could have afforded the tuition for a parochial school in light of Grandfather's recurrent hospital stays, Grandfather preferred to send his children to Chicago Public Schools.  Having grown up a son of the church organist in Slesin, Poland, and having watched church politics from the sidelines, Jozef Michael Zajfert wanted his daughters to view life from a more broadminded, i.e., less parochial, perspective.  Maybe that attitude came through in Mother's innocent curiosity at that tender age.

The second was what happened in catechism class the day the nun spoke to the children about what kind of books "good" Catholics read.  "Good" Catholics read only those books that had a certain stamp on the title page of the book.  The stamp was called the imprimatur.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Imprimatur
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprimatur

Mother piped up in her eight-year-old voice stoked up by Chicago Public Schools civics class, "But Sister, isn't that censorship?"
http://www.icivics.org/
http://nytimes.com/2008/06/09/arts/09sand.html

Guess who flew out of catechism class that afternoon.  Perplexed about what is was that she could have done that was so wrong, Mother went home to ask her parents why the nun had reacted to her question by expelling her from class that day. Grandmother and Grandfather reassured Mother that she had done nothing wrong.

Grandfather went for a walk and stopped by the rectory that evening to chat with the priest.  That was the last time Mother flew out of catechism class.  But the seed of skepticism, not cynicism, born of injustice and stupidity already had been sown in a child's mind and heart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skepticism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynicism

Fast Forward:  In 1960 most of my third-grade classmates in Copaigue, Long Island, New York were attending catechism class after school; the rest were attending Hebrew school.  Where did I belong?  I asked my mother why we had no catechism class in our church.  She explained, "We do.  You will attend your catechism class in eighth grade, when you are old enough to comprehend better what you are getting into."

Mother formally converted to the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States on the same day I made my Confirmation in Red Bank, New Jersey, in 1966.  Mother brought her Polish traditions of Christmas and Easter babka, rye bread, pierogi, smoked sausage, sauerkraut laced with caraway seeds, and horseradish with her.  She left behind the confessional and blind obedience to papal infallibility or to any earthly authority for that matter.

So, my Polish Roman Catholic mother and my German-Irish Evangelical Lutheran father reared me as an American Episcopalian, i.e., a renegade Catholic/backsliding Protestant fan of Erasmus of Rotterdam.  My childhood best friend Ruthie was a Reform Jew whose Viennese parents had fled Hitler.  I spent more time in Ruthie's synagogue than in my church during high school.
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/erasmus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderius_Erasmus

All in all my spiritual upbringing instilled in me a small-c catholic outlook on life.  It's a bit like being a small-d democrat.  In terms of intellectual rigor amalgamated with human empathy, I think it was the skepticism and respect for critical thinking that stuck.

Addendum:  See also (broadcast August 9, 2011)
http://www.npr.org/2011/08/09/138957812/evangelicals-question-the-existence-of-adam-and-eve

Meet My Grandmother

My maternal grandmother, Felicja Zajfert (pronounced ZI-fert), was born in or near Bialystok, Poland.  She had terrible childhood memories of blood running in the streets from the pogroms, and she detested bigots of any sort.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005183

Immigrating to the United States as a very young woman, Grandmother went to work as a seamstress in the sweatshops of Chicago early in the 20th century.  Today factory floors are filled with some mindnumbing cacaophony over the loudspeaker.  Back then Grandmother and two of her coworkers would recite poetry to eachother on their breaks.  When the noise of the machines ebbed, you could hear verses by Pushkin, Mickiewicz, or Goethe being recited by three women who had been lucky to get a grade school education back in the old country.
http://www.laborrights.org/rights-for-working-women
http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/KCL05780.html

Grandmother married in Chicago in 1917 or 1918 and had two daughters.  The first was my mother, born in 1919.  After the birth of her second daughter during a very difficult delivery at Cook County Hospital in March 1925, the doctor told my grandmother, "Mrs. Zajfert, if you have another baby, you will leave behind a widower and three orphans."
http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/336.html;
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/health/views/26zuger.html

Grandfather Jozef Michael Zajfert, born in Slesin, Poland, was a decent enlightened human being and not interested in sending his wife to an early grave.  So, they did what they had to do to maintain their marriage that lasted until his death in 1958.  They never mentioned to their daughters which birth control method they were using, and their daughters did not ask.  It was their parents' private business.

Needless to say, Grandmother heard the usual exhortations from the pulpit to be a good Catholic woman and to fill the world with Catholic children at Sunday Mass.  One day -- in the worst days of the Great Depression -- my mother was leaving the church with Grandmother when a woman in tears ran up to the priest.  The woman was begging the priest for help.  Her husband had abandoned her with eight children.  There was no food in the house.  They were being evicted.  She was desperate.  Could he help her --

The priest rebuked the woman, "Woman, nobody told you to have eight children."

Grandmother, God bless her memory, turned on that priest and crawled up and down that fool in Polish and English:  "What do you mean that nobody told her to have eight children?  I've sat here Sunday after Sunday when YOU were preaching that it's the DUTY of 'good' Catholic women to bring baby after baby into this world!  Now that she can't feed them, YOU want her and the babies to just crawl into some corner and starve!  [...]"
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/photoessay.htm
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/depression/about.htm

The priest was stunned, unaccustomed as he was to being called to account by a woman -- and an immigrant laywoman with only a grade school education at that.  He gave Grandmother a wide berth after that encounter.

My mother never forgot that encounter.  She related it to me when I was a girl as she was telling me about Erasmus of Rotterdam and "free will".  According to my mother, God gave every human being at least two grey cells to rub together in each cranium, and it is our duty to use them to the best of our ability.  It is one thing to consult educated experts about how to handle a problem.  It is quite another to let others do your thinking for you.  So, always think about things and check the experts' credentials both for technical expertise and the soundness of their judgment before you accept their advice.  Never suspend sound judgment and healthy skepticism to follow anyone or anything blindly.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/erasmus.shtml
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/erasmus.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderius_Erasmus
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill

No woman with two grey cells to rub together in her cranium will submit to any hypocrite that can turn on her like that priest in her hour of need.