William Kienzle - Masquerade

The Gothic interior of the chapel was so traditional, even with the altar placed just inside the sanctuary instead of at the rear wall. Religious statues and paintings abounded. It put her in mind of her home parish in Detroit. She had spent a lot of time there, too.

She was eighteen again, in church, and feeling guilty.

Thursday before First Friday. How often had she done this? Marie Monahan had plenty of time before it was her turn to go to confession. Let’s see, approximately eight times each scholastic year for, since she’d begun going to confession in the second grade, eleven years. So, eighty-eight times.

As far as she could recollect, it was Saint Margaret Mary who had the vision during which Jesus promised grand spiritual rewards to those who “made” the first Fridays.

The idea was to go to Communion on nine consecutive first Fridays and all the promises Jesus made to Saint Margaret Mary were yours. Somehow, someone must have dismissed the magical number nine, for she, Marie Monahan, and her classmates had completed nine consecutives long ago. Like so many Catholic devotions, the first Fridays had become a quasi superstition. If nine first Fridays were good, a limitless number of first Fridays was infinitely better.

The confessions, of course, were necessitated by the Communions. No one in the world could have foretold then, in 1960, what would be accomplished by the Second Vatican Council, to begin the following year. One of Vatican II’s achievements would be the divorcing of confession from Communion. Catholics would be advised that they could go to Communion without first going to confession practically forever as long as they did not commit a mortal sin. Just when they got used to going to confession only infrequently, if ever, a later Pope would emphasize the necessity of individual frequent confession, and put confession and Communion back together again. After Vatican II, the casual Catholic was frequently confused.

The eighty-eight confessions Marie had just carefully computed by no means approached the total number of times she’d been to confession to date. Sometimes she would confess every week or every other week. And always, always, the same thing: disobedience, angry thoughts, inattentiveness in school, gossip. Venial sins, imperfections.

There were times when she suspected she might find some other sins if she examined her conscience differently. But she had been taught by the nuns how to examine her conscience when she was in the second grade. Never having been given an update, she retained a child’s approach to confession. In this she was not unlike many, if not most, adult Catholics.

The inside joke to all this was that by her peers she was considered to be “wild.”

“Wildness” meant something considerably different in a parochial school of 1960 and prior than it would some thirty years later. Marie was a starter on the girls’ basketball and softball teams. She was a cheerleader. She was a tomboy. Her tight-knit circle of girlfriends tended to be boisterous. Worse, they were forever testing the dress code limits of “Marylike” modesty. As often as they could get away with it, they’d be mischievous and roll their waistbands until their school uniform skirts hung well above the knee. Or they’d “forget” to fasten the top buttons on their blouses, leaving a fraction of a bra exposed. Around them at all times the vigilance of the nuns was ever required.

Marie Monahan was never in the running as the sodalist selected to crown the Blessed Mother’s statue on May Day.

And yet, with all of that, to her knowledge, she had never in her life committed a mortal sin.

Probably the simplest mortal sin possible to a Catholic would be the deliberate missing of Sunday Mass. The next most commonplace would be a grand dinner of meat on a Friday. After that, things got complicated. Stealing an article of significant value or lots of money would do it. Or killing someone, of course.

Possibly the classic mortal sin-and this was far more the venue of males-was almost any sexual sin anyone could imagine.

The gravity of sin, in those days, was measured by three criteria: the matter, the intention, and the circumstances. Matter: the difference, say, between ten cents and ten dollars. Intention: inadvertence, force, or fear could limit responsibility. Circumstances: participation in a “just war” justified killing. Sexual sins did not admit parvity of matter. Thus whatever the intention or circumstance, one embarked on a sin of sexual nature with serious, grave, mortal matter.

But Marie Monahan had never committed a sexual sin.

That fact was not a commentary on her natural attractiveness. She had neither a good nor an accurate self-image. She considered herself quite plain. Actually, she had a natural beauty that came close to perfection. The boys in her school were well aware that Marie Monahan was amply endowed and that, under that bulky school uniform, there were sensuous adult curves just begging to be fondled. All such male thoughts and vulgar references were confessed with religious regularity.

It was her turn. She’d been waiting to go to confession for more than half an hour, inching forward as each student ahead of her was shriven. All this time wasted, when she should have been examining her conscience. All she’d done was to entertain distractions.

She knelt on the unpadded bench, rested her folded hands on the little shelf. Directly in front of her was a dark and seldom-if-ever-cleaned cloth behind which was a wooden door that made a terrible racket when the priest slid it open or shut. It was dark in there. Neither priest nor penitent could see each other even when the little door was open. The cloth and darkness saw to that.

Slide. . Bang!

“Oh,” she whispered, “bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was about two weeks ago.”

Snort, cough, growl. The priest cleared his respiratory passages.

“Since then,” she whispered, “I disobeyed my mother four times and my father twice. I gossiped a bit, nothing very serious. And,” rememberinga few minutes ago, “I had distractions in church. And that’s about it.

“I’m sorry for these and all the sins of my past life, especially for disobedience.”

She thought that a representative confession. It had been serving her, with slight variations, for the past eleven years.

“For your penance,” the priest’s voice sounded tired and bored, “say three Our Fathers and three Hail Marys. And now, make a good Act of Contrition.” She could not have guessed how bored-almost terminally-he was. He’d been hearing practically the same humdrum story for the past six hours, beginning with the third graders and marching upward through the classes. The sole salvation of his sanity was that the present-final-penitents were high schools seniors. Purgatory was about to end.

Marie mumbled the Act of Contrition while the priest mumbled an absolution in Latin. That they were speaking in different languages simultaneously, neither paying any attention whatsoever to the other, did not bother them.

It did not take Marie long to forget that confession and, indeed, school in general. Christmas vacation was about to begin and that was on everybody’s front burner.

Marie had been invited to the seasonal teen club dance by none other than the captain of the football team. It was such a natural: a three-year letter man in football, basketball, and baseball-and team captain in football-dating the school’s outstanding female athlete and captain of the cheerleaders. The wonder was that it had taken them so long to get together.

It took so long because, on the one hand, with her poor self-image it never occurred to Marie that the school’s prime catch knew she was alive. While, on the other hand, she was regarded as the unapproachable-the virgin queen, above and beyond accepting casual dates, and probably frigid to boot.