Michele Madigan Somerville, poet, friend, OTBKB contrutbutor and Brooklyn Reading Works Regular, has written a post for the New York Times blog, Happy Days.
As described on the blog, " Happy Days is a discussion about the search for
contentment in its many forms — economic, emotional, physical,
spiritual — and the stories of those striving to come to terms with the
lives they lead." Here's an excerpt from Somerville's piece called, Born Again in Brooklyn:
About a decade ago, moved by a convergence of my longstanding
fascination with religion and a time of great personal loss, I embarked
on a search for a church and wound up a born-again Catholic. It was not
a straight or untroubled path, guided as it was by both my attraction
to and enmity for the Roman Catholic Church into which I was born and
baptized.
to experience the best and worst of the Church. Most of the Sisters of
Charity who taught at my grade school were tyrants. In 1971 I knocked
on the door of my parish rectory to inquire about becoming an altar
server; I was advised that only boys could serve. Brides, said the
priest, were the only females allowed on the altar. When my mother
became critically ill at age 30, a Catholic priest administering last
rites, refused to offer absolution when she, who had given birth to
four children by age 25, refused to express contrition for taking birth
control pills. People for whom I care deeply have been molested by
priests.
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