I left the Church soon after my children were born. They were both baptized, but because of the sex-abuse scandal, as well as the usual culture-war issues, I left in anger and never looked back.
Yet once a year I would take them to my family’s parish, Our Lady of Czestochowa, in New Jersey, for a memorial mass for my father, whom they had never met. He had been active in his Polish church, sitting on the altar on Holy Thursday with eleven other men to have his feet washed by the priest in the late Lenten ritual, carrying a basket from pew to pew for the weekly collection. Most of our extended family lived directly across from OLC, a neo-Gothic church on a quiet, tree lined street. I was in the choir and often read at Mass. I eventually joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.
But I had given all that up for a secular life, hoping against hope that it wouldn’t adversely affect my children’s moral and ethical development.
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