THE WAY WE WERE

...Saint Catherine's had many school assemblies and a variety of social events that brought the entire neighborhood and parish together...

...I for one would like to see the church in America find the means to become different too-before it's too late...

...Neither of my parents had a Catholic education, neither finished high school, and except for an occasional funeral, baptism, or marriage, neither went to church...

...I took all I had learned from a nurturing church and loving community of nuns and created with my husband (a former priest) a family life for us and our three children that reflects all that we believe the church is...

...Even today, the public park that stretches along First Avenue from 67th to 68th is called Saint Catherine's Park...

...Our parish was Saint Catherine of Siena...

...Yet the change did not take...

...Though there were frequent reminders of a possible nuclear attack, the 1950s were not turbulent...

...It was not unusual to have brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles living within a few floors or buildings of one another...

...The parish church, school, and rectory were all on the same block...

...Yet the parish of Saint Catherine of Siena on 68th Street meant a great deal to them and to us...

...Through the sixties, I served as a Sister of Charity of New York...

...All of sudden, within a matter of months in the late 1960s, communities of nuns changed quickly even as priests retained their collars, black suits, and priestly vestments...

...We rarely left the classroom or our seats except for an occasional recess or drill...

...For a short period of time, I had a job at the Saint Jude's room in the rectory, where once a week after school I would join ten or twelve others in an assembly line collating the Saint Jude fundraising mailers...

...My life in the church had been too rich and fertile for that to happen...

...On Sundays the dance was around a huge jukebox at Saint Vincent's on 65th Street...

...I do recall feeling an overwhelming obligation to myself and to God that it was time to go because if I stayed a nun any longer, I would live a sterile existence and that was not God's plan for me...

...How is it that he as an altar boy, who with his friends took many overnight trips to the country with priests, never had a bad encounter...

...On the other hand, they may say that the church, which parented me and my generation in parishes across the country, had a wonderful opportunity in the second half of the twentieth century to take a stand with us for the future, but chose otherwise...

...We saw a different church emerging that had more in common with other faiths-equal, not better-recognizing that all were entitled to a good life and eternal salvation...

...I was raised in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, on York Avenue between 66th and 67th streets, just across from Rockefeller University and in the shadow of New York Hospital...

...Was it simply the times...

...The nuns who taught me, as suburban mothers are to their daughters today, were always encouraging, often demanding, making sure I made the grade and took advantage of new opportunities...

...As a child or adolescent, I never had an encounter with our parish priests that was less than good or religious...

...Beyond the constant air raid drills and hiding under our desks, we were allowed to be kids...

...They taught us how to play, created school and parish teams of boys and girls, and gave us an outlet for our energies other than the streets...

...Not that we were isolated from abuse by neighbors or family-abuse no one ever spoke of at the time-but took care of it quietly and swiftly...

...It was a good and holy church that made us what we are today...

...Like me, thousands of women left their convents and re-entered the workforce...

...On a Friday night, it was a dance at Saint Catherine's...

...To her credit, each of us had twelve years of Catholic schooling...

...This huge parish was staffed by Dominican priests, brothers, and nuns...

...We have racked our brains and examined our histories to try to discover the root cause for priestly abuse, and to understand when and how such abuse could have reached such proportions...

...I started out as a nun and teacher modeled after the best I had known, but soon found myself changing, enjoying working in poor neighborhoods to improve living conditions...

...Since there was no tuition charge, these were among the ways the parish supported the school...

...They walked among us as we played on the streets, knew our names and our circumstances, and often forced us to run and hide if we had not been to confession that Saturday or to the children's Mass on Sunday...

...The nuns lived a more sheltered life in a brownstone on 69th Street, a few avenues up from the school...

...That meant huge classes with sixty or sixty-five children and one nun who taught without aides, special education programs, or group discussions...

...For, although we are the children of the parish church in America, we are different from the church that reversed its course so many years ago, our children are different, the world is different, and even immigrants living in America today are different...

...Still, there were special music and art programs and many, many stage performances...

...In the midst of the current crisis in the American Catholic Church, I have had numerous discussions with friends and family, from New York City and cities around the country, all raised in the tradition of Vatican I, but who came of age during Vatican II and beyond...

...We believed we were being transformed together into a different church-committed to social causes beyond the parish-to a world that needed us...

...There was only one class of each grade, kindergarten through eight-nine classrooms in all-with desks in neat rows bolted to the floor...

...It was at the core of the neighborhood, spreading out across streets and avenues, offering us support: nuns were mother figures, and brothers and priests were heroes and father figures...

...I have asked my brother about his experiences...

...The Sisters of Charity were the first nuns to march for civil rights in Harlem, and I traveled regularly on weekends to Washington, D.C., to march for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam...

...For when it comes to our memories of growing up in the 1950s, we cannot come up with any sexual-abuse experiences...

...Some of the fathers, brothers, and priests turned the auditorium into a temporary basketball court by painting regulation lines and borders on the wooden floor and by building roll-away wooden backboards...

...Housing was so affordable and so plentiful that families often moved from apartment to apartment in the same building rather than go through the hassle of painting...

...Extended families were all around because relatives knew of vacancies long before any outsider did...

...The parish priests were always welcome and they dropped in now and again...

...For my parents, and my mother in particular, the parish provided for her children what she could not...

...We picked up the key in the rectory anytime we wanted, and we could hang out on dreary Saturday or Sunday afternoons without chap-erones, if the truth be known...

...We helped paint it and the parish equipped it with old couches, a Ping-Pong table, and a record player...

...We would also take turns at the small shop in the vestibule of the church, selling statues and religious wares to churchgoers...

...and a large number of priests, who served the parish, the school, and the surrounding hospitals, among them New York Hospital, Memorial Hospital, and Sloane Kettering...

...I have often thought about this over the past year...

...They were our priests who would always be around and who had our respect and deference...

...There had to be something else for me to do...

...The rectory housed a community of men: one or two brothers who were the sacristans, caring for the altar, the many vigil lights, and the shrines within the church...

...They were holy men to us with none of the obvious failings of our fathers...

...The parish opened the basement to weekly dances...

...It educated us, taught us all we needed to know in order to succeed, opened our hearts and souls to a rich, spiritual life, and pointed us toward the future...

...As the church faces its greatest crisis, and as we make our way into the twenty-first century, these recollections may say that we have lost some of our common ground and heritage...

...Because for me and many like me, "once upon a time in a parish," we were the church in America...

...The promise of Vatican II faded, and nuns and priests left their communities in droves...

...I remember that the desire for marriage and family never entered the picture as a reason for my wanting to leave...

...We welcomed the fresh air that came with John XXIII and Vatican II...

...It was no longer the church of our childhood, but one that seemed to mirror our progression as we took on the ills of the world...

...What, then, do these recollections of a city kid say about the Catholic Church in America...

...They took pride in providing a roof over their children's heads, one or two meals a day, a good neighborhood, and an opportunity they rarely had themselves-the opportunity to attend Catholic schools...

...Rock 'n' roll changed us forever...

...The parish worked at keeping even teenagers close to the church by refurbishing a room in the school basement for us...

...Rather the church was a haven for kids like me who grew up on the streets with parents who lived mostly in the present, living from one weekly paycheck to another...

...We were among the first to go from full religious garb to modified habits and later to street clothes...

...We saw the church changing physically as the altars and our priests turned to face us and colloquial English replaced the familiar, more solemn Latin...

...My mother knew that, if she entrusted her three children to the good priests and nuns of the parish, all would be well...

...They may say that the church was truly great in the first half of the twentieth century, when its parishes nurtured immigrant communities and its priests were genuinely engaged with people in neighborhoods...

...I was trained in Elizabeth Seton's nineteenth-century religious and community traditions and educated at the College of Mount Saint Vincent in the Bronx to teach in the city's parish schools...

...Abuse did not come from the church or its priests...

...It was well known around the world as the national shrine of Saint Jude, Patron Saint of Hopeless Cases, and was the site of numerous novenas (nine-day prayer vigils), which I often attended as a young girl and which were packed with devotees from all over the city...

...Her two daughters went to Cathedral High School and her eldest son to Cardinal Hayes-a monumental achievement for a young woman from the West Side, Barbara Kane Pilliod, a former Sister of Charity of Mount Saint Vincent, is a public relations consultant in Niskayuna, New York...

...And there was...

...It was the heyday of rock 'n' roll and we danced our way through our school days...

...The classrooms were all on the first floor, and a fabulously large auditorium covered the entire second floor...

...who never held a job outside her home, who married her childhood sweetheart at seventeen, and with him grew up with her children and was devoted to them...

...In fact, we rarely looked on them as men...

...As young adults in the 1960s, we realized how much we had changed and with our collective strength took to the streets to protest against an unjust war and racial and gender discrimination...

...At lunch time, we rarely left the schoolyard...