Body of Christ.
That’s what Corpus Christi meant in Latin.
Younger kids called it Corpus Crispy, and it wasn’t as nice a name as the neighboring parishes: St. Philip Neri, St. Ambrose, and Mount Carmel.
But it was my church.
And when I wasn’t going back and forth between public schools, it was my school, too. Because I had returned to the church before my mother, I behaved as though I’d discovered the place or built it myself, stone by stone—but in truth, the church had always been a part of our family.
I was baptized there. Back in April 1968, two strangers dabbed my forehead with oil, stood beside the font, and said prayers over me. The woman was pretty and young. A nun, according to my mother, who’d abandoned the sisterhood soon after my baptism. She didn’t remember much of the man, just that he was a kind-hearted parishioner who felt sorry for the rust-haired baby with no one to stand up for her. My mother couldn’t remember either of their names, but they took me into their arms, anointed me with oil, and became my godparents just the same.
My mother’s Catholicism ran hot and cold. In fairness to Rome, the religion she practiced should have had its own name. It glorified mystery, but resisted authority. She opposed birth control, for instance, but had a certain appreciation for sex outside of marriage, and sex in general. She’d stay away from the church for whole stretches of time, only to re-emerge wearing a scapular under her shirt, proud of the tiny badge that guaranteed straight passage to heaven in the event of an accident or sudden illness. Her behavior ranged from embarrassingly devout (she said rosaries to cure common ailments like warts and ringworm) to shamefully liberal (she advised us not to marry the first man we fell in love with; certainly not the first we slept with.) She learned her Catholicism from her mother, and who knows where my grandmother learned hers.
Missionaries maybe.
Her own mother had been wild, making up her own rules about everything, but adoring the Virgin all the while. Her father, on the other hand, was a practical man, a woodcutter and a Methodist, who was suspicious of Catholics and was said to have driven away the unfortunate priest who came to the house to call on his wife. My mother had both sides of her lineage battling inside of her, the sloppily devout along with the untrusting and practical. Except for St. Mary’s downtown, where she’d had her only wedding, Corpus Christi was the church she’d always attended. It was closest in proximity to the various places we’d lived in the city, the hub of the circle we’d traveled. My mother had had every one of us baptized there, which could not have been easy, considering that the babies kept coming—even after she’d separated from her husband—and each child offered up had an entirely different set of features.