June 3 – Dear Diary, Before dinner, we said Eternal Rest for Pope John XXIII. A plane crashed off the coast near Alaska, and 101 passengers bit the dust. All those people got to see the Pope at heaven’s gate. I hope some of them were Catholic, so they could get in.
It wasn’t enough that there were thirteen of us born of the same two parents, living in a creaky old house with ratty grass and spilled tricycles in the front yard—across the street from the tennis courts of a ritzy Protestant girls’ school in Pasadena. Or that our dog Sparky chased the cars and nipped at the heels of these privileged girls after school every single day, calling constant attention to our embarrassing rank in the neighborhood.
It wasn’t enough that we were Holy Rollers in an obviously secular society: good, patriotic Catholics who found parking spaces by praying to St. Anthony, who could recite the old Latin Mass by heart, and dutifully learned the modern English version, word for word after the Second Vatican Council. Not enough that we went along with the flock and replaced the magnificent, time-honored, glorious Latin hymns with inferior folk songs led by guitar strumming, self-declared musicians who had no sense of rhythm. It wasn’t enough that we were Navy Brats and every three or four years, in service of our country, we gave up our friends and favorite haunts and moved to a completely new military base, Whidbey Island being one of those places, where one of our brothers, Buddy, (# 10), who weighed thirteen pounds at birth, arrived during a freak snowstorm.
Even being the second-to-the-largest family in the parish was not enough. (We were neck-and-neck with the Feeneys; they were ahead by one child, albeit a gimp). There were so many of us that the number of our birth was more important than our name. (I was # 6). Certainly nobody but me cared that our mother had flaming red hair, white skin prone to freckles and sunburn, traits which I inherited, traits which made me stick out of the crowd I was born into and every other crowd that ever gathered for anything for the rest of my entire life.
We did have the dubious distinction of being the only family in the whole school who fought communism every night by praying the rosary. The stained and weary lot of us knelt down in front of two statues and a chalice every night after dinner, counting fifty Hail Mary’s, one Our Father and five Glory Be’s with a string of beads when other kids were already finished with their homework and watching their new black and white TVs. It wasn’t enough that the family’s main galvanizing fear, the Cold War, was lurking mysteriously and darkly on the horizon somewhere in Russia, a war which made us bump our heads on the underside of our desks at school and crawl into a ball whenever the siren sounded. We had a bomb shelter— a hole in the ground with cement steps leading to a pit next to the garage, but this is where we would almost certainly be vaporized in the event of a nuclear holocaust because it wasn’t deep enough. A dark, grave-like corner in which to huddle pathetically in mass panic; a hole that Mother and Daddy hastily expanded and stocked with canned vegetables (the soggiest, most barf-inducing food you could ever eat) after the Cuban Missile Crisis at the end of last year. And our Bombs Over Tokyo! Dad who wore a Navy uniform to work everyday (when not a soul we knew did military service) constantly reminded us that “Rank has its privileges” and that we were really nothing more than his own private “Mess Hall,” mere props in his Last Supper tableau.
None of this was enough for us. Underneath it all, we had visions of grandeur and ambition as sprawling as we were. And suddenly, we had the chance to reel it all in.
It was 1963. You may remember it as the year President Kennedy was assassinated. With more than a dozen kids, our parents (following church doctrine by using abstinence as their preferred method of birth control) had already defined the word good as in: Catholic. In 1960, they also defined the word staunch, as in: Republican, by voting against the Catholic candidate for President. When Kennedy got shot dead, it was one of those things that my father silently praised God for, even though to the rest of the world it looked like a tragedy. Or, as our parents would say, lacking any other explanation, a tragedy that God intended “for His own mysterious reasons.”
But Kennedy was shot at the end of November. The big thing that happened to us that year happened in June.
The Pope died.
That benevolent-looking, roly-poly guy in the white robes, Pope John the XXIII. And the whole thing nearly changed our fortunes. Because of his death, 1963 was the year we were the most famous Catholic family you ever heard of. 1963 was the year that the messy, lumbering lot of us finally earned some status in the world.
On December 7, 1941 our dad, Martin Shea, was 22 years old, an assistant supply officer, a boot ensign aboard The USS Pelias stationed at a submarine base dock at Pearl Harbor. The night before, he and his shipmates hooted it up at a party on the beach, a luau at the Officer’s Club. The evening was humid and warm, palm trees silhouetted against a moonlit sky, and the officers danced hula with the young ladies. Father Stefanucci, an Italian-born American priest, the ship’s Chaplain, was “three sheets to the wind,” apparently excelling at the hula.
But it wasn’t until the next morning that their friendship really got going. Our dad was up just before 8:00 dressing to go to Sunday Mass, when General Quarters sounded. Beep! Beep! Beep! Father Stefanucci had a cabin across the hall from our dad and hearing the alarm, peeked out the door, still in his pajamas, and certainly not ready to say Mass. Beep! Beep! Beep! the alarm kept sounding. “All hands to your battle stations.” Our dad, who wasn’t yet our dad, slapped on his trousers, quickly buttoning his shirt as he skipped up the steps to the main deck. Beep! Beep! Beep! Then he saw a plane roar by, level with the ship, covered with Japanese markings. Bombs were already dropping in the visible distance, huge sheets of flame shooting skyward, the sound of droning airplane engines and the smell of burning oil filling the air. He ran back downstairs, two steps at a time. Father Stefanucci was still standing there, stunned and somewhat hung over.
“Why does everything have to happen where I am?” Stefanucci wailed, still glued to the spot. Apparently he was well traveled and things went wrong on his trips.
“Father, get a hold of yourself,” our future dad barked, as he steered Father Stefanucci back into his cabin and started yanking dresser drawers open, throwing clothes on the bed. “Get dressed! Where’s your battle station?” That kind of talk usually snaps us out of it, makes us hup-to, and I guess it worked on Father Stefanucci.
Back up on deck and looking across the harbor, a massive explosion instantly gave way to walls of orange flames and billowing gray clouds as The Arizona was hit, three-quarters of a mile away. Bombs hailed over the scene, a huge explosion rocked The California and lit it on fire. The sky filled with black smoke, and the morning became dusky and thick, almost like evening.
So that was the big story about our dad and Father Stefanucci. Together in battle on the most famous day of days—for anyone, not only in the US Navy, but also in the whole world. The thing that made it such a game-changer for us—the reason for all the excitement between June 3rd when Pope John XXIII died and June 21st when the Council of Cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel to vote for a new pontiff of the Holy Catholic Church around the world—was that Stefanucci was on the shortlist to become Pope! His name was in all the papers as the first American Cardinal to be considered a candidate for His Holiness! Stefanucci’s election would make 1963 a banner year for the Americans and the Catholics: Kennedy still reigned as the first Catholic President of the United States (it was only June, he wasn’t assassinated yet). And if elected, Cardinal Stefanucci would be the first American Pope—ever.
For those two weeks, it was glorious for our dad. And for us, his faithful extras. Suddenly we weren’t on the losing team anymore. Our dad and Cardinal Stefanucci had been best buddies. Since Pearl Harbor! And we, the whole unkempt gang of us, were suddenly his lifelong friends. After all, he came to visit us once on Whidbey Island, just before he became Archbishop. Buddy, who was barely out of diapers, was so desperate for attention that he hung onto Stefanucci’s arm the entire night until he was extricated when the Archbishop tried to put on his cape at the door.
Daddy didn’t waste any time telling the nuns and the Monsignor at St. Andrew’s of his privileged position as the guy who might even have, ahem, saved Father Stefanucci’s life. Because their story changed a bit after that. Now we saw them both on the upper deck, with our dad yanking Father Stefanucci out of the way as the bullets rained over them. And the two of them panting heavily under the awning that protected them, their ears pulsing after the huge roar of an engine had splintered the air.
We stormed heaven that June, the month when the air is the sweetest in Southern California, when if you’re a kid you just have to be outdoors, inhaling smog and eucalyptus scent kicked up from the leaves of the tall, elegant trees with multicolored bark. June, the month you create and star in magnificent adventures out back (re-enactments of Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett), by the shed, or in the bamboo, or behind the bushes, or even downstairs in the bomb shelter until Mother calls you in for dinner. “Last one in is a hairy ape!”
That June, the June of 1963, all of us roused ourselves for 6:30 Mass with Daddy (to bribe God with our devotion). It was the month we all sat subdued and nodding in the Volkswagen bus on our way to church as the streetlights went dim and the sun rose like a blush around us. On Sundays, we went proudly to Mass en masse, better late than never as we trailed up the aisle, stretching the good Christian nature of other Catholics who knew how to get to the church on time. That June, at the doorway to the church, we saw for the first time ushers nodding approvingly as we filed up the center aisle. The faithful congregation, usually whispering disapproval, inched down the pew in their Sunday suits and high heels, smiling indulgently as we proudly, rather than sheepishly, created a conspicuous disturbance during the sermon.
One morning that spring, as my sixth grade class sat fresh and scrubbed with our hands folded on our desks, Sister Everista opened the day’s proceedings directly to me with, “Any word from the Cardinal?”
“Um, well,” I said, gulping air and sensing a unique advantage. I took another breath. Unbelievably, I had the full attention of every single person in sight. There was only one thing to do.
I made stuff up.
He had called last night during the rosary, long distance from Rome. He recognized my voice. What a smart guy, no wonder they want him to be Pope! So many voices to recognize and he got it right! From across the ocean! Dad got a special delivery letter in the mail with simply The Vatican as the return address: it was sealed with a red, wax seal and its embossed contents were a secret.
I never lied so much in my life, but how could it hurt? Our parish sucked it up just as much as we did; they were not above glory by association. In the end, when our prayers were answered and Stefanucci got to be Pope, I’d just go to confession. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, I told a few itty bitty lies.”(Big deal!)
God would have to forgive me. You can’t get any closer than the Pope.