Pants on Fire

Offer it up for your sins I was told or for the unbaptized baby souls in limbo waiting to get into heaven.  Sister Jerome didn’t like me grousing about the getting the worst assignments as an altar boy.  I suspected she was selecting me for Saturday service because I seemed ungrateful for having been admitted to Catholic school at all. I was the “parish child” which meant I was the poor kid whose family could never afford the tuition.  Saving my soul from having been born into a Jewish household with a mezuzah on the door frame was no doubt the intent of the scholarship. 

This was not the usual 7 a.m. mass every weekday. This was Saturday, a twelve-year-old boy’s freedom day or ought to be. And it was a lengthy ceremony, longer than serving at a funeral or a Holy Week ceremony. In fact, this was a wedding, the wedding ceremony of a dozen nuns.

Now the reason a wedding for nuns sounds bizarre is because it truly is strange.  The novice nuns make three vows and are married to Christ. They receive a veil and a gold ring and the works. The vows are to “poverty, chastity, and obedience,” although coming from a poor family myself I could never see how poverty was something to embrace.  Or chastity for that matter. 

This all took place at a girls’ school run by a convent of fully-fledged nuns and aspiring novices, the brides. A monsignor presided over the ceremony along with two altar boys, incense, flowers, candles, a choir and the whole shebang. Very male upfront and the flock of nuns and schoolgirls behind the altar rail. Timmy, the other altar boy, and I had the job of swinging the incense censer, handing off water and wine, and mumbling our Latin. It was not only strange but exceedingly boring.  And it was interminable. 

At one point while Timmy was parading that censer around with the smoky incense choking us all, I felt like maybe it was not only boring but also getting kind of hot. A gasp arose from the congregation like from an audience watching a high-wire performance. But I was the object of wonder. A low candle behind my behind had ignited my cassock and it was going up fast in flames. Timmy cried “Oh shit! You’re on fire.”  I hadn’t the sense to drop and roll but Timmy ran to me, slapped out the flames and ripped off my cassock. I was unharmed but the fire had melted through my polyester pants.

And there I stood nearly bare-assed in front of God and everybody, and everybody consisted of a flock of nuns and schoolgirls. The mother superior whisked me off into the sacristy and found another cassock to cover my disgraceful display. This kindly lady called my mom to bring me a new pair of trousers for which the convent paid. While I waited, she served me a nice lunch of shit-on-a-shingle. 

Now sixty years later my Catholicism has been left for a memory and I understand that young nuns no longer get the wedding ceremony.  The Latin mass is gone.  No more fish on Fridays.  Even St. Christopher has been de-sainted. There is no more place like limbo for the unbaptized innocents. I just wonder what happened to all those baby souls. I hope they made it in.