Tales out of School: A Challenge to Catholic Educators

Part One:

The Personal is Political

Holy Family Parish

Looking south over Lake Ontario on a sunny July day, I had forgotten how serene the morning sky could be. Usually as I perform my early trek along the boardwalk from the Palais Royale to the Palace Pier, I fret over the defecation of the gulls and Canada geese, often my only company at this time of day. But my exercise completed, today the sky is many layers of blue, soothing my troubled spirit as I sip my cappuccino at the pavilion café.

This place is bathed in my past as well as my present. In the nineteen fifties, I came here with my brother, Art, and my sister Carolyn, to swim on a hot summer’s day. A quarter to get in and a few cents more for a cold drink with the sandwiches we had brought with us. The money came from our allowance, and was not freely spent. We called it The Tank in the local lingo. No one referred to it as Sunnyside Pool as they do now. Sunnyside was the amusement park with a roller coaster and rides. One day Art dared the two of us to dive from the high tower. As always, Carolyn and I allowed ourselves to be bullied into it, eager to prove to ourselves and to one another that we were not cowards.

But this summer morning I am not here to swim. I am marking the beginning of my retirement from education. The pool is occupied by a Scandanavian water polo team intent on their practice for the day’s competition, and oblivious to the early walkers like me who stare and admire their glistening youthful bodies and male camaraderie. I trek along this boardwalk in front of The Tank by the western beach from late April to mid-November, sometimes with a neighbour, as often alone, especially in the morning. In May and June especially, the evenings are full of young people, chatting and flirting over the tables of the café. Their excited voices are celebrating the aftermath of sand volleyball or the evening practice for the Dragon Boat Races at Centre Island in June. I find their energy and youthful anticipation of their unknown futures as intoxicating as the evening air.

I grew up not far from here, one block from the lake on Dowling Avenue. In the forties, this part of Parkdale was upward mobility for my parents. We moved to Parkdale from Berkeley Street in Cabbagetown in 1946 just after my sister Carolyn was born. Louise Grenier Arbour, my paternal grandmother came with us. The big Victorian house had ten rooms on three floors. The original owner, an architect, and Scotch as my mother would say, had designed the house to his taste - a large veranda in front of the foyer leading through French doors into a large living room. The first thing you noticed was a well-lit alcove with diamond shaped, lead pane windows where the tree stood at Christmas time. Above the front window and above our sofa, the original owner had designed a stained glass tribute to the Scottish poet, Robert Burns, more clearly lit from the veranda outside. A working fireplace and marble mantel lined with family photos was the centrepiece of the room along with the velvet portieres on the left that hung behind the piano over two large sliding doors that opened into the next room. These special features revealed the refined taste of the builder, something not lost on my father. Though I knew the stained glass winders were unique and beautiful, the sentiment they reflected bore no connection to my Polish-French Canadian consciousness. Nothing of the British Isles had to do with us, and certainly not a Presbyterian Scot, however populist. Parkdale was a safe place to live in during the fifties before the construction of the Gardiner Expressway destroyed the gentle village quality of the neighbourhood.

When my brothers Kenny and Paul were babies, I would wheel them in their carriages down the street toward the lake, showing them the trains and the charming houses and gardens on streets that no longer exist. South of the tracks, the houses were smaller but choice. North of the tracks was a curious mix of small three story apartment buildings alongside large Victorian houses with ample lawns. Unlike today, there were no high-rise buildings anywhere, and no obvious signs of poverty. By 1960, all of this would change, and two years later, my family would leave the neighbourhood for suburban east Montreal.

As children we felt entirely safe in the neighbourhood, except for the imaginary bogeyman in the cellar. We rarely played in the backyard after we outgrew the sandbox, except when my father created an ice rink in winter. We played on the street, or in the back alleys and laneways, or in the empty Dowling mansion halfway down the street. As we grew, our boundaries extended to Sunnyside and to the Exhibition, and especially along the shore of the lake. Lady, our Springer spaniel, a sweet and gentle dog, was always somewhere nearby. Her only vice was a tendency to chase cars up the street. My mother explained that she couldn’t help it. It was the hunter in her.

I attended kindergarten at Queen Victoria School on Close Avenue. Due to biased provincial funding formulas, Catholic schools in Toronto could not afford kindergartens in those days, and my older brother, Art, had started school at grade one that same year at Holy Family, also on Close north of King, behind the parish church. I remember my mother explaining to anyone who would listen that she was sending me to a public school, a heathen place at best, so that she could get some rest from her three small children in the afternoon. The teachers, there were two of them, were attentive and kind. It was the beginning of my love affair with school.

Our connection to Holy Family church and school was pervasive and unquestioned. My father’s mother, Louise, went to daily Mass until she was too frail. Next door to us lived a wealthy bachelor, Mr. Anthes, the owner of a gas company, Anthes Fuels, attended by his live-in housekeeper, an older woman with grey hair that everyone called Pinky. Situated on the southeast corner of King and Dowling, the house also had a large, well-kept backyard, enclosed behind a tall wooden fence where I would sometimes help Pinky hang up the wash, handing her clothespins or pieces of clothing. I also accompanied her to daily Mass occasionally, until we were old enough to travel the three blocks along King ourselves.

For grade one I transferred to Holy Family School, behind the parish church, where, with my brother Art and soon after my sister Carolyn, we settled into the larger Catholic world of the neighbourhood. First Confession and First Communion were big events in our lives, always in the spring around Mothers’ Day and meaning for me a new white dress and veil worn to Mass in the morning, followed later on by a large family gathering on the big day. When Art was accepted as an altar boy, my mother informed everyone and took great pride in washing and ironing his white surplice and occasionally sending his black soutane to the cleaners. Carolyn and I would often go to Mass with him in the mornings when he was serving Mass, afterward rushing home to eat breakfast and return to school on time.

In grade three, my teacher, Miss Kathleen Healy, challenged all of us to attend Mass every day during Lent and Advent, and we would always see her there providing a good example. I recall giving good example being a repeated exhortation at school in those days. Perhaps it was just that I was the eldest female in our family and took my responsibilities as a local paragon of moral virtue seriously. The idea that the Gospel was a subversive document, not intended to endorse the middle-class status quo was entirely alien in this world where respectability ruled.

My mother supplemented the family income in those days by renting the extra rooms in that spacious house. These roomers prepared their own meals on stoves or hotplates but we would provide them with fresh linen. In the front rooms on the second floor, a retired nurse and her daughter, Odna, lived from the time that I can remember. Not a Catholic, Odna attended Parkdale Collegiate and was almost like an older sister to me. When I was four, she and my mother colluded about buying me a violin, and she began to give me lessons in the evening. Art, Carolyn and I also took up the piano the following year with Mrs. Milligan, who lived a few doors down from the Church, a sweet, kind lady whom we all adored. Sadly, we learned that she was a Protestant.

Early on, from a playmate next door, I learned that Protestants and Catholics were enemies. Checking out this news with my mother, I discovered there was some truth to the matter but in a nonverbal, embarrassed kind of way. My friend, playmate and neighbour Colleen from the North of Ireland was adamant about this. When Mrs. Milligan’s eldest daughter was married at Parkdale United Church, my father told us we could not go to the Church ceremony. We could wait outside afterward. He had checked with Monsignor Brennan, our pastor at Holy Family then. This would not be the only time my father would carry the flag for Catholic honour. My parents were not educated people, and were not inclined to read books, just the newspaper as political life was often discussed. At election time, the house was used for a voting poll.

My Uncle Lad, my mother’s brother and a welder by trade, was very active in his union. He had left the Catholic Church when Father Howe, the pastor at St. Paul’s on Power Street who had married my parents and baptized Art and me, denounced unionism as a social evil from the pulpit. I would listen to my father and his brother-in-law, always good friends, debate the policies of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (later renamed the New Democratic Party) and of the Liberal Party. This was in the fifties during the prime-ministership of Louis St. Laurent and I assumed that my father’s loyalty lay with the French and the Liberal Party. The distinguished Canadian barrister and defence counsel Arthur Maloney ran for the Progressive Conservatives in Parkdale. But solid Irish Catholic from the Ottawa Valley that he was, no one in my house ever voted for the Conservatives.

Monsignor Edmund M. Brennan, the pastor at Holy Family, was beloved of our family. My father would have done anything for him and did. Monsignor Brennan had been the rector at St. Augustine’s Seminary on Kingston Road in Scarborough where diocesan priests were prepared with seven years of training in philosophy and theology to assume their position of leadership in Catholic parishes. As Vicar General of the archdiocese, he was a refined and literate man, the son of a judge in St. Catharines on the Niagara peninsula. To my sister and brothers and me, he was learned and kind and distinguished if a little remote. He often quoted poetry from the pulpit at Sunday Mass. I still remember the long slender fingers of his hands placed on the edge of the pulpit as he spoke. To my father, he was a mentor and friend. When Monsignor Brennan came to our home, it might as well have been the pope.

There were always two curates in those days assisting the pastor, and living in the priests’ house. In Holy Family, they were always Irish Canadians. These idealistic, good-natured priests presided over all the clubs and societies that filled the lives of Catholic families in south Parkdale. Brownies and cubs, scouts and girl guides, Legion of Mary and altar servers, junior and senior Young Peoples’ Clubs, the tennis club in the spring and summer, the Catholic Women’s League, the Catholic Mothers’ League run then by Mrs. Phelan, the grandmother of my best friend, Betty Regan. The parish Credit Union was run by a handful of professional men and women. This bubbling arena of human initiative was a compelling subconscious lesson for me about the power of community. Catholic life was defined as a community for liturgical observance and social intercourse in this working class neighbourhood before concerns with justice and poverty began to grip the Catholic conscience. I did not appreciate until much later that Monsignor Brennan had clearly chosen to work in this insignificant parish full of very ordinary middle and working class people, not in a more prestigious one in North Toronto which could have been his for the asking.

My parents loved to roll up the carpet and to dance in the living room, or play cards with friends on Saturday evenings when we were very young. When they did not entertain, my father developed the habit of attending devotions to the Blessed Sacrament on Saturday and to the Sacred Heart on Sunday evenings. Never a believer in freedom of choice when it came to religious matters, he would insist that someone come with him and often this was my opportunity to have him to myself. I did not sit with him as I would sing with Ms. Fleury, the organist in the choir loft, keeping her company I thought. But he and I would walk back and forth to church together, and this shared sense of piety was our particular bond.

Christmas Eve was always significant. As altar servers, my brothers would be needed for the Midnight mass, and I would sing in the choir. My father would go with us. My mother, weary from cooking and Santa Claus preparations, would go to the ten-thirty Mass in the morning with any child too young for that late hour. Afterwards, in the kitchen, my father would talk about his mother, now deceased, while we ate the tortière my mother had prepared, this particular food evoking memories of the French Canadian custom of the Réveillon, of a large meal and presents after Midnight mass, the Christmas custom of his childhood.

I cannot remember when I was not pious as a child. I learned the Latin hymns and responses very young and loved to go to church, even when my father forced us to attend the Sunday afternoon classes especially organized for children attending non-Catholic schools, drenched in religion though we already were. Monsignor Brennan must have asked him to bring us along to expand the group, or perhaps to answer his questions to inform the other children.

My closest childhood friend at Holy Family was Betty Regan. Her family lived in an apartment at the top of the stairs across the street on King at Dowling Avenue. Her father was a stockbroker on Bay Street and her mother a housewife as it was considered in the fifties a negative reflection on a man if his wife was employed outside the home. The feminist revolution of the sixties would change all this. Her brother Brian was a few years younger. Betty participated in Brownies and Girl Guides with me, and later in the Legion of Mary. Betty was president of the Legion of Mary before I took the helm.

Our advisor, a young handsome Irish curate named Fr. Pat McGovern had grown up on High Park Boulevard in St. Vincent de Paul Parish on Roncesvalles Avenue. He was clearly drawn to Betty and she to him, but when he drove her home from church one evening, he asked her to sit in the back seat of his car. Sitting beside him would be considered an impropriety. Her face reddened as she described the episode to me. Scandal in those days meant a priest being too familiar with a woman. Fr. McGovern left the priesthood in the wake of Vatican Two and, having landed a position at a local Community College, came back to Holy Family looking for Betty. She had married Ricky Bernard, her Protestant childhood sweetheart a month before. I ran into Pat McGovern shortly afterward by chance and as he described the irony of it, I could detect a lingering sadness. As would be the case with other Catholic clerics throughout my life, he had much earlier recognized my academic interests, and had asked me what I wanted to do after college. I had told him I thought psychiatry would be interesting. Immediately he offered to introduce me to a friend of his in the profession.

The school and the church were the centre of our neighbourhood life. In summers we played tennis into the evening hours and socialized at weekly dances, the Young Peoples on Friday nights in the winter, the Tennis dances on Sunday in the summer. Fr. Edward Zeagman would stand at the door, asking people to recite the Hail Mary to establish their Catholic credentials, or to establish that they could speak some English. Newly arrived Italian immigrant men in search of a wife, or sometimes seeking a sexual liberalism not acceptable in their own community, descended on the church from other parts of Toronto, and we often complained about their rude, aggressive behaviour on the dance floor. We became hardened to their feelings and refused to dance with them at all.

After midnight as we did on Sunday after Mass, we would head down to the Dufferin Gate restaurant near the Exhibition for ice cream and vanilla cokes and share the news.

About forty or fifty of us, mostly Catholics but some not, grew up together this way. The Catholic ghetto I would later come to call it. But it was a safe and innocent culture while it lasted, if somewhat narrow in scope. It was a world where females did not go to college but spent a lot of time in hockey arenas cheering on the boys, and where baby showers hinted at the lives we would certainly lead. The young men did not go to college either, but everyone played hockey and spent their early earnings buying their first car. I do not miss this world or its confining, fearful, inadequate assumptions and practice. But I cherish it for what it was.

The Holy Family Church I have described burned down in 1997. The warm dark wooden interior, contrasting with white walls and altar, are gone now. The new church, more Roman than Gothic, paid for, rumour has it, by the Canadian industrialist Conrad Black, is beautiful in its plain interior, but entirely cut off from the school. A high fence protects the religious order now ensconced in house after house along the street from the irritating presence of school children. Now Holy Family is in the hands of conservative traditionalist academic priests, the Oratorians, who refused to send their men to St. Michael’s for their theological education because they deem it too liberal and dangerous. St. Mike’s has been for a long time part of an ecumenical network of theological colleges, and is inclined to create critical consciousness in its students.

My dear old parish has become a bastion of defensive nineteenth century Catholicism, still fighting the old dangers of liberalism and secularism, more monastery than parish church. Though I still resonate to the sounds of the Latin mass of my youth, the old ecclesiology of separation of clergy and laity are entrenched here. There was a medieval eastern orthodox barrier behind the altar. The priest has his back to the people. A beautiful marble wall surrounds the sanctuary like a parapet where people still kneel for Communion and receive the bread on their tongues. The Sunday I attended, the young preacher kept reiterating how sinful humanity is. In this monastic retreat, so removed from the challenges of the world, the laity continue to be treated like spiritual children, not as adult critical Catholics, not as spiritual equals. God forbid.

I wonder if these priests, who live in socially removed academic cultures and have abdicated by their monastic choice, a sense of responsibility for the public commonweal as such, appreciate how debilitating to a sense of personal empowerment these cultures are for the laity, who must live and act in a society far more challenging, hostile to their values and psychologically difficult than those of any monastery. If their spirituality is focused on unworthiness and deficiency, how will the laity ever raise their negative, self-focused eyes above their navels to see what is around them, let alone be motivated and empowered to fix it. Surprisingly, many educated Catholics longing for the Latin liturgy or for the solidity of an absolutist past, travel to Holy Family, for a traditional theology and Gregorian chant no longer available in most parishes.

But it must be said, that only in a neighbourhood now rundown and populated by the poor and by immigrants without social or economic power, locked into ethnic cultures and clinging to what was, ill-educated and uncritical, in a church desperate for male vocations, could such an anachronism flourish.

Melanie

Sister Melanie McCann had come to Holy Family at the beginning of grade eight, my last year there. In the early days of September, news travelled across the schoolyard that the new principal was playing football with the boys. A mob of children rushed to the back of the school, over to the boys’ side to have a look. In full habit, her veil flying, she kicked that ball clear across the playground. Sr. Melanie McCann was feminine and gentle to her roots. From a large Irish Catholic family, she had obviously learned something from her brothers. As children, and later for me as an adult, we witnessed in her the sheer pleasure of being alive.

Mother Melanie we called her then, before the reforms of Vatican Two made the term extinct. In Ireland where this community was founded by the social reformer Mary Ward, there was a class distinction between the terms mother and sister, mother representing those higher born and educated, sister for the ill educated from the lower ranks of society. But we only used this form of address when speaking directly with her. Everyone called her Melanie, as a sign of affection not disrespect. She had a way of connecting - with the staff, the children and the parishioners, and always exuded that divine positive energy even when upset. I have no memory of unkindness as a child or after, as a member of her staff. No one was afraid of her either.

She was pals with Sr. Fredricka, the principal at St. Vincent de Paul up on Roncesvalles, a more affluent parish than Holy Family but still dominated by Irish Catholics. Class differences were never acknowledged in my family. One either had class or one did not.

I remember my father, always carrying a sense of investment in the life of the parish, commenting, Those two are certainly full of beans! Underneath the voluminous cloth of their black habits, it was obvious that they were both visibly beautiful women. Sr. Fredricka was taller and more statuesque. Both had what my father called class. In those days, a principal in a Catholic school taught full time except for a couple of afternoons when a regular replacement teacher would give her some time to attend to her administrative duties. How we missed her on those afternoons! Not just for her discipline, always imperceptible but real, but also for the sheer fun of her presence.

When I returned for that one year to teach in her kindergarten, I got to know her as an adult. On my first morning, she came into my classroom to see how I was managing. She focused on my manner with these little ones, rather than on my skills. Every so often, she would drop in unannounced. I remember only her support - never a whiff of a need to criticize or control.

Fr. Zeagman would come by to visit her each morning around 10. The three priests of the parish would have said their daily masses by then and eaten breakfast together. Sometimes we could hear Melanie and Zeag laughing down the hall. Every so often a teacher would deliberately send down a particularly cute child on a bogus mission just so they could interact. One time over lunch, a sharp-tongued Irish woman commented on the inappropriateness of their friendship. I remember thinking even then that it was probably one of the few times they were able to freely socialize with the opposite sex, a real deprivation of their celibate lives.

Elementary school cultures differ greatly from secondary ones. We played a lot of cribbage during the hour and a half lunch period. I dated a nice Protestant Dutchman, a friend of one of the teachers on staff. I went to a number of baby showers that year for my friends. I remember deciding that I would return to university, this time to McGill, if only to escape the claustrophobia of that tiny little world. Years later, challenged by a sister of St. Joseph to do something about the sorry state of religious education in the secondary schools, I would seek out Melanie about my decision. Now a superintendent at the Board, and with her usual delight in one of her previous students, she insisted on being present for the selection interview.

I saw her less frequently after that. Occasionally at a lecture. Once we met for dinner at the College on St. Mary’s Street where she was living, to meet her distraught brother who had lost his wife and some of his children in a fire months before. Their bodies were found around the bed where, unable to get out from the upper floor, they were praying the rosary. She worried as much for him as for his remaining children.

Another time she wanted to discuss the impact of the Church’s demand that women delay sexual intercourse until marriage in a more liberal culture when such strictures might deny the possibility of marriage. She worried for her nieces. l felt she also worried for young women like me.

After she had retired from a lifetime in education, I learned one day that she had Alzheimers and was in the infirmary at Loretto Abbey on Mason Boulevard. I never went to visit her during that time. I could not bear her not recognizing me. She was for me the only woman in my childhood who actually saw me for who I was. She died a few years ago in December, remembered by the sisters in her community for her joy and her strong sense of community. Her nieces, now married and with children of their own, wept throughout the Mass. Someone had gathered photos of her at different periods of her life for display. In one of them, she sat in a chair at one of the annual St. Patrick’s Day concerts in the Church hall at Holy Family, a child on her lap, that distinctive rueful grin on her face.

St. Joseph’s College School

"Of Courtesy… it is much less

Than courage of heart or holiness

But in my walks it seems to me

That the grace of God is in courtesy.

Hilaire Belloc

I was young, just turned twelve two months before, when I began my first year of high school. In 1956, St. Joseph’s College School took up an entire block on the south side of Wellesley Street at Bay in Toronto, where the MacDonald Block now stands. Towering over the convent but connected to it stood a charming Gothic chapel that seated about 800 people. The convent and the school were connected by a circular music hall featuring small teaching and practice rooms, everything constructed of wood. All three buildings opened onto a spacious, well-groomed park hidden from the street by a high wooden fence painted grey. We could enter the school from the main entrance on Breadalbane Street, but if we took the bus up University in the morning, it was a shortcut to enter through the back yard, frequently walking past a line of street people lining up for food from the Sisters’ kitchen. I learned later that the nuns always referred to each of these homeless men as St. Joseph, the community’s way of communicating to these people a belief in their dignity and value.

Before the subway line was installed, the University bus ran only at rush hour to accommodate the employees at Queen’s Park, at the Hydro, and at the hospitals - The Toronto General, Sick Childrens’ and Mount Sinai. We also enjoyed the morning company of the boys from De