Dio C'e: A Singular Quest

Contents

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

Part Two

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Part Three

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

Part One

1

A priest destroyed my marriage. He worked his will with my wife to convince her to abandon her husband. It’s natural for anyone to wonder how such a thing could happen. Is this some priest of the dark arts allied with devil worship, a practitioner of evil deeds, and a man who sets out to destroy love? Perhaps. But this priest’s affiliation is with a Church that preaches love as one of its most basic tenets, and confers a most sacred sanctity on the institution this Church says was elevated to the highest level, the level of a sacrament by none other than Jesus Christ himself. Yes, the priest who destroyed my marriage was ordained by the Church whose fathers trace their lineage, their origin to the man they refer to as the Son of God Himself. It would be a mistake to assume that I am intrinsically opposed to any church, to religion or to the clergy. On the contrary, it’s a fact that I have always been more and more interested—fascinated perhaps is the better word—by the mysteries of religious faith. I found that increasingly I wanted to know all I could about what makes a person believe in the principles of their beliefs, all the concrete dogmas as well as the esoteric accretions that attach themselves to a group of believers, those superstitions, if you will, that do not allow of any rational explanation. In spite of all my misgivings at the time, that priest’s actions made it possible for me to embark on one of the greatest adventures of my life, a voyage of discovery I would never have undertaken if I had remained married to my wife.

I didn’t become a Roman Catholic myself until the time of my marriage. My mother, the daughter of Italian-American parents, the granddaughter of native Italian grandparents, had married my father, whose parentage boasted, if that’s the right word, ties to Germans, Poles and American Indians. My mother, I was told, thought about having me christened soon after I was born, but my father, an agnostic, would not hear of it. My mother herself had discontinued attending Mass before she even met my father, so she entertained no especial desire to bring her son into the Church of her fathers, and certainly no fear that my soul would be irremediably lost if the waters of Baptism were not sprinkled upon my tender head. My mother did suffer from delusions about the powers of certain saints, and she had a general if not a particularly devotional appreciation for the Church’s basic teachings. That was the one thing I could never understand growing up—how so many Catholics could just affirm ideas that had been inculcated in them since childhood, but never actually live their lives as if those ideas had any real meaning for them. Every time my mother even thought about teaching me something about her religion, my father would just silence her with remarks tinged with sarcasm.

Give me a break Angela! When was the last time you went to Mass?

You know very well that I haven’t been inside a church since I was nineteen, Jim.

Case closed! My father smirked his superior smirk. Why do you want to feed that nonsense to Bill then? Leave the kid alone. When he’s ready, he’ll come to his own conclusions.

There are variegated ideas held by all stripes of believers and non-believers about the proper exposure a child should have to religious beliefs. Some say there has to be some religious training from earliest childhood and to avoid doing so can only wreak havoc on a child’s moral compass, while others will affirm with vehement conviction that this is unnecessary and even harmful, that without this baggage an individual will grow to maturity well adjusted with a rational outlook. My father strongly subscribed to the latter viewpoint.

My mother became a teenage rebel, true quite late in her teen years, but most would agree that she had been given very good reasons to battle authority. My grandparents were weak parents, never really exercising any authority over their daughter. The crisis hit her and by the time my mother was twenty-one, she had been through a number of men, or should I say that they had been through her. I know. It’s not nice to say things that may compromise your mother’s reputation and integrity. But I am all about telling the truth here—that’s my mission. And I do love my mother. She has always been everything a mother should be to me, her only child.

As for me, the exaggerations, distortions and outright lies that all religions promulgate had no effect on my upbringing. I had mixed feelings about my lack of exposure to things that most young people at any given age from six to sixteen either took for gospel truth (that’s an oxymoron if there ever was one!), not knowing any other, or took for granted altogether. I would see kids my own age going to Church with such a strong sense of belonging to something I had no idea about, hear them talking about how Jesus had saved them (from what, I always wondered), and I would sometimes feel as though I may have been missing out on something that may have provided a certain measure of social interaction that could have been interesting. At times I resented my parents for what I thought was absent from my life, but that didn’t happen too often, and then I would be grateful that I was free from all the obligations and proscriptions that fettered my friends’ attempts to explore the byways of life, the circuitous paths that the timid never venture into. I still had Christmas which, after all, is such a secular holiday that Christian churches actually have to implore their members to keep Christ in it. I received presents just as my friends of faith did.

Thus I grew, some would say bereft of the grace needed to become an adult in the most proper sense, a member of the body of Christ. I can only imagine what the extent of my belief or disbelief may have been if I had been born into a Jewish or even a Muslim family, or even any of the many Christian sects, cults, or ego driven marginal churches. I was fascinated by religion, but I wasn’t envious of those whose lives were directed by it. In fact, I often wondered why they actually found it necessary to tolerate certain (to me) bizarre practices. The neighborhood I grew up in was a mixture of mostly Italian and Jewish families, some of which were quite observant—to a fault, I would then think. I recall, especially, an old woman and another older Jewish man who would approach me and offer to pay me a few cents if I would follow them into their homes and turn on the lights. This only happened on a Friday night or during the day on Saturday. Once, on a Monday afternoon towards dusk, I saw the old man on the street and asked him if he wanted me to switch on his lights. He gave me such a look of contempt combined with pity and just patted my face and said Go on be a good boy, eh. I was quite a curious kid and this bothered me. I had to find out why he seemed to be annoyed at my offer. The next morning at school I asked my friend Josh, who was Jewish, why at times the man and woman were so happy when I agreed to turn on their lights and then, when I made the offer myself, the man gave me the cold shoulder. Josh laughed and then laughed again.

What’s so funny? I asked.

You are!

Me, why?

They want you to turn the lights on when it’s the Sabbath because they can’t do it themselves.

Why can’t they?

Because of their Sabbath observance. They’re not allowed to according to the Jewish religion.

"But why?" I persisted. Josh was very patient and understanding too.

It’s considered work, and according to the Bible, they’re forbidden to work on the Sabbath.

Work? Turning on a light is work? I was really dumbfounded by his answer.

Well let’s look at it like this, Josh went on, without the slightest hint of annoyance. Do you have any idea how people got light into their homes in ancient times?

Didn’t they have candles?

Candles came later. There was a time, before and around the time the Bible was being written when people had to make a fire for light. And, no, they didn’t have matches either. They had to rub stones together, get the fire started, fan it and all those kinds of things—work! And even today, you may not have to work to bring light into your home, but someone somewhere is working to bring it to you!

Oh, so it’s kind of symbolic.

Yeah, in a way. Josh smiled and seemed to feel good that he could bring some understanding of his religion to a heathen like me.

Oh! So do you get to turn the lights on in your house on Saturdays?

You really don’t know anything do you? Josh now seemed to be losing patience. We’re not Orthodox Jews, so we don’t take everything in the Bible the way other Jews do. There are many kinds of Jews who worship in many different ways. I didn’t know what to say to this, not wanting to feel stupid, so I tried to be humorous.

Well, if I ever get the idea to convert and become a Jew, just remind me to join your section.

2

I should say something more at this point about my mother. After all, whoever I am today is to a certain degree the result of the influences she had on me as I grew from infancy to childhood, through adolescence to being the adult I am today. I find it interesting and amusing that so many of my contemporaries act as though they came forth fully formed, denying the linkage to their parents or the influences that objectively considered—from whose perspective one may well ask—make them the persons they are for better or worse, whether they developed the positives and shed the negatives or turned the negatives into their own mixtures of paragons for living.

Angela La Rosa, my mother, was a true believer from an early age. On the day of her First Holy Communion at age seven, she dedicated her life to God. She prayed with fervor, a practice she would continue into her teen years. She prayed for everyone and for everything to be good, for her family to be favored by God and for the grace to follow God’s will in all things. Each Saturday she went to Confession and each Sunday she went to Mass and received Holy Communion. She never ate meat on Fridays and embraced the Lenten fasting directives with enthusiasm and purpose, sincerely believing that her sacrifices were helping to improve a wayward world, and even if this could not be seen clearly, she was at least certain that her efforts were lightening the load imposed on those poor souls in Purgatory. She collected indulgences for herself and others as some of her classmates collected baseball cards.

Indubitably, she was a very pretty girl, and from the age of about twelve she had boys trying to garner her attention, but Angela would have none of it. She would be pure and save her affections for her dream man, the one who would one day be her husband. She didn’t really know anything about how any of this developed in time, but somewhere in the recesses of her imagination, she felt certain that all would work out well. This is not to say that whenever a boy tried to talk to her she shunned him. No, Angela was gregarious to a fault. She talked to everyone, smiled at everyone, listened carefully to everything anyone had to say. This endeared her particularly to the adults of that generation, who greatly admired a young lady who was always respectful of her elders, but from the other side—and this was true especially in the years from fifteen through seventeen—the boys who tried to break her down, to become her favorite male companion, came instead to resent her. They made bets amongst themselves as to which of them would get her to go to a movie and make his move on her, at the very least hoping to get her to French kiss, but Angela would not budge. She had strength of character that belied her age and aroused admiration commingled with a little jealousy in her female classmates. Her rebellious side in that period of her life was not directed against the values she lived by, but against any restrictions her parents tried to place on her activity outside of the home. Beginning at the age of fourteen, she would gather together some friends, girls as well as boys, and take the subway into the City, just to walk around Times Square, look into the windows on Fifth Avenue and hang out. Time after time, her father would forbid her to leave the house after eight in the evening, but Angela would find a way to get around him, firmly believing she had to respect her parents, but feeling nonetheless that she was doing nothing wrong. And truly, she wasn’t.

Angela, too, was an only child. My grandmother had her after two miscarriages and was then unable to have another child after her birth. Her parents were both active in their local parish, St. Ann’s in Brooklyn. My grandfather was an usher, helping with the Sunday collections, while my grandmother was a member of the altar society, working with other devout ladies to beautify the inside of the church.

My grandfather had a friend who read the announcements at Sunday Masses. They used to play cards together with some other men. He was a tall good looking man from what I’ve been able to ascertain. He had a commanding voice and considerable charm. He was apparently happily married, a true practicing Catholic with seven children already, and he was still at the time in his early thirties. My mother looked up to him and fantasized that the man she’d one day marry would be someone like Don Acosta.

One day when she was seventeen, at home studying for her high school Regents exam in world history, the doorbell rang. Angela’s mother and father had gone to the City on a day trip to see a Broadway show. Acosta evidently knew that Angela would be home by herself, but he acted surprised when she told him that her parents were away. In her own friendly manner, after mentioning that she was studying for this important exam, Angela asked if he would like to come in. Could she offer him something to drink? She really thought he’d refuse and say that he would return when her parents were there, so that Angela was a bit taken aback when he smiled and walked in. He sat at the dining room table where Angela had her books spread out. When she went into the kitchen to pour him a soft drink, Acosta followed her, stood behind her and ran his hand up inside her dress. This was something Angela would never have expected, never even have imagined in any way at all. She shrieked and jumped back and when Acosta saw the horrified look on her face, he quickly realized that he had miscalculated. Overcome with apprehension, he began to make excuses for his behavior. It wasn’t intentional. He dropped something and bent down to pick it up. He was sorry if he upset her. He’d better leave. And then, in a tone quite different from that Angela was used to hearing in church, he appealed to her not to say anything to anyone. People would misunderstand, she knew he was not that type (what type, Angela wondered?); he said he was sincerely sorry, and quickly walked out.

It was nothing really. She tried to convince herself of that. Maybe he didn’t mean it. But no matter how much Angela tried to put the incident out of her mind, it had made an impact on her and continued to disturb her on two levels. First she was shocked that this man, this paragon of virtue as she had thought of him before that day, would try to compromise the virtue of an innocent girl. By any measure, Angela was not especially worldly, but she was streetwise—at least as much as most girls of that period were, and the more she mulled it over the more she came to see that what Acosta was up to, appearing at her door at a time he had never appeared there when her parents were at home, entering the house while knowing they were not there, and following her into the kitchen—well, it was so evident, how could she think other than that he had had bad intentions. Nevertheless, she would say nothing. Who would believe her? And yet, if a man like Acosta, a man devoted to his faith, if a man like that could err to that degree… well, she just didn’t know. Up until then she sincerely believed, with all her heart, with all her soul and all her mind that if one just lived her faith, nothing could lead her astray. How was it, then, that a man with everything that Don Acosta had could bring himself to such a low level? Oh, yes, of course, she had heard about the wiles of temptation, about how no matter how good we all are we are still sinners, but she took that to mean that we were all tainted with original sin, and that anything else could be eliminated by the kind of good living she was accustomed to. Angela’s innate goodness would not permit her to compromise the lives of Acosta’s wife and children by disparaging his character in putting forth an accusation that would not be met with belief by most people who knew the man. And after all, he didn’t try to force himself on her. Her faith was being tested, she thought, but Angela was too intelligent a girl to let it go at that. Next she began to question her faith, question what she believed. It didn’t happen suddenly. No, it took her until well into her nineteenth year before she viewed aspects of her Catholic upbringing as not quite absolute.

The secondary aspect of Acosta’s action was to stir Angela’s fantasies in ways they had never been aroused before. Afterwards, every time she thought about what had happened she was fascinated, even excited by the thought. When Acosta’s hand touched her where she had never been touched before by a man, as slight as it was, the recollection stimulated her and opened her thoughts to the possibility that perhaps she would not wait for that perfect man, since now the actual concept of perfection in a man seemed impossible. Thus, at the age of nineteen she became a worldly woman. She met my father when she was twenty-four, not the ideal man she had dreamed about as a young girl, but a decent loving man whose sincerity set him apart, far apart from all the other men she had had relationships with until then. At that stage in her life, her libertine ways were wearing her down. She craved stability, and in my father she saw the fulfillment of her needs. She was also impressed by his intellectual perspicacity in that he could intelligently discuss the reasons why he was not a member of a church. Unlike so many other religious people she knew, James Prince had actually read the Bible in its entirety, both the Old and New Testaments and he could quote chapter and verse as well as—well, perhaps not as well as some Protestants that Angela had discussions with—many she had had conversations with and better than most Catholics she knew. His abrogation of religion in his own life seemed to give greater validity to her decision to embrace apostasy from the Church of her fathers, assuaging to some extent her sometime feelings of guilt.

3

My father’s paternal grandfather had come to the United States from Germany with his wife and young son. His family name was Prinz. In his new homeland this translated into Prince, a name he never adopted officially. He just began to sign every document of importance with the name Prince, and when his children were born, the birth certificates allowed of Prince as the family name. They were non-practicing Lutherans who were more interested in an affluent lifestyle than in any questionable concepts relative to the soul’s salvation. He had been invited to work for an old friend who had a successful auto repair business in the Bronx. Johannes Prince had learned auto mechanics as a young man in his home town of Ronnenberg, a town situated some eighty kilometers south of Hanover. He worked hard, saved his money with the help of his thrifty wife Krista and eventually started his very own auto repair shop. The Princes had three more children once they had settled in the United States, two daughters and a second son, my grandfather William Prince. With his two sons’ capable assistance Johannes’ business evolved from auto repair shop into selling used cars and ultimately into a new car dealership. By the early 1960s, after their father’s retirement, Peter and William Prince ran the most successful Volkswagon dealership on the East coast, but this followed a dark period in my grandfather’s life. In 1935 he met my grandmother Mabel, she the daughter of a Polish immigrant who had settled in Mississippi and his wife who was part Polish, part American Indian.

On a trip to Mississippi to visit Mabel’s family, my grandfather’s car was stopped on a rural road by local police who mistook him for an escaped inmate from a Federal prison nearby, a man who had been convicted of murdering a judge, and who was regarded as extremely dangerous. Despite my grandmother’s pleas and my father’s tears, he then just ten years old, my grandfather was taken into custody and returned to prison. Mabel, a very devout southern Baptist, assured my Dad that Jesus would hear her prayers and help to