Catholic in The South
The Papist Incident
When I was seven, I moved with my father and one older sister from suburban Maryland to rural Virginia. My oldest sister, who’d recently graduated high school and had a serious boyfriend and a good job, chose to remain in Maryland.
In Virginia, we would be one of only three Catholic families for many miles.
Catholic life in nowhere-Virginia was much different than in Maryland, a state that was predominantly Catholic. There, we attended a large cathedral-like church that not only had a priest but also brothers and nuns.
My older sisters went to Catholic school. I didn’t, only because the elementary school had no openings when my father took me for registration. My father also did volunteer carpentry and repair work on weekends for the nuns at a convent in our town. He often took me along where I would wait in the kitchen with the chef sister affectionately called Sister Jellyroll because of the yummy sweets she baked. Sister Jellyroll would tell me stories and feed me fresh-from-the-oven cinnamon rolls.
Being Catholic in Maryland was normal and acceptable but in Virginia, we were considered ungodly.
To attend Sunday Mass in Virginia, we traveled fifteen miles to a small parish church — one that served a large rural area. A group of priests from the Virginia Beach diocese rotated between our church and other small rural ones performing Mass and other priestly duties.
My father was not religious. He grew up in a mixed family — his father was a non-practicing Methodist and his mother, a devout Irish-Catholic. Their three children — my father was the eldest — were raised in their mother’s faith, leading to my Uncle Jack becoming a priest — but that’s a whole different story.
My father only attended Mass on Christmas and Easter — maybe. But, he made sure my sister and I attended every week. Not wanting to drive the fifteen miles to the parish church and wait for us in the parking lot of our small chapel, Dad arranged for one of the other three Catholic families in our area to drive us to Mass. He took us two miles to the main highway and the Nelsons, who were driving by anyway, picked us up.
The Nelsons were an odd family. Mr. and Mrs. Nelson seemed too old to be the parents of Dabney, their son two years older than me. Mr. Nelson was mostly silent — well, honestly, completely silent. Can’t say I remember him doing more than grunting. I do remember Mrs. Nelson talking a great deal, usually in the manner of disparaging and negative remarks. I specifically remember the conversation the Sunday after The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.
“A migraine! That’s what those shaggy boys gave me — a hideous migraine! Who calls that music? I was in pain for hours after just hearing a few minutes of them singing. Not that I call what they did singing. Wailing or moaning, maybe, but certainly not singing. And, the screaming girls — lordy, the way they acted should be illegal!”
My sister, an Elvis fan, said, “I didn’t like them much at all.”
I said nothing because I did like The Beatles — very much.
The Nelsons fulfilled their weekly duty of delivering us to Mass, and Mrs. Nelson took charge of my first communion and confirmation.
Our community did not like Catholics much. Actually, they didn’t understand Catholics and were grossly misinformed about our beliefs. We were Satan in the flesh to many.
Most white people in the area were Southern Baptists, Jehovah Witnesses or Methodists. The Methodists didn’t bother us. In fact, two of my best friends were Methodist. But, the Baptists and Jehovah Witnesses neither liked nor trusted us.
Every Sunday for our first couple of years living there, before my sister and I returned from Mass, two or three Jehovah Witnesses with bibles and Watch Towers in hand would knock on our door and interrupt my father’s newspaper time, wanting to enlighten him about the kingdom of God and how a Catholic could never enter there. Dad tried to be nice since the proselytizers were members of our community and often people with whom he did business, but after a while, his irritation grew and nice was no longer an option. He told them to never return or he would chase them off his land with a shotgun — a shotgun he didn’t own. But, they didn’t know that and quit knocking on our door.
The Baptists had us on their radar, too. Usually, they hit us up — each of us — when we were going about our business. For my father, that meant in the hardware or grocery store. For my sister and me, that meant at school.
Over and over, I was approached by one, two, maybe three students of the Southern Baptist faith carrying bibles as they cornered me in the cafeteria, on the playground, or even in the bathroom.
Back in those days, religion at school was not only allowed but welcomed. Teachers were not beneath joining the group that had me trapped in a hallway or by the lavatory sinks. When I complained to my father, he made a trip to the principal’s office and the in-school proselytizing stopped. Never knew what he said but it worked. It also led to a snarky remark from the principal that damnation couldn’t be prevented by education. Her comment is one of the many reasons I am a staunch believer, to this day, in the separation of church and state.
In the 60s, the Pope instructed American Catholics to refrain from eating meat on Fridays — sort of a meditation on how good we had it here when most people in the world couldn’t afford meat.
To accommodate even one Catholic student, public schools had to serve fish or something non-meat for lunch on Fridays. For my school, it was fish sticks — every damn Friday.
Fish sticks were disgusting tubes of a fishlike substance that tasted surprisingly like nothing. No one, and I mean NO ONE, liked fish sticks. And, I and the other few Catholic students were to blame for the worst lunch of the week. Every Friday, we were the most hated pupils in the school.
In spite of the trying-to-save-my-soul efforts and the snide remarks about fish sticks, which I totally understood, I made friends with most of my proselytizing classmates. Young kids are cool that way — even after trying to save someone from the devil’s grip, they return to being kids, just playing and learning. No hard feelings.
Until Wade Rutter.
Wade was one of my best friends at school. He was kind, smart, and sat near me in class. It didn’t hurt that he was cute, too. We talked — a lot. About everything except religion.
I lived on a two-mile-long road populated by only ten houses. One of those houses, a mile away, was home to two kids — a boy my age and a girl, two years older. We played when we could, but their parents owned a restaurant in town where their children were expected to work several hours each weekend, meaning that most of my playtime was solitary.
I was ecstatic to learn Wade’s parents bought property across the road from us but confused that Wade was surprisingly quiet about it at school.
Although our properties were across the road from one another, there were many acres between us — at least eight — as often is the case in rural communities. I didn’t see Wade and his family at the construction site of their home until the house’s exterior was complete and school was out for the summer.
I was riding my bike when I saw my new neighbors at their work-in-progress house. I peddled over to say hi to Wade and to meet his family. But, when I knocked on the door, Mr. Rutter greeted me sternly.
“Who are you?” he asked.
I gave him my full name, said I lived across the road and that Wade and I were in the same class at school.
“I thought so,” he growled, “You’re that papist girl!”
I wasn’t sure what papist meant but it had to be something very bad the way he spat out the word. I denied being a papist.
“Liar!” he yelled, “Leave this house and don’t return. Wade is not your friend — he’s not allowed to associate with heathens!”
I jumped back as the door slammed in my face. Stumbling over the rocky construction site, I grabbed my bike and rode home crying.
I told my father what Mr. Rutter said.
“We’re not papists!” I declared, then asked more quietly, “Are we?”
My father explained that papist was the term some people, usually people who didn’t like us, used instead of saying Catholic. He told me that he received the same type of nasty greeting when he walked over to introduce himself to Mr. Rutter a few weeks earlier.
“These people think we worship the Pope instead of Jesus,” he said.
I replied, “Let’s go over and explain that they’re wrong! We don’t worship the Pope. Let’s tell them. They’re just confused or don’t know any better. We can explain and then I can play with Wade.”
“They’ll never understand,” Dad said.
“But, Wade’s my friend!” I declared.
My father replied, “Maybe at school but not at home. Stay away from them. I don’t want you to go over there again.”
I didn’t.
When school started in September, Wade was not allowed to wait for the bus with me. Although our driveways were only about 10 yards apart, the bus driver had firm instructions to pick me up first and then drive the short distance to get Wade. Sometimes while waiting, Wade and I would wave at each other but we never spoke.
Until . . . we got on the bus. Then, we chatted away like the friends we’d always been.
Wade once apologized for how his father treated me and lamented that we couldn’t play together, but that was the only time either of us mentioned the papist incident.
Wade and his family did not live near us for long. One Monday morning in the spring, the building in town that housed their general store was empty and so was their almost-new house. Rumors swirled about financial problems. People said the Rutters moved to Richmond, very suddenly and without notice, to live with family. I never saw Wade again.
I continued in my papist ways until deciding at the age of fifteen that religion wasn’t for me. I declared my independence from church-going. My father only nodded, acknowledging I was old enough to make that decision.
