St. Peter’s Bones
By Brandy E. Wyant
When I was young, perhaps seven or eight, I struggled to make it through Sunday Mass without lying my head on my mother’s shoulder. She never scolded me for it, or nudged me up, or asked why her fiercely independent child felt the need to lean on her in church. Maybe the priest’s homily bored her into a stupor the same way it did to me. On weeks when we found the parking lot already full, along with the auxiliary lot and the streets encircling the church, I cheered when Mom turned the car around for home. I don’t remember whether I was scolded for that.
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As one of the lay leaders gives announcements, my gaze falls on the minister seated behind the pulpit. Her eyes are closed, but she doesn’t display the gentle, intentional smile that conveys both warmth and confidence. This smile will come later, during the “time of silence” portion of the service. For now, I sense exhaustion and recognize the slightest darkening under each of her eyes, just like mine. She can’t be much older than I am. Her long brown hair isn’t yet gray. She. Her.
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In the 1960s and 70s, there were only altar boys. I became an altar girl in fifth grade in the late 90s so that my mother could live vicariously through me. She always wanted to be an altar boy. Meanwhile, I was afraid to light candles with matches, an essential part of the job. Yet I saw my mother’s enthusiasm when my Catholic school sent home the alter server training information packet, and I knew what I had to do.
At each Mass, the altar servers carry the bread and wine to the altar and set them before the priest to become consecrated into the body and blood of Christ. At communion time during one of my first Sundays as an altar server, I saw a bowl of wafers sitting on the table designated for the bread and wine, so I grabbed it and deposited it on the altar for the priest to work with. He wordlessly sent it back with my partner altar server. After Mass, my mother noted, almost eagerly, “You took up bread that was already consecrated.”
Only someone deprived of her calling would have noticed.
As an altar server, I didn’t have her shoulder to lie on when seated on the marble bench facing the congregation, its chill permeating my bottom even through the white robe over my clothes. I thought of myself as an activist of sorts, giving up the comfort of the shoulder for the feminist cause. I had never even been to a Protestant service. In my narrow slice of spirituality, we called all clergy “Father.” If there was a woman preaching, I never heard her.
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In Rome on vacation in my early twenties, my group of friends and I attended Pope Francis’s weekly audience in St. Peter’s Square. In back of the crowd, we unknowingly positioned ourselves directly beside the pathway traveled by the Pope Mobile. Every few yards, the Pope stopped to greet the faithful. Mothers lifted their wailing, disoriented babies up to him to be blessed. When the mothers turned away, holding their still-wailing babies, tears of joy obscured their features.
At the time, I didn’t even believe in God, much less the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet when the crowd cried out to him, “Papi!” I heard myself call it out too.
His eyes met mine. I ruined any blessing that I might have received in the exchange of eye contact by snapping a photo.
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I imagine handing my future baby to our minister, their chubby arms resting on her black clerical robe, studying her smiling face with the characteristic infant expression of mixed curiosity and trepidation. You’re not my mom. I already know that this nonexistent child will be tucked against my chest in a sling during the service rather than entrusted to the church’s basement nursery. Yet I would hand my baby to our minister and walk off to explore the post-church refreshments table without a second thought. I know that my trust springs from the fact she had her own babies. I know that’s not fair. It’s still true.
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As part of the Safety Committee at another church years ago, I read some literature intended for congregations to prepare themselves for a variety of threats – natural, biological, terrorist. The safety manual lectured about the relative risks and benefits of installing opaque windows in the doors of the religious education classrooms. We don’t want an active shooter to see in, of course. But we also can’t have a windowless room when the door closes. No one says why not, and I can fill in the blank only because I saw the film Spotlight. Seven years of Catholic school and a smattering of sacraments, and I had the privilege of learning the extent of the child abuse and cover-up culture through the investigative reporting of the Boston Globe and not from direct experience.
After watching the film, I scoured my memories of Catholic grade school for evidence that child abuse may have happened at our parish. Once in second grade, the teacher refused my multiple requests to be allowed to go to the bathroom during a school assembly in the church basement. Her demeanor was warm and gentle, not flustered or impatient, as a hypothetical teacher might be in the same situation, though she never gave a reason for her refusal. Struggling not to wet myself, I still remember my own confusion at the teacher acting out of character. As soon as we crossed the threshold of our school building adjoining the church following the assembly, she invited me to use the first bathroom we came across and to catch up with the rest of the class after. Why was the school’s restroom safe for a small child to inhabit alone, and the church’s restroom unsafe? To this day, I wrestle with whether to thank the teacher for protecting me from a threat she could not name aloud or to dismiss my post-Spotlight thoughts as paranoia and label the teacher unnecessarily cruel.
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Around the time we became altar servers in fifth grade, a priest led our class on a tour of the backstage areas of the church, all the storage closets and balconies previously out of bounds for us. I remember him describing three bone fragments from a saint, kept at the altar as holy relics. We could not see the bones with our own eyes. The church kept them covered for protection and did not advertise their existence to the general public. In a bizarre coming of age ritual, that day we were let in on the secret.
The church was named for St. Peter. I surmised that the bones were his and carried this belief well into adulthood, never questioning the logic of innocent childhood grandiosity. Of course our church could have one, or three, of the bones of none other than the very first Pope, no matter that dozens of churches named for St. Peter existed in our state alone.
Nearly thirty years later, I mentioned the relics to my mother and childhood friend, wondering aloud whose bones they were, if not Peter’s. They each vaguely remembered the bones, but I had already sullied their recollection with the power of suggestion. Unable to let the question rest, eventually my mother called the church to ask. We learned that “first class” relics – pieces of the saint’s body or hair – would not typically be kept at a community church but instead housed at a basilica or cathedral. The bones were never there.
But they were. I can still feel the mixture of disgust, fascination, and reverence that gripped me that day in the church as a child, standing in their presence.
What else am I misremembering?
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This much I – probably – remember. The priestly vestments were stored in the same impossibly tiny walk-in closet as the altar servers’ white robes. Before each Mass, we stopped there to select a robe close enough to our size and slip it over our clothing. At ten years old, my arms were so short that I had to roll up the sleeves. Maybe it was better for my mother that she never got the opportunity to serve at the altar. Maybe she dodged a bullet.
She is 500 miles away, not in any church this morning. After I moved out of state, she told me, “I don’t like to go to church alone.” She was resolute; unmoved by my appeals to logic. Don’t we go to church not to be alone?
Since Spotlight, I only go to Catholic Mass for weddings and funerals. At my new church, there are no altar servers, no communion, no bread to consecrate. I don’t necessarily come to cure loneliness. I have little explanation for my church membership besides that if I go too many months without the Sunday morning ritual, I feel an intangible nagging to return.
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Children’s joyful shouts permeate the wreathed windows and break my focus. Move Sunday school outside, and you avoid the question of whether to add windows to the doors. The minister stands at the pulpit and muses at us. She has no hint of fatigue now, her voice lilting with a deliberately inserted joke and her eyes lingering for a moment on one congregant, then another. When she makes eye contact with me, I expect a blessing. Instead I receive an intrusive thought, a line from the safety manual, the one line that has stuck with me verbatim all these years. Consider that the gunman may target the minister.
Reading it at the time, I longed for more guidance. “Consider…” What did that mean? Were congregants expected to shield the minister with their bodies? Yell at her to dive for cover? Run away from her, saving themselves? I wonder whether she ever read those same words herself or was issued a warning during divinity school. I want to be assured that she accepted the call to her vocation with informed consent of the risks, the same informed consent that so many children, taken to church by well-intentioned parents, did not receive.
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When one of the priests stopped by for a classroom visit, which happened perhaps quarterly, the teacher immediately ceded the floor to him and retreated to her desk in the corner. We might have been in the middle of a math lesson or mid-page reading aloud, and his appearance brought it all to a halt, without him having to say a word. He entered the room, and nothing else mattered. To have that power! What would any of us even do with it?
He then preached at us for awhile, his commentary somewhere below the intellect of the average homily yet still above our maturity level. One day, the lesson was that we should love God more than anyone or anything else.
I raised my hand, with not a question but an invitation to debate.
“My mom says she loves me more than anything.”
The unspoken implication – Do you mean to say she’s committing a sin, not loving God more than me?
To his credit, he didn’t laugh, dismiss, or correct. He only answered, “I’m sure she does.”
He had dodged my unspoken question, and I knew it. Dissatisfied, I fell silent.
Now, I know how I would answer. I would tell myself as a child that when we love each other, we are loving God the most.
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Standing in line for my first confession in second grade, I analyzed the facial expressions of my classmates exiting the box ahead of me, for clues of what to expect. When my turn came, I sat on the wooden bench, facing the priest on his side of the box. A barrier built into the bench separated us, almost like an armrest.
We had the choice of either facing the priest directly or speaking to him behind a screen, through headphones that I was too nervous to try to operate. I wondered how his impression of me may have changed because I chose face-to-face rather than visual privacy with the headphones. I rattled off, “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. This is my first confession,” with barely a conscious thought, because the teacher had drilled it into our heads for weeks. Afterward, my friends and I compared our assigned penance. “I got three Our Fathers and two Hail Marys. What did you get?”
But what did the priest say, after I unburdened my seven-year-old soul?
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what happens in confession Catholic
I scroll through the results of my search, wishing in vain that they would jog my memory. If the online descriptions are correct, the priest did not pray for me, only absolved me of my sins using a script.
How can I remember so many details, yet not whether I received a personalized prayer?
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When I asked to schedule a meeting with the minister, perhaps I was only granted one because I was an adult. In religious education classes, as outlined in the safety manual, two adults at a minimum must be present in rooms with children at all times. I’m not sure what would happen if a child requested to speak to the minister alone. Even post-Spotlight, the Catholic church would not refuse children the sacrament of penance, which by definition occurs alone with a priest.
This was not a confession but a “pastoral care appointment.” From the minister, I mostly sought a fresh pair of eyes on a situation that I was already processing in depth with my therapist and a couple close friends. Just as in a therapy session, she drew the loose ends of the conversation together at just about the 50-minute mark. Unlike therapy, this meeting had a final step, the prayer. She asked, “Do you want to stay sitting where we are, or do you want to hold hands?”
With little time to think, and no rationale for my choice, I told her that I would “try the hands.”
I remember the warmth of my fingers resting against hers. I remember the relief that it didn’t feel awkward, or worse, sweaty. I remember closing my eyes in a sign of effortless trust, something I rarely did when invited during the moment for quiet reflection during each service. I remember wondering how her impression of me may have changed because I chose to hold hands instead of remain separated by the distance of her office. I don’t remember anything she said in prayer.
I would like to believe that I felt better after the meeting because I had been listened to and validated, or even as a result of the touch of her hands, or the extra hug she gave me afterward. I want to claim that the prayer added minimal value, because I believe that no one besides the two of us humans had heard those words. What’s more, at least one of us can’t even remember them.
But it would be a lie. It was the prayer. I felt better because she had prayed over me. My friends gave me hugs, and my therapist listened to me and offered validation. The prayer, intended only for me, was a missing ingredient. Without those seven years of Catholic school, I don’t know that my subconscious would have sent me to the right place in search of it.
::
On the top shelf of my closet sits a small cedar box. Inside, among my passport, expired driver’s licenses, and several ticket stubs is a thumb-sized box made of folded heavy paper. The top panel is a print of a Madonna and child painting.
This same paper box once fit into my five-year-old palm. I had studied the painting as our kindergarten teacher told us that we could open the box and look at its contents, for example, when “you get sent to your room, or your parents are fighting.”
With my thirty-something year old hands, I open the paper box and unfold the yellowed scrap of paper within. In the neat block print of a kindergarten teacher, the paper reads, “A little box of love.”
With my own eyes, I see the Madonna and child. As I hear the kindergarten teacher’s voice in my mind, I feel the crumpled paper. My relic is real.
Brandy E. Wyant (she/her) is a clinical social worker and writer based in Massachusetts. Her personal essays have appeared in Atlantic Northeast, Change Seven, HuffPost Personal, Solstice, South 85 Journal, and The Writing Disorder. Read more on her website.
Artwork Source: “Interior of a Church,” part XIV, plate 70 from “Liber Studiorum, by Joseph Mallord William Turner. In the public domain.
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