The Blessed Mother was celebrated this last December 8 for being untouched by sin. As a virgin, she was also untouched by sex, our Catholic teachers insisted, though nothing in scripture tells us that. For the faithful, sex and sin were extremely close. So when my six-foot Catholic pastor shoved me up against a wall and put his hands all over me, I could feel my brain move like an old-fashioned Rolodex, spinning frantically for an explanation. For the first time in my life, I was physically trapped, but when he bent at the knees and let out a low groan, I was able to push him away and run out of the room.
A few years earlier, in 1960, my friends and I had looked up orgasm in the dictionary, but we still couldn’t figure out what it meant. We were at a slumber party, and somebody else was calling the Rexall Drug Store in town, asking if they had Sir Walter Raleigh in a can. It was a brand of pipe tobacco. The clerk who answered the phone said yes.
“Well, you better let him out!” my friend shouted, and we all squealed.
.
We were in eighth grade, the last year of Catholic grammar school. Peering over the wall into adolescence, we were oblivious to where the sixties would take us. Four years later, when Monsignor invited me to his private library, I had written an essay on social change through collective action, but I still hadn’t kissed a boy.
An invitation to go upstairs with Monsignor had made me feel valuable, singled out, like going to the head of the class. But it was just the opposite. Since priests were God’s representatives on earth, what happened had either been my fault or God’s fault. I’d been the one to lay flowers at the feet of the Virgin during our May Procession. Now I forced myself to walk home slowly; anyone who saw me run would know my horrifying guilt. For decades, I buried it, but guilt ran me around anyway. Forty years later, the Boston Globe’s story clued me in: I was not the only one. That’s when I first felt the rage.
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