Perhaps it’s a sort of Original Guilt – Original Sin’s bastard offspring – that Catholics are born indoctrinated with a sense of the awesome sanctity of church, presumably predicated on the Real Presence. So for us there’s something viscerally shocking when it’s not observed. And yet…
I remember being about seven, going to Mass one Sunday, and my father struggling not to laugh as a frightfully well-spoken old Jesuit tried to remove the tramp slumped in the porch with the words: ‘Will you please just fuck off?’ I knew that was really naughty language because a girl had recently been asked to leave my convent prep for deploying the word one break time. For such an utterance to occur on hallowed ground, and for it to come from a man who’d recently heard one of my tame early confessions, was frankly mind-blowing. (I think it might have been the confession when I told the priest I’d taken two Brazil nuts and three banana chips from a local greengrocer – himself a wonderfully camp Catholic convert who rejoiced in unconvincing toupees.)
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone I respected swear on church turf. That had come much earlier in my young life when a particularly pious old shrew had scolded me for running around in the Lady Chapel during the sermon. This desiccated pensioner then waited in the narthex after Mass to reprimand my father for failing to control his wayward toddler. After she’d torn a strip off him, my father leant forward and whispered into her hoary old ear: ‘You iniquitous old bitch.’ Whether it was the horror of her expression or the kick my deeply conservative father got out of the exchange, it was a story he loved to tell.
Indeed, elderly women often seem to be the recipients of foul language in holy places. My maternal grandmother was one-dimensionally devout: she was truly good because she’d never had the daring, or even the imagination, to want to do anything bad. I wonder how much moral merit there is in that; possibly a great deal.
She would spend much of her day in prayer – she had her morning prayers, her afternoon prayers, her evening prayers, her quiet prayers, and her ‘out loud prayers’ which she liked to execute sitting on the prom at Eastbourne, where she had a holiday house, and which must have been diverting for the day-trippers. My grandmother went to Mass daily, and there was once a visiting priest, a missionary, at her London church. My grandmother thought she’d ask him to hear her confession. She kicked off in the usual fashion – ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been a week since my last confession’ – but then continued with the words: ‘Father, my problem is that I find it very difficult to sin.’ This sort of performative spiritual contrivance riled the priest, who’d seen some shit go down in sub-Saharan Africa. He responded with the memorable line: ‘Get out of here, you sanctimonious old cow.’ My grandmother didn’t go to confession again for some time.
The swearing may be shocking enough, but there’s something particularly remarkable when it’s coupled with physical rage. There’s the tale of a smart parish in London where it used to be the custom to read out in some detail the intention for which the Mass was being offered. (A priest friend of mine tells me he has a policy of never doing this because a great number of intentions are ‘absolutely crackers’.) On one occasion, the priest read out the name of the woman whose intention it was, but failed to read out that of the beneficiary of her religious generosity. She followed him into the sacristy afterwards to berate him for this oversight. At this, he picked up his missal and pitched it at her, saying: ‘Fuck off, you superstitious bitch!’
Any of us can fall short of the highest spiritual standards when booze is involved, and priests are no exception
Of course, any of us can fall short of the highest spiritual standards when booze is involved, and priests are no exception. There was apparently an alcoholic parish priest at a church in London many years ago who rather let down on of his most devout parishioners on the day of her husband’s funeral. She arrived with her family and friends, alongside the funeral directors and the pallbearers, to find the church locked. After waiting for some time, the story goes that the widow headed to the presbytery, her fellow mourners, the funeral directors and the pallbearers solemnly carrying the coffin, forming a cortege of confusion behind her. After knocking for a good quarter of an hour, the parish priest duly opened the door – puce with rage and booze – and screamed at the assembled gathering that they could ‘fuck off’. There was no funeral that day.
There are few anecdotes more pleasing, though, than that about the Australian-American actress and devout convert Coral Browne, responding to a friend who’d accosted her after Mass on the steps of the Brompton Oratory with some scandalous gossip: ‘I don’t want to hear this filth. Not with me standing here in a state of fucking grace.’
And unholy behaviour in holy places isn’t just confined to Catholics, obviously. I remember going to an Anglican wedding somewhere reassuringly rural, and shortly before the nuptials kicked off, a particularly flamboyant male friend exclaimed in the stagiest of stage whispers: ‘Jesus Christ! I’ve shagged the vicar!’ It’s fair to say it took several minutes for the sanctity of the church to be restored.
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