This checked perfectly with Father Urban’s estimate of Johnny’s character. Hockey was one sport Father Urban hadn’t played in his youth — there just wasn’t the ice for it in Illinois — but he’d often thought, as he watched NHL games, that, had he played hockey, he would have been used at wing or center. That was the difference between Johnny and him. No, Johnny was no Father Urban, and never would be, but he was doing better now than he’d ever done before as a priest. Father Urban, both amused and gratified to hear himself being imitated on the telephone, couldn’t have asked for a better assistant. If Phil wanted to know what had happened to the boy in his absence, Father Urban would tell him the truth, in which there might be something for Phil himself: “Hell, I don’t know, Phil. Maybe he decided to join the human race.”
Father Urban was familiar with the classic view of the parish as a natural unit of society, second in importance only to the family, but he had seldom found this view held by clergy and laity in the same parish. If the pastor tried to get his people to think of themselves not as Jaycees or trade unionists, not as Republicans or Democrats, but primarily as parishioners, the chances were they’d resist him, and Father Urban didn’t really blame them. Such a thesis made small appeal to any-body who’d arrived at a greater, or clearer, station in life than that commonly designated by the term parishioner — and who hadn’t? If, on the other hand, the people tried to raise the status of parishioners, the chances were their pastor would resist them—and wisely — for wherever you found people trying to make a lot of their parishionership, you’d find agitators at work. Invariably they were the products of higher Catholic education, or converts, whose real object was to assume unto themselves all but the strictly sacerdotal activity and to see that this was in accord with their understanding of it and the latest word from Rome. They’d had a field day under Pius XII.
Who now looked to the parish in the old way? A few foreign-language groups in cities and on the land — a few people cut off from society. Oh yes, Father Urban kept hearing about ideal parishes (for some reason, he’d never been asked to work one) where the entire congregation chanted from missals and where everything was “liturgical” down to the blessing of foodstuff and the churching of women. Much time and trouble went into training ordinary people to perform in church. The more Father Urban heard of these ideal parishes, the more they smacked of Oberammergau to him. Somewhere in between, between that and what St Monica’s had been like when Phil was there, would be found the ideal parish, Father Urban believed. The most successful parishes were those where more was going on than met the eye, where, behind the scenes, a gifted pastor or assistant pulled the strings. God, it seemed, ran those parishes, which was as it should be. Wherever parishionership became a full-time occupation, whether it consisted in liturgical practices or selling chances on a new car, the wrong people took over. At St Monica’s, though, parishioners had been left too much to themselves.
Father Urban wanted to set up a serious program — talks by himself and others (if others worth hearing could be found), classes in the papal encyclicals, the Great Catholic Books, and so on — but there just wasn’t the time for it, and perhaps more than time would’ve been lacking at St Monica’s for such a program.
So Father Urban played it safe and engaged the people on their own ground. He gave card parties for “seniors.” He put on barn or square dancing (as they preferred to call it) for “young marrieds.” He tried a rock-and-roll dance for “teens”—once. No trouble, no, but he found he didn’t care for it when he saw what it was like. Sleigh rides and skating parties, these presided over by Johnny, were better. For the children of the parish, and their mothers, there were all-cartoon programs in the best movie house in town. For Men’s Club, he sent away for films of Notre Dame football games, and these were studied at smoker sessions. For Altar and Rosary Society, nothing special, but there was always the possibility that he’d pop in and say a few words. The school nuns were not forgotten. He gave them the use of his (Phil’s) car, permission to shop at supermarkets, and occasionally he threw the boss a ten-dollar bill—“Buy yourself some cigars, Sister.” They all loved him. And he addressed the Home and School Association, the local equivalent of the P.T.A., something Phil had never thought, or cared, to do, and a number of fathers and mothers told him that he’d given them new hope.
Father Urban’s object in all this was simply to pump a little life into the parish, without being pretentious about it. He discouraged the notion that church-sponsored recreation is necessarily a means to sanctification — an error into which gambling parishes were forever falling. He said he hoped to see more people at the communion rail oftener, but he also said that nobody should feel that this was expected because of his or her perfect attendance at social affairs. He had to watch it, though, in and out of the parish. The Cathedral curates (Monsignor Renton called them Cox and Box) wangled an invitation to the Saturday-morning theater parties for the children of their parish, and then urged that short subjects of a religious nature be dropped into the all-cartoon programs. Father Urban rejected the proposal, saying it wouldn’t be fair to the kids or to the exhibitor, a Jew, who was already taking a loss on the deal.
Just as parish life quickened under Father Urban’s touch, so did life in the town. At noontime luncheons, at wedding breakfasts, at funeral parlors, wherever and whenever people gathered, in joy or sorrow, there was Father Urban. At least he’d put in an appearance. “Look at the clock!” Off he’d go, and be late at the next stop. “And the worst of it is, I can’t stay!” “OHHHH!” So he’d relent and say a few words. And then off to the hospital, to the county jail, or back to the rectory for a little talk with an erring soul, who might or might not show up. Yes, there were disappointments, a few anyway, for Father Urban was working with people, after all. Very few disappointments, actually. Yes, he received an anonymous letter with the curt message, “Drop Dead,” and, yes, a woman was offended when he laughed at the idea of serving coffee—cappuccino, she said — after the last Mass on Sunday, and, yes, alas, he heard that Cox and Box, doubtless smarting from their setback at his hands, were referring to the current regime at St Monica’s as one of bread and circuses.
“Wait’ll Lent starts,” he said one evening to parishioners thronging about him after a card party. “All this’ll have to stop.”
“Will you still be here, Father?”
“No, I’m afraid not, Charlie.”
“OHHHH!”
“That’ll be the hardest part about Lent for a lot of us,” said a woman—and that woman was Sylvia Bean.
In the past weeks, Father Urban had occasionally caught sight of Sylvia in the congregation at Mass on Sundays and at card parties, but he had stayed away from her, thinking he was avoiding trouble. In his first week at St Monica’s he’d called at her house in the course of census-taking, and she’d begged him to book the Shrapnel Brothers, the editor and the publisher of the Drover, into the parish. (They put on Lincoln-Douglas style debates, one brother getting to take the “conservative” position and the other having to take the “liberal” position, this determined by the toss of a coin, and the audience was left to judge the winner.) Sylvia Bean had offered to underwrite the cost of bringing the act to the parish. No, thanks, Father Urban had said after first asking what the Shrapnels charged for a performance, which in a professional way interested him, but Sylvia had persisted, and finally he’d said, “Over my dead body, Mrs Bean.” After that, she’d made him feel as she had when he dined with her and Ray in the Greenwich Village Room — that she was finished with him. Evidently he’d been wrong. That’ll be the hardest part about Lent for a lot of us. This, considering the source, was perhaps the strongest testimonial to the kind of job Father Urban was doing at St Monica’s.