The Past is Another Country

Via Russell Wardlow's link, I visited the Dawn Patrol website and in scrolling down came upon the video above. I must be fairly healthy for a dedicated gourmand as I thought cardiac arrest would happen. The video is about the May Procession held every Spring in the parish I grew up in during the fifities. I never remember it being other than sunny on those days. I and my sibs were part of them when we attended the parish school.

I am sure someone could do a dissertaion on all this. The pastor who is patting the dog in the video was a wonderful man. I tend to be a sceptic in most things. It is impossible for me to get away from the faith of my ancestors partly due to people like him. If the priest who took over after he died had been there earlier, I am sure I would now be Richard Dawkins instead of just anti clerical. There are other things too. I feel guilt over the way I mistreated the nuns. The few times I run into people from the school, the ones who always sucked up to the nuns are the ones who now claim to have been horribly mistreated.

Lovely music, beautiful ritual, it is all gone. Catholicism is now, in this country, little more than "Unitarianism with a pope," according to the novelist, D. Keith Mano.

Oh, the church that you see at the beginning, it burned down a year or two ago. It was beautiful inside.

For more about life in Eastern Mass during and after the 1950s visit Ponderosa65