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[102] [ Five ] Faith Catholics dwarfed other religious groups in my Fall River the way granite mills dominated the industrial landscape. The three-volume definitive history of the city, completed in 1946, reported that Fall River was 80 percent Catholic. Ten or fifteen years later, that number must have crept upward toward 85 percent. Twenty-seven churches ministered to the faithful during my youth: nine Irish, seven Portuguese, six French, two Polish, one Italian, one Lebanese, and one Ukrainian. Fall River’s Catholicism was as tightly entwined with ethnicity, class, neighborhood, and extended family as the inner threads of the old, coverless baseballs that we wrapped with black friction tape. My study of Puritanism would later offer an escape from this entanglement . I would come to see New England’s formative religious faith as solely residing in Protestantism. I would miss the forest through the leaves. New England has been a majority Catholic region for more than a century. Mill cities from Lewiston to Lawrence and well beyond abounded with Catholics. There was no single moment when the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that there is more than one New England conscience; that my religious heritage mattered; and that like tens of thousands of New Englanders, my habits of heart, with their own geyser of guilt, represented an authentic regional tradition. [] My father, mother, and titia were all devout ghetto Catholics. That is, they had boarded up their minds and nailed them shut to any religious ideas and influences that did not stem from Catholicism. Evangelist Billy Graham would be the only exception. Their religious life was a closed book stamped with the Church’s imprimatur. My father had not always been such a pious Catholic. My grandparents seem to have had a typical southern Italian attitude toward the Church. It was there for life’s turning points—birth, marriage, and death. I never Faith [103] saw Nonna or Nonnuzzo in church on occasions when I attended Holy Rosary with my father. Like my mother and titia, my father never missed Mass on Sunday or Holy Days of obligation. And like them he dutifully adhered to days of abstinence. When it came to Lent, however, my father did not win bragging rights in our family. I gave up candy and held on for seven weeks despite ever-present temptation. My father sacrificed his daily pack of Philip Morris. Then he retrieved his tobacco pipe from a bureau drawer where it had gathered dust for a year. The pipe supplied his daily nicotine fix until Easter Sunday. I found this amusing, another blemish on his fatherly figure—like his inability to synchronize a car’s clutch, brake, gas pedal, and steering wheel. Father John Sullivan did more than help my father open his barbershop . The humble Irish pastor who spoke Italian rescued my father from his tepid Catholicism. He imbued my father’s faith with the puritanical Catholicism so characteristic of the Irish-dominated American church. Father Sullivan became pastor of Holy Rosary in 1929 and energized a small, flagging church. He reached out to the youth of the parish and beyond by transforming the church basement into a boys’ club. He tapped my father to coach a highly successful basketball team for twelve- to fourteen -year-olds that was called the Piccolinis (nice small boys). My father also coached a baseball team that played in Columbus Park. He kept a scrapbook of the Piccolinis’ impressive string of victories in the early 1930s, before he opened his barbershop. I paged through his Depression-era album as a teenager, and it spurred me to start one of my own. My childhood and teen years were sprinkled with references to and stories about Father Sullivan, a narrative of a holy man who walked on stilts, if not on water. “He was the finest man I ever met,” my father pronounced whenever an opportunity landed his way. I remember one story he told about Father Sullivan when someone, whom I can’t recall, was visiting our house on Way Street. A woman parishioner came to Father Sullivan seeking permission to marry a non-Catholic who had no intention of converting. Father Sullivan discouraged the idea and told the woman she should reconsider, my father related. “The woman went away disappointed and determined to try again. She revisited Father Sullivan, who tried again to persuade the woman to change her mind, telling her he would not sanction the marriage. The woman persisted and...

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