Don't call me Mrs.

When the local Catholics couldn't face my surname, I went church shopping.

By Donna Cornachio

Feb 23, 2000 | I am taking classes to learn how to be an Episcopalian and I'm primed for the usual jokes: that I'll start taking the crust off my white bread, speak with a WASPy lockjaw accent, leave thank-you notes for the newspaperman. But I don't believe any of those things will happen. Roman Catholicism remains thick in my blood, from my Italian surname, to my respect for higher authority, to my belief in angels and saints.

As a child, I went to church every Sunday with my mother and six siblings. We were always late, usually coming in during the priest's invariably deadly dull sermon or, if we were lucky, afterward, during the interminable Apostles' Creed. I am old enough to remember the pre-Vatican II Council Masses that were celebrated in Latin, and at 4 years old I could respond to the priest's "The Lord be with you" with a respectable "Et cum spiritu tuo."

The only part of the Mass that held my interest was the transubstantiation -- the dramatic moment when the priest holds up the host and chalice and declares them to be the body and blood of Christ. The altar boys would ring the bells and everyone, except me, would bow their heads in reverential prayer. I always kept my head up watching and waiting. I was determined to witness Jesus coming down from the cross and becoming one with the offering.

For 12 years I attended Catholic schools. In grammar school I learned the Baltimore Catechism by rote. I made my first Holy Communion at 7, my confirmation at 13. As a freshman in high school (an all-girls one, taught by the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary) I experienced my first crush on a nun -- Sister Barbara Jablonski, a sprite, clever, suffer-no-fools teacher who caused me to love Latin almost as much as she did. (To this day I can decline "agricola" in my sleep.)

I don't have a litany of nun-bashing stories to relate from my childhood. In fact, I have great respect for the nuns who not only educated me but helped form my moral background. One of the greatest gifts anyone gave me came from a nun, Sister Jeannine, who, in my junior year, accepted me into her coveted English honors class and was the first person to tell me I was a writer. Some years after I graduated, Jeannine left the sisterhood to marry a former priest -- and the story of her departure was the first article I published.

The church and I pretty much parted ways in college, though not by way of any dramatic schism. I was simply asserting my independence. I do have a distinct memory of going to Mass one Saturday night (only because I had promised my mother I would) with a Jewish guy after we got high in his fraternity room. Though stoned, I had remembered my promise to my mother, and my date agreed to come with me. He'd never been in a church before and was so fascinated by the rituals that he even took communion. (At the time I didn't know which was the graver sin: that I'd taken the host stoned or that he'd taken it as a Jew.)

I met my husband in my senior year of college and remember feeling relieved that he, too, was raised a Catholic. We assumed that one day we would be married in the church. While we lived in the city, we attended a progressive Catholic church and helped out in the homeless women's shelter in its basement. I was struck then by the fact that while most of the work seemed to be the domain of the sisters of the parish, they still could not serve on the altar.

Several years ago, my husband and I bought a house in a small Westchester, N.Y., village. Soon after moving in, I called my local Catholic church to register in the parish. I gave the church secretary my name and my husband's name (we have different surnames). She was stymied. I assumed she was having difficulty with the spelling of my last name, so I gave it to her. But she still didn't get it. In frustration I said, "Surely we're not the first couple to join your church to have different last names."

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