Introduction by Cliff Baxter

Weddings are usually a time for unity, a time to join hands and share the joy and hope of the 'lucky couple'. We relate stories about family characters, and we feel long departed ancestors are with us. It is a coming together of two clans from similar traditions. It's not a time for being strangers.

But what if the groom is a 'stranger': a Protestant — breaking a long chain of totally Irish Australian Catholic marriages?

Wendy's delicate piece, Mixed Blessings, opens the door on what happened in her family and the challenges they faced. The reader discovers the mix of joys, triumphs and defeats experienced when, after many generations, the single faith wedding chain, for the first time, was broken.

In our time, some 'traditional' extremists try vainly to revive the old fortress mentality, an 'us-and-them' Catholic Church in Australia. Wendy's vignette demonstrates the need for tolerance, love and understanding between people of different traditions. 'Us and them' is not good enough.

The old Protestant-Catholic sectarianism has passed. Nowadays we have to face the fact that Muslim-Catholic marriages are on the rise. What problems will they face? There are real lessons to be learned from Wendy's story. Please read on, and enjoy Wendy's story of...

In her wedding portrait my mother sits quietly in her tweed suit, a magnificent corsage on her lapel, and a small brown hat with a wisp of netting.

In 1949 my parents broke a chain of Catholic marriages stretching back into Irish antiquity. In Irish Catholic circles the dreaded P word caused as much affront as the confronting F word did during my adolescence. Today's young ones don't get quite so het up about the F word. And that's probably a good analogy.

My dad was a Protestant. It was anathema then; grudgingly acknowledged by, say the late '60s; and nowadays probably a cause of indifference.

Mixed Marriage...

My parents' marriage was a sacristy affair, in the church's change room. To add to the intrigue, they wed in secret, because of both families' hostility to this Mixed Marriage.

Their marriage preparation was carried out by a shrewd old priest. Over a series of late-night chess games he discussed religion and faith with Dad and advised him not to convert, not even to satisfy his in-laws' sense of entitlement.

So Mum became the solitary one of five siblings, and the first of three generations, to take on this new life-form, so alien to her family culture. Of her six children: one has married a Catholic (non-practising), and in the third generation — aged in their thirties — all are in mixed marriages. From my time as a parish secretary in the '80s, I can attest that the once-dreaded mixed marriage is now well entrenched, and therefore worth a careful appraisal.

In practice, I believe Mum's life in a mixed marriage was easier to manage than my own. Sure, there were issues with not eating meat on Friday. I recall Dad would be served up his chops and gravy while we kids got baked beans on toast. Sometimes he'd jokingly wave a dripping forkful of luscious lamb in front of our noses.

Mum and Dad had sorted out the bigger issues of contraception and Catholic schooling — so on the surface life went on fairly smoothly. Dad wore a condom — no sin for a Protestant. We all went off to the "Tyke" school, as Dad always called it. Mind you, there were still six unplanned pregnancies out of ten conceptions — four miscarriages and a lot of ill-health for Mum. My youngest sister was called their 'Johnny Walker Special'. Money was scarce, and Mum would occasionally tell us that they really only wanted two children; for one of my sisters this has been a deep, lifelong private trauma.

Mum managed to blame the Church for it all, though there was no contraceptive pill in those days and Dad was a bit of a lad, really. Not a lot of self-discipline, I'd guess.

Of more grief to Mum was that Dad refused to attend our baptisms, first communions and confirmations. He was no doubt influenced by the scorn of his own family. But I can understand their disappointment and pain at having to relinquish their Anglicanism to future generations.

We kids were a race set apart...

I always felt that on both sides of the family we kids were a race set apart. Somehow we didn't quite belong. When my grandmother babysat there were stinging comments about 'You Catholics' when Mum wasn't around.

Mum's relatives had houses liberally decorated with Sacred Heart pictures, holy water fonts at the door and little statues that glowed in the dark. Not in our house; there was not a single religious icon to be seen.

Years later, when Mum went into a nursing home, we discovered among her belongings a stash of the most amazing artefacts: holy cards, little prayer booklets she'd sent for in the mail, scapulas, a variety of old medals, even little newspaper cuttings with The Text for Today. I treasure these fading, scratched old bits and pieces. I had no idea that Mum was religious to her core, in an old fashioned kind of way. I found a little card where she signed herself up as a member of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith when she was eighteen and single. She agreed to pay a shilling a month.

Fifty years later, when Catholicism had hit the wall and almost disappeared from this branch of the family, I was appointed a Diocesan Director of Catholic Mission, the agency charged with overseeing the Prop appeals! I carry that card of hers in my purse now; a reminder of my private heritage from Mum, even though by that stage she hadn't been to Mass for twenty-three years. But I'm getting ahead of myself there.

Mum cried victim pretty loudly over Dad's indifference to Catholicism, and his family's Protestantism.

As for our schooling — well, what an experience being a Catholic schoolkid in a mixed marriage family.

Secret inferiority complexes...

We were warned not to associate with the 'publics' who were pagans, not to be trusted and sure to go to hell for eating meat on Fridays and not going to Church every Sunday. We developed secret inferiority complexes and I hid Dad's Protestantism from our schoolmates.

Dad was pretty tolerant of what went on in our home. Every Sunday he kept out of the way as Mum screamed at the six of us to get up and out for 6.30 a.m. Mass, the only time available in our small suburban satellite suburb. He supported Mum's insistence that we all went to Mass on Sundays. He wouldn't be involved himself, but I think he was glad of a sort of insurance policy where Mum did the religious training and instilled religious moral values in his children.

When we were teenagers Dad would discuss religion with me and be quite challenging about some of the difficult-to-explain Catholic traditions. That helped me become the 'dissident' I am today, for my father was a deeply reflective man. A lot of what he said made sense.

My own balance was also regained when we went to a state high school. The nearest Catholic one was a good two hours' travel away. I never learned to trust the 'publics' fully, and I struggled for answers whenever schoolyard religious 'deep-and-meaningfuls' happened amongst the students.

No teenager likes to be different. I was ashamed of my Catholic stuff quite a bit in those days, however, I had a deep, valuable, intensely private and pleasurable, relationship with Christ.

It served me best I suppose when it came to dating boys and avoiding the back seat of their cars and their groping hands! I used to wonder how the girls who didn't have Catholic stuff managed to hold off the boys. I'm ashamed to admit, I felt far superior to them. I was going to stay a virgin, just like St Maria Goretti and so many others. I was going to earn my bridal whites!

Earning brownie points from Father...

Luckily for Mum, to be a good Catholic in those days you just had to go to Mass on Sunday. Once the hour was over, there were no further demands on the laity. Sure, there were the sodalities and Catholic womens' guilds but you could survive as a Tyke as long as you made it to Mass. For a while we cleaned our little church every Saturday and earned brownie points from Father.

We kids did try the CYO and Catholic dances, but we still never really fitted in, not we Public high school lot. But other than that there were no real problems.

At home, all was not going well for Mum. I remember I arrived home one day to find a pile of issues of The Catholic Weekly and her beloved Fatima newsheet on the front lawn. Mum was inside, crying her eyes out and raging against God and His Blessed Mother. I was shocked, as her devotion to Our Lady was so strong. She'd had a massive fight with Dad (not unusual) and just lost it because her prayers were not being answered. We tiptoed round her. She eventually retrieved the papers and put them back in her bottom drawer in the back bedroom.

I felt sorry for her because she was isolated, living in a spiritual no-man's land. The occasional visit by the PP was stressful for her, as she never knew what Dad would come out with — or what the PP would say to him to upset the apple cart.

Despite gradually succumbing to it being 'too hard' to practise her Catholicism, I was aware that she never lost her faith. Her prayers at night were legendary. In her early seventies she told me she'd had to stop praying on her knees because by the time she'd finished her list of petitions, she couldn't get back to her feet!

Unfortunately, she remained locked into her childhood beliefs. She enjoyed the English Mass, but Vatican II had no impact on her. She never attempted any adult faith development work; she never changed her childlike belief system. Even today she has a terrible fear of dying and being judged by the ever-watchful God of her childhood.

She'll tell people she's Catholic, but she has hated a few priests and nuns with a vengeance over the years, and still holds dear all those occasions when Father scorned the pennies she was putting on the plate, or Father expected everyone to turn up for the working bee and publicly named those who didn't.

When I was nineteen, my younger sister ran away from home. We got that sorted out and she boarded with a friend in Sydney. She met a bloke there and, four months after running away, she arrived home to announce a two-months pregnancy and intention to marry her beloved.

Threat of excommunication...

Grim faced, Mum arranged a Registry Office marriage; the bride and groom had no say in it. Mum went to confession, and the priest told her if she proceeded she would be excommunicated. Out the door she went — never to return to Church. It was a mortal blow for a woman who had struggled with her faith all her life, with no spousal support.

She was utterly sure my sister's marriage wasn't going to make it and was trying to keep the door open for her daughter to maintain her Catholicism as a divorced woman.

Ironically, my sister never practised her faith again. But she and her husband had their civil marriage convalidated after five years. The marriage lasted seventeen years then ended in divorce. Mum had paid a huge price, all for nothing. There were three children born of the marriage, all baptized, but never taken to Mass.

Over the years I occasionally tried to get Mum to return to Mass with me — but she never really recovered her motivation. She was an intelligent woman who fully believed the Church had let her family down with its lack of compassion in an extreme circumstance. Because she took the issue to the priest, seeking some sort of approval, there was really nowhere for him to go.

The emergence of a new concept, Community, was the major difference between mixed marriage in Mum's day and my own later experiences.

While some of Mum's problems were definitely personality driven, I think it was the lack of a shared religious life with Dad that made it so hard for her to live a full life in the Church. Perhaps if he had been able to support her — if it had been a shared responsibility to set up that civil marriage — she might have coped better. But, being a convent girl to her bootstraps, I think she just had to grimly stand on her dignity and hope that God — if not His Church — was more accommodating of one of His faithful servants, trying to do her struggling best.

They say there are three major areas in our lives of intimacy with our spouse where differences cause a rupture to the relationship: sex, religion, and finances. Living with differences in these areas can cause great pain and loneliness; and things did become worse around the late '70s. I believe that the more we came to see Church as Community, the greater the stress we placed on the intimacy of a mixed marriage. My own story follows on from this — the same story, but different. Changed issues for sure, but equally challenging.

NAVIGATION: Part II | Part III

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Photo Credit: Main title and quotation image from stock.xchng. Photographer: Benjamin Earwicker, Boise, Idaho, United States

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Wendy can be contacted at: wendy@catholica.com.au

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