by Warren Longwell

Created on: January 01, 2010

Growing up Catholic, I was always confused by some of the elusive truths of The Roman Catholic Church, teachings like the existence of purgatory and limbo. Most other religions teach about heaven and hell. But the Catholics had discovered a roadmap to the great hereafter that included a stopover at a halfway house to endure some punishment. The eternal landscape also had a permanent holding pen for un-baptized babies. In my overactive pre-teenage imagination, I tried to visualize what such a place might be like. I thought it was likely that purgatory and limbo might be two branches of a single institution. So I pictured a long cellblock like a photo I had seen of Alcatraz, with a row of baby cradles in a line down the cellblock in front of the bars. And when the babies would start to cry from hunger or would mess their diapers, the people doing their time in purgatory would be let out of the cells to feed and clean the babies. Keeping the babies from crying and keeping their diapers changed was part of the punishment in purgatory. Of course, I realized the imperfection of this imagined setup. But even at age eleven I also knew that the best minds of the Curia and the infallible wisdom of the papacy had never concocted a better explanation to offer me.

Later on I started to question just where Roman Catholicism might have found such a peculiar roadmap to the promised land. And I wondered whether those babies were allowed to ever grow up. And I wondered if they always had to stay there in that dark miserable supposedly holy place. But mostly I wondered what the babies might think about all that if they did grow up.

Once I started to question things, my days as a Catholic were numbered, much to the dismay of my grandmother who was one of those so-called devout Catholics. Old women like that want every boy to become a priest. I think she just wanted me to become a priest so I could be a honcho in The Legion of Decency. Honest to God, I think she thought it was a real legion, like the French Foreign Legion. I asked her about it one day.

She said to me, “You see, it all goes back to how the Church feels about doin’ business. They don’t like it. Pope doesn’t do it. He don’t like it. All them Cardinals that work for him over in the Vatican, they don’t do it. They don’t like it. Priests don’t do it, but some of them might want to do it so they take those vows not to do it. It’s just not allowed! But the folks like

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