No envelope, please - official list of donors who contribute money to their parish church on Sundays and the sums they donated

I have never submitted to the envelope system. In whatever city or town we have lived, I have preferred to align myself with a laity unnumbered, hopefully generous, and anonymous. One of the earliest memories I have of stout Father Connolly is a Sunday in the midst of the Depression, when I first discovered in the parish bulletin my father's name on the list of contributors to the previous week's collection. In what seemed to me a bold and confrontational reckoning, there it was' DANIEL M. LYNCH -- 50 cents.

Was the pastor trying to humiliate my father? Hadn't my father in past years been president of the Holy Name Society, didn't he call numbers at the bingo games? Wasn't my mother in the Altar Society and my older brother an altar boy? What was wrong with this fat priest? I searched further on that Sunday morning. There were my friends' fathers: Bill Brennan's -- 25 cents; Sam Orcutt's -- 50 cents; Peggy Wheeler's -- 35 cents. How long had this been going on, holding these parents up to ridicule? I can only imagine the uneasiness and embarrassment fathers and mothers suffered as they placed a quarter or two quarters or a quarter and a dime in the Sunday envelope, knowing that it would be revealed to the entire parish.

My parents would not for an instant have considered bypassing the traditional envelope system; and now in the hands of Father Connolly it had betrayed them. Assuredly, it was one of the church's ways of keeping track of the saved and the unsaved, the pious and the backsliders, the wealthy and the poor and the middle class. But at that early age (too young even to be an altar boy myself), I was both confused and defensive, not much caring about the circumstances, the cost of heat and light, the age of the church's roof, the need to pave the parking lot.

I had stood on a chair and peeked and was aware that my father every Monday morning on his way to work would leave a five-dollar bill on the fireplace mantel for my mother to buy groceries for six people for a week. He repaired our shoes with adhesive kits sold at Woolworth's, trimming foot-shaped pieces from cheap rubber and gluing them on soles you could nearly see through. He bought our winter jackets and leather hi-tops (they were preferably worn with corduroy knickers; there was a handy pocket for a jackknife on the right boot) at the discount clothing store of the Ford Motor Company in Highland Park, Michigan. He then waterproofed them with bacon fat in our kitchen. Mother darned our socks and sewed dresses for my sisters.

I never did succeed my brother as an altar boy. Father Connolly had gout and carried a cane at the altar. During one Sunday high Mass my brother moved too slowly for Father and he blindsided Dan and whacked him across his crimson-cassocked bottom with the cane. Dan carried out his commitment, but when my turn came my mother refused to let me serve.

In a Detroit suburb in the '50s, I had a pastor who often dispensed with the sermon, came down from the sanctuary, and pranced into the center aisle, pointing and proclaiming to his pew-bound flock: "I know who you are. I know where you work, I know what you make, I know what kind of car you drive. You're not fooling me. The Lord isn't getting his share!" Within a year, through this and other idiosyncrasies, the pastor had qualified himself for removal and was shipped westward for counseling, where he could bring his histrionics under control and obtain a better grasp of his ministry.

We have lived in Massachusetts for thirty-seven years now. Our first pastor bullied his assistants and acted the good priest-bad priest with his parishioners. Some converts said they would not have come into the church if it hadn't been for him; others were abandoning the parish because of him. When our family had a particularly difficult time one year, in reply to a request for his Grand Annual Collection, I sent the pastor, in a truly unguarded moment, a letter explaining our financial situation and pledging to catch up with a named sum when things got better and I could afford it. Since I had opted for fiscal anonymity on a regular basis, I thought it the least I could do to show that I belonged to the parish.

One of my daughters came home from CCD class one Saturday and announced that everyone was reading my letter--it had been posted on the bulletin board in the church vestibule, glass-enclosed and padlocked. I drove to the church and appealed to one of the assistants to get it out of there. I threatened to break the glass. I threatened to cut away the padlock. I threatened to go to the cardinal! In time the pastor relented, but with no apology and dogged insistence, said that he would not return my letter. I drove sadly home, bruised and wondering if I was in my right mind. Regardless, three months later I kept my pledge, but few words ever again passed between us.

John Lynch lives in Framingham, Massachusetts. His article "Loaded and Fired Machine Gun ..." appeared in the April 24 Commonweal.

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