Member-only story
A Letter to the Church Ladies
With all due respect, I think you should model love, not judgment.
Monday, November 9, 2020
To the White-Haired Ladies in my Catholic parish:
It pains me to write this letter. I grew up in a parish in New Jersey, 20 minutes up the Garden State Parkway from here and a 10-minute drive to the East.
When I was a homesick freshman at Douglass College, 1 1/2 hours away from my family, I found a strong thread to my girlhood at Sunday Mass in Voorhees Chapel, by the green Ravine Bridge. It comforted me to know that I was saying the same prayers as my mother, who was at the 12:45 p.m. Catholic Mass back in Dumont.
I moved into my own apartment in a cute Jersey Shore town, and joined a parish there. Since I worked in Manhattan, I also attended services on Holy Days at lunchtime there, at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral or St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street — a beautiful place to pray, with a website motto that says “We welcome all people.”
The seaside parish, which held rare Masses at the beach, was more homogenous and judgmental. Was it that, or that I was now navigating my faith on my own as a 26-year-old, not as Anne Garbarini’s daughter in a tight-knit Catholic community? (My Mom was in the Rosary & Altar Society and prayed novenas to Mary. She and my Dad raised four…
