POETRY ANI) THE SACRED
85
On a Saturday afternoon in about 1956, three years after the publication
of
The
Captive Mind
and more than a decade before I myself would read that
book, I went to confession in Our Lady Help of Christians Church, a mixed
Irish, Italian, and Polish parish on the west side of Chicago. "Bless me, father,
for I have sinned," I said. "It has been two days since my last confession. I
have commjtted the sin of self-abuse three times." It is the belief of the
Catholic church, repeatedly confirmed in recent years by His Holiness John
Paul
II,
that any deliberate sexual activity outside marriage merits eternal tor–
ment. Die wi th such a sin on your soul and you will rot in hell forever.
On this particular Saturday afternoon, the clerical voice from the other
side of the confessional grate happened to have a heavy Polish accent. I had
somehow found my way into the confessional of the man we called "the
d.p. priest."
The letters
d.p.
stood for displaced person, but many in our neighbor–
hood, where there were a great many d.p.'s, no longer knew or had never
learned what the initials stood for.
D.p.
was simply a demographic catego–
ry, standing for a body of pale, generally unsmiling people in ill-matched
clothing with unpronounceable names and excruciating accents-people
who didn't know how to talk, didn't know how to dress, didn't know how
to act, didn't know anything but Polish or Lithuanian.
What the d. p. priest asked me on that afternoon in 1956 was, "How
old are you?"
"Fourteen, father," I said. An unsettlingly long pause followed, and
then the d.p. priest said, "I think, for a boy of your age, this is not a seri–
ous sin. Do you have some other sins
to
confess?"
"No, father."
"Very good. Now I give you my blessing. Say one Our Father and one
Hail Mary for world peace."
The d.p. priest-or so I later came to think-was what we would now
call an emigre intellectual, a dissident priest, a reformer. At the time, howev–
er, I took him to be what k.ids in the neighborhood said
d.p.
really stood for:
dumb Polack. He d.idn't even know that masturbation was a mortal sin! There
was no doubt in my mjnd that I still had this sin on my soul, so I went into
another confessional. There were six in my church, and on Saturdays there
was a priest in every one. This time I drew an Irish-American priest, Fr.
Donahue, who exhorted me to purity in the language I had become accus–
tomed to hear once a week. He assigned me a rather longer penance of prayers
to reci te and absolved me routinely:
"de omnivus peccatis tllis in nOli/inc patris et
filii et spiritlls sal1cti. AII/CII."
I went into the afternoon cool feeling cleansed,
renewed, innocent, my mjnd at peace-but captive.
My approach
to
the implications of Czeslaw Milosz's work for religion
and politics is by way of four vignettes. I've given you the first. The second is
