Half-Mast for a Pope

Today's 14-MPH winds snapped flags to attention out on Parmer Lane, the route I cycle with Ron Wilcox in the evenings for HCRA training. I was surprised to see that the flag stood at half-mast, in respect for the Pope who'd died on Saturday.

Here's a man beloved by millions, but well outside of being a head of state. He is the Church, which my country has aimed to keep separate from the State.

I say that as a former constituent of John Paul's. I was reared Catholic in Toledo, Ohio. Baptized at the tiny wooden church on Summit Street in Point Place (below) just a few miles south of the Michigan state line. Just north of that line our great-grandfather set up housekeeping after he'd left his priesthood and married his housekeeper. That's a picture of Father Joseph, who immigrated across the Atlantic from Alsace-Loraine, near the French-German border. He spawned a doctor, who fathered my dad, an engineer. We grew up Catholic because of dad's family, which included his cousin Father Paul, and another cousin Pat, who'd tried the seminary and wound up teaching Latin at Catholic high schools, including mine, Central Catholic.

By the time my dad died the Catholic church played no role in our lives. I'd been an altar boy in the 60s, but there was too much authority in a 1900-year-old institution for a teenaged boy. My father's funeral didn't even take place in a Catholic church. His death was marked at a Protestant church — that's what us Sixties Catholics always called the other side of the spiritual fence — in Point Place, a United Church of Christ where my mom and sister Tina had found their spirits lifted up. (Tina's still key to the congregation; she runs the church's youth group.) The only flag on my father's funeral day was folded into the traditional triangle for the fallen Catholic who'd served in the Navy.

I called up my father's resentment of the church for an instant when I saw that flag on Parmer Lane. Pope John Paul took office the same year dad died, 1978, and the pontiff served the third-longest term of any pope. Some have celebrated him as a man for modern times, a former actor, philosopher, scholar, poet, and author, according to another Catholic's column at Poynter.org. But John Paul hasn't changed much about the Catholic church for women like Tina or my mom. Their reproductive rights remain in limbo, I suppose, outdated thinking that enables the violence at American reproductive clinics. Catholics Against Kerry probably helped Bush win another term. Paul, and the 113 Cardinals he appointed, had a hand in that. (Catholics Against Kerry has closed its Web site. Mission accomplished, as our president would say.)

So it's not a surprise that the leader of one of the biggest slices of the US population — 67 million Catholics, in a Catholic News tally — gets the half-mast treatment alongside the highway. The next pope probably doesn't have much chance of being a man who will change the rights of women. My Aunt Lottie's fortune from a Toledo millinery business and Depression-era stock went to John Paul's Church. Ultimately the proceeds from selling our family's lakefront cottage went there, too. It might have taken the Greatest Generation women in my family to unfurl respect like that.