I’ve been to Italy and I’ve seen duomos in Florence and Siena. I live in Brooklyn where Irish immigrants attended mass in beautiful stone structures with stained glass windows. My friend Jeff was married in Western Massachusetts in a simple, classic, small white church. These are what churches are supposed to look like.

The church I attended as a child looked like a stoned atheist’s senior thesis for architecture school.

A lot of the churches in the suburbs of Rochester, NY had that feel, like someone in the seventies just decided that all churches should look modern, like the engineering school on a college campus.

My church was Our Lady of Lourdes. The exterior was made of flat gray stones and large windows so everyone could see my mother and me walking from the parking lot into the back pew ten minutes late. We were always late unless I was an altar boy* or she was the reader that weekend, then we would get there on time. The prizes to compete for among altar boys were got to carring the cross down the aisle, ringing the bells during mass, or snuffing out the candles after.

Church was always an obligation and I rarely got anything out of mass. I still consider myself culturally Catholic like my mother. Now, what do I mean by that? I’ll explain.

My mother went to Catholic school at a time when nuns could still hit children. She probably was and, true to form, never spoke of it explicitly. But there is a white wine chugging chain smoking kind of woman that is only produced by Catholic education and my mother was one. Now, I heard this story from a friend after she died. My mother left her home town and went to college to study acting, most likely casting off the shackles of organized religion and living as an artist.*

But, in 1962, The Cuban Missile Crisis happened and my mother did what any anxiety ridden baptized human might conceivably do. She prayed. Dear God, if you get us out of this, I will go to church every Sunday, I swear.

The Cuban Missile Crisis ended sans nuclear annihilation and my mother went back to church every Sunday, eventually dragging me with her.

So, what do I mean by cultural Catholic? When I heard this story, I, someone who has questioned his faith in a God or a savior a million different ways and hasn’t been to church in years, thought, “Oh yeah, that makes complete sense and I would have done the same thing.” That is what I mean by cultural Catholic.

That church holds a lot of memories for me. Most of my time there was spent feeling bored. Sermons and readings rarely meant anything to me. But I remember my first communion because family came and I got to wear a tie. I remember doing the reading one Christmas Eve when I was young and it was night and the church was dark and full and filled with poinsettias. I went to youth group in the basement. And it was in that same basement years later that I would greet old friends and co-workers of my mother after her funeral.

Towards the end of her life, my mother stopped going to church. She told me that they had asked everyone to vote for George W. Bush and that was the last straw. I can neither confirm nor deny that but I think she needed an excuse not to go. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a long time passed and I think she felt like she held up her end of the bargain.

When I’m back in Rochester for Christmas, I always think of going to midnight mass and then I never do. I guess I look at my church like I look at my high school. Yeah, I could go in but I don’t know anybody there anymore.