Mother Petronilla, the Brown Scapular, and the Poison P’s!
By Robert Fontana
I’ve been thinking a lot about being raised Catholic at a time when Catholics knew how to practice their faith. We were good at it. We knew how to fast from meat on Fridays – ALL FRIDAYS, receive ashes in Lent, attend May crownings, pray the Stations of the Cross, make the Sign of the Cross while passing Catholic churches (not Protestant ones), bless our new homes, new babies, and, in Louisiana, the shrimp boats, with holy water.
We did not necessarily understand Catholicism; it was all a mystery anyway, but we knew how to practice the religion of our ancestors, from the time we were very young. For example, when I was a child, probably at my first Communion, I was given a brown scapular, which was two pieces of cloth, each about an inch square, and decorated with an image of Mary. The two cloth squares were connected by cords and worn around the neck.
Wearing a scapular was serious business. The one spiritual truth I remember about it was that no person wearing one at the moment of his or her death could ever be sent to hell. Honest! One day, I had an intense conversation with my brother Francis, who is a year older than I. We were pondering how this was possible.
Francis – I never take my scapular off. NEVER!
Robert – You mean you even take a bath with it? Ain’t that a sin, I mean getting a holy scapular wet?
Francis – No, stupid, not with a scapular. If you drown in the tub, or a hurricane knocks a tree down on the house and smashes the bathroom with you in the tub, you want to be wearing the scapular. It’ll keep you out of hell when you die, so wear it even when you take a bath.
Robert – Wow!
I thought it was a sin to get a scapular wet, like it was a sin to chew the communion host. But a scapular’s having the power to save me from the torments of hell, that was something else. But I was confused about one thing.
Robert – What if you have a mortal sin on your soul? Will you still go to heaven if you die wearing the scapular?
Francis paused. He was stumped. That was a theological issue that he had not considered, nor had it been explained by any of the Sisters of Mt. Carmel, who taught at our school, which we and every child in a 10-mile radius attended.
Francis – I don’t know what happens then. Maybe it just falls off if you are dying and have a mortal sin on your soul. Mother Petronilla did say that we have to be good when we wear the scapular (she was our first-grade teacher).
As I said, we Catholics were pretty good at practicing our religion even though we did not fully understand why we were doing what we were doing. That may have worked in the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, when Catholic culture was intact, and the most important issue was keeping immigrant Catholics from becoming Protestant, but it will not work today. The world has changed. The fundamental challenge to Catholic Christianity is not Protestantism, even in its evangelical variety. These Christians are our allies. The challenge is greed and selfishness that have run amok as men and women of all ages pursue what Franciscan Father Richard Rohr calls the “Poison P’s – Position, Power, Possessions,” and Privilege (I’ve added this last one) made possible by money.
POSITION, POWER, POSSESSIONS, AND PRIVILEGE suck the life from one’s soul and leave one looking like what Jesus described as “white-washed tombs on the outside, but dead-men’s bones on the inside.” (Mt 23:27)
POSITION, POWER, POSSESSIONS, AND PRIVILEGE blind entire communities to the needs of the unborn and the poor, to the desecration of the earth, and to the demands of justice.
BUT REMEMBER THIS! We cannot avoid the Poison P’s. We are immersed in them because the pursuit of position, power, possessions, and privilege is a foundation of our American culture. They are the “water we drink, the air we breathe.” We cannot avoid them, BUT we can transform them!
Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. Romans 12:2
Paul would have made a good psychotherapist. There is an axiom in the therapeutic world: “change the way you think, and you’ll change the way you feel, and you’ll change the way you act.”
What if your deepest identity was not defined by your position as a lawyer, teacher, cashier, or even priest? What if your deepest identity was that you are a beloved child of God? Then you would use your power to be a power for good in the world. You would acquire the possessions that you need and share them. And with any privilege you have, perhaps because of having parents who stayed lovingly married, or being very successful in business, you would build on that to help those who are underprivileged.
Whoever taught that wearing the scapular would save us from hell was treating that very nice symbol as magic. In the modern world, the “Poison P’s” are creating hell on earth. Being a practicing Catholic today means working to transform the “Poison P’s” however they are present in the circumstances of one’s life. They can be transformed – through faith, hope, and love. I think Mother Petronilla really knew the true purpose of a scapular: it was a very concrete reminder for us to be good.
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Scapular photo used with permission: Copyright: <a href=’https://www.123rf.com/profile_echeverriurrealuis’>echeverriurrealuis</a>
