Raised Catholic (Can You Tell?) (American Storytelling)

He was the only son of an Irish Catholic mother and a Protestant Navy man. His mother frequently prayed for him to become a priest. But his father warned him, “Son, never get a job where you have to wear a dress to work.” So Ed Stivender compromised. After earning a master's degree in theology, he taught religion in a Catholic high school, where he found his true calling as a jongleur (loosely translated as “wandering minstrel-juggler”), telling stories, sometimes with music and often from the Bible. His many years as both a student and teacher in the parochial school system form the basis for this cycle of stories about growing up Catholic in the 1950s, prior to the reforms of Vatican II. Stivender recalls this indelible experience with affection and precision: leaving room for his guardian angel between himself and his first-grade seatmate; his antic first mass as an altar boy; his first kiss, which made him realize the sacrifices required by his intended vocation, the preisthood; the classroom games of “doctrinal tennis” that often ended with the priest against the wall claiming, ‘It's a mystery of faith,’ when the doctrine wore thin on the abrasive washboard of logic and common sense.” Stivender says he developed these stories for “all the wounded Catholics in the world, as well as for anyone who has ever wondered what it would have been like to be Catholic.”