Neither Catholic nor Jewish

I grew up as a member of a religious minority: a Protestant in a Catholic neighborhood. In those days the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side was mostly Irish. Although my family claims Scottish ancestry on my father’s side, our name sounded Irish enough to blend in, sort of.

Occasionally this was a source of confusion. Shortly after my parents moved into their apartment in the 1940s, the doorbell rang and my father buzzed the visitor in. It was a rotund priest, who huffed and puffed up the three flights of stairs to ask my father why he had not attended mass. “We’re not Catholic,” my father explained. The priest lost it: “Not Catholic! How can you have a good Irish name like McClure and not be Catholic?”

One of my brother’s playmates, the youngest of the five Maloney kids, settled the issue. She assumed we were Irish but was unable to visualize a non-Catholic Christian. “If you’re not Catholic, then you must be a Jew,” she declared. So for a while the neighbor kids thought we were an exotic species of Hibernian Hebrew.

We encountered other incidents of cultural dissonance. When my grandfather passed away, we were touched when our Irish-immigrant neighbor made the trek to the South Side to attend the wake. His grief was genuine when he learned that no liquor was being served.

Since most of the Catholic kids went to the local parish school, many of my classmates in public school lived in a Jewish enclave a couple of blocks away. My mother made friends with their moms in the PTA and I attended Cub Scout meetings in a synagogue.

When I was in seventh grade, some of my friends were celebrating their Bar Mitzvahs with lavish parties and lots of presents. It was a much bigger deal than my confirmation in the Congregational church and I could not help being a little envious. My parents reminded me that I was different from the other kids.

Years later, I found myself in another Irish-Catholic environment when I bought a house in Oak Park’s Gunderson neighborhood. The vintage houses there were a magnet for large families (a few with 10 kids or more) because their attics could be converted to dormitories. When we first moved in, I asked the next-door neighbor how many children she had and was told: “Only five.” A year or so later the same neighbor pointed out that my wife and I had only two children in a four-bedroom house (not to mention the attic) and needed to catch up with the neighborhood.

Lately I have been hanging out with the Knights of Columbus. My neighbor in Albuquerque is a big wheel in the Knights. I always buy a ticket to his chapter’s pancake breakfast, and we sold a few copies of the book we co-authored at the organization’s state convention. Last Sunday he invited me to a backyard barbecue for his group after borrowing my folding tables. I had a nice time, but had to keep explaining that I can’t join the Knights of Columbus because I’m not Catholic.