I Used to Be Irish Catholic

I used to be Irish Catholic, now I'm an American

You know, you grow

I was from one of those Irish neighborhoods in New York

One of those kind of uh, parish schools

Wasn't typical, it was Corpus Christi, was the name of it

Could have been any Catholic church, right?

Our Lady of Great Agony

Saint Rita Moreno

Our Lady of Perpetual Motion, what's the difference

What's the prize, you know

The church part and the neighborhood part were typical

But the school was not

It wasn't one of those old fashioned parish

Kind of prison schools with a lot of corporal punishment

And Sister Mary Discipline with the steel ruler, right?

"Ah, my hand, ah!"

You'd fall two years behind in penmanship, right?

"Well he's behind in penmanship, Mrs. Carlin, I don't know why"

"Well he's crippled, he's trying to learn to write with his left hand"

We didn't have that, we got, somehow I got lucky, you know

I got into a school where the pastor was uh, kind of into John Dewey

And progressive education

And he talked the parish, uh talked the diocese rather

Into uh, into experimenting in our parish

With progressive education and whipping the religion on us anyway

And see what would happen with the two of them there

And uh, worked out kind of nice

It was a lot of classroom freedom

There was no, for instance there were no grades, or marks

You know, no report cards to sweat out or any of that

Uh, there were no uniforms

There were no, there was no sexual

Segregation, boys and girls together

And the desks weren't all nailed down in a row, you know

They were movable desks and you had new friends every month

It was nice, like I say a lot of classroom freedom

In fact, there was so much freedom that by eighth grade

Many of us had lost the faith

Cause they made questioners out of us

And uh, they really didn't have any answers, you know

They'd fall back on "Well, it's a mystery"

"Oh, thank you, Father"

"Mystery, I don't, what's he talking about? Mystery"

Part of class clown was being an imitator, as you probably noticed

But I used to imitate the priests

Which was right on the verge of blasphemy, you know

I could do them all rather well

I did Father Byrne the best

Father Byrne was the uh, one who used to celebrate the children's mass

I always thought that was great, celebrate mass

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah"

Father Byrne did the children's mass, did the sermon every week

He used to do parables about Dusty and Buddy

Dusty was a Catholic, and Buddy was not

And Buddy was always trying to talk

Dusty into having a hot dog on Friday