DownWithTyranny!: Courtesy of Joseph Mitchell: These two nuns might strike you as ideal role models for the Catholic Church, but you'd probably be wrong

by Ken

For reasons that might be worth talking about some other time, I've started reading stuff by the legendary New Yorker reporter Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996), and in a 1940 nonfiction piece called "Mazie," I came across a moment that hit me so hard, and so purely and simply, that I had to share it.

By way of background, Mitchell loved the gritty side of New York City, whose often sorely pressed denizens he felt singularly at home with. "Mazie" is Mazie Gordon, a woman then in her mid-40s and a legend of sorts in her part of town, which was -- more or less -- the Bowery, the old Bowery of scraping-by and probably lost souls, of cheap entertainments and cheap intoxicants. Mazie, with her sisters Rosie and Jeanie, owned a movie theater near the Bowery, the Venice, where a dime bought "two features, a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, and a serial episode."

The theater had been built and owned by sister Rosie's late husband, a successful racing gambler and local developer, but after his death was inherited by the sisters. Only Mazie was active in the business, though, and while she could probably have afforded to hire a ticket-seller, she preferred to do the job herself -- occupying the cage out front seven days a week, from 8am till 11pm. (The theater didn't close till midnight, but I assume that by 11 it was safe to stop ticket sales.)

At the same time, Mazie involved herself -- all over the neighborhood -- in the lives of the kinds of people who patronized the Venice. Mitchell has a great deal to tell us about this, but it's when he sets about describing the way Mazie had rigged out her telephone-both-size home away from home that he eases into the story I want you to hear.

On one wall of Mazie's cage were two shelves, and on the top shelf were books. After describing some of them, Mitchell writes:

Also on her top shelf are a rosary, some back numbers of a religious periodical called the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, and a worn copy of "Spiritual Reflectons for Sisters," by the Reverend Charles J. Mullaly, S.J., which she borrowed from an Italian nun, one of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, who conduct a school in Chinatown. Lately Mazie has been reading a page of this book every day. She says that she understands hardly any of it but that reading it makes her feel good. Mazie is not a Catholic; she is Jewish, but she has been entranced by Roman Catholicism for many years. One of her oldest friends in the neighborhood is Monsignor William E. Cashin, rector of St. Andrew's, the little church back of the Municipal Building. She frequently shows up for the Night Workers' Mass, which is said every Sunday at 2:30 a.m. in St. Andrew's by Monsignor Cashin. She sits in a middle pew with her head bowed. Surrounded by policemen, firemen, scrubwomen, telephone girls, nurses, printers, and similar night workers who regularly attend the mass, she feels at home. On the way out she always slips a dollar bill into the poor box. Now and then she calls on the Monsignor and has a long talk with him, and whenever he takes a walk on the Bowery he pauses at her cage and passes the time of day.

Mazie also knows two mothers superior quite well. The rosary she keeps in her cage is a present from the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, who run Madonna House, a settlement on Cherry Street. Margaret, the superior there, has known Mazie for years and has made an attempt to understand her. "On the Bowery it's probably an asset to have a reputation for tougness," Sister Margaret once told a friend, "and I'm afraid Mazie tries to give people the worst possible impression of herself, just for self-protection. She isn't really tough. At heart, she's good and kind. We can always count on her for help. A few weeks ago there was a fire in an Italian tenement near here. One of the families in it had a new baby. It was late at night and we didn't know exactly how to help them. Two of the sisters went to Mazie, and she came right down and found the family a new flat and gave the mother some money." Mazie's favorite saint is St. John Bosco. There is a statue of him in a niche in the steeple of the weatherbeaten Church of the Transfiguration in Chinatown. At night the saint can be clearly seen by the light of the galaxy of neon signs on the chop-suey joints which surround the church. When she passes through Mott Street, Mazie looks up at the saint and crosses herself. "I asked a sister once if it was O.K. for me to give myself a cross, and she told me it was," Mazie says.

We come now to the part I needed to share.

Mazie became interested in Catholicism in the winter of 1920. A drug addict on Mulberry Street, a prostitute with two small daughters, came to her cage one night and asked for help. The woman said her children were starving. "I knew this babe was a junky," Mazie says, "and I followed her home just to see was she lying about her kids. She had two kids all right, and they were starving in this crummy little room. I tried to get everybody to do something -- the cops, the Welfare, the so-called missions on the Bowery that the Methodists run or whatever to hell they are. But all these people said the girl was a junky. That excused themselves from lifting a hand. So I seen two nuns on the street, and they went up there with me. Between us, we got the woman straightened out. I liked the nuns. They seemed real human. Ever since then I been interested in the Cat'lic Church."

I suppose it's presumptuous of me, not only a non-Catholic but a non-Christian, to make the call, but it appears blindingly obvious that those two nuns -- who "seemed real human," and who swung immediately into action, unlike everybody else whose first impulse was to find a reason "that excused themselves from lifting a hand" -- grasped the teachings of Jesus. Which is to say, unlike the hordes of Crap Christians who pay lip service to Jesus while devoting untold energies to spitting and defecating on everything he believed and taught.

Mazie's story has special resonance today, when as we know the recently retired pope marshalled his troops for a war on the nuns who remain the best face of Catholicism. When you get right down to it, what probably drove the ex-pope batshit crazy was that the American nuns he targeted "seemed real human."

"Mazie," like most everything Joseph Mitchell wrote, appeared originally in The New Yorker. It was reprinted in his 1943 collection McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, which was itself later incorporated -- in an expanded version -- in Up in the Old Hotel, the 1992 compendium (718 pages in the hardcover edition!) of four of his books. Copies can be had for a song.