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Dear Catholic Consumer Magazine, Years of married bliss have gone down the tubes. We used to be so happy. Then Mother Mary Salesian came between my wife and me. And let me just say, she's heavy on the "Sale" part. Now I'm penniless, and my wife has joined a convent. I only hope that other readers can learn from my story. I guess I should have seen it coming, but things seemed so right in the beginning. We met in college. I'd often seen her on Sunday nights for the campus liturgy. I admired her faith. In fact, in the beginning that was what brought us together. Who would have known that it would end up tearing us apart? It wasn't long before we knew that we were meant to get married. We were soul mates, she told me. Now, I'll soon have a cell mate if I can't pay this debt. Our wedding was simple and conservative. I had recently graduated and was a reporter for our little local paper, so we didn't have a lot of money. But that didn't matter to us. As I looked at her in her white veil and held her rosary-clenched hand, I knew that God had sent me my angel. She taught me so much (which was no surprise because she was a Catholic schoolteacher). I never knew there were so many prayers. And indulgences. I thought those were abolished after the Reformation, but I was wrong. And so I indulged, and we were happy. After years of trying, we had a son. My wife decided to stay home and take care of him. Money would be tight, but we both knew this was the right thing to do. One day when I returned home from work, I noticed that our son was crawling down the stairs while my wife was dialing the phone. "What is going on?" I asked. "Mother Mary Salesian of the Catholic Home Shopping Channel says this is a must buy for every Catholic," she said with an intent look in her eyes. "A holy water font will keep this house free from danger." "Will a holy water font keep our baby from smashing in his skull at the bottom of the steps?!" I demanded. "He will bear you up on eagle's wings," she replied. "That's from a song on a CD I just bought. It's sung by a group of Dominican monks Mother knows. Mother says that when she hears them sing, it sounds like the voice of God." Voice of God?! I was looking for the voice of reason. And that's the moment when not only our son, but our marriage took a nosedive. Every day I dropped our son off at my mother's house, and my wife did nothing but watch the Catholic Home Shopping Channel. It had become like a new religion to her. Now it was no longer what the church said or what Jesus said was right, but what Mother Mary Salesian said and what Mother Mary Salesian thought was right. "Mother Mary Salesian preaches life," she said. "We should try to have more children." "You can't even take care of the son we do have," I reminded her. "That simply isn't so," she replied. "I have given him every nativity figure, rosary, and chew-on bible a baby could ever want." And those items weren't the half of it. Each day more boxes arrived at our house. Big ones. Small ones. Ones that said "fragile." Ones that were written in Latin and Greek. I swore that if I ever saw a box labeled "Splinter of the Cross", I would leave town -- but that one never came. There were plenty of others though. My house had more icons than our Church. Candles burned at all hours, and crystal rosaries gleamed in their light. Surely my wife was trying to create a homing beacon for a Marion apparition. What was even worse was that my son and I couldn't do anything right. Whenever I wanted to watch a football game or Saturday Night Live, my wife would say that the TV was the devil's instrument. Funny -- the devil controlled all channels but the Catholic Home Shopping one. I tried to wean her from her addiction, but she would come back with comments like, "Mother says this is the one book the devil doesn't want you to have. I have to buy it. Somebody's got to save our souls." "I think Jesus already did," I said. But that was never enough to please her. In the end I guess even the Catholic Home Shopping Channel wasn't enough. After years of building up her devotion to Mother Mary Salesian, my wife left to become a nun of the same order as Mother. So now she's vowed to live a life of poverty, and I'm stuck with a treasure trove of religious supplies and a debt bigger than Goliath. I'd ask for your prayers, but I've got books full of them. What I need is you to take this stuff off my hands. If you know of anyone who is like my wife, get them some help. But first, let them read this article. If they would like to buy any of Mother Mary Salesian's wonderful products, I would be more than happy to deliver them. I'm sure that God would bless them for each item they buy. Broke in Baltimore, Gary Spengler Copyright 2002 by Nick Popadich |
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