Religion is an understated difference in people. For the most part it is something that is on the inside and cannot always be detected by others. When it is brought to the front burner it can be as important as ethnicity or race.

Being Catholic and transplanted to a small rural town brought out my differences. I was in fourth grade and nine years old. My family had just moved to Monrovia, Indiana, a tiny, rural town, from the suburbs outside of St.Louis, Missouri. My father’s job had begun in upstate New York but was transferred so my family was forced to move along with it. In Missouri I had attended a Catholic grade school and had never gone to a public school. When we moved to Indiana there was not a Catholic grade school near us so my parents enrolled me in the public school. This in itself was a time to learn about differences. This new school was so different and so much bigger than my old school.

It was so strange, but one of the most dramatic changes for me was the fact that I had to wear my own clothes! I had been used to wearing a uniform everyday to school. I soon realized that I really didn’t have very many "school" clothes. This was embarrassing for me because my parents did not have very much money and all of a sudden I was beginning to understand it.

The specific day that was the hardest was the day when the public school began to send the students to a Bible study class at a local church. The school sent home permission slips to the parents and mine would not sign the slip. They said I would learn things that were different from my faith and I would be confused. I remember I was the only one who could not attend the Bible study classes. I had to stay back in the classroom with my teacher and occupy myself somehow. I remember not knowing how to explain myself to the other kids. I was trying to fit in to this new and different place and one of the first things I was faced with was the fact that I was very different from the other children.

The time spent on the bus that afternoon seemed to drag. I was sitting in my newly assigned seat when my new friend from down the street and new classmate, Trisha Phiefer asked me "Why didn’t you go with us to Bible Study?". I was waiting for this question to be asked because I was the only person in the entire class to not go. I was curious myself and had asked my parents the same thing. When I did they seemed to not want to answer the question at first. It was probably not something they really wanted to get into with a nine-year-old.

My parents are very old school. They are from upstate New York and both come from strict traditional Catholic households. My mother is Irish and my father is Italian. The Catholicism seemed to be a common link between them and among my grandparents.

As children my two older siblings and myself attended the Catholic grade schools regardless of where we lived. We really knew nothing else. The only interaction with we had with other children had been with Catholic kids. Ethnicity never really was an issue here because I never saw anything except for white children and families.

I already had felt like an outsider but this seemed to really make it harder for me. Children at that age don’t understand differences like these at all. At that age children are unaware of the differences in religious practices. There in the white, rural community everyone knew everyone else and had all gone to the same small Baptist or Protestant churches their whole life. I felt I was an outsider for my religion. In other locations it probably would not be as poignant but here in a place where I remember hearing about cross-burnings and KKK meetings being different for any reason was hard.

I think this incident of detecting difference has stuck in my memory because I had just recently lost two of my grandparents and seemed to be missing the culture they were teaching my siblings and me. Also it was really one of the only times that I ever felt different from the others around me and was unaware of why.

Return to SBS 301 F 2000 PME home page