My disaffection from American Catholicism, which began during my adolescence in the late '50s, was due partly to its strident anti-sex rhetoric and partly to its increasing self-Protestantization and suppression of its ethnic roots. Within twenty years, Catholic churches looked like airline terminals no statues, no stained-glass windows, no shadows or mystery or grandeur. No Latin, no litanies, no gorgeous jeweled garments, no candles so that the ordinary American church now smells like baby powder. Nothing is left to appeal to the senses. The artistic education of the eye that I received as a child in church is denied to today's young Catholics.
     The polychrome images of tortured saints that are a staple of Italian and Spanish Catholicism contain brutal truths about the pagan realities of the body. Suburban American Catholicism, with its soothing bourgeois banalities, has censored out all the horror and ecstasy of human experience. The skull and lilies of my grandmother's picture [of a young Italian saint, with hands piously clasped, gazing down at an image of the Madonna, her heart pierced by the daggers of the seven sorrows] are a Catholic version of the Hindu cycle of birth and death, which we Westerners think we can transcend. As [James George] Frazer showed, the resurrection story, the triumph over death, originated mythologically in ancient nature-cults of the dying god.
     Mediterranean culture is honest about death, which it does not sentimentalize or conceal from children . . . Italian funerals feature open caskets and corpse-kissing, just as rural Italian families rear their young with useful life lessons of rough play. As a child, I learned to be wary about kisses from laughing old widows, who would give one sharp nip in the ear lobe for fun. The first line of my autobiography would read: My people were nursed by the she-wolf.