Perhaps it was because my mother had been a nun for so many years (it’s a long story). But whenever she heard about a Catholic scandal she would tell me about the cleaners. While nuns did their own cleaning, she said, putting on aprons over their habits, monks had cleaners. Cleaning to her seemed not ancillary but fundamental. Whereupon my father, who had been a monk (again, long story), would recollect being taught that church regulations ruled that priests’ housekeepers must be “quadraginta et non pulchra”: “40 and not beautiful.” He used to chuckle at that. My mother did not. 

Whenever I hear of Catholic scandals I think of that. Of priests, so separate from the world, and of those—often women—who cleaned up after them. And of my parents, who both left a church whose life and whose Latin felt increasingly anachronistic. And I think that, like most rituals, my parents’ probably had something in it.