When James Carroll was a boy, lying on the floor watching television, he would glance up at his mother and ‘see her lips moving, only to glimpse the beads in her lap. I recall thinking that they slipped through her thumb and forefinger the way cartridges moved into machine guns’.
There was nothing unusual about this: in 1970s England, as well as 1950s America, most devout Catholic ladies carried a rosary in their handbag. If you walked into church while the Legion of Mary were at prayer, you’d be deafened by their Hail Marys. It was a competitive sport. Whoever prayed loudest and fastest — usually an Irish biddy with the gleam of the Taleban in her eye — could force the others to keep up with her frantic pace. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessedartthou… women… fruit of thy womb Jesus… Holy Mary, motherofGod, pray for us… [gasp for breath] now-
andatthehourofourdeath, Amen! Hail Mary…’ etc. Ten Hail Marys were a decade, with one decade for each of the five Joyful Mysteries of Christ. Repeat twice for the Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries. (Pope John Paul II added the Luminous Mysteries, which traditionalists regard as a bit dodgy, and don’t say.)
It did sound a bit like machine-gun fire, and it’s not surprising that Carroll — a bestselling American novelist and church historian — should reach for that particular analogy. His father, Lt Gen Joseph Carroll, ran the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam war. He had trained for the priesthood, but backed out at the last minute. James, on the other hand, did become a Catholic priest — one of those self-consciously radical clerics who opposed the war. Like nearly all of them, he left and got married.
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