You mean that what they were telling us was actually true?

I was in parochial school in the 1950's and 1960's, when Catholicism was riding high. All those "huddled masses yearning to breathe free." All that "wretched refuse of [Europe'] teeming shore." All those "tempest-tost" Irish, Italians, Germans, and Poles who had washed up in America in the late 19th and early 20th century had made it. The second- and third-generations were fully assimilated. They owned things. They ran things. It was all pretty heady stuff, especially for Catholics. Especially when "one of our own" was elected president in 1960.

If all was hunky-dory for American Catholics, we worried about all those pagans out there in (non-European) foreign lands who really needed to be converted to Catholicism. We might not have thought of them as immigration material. But we sure did want more Catholics.

So we supported the missions, raising money to help orders of priests and nuns, like the Maryknolls, who labored overseas. 

Several times a year, a priest would blow in to our parish and speak at every Mass. There would be a second collection to support his work. 

We probably had more of this than other parishes because our pastor was the head of the Propagation of the Faith, a Catholic organization devoted to supporting the missions. Monsignor Lynch was very gung ho. Hoping that some of us would find our way to a vocation in the mission fields, he created an after-school Spanish language program for the schools "smart kids." As class nerd, I won my share of prizes. One was a statue of Our Lady. One was a Spanish-English dictionary. And one was the biography of Father James Walsh, a Maryknoll missionary to China. 

I got to meet Thomas Cardinal Sin - I even kissed his ring, bobbing up and down in the schoolyard when Msgr. Lynch showed Cardinal Sin around, making a joke about a cardinal named "sin." (Hoho!) 

And I got to kiss the glass case containing the mummified arm of St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit missionary to Asia, who baptized - estimates vary wildly - anywhere from 30,000 to 700,000 pagans.

The nuns were perpetually collecting money for the missions. "Our" order of nuns had a missionary wing, with a presence in Africa and Japan. Plus the nuns wanted to earn heavenly brownie points for supporting the Propagation of the Faith.

Mission money was collected weekly, with classes competing to see who could raise the most. During Lent, we were issued mite boxes, cardboard banks with pictures of pagan babies on them. There was a calendar with the 40 days of Lent on it and you were supposed to check off every day you went to Mass, made some sort of sacrifice, or donated mission money. After Easter, the mite boxes were turned in, and Sister Saint Whatever would open them all in front of the class, exclaiming loudly over those who donated the most.

One year, the mite box of Gerald N - one of the wildest boys in a classroom chocked full of wild boys - held a five dollar bill, proving to Sister Whatever that Gerald N was the most exemplary Catholic in the class, unlike the rest of us poor specimens who had only manage to save fifty cents or so that actually came out of our pockets. Grrrrr.

But all was forgiven when, one year, on my birthday, my class hit the five dollar mark which entitled us to baptize a pagan baby. And name it. 

Plus the class also got a nifty Certificate of Adoption - just like the one shown here -  issued by the Pontifical Association of the Holy Childhood, a spinoff of the Propagation of the Faith aimed at Catholic children. These certificates were proudly displayed in the classroom. 

Because we scrounged the money on my birthday, it was decided that the baby would be baptized Maureen Elizabeth.

Over the years, I came to the realization that, although we got the certificate, it was highly unlikely that there'd been any pagan baby baptized Maureen.

But I may have been wrong. 

I volunteer in a day shelter, and one of my tasks is checking folks in who want to sign up to take a shower. The other day, a fellow came in but couldn't find his card, which I would have scanned to check him in. Not to worry! I knew his name, which I recognized as an African one (which I now realize is of Ugandan origin), so I typed the first six letters into the search bar.

His name popped up, and as I went to add him to the shower list, I saw that, just below his name was a guest with a similar last name, and the first name of Maureen.

Maureen from Uganda?

Were they really baptizing the names we requested???

This Maureen is 76, so too old to have been the pagan baby my class "adopted" when I was in grammar school.

Still, it's gotten me thinking that somewhere in the African continent - or perhaps even an immigrant to the U.S. - there's a woman, somewhere in her sixties, who was our pagan baby. 

How about that!