Taking the Pledge
December eighth brought a holy day of obligation, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and along with it, “The Pledge,” as most of us called it. The Legion of Decency was a force to be reckoned with in the Catholic Church since it had first appeared in the early 1930s. Founded in 1934, the Legion asked Catholics to abstain from immoral and indecent films and made it mandatory that all practicing Catholics take “The Pledge”—kind of like the Pledge of Allegiance—every year in the fall. This event usually happened in church, but now that I was a bona fide parochial student, I was asked to submit to the pledge in homeroom as well.
We blessed ourselves and then recited the pledge in bits and pieces, prompted by Father Kavanaugh, who made a special visitation to all classe
