Katie Holmes-Tom Cruise divorce: dealing with religious splits
The Katie Holmes-Tom Cruise divorce news makes this author wonder how the couple's daughter, Suri, will deal with the alleged split in her parents' religious views. The author was a year older than Suri when her own parents – a Jew and a Roman Catholic – divorced.
In this Nov. 4, 2007 file photo, actress Katie Holmes joins her husband Tom Cruise as he holds their daughter Suri after Holmes finished the New York City Marathon. Holmes and Cruise are getting a divorce, leaving some to wonder about how Suri will handle her parents' differing religious views.
Kathy Willens/AP/File
As fans gird themselves for the cataclysmic marital revelations expected to emerge at any moment from the impending divorce of actors Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, I can only think about the spiritual insanity awaiting little Suri.
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Lisa Suhay, who has four sons at home in Norfolk, Va., is a children’s book author and founder of the Norfolk (Va.) Initiative for Chess Excellence (NICE) , a nonprofit organization serving at-risk youth via mentoring and teaching the game of chess for critical thinking and life strategies.
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Suri, 6, is just one year younger than I was when my parents divorced and decided to leave the choice of my religion to me. We were in process of moving out of New York City to New Jersey. In my case, a religious riff was also in the mix. I became the spiritual football as my parents beat each other up both physically and emotionally.
My maiden name is Goldenthal. My father, God rest him, was Jewish, my mother a Roman Catholic. I celebrated Passover and Easter, Christmas and Hanukkah. My mother gave me a little gold cross and my father bellowed, “If Jesus died today, would you all wear little gold electric chairs around your necks?”
Oy Vey!
It was the 1970s, a crazy time in the church when nuns were suddenly spotted on beaches in bathing suits or singing with a guitar. My mother, partially excommunicated when she married a Jewish man was being reinstated as the divorce took place. The loophole was that the marriage was then considered never to have taken place in the eyes of the church. I was told by my local priest that I was “illegitimate in the eyes of the church.”
I didn’t understand the term "illegitimate," or much else happening at the time, so I decided to look it up in the dictionary: “not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules: ‘an illegitimate exercise of power by the military;' (of a child) born of parents not lawfully married to each other."
I wasn’t a military exercise and I’d seen the wedding pictures, so I mentally morphed the definition, applying it to my immortal future as “spiritually illegitimate.” Within a week of that event, at age 7, I was told to choose between the two religions as divorce talk in our home got louder.
It was Mission Impossible – asking a child so young to make that choice.
In the Catholic religion I was rapidly approaching the rite of passage known as First Holy Communion. To this day I can’t sort out if my parents actually meant well for what ensued, or if they had made the conscious choice to use me against each other. Now, at age 47, I don’t know, don’t care.
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