The Saint Contraceptua Youthful Anti-Smut League is a Catholic-based club expressing opposition to obscenity and pornography (Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies, 98-9).
About[]
The club is named in honor of Saint Contraceptua Brown who died in 1955 from fatal screaming fits after being read the works of Henry Miller to her by a male acquaintance. Its moderator is Father Clodian Gumpert, noted author of religious pamphlets.
Its members all have up-to -the-minute ticker-tape-like machines with readouts from the Legion of Decency. Females don't wear patent leather shoes as the shoe's shiny surfaces reflect the wearer's undergarments. Males bathe in purple-colored bath water and "carry carved sticks which they use to tuck their shirts into their pants."
Inspiration[]
The color of the bath water refers to the liturgical color of the vestments that a priest wore wears while saying mass during the ecclesiastical year: purple vestments are worn during Lent.
Myers feels the passage may have been inspired by one of Notre Dame's religion professors, Francis Nealy, O. P. "In one of our college bull sessions, his name came up, and one of my friends, no doubt suffering from a temporary surfeit of religiosity, said, 'Oh, Father Nealy. He's so pious that he bathes in a cruciform bathtub!' I related this remark to Bellairs, much to his amusement and therefore assume that bathing in purple-colored bathwater was his variation on the theme.[1]"
Both Myers and Bowen recall hearing somewhere about a certain French seminary whose members were issued little sticks to tuck in their shirts, lest one accidental touch lead to another and so on[1][2].
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Correspondence with Alfred Myers.
- ↑ Correspondence with Charles Bowen.
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Saint Contraceptua Youthful Anti-Smut League • Knights of the White Sepulchre • The Devotion of the Vestal Verger |
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