The Infant Jesus of Pra-goo

Olympia Marzocco's Revisionist Guide to the Saints

My grandmother, Olympia Geffel Marzocco, always referred to by the rather Shakespearian “Nonny” as opposed to the Italian “Nonna,” was a believer in transactional religion. In her version of Catholicism, if you wanted something you asked for it, and as long as you behaved reasonably well, you might get it. In her process, God was out there somewhere, Jesus was relatively important, Marymotherofgod, always said as one word, was nice although ultimately not too helpful. By far the impact players on my grandmother’s revisionist Catholic roster were the saints.

I loved the saints. The saints were the very best part of a religion I started to question at a very early age. I loved reading stories about the saints. I especially loved their gruesome but fascinating deaths. I passed many otherwise tedious hours during mass identifying which saint was which by their icons - Catherine and her wheel, Sebastian and his arrows - in the stained glass windows of our church.

According to my grandmother, the path to getting whatever you needed was to talk to the appropriate saint but “only the Italian ones.” Highly useful saints, even those with murky origins like Saint Christopher, were assumed to be Italian. If the saint answered, my grandmother would smugly move on. If the saint didn’t answer, regular non-Nonny Catholicism would hold that you did something wrong – didn’t pray hard enough, didn’t go to confession, didn’t put enough money in the offertory on Sunday morning. In general, as a Catholic, and as a person, you failed.

But with my grandmother if the saint didn’t respond, she asked again. If that didn’t work, she said “Bah!” and moved on to the next one. The problem wasn’t the saint, or religion, or even the Pope, the issue was that you didn’t do the legwork and determine which saint was the go-to for your particular request, a situation that could easily be remedied by realigning your saints.

My all-time favorite saint, and possibly my grandmother’s as well, was one she called the Infant Jesus of Pra-goo. Technically he was not a saint, since he was, after all, the Infant Jesus, but we treated him as one of the array. I had no idea why he was called the Infant Jesus of Pra-goo, but that’s what my grandmother said, so that’s how we referred to him.

My mother and grandmother supported about half of all available Catholic charities by sending a few dollars here and there through the mail. They disagreed on almost everything else, but in this they were completely aligned. My mother was a big fan of Saint Jude with Saint Anthony a close second, while my grandmother gave money, a dollar or two at a time, to everybody else. With their contributions, in addition to mass being said for those in need, which sometimes included us, we often got something back. That is how we obtained our little statue of the Infant Jesus of Pra-goo.

The Infant Jesus inexplicably had curly blond hair because everyone in the greater Jerusalem area had curly blond hair, apparently. He was a combination action figure and fashion doll because wonder of wonders, the Infant Jesus came with a wardrobe! Our six-inch Infant Jesus arrived with a selection of five-inch robes in an assortment of colors matching whatever liturgical season it happened to be. Advent was purple, Christmas white, Holy Week red. My grandmother and I carefully changed the Infant Jesus’s robes for the appropriate time of year. By far the most tedious season was “Time After Pentecost,” when the poor Infant Jesus was stuck in the same green robe from Easter all the way to Advent.

I don’t remember either one of us asking the Infant Jesus of Pra-goo for anything, because he was so splendid just as he was, beyond the reach of the ask-and-maybe- you’ll-receive saints. We had our other saints for day-to-day requests, who my grandmother often communed with as she sat with her rosary watching the daily television soaps, which she called her “stories.” “The Guiding Light” was her favorite. “She is such a bad one,” she would say happily as she watched some daytime drama villainess, although who she was speaking to was unclear. Whoever it was, they appeared as real to her as the rosary beads between her fingers and provided good companionship during the afternoons of her very long life.

One day, not too long after my grandmother died, I was in an eastern European capital being ferried by taxi from the train station to my hotel. It was my first time in this city and I stared out the window, looking at all the beautiful sites, checking them off against the guidebook in my lap. The taxi stopped at a red light next to a church and I saw a very familiar figure with curly hair standing on a pedestal, serenely regarding the traffic.

I had the same feeling as when from across the room you recognize a friend you haven’t seen in years. “It’s the Infant Jesus of PRAGUE,” I said, out loud to the cab driver, who had the good sense not to reply to a woman clearly stating the obvious. “He’s the Infant Jesus of PRAGUE!”

I remembered our action figure, and at the same time I remembered a popular brand of jarred spaghetti sauce named Prego, pronounced by my grandmother as Pra-goo, as in “ragu,” the Italian word for a kind of a sauce. She would have assumed that “Prague,” a word that was completely unfamiliar to her, was pronounced the same way. I laughed to the point of tears in the cab, possibly reaffirming some deeply held opinion of Americans on the part of the driver, as I remembered my long history with the little Infant Jesus of Spaghetti Sauce.