The Catholicism Thread

jury is still out on miracles imho

oh hey here's my church

http://www.parishofstannegarwood.org/

This was mine (til I was 10) on the left:

http://www.olgc-ic.org/

Although I do think there is something about Catholic identity that is really about ethnic identity (Irish, Italian, whatever) in the midst of a larger other culture

Well yes, but being an Irish catholic in Ireland is an entirely different kettle of loaves and fishy priests (and Polish in Poland, Italian in Italy etc.)

The one I went to growing up isn't online anymore but this was my HS. It closed in 2009 which was sort of sad.

http://www.asjli.org/

Here's a weird Catholic thing or at least a weird thing from my HS. For graduation we had to wear long white dresses with elbow length white gloves and carry red roses. I guess it was sort of a brides of Christ thing? idk. I wonder if other girls' schools do that too.

Just found this pic. It's a pic of a pic so not great but you get the idea:

http://i53.tinypic.com/2vjosn9.jpg

I do think there is something about Catholic identity that is really about ethnic identity (Irish, Italian, whatever) in the midst of a larger other culture

yeah ... being Polish has pretty much come to be synonymous with "Catholic" (even before John Paul II), so much so that when i read that Renaissance-era Poland was a Reformation-era hotbed and the home of Unitarianism it legitimately blew my mind.

Here's "my" church - really my Nan's church, I just tagged along every Sunday, was never confirmed or any of that.

http://www.otway.biz/images/stjohns.jpg

lol i just realized that out of context that pic sort of looks like it's from my lesbian wedding and now I sort of love it

I do think there is something about Catholic identity that is really about ethnic identity (Irish, Italian, whatever) in the midst of a larger other culture

It's a really strange part of my identity. I was baptized at nine and raised Catholic because both of my divorced parents each married a Catholic - my step-mother an Irish-American named Molly and my step-dad, an honest-to-God Polish-German Yankee from Chicago. Prior to that, I really hadn't had any religion.

So while my friends were all drinking grape juice at their white-clapboard Baptist vacation bible schools, I was taking Communion, learning the call-and-response of the Eucharist, confessing my sins and catching my paper wax catcher on fire with a candle at midnight Mass.

I no consider myself a Catholic, but it still remains inside me like a lost language painted on a cave in France somewhere. It's provided me an opportunity to relate to Latino and Yankee cultures. And whenever I am asked my religion for reference purposes, I still say I'm Catholic. I'm not a Catholic, but I was baptized as one and took Communion. I can't explain it, but you can't bounce back from that all the way.

re orthodoxy: this is the Orthodox church that my Orthodox relatives attend (in Manville, NJ)

http://www.spiritoforthodoxy.com/Concertimages/20100516_manville/20100516_SaintsPeterandPaul.jpg

Worth a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Foreskin

Here's the church I was baptized in and where my mom and step-father got married:

http://stalhsar.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/church_017.114100533_std.jpg

While we're posting churches, this is where I went for 18 years:

http://s0.geograph.org.uk/geophotos/01/58/96/1589609_b3f8c4cd.jpg

As soon as I moved away from home I stopped attending completely, even though it hadn't bothered me up to then.

I guess I'm technically a lapsed Catholic, but I don't feel any real relationship to Catholicism even in a cultural/familial sense. My parents both came from big Catholic families and were educated in Catholic schools from grammar school through college. But we didn't start going to church until I was in second grade, and my parents pretty much never talked about religion at home, not even passing references to God or prayers before dinner. So Mass was always just a weekly ritual where I got to sing and recite stuff. Occasionally the homily would make me reflect vaguely about morals and how to be good, but I never had any sense of guilt or anything.

When I was 14 and started to question the tenets of the church, my parents said, "OK, we don't have to go anymore." Which is when I realized that we'd only been going so that my parents could provide me and my brother with some semblance of religious/moral education. We shopped around a bit after that and ended up at a Unitarian church for a couple of years, but that fell by the wayside once the minister my parents liked moved away.

Despite the fact that neither of them really believes in God in the traditional sense anymore (I guess I wonder how much they did even when I was a kid), I'd say that my parents probably still have a strong cultural attachment to Catholicism. Not only was their upbringing was considerably more religious than mine, but they both continue to work in Catholic institutions (a hospital and a university) and have close family members who are still devout.

As for me, it's mostly just childhood nostalgia.

Yeah, I think I feel pretty similarly tbh.

x-post PP your experience is really interesting. Also, I'm going to be thinking about how much of an influence being raised Catholic has had on me as an adult for the rest of the night. I mean, I would have said virtually none but now you've got me ~thinking~. Thanks thread.

My mom went to a Catholic school here in which she was taught the creation story as late as 1967; she had no idea what evolution was until college. Meanwhile my father's parents didn't give a damn about their Catholicism: when they fled Cuba in the early sixties they left all records of his baptism and First Communion, which became a problem when he married my mother.

I'm responsible for instilling the first spasm of religious faith in my father. I've alluded here to surviving an intense religious phase during junior high: Mass every day, strict observance of the sacraments, rocks in my sneakers as penance, that sort of thing. Since I was too young to walk to church by myself, Dad would accompany me on Sundays, and I watched him evolve from thinking "What do you see in this?" to "I get this." The irony of course is that when I abandoned my religious convictions in my junior year he stayed with his.

Now he's an atheist with a suspicion that an afterlife exists. My mom, a pro-choice conservative, still hangs on to her faith. I rather shocked her a few weeks ago when after a few glasses of wine I admitted to not "believing in something higher."

here's my church & grade school, st vivian in cincinnati oh. nobody used that gate - for show I guess - but damn it looks official

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_utjwEXmlgko/SeRuzQotBrI/AAAAAAAAAw8/mMVBUNMWLDo/s400/20090429StVivian003.jpg

It looks like a still from a Riefenstahl film!

considering my neighborhood was probably 75% german-american that's more apt than you can imagine

lol alfred, i dont recall evolurion being offered as an alternative to creationism until first year science in secondary school in 1993!

I dont think we were ever thought creationism as fact or w/e, but all throughout primary school we learned the religious fable side in catechism and the, y'know, not-crazy version simply didnt get a mention in any science class that i can recall

jesus, i dont think i've ever even considered how fuckin weird that is until just now. Wtf primary education

sup

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2346/2081577522_0053f67387.jpg

i remember my friend luke being all "btw the big bang guys" and a load of us turning on him and being like "don't you believe in GOD! omg!" even tho i was p sure i didn't believe in god i was on the persecution front. i think i was seven.

lol some quality nostalgia itt; <3 yall for quoting some hymns.

i totally agree w/the thing about how you are always catholic even when yr not; i used to be cool w/it but am now trying really really hard to not just accept my association with catholicism as some "oh, childhood" thing.

My parents are good Catholics in the sense that they still go to Mass every Sunday - I don't think it's easy to dissociate religion from your identity if you grew up in Ireland in the 50s - but I think they're actually happier that I'm not religious at all than if I were religious and in your face about it. They're certainly not in the judgemental Catholic camp.

plax - I tried that on my Dad and he came back with the old "but who caused the big bang?" response and I went away defeated.

"i remember my friend luke being all "btw the big bang guys" and a load of us turning on him and being like "don't you believe in GOD! omg!" even tho i was p sure i didn't believe in god i was on the persecution front. i think i was seven."

I went to Catholic secondary school in the north of England and it was really weird with this kind of stuff. Like, similar things would happen, but you would also be ostracised for being overtly religious - going on the RE dept. trip to Lourdes etc. It was pretty much taboo to talk about god at all, existence or non-existence. The only people who did were actually evangelicals. I guess this is due to it being a school full of 'ethnic catholics' in a secular society.

well, not ethnic catholics I suppose, there were lots of irish but not a majority.

btw catholocism is still awesome if you extract all the stuff that persecutes women/gays/non-white people/poor people and the part where you have to believe in god

maybe some other stuff

the wine tastes funny

otm

sorta like hip hop

I always thought I wld be a Catholic in a heartbeat if you extract all the stuff that persecutes women/gays/non-white people/poor people and the part where you have to believe in god.

lol

Moving to Southern Baptist hell as a Catholic pretty much warped my brain forever

i mean, robes

ROBES!

i like a lot of things about catholocism. the community, and how devotion is something that is expressed together and joy is shared (choral music, congregations), I like the pomp and ceremony, the way incense smells, stained glass windows. I like the connection w/ larger narratives, the history that stretches back. I like transubstantiation, the word was made flesh, the dialectical coherence. The eucharist is a way of understanding the possibility of meaning, the synthesis of object and meaning, the resonance and beauty of everything around us. The emphases is on the margins edges and borders between zones, between what is concrete and material and what is immaterial and eternal. The bread becomes the flesh, the word becomes flesh. That border, the liminal point is the body, the material thing that contains the soul. The truest physical thing, fragile and impermanent. The holy body desecrated, christ on the cross, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

did u just write that?

it's beautiful

man if those aspects of it had been emphasized i may have actually looked forward to going to CCD every week

thanks e ;)

It is! I Googled it and everything just to see whether it was a quote from somewhere.

was not expecting ILX to make me rethink the role of catholicism when i woke up this morning, gotta say

catholicism in my life*

seriously

Though I kind of doubt the legitimacy of this, to this day my mother insists that while I spent my first three months of life in an ICU incubator there were people in the Vatican praying for me by name. That our diocese had a guy who knew a guy and what have you. She still attributes my survival to this, and I was baptized at Nuestra Senora de los Dolores--Our Lady of Sorrows--in November of 1986.

I went to OLS for the first two years of school, then was moved to public school for second grade. When I was eight my parents got divorced, and within the year my Dad started attending a Pentecostal church where they danced in the aisles and guest pastors from Spain brought in snakes. The band ruled, and snakes were cool, so I liked it better than Catholicism. I got a little older and went to Jesus Camp-style militant summer programs where I decided I had to be a warrior for Christ in America and was going to preach the Word in China.

My mom moved us far enough away from my Dad & that Church that I got distance from that kind of fundamentalism, and she insisted I start going to the local diocese again. I went, but I didn't buy in--at the "Ask a Priest" nights in youth group I would ask petulant gotcha questions like "at what point in the Eucharist does the bread & wine actually transubstantiate into the body & blood of Christ?"

Inevitably my 17 year old mind was impressed by the subtlety and depth of the answers I got, and through nights like that and long conversations afterward with the clergy I found out that Catholic doctrine was a lot more interesting than I'd understood at the time.

I've since spent a great deal of time trying to figure out exactly which of my neuroses are Catholic and which are Pentecostal--how much of my guilt complex comes from believing in Original Sin vs. how much comes from tearful altar calls where I relearn how fallen and sinful I am on a regular basis.

btw catholocism is still awesome if you extract all the stuff that persecutes women/gays/non-white people/poor people and the part where you have to believe in god

Agreed on women and gays (though in fact, the church is unofficially quite tolerant of gays in its own ranks, and never as vocal in persecution as fundies), but, while the church has been guilty of persecuting the poor, when afforded political power, as in Ireland, it can also be, and often is, a very effective advocate for the poor and powerless: when catholicism gets radical, its as serious and organised about it as old fashioned communism. And the 'catholicism' of catholicism means it's inherently internationalist and cosmopolitan, and less tolerant of, and complicit with, racism than many protestant denominations.

It's probably appropriate that as I wrote that I was listening to Patterson Hood's "Murdering Oscar," in which he repeatedly mutters "I don't need forgiveness for my sins/I don't need redemption for my sins."

I was into Pedro the Lion, "controversial" Christian indie rock band, in my fundie days, and David Bazan's very public loss of faith and new record where he writes about that process with his usual sensitivity continues to be a source of fascination for me. There are some people who leave the faith behind and are happy about it and the abandonment of those beliefs never causes them any trouble. I'm not one of them. xp to myself, sorry for making thread 'hoos's thoughts on faith 4 u'