The Catholicism Thread

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'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades

xp

plax that thing u wrote was really nice

also w/r/t this

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.

my mom STILL, for real, calls her v devout catholic friend (who is a fukkin saint imo, srsly the kindest person there is) whenever she's worried about something my sister or i have to face/do. like oh your finals are coming up, well don't worry i called M____ and she's gonna bang out a few rosaries and even tho i don't really believe in that stuff anymore if anyone's got a mainline to the baby jesus it's M____ and may as well right it can't hurt

hile 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.

Yep. For all the truth about Pope Pius XII being Hitler's Pope, it's a fact that the Polish, French, and German Catholic Church protected thousands of Jews and other protected minorities at the height of Nazism.

yeah, that's kinda the root of my OK-ness with catholicism even as someone that has identified as 'atheist' since like 4th grade.

idk TBF its like a big part of what jesus said, protect the poor the weak the vulnerable in society. the fact remains that the catholic church has also helped create and maintain those positions as positions of vulnerability and idk how much of a pat in the back you get for sometimes helping the poor and weak while also shafting them quite a lot (via colonialism)

Catholicism brings out an intense mixture of contempt and defensiveness in me. As a kid I really never saw much beauty, fellowship, or hope in Catholicism. The impression I got was of decay: old churches, old statues, old priests, old ladies with strong perfume that made my eyes and nose itch. My parents were ardent churchgoers but they (like a lot of Catholics) never really knew their faith very well, other than the rituals and prayers they had been observing since they were children.

None of it felt particularly real or comforting to me. After moving to South Carolina, the bafflement and confusion in my mind toward Catholicism transformed into embarrassment and anger. At school my Baptist classmates questioned me (as the lone Catholic in class) many times about my religion and would then tell me to my face I was a heathen who "worshipped Mary".

It also didn't help when our parish priest was accused of molesting someone and was quickly shuffled to another parish.

I realize a lot of this reflects my own myopia and selfishness.

this thomas nast cartoon always kinda freaked me out

http://www.phlmetropolis.com/Nast%20Anti-Catholic%20Papist%20Drawing.jpg