The Catholicism Thread

its like if hercules was like "so yeah his dad was zeus and he was v strong and he cut medusas head off and then when he was old he found joy in the love of our only saviour jesus christ"

The story is told that when Saint Patrick was trying to convert king Lóegaire to Christianity, the ghost of Cú Chulainn appeared in his chariot, warning him of the torments of hell.

i sometimes think that one of the weirdest shifts b/w fenian mythology and christianity is the diff b/w the salmon of knowledge and fionn mccumhaill and his rise to head of the fianna and the tree of knowledge and adam and eve and the fall of man.

anyway its funny bc a lot of what people are talking about on this thread relates their catholic backgrounds to a kind of sense of difference, like community as set against mainstream values but like obviously i can't really vibe w/ that. I mean its not like that *is* the catholic experience (tho obviously it has been the catholic experience for a lot of people) and my own experience is really of like reflecting on it more over the last few years and how its shaped how i think about things in a more profound way than i would have expected. also when i lose things st anthony totally gets them back for me.

St. A was of no help w/ my lost argyle sweater, the bastard

you have to promise him
money

for the poor box

Who's the saint you're supposed to pray to when you have exams? I know there's one, or at least that's what my Mum always said...

Who is the one who you're supposed to buy a statue of and bury in the yard if you're trying to sell a house? My parents did that and I laughed at them and then felt bad about doing so but it's four years later though and the house is still not sold so WAY TO PULL THROUGH SAINT WHATEVER YOUR NAME IS.

lol...and Jude is lost causes, right?

tbf if somebody buried me in their back yard I would be pissed

Looks like exams is this guy:

Saint Joseph of Cupertino (Italian: San Giuseppe da Copertino) (June 17, 1603 – September 18, 1663) is an Italian saint. He was said to have been remarkably unclever, but prone to miraculous levitation and intense ecstatic visions that left him gaping.[1] In turn, he is recognized as the patron saint of air travelers, aviators, astronauts, people with a mental handicap, test takers, and weak students. He was canonized in the year 1767.

Doesn't ring a bell though.

I did this and it worked.

I'm not going to claim St. Joseph sold my house for me. It was a goofy last-minute act of desperation, but it happened.

you have to leave a headless statue of the child of prague outside the house the day before a wedding to get good weather

To obviously it wont work if you behead the statue on purpose, it needs to be an accident.

btw st patrick says hi i was up at his place earlier today

Last year my mom and my sister buried St. Joseph in our yard, a week later our house sold, and then they dug him back out. Apparently he gets mad and curses you if you leave him buried.

St. Joseph: patron saint of pottymouths?

you have to leave a headless statue of the child of prague outside the house the day before a wedding to get good weather

To obviously it wont work if you behead the statue on purpose, it needs to be an accident.

― the '' key on my keybord is not working (darraghmac), Thursday, March 17, 2011 7:46 PM (Yesterday)

lol i have never seen a non beheaded child of prague, my granny always had hers w/ head balancing in the window. i was like, you could glue it and maybe you would chill out a little.

I have heard of using the mystic power of the Child of Prage to effect good wedding weather, but never this beheaded statue thing.

Saint Josepeh of Cuptertino! I used to say prayers to him. and look how smart I am now!

if you check underneath any child of prague there's a tiny sticker says 'non-decapitation may affect climactic performance'

Also have a beheaded Holy Infant of Prague on my windowsill. I sometimes balance the head back on his neck. Doesn't last. God is telling us not be proud of our heads, because the holy infant is happy without his.

i think the message is 'less of ye're neck'

the older i get the more actively i dislike religion and catholicism. i don't know where this comes from, but one trip to mass a year at christmas is enough to annoy me. i hate the subservience of religion and the fact that it attempts to have power over people. i can't stand the sense of collective guilt or shame that permeates catholic mass, i can't think of anything worse than a system which makes people's value of themselves descrease. people's sense of self worth is low enough without religion. just glad nobody young goes anymore.

i also dislike the priests just as speakers and people, 99 per cent of the time.

igwym but a have a major aversion to giving babies the bathwater treatment

how do you mean?

just like i said, i mean yeah i hate our local priest and the catholic church has been a historically shitty thing but there's still a lot of things i like

yeah i guess it has value for some people, my dislike is definitely my own.

Sometimes I think the Irish managed to apply our singular talent for taking the good out of everything* to Catholicism, leaving only naked power and domination....

*See also Pop and politics.

Growing up, we had a very charismatic, kind Irish priest who played the fiddle and sang at mass, and got riproaring drunk with his friends at the yearly International Day. We actually liked to go to the lame youth group stuff because he would be there. He left on a mission to the Dominican Republic and after that the priests were really dry and boring. I found out when Ted Kennedy died that he was a spiritual advisor to the Kennedy family and hung out with them at Hyannis Port.

Now, on the rare times when my mom convinces me to go to church with her, I go with the expectation that it will be somehow fulfilling or enlightening, but it's always just soul crushing and depressing. I guess I need a magnetic figurehead in my organized religion.

a religion that holds dear statues of decapitated babies??? what sick & twisted shit is this?

I think it's that part of catholicism that sucked up all kinds of regional rituals and seems realy folk magic/idol worshippy.

To elaborate on that, I came from a pretty lapsed protestant/secular family and finding out about the way saints are canonized, the entire idea of relics, and the praying to individual saints for guidance seemed really out there.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you invoke a saint, you're really trying to get him to petition God on your behalf, right?

Yeah, they're intercessors or mediators.

I'm still in Protestant America.

For so being in the Bible Belt, I just had an amusing experience in my publishing office. The editor of our bridal magazine is reviewing photographs submitted for our "Photographers Favorites" feature and ran across a Catholic wedding. It's a portrait-sized image of the bride and groom standing in front of the altar with a 17-foot crucifix overlooking them all. The editor was all, "having a cross up there would be one thing, but I can't put this in the magazine with Him up there, distracting everybody."

lol

My best friend's parents are insanely Catholic. There are so many religious things in there house it's incredible but the thing that never ceases to amaze me is the stuff they have in their bathrooms. The guest bathroom has a little chest on top of which sits a crucifix and a booklet about the Lamb of God. I think there is at least one other crucifix in that bathroom. It's pretty creepy tbh.

I did always hope the first person to come up and read from the Gospel would suddenly turn around and go "A AAAAGGGHH UUH!"

Can't find my favorite estela quote about her worry over screaming obscenities in church.

Wait estela has this fear too? When I was kid and did go to church and esp in HS when I no longer believed but was made to sit through mass at school, I had this irrational fear that I would just lose control and start screaming obscenities or just like strip naked and run around the church.

Here, too. Less a fear and more a curiosity. Okay kind of a fear. But there was a secret thrill in thinking about it.

For a while there, my parents made me take notes on the sermons, btw, and might quiz me in the car homeward about what I remembered.

Not that I'm Catholic or anything. But these talks bring me back!

lol I mentioned this on the Quieting the Imps in Your Brainz thread.

Here we go:

i used to sit in church when i was little and think about how easy it would be to stand up and shout obscenities loud enough for the whole church to hear and then i would get scared i was going to do it if i didn't stop thinking about it so i would stare at the jesus on the cross until the thought left me. later i dated sad-looking boys with prominent ribcages and said dreadful things to them.
― estela, Tuesday, March 6, 2007 9:19 AM Bookmark

I am somewhat relieved to know that I was not the only one who did this. I remember feeling similarly when Laurel talked about it on the Imps thread.

i was always more worried about on of the immediate family doing something mortifying instead. My little brother knocked himself out sneezing into a pew at my confirmation, i hated him for hours. It was meant to be my day, goddammit.

the older i get the more actively i dislike religion and catholicism. i don't know where this comes from, but one trip to mass a year at christmas is enough to annoy me. i hate the subservience of religion and the fact that it attempts to have power over people. i can't stand the sense of collective guilt or shame that permeates catholic mass, i can't think of anything worse than a system which makes people's value of themselves descrease. people's sense of self worth is low enough without religion. just glad nobody young goes anymore.

yeah, i went to mass with family this past christmas for the first time in years and i was struck by how genuinely oppressive it felt.

when i look back on how the church affected me it's weird, b/c my parents were pretty "meh" about the whole enterprise, and i didn't have to attend catholic schools or anything, but somehow i managed to inculcate myself on my own with a lot of the garbage that the church promulgates. i think it's really sad and messed up how people are taught to fear something which should be a source of comfort and nourishment... and leading people to mistrust themselves and their natural impulses is largely spiritually poisonous imo. i respect people's trying to connect with god or expressing devotion to the saints or whatever, but in general it seems to me that catholicism presents a path of learning to be forever wary of one's self and throwing as many obstacles between one's self and god as possible

dell, I would make that accusation of all of Christianity, at the very least.