April 15, 2008
In honor of the Pope’s US visit, a flashback …
… to katecohen.com April 2002: “The Catholic Church taught me how to deal with sin. Every day — every school day, weekend day, holiday and summer day — from September 3, 1965 to August 13, 1973, I prayed the Act of Contrition and The Confietor. The church taught me that these prayers were necessary because my very nature was sinful. Bobby socked, uniformed, bespectacled, I knew I was a monster of depravity. …” Read more from the original katecohen blog.
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April 15th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
One day I sat with my 5-year-old nephew, Jesse, in a speach therapy waiting room leafing through a Time magazine. Jesse, still in his school uniform from a Catholic kindergarden, suddenly sat up and said excitedly, “Wait, wait, go back, there’s that guy! That guy!” I hurredly turned the pages back until he yelled, “Stop! there he is! That guy that goes to my church!” It was a photo of the pope (the last one) in his miter. I said, “Does the pope go to your church?” Jesse said, “That’s his name! The pope!” So I don’t know why everyone’s so excited, evidently the guy’s here every week. P.S. Jesse lasted a year and a quarter in catholic school, transferring several months into first grade to a place where they knew how to treat kids.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Janice - Hah!
April 15th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Kaye, what an awesome post — the original katecohen one, I mean. I was moved by your righteousness and power, no kidding. I can’t remember reading anything better about the Catholic scandal. Thanks for linking to it.
As for your true nature: You’ve lost the bobby socks and the uniform, but otherwise …
April 16th, 2008 at 10:56 am
wow. horrifying. I had agreed to let my children be brought up Catholic, without really knowing what that meant. Then when Steve came home after a brain washing session, otherwise known a catechism I believe, and informed me that they had informed him that he was sinful at the ripe old age of 4 or 5, I put my foot down and took them all out, forever. Thank goodness.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Freda: Yup. I am conflicted about my catholic education, though. Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about it as part of an essay I am writing on the actual sources of my own morality — on why I believe, and disbelieve, what I do.
It is difficult, because while I can and have made many deserved indictments against The Church and feel it is not a force for good in the world, it was still instrumental in shaping my ideas about life. And in the early sixties when I was learning what I felt about being a human being — during the golden days of Vatican II — there was a real feeling that all of mankind and The Church too might be moving in the right direction. And for my childhood years, I was an actively devout — mass three times a week — Catholic. And they were indoctrinating me with all kinds of bad — and a few good — things.
But The Church has changed. And I have changed and the world has sadly stayed too much the same. This Pope in particular wants to roll back the Vatican II reforms that made me love The Church in the sixties.
So of course it is hard to reconcile, almost nothing is all good or bad, not even the church. And for all the inky darkness it gave me, it also gave me a mote of light. A fact I am still trying to process as I write into the history of myself.
Mark: You make my day.