Ask A Catholic

repurposing of the crucifix is actually like in my top five favorite things about christianity

xpost -- Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

yeah she was all "i washed them off". lady it ain't your right to do that.

I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such,

Maybe I was privileged in this regard, but as a Catholic school attendee for 12 years I never got the guilt. Maybe it was a post Vatican II phenomenon? My mom, however, got nothing but guilt.

Why do/did Christians hate Jews for killing Christ when He* had to die for our sins so that we can go to Heaven?

(*still a believer, so all pronouns capitalized...)

Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

Because Fr. Frank forces us to say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys for masturbating in the bathroom.

I know that's not meant as a non-sequitur, and yet.

the whole ecce homo bit and he died for your sins is the main thing i took from going to church between the age of 3 or 4 and 15 or 16. crucifix probably the least inexplicable thing about the whole shennanigans.

catholics no longer believe that jews killed christ. apart from weird ones like mel gibo who go against the contemporary teaching of the church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#Suspected_to_have_had_male_lovers_during_pontificate

Lenny Bruce said Catholics would wear electric chairs around their necks if Jesus had been a 20th-century martyr.

xxxxp (*as if the switch from third- to first-person ("us") didn't already tip you off...)

Doesn't Mel Gibson follow an anti-pope?

i'm lapsed, but still feel like a catholic. I never got the political drubbing about abortion etc at my catholic school (which wasn't associated with a diocese and had very few people from the church involved in it). as a result I don't have that kind of grudge against the church. but knowing that is there makes me resist going back to it (even though I live in a really liberal area where I'm sure 75% of the catholics at the churches near me probably are not in line with traditional church thinking on this topic).

if i was going to let something temporal about the church bother me it would more be the endemic child fucking and covering-up there of than the backwards views on abortion that would piss me off.

but it's just the whole kit and kaboodle that i'm put off by so i needn't worry.

Christianity in general makes me so angry, Catholicism only even more so, I try not to be baited too often. But I also have a weird history of being a very serious-minded kid in a super Evangelical community with no outside influences to level me out, so it's not really the usual thing.

as a catholic school person for 12 i never got the guilt. again, prolly cuz i was thrown out of CCD in 8th grade for farting.

well here's what has always confused me about the crucifixion narrative. on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc. so re the second interpretation it makes sense that you'd wear a crucifix (maybe. it was still a very common event to be crucified so it doesn't seem like a great grower as a symbol of a new religion -- tho i imagine without any historical background in this area that probably the icon emerged long enough after the Roman empire that this didn't appear to be so bizarre). has the first account (despite being canonized primarily in Mark) mostly been ignored in the main Catholic narrative or what?

Also I tried to find things to carry with me, maybe just from the "spiritual practice" side of what I was taught, but I feel more and more certain as time passes that there's absolutely nothing salvageable there.

"forgiveness" a pretty good one i thought but w/ever

(i have the kinda-luxury of having been brought up Nothing so everything looks way better to me than it does to people who were brought up Something)

Mordy, one of the motives behind adopting the crucifix WAS its commonness and lowliness. It was the death of thieves and murders and rapists, the lowest thing that Our Lord could be subjected to. This is common across all Christianity, I think -- not specific to Catholics, although the rest of us don't portray the human form on the cross in our iconography.

xxxp I think it's the being rose again after three days that turns the crucifixion into a victory:

on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc

these all go together and are not contradictory:

he forgives the people killing him -his followers, the crowd who choose barabas etc.- because he is the ever forgiving christ-god who dies for us in order to wash away our original sin even though we've gone against him and aren't worthy of such a sacrific.

he is in crisis because, although divine, he is human and wrestles with his predicament and torture until reaching acceptance and understanding of it.

xxp yeah iirc (and maybe i do not rc) the crucifix was in use as a symbol from the religion's earliest beginnings as a roman cult. it is a really neat defiant thing, i think! and what laurel says about connecting the holiness of the godhead to the lowliness of the lowest is also def true.

yeah and also don't underestimate the attraction of sheer maudlin morbidity

oh man I got onto other stuff and now there's a lot of questions

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

well, it's not just Catholics - that's all Christians. Crosses everywhere. It's a paradox, kind of your classic Jesus paradox: Jesus came to save you. You love him for that, right? Assuming you accept that you were damned & were likely going to Hell, this Dude came to take your place, because He loved you exactly as you were, warts and all. You on your worst day, He still loves that person enough to die in his place. Presumably you love Him back for that, but He has to die to accomplish the work of grace. So the cross on which He dies in transformed into an instrument of triumph; the instrument of His demise becomes the sign by which those redeemed by Him recognize one another and gain comfort and fellowship.

this is not a specifically Catholic teaching but it's the cross as I understand it.

NB I do not still actually believe much of this but I'm willing to offer defences as long as people don't talk like "oh ua believes all this stuff," I don't, I'm just intimate with it

The English theologian John Bale attributed to Pope Sixtus "the authorisation to practice sodomy during periods of warm weather."

i'm hazy on this but i think the cross took a while to really take off as The Symbol of the church. the fish was the 'sign' among believers for a good long time

xp Didn't you know? Anal keeps you cool.

I actually see more people with fish pendants and fish symbols on cars than crosses and crucifixes.

evangelicals love all the 'early church' stuff

btw sodomy /= anal

i mean, i'd rather sit on a pillar in the syrian desert than live in a dallas exurb myself

xp

I was raised Anglican, mostly High Church style, was even an acolyte, let active belief fall away from me gradually and have been a fairly content agnostic since I was twenty or so. I've always wondered if my joke that being raised Anglican means you get all of the ceremonies of Catholicism but none of the Catholic guilt is true and from the sound of it it is (thus your opening words), I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such, and might explain why I found it so easy to let go. Is it something that is ingrained from the start in any/all Catholic religious instruction?

Catholic guilt is tradition. It does make intuitive sense to my indwelling Catholic: the Holy Family suffered as they did for me, but how grateful am I really, in my daily life? Not very. I'm more interested in myself. That's my nature, and I don't do much to overcome it or transcend it. But the saints show me that I could, if I really cared. Hence, guilt!

Lots of straights don't understand that though. Fortunately in Catholic school I learned what constituted sodomy since it was all non-procreative sex anyway.

xxxp can include anal sex

I actually see more people with fish pendants and fish symbols on cars than crosses and crucifixes.

that may be, but in hoc signi vincis iirc

Alfred, if you were Philip K. Dick & saw those fish symbols, you would be transported back to the first century, and a pink light would tell you about your son's birth defects

goole right, wiki sez, but the cross was still around early:

During the first two centuries of Christianity, the cross may have been rare in Christian iconography, as it depicts a purposely painful and gruesome method of public execution. The Ichthys, or fish symbol, was used by early Christians. The Chi-Rho monogram, which was adopted by Constantine I in the 4th century as his banner (see labarum), was another Early Christian symbol of wide use.

However, the cross symbol was already associated with Christians in the 2nd century, as is indicated in the anti-Christian arguments cited in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, chapters IX and XXIX, written at the end of that century or the beginning of the next,[2] and by the fact that by the early 3rd century the cross had become so closely associated with Christ that Clement of Alexandria, who died between 211 and 216, could without fear of ambiguity use the phrase τὸ κυριακὸν σημεῖον (the Lord's sign) to mean the cross

If my sister's experiences in the mid nineties are any indication, Catholic schools are feebler institutions than they were in the fifties and sixties.

no more nuns to run them

oh that's for sure. it's the one thing that i kind of mourn about the slow death of the catholic hierarchy.

Why do/did Christians hate Jews for killing Christ when He* had to die for our sins so that we can go to Heaven?

The Sanhedrin, "an assembly of twenty-three judges appointed in every city in the Biblical Land of Israel" as Wikipedia handily puts it, handed Christ over to Pilate to be crucified. The race stuff in all this is way too dense for me to really parse without making an utter ass of myself, but, speaking from a how-it-seems-to-me position rather than a doctrinal position here, it seems like Christians (including Catholics over the ages) think of Christ as a Jew-who-passes. He's not really a Jew, because the Jews persecuted Him. Yes I know this is profoundly fucked up, but I do think that's how anti-semitic Xians think of the matter.

"lay teachers"

Who'd'a thunk it? That Catholicism would be the Hot Topic of the Day on ILE? Next thing you know it will be declared DaVinci Code Day on I Love Books.

Can you explain the Immaculate Conception a bit more? Like, how is that possible? How is it connected to St Anne being a saint?

It's possible because of grace. Pius IX institutes the doctrine in 1854: "In the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin." From newadvent.org, further explanation:

The term conception does not mean the active or generative conception by her parents. Her body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation. The question does not concern the immaculateness of the generative activity of her parents. Neither does it concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body. Mary was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin at the first moment of her animation, and sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul.

Not only did the Sanhedrin hand him over, but Pilate also gave the crowd a chance to save one of the convicted, and they chose to have Barabbus, a "bandit", freed instead.

VERY INTERESTINGLY, wiki has just told me that "bandit" is one translation, but that "insurrectionary" or "revolutionary" is another one. So perhaps the interpretation is that the Jews who voted for Barabbus betrayed Christ by picking the WRONG revolutionary/the wrong version of their future??

Meanwhile, leave it to the Onion for timing (unless this is what prompted the threads):

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-to-ease-up-on-jesus-talk,19727/

xp it's cos of paddy's day tomorrow

the tenets of Christ are followed less than even the Tenet of Chris

Kate, I've just got back from the funeral of my uncle, my extended family of Liverpool Catholics were there as well as many from the Catholic school he was deputy headteacher of (in London) - he was a lifelong socialist and many of the others there are too. Think it doesn't need to be stressed that I don't agree that any of these people are "fuckin' bad news all round", and that includes my uncle's cousin, who is a bishop.

You know I have many problems with the church and hated my Catholic high school (which uses the same motto as the jesuits) and am absolutely an unbeliever now, but the actual people are generally fine.

no that's fair, "all around" is an overstatement. _intellectual converts to catholicism_. your tony blairs.

to be clear, i apologize unambiguously for that statement. i got _lots_ of issues with certain aspects of catholicism. but the actual catholics themselves, no, any problems i have are _very very limited_ and have more to do with the institutional culture fostered by certain people in positions of authority. like. they're not like _cops_ or anything.

I am totally going from a small. Sample size and should have worded it as a question. I am genuinely curious whether there’s something inherent in Catholicism that makes forgiveness, or the lack thereof, a powerful tool.

xp Well I am also very suspicious of Anglican converts to Catholicism, they take it all way too seriously, they don't get that having so many rules means that you can safely ignore all of them.

i mean look what you really wanna watch out for are _british catholics_. british catholics are just fuckin' bad news all around.

English Catholics I think you mean.

xp But I guess they usually convert because they object to female/gay vicars or something.

Some of the loudest leftists I know are Catholics, all of whom have liberation theology sects in their blood.

I am totally going from a small. Sample size and should have worded it as a question. I am genuinely curious whether there’s something inherent in Catholicism that makes forgiveness, or the lack thereof, a powerful tool.

― Comfortably numbnuts (Heez)

oh sure, it's the biblical passage that they say is the scriptural basis for the papacy, from Matthew 16:

17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

forgiveness, or the lack thereof, is an _integral_ part of catholic tradition, on an _ongoing basis_. out of the seven sacraments, the only ones that are _regular acts_ are communion and confession. it's part of why "catholic guilt" is such a thing, the expectation is that you are regularly going to confess your sins to a priest and do penance (i personally was never asked to do more than symbolic penance - a couple hail marys, a couple our fathers, not even close to a full rosary's worth, just a couple). it's kind of similar to the concept of "self-criticism" in marxist-leninism, except done in private rather than in public.

Some of the loudest leftists I know are Catholics, all of whom have liberation theology sects in their blood.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

the thing that gives me the most pause about this is that among white leftist catholics at least, the one they all seem to praise most is Dorothy Day. and in a lot of ways, in a lot of things, i think what she did was good. but it's the anti-abortion thing. to me, you know, i don't feel like that's someone i can be in _communion_, as they say, with. because what happens is time goes on and what gets lost is all the radical stuff she advocated for, and what _stays_ is the anti-abortion bit. an institution like the catholic church, particularly one founded by patriarchy, it wears down and erodes any opposition to it.

the same way, this is my understanding you have... francis of assisi. and this is a guy who was a radical opponent of the church, a radical reformer. martin luther wasn't the first. you had people, _often_ from the clergy, looking at what the church was doing and saying "hey, this, uh, this doesn't really seem to be in line with, like, what jesus actually taught, he wasn't all 'hey you want to live a good life start a rich, powerful, and oppressive institution in My name'"

and the church was like "ok two options. one, you quit talking about _political_ issues and stick to telling people to be good people, and you know, we'll encourage that. we're on the same page here, we want people to be good people too. but if you keep going around telling people about how what we're doing isn't in line with what jesus said, you know, we'll declare you heretic and kill you and all your followers. your choice, friendo." and he chose the first path, and that's why pope francis has the name he does, and catholics can all go like "lord make me an instrument of your peace" or whatever, and there are all these pictures of him being a friend to animals. and that's it, that's kinda all you get out of him, a name and some inoffensive pretty-sounding words.

i mean i guess being put to death as a heretic wouldn't exactly have done him any more good. like, what, he could be remembered the way the cathars are? yeah that doesn't seem like an improvement. idk. i guess i drank the kool-aid a little much as a kid when they kept telling me what saints the martyrs were.

i was at the funeral of an elderly rural catholic today, service was weird as they all seem to me now that im long enough outside of the cant and the concepts but the piece about the departed spelled out a life well lived and cherished and celebrated all the same regardless of noting his fondness for a pint

merchant seaman, mechanic, antiques dealer and father of ten. doubt he was a saint, dont doubt he was a catholic, doubt he was observant for what the purposes of this thread would seem to be

in other words typical enough of my experience of the irish roman catholic

little enough time was spent on the school-rules fanaticism which seems to dominate american commentator experience of catholicism. if i were to guess id say theres about ten of those people in the world and seven of them only started after reading dan brown.

is it possible ye read the rules and rarely observe the people at all, i ask

Eh there's a lot of American Catholics who identify culturally but don't practice any observance or church attendance except weddings and funerals, and they CERTAINLY don't have a personal religious practice or any interest in a moral code or spiritual pursuits. Unfortunately they still vote for Republicans and against abortion despite enjoying the benefits of birth control, family planning, mixed fibers, and doing whatever they want on the sabbath.

is it possible ye read the rules and rarely observe the people at all, i ask

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

the rules, and the powerful people who decide what the rules mean, they have more influence on my life than the people. it's just... it's the hardest thing for me, to talk about things on an _institutional_ level, and i do it poorly sometimes and it comes out as looking like i have something against the individual people. which i don't. i mean i don't have anything more against catholics than i do against, say, harry potter fans. the harry potter books, i haven't read them, but i'm sure they're fine books. they're important to a lot of people. it's just that, you know, supporting harry potter, it hurts people who don't deserve to be hurt, whether one _wants_ to hurt them or not. (and yes, i am drawing a direct equivalence between harry potter fandom and the roman catholic church. fuck it.)

feeling emotional and heartfelt at darragh’s post. last line a real killer.

hey my dad loathed religion all his life but still got a priest in at his deathbed. and i don’t think it was a pascal’s wager thing. not in the sense it’s commonly meant. and his mum was a lovely kind irish catholic married to a nasty disciplinarian by all accounts. both devout far as it goes. only one of them good.

community and communion probably meant something to them both but as darragh says, not sure the rules meant as much as all that.

❤️ fizzles

otm

hey my dad loathed religion all his life but still got a priest in at his deathbed. and i don’t think it was a pascal’s wager thing. not in the sense it’s commonly meant. and his mum was a lovely kind irish catholic married to a nasty disciplinarian by all accounts. both devout far as it goes. only one of them good.

community and communion probably meant something to them both but as darragh says, not sure the rules meant as much as all that.

― Fizzles

mmmm. i do feel differently about it.

my dad has a cross on his gravestone. i don't think it was catholic. he loathed religion all his life, and at the end, when he was alone, there was a lady who was there for him, to be his friend, and she converted him. that's what she _does_ with her life. and, i mean, i'm glad she was there for him. i'm glad she could get through to him when i couldn't. he buried himself in shame about abandoning us, about being a shitty dad, and poured it all out to her at the end. and it would have been nice. it would have been nice if he could have told me when he was alive. if i didn't have to get it secondhand. and for all that i'm grateful it seems... it feels _transactional_. to me, the cross, it corrupts, it debases, what i truly believe was this woman's genuine love, her genuine compassion.

that's the other thing about being a catholic, my grandfather's favorite movie was _a man for all seasons_, and it's a great film. it's one of those films where catholicism and leftism converge, i think, the film is a leftist film but it's a leftist take on catholic belief. and one of the things that i was taught about it, growing up - i didn't see it for a long time, but i was _taught_ about it - was that it wasn't enough to do the right thing, that there was a question of _why_, _why_ a person did something. that thomas more struggled with that. and no matter how good my dad's friend was, no matter how much it was _right_, the fact that on some level she was doing it to "win souls for christ"... i don't think that reflects badly on her. i think that reflects badly on _christ_. he has no _right_. no right to my dad's soul. that cross on my dad's grave marker is a lie. and a god, a church, a religion, that is willing to _accept_ that lie...

well, it's like Robert Wyatt sang on "Alliance" (_Old Rottenhat_, 1984):

It's hard to talk to enemies. We are enemies. What we had in common makes it even worse...

In truth, my values are as Catholic as anyone's. I believe in the power of forgiveness, truly believe in it. Not just for the sake others. For for my own sake, for my own _soul_. Forgiveness, for me, it's putting down a burden, letting go of that compulsion to distance, to wariness. The need for _vigilance_. I've had to be vigilant so often, about so many things. I have to be vigilant far too often now. I hate all of the things I have to see, I have to know.

Because I can't forgive. Not like, refuse, I believe, believe in my heart, that it's not possible. Not possible for me to forgive someone for something they don't believe was _wrong_. All I can do in that case is make excuses. All I can do is cape.

The thing about having 1.35billion adherents, is you're going to be able to find whatever you're looking for within that communion, good and bad.

I grew up in a fairly strict American Catholic setting. After my mom died, The Young Pope denied my dad's 2nd wife an annulment on her first marriage, so my dad stopped going to mass entirely.

On one hand, I respect it. On the other hand, hey what now?

That sucks. Most of the Catholics I know are either priests or seminarians or lay people with Bachelors in Theology. They are all, of the ones I know well, lovely, caring, sacrificial, forgiving people. I think seriosly studying the tenets of Christ and the Church sifts the grain from the chaff (for the most part)

Last I heard there were about 1 billion Catholics in the world. That number has certainly been inflated to include anyone raised Catholic or otherwise claimable by the church, but it suggests to me that anecdotal evidence about the nature of Catholic individuals is likely to run the full gamut from truly unrecognized saints to the worst people ion earth.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

A lot of this is my story too. I was an altar boy, I went to CYO, I went on Catholic youth retreats, I went to an all-boys' Catholic high school for two years. I never had any bad experiences through any of it; I guess I just wasn't any of my local priests' type, because at least two of them were defrocked or quit the church later. One moved to Las Vegas and got murdered one morning by a guy he'd molested years earlier. Anyway, I stopped going to church when I moved out of my mom's house at 18 — I'd long since drifted away from any kind of Christian belief and into reading about other stuff (Zen, Taoism, the usual shit). These days my "beliefs," such as they are, are a kind of personal amalgam of Zen, Taoism, Stoicism, and Norse/Asatru values — blood, honor, manliness, but without all the stuff about the gods.

My mom is still very much Catholic; she does the readings at her church just about every week, and does a lot of charity work — drives meals to the elderly, does people's taxes for free, maybe some other stuff too. She acknowledges all the shitty things the Church and her alma mater, Penn State, have done, but it neither invalidates her engineering degree nor impacts her faith.

similar for my dad, who was born and raised Catholic. He joined the Knights of Columbus after he retired and all the kids left the house. I don't ask too much about it but as far as I know that's mainly been a social thing for him.

I know he has some old-school thoughts about women that aren't as severe as other people, and he's been called out by my sister, so I've never felt like piling on to what's probably an in-grained lost cause. But he was never a Jesus-first parent - which I really appreciate looking back.

perhaps Heez hasn't finished Home Alone. Marley and his son forgive each other at the end.

well, my Methodist-turned-Catholic mom took me to see Home Alone when it was originally out in theaters, and I'll cherish that time and parenting decision forever.

Bob marleys in home alone?!? Ok I’ll finish it.

I grew up Lutheran in the south. It was extremely chill. Church camps all that stuff. Not much guilt or anything like that. My mother and father are still Christian but they do not go to the same church nor do they vote for the same party. My mom prefers the activist, community oriented side of the church while my dad prefers the traditional side. The south is mostly are up of baptist and evangelicals who believe in the gospel of prosperity and rarely do community outreach.

I now live near DC in a neighborhood filled with federalist society lawyers who rarely engage with their non-Catholic neighbors. I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who are some of the best ppl I know, but seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

Anyway Catholicism has come to represent this very corrupted version of religion that you either walk lockstep with or fight against. And yes, I understand my small neighborhood doesn’t represent the entirety of Catholicism, so I’m mainly just asking questions, be it from a very skewed place

The thing about having 1.35billion adherents, is you're going to be able to find whatever you're looking for within that communion, good and bad.

― H.P

sure. 1.35 billion adherents is a lot. i don't need to play diogenes looking for a Good Catholic. they're all over the place.

one pope, though. one college of cardinals. all men, all celibate, or pretending to be. one Young archbishop of Portland, denouncing "gender ideology", issuing edicts forbidding teachers in Catholic schools from referring to trans kids by their _names_, from gendering them correctly.

one man. how many children? how many fucking kids is this one man abusing, and nobody says anything, nobody _does_ anything, it's _fine_ because he does it in the name of _Christ_, he does it in the name of the Roman Catholic Church?

-

I can't... I can't talk about what it was like for me, growing up Catholic. How it affected me. I try, but I can't. It hurts too much. Sorry. Y'all... I think y'all talking, I really would _like_ for y'all to know. But I can't tell you. Maybe someday. The most I can do is jump off Heez here:

I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who ... seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

My Catholic roots are Midwestern. Brahmin-y, but Midwestern. My parents, my mom's parents... I don't think of them as "strictly religious" either. I went to Catholic school, Catholic college, church every Sunday, but I don't think of my upbringing as "strictly religious" in the "women with exposed ankles are immodest" sense. Have I been extremely damaged by the Church and my parents? Absolutely.

I can't say more than that right now. I wish I could. I don't believe in... I don't believe in the culture of _silence_ I was raised in. I really want to speak up. I just can't right now. I'm sorry.