Ask A Catholic

Martin Luther: [looks directly at the camera, Office-style] https://t.co/s9EFy1IZPe

— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) March 22, 2020

capitalism: this fuckin thing has exposed most of our activities as painfully blatant scams

catholicism: hold my bier

lol x 2

What a world

https://www.aod.org/sacramentsupdate

peter at the pearly gates: i'm sorry, we can't let you in. looks like there was some sort of administrative error down there on earth. it's gonna take a while to clean up. don't worry, there's a waiting room *nods toward purgatory*

“Look it’s not a big deal, minor administrative snafu, well get it figured out, but in the meantime don’t die because of you do youre going to hell”

so...if the priest wasn't technically baptized all that time, does that mean that the people he baptized are also at risk of eternal hell due to administrative error?

so...if the priest wasn't technically baptized all that time, does that mean that the people he baptized are also at risk of eternal hell due to administrative error?

The church (shrugs): Hey, God makes the rules, we don't.

administrative assistant to god: god dammit, we've got another memo from earth. it's another policy clarification request.
god: let me guess, fucking b-
admin assistant to god: baptism, yep, it's baptism again.
god: it's whatever they want. it's whatever they want. we've told them this. i don't care. this is the least important planet on my plate. this planet shouldn't even BE on my plate

okay I have a dumb question:

When you put ash on your forehead for Ash Wednesday... where does the ash come from? Is it special, sanctified ash, or just some regular old ash from the bottom of the BBQ?

thanks in advance from an ignorant protestant

Who even knows where the hosts come from? probably some warehouse in Skipton!

They are supposedly from the previous Palm Sunday’s palm leaves? I never knew this though tbh I never paid attention in either Mass or religion class.

so does a priest have to daub the ash on your forehead? Or is it DIY

At primary school I was told it was previous years Palm Sunday's Palms.

Priest
xp to me

At school the teachers used to give us a row if anybody wiped them off our foreheads.

Who even knows where the hosts come from? probably some warehouse in Skipton!

My mum as a lifetime on/off lapsed catholic buys wafers as a substitute because she fell in love with communion hosts at an early age ... I'm not making this up! Had no idea they were widely available online. At least now I have a good birthday pressie option for her.

in my presbyterian youth, we used sourdough bread (very NorCal) and welch's grape juice.. everybody got their own shot glass, we didn't share a cup

also there was no transfiguration or whatever you call it, the bread was just bread and not the actual flesh of christ

i don't understand the catholic sense of forgiveness. some of the most of unforgiving ppl i know are catholics. is this just my limited experience or is the concept somehow perverted as a type of punishment?

I forgive you.

catholics do love history -- the old churches, holy relics, that thing you did

Bless, alfred

Lol sufjan

guilt and forgiveness are the pendulum that swings butts into seats on Sunday. there's a sacrament requiring the CEO's signature on forgiveness with middle management present.

The simple answer: it's easier to condemn than to accept. The latter puts you in a position of weakness.

Seems like a lot weight to carry but you know

Jesus carried his own cross, man -- it's the least we can do.

a new priest has Young Pope'd my home town's church. women wear veils. men wear suits. One (drunk) lady started speaking in tongues in a webcast mass. Turned it into his fascist terrarium. most people left, but a new crowd showed up. there's a spectrum of "catholics", so it can be important to know which we're talking about.

Most Catholics in my acquaintance only speak in tongues when I offer them Negronis.

mel gibsons and negroni fiends

i don't understand the catholic sense of forgiveness. some of the most of unforgiving ppl i know are catholics. is this just my limited experience or is the concept somehow perverted as a type of punishment?

i don't understand the catholic sense of forgiveness. some of the most of unforgiving ppl i know are catholics. is this just my limited experience or is the concept somehow perverted as a type of punishment?

― Comfortably numbnuts (Heez)

there are lots of different sorts of catholics but those sort of catholics you're talking about...

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

anyway, those kind of catholics, and you have a lot of the same in america too but they're not oxbridge educated, they'll forgive you, but only for the stuff _they_ did.

then you also have the catholics who are basically pipelining evangelicals, the evangelicals decided they loved catholics when roe v. wade came down and ever since then they've been, like. evangelicalizing a lot of catholics, to where american catholicism is in a lot of ways another evangelical church, but with the robust tradition of highly organized institutional child abuse american roman catholicism is renowned for. i mean when evangelicals do child abuse, it's usually more grass-roots, more of a DIY thing. catholics... well, they don't have it set up as well structurally _now_, because they lost a lot of their funds once they were held legally responsible for institutionally supporting CSA. but for a while there, i mean, it was them and the mormons and _no_ competition from anybody else. i don't really know shit about the mormons, we grew up on the east coast, not really a lot of mormons out there. i just know that they're very organized and very patriarchal.

the ones you really wanna watch out for is the jesuits. they'll take the most fucked up wrong shit imaginable and make it sound reasonable. whenever i say fucked up shit and somehow manage to make it sound reasonable, that's part of my heritage, my grandfather got his law degree from a jesuit law school. i've been working really hard for a long time to try and unlearn that behavior.

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.)