So you’re saying that sex isn’t healthy or pleasant? Well, crap.
I can’t comment on the Off the Record blog, see. So I’ll comment here.
Just because you train children to do something doesn’t mean that they actually do it. “Abstinence” to most teens means sticking to oral and anal sex. And nobody uses protection for oral sex.
I’d like to live in that ideal world where people don’t have lots of unprotected random sex, but none of us does.
I sure as hell didn’t go to high school there.
Uh oh!
Oh noes! The atheists and antitheists have wandered to the Curt Jester entry on homophobia! Look how ~*~*edgy*~*~ and rebellious they are, spelling “God” in lower case! My poor brainwashed mind can’t handle their crushing wave of logic.
Cloudy
My mood has been murky today as I turn this article and its reaction in the Catholic blogosphere over in my mind. I am a political moderate but a registered Democrat as of this past spring, for the sake of voting in the 2008 presidential primary. Pro-life Democrats are rare now, and not particularly vocal.
I think sometimes that the faith isn’t particularly compatible with democracy, and the nature of our political system. I prefer when government stays out of my life, and I say that as a government employee.
The horse has, unfortunately, left the barn, and I don’t think that banning abortion wholesale would have much of an effect other than pushing women to illegal clinics. I oppose the expansion of available abortion and new government funding for it, but I think that the greater priority, given the current culture and political climate of America, is prayer and working to change the culture.
Yet some people tell me that so much as casting a vote for a Democrat is a grave sin.
I’m French, not a Hun.
Man, getting excommunicated has done wonders for my hit count.
What lurks down the street….
I contributed a picture of a church within walking distance of my house to the Terrible Tabernacle contest. I’m a bad person, but it’s an ugly tabernacle. Looks like a dollar-store Christmas decoration gone horribly wrong.
.
I thought that was pretty bad, but then I saw this picture of the altar. Which at first I thought was a timpani. The resemblance is hilarious.
I have to admit, when I saw pictures of this church on the Web site, I realized that it was not quite the parish for me. They have healthy attendance and a fine school…just not my “scene,” as the kids say.
In which satire gives me insight into my reversion
Spirit of Vatican II “Catholic” Faith Community makes me giggle hysterically. I admit it. I will read it and start laughing so hard that my atheist-raised roommate will look at me as if I’ve gone quite mad. I send her the pages I’m reading, but despite her abiding hatred of hippies, she doesn’t get the material or understand why so much of this blog is so wrong, but also utterly hilarious. I’m not sure anyone who wasn’t raised in this kind of Catholic church would get it, or find it nearly as funny as I do. I was talking this over with a convert friend, and she admitted that she isn’t sure what’s tongue-in-cheek and what’s real (or what’s exaggerated for effect and what really goes on in dissident parishes, I imagine.) I suppose she’s lucky in that way.
There’s a more serious side to why I find the blog (er, I mean the parish) so funny, though. The church I grew up in wasn’t quite so … nutty, but we had more than our share of forced hugging and group meditations during confirmation class, and I learned nearly all of the theology I know ten years after “graduating” from religious ed. Baptisms of children and adults were part of Mass and served the purpose of “welcoming infants/catechumens into our faith community.” Never mind exactly what that faith was in, which remained fuzzy and amorphous for me until well after I was confirmed. Doctrine, tsk! That’s so old-fashioned.
I found the forced camaraderie, the constant pressure to hug people I didn’t really like, the liturgical dance, the screechy syrupy recycled ’70s folk songs in our hymnals, .. everything…spiritually dry and sometimes even revolting. I liked participating as a guitarist (yes, folk mass. hush) and as a a lector. Indeed, a lot of things were nice about the parish I grew up in, and I also sometimes liked the bare-bones Mass we had in the Protestant chapel in college, but overall I just gave up on a certain level. I kicked around converting to Buddhism for a while, but that seemed like too much of a radical departure. Most of my college friends were neo-pagans, which didn’t appeal to me at all. I proclaimed myself “culturally Catholic,” and avoided Mass mostly in order to avoid my ex.
After I graduated from college, I tried to arrange my work schedule so that I was in the office during all possible mass times on weekends. It was a drudgery and I couldn’t stand going. I’d sooner pray on my own….provided that Anyone was listening, and as I became more lonely and depressed and discouraged about the present and about my future, I doubted that there was any deity at all. The parade of human suffering that I dealt with every day in the call center where I worked made a compelling case for that.
I moved to another city for grad school, but decided not to hang out with the Newman group on campus. I was 23, and they seemed so…young. After Pope John Paul II died, I felt compelled to attend Mass at the cathedral for some reason I didn’t quite understand. (So did a thousand or so other people, and a few local news crews. Mass attendance there is usually quite sparse.) I attended the cathedral parish on and off for about two years after that. I was drawn back even though I couldn’t articulate why. Now I realize that it was because the Masses there were reverent, traditional, and aesthetically pleasing. I attended the cathedral sporadically until sometime just after Ash Wednesday of this year, when something clicked in my brain and I knew that I needed to go back.
Poking around the Internet and reading blogs and forums made me realize–I’m not as weird as I thought. In the minority, perhaps, but not wrong. Not wanting to hold hands during the Our Father, disliking the Gather hymnal, or not having lots of sex with my youth group boyfriend were indeed not things that made me a bad Catholic, as my experience growing up had led me to believe. There wasn’t something wrong with Catholicism, or with me. The problem lay in the liturgically liberal, theologically moderate tradition in which I was raised–many people seem to find that fulfilling, but I don’t anymore.
The sadness I felt was in part a God-shaped hole inside of me, and returning to the Church according to her rules has left me serene and even content. If I want to be intellectually honest, I have to admit that I can’t ever be completely sure again that there’s a God or that he’s holding us to Catholic rules.
Maybe in time I can be sure of that again. I hope to. A total loss of faith is hard to recover from. I keep the rules and habits that I should, in hope that the doubt will disappear someday. Moral guidance is important, as is ritual, but transcendence and salvation are far more important.
Depends. Can I get a diploma?
I was looking at employment listings, when I saw the following lines in a list of qualifications for a religious studies department liaison librarian:
ALA accredited Master’s degree in Library Science; second Master’s degree in Religious Studies or Theology preferred. In-depth knowledge of the Catholic Church.
Okay, I have the first one, the second is optional. “In-depth knowledge”? Well, I do read a lot of Catholic blogs…
OMG LET ME TELL YOU INTERNETS I HAVE SINNED!!!11WTFBBQ
Online confession? I only wish it were that easy. Being able to type things out emboldens us to say things we normally wouldn’t, and that might make things easier. But that doesn’t make it any more right than consulting with an online “doctor” to get a “Canadian” prescription for Viagra. Less so, actually–you might get real Viagra through the mail, but no real absolution over TCP/IP.
(I can’t wait to see the Google hits I’ll get from this post.)
Blogosphere bits
I had been working on an outline and some background research for a blog entry or even an article along these lines, but someone else wrote it for me. I’ve written before about my experiences in France. I loved France and intend to go back for a while once I have the money to spare. Like Québec, what was once a culture so thoroughly based on Catholicism (practices, if not necessarily faith) clamored in the late ’60s and early ’70s to cast off religion like a particularly scratchy wool sweater.
I found the story of the young woman who came up to Ms. Eden after her program particularly touching. I can’t presume to say what’s always the best thing for everyone, since premarital and extramarital sex has been going on, well, for as long as there’s been marriage. In a way I surround myself with like-minded people, since even the most liberal of my friends are only interested in sex in the context of a relationship.
I really think, though, that the last few generations have been sold a bill of goods. I always thought so, even as an atheist. Sometimes I longed to act on my impulses… well, that’s not true, since it wasn’t so much to act on my impulses as it was to finally make myself just like everyone else since being a “geriatric” virgin (i.e. older than 20) is rather shameful in the circles I moved in in college.
Even if the sexual revolution’s backlash doesn’t change society as a whole, if writers and religious leaders are brave enough to speak out about it, if that saves some people from the suffering that mindless sex can cause, then so much the better.
And the “Three Cool Cathechists” title of that post made me have to track down the Beatles’ version of the song it pays tribute to.
Lastly, for some reason I missed “The Colbert Report” on his latest night of super-awesome Catholic content (discussing the Gospel of Judas) and only heard about it through Custos Fidei.
Based on interviews I’ve read, Stephen Colbert seems to come from the same school of liberal but still devoted and theologically nerd faith that I do, and I’ve long been a fan of his. It’s fun to see him explode across the Catholic blog scene periodically.
Speaking of TV, the Holy Whapping Television Network (HWTN) post made me giggle so hard I nearly spit cranberry-grape juice on my (white) skirt. Oops.
Eternal rebels
Who are the real rebels, indeed?
Considering how much anger I inspire in most of the people I know when I say fascist things like “having sex with someone you’re not even dating is always morally wrong” and that most horrible, rebellious of all things a young single woman can say, “I’m against abortion,” I do identify with this article. The hatred Eden inspires in the secular press (see Gawker) makes me wonder where it comes from. I’ve experienced much of the same online, just with a lower profile.
