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Practise what you preach
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.
Every once in a while, someone who knows I attended Catholic School will say, “You must be a good Catholic girl”. Yep, I went to Catholic schools. And I was a pretty good kid, but I don’t think my behaviour had much to do with having gone to Catholic schools. For eight years I attended St. John’s and St. Jude’s in Metropolitan Toronto. I memorized all of the prayers, the psalms, the hymns, the Mass responses and the dogma in Father McGuire’s The New Baltimore Catechism. I was baptized, confession’d, communion’d, confirmed and married as a member of the Catholic Church. But don’t get me wrong. Even though I was a pretty good kid, I had a lot of trouble believing everything I read and practised. Behind my back, you could have called me a pious hypocrite. What I learned definitely didn’t jive with what I saw. As a child in school, I was always the first to ask questions about what we were being force-fed. Basically, I was the kid who just didn’t get how a person could die and come back to life. Why would a father do that to his son? I was one of the kids who looked to see if anyone else was buying “the body and the blood” stuff. I thought Judas was a scapegoat, and made the mistake of saying as much in Catechism class. Although I could easily regurgitate the material on a test paper, I vividly remember thinking, as I looked around the classroom, “Who the H E double communion wafers believes this stuff?” I had a confidante in one of my siblings, but together, we were just a couple of annoying kids who asked too many questions. And, much to the dismay of my teachers, I never really bought into the game of believing in “One, Holy and Apostolic Church”. Truthfully, the priests in our parish were far from humble, and a couple of the nuns were pretty handy with the strap or the pointer. All of them had deadly aim with a piece of chalk. Where was the kindness? Where was the goodness? Where was the humility? At home any discussion I attempted to have, questioning the Catholic Church, was not encouraged and often shutdown pretty quickly. My parents figured a kid needed to have the Fear of the Lord instilled in them to keep them out of trouble. Except, I didn’t have “the fear”. I had the questions.
As an adult, my questions didn’t stop. As a matter of fact, the more I read in the news about the real Catholic Church, the less I believed what I had been taught as an elementary school child. Why would a business (and yes, the Catholic Church is a business) as big as the Catholic Church allow, and turn a blind eye to, the abuse of the very people who are encouraged to place their trust in a person of God. I just don’t get it. No, I wasn’t a victim of abuse by any of my teachers or any of the preachers, unless you count how horrible I felt watching innocent classmates being singled out for behaviour and learning problems. How many times did I watch a friend be shamed and/or strapped for, essentially, being a kid. How many times did I sit in trembling in fear, hoping I didn’t make a mistake or misspeak or misbehave. And now the world sits back and watches as the abusers get shuffled from parish to parish, their abuses swept under the carpet. No, I’m not a “good Catholic girl”. I haven’t ever been one and don’t buy into the concept of organized religion. It’s hypocritical, judgemental, oppressive and dangerous. The time has come for the One, Holy and Apostolic Church to clean up its act and acknowledge the pain, the anger and the sorrow it has inflicted on so many of its believers. Time for this Pope to practise what the Catholic Church preaches.
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