When I was a wee lad, no more than a couple months old, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church; and thus began my journey along the path of righteousness.
Some few years later, after having moved west to Edmonton from Ontario, I took part in the Holy Sacrament of First Communion. I did this with my entire class from the school I was attending. (My most vivid memory of that event was that one girl, upon having the Eucharistic Wafer placed in her upturned hand, popped the wafer into her mouth directly from her palm rather than lifting it reverently to her lips with the fingers of her other hand. I thought her lucky that she had to go again: twice the Christ for the same price!)
And then a year or two after that, again with my school and going back to the same church, we were given the opportunity to confess our sins to a priest and be forgiven for our many transgressions against our fellow man. I had no idea what to say to the old man in his bathrobe, but I'm sure I blubbered something about beating up my brother and such. I remember I left my first, and only, Confession with some tears in my eyes, not knowing exactly what it was I was supposed to feel guilty about. That was almost 25 years ago; man, do I have a backlog!
About the time I was 17, I was driving home one Sunday afternoon with my mother in the car and, as we were passing the local convenience store, I informed her that I wasn't going to be attending church any more. She had, for years, lured my brother and I to Sunday Mass with the promise of a Dairy Queen chocolate-dipped cone afterwards. Most people who know me will realize that an hour on a wooden pew is small price to pay for that kind of reward. (And as a small aside, it was years before I realized what the real lyrics were to the song, "Peace is flowing like a River / Flowing out of you and me / Peace is flowing like a River / Setting all the cactus free!" As a result of that song, I had visions of liberated cacti running rampant through the desert for quite some time.)
Now that I'm just past 30, I've only ever gone to church with the family for Christmas Eve service and maybe once or twice at Easter. When my wife and I got married, it was a civil service performed by a good mutual friend of ours who took out a 24-hour marriage license and performed a ceremony that Amy and I took and modified from a book.
I'm saying these things as a bit of a back story to my reaction at a portion of a letter I read from a Calgary Catholic Bishop urging the government to suppress same-sex marriages, courtesy of CBC news this morning. The gist of it is thus:
"Since homosexuality, adultery, prostitution and pornography undermine the foundations of the family, the basis of society, then the state must use its coercive power to proscribe or curtail them in the interests of the common good. ... An evil act remains an evil act whether it is performed in public or in private."
Suffice to say that I vehemently disagree with that statement for many the same reasons that I have not been a practising Catholic for quite a number of years. The Church, Catholic or otherwise, does a great deal of good in this world. I'm not disputing that. It's just too bad about the blind obedience that is demanded, and all too often granted, from its lemmings.
When my wife and I got married, I was not at all looking forward to the hoops I expected the Catholic Church to make me jump through for the priviledge. Upon our first meeting with the priest, he said, "I am not going to ask Paul to convert. I already have enough non-practising Catholics in this parish." I was delighted to meet an intelligent and pragmatic member of the clergy. Then we moved to Aurora, and I met the priest of this parish. I haven't been back to church since.
Posted by: Paul | Monday, 17 January 2005 at 07:37 AM
A co-worker once asked me: "What religion are you?"
"Catholic. Well... Lapsed Catholic."
"Is there another kind?"
Posted by: fv | Monday, 17 January 2005 at 08:53 PM