No Religion has now overtaken Catholicism as the most popular religion. This was in the Wall Street Journal last week. This an interesting fact as Holy Week begins. I don’t think many of the younger generations realize how important the Church was to us. Most of my extended family attended parochial schools. Most had at least some experience of being taught by nuns. When we were growing up it really was a badge of pride to be attending a Catholic school. We were so much better than the “publics”. When someone asked you where you lived, you didn’t tell them the neighborhood or town. You told them the parish you belonged to.
The religious holidays were really a part of life. There were individual ceremonies to mark your growth from baptism to first communion to confirmation. Every first Friday there was a special liturgy. There was a real honor to have the traveling statue of the Virgin Mary come to your house. The neighbors would come over and a group rosary would take place. If you moved into a new home, it was important to have the priest come over to bless the house. 1954 was designated as a “Marion “ year dedicated to the Virgin. In Chicago this was a very big deal. I remember there was a huge procession down Lake Shore Drive to Soldiers Field for a mass there.
There were also the religion classes where you had to memorize the Baltimore Catechism. There was no real room for argument about this. There was right and there was wrong.
I think a lot of this started to change in the early 1960s. A Vatican council was called to modernize the Church. Since then the Church has lost much of it’s power. The abuse scandals of the last 10-15 years have also hurt. However I think that as many of the people in my generation became better educated, we began to think for ourselves rather than have the clergy and religious do it for us.
This is both good and bad. The good is that we realize that our lives really are our responsibility. We need to take responsibility for the decisions we make and accept the consequences of those decisions. The bad is that we have lost some of our history.
We have now lived here for two years. When we moved we belonged to a fairly modern parish in Naperville. We enjoyed the liturgy there and the social activity. There seemed to be a real sense of community. Since we moved we have been attending the parish here. This diocese appears to be much more conservative. There are references to saints and relics and observances that were popular when I was in grade school. There is a definite effort to go back in time. I think that door is closed for me. I now question everything. I still go to Mass, but I now tend to fall asleep during the sermon. I told myself that this was because I had to listen to people professionally for so many years that it hard for me to listen to someone just talking.
The importance of some type of spiritual experience is still there for me. Now I question where it is and wonder if I can ever find it. It really is easy to criticize the Church. I can think of so many ways to do so. However I also realize that somewhere along the way I did lose something. I am not ready to discard everything and begin worshiping the sun or sacrificing virgins. I am not a total materialist. I just am not sure where the truth is.
The Old Testament and the New Testament often seem in opposition. The Jesus of the New Testament presents a loving, forgiving faith. The way this has been interpreted over the years is part of the problem. There is still an effort to say there is one right and many wrongs. I think there is a desire to go back to the memorization of the Baltimore Catechism.
I once had a very devout patient. He and his wife were members of an evangelical Church. They were very active in that Church. They didn’t trust society as a whole so they even home schooled their children. They were very unhappy yet they decided to stay together. The wife would verbalize that her husband was the leader of the family and she should subjugate herself to him. She would say this and yet continue to sabotage his relationship with their children on a regular basis. They would have sex because he wanted to and then she would try and make him feel guilty. Any recommendations or interventions I made almost had to be biblical according to their understanding of the bible.
I think I saw them five or six times. I recommended that they might be better working with their pastor or a Christian counselor. They didn’t want to change. I have often wondered what happened to them and what happened to their children. They could be very satisfied that they were bringing their children up in a religious home, but what message were they really giving. This is not just true of the Christian religions. I think any organized religion that insists on absolutes and negates individual responsibility creates the same difficulty.
There is a need in me and probably in all of us for some contact with a higher power whatever that might be. I don’t want to be like Diogenes and, rather than searching for an honest man, be continually searching for the true religion. I just want to have some belief that touches me and continues to help me heal.