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Experiences of our Catholic Upbringing; What keeps us in & what brings people back?
Topic Started: Friday, 4. May 2012, 23:08 (505 Views)
Rose of York
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I was intrigued by a post, made on another thread, so by agreement with Valleyboy I am using part of it to start this new topic where those who are willing, can share our experiences of our Catholic upbringing.

valleyboy
Friday, 4. May 2012, 22:43
Peers who stayed with the church seemed to have a more grounded view of the role of conscience in the proceedings and rather less of the moral Catch 22 I was inculcated with. I'm determined not to get drawn into Catholicer-than-thou debates which might trigger old misgivings about dogma, and accept its essentials which I've never had any issue with. Thanks again for the input.
Keep the Faith!

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Rose of York
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I am a rarity, a war baby conceived in peace time. Derek is the oldest man on the forum, I am the oldest woman.

My Catholic upbringing included:

Family prayers, kneeling round the fire. We said Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, O Sacrament most holy, O Sacred Heart of Jesus, Eternal Rest and God bless Mother and Dad, all our brothers and sisters, all our aunties and uncles Amen. In May and October we recited the rosary.

Religious pictures on the walls, just a few. The Sacred Heart presided over the home, from the chimney breast wall. Saint Theresa was at the top of the stairs. Our Lady of Perpetual Succour was in the biggest bedroom.

Crucifixes in all bedrooms and on the mantlepiece above the fireplace of the kitchen cum daily living/dining room.

Rules galore. In the cold winter of 1947, we got back from school freezing cold. Mother gave us drinks of bovril beef extract in hot water on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. On Fridays it was Marmite yeast extract, because bovril came under the category of soups made from meat, so it would have been a sin to give it to a freezing cold seven year old on a Friday.

Total awareness of what would result in Hell, and how to cut down on our time in Purgatory. Missing Mass on Sunday was top of the list, it would have been as bad as cutting another kid's jugular and laughing while they bled to death.

A deep love of receiving Holy Communion, and afterwards having a secret one to one chat with Jesus.

More later.

Keep the Faith!

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valleyboy

Rose of York
Friday, 4. May 2012, 23:18
I am a rarity, a war baby conceived in peace time. Derek is the oldest man on the forum, I am the oldest woman.

My Catholic upbringing included:

Family prayers, kneeling round the fire. We said Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, O Sacrament most holy, O Sacred Heart of Jesus, Eternal Rest and God bless Mother and Dad, all our brothers and sisters, all our aunties and uncles Amen. In May and October we recited the rosary.

Religious pictures on the walls, just a few. Crucifixes in the bedrooms and above the fireplace of the kitchen cum daily living/dining room.

Rules galore. In the cold winter of 1947, we got back from school freezing cold. Mother gave us drinks of bovril beef extract in hot water on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. On Fridays it was Marmite yeast extract, because bovril came under the category of soups made from meat, so it would have been a sin to give it to a freezing cold seven year old on a Friday.

Total awareness of what would result in Hell, and how to cut down on our time in Purgatory. Missing Mass on Sunday was top of the list, it would have been as bad as cutting another kid's jugular and laughing while they bled to death.

A deep love of receiving Holy Communion, and afterwards having a secret one to one chat with Jesus.

More later.

Where to begin? Benediction, 'First Fridays', altar service, scapulars, mass when barely fit to stand up, priests, nuns, frequent corporal punishment at school - regular British baby-boomer working class catholicism. Mother a cradle catholic, father a convert, his family kept at arm's length, her's in the surrounding streets. Top-down authoritarian, thou-shalt-definitely-not, especially where pleasure is involved. Similar upbringings turned out radicals, artists, much of the popular music industry and an efficient atheism machine.

Bizarrely, I never doubted a progenitor God, or the trinity even having spent most of my life with non-believers. Hard to pin down one thing that brought be back to the church, but a series of events that required extraordinary forgiveness on my part (more than I'm capable of in truth) showed me my own trespasses over the years. This coincided with reading Randall Sullivan's 'The Miracle Detective' which resonated deeply. A close study of cutting edge science showed there was no satisfactory theory of consciousness - or emergence to give it its technical name - and I found myself wandering back to mass despite myself. Weird, huh? I hope I never become reactionary or conservative but you know what lost sheep are like, always telling people how to suck eggs.
Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too.
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Rose of York
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We all went to Holy Hour, Rosary and Benediction on Sunday and Thursday evenings. When I was about 12 we got a new parish priest, an Englishman! A convert! I must have been aged about forty before I met another priest who was not Irish, or the child or grandchild of Irish immigrants.

The local culture was very Methodist. My Dad liked to go to the pub, for company (he was a very moderate drinker). Our Methodist neighbours abstained from the demon alcohol, but got on well with my parents.

Prayers for the dead had high priority in the family, parish and school. When I was about seven a young man in our parish was hung for murder. At the very minute he was due to die, the parish priest commenced a Requiem Mass. We children in the infants were in our classrooms, we said a prayer for him. The street outside was packed with kneeling Catholics, who could not get into the church because parishioners who were not out at work had turned out in full force. That was real love. One of my class mates was the young man's niece. She told us it had helped her grandmother who had lost her son, and her father whose brother had been executed.

After school there were always plenty of pupils popping into church next door to say a few prayers or do the Stations of the Cross, individually. Occasionally one of us would act as leader of a small group doing the Stations together.

Only one of our teachers regularly administered corporal punishment. The other teachers, nuns and lay were kind friendly people who had a skill of correcting us, and explaining why some behaviour was not acceptable.

I could have recited every sin in the book. It was many a year before I knew that my father in Heaven loves me. Our religious instruction left me with the impression Jesus is lovely, he is kind, but his father's role was to dish our the punishments. The Holy Spirit was rarely mentioned.

Marian devotion was, in my opinion, overdone.
Keep the Faith!

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Josephine
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All of the above....and the Infant of Prague
with a few pennies under the statue
to prevent destitution;
and never, never forget "Missions" from visiting Redemptorists.

Prayers said kneeling by the bed on a small mat on expanses of
freezing lino - no praying in bed unless you were VERY ill.

Making the sign of the Cross whenever you passed a church.

Mass on Saturday morning, confession on Saturday afternoon,
Mass on Sunday morning and Benediction on Sunday afternoon.

Clean gloves or mittens, polished shoes and a hat or headscarf for all of the above.
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valleyboy

This thread reads like the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. I was always suspect of the way the religious franchised out the business of corporal punishment, I mean, if mortifying the flesh was so important you'd have thought they'd have kept it in house?
Priests, good and not so good. One from the 1960s used to recite mass like a horse racing commentator, 25 minutes maximum. Another old boy had a thing about martyrs and would go into great detail about their suffering. He always seemed to get the last mass on a Sunday afternoon, definitely a reason to be up early. Another sticker would stop proceedings if anyone arrived late, wait until the family had taken their seats, glare and continue with a withering smile. On the other hand many were hard working, committed Christians battling with their faith after VII and making the best of things.

Church was generally busy back then, mass at 7.30am, 9, 10, 11, 5.30 and 7pm, all pretty full, some packed.
Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too.
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Rose of York
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Corporal punishment was the norm in nearly all schools. A woman who will be about 95 now if she is alive threw up her hands in horror when I told her I was taught by nuns. She cried out "You poor child, how you must have suffered at the hands of those terrible women." I was happy to tell her I have happy memories of many dear kind, gentle nuns who, being highly educated and well trained in teaching, were successful educators. The boys my brothers and I used to play out with used to brag about how many times they had been caned that week, in their schools, which were run by the local education authority, no connection with the Catholic Church. In those days giving a child a "good hiding" was generally considered to be acceptable.

At the school I attended from age 10 to 17 there was no corporal punishment. Discipline was good. We were taught to respect our teachers, domestic staff who cleaned the school and cooked the dinners, and each other. I never heard of any pupil appearing before the juvenile court. That is a good record for a school with 500 pupils.
Keep the Faith!

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Rose of York
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Josephine
Saturday, 5. May 2012, 00:45
Prayers said kneeling by the bed on a small mat on expanses of
freezing lino - no praying in bed unless you were VERY ill.
My mother gave us a dispensation from that in the winter of 1947. We had snow for four months, and the nation had a coal shortage. Icicles were on the inside of the window frames, so Mother gave us permission to say our prayers in bed.

Quote:
 
Making the sign of the Cross whenever you passed a church.

Bowing and making the Sign of the Cross when, on First Fridays, we crossed paths with the curate, who had a pyx around his neck. He was carrying the Blessed Sacrament and we knew we were not even to say "Good Morning Father" because Jesus was there in that pyx.

Quote:
 
Mass on Saturday morning, confession on Saturday afternoon,

Confession once a fortnight. I confessed the same sins regularly during my childhood. Just once, I had a new sin to confess. "Father I did something profane". The priest was obviously surprised to hear that from a child, so he asked how I knew I had been profane. "Father my mother told me off, she said it was profane." "What did she say was profane". "Father, I baptised the cat, I the last one died and I wanted to make sure this one goes to heaven when it dies." I remember the priest stifling giggles.

Quote:
 
Clean gloves or mittens, polished shoes and a hat or headscarf for all of the above.
That rule was followed even by children going into the church for a few minutes to say a prayer. I have seen children with handkerchiefs on their heads.
Mass on Sunday morning and Benediction on Sunday afternoon.
Keep the Faith!

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Angus Toanimo
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Rose of York
Saturday, 5. May 2012, 02:07
Corporal punishment was the norm in nearly all schools.
Yes, my father used to tell me all about getting the cane etc. His only objection to it, as I recall, was getting caned by an older kid - a monitor, I guess these days what you'd call prefects. Stupid thing. Such children these days would get their heads kicked in.
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Rose of York
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Parish gala in the summer.

Sale of work in winter. Parishioners knitted and sewed clothes, made lampshades and toys. The goods were sold and the money raised helped pay for essential repairs to the church.

In wartime building materials were unavailable. We had buckets all over the church, to catch rainwater when there was a storm during Mass.

Cold churches. Most parishioners were very poor so the priest had to economise. Heating was on only when it was unbearably cold.
Keep the Faith!

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Rose of York
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A few years ago we discussed topics such as "Why do people leave?" and "Why I am still a Catholic". I don't remember discussing what it is that brings them back after a long absence. Perhaps if we did, (and if our priests and bishops joined in the search) we would have a chance of getting more back. On the other hand, perhaps they are better left alone to come back in their own good time, when an incident in their lives makes them consider whether to return to their spiritual roots?????
Keep the Faith!

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valleyboy

I was surprised your previous topic on Catholic upbringings elicited so few replies, because it's an interesting subject. Perhaps people are coy about their early relationship with the church, or they feel looking too closely at the subject might compromise their faith in some way?

Because I was away from the church so long I had to do considerable soul searching about the reasons I left and even greater reflection on why I wanted to return. The feeling is that my peers who stayed with the church did so on their own terms, whereas my religious training would not have countenanced such a personal approach. Christians as a whole do not handle doubt well, even though it's the distinction that defines faith.
Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too.
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Anne-Marie

valleyboy
Saturday, 19. May 2012, 08:34
I was surprised your previous topic on Catholic upbringings elicited so few replies, because it's an interesting subject. Perhaps people are coy about their early relationship with the church, or they feel looking too closely at the subject might compromise their faith in some way?
Maybe, but for some of us our relationship with God is an intensely personal thing, in many ways as much so as the intimate form of expression of the marital act - It's something you keep very much to yourself, rather than talking openly about with others. For others. of course, such things are as natural as anything, so are considered rightly spoken about openly.
I really don't think in some cases, the meaning is anything deeper the its intimate personal nature.
Anne-Marie
FIAT VOLUNTAS DEI
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Gerard

Sorry mate - too depressing to dwell on.

Had some nice women school teachers, though, who knew God was not the tyrant presented by the men in black.

Gerry
Edited by Gerard, Saturday, 19. May 2012, 14:50.
"The institutional and charismatic aspects are quasi coessential to the Church's constitution" (Pope John Paul II, 1998).
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Rose of York
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Anne-Marie
Saturday, 19. May 2012, 14:30
valleyboy
Saturday, 19. May 2012, 08:34
I was surprised your previous topic on Catholic upbringings elicited so few replies, because it's an interesting subject. Perhaps people are coy about their early relationship with the church, or they feel looking too closely at the subject might compromise their faith in some way?
Maybe, but for some of us our relationship with God is an intensely personal thing, in many ways as much so as the intimate form of expression of the marital act - It's something you keep very much to yourself, rather than talking openly about with others.
Yes our relationship with God is a personal thing, but I see nothing personal about the practicalities of worship, the fear associated with obeying the rules, or differences between the way things were then and the way they are now.
Keep the Faith!

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