Steaming Catholic

It is difficult being a Cradle Catholic. I am sure a convert from the Church of What's Happenin' Now, or from even a liturgical Protestant denomination (there is the Church and then there are all the denoms that denominated from it) still has a hard time. But we Cradles have a unique pain-in-the-butt experience with our Church. Especially if we are faithful.

Yesterday, while still on vacation with my beautiful family, I watched the movie Henry Poole Was Here. Great picture. But it nearly made me cry (death and illness), which is a hard thing for a movie to do. It didn't make me nearly cry for the obvious reasons though. It made me cry because it reminded me of where I grew up - LA - the same place where Henry Poole grew up and returned to when he grew into his thirties, lonely and dying. And it reminded me of the Latin Catholic Southern California where I learned to know God, to trust Him through my Church. It made me long in a very sad way, for that past. For that style of Catholicism that is completely foreign to the cold Northeast.

I hate the way my faith is twisted into Oktoberfests and mom and tots groups and nearly absent pro-life movements in this part of the country. I hate the way priests can live completely apart from Canon Law -as if the Pope is not their boss. Not their Holy Father. I hate that they can refuse me confession, because they have more important things to do. How they can rush me along in it, because my confession is "boring".

It must be hard for converts. If you convert while living in the dead, rapidly Catholic-shrinking, priest sex scandal Northeast, and you never experience that profound, devoted, Latin missionary version of the rest of the Catholic part of America, you might actually believe that this is all there is to Catholicism. That this is being Catholic.

That must suck.

It does for me. It sucks so much (I apologize for completely tossing aside all my years of study at great American universities and colleges to write like an eighth grader) that I have actually had to step over to the East in order to recognize that beautiful, incense-filled, Western Latin Church I grew up in.

"So, Father," I asked a wonderful Byzantine priest recently - whose liturgy I will be part of this Sunday - "is the tiny, mostly ignored East now saving the huge, elephant, train wreck West?"

"Not exactly," he said. "Most Catholics who were never taught to be Catholic - which is the Church in the Northeast - are just leaving or only showing up for Easter and baptism. They would never put up with all this." And he sweeps his hand across the view of the Icon screen, the Eucharist centered in the middle of the Church. "We are too strict. Too in line. But we are booming out West and in the Midwest. Even the Bible belt is loosing Christians in every denomination - including the Church. Don't let those Baptists fool you. They are shrinking like a soppy balloon, too."

Washington's Colonies are becoming Marx's thought center. "Religion is the opiate of the masses." Just ask anyone at Starbucks today.

I am still so freaking mad at my last miserable parish - the indifferent parishioners, the sad priests who quote popular movies in order to draw the sleepy congregation into the Gospel, the three-person 80 year old Rosary group, the parents who demanded that my husband forgo a much needed youth group - one of only three total youth groups in a diocese of more than 700,000 - because it was "inconvenient". Where as in Oregon, when I visited my father two years ago, every parish in the state had to have an active, Eucharistic-centric, youth group. "Otherwise we are fooling ourselves thinking the Holy Spirit is going to pull dead old Catholics out of their graves to fill the pews. We must allow God to envigorate the youth or else pay for the sin of completely ignoring them," said a kindly Indian missionary priest from Bombay when I visited this parish two years ago in the Portland Archdiocese

Thank God the West (of America) has figured this one out.

In the Northeast, they speak like the priests who don't really care if they hear any confessions at all. But they will rage if you screw with their summer fundraising beer gardens.

I am so mad. I can only take the Eucharist in the Eastern Rite. They still keep the Eucharist in the center - like they do in just about all other parts of the Catholic world. Even in Europe where they rarely go to Mass - they go with chapel veils on and mostly remain on their knees. You can't even enter a French, Spanish, Serbian Catholic parish without getting, at least, a piece of white paper slapped on your head if you are a woman. "Respect," they will say in their own language.

"It's not that we do not want you," says an Eastern priest to me. "It's just that we do not want our Church going in the direction of the Catholic Church. If you can even call it a direction."

So, in other words..."We don't want to look like those crappy partying parishes that only have pseudo membership unless they are 'illegally' 100% Latin. And that's where you are coming from, my dear. From the Catholic Northeast."

Yes. I would love to move "back home".

Yeah. But I am here. In the crappy version of the Catholic Church God chose to stick me square into the middle of. Why? What could I possibly do other than complain to disinterested collars or unknowing converts who repeat, "Well, everything seems fine to me. I don't even understand your complaints. It must be cultural."

No, former Evangelical. It is just that you got a sad catechises and you don't even know it. You have no idea how beautiful it is to receive the Eucharist in mid-genuflect. Unless of course, you have somehow discovered a hidden Latin only Mass ordered far outside High Mass times or in the basement of your local church.

It would be nice to go to confession about now....