I was raised in the Roman Catholic faith. Fortunately, by the time I came along, my parents were too broke after educating my older siblings, so I never had to spend a day in parochial school (unless you count Saturday morning catechism class). It wasn’t long after I turned old enough to make my own choices that I walked away from it, much to the chagrin of my family. The last thing I had to say to the Catholic Church was when I wrote “Saturday Night with the Virgin Mary” in 1987.
Incidents like the Spanish Inquisition speak for themselves, but even more recently, the Holy Mother Church has been committing atrocities no nation would get away with.
Back in those days, I had a friend named Doug. He was a handsome young man, a few years younger than me, but whose mother was more of the older side of my generation. Linda also had been raised in a Catholic family in the south, a lot like mine. Their approach to keeping their kids was having sex was that if they didn’t know about it, they wouldn’t do it. Of course, everybody with a mind of their own knows that sex isn’t so much a learned behavior but an instinct we are born with. So when she was informed by a nurse at her doctor’s office that she was pregnant at 16, she had to ask the nurse how it happened. Nobody had ever told her that sex makes babies. The only thing worse her parents ever did was that when she told them, they became angry with her, and disowned her. And Doug’s father? He took off, of course. (Needless to say, Linda made sure Doug learned The Facts of Life when he was seven years old!)
The answer to these situations is, of course, sex education. But the Catholics are against it. Just as they are against abortion, though quietly terminating her pregnancy would have made Linda’s life easier and saved Doug from the screwed-up kid he turned out to be against this sociopolitical backdrop. Their opposition to euthanasia has caused many to suffer needlessly while medical science worked to prolong lives that were no longer worth living. Worst of all, their refusal of contraception means they won’t tolerate condoms. As a result, HIV and AIDS have run rampant, both here and in Africa.
It’s bad enough that Catholics hold these values, but worse in that they seek to codify them into all of our lives. People like Bill Donohue and his “Catholic League” make sure their dogma is crammed down everybody’s throats.
The Catholic Church isn’t just a church, either. It’s also a country. The Vatican is considered the smallest sovereign state in the world. Considering its record on human rights violations and treatment of women, it isn’t a country we should have diplomatic ties with.
One of the silliest things Catholics believe is that the Virgin Mary stayed that way for the rest of her life after Jesus was born. To that all I can say is, “poor Joseph!”
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