What is your experience of being a Catholic?

@reasoning logic,

good. then I hope we've heard the last about this particular ******* nun.

@chai2,

Quote:

I hope we've heard the last about this particular ******* nun.

I sense hostility, Oh well Idea

you said that you would talk about your experience, probably over the course of a few posts here and there.

I'm all ears and sorry if I seemed to not be interested.

I was the same way when it comes to "not being able to get into religion. It was not because I did not try because I did but it just did not feel right to me, "I felt as I did not belong even though I tried to fit in.

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@reasoning logic,

Quote:

I felt as I did not belong even though I tried to fit in.

No animal nature belongs or can fit in. That's the point.

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@spendius,

Quote:

No animal nature belongs or can fit in. That's the point.

Then how were you able to penetrate wearing a sheepskin?

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@Frank Apisa,

Frank Apisa wrote:

. . . It is interesting (as I have mentioned several times in the past) that
two of my favorite memories in life have my previous Catholicism as a
base…namely the time I served Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican…and
the time I participated in a general audience with Pius XII. . .

I gotta ask for the back story, Frank.

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As for my experience of being a Catholic, it's like my experience being an
American. I'm an American citizen without ever having asked to be. Same
thing with being Catholic. I grew up in East Boston in the fifties. I
probably knew more non-citizens than non-Catholics. I never thought
much about being American or Catholic. It was just part of the backdrop.

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@George,

Over time I "wised up" -- as we used to say about both. Not to the point
point of turning my back on either, but developing a certain skepticism
and facing up to the dark side of things.

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@reasoning logic,

Do I think I am sharing an empathic response?

What a tweetybird thing to say to me.

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@George,

I left home at sixteen to enter religious life. For a time, I was Brother
George, living under vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, teaching
high school English and rocking a predominantly black wardrobe.

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@George,

Quote:

I never thought much about being American or Catholic. It was just part of the backdrop.

Same for me George. Producing all the virgins of the parish in their Sunday frocks once a week was a sufficient justification imo.

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@spendius,

Sometime in my 30s I was told that everybody had me pegged to enter the priesthood.

I gawped at them astounded. The idea had never entered my head.

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@chai2,

Quote:

No, you know know me well rl.....I don't deal with noise, including voices like hers nattering, well at all. I like and seek out quiet.

I am not sure why you think that I would know you well but I do find many things about you attractive even though I do not know you well.

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@ossobuco,

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What a tweetybird thing to say to me.

I think that you have come very close to reviling my identity but I would be willing to bet you still do not know.

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@chai2,

As you probably know, I signed up to be a postulant.

I was very confused, the nuns telling me I had a vocation. (I think I triggered that by telling one I wanted to be a doctor, thus maybe flagging myself as a nursing nun in India). This was a few years - but not that many - before women got to be doctors.

I'm resentful now, re those nuns, but try to get over that, that is the way of much of life.

Some of the nuns were dumkopfs, and some, especially the ones in grammar school, and the ones in my one year of catholic college, were sharp. The inbetween years nuns are the ones I rail about (no enjoyment of sex in marriage, quote Sister Mary Anthony, mortal sin)

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@ossobuco,

Ah, I meant not to post. But my history is vast, so it's hard to shut up.

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@ossobuco,

Quote:

(no enjoyment of sex in marriage, quote Sister Mary Anthony, mortal sin)

It can get a bit hair raising after a few hundred enjoyments. It is not a static process as it is with sheep and goats.

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@spendius,

Not funny. That is what we were taught.

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@George,

George wrote:

Frank Apisa wrote:
. . . It is interesting (as I have mentioned several times in the past) that
two of my favorite memories in life have my previous Catholicism as a
base…namely the time I served Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican…and
the time I participated in a general audience with Pius XII. . .
I gotta ask for the back story, Frank.

Not a great story. The chaplain on our Air Force Base set up a retreat to Rome back in the 1950's...and about 30 of us went. I was one of the two Airmen who served Father Kevin J. Heyburn, the chaplain, at Mass. He got permission to say Mass at one of the side chapels in St. Peter's...and I served.

The next day we attended a general audience with Pius XII at Castel Gandolfo, the summer residence of the pontiff.

I also served as acolyte to the Catholic cardinal of England at a High Mass he offered for the American military stationed in the UK.

Thought I had a religious vocation, but later decided that would be a bad idea...for me and the church. And then came Agnosticism.

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I don't particularly like Pius XII, a subject for another time. I don't trust what I read, but I also don't distrust all that either. Too much on the all that side of things.

Let me mention a book - by Branko Bokun, Spy in the Vatican. At the least a very good read.

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@ossobuco,

Quote:

Let me mention a book - by Branko Bokun, Spy in the Vatican. At the least a very good read.

I realize that you do not like to repeat yourself but could you possibly copy and paste what you found most astonishing about the Spy in the Vatican?

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What is your experience of being a Catholic?

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