The problem with the church in a nutshell

Would this have helped?

QFT. The wedding ceremony is like an afterthought of the mass.

And then the people who go through the motions without even giving it a thought. I was at a friend's wedding about 3 years ago. Same as you 10 or so years without going to a church and I listened to the priest's sermon which basically doomed the matrimony to fail. When I told my sister about it after mass, she didn't know what I was talking about as she didn't even pay attention to the sermon, and she I the one that regularly goes to church in my family.

I don't know if its the same in the US but in Mexico is just like that.

That's why I prefer to go to church weddings in southern revival tents. More energy and snake kissing.

Never been to a Catholic weeding. Do they still read the stuff about the approved sexual positions?

We had the big catholic mass ceremony, but the Priest that performed the ceremony was a really cool guy. During the ceremony he was pretty outspoken about allowing women and gays into the formal priesthood (he also spoke about how technically any Catholic is a "priest" and that Holy Order was more a dedication to God rather than bestowing "magic powers" as he called them) and made the ceremony about our marriage.

Best mass I had ever attended.

That's pretty refreshing. Kudos to him.

Man, if you think wedding masses are tough to sit through, try being a kid and having to sit through Christmas Eve Mass while you are almost literally bouncing off the walls with greedy excitement. What a great feeling though when it was over and I knew I was in the home stretch!

What, did I miss the point of Christmas or something?

My main issue? Sermons with 10 minutes worth of content that go on for 30 minutes or longer. Seriously, edit that shit and deliver a focused message. If MY mind is wandering, what do you think's going on with all of the teenagers who would rather be ANYWHERE else but there?

The age of long-winded sermons is over. Learn to adapt or you're going to lose an entire generation to apathy.

God, billylove is like some retarded version of Oskar from The Tin Drum, refusing to get any smarter, more clever, or funnier by sheer force of will alone. And I swear to christ, he gets dumber with every half-assed joke that wasn't funny in the fourth grade, and isn't funny now.

Shut the fuck up, billylove. Save your own soul, before it's too late.

A tad harsh, no?

It's ok I know Rath doesn't like me. It's cool, but Rath, I think you take shit way too seriously sometimes.

Seriously.

Rath is just upset today because he lost the office Pulitzer pool.

My problem with the church in a nutshell are all those colored shiny windows in our Cathedral. They always distract me from the sermon.

Why is an office Pulitzer pool making me lawl so much?

Woah, what the fuck dude? Way to throw a hissy fit for no apparent reason.

God, if you think that's bad, try going to your sister's wedding in Italy! Everything, literally EVERYTHING was better than the actual WEDDING ITSELF. I mean, I could hardly understand sermons when they were in English...

And if you think that's tasteless, well...I went to a funeral way back in high school, friend of mine's mother...and it just so happens the funeral happened to be on Easter Sunday...so of course it was way more about Jesus and Easter and we must never forget him, and less so about, ya know, the actual person who died.

Ugh, I should just never post on Mondays.

As a kid, I always spent the whole time in church daydreaming. I had a frequent daydream that Rawhead Rex would burst through the main window behind the pulpit and rampage throughout the building.

Our wedding was way different, you're in Orlando, maybe you should try a Spanish Mass.

Same, I'd just let my mind wander so I was off fighting fucking dragons or something.

Then puberty hit and I just sat there ogling every half decent looking girl and woman in the place and having impure thoughts while trying to hide my boner.

No Christian denominations have funerals on Sundays. I call Bullshit on that.

But with Electric Keyboards and Marimbas (I would assume).

The one I attended was in Mexico, in spanish, same bull only with a mariachi band singing Ave Maria.

Mechanical rituals are the VERY reason religion exists as a mass phenomenon.

Simple folks need to think that, by forcing themselves to perform repetitive, boring rituals every week or so, they somehow grant themselves some sort of approval, forgiveness and/or reward.
They don't seek deep understanding.
They want a "free pass" and need a "step by step" manual to follow in order to achieve it.

I understand this might seem oversimplistic, but it's really how I perceive it (at least, I repeat, as a *mass* phenomenon - no pun intended).

Actually there is obviously the Mass ritual, but I find the Anglo / english masses too boring as compared to the Spanish ones. And again, my wedding was not at all how you described it, you seem to think all Masses are celebrated exactly the same way in style.

Here in Chile (and most of Latin America) Wedding Masses are far more entertaining and less sytematic than you describe; Most priests actually sepdn time with the couple and work with them to incorporate elements the couple want to be features in the main sermon, and a big chunck of the ceremony is the personal wedding vows and the readings of the Bible by chosen members of their families, also a lot of times the priest actully is invited to the reception/party, and some of them party hard (well, in moderation, obviously...I actually disscused "Constantine" with a priest at a wedding reception over a bottle of scotch).
Still, it all depends on the type of ceremony the couple wants.

This is no accident. The aim of the Catholic mass is to be universal to the faithful throughout the world.

Spanish weddings are a blast. And the receptions tend to involve fire. Lots of it.

I may have everyone beat with having been to a Russian Orthodox ceremony, which by my calculations lasted about 4 and a quarter hours. They used a lot of props too; little sculptures, brass decanters, exotic D&D-looking pikes, etc. If you think the standard American Roman Catholic ceremony can get tedious, you can imagine the pewsores from this taste of orthodoxy.

I've been lucky, on the whole, though. With a ton of female cousins in a large Italian family, I've been to more weddings than I care to recount. Most went the traditional Roman Catholic route for no other reason than to simply keep the peace with the older generation in the family. Ultimately, the church end of things tended toward the shorter, with the aid of some fairly progressive priests.

My youngest cousin, the last girl relative to get married, got a big Roman Catholic Italian showstopper. The ceremony was a by the book affair(no pun intended) which included what seems like it should be a favorite of most posters in this thread - readings by members of the wedding party. Ugghhh.

One chick read some Song Of Songs stuff(which is fine, as it's a pretty lovely sentiment on it's own). The other, though, read some lengthy-ass turgid passage from the Book Of someone or other which culminated in the age old truth, 'A good wife makes her husband's day twice as long!'

Good Lord! Needless to say it became a running joke amongst my wife and cousins and their spouses for the remainder of the ceremony and reception.

A Church Mary Can Love

Here's a link to today's Kristof editorial. He writes about the two Catholic Churches that he sees. I think you'll enjoy it.

Church of England wedding are 45 minutes long and all about the Bride and Groom, It's why I agreed to have my wedding in a church* (even though I’m not religious). The wedding is seen as a celebration and is tailored to the couple.


* That and the fact that say what you want about religion a 14th century church is a damn impressive place to look at.

Yeah, everyone in this thread -- and in the other one too, for that matter -- should read this. If they can see the print from their high horse, that is.

I've been to two Catholic funerals on Sunday.

We have a winner.

Ha ha. What?

It's a nice senitment, but there's nothing startlingly revelatory about Kristof's points. At least not to anyone who's bothered to look at the history. Complaining about the lag in the progress of the church as a whole after all this time is pretty disingenuous anyway. Where were these folks for the last few hundred years? The gulf between St Peter's and the pews got there thanks to generations of lazy, dogmatic line toeing by the faithful at all levels.

I was tempted to bring up Maryknoll in the "Pope Sucks" thread but ultimately didn't bother. My grandmother got me involved with them at a very early age and though I left the church in what I considered a pretty complete manner, they continue to have a large impact on my understanding of a person's duty to community, both in the theological and secular senses.

They are, like most Roman Catholic endeavors, saddled with some fairly antiquated ideas that cast faith in a kind of penitentiary paradigm. But ultimately I still find them to be much closer to what I felt was the ideal Christian ethic before and after my break with the church. It's a troubling dichotomy. As with a good deal of Catholicism is general, there's the attendant whiff of arrogance*, often escalating into the mindset that people need forgiveness instead of deserving acceptance.

Truth be told, for all the good works of these (let's call them this in the sincerest sense of the word) crusaders, they're all still just a very small part of the structure. A healthy hand on a sick body.

As far as I'm concerned, I think the pope should be running around washing the dirty feet of pauper children, not being paraded about in a Mercedes clamshell like a giant unopened action figure. So, as you can see, by many folks current standards, I make for a lousy Roman Cathy.






*Here's a interesting comment posted to Kristof's blog entry on the Health Care bill which perfectly illustrates the vibe I'm talking about.

You smell that?

Honestly Rath - and I realise this is pretty personal with you - how exactly is people here finding church services wrote, boring and unable to connect to them personally or inspire them in any way getting on any kind of high horse?

Maybe you get something out of them many here don't. If so, I personally would be interested to hear what that is and why, rather than some tossed off snark - that smacks much more of a high horse to me.

Yeah, Rath, apologies for finding an organisation that has spent years covering up child abuse to be rather unpleasant. I'm sorry, I know it's your faith and all, but try to look at it from an outsider's perspective - having no personal stake in the Catholic church, I find the whole thing top-to-bottom to be deeply repulsive. That's not to say that it offers nothing at the community level, but the basic tenets and heirarchy of the church are horrible. if that's being on a high horse, well, saddle me up. I'll also admit to being baffled by seemingly intelligent individuals like yourself clinging to the church so stubbornly, when it's clear that the powers-that-be aren't particularly interested in making wholesale changes. Why not look for a more progressive, inclusive denomination of Christianity? And one that doesn't seem to be two steps away from adding "Thou shalt bugger young boys" as its official eleventh commandment?

Horses are for the faithful. We prefer to ride on goats or black cats.

Or motorbikes with machine guns mounted on the handlebars.

There's a great line from Homicide that sums up my feelings pretty accurately: "There are two types of Catholics; practicing and falling. I fell."

I haven't been a practicing Catholic for nearly four years, and I haven't stepped inside a Christian church in nearly half that. The first round of abuse scandals and election of the pope played a big part in that. Yet I got more spirituality out of Lamb and Last Temptation than all that time spent with the Chuch.

And everyone here makes good points, and I apologize (again) if I get frustrated from time to time. But to be honest, I wouldn't believe a lot of the things I do from a political standpoint if not for the Church, and my Jesuit education. I'll be the first to admit that those four years of high school were miserable and constricting, but I also learned a lot about myself, and what I believed in. I protested the School of the Americas and went to work for the Catholic Worker Farms in West Virginia. (Even though they're politically complex figures, I have a lot of admiration for Dorothy Day and Archbishop Romero.) Not once during those trips were we asked to preach or push our religion on others. That continued beyond my high school years into college and my time with the YMCA, which began almost six months after I broke with the church.

And even though I was a pro-choice women-yay abuse-bad guy before I started getting mixed up in the Catholic church, I give a lot of credit to those years for what I learned during them. Although it remains funny to me that what I learned was why I left.

Great line and that show is still one of the ten best of the last two decades.

I can completely relate to what you're saying here. It's exactly what percolated in my mind for years after I left. Right down to the ability to find the spiritual more easily through the humanities.

I can honestly say that my first and most crucial exposure of it all came from my uncles two album set of Jesus Christ Superstar. Like some child watching Barney, through catchy songs with lyrics I still wouldn't fully get for years, I was introduced to something that wasn't old, dusty, stiff and monotonous. It was alive and, and as unctiously cliche as this sounds, it spoke to me. And more importantly than anything else, it was relevant. To say my understanding of my faith and the decades of thought and convictions concerning the religion in it's "organized" sense can be traced back to a hippy rock opera sounds ludicrous when spelled out. Nonetheless, it is the case.

The same uncle (who went to both Drew and Harvard for divinity and theology, yet ended up quite successful as computer programmer in New York!) was responsible for introducing me to the Kazantzakis book, which did for my faith what Sagan's Cosmos did for my intellectual humanism.

That it gets you worked up is understandable. You may be able to imagine the teeth gnashing I go through not just reading and discussing this on the internet, but in decades of routine loggerheading with family and friends scattered across the spectrum.

Outside of weddings, I'm pretty sure I've not been in a church properly longer than you've been alive. Amazingly though, when I am in there, I don't squrim or feel uncomfortable (though I always joke with my wife that the regular parishioners can sense the outsider in their midst). I actually love taking in the stunning artistry of the windows, or the smell (all churches have that 'church smell') will trigger memories of going to church with my grandmother. The celebration of a faith is always interesting and always genuinely beautiful. Whether you're talking about the paganism of antiquity, the western Judeo-Christian tangle or the estoric eastern ones. Even the far flung cultures like the Dogon who know more about astronomy through their faith (which we call mythology!) than the average American high schooler.

(One thing that's still cringe-inducing, the settings for all the liturgical songs are uniformly terrible. It's like a musical version of flagellation. I'm sure God wouldn't mind if you kifed a melody from some gentle musical number now and then.)

Frankly, I thought that I had worked most of this out of my system by now, but the constant recurrence of it even here on a web film forum has reminded me how much I still retain and, yes, even what I miss.

While my wedding priest was a breath of fresh air (see above), this weekend we met the priest who would be doing our daughters baptism.

For our "new" church, we have to take a baptism class prior to scheduling our daughter's baptism. The class was scheduled to be a hour long and discuss the role of baptism and the procedure. Everyone had to register at least two weeks in advance or in the secretaries words "they would not be admitted." Just from that alone, I knew this was going to be one of "those" churches.

Class was supposed to begin at 10:15. As a group of 9 couples and 1 mother whose husband had to work, waited, the priest, who never introduced himself, walked by and quipped "we'll start when I'm finished making the coffee, but go inside and set up a circle around the piano."

As we go inside as set up the chairs, many of us while our children in tow, we set-up and make small talk, the priest, who has a registration list and walked by us in the hall and says "coffee is almost ready, here are some cookies and the cups," while laying out 5 cookies and 4 ceramic coffee cups.

10 minutes later, the priest returns, as some parents who are now walking their fussy children around the room, slowly picks out a cookie, pours himself some coffee and then leaves to get creamer. Fortunately for us, our daughter has is enthralled but the goofy Knight of Columbus banner hanging in the room, so she is fine. Other parents, are now pulling out bottles, rattles and anything else to deal calm the kids (all newborns as this is a baptism class).

Finally, at 10:50, the priest begins. He does 5 minutes on what baptism means, with a weird tangent into Roman history, but then goes on by saying that it's ok if the kids are fussy during the ceremony. "The United States has lost it's way. Everyone is so worried about being impolite, but everyone has children, well every good Christian. Unfortunately, in this culture of death, and I can't say this at Mass, or I'll get in trouble, but in this culture of death married couples don't live by God's law. They pervert their marriage, by 'planning children.' Let me tell you, planning children, through abortion, contraception or deciding only to 'express their love' at times where they cannot get pregnant is mortal, I repeat mortal sin. Now we Catholics are all sinners. [non-ironically] We are sinners who constantly sin and need redemption. However, this culture of death in the United States, perverts marriage. It's as perverted as gouging your wife's eye out because you want to be with her always. That's not what always wanting to be with someone means. It's a perversion, like planning families. It goes against God's will."

At this point, my jaw has dropped. The room is dead silent and the Priest's concludes by saying "if I don't see you at mass the day of your child's baptism, I will not perform it. Now there are some couple's here with 'irregular marriages.' Let me tell you now, you'll have to fix these before I'll perform the baptism. That means enrolling your spouse into a class to convert, if he or she isn't Catholic. Alright, here are the couples I need to speak with about that..."

And that was it. 5 minutes on baptism, 10 minutes of why I was going to hell and 30 on coffee and cookies. The fact that this guy's views are harsh by even the Churches standards, freaks me out. But the baptism is scheduled.

I would've left at "The United States has lost its way" and followed it up with a visit to the Bishop.

Yikes, that sucks.

That is one of the problems with going to Church. The Priests can seem like perfectly nice people, then they'll turn around and say something nasty. The problem is these guys aren't married, aren't in a relationship, and have no kids, but they're telling you how to run your life. It's one of the reasons I stopped going to Church.

The priest was a relatively younger guy, which was even more scary. The psychology behind this dude is fascinating. What drove him to be such a hardline Catholic? Was it family, was it the Church, was he just born with a complex.

He was by far the most extreme Catholic priest I've ever encountered. He also came off as one of the most insecure priests, I've ever met. That it was easier to logic through an extremist stance than delve deeper and perhaps discover a more nuanced view.

As a Catholic, are you stuck with whatever church happens to own your block, like a school district?

If so, then I'd wager it's time to consider how much Catholicism really means to you.

You should have asked him if he meant that by "sinner", he meant that he acknowledges that he'll want to sodomize every little boy he can get his hands on...

Seriuously, it's this type of freak that drove me the fuck away from religion. I've met a couple of cool priest, with moderate views, but they're sadly the exception.