Growing up Catholic
My Dad was raised Catholic – my mother converted so they could be married in the little log cabin chapel on the campus of Notre Dame. How do you get more Catholic than that? What follows are the benefits, side effects and catastrophic results of being raised Catholic.
I can recite Mass verbatim. I try very hard not to go to Mass, having averaged once a year for the last, oh, twenty years, and can still recite Mass. Why? Because when you endure 12 years of Catholic school, you go to Mass every Friday as a school and then every Sunday with your parents.
You can lie to nuns with a straight face and eventually become numb to the eternal damnation to Hell for lying to a nun.
You get to witness Father Balash, quite possibly the hottest priest to set foot in a Church, get so pissed off at your 8th grade class that he holds you after Mass, swears at you and even throws the Bible down on the floor during his tirade at the classes behavior during Mass. You will also wait for the lightening bolt to strike him down for swearing and throwing down the Bible in the Church.
You will be dismayed when Father Balash gets busted for having a girlfriend and gets transferred out of the parish.
You will learn how to coordinate your LL Bean sweaters that range in color from mustard to purple to the standard Catholic school girl uniform Blue and Red with tights of the same color. Yes, really. I had a pair of tights to match every sweater I owned. It was hot, especially with the green plain uniform skirt.
You will learn how to roll your uniform skirt the minute you walk out the door in the morning, just shy of detention length so the guys can admire your 17 year old thighs in those hot tights.
You will learn in your Home Ec class that yes, girls have found themselves pregnant while attending your high school but that they were “sent away” and welcomed back after they had the babies…and that having an abortion will result in your suspension. And birth control is a sin against God – yea ok, but having a kid at 16 is such a blessing.
You will learn how to argue with your Senior English teacher and get him to give you an A on your Senior Term paper that you are submitting to all of the colleges to which you are applying. Never mind that you wrote it on Satansim as a True Religion. It was written well, it was properly bibliographied and damnit, you are NOT submitting a B paper to your prospective colleges just because your almost-a-priest goof of an English teacher doesn’t agree with your thesis. And yes, I did get him to change it to an A from a B.
You will wander the halls and get an impromptu lecture on safe sex from your boyfriend’s physics teacher. You’ll learn a few years later said teacher had a pill-addiction.
You will learn how to strategically hide liquor in your purse, weed in your locker and then say many prayers to God when the entire school is evacuated into the church next door and you see cops with dogs all over the place. You will practically piss your pants with your best friend as you wait for the stupid dogs to find the weed in your locker and wonder how you’re going to explain this one to your parents until you find out that the dogs and cops were there because of a bomb threat, not a drug bust. You will then start leaving said weed in the glove compartment of your Geo Tracker. Ok so that has nothing to do with being Catholic but it was a pretty tense and funny moment, mostly because we were also high at the time.
You will find yourself faced with a major decision at the Senior Retreat – a weekend getaway with a group of fellow seniors, for spiritual guidance and bonding with your Catholic classmates. Upon being tipped over in your canoe on the lake, spending over an hour in the water on a cool September day and freezing your tits off and finally getting rescued and taken to shore in your soaking wet white t-shirt, your aging Geometry teacher will promptly take off his t-shirt for you to put on. You will have two choices in your shivering mind. Face the lake – and the 20 boys anxiously awaiting a peek of you in your bra, or face the teacher and rip off your soaking t-shirt and put on his. You will face the teacher, ignore the look of shock (apparently he thought you’d go into the woods or something to change) and earn a year’s worth of passes out of any class you want from said teacher. After that, even the librarian who witnessed said event started calling me Mr. Nally’s girlfriend.
Growing up Catholic will teach you the art of guilt. As such, you will find you can guilt adults into anything. When you and your best friend are shit-faced at the high school Halloween dance and are refused re-entry to said dance after you go to the car to take a few swigs of Southern Comfort, you will proceed to tell your Sociology teacher how drunk you are and that by refusing us entrance and making us leave, we will die on the drive home and it will be on his conscious for the rest of his life. He will then follow you all the way home to make sure you get home ok. Take our keys, tell our parents, suspend us? Nope! Just making sure our deaths aren’t on HIS head!
Growing up Catholic will, by the time you are 18 years old, make you a non-practicing Catholic, yet still able to recite every word of Mass 17 years later and make you say a quick prayer every time you’re forced to enter a church: “please don’t let me burst into flames upon crossing the threshold” because you have already been damned to an eternity in Hell for being a drinking, partying, smoking, vindictive, evil slut who turned her back on the Church years ago [Catholic guilt never truly goes away]. But have faith – I haven’t spontaneously combust yet!
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