I am Roman Catholic now and was raised Roman Catholic.
My entrance into the church began at Baptism when the priest refused to baptize me with the name my parents gave me because it wasn't a saint's name. So to the Church I am Catherine although no one else knows me by that name. My sister was also baptized by a different name too because her name didn't correspond to a known saint. She is known to the Church as Mary. My brothers where given saints names except the youngest but by then the rules had relaxed and he was baptized by the same name as the one on his birth certificate.
The Church has changed a great since I was a child. The biggest change is that the mass is now celebrated in English here and the native language of peoples living in other countries. Finally, I can understand what is going on all the time. When I was a child, I didn't understand any of it. The Church wasn't child friendly. As I grew, I learned more and more but still didn't understand Latin. We went to religion classes on Sunday. We were taught by nuns who would travel from the next bigger town where they worked in the hospital. They wore their habits then and kept their hands hidden in their sleeves so all we saw was their faces. We hear so many stories about how mean nuns were but I didn't find that to be so. I thought they were very kind and gentle maybe because they worked in the hospital with the sick or maybe they liked to work with children who were healthy.
We lived less than a block from the church and were told very often that our grandfather and great uncle designed and built the church. We thought of it as ours and we loved the sidewalks that were in the front and the side. They were very smooth and the one of the side had a downhill slope that was great for speeding down on our rollerskates. It had a good grade and a sharp corner at the bottom. After skating on that section of sidewalk, we were ready for the Roller Derby. We would take that corner at high speed and go back to the front of the church to do it again.
There was also a small grove of very strange trees behind the rectory(Priest's house). They were green and gnarled and only about six feet high. They were strong enough for us to climb and sit in the branches. Behind these trees, were grape vines. We would ask the priest if we could pick them. He answered in the affirmative. We hurried home to get our wagon and picked all the ripe ones and brought them home. They were concord grapes which are different from the grapes we buy now at the supermarket. They had seeds and only the skin tasted good. We had purple tongues for days.
My brothers and cousins served on the altar so they were there on days other than Sunday for practice or cleaning. One day my brother and cousin decided to go into the confessional and pretend one was the priest and the other one took the part of the penitent. My cousin was the penitent and was loudly proclaiming all manner of sin. My brother was sitting in the middle section where the priest normally sat. He had left the door open and happened to look out into the church and saw the priest walking toward them and tried to hush his cousin but he was on a roll and kept confessing until the priest walked up to him and opened the door. They were given a sermon about respecting the sacraments and let go home. I don't know for a fact but I think the priest had a hard time not laughing.
Another day, my sister and I were singing in the choir. The church had a choir loft in the rear of the church and when we looked out we could see all of the pews and the altar while the people in the pews couldn't see all of the altar because of the altar rail and the communion cloth which hung to the floor and blocked their viewing the whole altar. At one point in the mass, I saw the priest motion to my brother who was kneeling on the right side of the altar. My brother wasn't understanding at first and then he suddenly nodded his head and dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the other side of the altar and popped up. I have often wondered what the congregation thought because they couldn't see him crawl. All they saw was him kneeling on the right side of the altar suddenly disappear and reappear on the left side of the altar.
Another brother didn't like to go to church. He was only a toddler but could talk quite clearly. Again we were up in the choir loft. This little brother was being very loud and disruptive during mass and our Dad picked him up and was carrying him out and our little brother said so all could hear,"I'm glad you don't like this place either."
I was married in the same church that I attended as a child. I went to a lot of funerals in that church. I went to a lot of baptisms in that church. I still think it is the most beautiful church.
I wrote about the funny things that happened because God gave us a sense of humor and we should not waste one of God's gifts. There were many deeply spiritual moments but they are not times I wish to share.
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