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Recently I answered another Quora question on religion. While the answer dredged up another hurtful memory, it also seemed to resonate with numerous Quora members. So, for the pleasure of my many readers I will report my answer here, with additional bonus commentary.
My answer relates how a Catholic Priest once compared being a prostitute to a Protestant, knowing I was attending his Mass and knowing I was a Lutheran.
The Quora Question
The Quora question posted was “What did you pastor say or do to make you quite his church?”
Not a pastor, but a Catholic Priest.
I’m Lutheran, and was a non-practicing non-church goer when I married my first wife. She was a devout Catholic who attended Mass every Sunday. As her husband I would always go with her.
We moved a lot during our first ten years of marriage and so changed churches. I routinely attended services with her and began to feel very comfortable with Catholics and Priests. Enough that I started seriously thinking about converting.
Well, by this time we had settled down in one small Mississippi town, and had been attending the same small church for several years. I really liked the Priest, had become friends with other members of the parish. I started to discuss converting and my friends were enthusiastic about supporting me. Then, we got a new priest.
This new priest was not nearly as welcoming as the previous. Knowing I was not Catholic but attended mass every Sunday, this priest would start his sermons reminding the congregation that only Catholics were allowed to take communion in a Catholic service. Then he’d go into some homily which included reminding us of “Catholic Law.” Completely devoid of anything about tolerance, love, or God’s mercy.
I started feeling very uncomfortable in the services.
Then, one Sunday, this priest started his sermon with a joke, the punchline being that being a prostitute was preferable to being a Protestant.
The entire congregation laughed, and several people sitting near me looked at me with a smirk. After mass ended, several people who I thought were friends smirked at me and walked away saying nothing.
I never went back to that church. My wife and I attended mass at some other churches further away, but I never felt comfortable at those locations. Eventually, I just stopped attending mass and my wife went alone. A couple of years later we divorced for reasons other than our different flavors of Christianity. But, not attending services together was a nail in the coffin ending our marriage.
The Not-Joke
I didn’t publish the joke that Priest told, but one of the Quora readers did post a link. Here is a version of the joke, stemming from Ireland:
The Mother Superior in the convent school was chatting with her young charges and she asked them what they wanted to be when they grew up.
A twelve year-old said, “I want to be a prostitute.”
The Mother Superior fainted dead away on the spot. When they revived her, she raised her head from the ground and gasped, “What did you say?”
The young girl shrugged. “I said I want to be a prostitute.”
“A prostitute!” the Mother Superior said. “Oh, praise Sweet Jesus! I thought you said you wanted to be a Protestant.”
Cite: Steemite
Yes, that priest was Irish, and I’m sure in the proper place and time I might have even laughed if he related it. But, coming from a Priest during mass, at the pulpit, at the start of a sermon, that “joke” was hurtful and divisive.
As an additional commentary, my wife and I wound up divorced just about two years after this event. I couldn’t help but observe that, had I followed through and converted to Catholicism at the time, I would have converted right about the time of my divorce. One of the many Catholic-interpreted “Laws of God” is that a divorced person is not allowed to take communion (unless the marriage is Annulled). So, I would have spent two years in the rituals of transformation, only to once again become an outcast in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
Final Commentary
I can’t help thinking that the Catholic Church has become a hollow institution. The practitioners have forgotten that religion at it’s best should be about love, tolerance, and respect for all creatures great and small.
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Response
My answer has already received 10.7K views, 390 upvotes, and one share. It appears I struck a chord with many readers.
