what and why

I was raised Catholic, in a small and very old-fashioned family.  I created this blog to explore the attitudes and beliefs that I was given by my grandmother and my mother and father, as a result of their membership and fervent belief in this particular religion.  Now that I'm 31, and far removed from my unusual childhood, I hope to finally start understanding some of these attitudes and beliefs, and how they've affected my life.

Some of the stories and recollections will seem extremely far-fetched to many of you, but I will not be embellishing them whatsoever.  They are strange and anachronistic, yes, but so is Polish Catholicism, and so is everyday life in the blighted Pennsylvania mountain town where I grew up.  My mother truly did have 'baseball cards' of saints wedged into the mirror frame in the bathroom, where she could see them regularly... and, presumably, say little prayers to them as she went about her day.

Maybe this will be more of a meditation upon cultural differences, of Back East versus Out West.  The families I see in the small California town where I now live, they seem to be from another century when compared to my memories of childhood.  Children here in Northern California, they ride bikes to swimming holes and play outdoors all summer long.  They laugh a lot, and they seem unselfconsciously happy about life.

Myself and my schoolmates, we weren't raised this way.  Almost everyone I knew in grade school (where we were trooped off to the nearby church once a month, as a class) was severely sheltered by her or his parents, and didn't play outdoors, or even walk to school.  The general atmosphere for us was one of fear, of great and terrible danger that lurked right around the corner, somehow held in check only by saying prayers, doing little rituals with rosaries, and similar weird stuff.

See, when you grow up Catholic, you grow up believing that you are a bad, flawed person, and that the only cure for this is to pray a lot and apologize to god for your almost-daily sins.  Telling a white lie was a sin.  Hitting another kid was a sin.  Feeling resentful about having to say these prayers was a sin.  Resenting your authoritarian teachers (some of them elderly nuns!) was a sin.  There were endless amounts of sins.

Before I get carried away trying to explain it all, I'll simply say thanks for reading this meditation on Catholicism and childhood.  If you have anything to ask, or share, please feel free to do so.  I find it amazing that children are still being taught this system of beliefs, here in an era of humanity that offers so many wonderful social developments and advancements in communication.