| | Like I’ve said a few times here, I was born and raised in Southern Louisiana. Obviously we’re a little different from the rest of the South when it comes to religion. There were a few Baptists around with a couple other Protestant churches but by and large everyone else is Catholic, my family included.
I spent my grade school years going to different Catholic and public schools; Catholic when my family could afford it and public when we couldn’t…we couldn’t in high school. Academically, there really wasn’t a question about which was better, there is a small Vietnamese community there and many of those parents (dedicated Buddhists, I was friends with a couple) sent their children to Catholic school simply because it was so much better. Now one of my friends who went to a Catholic high school recounted a story to me about how one of his teachers was arrested after a fight in a bar. I’m not too sure how they handle things like that in Minnesota but it’s not that big of a deal where I’m from, if no one is hurt you’re basically just taken back to the station to sober up and then they let you go home. In any event, the school didn’t fire him but had him apologize to the entire school the following Monday over the PA system. The only possible ‘violence’ I can think of that ever happened with a teacher is that in elementary school, if a student keeps misbehaving the principle will come to the classroom and paddle the student. Now before you start pointing fingers, public schools did the same thing, as far as I know still do. Maybe that’s just a Southern thing.
So even though I’ve been an atheist for years, I still look favorably toward Catholic schools, especially as compared to public schools. They don’t put up with multicultural BS, there are no fights in the halls, and the students are there to learn, not count the hours until they can get home. Of course there is the inevitable class on Catholicism but looking back it wasn’t really that bad. I’m sure that at some other schools it might be very different but at this one, Catholicism was treated less like a religion and more like a subject to be studied. Most of the time, the only prayer I heard during the day was during the morning announcements, again not a big deal.
I think your analysis of Catholicism is mostly accurate but it does leave a misguided impression on what the Catholic community is like. The way you put it, a person should run for the hills every time they see a Catholic priest. For example, never in my life was I told I could go to hell by a Catholic priest, and I’ve known several. The two times I’ve been to a non-Catholic church (a mega non-denominational with an aunt and a Baptist one with a girlfriend) I was told several times I could go hell because I was “insert sin”. Actually when I went to that Baptist church in North Louisiana, I was pretty much told to get the hell out after they figured out I was Catholic whereas the Catholic Church I usually went to pretty much began every mass welcoming people from other faiths.
I left the Church because there is no such thing as God; not because (at the time) I had a problem with the Catholic community or discipline in it. Granted I was raised in the Church so my view is biased but I could have turned out a lot worse. In getting their son educated my parents had two choices; private Catholic school with an excellent education and moral values or public schools where I would receive a mediocre education at best and where subjectivist morality ruled. I’ve been to both and there is no comparison, kids need to go to a school where they’re told, “This is right and this is wrong…Christopher Columbus was one of the greatest men in history…tuck in that shirt.” A school that really celebrated reason, Western Civilization, and taught values based on those ideas didn’t exist. I wish my parents had an alternative, I wish most parents had one now but as my uncle used to say “If wishes were all horses, we’d all ride”
(Edited by Clarence Hardy
on 5/23, 7:49am)
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