Superstition, the Catholic Handshake, and Catholic 101

So I adopted this little superstitious thing, this Catholic thing and soon, I asked my then-boyfriend if he would take me to one of his “services”. And he did. I just sat and stood and kneeled when everybody else did and he had a book, called a Missalette, that he flipped through to know what was going on. I couldn’t keep up. Even when he would point out the page number, by the time I found it, they were half-way through whatever the response was. He knew what was going on by some instinct, and that was my first inkling that there was a “Catholic Handshake”.

That first Mass was almost surreal. The pews were made of oak, the Altar was marble, the glass was beautifully stained. There was so much to see that I’m certain my neck was aching when we left from all the twisting around I did. And the Priest wore a dress, for heaven’s sake and the people talked to him from the pews! Not “Amen, brother!” like I’d heard in my Grandmother’s Baptist church, but responses that they all said together, in unison. And they all knew what was going on and I didn’t.

As we left that morning, they handed us some papers and my boyfriend, good Catholic that he was, didn’t bother to read them. As it turned out, it was the parish bulletin and I read the thing and noticed a tiny little notation that said, “Interested in learning more about the Catholic Faith? Come to our first RCIA meeting on Tuesday.”

So I packed up my courage and went. There was no pressure, I was thankful to find and they seemed nice enough. And I heard the stories of the others who were there and we all had different reasons – one lady was baptized Catholic but her parents left the Church when she was young and she was unchurched; another thought it was about time because her husband and kids were Catholic; several others had varying reasons or things they wanted to know. Me? I just wanted to learn more about my boyfriend.

After that first class, I shared with my Mom where I had been and she nearly had an apoplectic fit! She immediately began feeding me things that she knew about the Catholic Church. I tried to assure her that they didn’t worship Mary (because I’d never seen my boyfriend do anything like that, but I was feeling a little weird about the seven Hail Mary’s I’d been praying), but she came out with other stuff I’d never heard of, like cannibalism, and that Catholics had added books to the Bible and that they burned Bibles and killed people and tried to suppress The Truth.

Fear spurred me to go back to RCIA the following week, armed with all these new objections. I HAD to get my soon-to-be husband OUT of the Catholic Church! That was all there was to it!

Much to my surprise, the Facilitators of RCIA answered my questions patiently, and with great clarity. And they started to make sense! And every week, when I came home and called my Mother, she became nearly frantic with concern. She piled on new objections each week and I took them back to RCIA and the RCIA answers always made better sense, to tell you the truth. I was honestly scared to death.

One night, there was a guest speaker and the topic of conversation was Creation versus Evolution. The man sat there and droned on and on about how the world could have been created in a literal six days but it was unlikely. And that God could have hit a Big Button and banged the world into existence. Or he could even have created man from monkeys or apes. Any scenario was appropriate for belief within the Catholic Church – as long as one properly understood that God is our Creator and everything we have and everything we are is because of Him. But that all humanity came from one man named Adam and one woman named Eve was set in stone.

Now can you imagine the panic that rattled upon my heart at the very IDEA that Genesis 1:1-11 wasn’t literal? Or that God might not have destroyed the WHOLE earth, but just Noah’s corner of it? Or that Jonah might NOT have really been swallowed by a whale?

Well, I did what any self-respecting, true Protestant girl would do: I ran like HELL! Literally, out of the room and out the door I went, my fiancé in hot pursuit, along with the 80-year-old Priest. “Whatsa matter with you?” he wanted to know. I could hardly articulate how appalled I was. They were talking about the Bible here, and saying it wasn’t true! No, they weren’t, he assure me, and if I wanted to believe in a literal six-day Creation account, I certainly could!

I’m afraid, however, that I just couldn’t take it. This, added to my Mother’s constant, long-distance conniptions, had me heading out the door – for good. And my Cafeteria Catholic future husband had no problem with following me. He continued to be a Catholic In Name Only.

It was official: I was a Catholic 101 dropout.