by Kimberly K

Created on: July 01, 2008

Before I can discuss what it means to me to be Catholic, I first have to address what it does not mean to be Catholic. To be Catholic means you should not judge someone because they are down on their luck. It does not mean that you should kick children out of the Catholic school because the parish is low on money, and the family is having a hard time paying their school tuition due to tough financial times. Being Catholic does not mean that a priest should hold onto teacher contracts until the second to last day of school, and then not renewing one of the contracts because of a personal conflict with that teacher. It also shouldn't mean that the parish priest decides to cut teacher hours and salaries because the parish is in debt. It also does not mean that a child should feel that he cannot be an altar server because of snotty treatment by the priest (due to a personal conflict with the child's parent). I will admit that these are things I have either directly experienced over the past month or have seen others experience. It is also not something I am used to from the Catholic Church.

I was born and raised in the Catholic Church. I received all my sacraments at the same parish, and my kids were all baptized in the same parish. I have had nothing be love for my faith, and wanted nothing more than to teach it to my children. We enrolled our eldest in the parish school and had a great experience. She even wanted to be a nun for awhile. Four years ago we moved to another city, and thus a new parish. At first we were very impressed with both the school and parish. The people were nice, the principal and teachers were great. Then, this past year we fell on hard times. We had a hard time paying our tuition, we talked to the principal who was very kind, and then to the woman in the church office who does the billing. We communicated with her off and on about our situation, and didn't hear much from her. Then, in May we received a letter stating that our kids would not be enrolled for the next school year due to our failure to pay our remaining balance. I called and left a voicemail for her, and I e-mailed her as well, explaining to her that we were having a hard time even holding onto our house let alone pay bills. We wanted to pay I told her, but I just didn't know how to go about it. We'd already borrowed a lot of money from our families and we had nowhere else to go. I begged her to help us come up with a solution that would be satisfactory to both of us. Her response

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