by Dymphna Morrissey

Created on: January 06, 2011

I love being a Catholic.  I think it’s the best religion because it makes me happiest.  Some people will immediately laugh at the assertion because being Catholic is normally not associated with being happy.  Catholics are usually considered guilty people who are sexually repressed.

It’s true that there are some guilty sexually repressed Catholics out there, but most people nowadays are Catholic in name only.  Catholics follow the rules of the church about as well as the general population.  Thus, guilty sexually repressed Catholics are quite the exception.  In any case, sexually repressed is not good even for a Catholic because it implies a person who hides from God and himself.  In that sense, even an openly sexual person can be sexually repressed.  Though we don’t live in Victorian times, in some ways we are as repressed as the Victorians.  The pendulum only swings in the opposite direction.

When people poke fun at being Catholic, it’s because they don’t understand Catholicism.  They think it’s all rules, regulations, and rituals, and sex under extremely restricted circumstances.  But that’s because they see it in the spirit of fear.  When things are done in the spirit of love, one can only conclude that Catholicism has the fullness of truth.  Some people become “lapsed Catholics” because they saw only the rules and regulations and turned away.  It’s easy to understand why lapsed Catholics leave.  The church can seem cold and for whatever reason, they do not receive the fullness of the Catholic faith, with its message of love that has conquered the world.  They do not see this because the church is run by imperfect humans who have destroyed the lives of people who put their faith in it.  But Christ still resides in the church since he gave the keys to Peter two thousand years ago.

These Catholics probably saw the sacrament of confession as an impossible burden.  Confess my sex sin to an old man who supposedly never had sex?  Never!  I remember crying before my first confession when I was nine years old.  Then once a month every Saturday my mother would tell me to go to confession.  The whole day I would feel nervous in the pit of my stomach as the hours ticked by until four o’clock.  Then I would walk down to the church to go to confession with sweaty palms.  For some reason,

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