A Catholic family lived in my neighborhood for several years. They had a bunch of kids who all called their dad “sir”, went to church multiple times a week, and ate fish every Friday. Those things definitely were not the norm of my world.
Maybe what made the difference here was that we have a seperate catholic school system. So any catholic kids would’ve gone to a seperate public school, and sometimes a seperate hs as well.
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I think that was probably the case when I was growing up, because the Catholic neighbors sent their kids to the private local Catholic school (K-8 and high school). School uniforms seemed weird to me too.
I was first aware of Catholics the day 2/3 of my kindergarten class showed up with dirty faces.
But they also all went to CCD every Wednesday afternoon. They also had bigger families than the rest of my classmates.
I remember asking someone (maybe a babysitter) what the difference was between Catholics and Christians, and she confused the hell out of me by answering that to be Catholic you just had to be born Catholic, but to be a true Christian you had to believe, or something like that. Because i had thought Catholics were a subset of Christians, and she implied the opposite.
That would be a pretty snarky explanation from someone who doesn’t think very highly of Catholicism. Of course Catholics are a subset of Christians, sheesh.
She may not have thought highly of Catholics, but she wasn’t being snarky. She also grossly misjudged her audience (me) because I was just confused.
In retrospect, I think she WAS a Catholic, and was ignoring the existence of non-Catholic Christians, and just judging some of her own flock harshly.
There were a lot of Catholics in my neighborhood. Enough that it wouldn’t have been weird for a teen-age Catholic to think of Catholics as normative Christians. In contrast, as the only Jew in my class, I grew up feeling I was part of a minority.
Growing up, it was odd in my kid worldview to meet people who were not catholic.
In Lake Wobegon where I grew up, you were either Catholic or Lutheran. I knew other religions existed, but I don’t think I knew anybody actively practicing any of them, just some older people who stopped going to church and would wait out in the car while their spouse attended.
…and all the kids were above average…
I used to joke there were 3 kinds of people: Catholics, Heretics, and Heathens.
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I feel downright cosmopolitan compared to y’all. I met my first atheist in 6th grade. He was obviously an atheist because his parents were atheists but by that point I was at least moderately aware all 3 Abrahamic religions and at least a few of the various Protestant denominations, even if I hadn’t learned much about them.
whoa, we KNEW about these others. I mean, how else would we make fun of them?
I knew about other denominations fairly young bc we went to all their Vacation Bible Schools in the summer. But there was only one Catholic girl in my class and it never occurred to me that most other Catholics went to private school. Was it cheaper than it is now? How did everyone seem to afford it. Even my friend who was poorer than poor with a bunch of kids went to Catholic school.
My family had 5 kids and we were always “the family with a bunch of kids”. Guess we should have been Catholic.
Yeah, like the others I KNEW lots of other religions existed even beyond the Abrahamic religions., I just didn’t know a lot about their practices, nor did I actually know hardly any adherents.
There was a Catholic HS in SLC that our HS competed against sometimes.
I think many parochial K-8 schools are pretty inexpensive for members of the Catholic church. And I know in Cincinnati where I grew up a lot of the elite Catholic schools had/have scholarships. Both academic and need-based. I’m not sure if you have to be Catholic to qualify for those.
But they’re getting a lot of financial support from the church, so they don’t have to charge anywhere near what it costs. I think the top high schools do have a high sticker price for the rich non-Catholics sending their kids there for the academics, but then poor Catholics don’t actually pay that.
When visiting a new town, the method used to tell a Catholic church from a Lutheran church was the presence of a sign advertising Wednesday night Bingo.
Catholic schools were subsidized by Bingo.
Nor are they the norm of most Catholic families.
The first time I heard about Ash Wednesday was in college, when I got ashed. College is a weird time.
I went to a Catholic k-8 in a small town. They have their tuition published: roughly 4k for the first kid, 2 k for the second kid, and any kids beyond that are basically free. That sounds cheap compared to what I think the Catholic Church’s in my suburb probably charge. It’s about double what tuition was when I was there a few decades ago.
I’d say about 80-90% of the Catholic kids in my town were in the Catholic school, that is based on the public school kids that happened to join us for major Catholic milestones.
The school currently has about half the k-9 attendance from when I was there. There have been at least a few negative headlines against the Catholic church since then…
Obviously didn’t watch Penny Dreadful (excellent show)
There is such a thing as a vertical mouse.
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