Depression Sucks

As the title says, depression sucks.  I’m stuck in a spiral, out of control, everything is getting worse world where no one even notices that I’m hurting or refuses to acknowledge it or want me to hide everything I feel because making them feel bad is the unforgivable sin.

I’m too fat.  Jeans I only bought two months ago have become too small.  I seem to gain weight even though I don’t eat bad food full of sugar.

I’m so bad that I deserve to go to Hell just like my mother and the traditionalists always say.  I starting to really believe it.  I must not be lovable or likable and I certainly don’t have any talents or gifts.  I’m just a useless, worthless, waste of space that deserves to die.  People would be much happier if I was gone.   I’m not even a person.  I don;t matter.  No one notices or cares if I’m here or not.  People say God does but it He cares about everyone so I’m not even a blip on the radar.  People say they at I’m doing this for attention, that I stay this way because I like being a victim.  No I fucking to do not want to be this way.

I want to be loved,  I want to be good at something.  I want to be a person.  I want to be cared for.  I want to be noticed and remember.  I want to go to Heaven not be damned to Hell.  I want to be special.  I want to be the go to person.  I want to be perfect.  I want to be more than a stupid mental illness. I want not to cry anymore.  I want to have actual dreams that actually come true rather than having to squash them in order to make everyone else happy or because I always make bad decisions.  I want to make good decisions.  I want to be thin.  I want to be pretty instead of the real ugly idiot that I am.  I want to be more.  I don’t want to have to settle for scraps.  I want to be free.  I don’t want to be like my mother.  I want to be me whoever that is.  I want to be a real woman not the fake woman everyone else wants me to be.  I don’t want to be the boy my parents wanted and so when they were disappointed that I wasn’t they abused and neglected me.  I don’t want to be abused or hurt.  I want to be accepted for who I am.  I want traditionalists to shut up and get lost.  I want to be something.  I want to be a federal agent.  I want people to take me seriously.  I want people to stop ignoring me.  I want people to acknowledge that a single woman is not a heresy or bad person or a failure or not a person because she isn’t married or has kids or what not.  I don’t want to keep eating emotionally.  I don’t want to be fat.  I want to be real.

 

 

 

There’s Something About Mary (with some help from a Fransiscan Brother)

Until a few days ago and a few post by Brother JR on CAF, I did not have a good outlook or view of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Now, I didn’t have a problem with her being the mother of Jesus or being ever virgin or conceived without sin.  I understand and accept all the Church’s teachings on Mary.

I did have a problem with people who claimed the Rosary was a “magic cure-all” and that just praying it once would fix all the problems in your life and you would be so holy and perfect afterwards.  I am not a big fan of the Rosary and it is nice that it is a private devotion that is not demanded of us.

As I have posted before, my  mother abused me while I was growing up so I have a problem with mothers and yes, the Blessed Virgin Mary is included in that.  She’s someone else’s mom.  NOT mine.  Yet, I would read and hear about people who supposedly had problems with their mother (I love the ones that compared her having a fight with her mother to the severe emotional, physical, and sexual abuse another poster mentioned and said that after praying to Mary once her relationship with her mother fixed and everything was better and that the abuse victim just needed to pray the Rosary and ask Mary to be her mother and her real life mother would be healed and they would become best friends) (gag me with a spoon) saying that they went to Mary and their own relationships with their mother was fixed or they took on Mary as their mother.  Abuse is hard and it takes an extreme toll on its victims.  We are not healed magically by saying a prayer and asking someone we have no interest or connection to to be our mother and heal all the damage that was done to us by someone who was supposed to love and care for us.  So when people told me that I could have the Blessed Virgin Mary as my mother, all I could think, was no, she’s somebody else’s mother and I’m without a mother who will love me.  People just don’t understand what that means.  It’s not like I can snap my fingers and everything will be fixed and healed and there will no longer be abuse in the world.  It doesn’t work that way.  I want my own mother but I’ll never have one because the one I had didn’t want me and didn’t love me and there is nothing that will change those facts.

Then there is the whole idea that Mary did nothing beyond give birth to Jesus and then led a quite life hidden in the background and was a two-dimensional background character.  Many Catholics, especially traditionalist Catholics, see Mary as someone who was practically invisible and the only model for women. They say that women need to be Mary-like and to them that means: quiet, servile (not in the loving service to others but more like a slave), inferior to men, baby-factory, stay-at-home mother, no emotions, no personal opinions, no education, passive, no personality, does everything that a man tells her to do, basically not even a real person but a robot.

Then there are the posts by Br. JR, a Fransiscan Brother of Life that tell the truth about Mary (and about women in general).  I’ll let his words speak for themselves.

First:

In fact, the Catholic Church was probably the most liberal institution when it came to women. Long before there was a women’s movement, Catholic women were very independent and powerful. It’s just not that noticeable in light of today’s culture. However, if you look at it in light of the world prior to Vatican II, Catholic women rather liberal compared to their Protestant counterparts.

We have a long history of women founders of religious congregations, monasteries and even some orders. Men did not govern these communities. In women’s monasteries, the Abbess ruled and no man ruled over her. In a religious congregation the Mother Superior ruled. In Catholic schools, hospitals, orphanages and other Catholic institutions the sisters ruled.

These women ran their own institutions, managed their own property, had money and budgets, made laws that governed them, traveled around the world without permission and supervision from men. Some abbesses ran dioceses. A few wonderful examples are: Teresa of Avila, Mother Teresa, Frances Xavier Cabrini, Katherine Drexel, and Elizabeth Ann Seton. These women were missionaries, pioneers in their fields of ministry and leaders in the Church. Mother Teresa was the most recent of these powerful women and she began her work in the world circa 1946, during the WW II era, but long before Vatican II.

No one dared to contradict them, not even the bishops. They were a force to be reckoned with. Teresa of Avila had a wit that could outshine any bishop or Jesuit. Mother Teresa made Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II nervous, though they loved her.

Elizabeth Ann Seton gave Archbishop Carroll a run for his money. When he gave her the statutes that St. Vincent de Paul had written for the Daughters of Charity so that she could model her congregation on St. Louise de Marillac, Elizabeth gave them back to the Archbishop and said that she would not lead the new congregation because there was no place for a mother in the statutes. Elizabeth simply told Archbishop Carroll, “I’m a mother first.” Archbishop Carroll had to add to the statutes that those sisters who were mothers could keep their children and raise them. As I understand it, there were two widows with children in the original group.

About Mary:

I’m not sure if I agree with the image that some people paint of being like Mary, because I would never say that Teresa of Avila or Mother Teresa were unlike Mary. I believe the opposite. They were very much like Mary. Like Mary, they conformed to Christ in all things.

If we look at Mary, she was a very strong figure, not a retiring figure at all. We know that she lived in different cities, that she followed the Church as it grew. She did not spend her life in retirement in Nazareth. We see her in Jerusalem when Jesus is crucified. Jerusalem was more than two days away from Nazareth in those days. Why was she there? She did not live there. The only conclusion is that she followed her son and his disciples to Jerusalem. We hear from the Church Fathers that she was in Ephasus after the Ascension. Why? She was with the Church, probably with John, according to Polycarp. Luke tells us that she went to the Hill Country to visit Elizabeth. Scholars believe that this may be the area that we call the Golan Heights, which is quite a distance from Nazareth. Regardless of Elizabeth’s physical address, she did not live in the same city. Mary goes out to her. Back then, women did not travel without their husbands. But tradition does not mention Joseph being present in Elizabeth’s home or at John’s birth. However, it tells us that Mary was present and probably three months pregnant when she returned home and rejoined Joseph.

We also see Mary in Cana. From the wording of the story, one can extrapolate that Jesus was with her, not the other way around. She was the invited guest and Jesus and his friends went with her to the wedding. This is inferred in the familiarity between Mary and the servants. No one approaches Jesus with the concern about the wine, as would have been the proper thing to do. Mary speaks to the servants with authority, “Do whatever he tells you.” It is probable that she died in Ephesus, which is a long way from Nazareth, if not in Jerusalem.

We tend to paint Christian women, especially Mary, as more demure and retiring than is historically true. I’ve often wondered if it may be a cultural influence, more than a Catholic influence. The Orthodox have the same stories about Mary, independent of the Western Church. They also have ancient legends that portray a more dynamic Mary and their nuns are also very independent and very influential in their Churches.

My answer to your question is that this absence of women in the forefront has nothing to do with the Extraordinary Form of the Mass or even with being Catholic. It’s really the culture or preference of a community. If you begin to tell women that they cannot do things that are not prohibited, that’s when you fall into gender discrimination. If women want to assume a more retiring role, of their own free will, there’s no rule that says they cannot do so.

And then there’s:

To understand how St. Therese understood Mary, you may want to read what I wrote in Post 33. St. Therese is identifying with Mary the contemplative, which is very true. She is not implying that Mary lived a hidden life or an inactive life. That is contrary to Carmelite Tradition. Carmelite tradition teaches us the opposite . . . Mary was very involved in the life and ministry of her son and the early Church. At the same time, she was also the contemplative. If we could blend Bl. Mother Teresa, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Therese into one person, we would have a more complete picture of the historical Mary.

We have created an image of Mary that is more consistent with out imagination than with history. Our image of Mary is the quiet woman who is in the background and who is demure, says and does very little because she is humble.

Mary is humble. However, humble means honest. She is certainly that when she says that all generations shall call her Blessed. That’s not a demure woman speaking. That’s a woman who is very confident about herself and her role in Salvation History. She is very active in Jesus ministry. She’s present at many events, times and places outside of Nazareth. History tells us that she did not remain in Nazareth, but traveled with the Church as far as Ephesus. We’re not sure whether her last day on earth was at Ephesus or in Jerusalem, but we know one thing for sure. It was not in Nazareth in the quiet of her home. We also know that the Apostles refered to her as Mother. St. Polycarp gets this from St. John. The early Eastern Christians, who would later become the Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have a long oral tradition of Mary as an active participant in the life of the Church during Apostolic times.

We can see a woman who is very much a contemplative, a woman of intense prayer, silence and dedication to the Lord, but also a woman who was a missionary, an intercessor, and even a source of consolatioin for the early Christians. In other words, she was not hidden as we use that word.

Hidden, as St. Therese uses the word is more like her spiritual mother, St Teresa of Avila who did what she had to do and at the same time tried to do it without calling too much attention to herself. The truth is that she attracted a lot of attention, but Teresa tried very hard not to do so. The same is true for Bl. Mother Teresa and St. Therese. That’s the true meaning of hidden in Christian Mystical Theology.

Plus:

This is Mystical Theology speaking, not history. The Mystical Theologian focusses on the activityof grace on the soul. What was kept hidden from her contemporaries was the nature and scope of the activity of grace on her soul and the anatomy of her soul. God works on Mary in the secret and silence of her soul. Mary does not share that with the world. We can only assume and extrapolate from the bits of information that we have through Christian Tradition. There is the silence of Mary found in the writings of St. Louie and St. Therese.

St. Therese does this very well, because she’s a cloistered nun; therefore, she understands the whole concept of a hidden life, without being in obscurity. I think that many very traditional Catholics believe that being like Mary means being almost anonymous. That is not Mary. That is not the Mary of St. Therese nor St. Louie. Catholics to the other extreme, I hate to call them liberal, because in my book liberal has a very positive meaning, these other folks to the left, believe that Mary was a passive figure who did not do much. That’s not Mary either.

That’s why I said above, if we could blend the three Teresas: Teresa of Avila, Therese of Liseux and Teresa of Calcutta, that’s the real Mary.

Notice, that she’s such a complex person and there is so much richness to her soul that it would take three of our giants to give us a glimpse into the historical Mary. As far as the anatomy of Mary’s soul, you can forget that. Everything that God did there will remain hidden to us until God wishes for us to know it and only as much as he wishes for us to know.

There is a wonderful book about her by a Capuchin Franciscan Friar The Silence of Mary by Ignacio Larañaga. This book and the writings of St. Louie changed my life.

These posts were really helpful in giving me the first, real picture of Mary and what women mean to the Church.  NOT the burqa covered robots that some Catholics want and agitate for.  Mary was and is a real human woman and this is the first time I saw her this way rather than a lofty figure that was unreachable.  I am grateful of Br. JR’s words.

Women Hating is Alive and Well and promoted by Traditionalists

In the Traditionalist forum at CAF, there are a couple of threads dealing with the role women play in the Mass and the leadership/servantship roles they play in the parish.  The “Traditionalists” are out in full force in wanting women to be kept in their place aka the kitchen.  They see women as baby factories (Not mothers and wives and with career vocations of their own, no sir) and as slaves of men.  They hate women.  They think women need to learn that their place is silent and unseen not only at Mass but also in the home with a man to make all their decisions for them since they aren’t capable of thinking properly or making good decisions.  Women are not even people worthy of dignity and respect because they are made in the image and likeness of God.  No, they are seducers and prostitutes and drag men into sin.  They need to learn their place and if that means a beating then so be it.

Now, thankfully the CHURCH DOES NOT TEACH that women are inferior or weak or need to stay at home or be uneducated.  Considering the highest example of humanity is a woman (Mary) and that THREE doctors of the Church are women, the Catholic Church is much more welcoming and loving of women.  Many of it’s members are not.  Male and female.  I have met many women who want to go back to having no rights, to not being educated, to having no legal protection, to getting rid of abuse and rape laws, to outlawing divorce, to keeping women at home and under the dictatorship of a man (not a husband that is the spiritual head which is much different).

They think these things are pleasing to God and that the Church has always taught this abuse of women.  She has not.  Yes, there have been men and women who have spoken and written that women are unrepentant seducers, that they are inferior and weak, and not capable of higher learning but they do not speak for the Church.  They Do NOT SPEAK for the Church.  The Church through Pope John Paul II wrote Mulieris Dignitatem that underscored and highlighted the value and dignity that women brought to the Church and to society at large.

The Catholic Church does not teach or endorse the abuse of women, their devaluing as members of the Church and society, or the twisted use of Catholic teaching to hurt women in any way.  By hurting women, you hurt men and you hurt the Church.  If I only knew and met only Traditionalists on my journey in the Catholic faith, I probably wouldn’t want to be Catholic or to remain Catholic if these were the kinds of people I would have to spend my life and eternity with.  They aren’t very happy and they don’t like women and they hate anyone who doesn’t agree with them.  I hate it when people hate women and would do anything to subjugate them or abuse them or even kill them because they don’t fit into their narrow world view.  Sexism is alive and well even in American not just among “Traditionalist.”

Another Week in the Healing Process

If I thought last week was bad, this week was tough.  I had one of my worst crying jags Sunday night/Monday morning at work.  At least the coworker who heard part of it brushed it off as lack of sleep.  (I had chewed him out over something that was not his fault.)  My shift supervisor has issues with me and I have major issues with her.  She decided not to tell me several key things Sunday including a coworker going home sick (the coworker told me and I had to pick up a few of his duties which was wasn’t a big deal but the whole not telling me was), that the coworker I chewed out was doing something she told him to do (I think she made something up just to get him to do some work), and lied to me.  I had every intention of talking to her Monday night but that didn’t work out because she decided to deal with an issue and then hang out with one of my coworkers.

The big problem is that this supervisor hits all my triggers because she acts just like my abuser.  I have talked to her about a month ago about her behavior but it didn’t last because she honestly believes she is doing nothing wrong and won’t take me seriously.  She says that she has to act the way she does because of the work that needs to get done (which she likes to dump on me instead either doing it herself when it is part of her job description or delegating it to other officers who have the time and ability to do it), that I am her most capable officer (like I said she lies)(yet she treats me like dirt; she treats almost all of the female officers like dirt unless they are married or have children) (she hates the position I work), that I’m smart (but only so far as having completed college; being Catholic is the unforgivable sin to her) (actually, believing or even accepting evolution and using science is the unforgivable sin) but I feel that I’ve been singled out for her abuse.  She hates working there and has said so repeatedly.  She lectures about her religious and political views when those are big no-nos at work and especially as a supervisor to a employee.  She has let certain individuals get away with behavior that should have gotten them fired and plays favorites (even though one of her “favorites” can’t stand her).

Except for this supervisor, the job isn’t that bad.  There are a couple of problematic employees but one is switching to the construction side of things, the one I see for only a few minutes, and the only I only have to deal with for six hours though if he screws up like the stories that go around about his last time here, he won’t be here long.  First half of my week is okay.  I  have an excellent supervisor that appreciated what I do and the position I have.  The other half of the week is the bas supervisor and I dread coming to work the second half of my week because I don’t know what will set her off, what she’ll blame me for, what stupid, insane thing she wants me to do now.  She totally stresses me out.  I’m stressing out just writing this, remembering what she does to me, what emotions she evokes in me.

I hate putting myself in a situation where I can only expect stress and fear.  I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to come up with some imagined slight or mistake on my part and I get fired.  Doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. I wish I had a better job waiting for me.  I wish I didn’t have all the bills to pay that keeps me in this job.  I wish that people who abuse would understand what they are doing and the effect they have on people.  I don’t know what’s going to set her off.  I have to walk on eggshells around her.  It’s just a job but it seems like so much worse than that.

It also doesn’t help that last week I had the fact that my father doesn’t think much of me either.  I was never either of my parents’ favorites but I still has the delusion that my father loved me.  Nope.  My sister K gets all his love and attention.  I got the random backhanded gift out of the blue growing up but K was and is his total favorite.  My sisters S and G are my mother’s favorites though S more because S has a son.  I understand that my mother chose to hurt me and has an undiagnosed mental illness (possibly) but to have consider and possibly accept that my dad chose someone over me still hurts even at 29.  To know that neither parent really loved me really, really hurts and is unimaginable.  I still had that delusion that my dad was on my side, even just a little bit.  Not any more.

This really sucks especially since I don’t have anyone in real life to talk to about all this.

 

 

The Past

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here but I am a survivor of abuse.  Emotional/psychological and verbal abuse.  Not much physical abuse and to my knowledge, not sexual abuse thought there was abuse by my mother that could be considered if not sexual abuse then boundary abuse.  And yes, my mother was my abuser.  That went on for nearly the first twenty years of my life.

Then I went off to college at 18 while still carrying all that baggage/garbage, etc.  It wasn’t until I was 21 that I was able to start drawing lines and when I was 22 realize my parents didn’t care all that much about me.  My mother was abusive, my dad neglectful.  And I thought that this was all normal.

It wasn’t until I was forced into counseling my senior year of college (I had gone to my advisor to get an extension for a paper and was in tears because I was so exhausted but she thought I was depressed and made me make an appointment with the counseling center) that I had someone outside the situation actually say what happened to me was abuse and neglect.  I tried to say that to people while in the last year or so of high school but no one believed me.  From hearing things like I must be making things up to my parents weren’t really like that I doubted what really happened to me and even believed that I was making it up.  There are still times I think I made up what happened to me and then I remind myself that, no, it really happened.  Why would I be as messed up as I am if I hadn’t been abused?

I recently read a book about daughters and their mothers.  I really shouldn’t have read past the first few pages and returned it immediately to the library.  It was the absolutely the worst book to read.  This women advocates that all women and I mean all women need to be best friends with their mothers regardless of how their mothers treated them in the past and that the only friendship a women needs in one with her mother.  Actually, the author advocates that the only relationship a women needs is the friendship she has with her mother and that her mother should be the center of her universe.  That a women being a mother, a wife, a sister, a friend to other people is considered unimportant and even blasphemous to this whole mother-daughter friendship the author advocates.  That’s such a load of BS it isn’t even funny.  There are many of us that can’t even have a civil relationship with our mothers let alone a mother-daughter relationship and a friendship is completely out of the questions.  Yet this author can’t see that.  It upset me to read the book and I really shouldn’t have read it.

But this mentality hurts because I’m also getting it from a supervisor at work.  Now, this supervisor at work doesn’t know that I was abused and I’m not going to tell her.  But she can’t conceive that parents might abuse their children and that those children can’t have anything to do with those abusers as adults as a means of protecting themselves from getting hurt.  My supervisor lives in a very unrealistic and a very self-selective world that’s definitely out of touch with reality.  She gets along great with her mother but then her mother loved her.  My mother wasn’t capable of loving me.

Another effect of my mother’s abuse (from all her screaming) is that I don’t handle loud noises really well.  If I’m aware that there is going to be loud noise, I can prepare myself to handle it but there are times when that’s just not possible.  Part of my job in security deals with responding to alarms (there’s actually more to alarms to than that but that’s all I can get into).  Many of these alarms are loud and extremely obnoxious.  Enough, even after my time working there, the sound stresses me out.  A lot.  I cringe and want to run away which isn’t possible.

The cringing and running away when I feel I really can’t also happens with regards to personal space.  If I feel someone is sitting too close to me (which has happened a lot at Mass recently) I start to cry and want to run away but have this overwhelming feeling that I just have to stay there and let the bad things happen, that I have to let the hurt happen.  Because leaving and running away is not an option.  It is for everyone else but not for me.  I can understand how screwed up that is but that’s what’s going through my mind when someone sits so close that it feels like they are sitting in my lap and I can’t move and that this person is going to hurt me and I have to keep silent and let it happen.

So this has been a bad week for me.

Let’s Just Beat People with a Stick, Why Don’t We?

Again, CAF seems to be full of people who would rather smack people down than help lift them up.  There’s a thread on how a “priest was harsh in confession” (harsh? define harsh) plus threads on cafeteria catholicism, soft catholicism, etc. and there are people who are going on about how priests today are weak and that nobody talks about hell and damnation anymore.  There are people advocating holding people from receiving the Eucharist (wow, even Christ isn’t that mean) for months to even years at a time, to arguing that people should have to recite multiple Rosaries, to saying that no priest preaches hell and damnation and that since most people are damned anyways (where does it say God on their drivers license) that people should know what to expect after they die.

I will admit there are people who have no concept of sin let alone their own sin.  But to advocate withholding Sacraments and fire and brimstone teaching deviates way past any truth about the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  Reconciliation is not about the priest hitting the penitent over the head for not being sorry enough or not confessing every sin as if it were mortal sin or for scaring the penitent into fearful obedience.  Reconciliation is about admitting our sins to Jesus and being forgiven, being absolved of our sins, and receiving the grace that comes from that sacrament that grants us the gift of being in a state of grace to receive the Eucharist.  Reconciliation reconciles us with Jesus and strengthens our relationship with him.  It’s not meant as a means of forcing the penitent into doing what the Church expects of him/her.  It’s about repairing a relationship not reinforcing an abusive dictator.

Scaring somebody straight doesn’t work.  They tried that with juvenile delinquents.  Didn’t work and there are studies to prove it.  Yet people want people to be afraid of GOD.  Why?  A fear of God doesn’t mean you obey him out of love. It means you obey him out of fear of punishment.  That’s not a healthy relationship.  As somebody who was raised in a fear filled environment, fear only made me tense and hypervigilant to my mother’s moods and words.  It made me unable to trust people and I definitely don’t understand how to love. I was always afraid that I was doing something wrong or did something or even just breathed funny and my mother would start screaming at me for being a bad girl that’s going to Hell.  Many times it didn’t even need to be something I did.  It could be one of my sisters or something on TV or some imagined slight my mother came up with.  I was going to be screamed at no matter what and there was nothing I could do about it.  To this day I cringe when anybody says my name or I hear a loud noise or people speak in a certain way because I’m expecting to get screamed at for something I did.  Or blamed.  And I know I have to take it because there’s no arguing.  They are right and I am wrong.  Remember, this is conditioned into me from nearly 20 years of abuse.

So I have a hard time accepting that yelling and screaming and making people afraid will get them to cooperate and do good.  Oh, it might work in the short term but eventually, in the long run, it will backfire.  The Bible doesn’t just speak about God’s wrath, which usually happened after several chances to repent and change their ways but also God’s mercy.  Why do people want God’s wrath for everyone else but God’s mercy only for themselves, if that?  There is more justice in God’s mercy and mercy in God’s justice than anything we can conceive.

Why do we have to smack people down and hurt them all in the name of religion?  Jesus didn’t do that.  He criticized the Pharisees but he didn’t hurt them or say they weren’t loved by God.  He did call for them to repent and that the people should listen to them, just not act like them.  Yet people want to condemn people to Hell all for not agreeing with them or not being sorry enough in their eyes or for the priests not smacking the pulpit while preaching hellfire and brimstone and hell and damnation.  Each priest deals with a unique congregation and unique needs specific to that congregation.  Don’t put down priests just because they don’t preach what you want.  They aren’t there to please you.  They are they to be in persona Christi and to offer the Mass, not to satisfy your need to put down others and hold yourself as a superior model of Catholic living, because you aren’t with that attitude.   What the priest may not deal with in public, he may deal with in private.  It is not your place to determine which priests are acting like priests and which aren’t.  They are priests and that is all you need to know.  You are not God.  You have no place to judge for you judge Jesus himself when you judge a priest.

You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.  Just a though.

A Declaration

Yes, at 4:40 in the morning.  Well, it is what time it is here.

I am a feminist.  There.  I said it.  And being a feminist is a good thing.  However, there are forms of feminism that are bad: radical feminism, any form that supports abortion and contraception and “sexual freedom” and bashing men and supports the homosexual lifestyle.  Those are anti-women and anti-men.

Abortion is anti-women because it’s about choosing to punish yourself and a baby for existing as a person and being able to give life and for being a women.  It’s also anti-men because it doesn’t care about men as fathers or as people.  Abortion is anti-people because it is indiscriminate in who it kills: girls, boys, gays, straight, the innocent, the potentially successful, the potentially disabled, etc.  Abortion basically says that you aren’t good enough to exist because you don’t fit in some arbitrary category about who and what a person is.  Abortion isn’t a choice or a freedom.  It’s a death sentence for the baby and for the mother.  It puts the mother in a continuous cycle of sexual abuse and prostitution.  A women who uses abortion to “get rid of a problem” abuses herself.  No woman is free when they get an abortion.  NO woman is free when they have sex with anybody outside of marriage.  They are abusing themselves and selling themselves as prostitutes that aren’t getting paid to have sex.

Bashing men also bashes women.  Men can’t exist without women and women can’t exist without men.  It’s biologically impossible.  If there was only one sex, then they wouldn’t be women or men.  There would be no concept of male or female, man or women.  The words and concepts wouldn’t exist in our language because there would be no need for them.  While I’m certain there are people who would love to eliminate such words, it’s impossible and entirely impractical.   It just wouldn’t work.  We need men and women and we need them to be different.  Yes, there are people who are trying to do with mother and father and what they mean but they will fail.  Not only do we need them, to eliminate them would eliminate what makes humans unique.  Actually, it goes beyond that.  It would destroy society.  Society as a whole needs mothers and fathers and men and women.

I believe in equal pay for equal work.  Now, it has gotten better but there’s always room for improvement.  There is also room for improvement in how people are compensated for their work and how work is valued.  Value shouldn’t be based entirely on monetary value but on what that person brings to the company or whatnot and not how much money they can make for the company at the expense of that individual’s health and personal relationships.

I believe rape, abuse be it sexual, physical, emotional, spiritual, verbal, psychological, or mental and neglect are crimes against people regardless of gender, age, sexual orientation, creed, ethnicity, etc. and should be prosecuted as such.  A spouse has no right to rape their spouse or beat them because they are married or to verbally abuse them because they think they can.  Parents should abuse their children nor should children abuse their parents.  A gay partner can’t beat their partner and get away with it.  It’s a crime against a person.  While I have problems with the homosexual lifestyle, they are still people who should be treated with respect and crimes against them should be investigated and prosecuted.

I believe a woman has the right to choose what she wants to do with her life.  If she wants to be a wife and mother and work, I support that.  If a woman wants be a wife and mother and be a stay at home mom, I support that too.  If a woman wants to work but stay permanently single, I support that as well.  If a woman believes she is called to the religious life and chooses to follow that, I support that as well.  I don’t support people who dictate how other people should live.  I have no right to tell Woman A or even Man A what to do with their lives.  I can’t make them work in a particular field or make them get married and no one else should either.  They can seek advice and counsel from people they trust but should make their own choices about their life.  And I will defend a women’s right to determine her own life.

I believe women are the biggest oppressors of women.  They are the ones who watch others like a hawk and talk about people behind their back and pass judgement on them because they don’t live exactly as they do.  If a woman wants to dress like a Goth (does anybody still dress like a Goth anymore?), as long as she dresses modestly (this is predicated on her and the society she lives in) then she can dress like a goth.  Or a punk.  Or in jeans and a t-shirt.  Or dresses.  Or formal suits.  No one can dictate what she wears unless she works in a particular industry that requires a uniform for work (even the typical office has a “uniform” for how to dress).  Women are the biggest believers about the lies of women: that they are weak, inferior, support things that hurt women, uneducable, shouldn’t be allowed to work, shouldn’t be allowed to receive a college/university degree, that the only thing a women can do is get married and have children and stay at home, that women who don’t revolve their lives around men have something wrong them or are lesbians.

I believe people are individuals with their own unique life experiences. No one is automaton and people shouldn’t make people into clones of themselves just because it makes their lives easier or because they think they have the power to do so.

Now there are people who are going to have a problem with me, a Catholic, being a feminist.  Yet all that I posted doesn’t contradict anything the Catholic Church teaches.  Being a feminist isn’t anti-Catholic.  It’s pro-humanity.  The Catholic Church was the first feminist force in the world.  Now there were people in the Church, but not the Church Herself, that advocated beliefs and practices that were anti-women but they weren’t the Church.  They were sinners who got tangled up in the details and pushing their own agendas rather than focusing on Jesus.  Jesus is very pro-women as demonstrated in the Gospels.

Let the tomato and lemon throwing commence.