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In reply to the discussion: I am an older white woman, a retired teacher. [View all]calimary
(81,117 posts)teacher. One of the priests would come over from the church-side to conduct religion class or catechism class, and Father Flanagan took this one particular 5th grade class. And I remember so clearly sitting there quietly as he lectured about the roles of husbands and wives and kids and took questions, and it was like having an out-of-body experience. There was a me who sat there and started getting a little annoyed. I remember looking at him and thinking "hey, Father, how can you possibly weigh in on any of this? You don't have a wife. You don't have kids. You don't have to get a job to support a family. How the heck can you pontificate like this? How can you possibly know what it's like for families and husbands and wives and moms and dads? Since when do YOU get to decide for all of us out here in the secular world? And you're certainly not a woman so you can't be a mom, and you can't get pregnant and have kids, so how can you tell us girls how it's supposed to go? How can you possibly say? How can you possibly know?" I just sat and mulled that one over and over and over in my mind while he was yammering away. It was the first time I realized that THIS was NOT speaking for ME, or to me, either, and that whatever he was decreeing as a kind of civilian "gospel" could NOT be weighed on the same scale with conditions in reality outside the nice insular rectory where he and the other parish priests lived. It struck me that what he said was certainly interesting and curious enough, but could not serve as much of a practical guideline in MY life.
Many years later, I heard another speaker on subjects of Catholic life for the laity reveal that whenever he had questions about something in his marriage or involving his wife and kids, he never sought out the advice of his parish priest. He went down the street to talk to the local rabbi, who had a wife and kids, too. He thought that was a FAR more relevant source of wisdom for him, personally, than consulting a celibate would offer.