Lesbian Catholic school teacher fired after mother's death because obit listed her partner

[hunter]

82. Could be the Irish in me speaking, but you and your twelve apostles go have a good time...

I'm not sure where that comes from. It sounds like something my crazy grandma would say. In my head it's her voice, but I don't remember the circumstances. Was it me being unusually pedantic? There's few things more annoying than a pedantic teenager.

But it illustrates a choice: Would we rather have one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church with a large unruly flock, or a very much smaller church with a very well disciplined flock?

In my family genetic traits like depression, OCD, and bipolar disorders are common. Hyper-religiosity is often attributed to those. As a kid my bipolar mom took us on a wild religious ride. She'd wanted to be a nun but an unfortunate encounter with a creepy priest (who wasn't very bright) sent her down a much different path. She married an artist and had lots of kids.

My own kids had a stable family life and ordinary Roman Catholic upbringing. But they did miss out on certain adventures I enjoyed, things like fleeing Franco's Spain for France in the middle of the night, or being removed and banned from various churches.

We rarely had any trouble involving our kids in church, attending Mass... no teenage temper tantrums, none of that. My youngest often read at the youth Mass. Now as young adults they consider themselves Roman Catholic. Our expectations of them were always firm, but never authoritarian. As parents you learn to choose your battles, otherwise everything is a battle and the good is lost along with the bad in the wreckage.

As a source of spiritual strength and guidance our Church is in much the same position as any parent. If a kid runs away from home or self destructs, sometimes it's something inherent in the kid, but more often it is a failure of parenting.