Congratulations! How exciting! Your first mass!
:bounce::yup::clapping:
Anyway, you don’t have anything to worry about. You’re not a child. How would a priest be able to abuse you? This is Christmas mass you are talking about. Any Catholic church is at their maximum capacity at Christmas. Sometimes, I think attendance…doubles…or triples! They usually take out special chairs. Some people have to stand, especially the latecomers! What I’m saying is I doubt you’ll be alone!
Priests are so busy. When I even go to confession, there’s a line. Even to talk alone with one seems hard. Everybody else wants to talk to him! They are often spread really thin! Some people have a hard time even getting an appointment with one!
Ever since those incidents with the priests, the Catholic Church, and all its clergy, have been held to a much higher standard than anybody else. If a minister does the same thing, he often gets a name, not associated with his church, necessarily. With priests, it goes back on the parish, on all Catholics.
The priests, and Church, has been held under a magnifying glass, under very intense scrutiny, much more than any other faith I know.
I remember I once volunteered in the US at a Catholic school, and that school, due to all this, absolutely bent over backwards to make sure nothing went wrong. We had a manual we had to read, and I was just a VOLUNTEER! I have volunteered in other places and never had anything close as strict as with that one Catholic school.
I’m just saying I think you’d have more reason to fear at a public school than a church, in all honesty!
Priests are people. People, from time to time, make mistakes. The media LOVES to get ahold of just one story of a priest doing wrong so that he can make them all out to be the villain, seemingly as a way to get at the Church, itself, really do it some major damage! It has reached a point it doesn’t seem fair!
I have known such WONDERFUL priests.
Keep in mind we’ve always had evil with us, even in the early Church. Look at with Christ! He picked Judas! Yet, we had the other 11, including Peter! So, for one Judas, you’re going to throw out all the rest? Does that seem fair to you?
The probability of this is VERY small.
We talk about the unfairness of discrimination on the basis of skin color, race, etc. We say you can’t generalize everybody by one. This is like a kind of discrimination…against all priests, due to the actions of a very few.
What I hope is that you will one day meet a priest, have a positive experience, and be able to put all this behind you.
I’ll close with a prayer.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blest is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. :angel1:
