I had a Catholic friend I met in Girl Scout camp, and after that since we lived in different towns, I would visit her for weekends a couple times a year, and she would visit me for weekends. My parent were divorced – and tho my mom was somewhat religious, they had seemed more focused on worldly things. Her family was intact, they seemed more humble, and less focused on worldly things, except her mom wrongly admired my mom.
Also my mom wondered why I had picked a friend from a lower class, and I hadn’t seen that, and I think that actually made her family more dear to me.
My friend is a very soft-hearted person, with a soft spot for injured animals, etc. Still in old age she is meek and unassuming, sweet and gentle.
Later when I met my husband-to-be, a Catholic from India, I was quite ready to convert…I think bec of my friend and her in-tact, humble family. Also a couple of years earlier I had a dream about the Eucharist as God radiating love and power from the tabernacle, even though I didn’t have much knowledge about it and didn’t really understand the Catholic beliefs re it.
However…45 years later after conversion I’m getting pretty turned off of some Catholics here at CAF who are just the opposite of my friend. They have Catholic listed as their religion, so I take them at their word, but they seem arrogant and intolerant, and especially hate environmentalists like me, calling us all sorts of names like Earth worshippers and baby-killing population controllers, refusing to accept that most environmentalists are in it for pro-life issues, concerned about the harm and killing of people thru environmental harms, as well as others of God’s creation. They refuse to believe there are any environmental problems that harm and kill people or that we need to mitigate them. Some even suggest they’ll be driving their SUVs and Hummers the long way home, etc, just to emit more pollution. They are probably just making mean jokes, but if they are rich enough to have SUVs and Hummers, they are certainly rich enough to waste gasoline.
I have always been anti-abortion; but that is not my only pro-life concern, just a very important one, and it seems to me that people who say they are anti-abortion, but refuse to acknowledge that we are killing people in other ways, such as thru environmental harms, to me those people don’t come across as being genuinely anti-abortion…it seems just more a follow-the-leader fad for them, or something.
In 2007 we finally got cable TV and I eagerly awaited watching EWTN – of which I’d heard so many good things. I was soon surprised and dismayed that they failed to speak about the environmentalism expressed BXVI’s Loretto homily in their commentary, then later shocked by their snarky remarks against environmentalism and disgusting mis-portrayals of environmentalists, and lack of knowledge and concern about pro-life environmental issues, and their hosting of speaker priests with ties to big oil who cast doubt on climate change and lobbing serious ad hominems against environmentalists, while spouting a vague (damning by faint praise) notion that of course we should be stewards of creation.
And my own parish – when I asked the priest some 8 years ago if he could say something about global warming, he said he was afraid of the Rush Limbaugh Catholics in the parish (and I think he may have been a Rush Limbaugh Catholic himself).
And my own Carmelite 3rd order also seems have some anti-environmentalists, tho I rarely discuss it there. I was even thinking at one point of leaving the order and becoming a Franciscan (who is supposedly the environmentalist saint), but then I got to thinking about my Carmelite roots and one thing that attracted me to Carmel was its focus on detachment from worldly things (nada, nada, nada), and that is precisely what is needed to solve environmental problems, and besides the EWTN anti-environmental folks are Franciscan.
If it were not for JPII, BXVI, and our new Pope Francis, and their high degree of environmentalism, I’d be pretty much turned off of Catholicism at this point. Much of the rest of the Catholic Church is demoralizing to me, as is the anti-environmentalism expressed here at CAF. I cling to Jesus, Mary, and our holy fathers, and pray for the Church.
