Straight forward, good answer. I experienced plenty of ridicule as the only Catholic in my family. Some folks simply ignored me, but others were directly hostile. People are left with making choices and the basic one of choosing between God and family is a huge one. Over the years several folks converted, but it took lots of time and prayer. (Not to leave out patience and hope.)
And there will always be those who never see the light and become a source of constant ridicule and division. That is our challenge.
my grandparents on my dad’s side of the family were married in the Catholic Church but there was a big argument over the burial of a baby that was stillborn, or some issue very close to this. And, it involved an argument with a parish priest, perhaps the pastor.
As a result, my grandmother reverted or converted to be a Jehovah’s Witness and I don’t think my grandfather belonged to any church. There didn’t seem to be much compassion towards them by the priest when the baby was stillborn.
Then, it doesn’t make sense, but some of their children grew up Catholic but some (of the 7) were JW or evangelical. To me, the crucial insight was that when my dad died, when I was nine, none of the remaining siblings on either side of the family with any religious allegiance were very “Christian” in the Old- and New-Testament sense of taking care of widows (my mom) and a fatherless boy (me). They all acted like they simply had their own lives to live and their own children to raise.
In the late '50s and early '60s, only one or two of them extended any generosity towards me whatsoever, to buy me a hot dog or a coke. Now, this is relevant because I think my mom had some form of personality disorder, and there were vivid flashbacks in her life of earlier sibling rivalry. So, I suffered considerably from neglect, in my opinion. Both their prior Catholic upbringing and their ongoing attachment to Catholicism (as the case may have been) had very little direct benefit to me.
Read the letter of James see what some aspects of Christian family living should be like. I got more attention, moral and social support, and, yes, assistance from perfect strangers. I could only and did rely on my catholic school education to learn right from wrong (which is why I didn’t know all that much about right from wrong). But, God was with me then and throughout my life. God has brought me through it, one daily miracle after another. It was like a reality version of Frogger, evading one alligator after another. I sometimes feel God has almost been too good to me, despite all the social stress.
