T
Tantum_ergo
Guest
in the Maronite Church. I’m Latin rite (Grandma raising them with my son as single dad). My ex (formerly Protestant) remarried in the Maronite Church; he’s dying of cancer, very little time left, asked to have the boys baptized in ‘his’ Church. So we did. It’s quite a distance to this Church and there is no other nearby. As it is, the Latin Rite churches in my area are not bastions of orthodoxy. So while I’m delighted the boys (2 and 3) are baptized at last, and while I’m doing my best to teach them Catholic practices (prayers, Scripture, lives of the Saints, catechism in a very limited way), I’m at my wits end trying to figure out how to get them into a community where they can really practice their faith. Their dad works nights and many weekends and doesn’t want to drive an hour over and an hour back plus the rather long Maronite service, not to mention the ‘extra’ things like the Mens group, the coffee hour, etc., that would give the boys (I think) a great community, and unfortunately with the cataracts I had to give up driving myself, so I can’t take them there. The local church has a very NICE priest and people, but the orthodoxy is completely lacking, so while they’d be getting to know ‘nice people’, they really would not be learning the Faith; they would be learning what Father X thinks ‘his people’ want to hear, spun completely off the cuff, and culled from pretty much every dissenter on the block. A recipe for disaster and while the parish has a ‘church school’ so they have kids present at Mass ‘by compulsion’, the minute these kids leave school, they are GONE from the Church. There are almost no young adults in the parish at all; only those who happen to have children in the school will come, periodically.
I’m rather stuck here, having bought a house that we could afford, near my son’s job, with an excellent public school as well as the Catholic school, and I was still driving then and could go ‘over the border’ to a parish that was still not really orthodox but better than the one here (and THAT says something about how truly awful here is), but now I can’t.
There isn’t any public transport on a Sunday to the Maronite parish town. (Saturday either, come to that).
So. . . any ideas?
Thank goodness they are still so little, in a way. . .should I ‘suck it up’ at the local parish and pray that in a couple of years the bishop takes pity on us and appoints somebody who will say a valid Mass (I mean, seriously, not even the words of the Consecration are said according to the rubrics)? And hope that in 3-4 years when I can have cataract surgery that I’d then see well enough to drive again, in the event things don’t improve on the home front?
So many Sundays I can’t get to any Mass because my son is sleeping, my mom is exhausted, and even if I managed to get the children into church, they get restless, make noise, try to run around, and I wind up spending so much time outside to keep them from disturbing the others that I just give up and go home. But sooner or later they are going to be able to get through Mass, and I want them to be exposed to a REAL Mass, because it’s confusing enough for children to learn something with as much ‘ritual’ as Mass, but if they have learned "Father X’s’ very ‘different’ ways, and then a new priest comes and does it ‘the right way’, they’re going to be upset and they’re probably either going to think, “I liked Father X, he let us come up around the altar, he made funny jokes, you never knew what he was going to say so it was exciting --this priest WON"T let us come around the altar, and he always says THE SAME PRAYER, Mass is boring”. . .or else they’ll think, “Why should I trust the Church’s teaching when Father X told me this, and this new priest says it’s not --they’re both priests, right? If they can’t agree, why should I accept anything anybody says? Somebody will come around and say the opposite, I’ll just choose to believe what I like”. . .
I never would have thought (I’ve been begging for baptism since the older boy was BORN) that having my boys baptized would be bittersweet like this.
I would welcome prayers. As it is, my inclination now is to try to do as much at home as I can, and avoid the local church (for them, obviously I’ll try to get their for my obligation as much as possible) until they are 5 and 6, in kindergarten and first grade, and then try to be involved in their religious ed program as much as possible, AND hope that the ‘orthodoxy’ situation has improved by then, but if somebody has had a similar experience and has any different ideas or different insights, I would welcome them too.
God bless.
I’m rather stuck here, having bought a house that we could afford, near my son’s job, with an excellent public school as well as the Catholic school, and I was still driving then and could go ‘over the border’ to a parish that was still not really orthodox but better than the one here (and THAT says something about how truly awful here is), but now I can’t.
There isn’t any public transport on a Sunday to the Maronite parish town. (Saturday either, come to that).
So. . . any ideas?
Thank goodness they are still so little, in a way. . .should I ‘suck it up’ at the local parish and pray that in a couple of years the bishop takes pity on us and appoints somebody who will say a valid Mass (I mean, seriously, not even the words of the Consecration are said according to the rubrics)? And hope that in 3-4 years when I can have cataract surgery that I’d then see well enough to drive again, in the event things don’t improve on the home front?
So many Sundays I can’t get to any Mass because my son is sleeping, my mom is exhausted, and even if I managed to get the children into church, they get restless, make noise, try to run around, and I wind up spending so much time outside to keep them from disturbing the others that I just give up and go home. But sooner or later they are going to be able to get through Mass, and I want them to be exposed to a REAL Mass, because it’s confusing enough for children to learn something with as much ‘ritual’ as Mass, but if they have learned "Father X’s’ very ‘different’ ways, and then a new priest comes and does it ‘the right way’, they’re going to be upset and they’re probably either going to think, “I liked Father X, he let us come up around the altar, he made funny jokes, you never knew what he was going to say so it was exciting --this priest WON"T let us come around the altar, and he always says THE SAME PRAYER, Mass is boring”. . .or else they’ll think, “Why should I trust the Church’s teaching when Father X told me this, and this new priest says it’s not --they’re both priests, right? If they can’t agree, why should I accept anything anybody says? Somebody will come around and say the opposite, I’ll just choose to believe what I like”. . .
I never would have thought (I’ve been begging for baptism since the older boy was BORN) that having my boys baptized would be bittersweet like this.
I would welcome prayers. As it is, my inclination now is to try to do as much at home as I can, and avoid the local church (for them, obviously I’ll try to get their for my obligation as much as possible) until they are 5 and 6, in kindergarten and first grade, and then try to be involved in their religious ed program as much as possible, AND hope that the ‘orthodoxy’ situation has improved by then, but if somebody has had a similar experience and has any different ideas or different insights, I would welcome them too.
God bless.