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bben15
Guest
At least she genuflects. I rarely ever see a teenager genuflect. They just walk right into the pew.So true. Yesterday at Mass I say a teenage girl texting as she was genuflecting.
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thequietsinger
Guest
Ah, the good 'ole days, when the prayer’s were pure, the holy water font never got moldy and every father wore a belt and wasn’t afraid to take it off and use it.
I could get people on here who will tell you how the altar boys put ground ginger in the incense and choked the whole Church with acrid smoke. The priest just continued like nothing was happening while everyone choked and after Mass he took the can of incense from the shelf in the vestry, looked at it and said, “I didn’t know this stuff went bad!” and threw it in the garbage can.
I know a guy who told us how he used to put a screwdriver in the rope to the church bells - the monk would go up to ring the bells and when the bells got really swinging the screwdriver would get jammed in the pullies. He said he used to bet the other boys that he could get the monk to curse and that is how he would do it. The monk would scream, “You son’s of blankety-blank!” and they would all run away.
Yeah, but that stuff never happened.
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I’m sorry, but I can’t help laughing at your post! I have to ask though, did your Priest ever use his belt on you? Not accusing you of anything, but I’ve never known a Priest to discipline someone. 
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thequietsinger
Guest
This is such a wonderful story and photo. Staged or not, it really did move me, because I have never seen anyone kneel before a Catholic Priest before.
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DevoutRabbit
Guest
They are not kneeling before the priest, they are kneeling before Jesus. The OP said that this is a picture of a priest bringing Holy Communion to a sick person.
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CarolNoel
Guest
Me thinks you are a party pooper.
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thequietsinger
Guest
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing. Please forgive me.
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JimG
Guest
Yes, my parents had a sick call set with candles and crucifix available as long as I can remember. After they died, I inherited it from them and have it still today. I recall once as a child being so sick that I seriously considered asking my mom to call the priest, but I didn’t ask, and got better anyway.
As far as the photo being staged, it is hard to say, but Life photographers and photojournalists in general were pretty creative in getting just the photo that they wanted, and they didn’t take a lot of time to arrange it. The photographer might have asked the girl to kneel while he composed the photograph before the priest arrived.
Everything was on film, (no digital) and many photographers used Speed Graphic cameras with a slide holding only two negative frames. In any case, they had to capture the right image in just one or two tries, so preparation and composition was important. (Nowadays I just shoot a dozen or more frames in the hope of getting one that’s just right!) Life magazine used to give photo credits for all its photographs. I would study the photo credits and the photos. It was apparent that different photographers had their own particular styles, and one could learn a lot from studying them.
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Jon_Paul
Guest
What exactly about Quebec and Ireland at that time was Jansenist in the Church?
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triumphguy
Guest
Mulrooney!
My wife is from French Canadian stock and her dad was the eldest of 18 kids. They lived in a three bedroom bungalow.
His parents were extremely religious. However, despite that, all the children that survived to adulthood left the faith, and their now adult children have very little idea of what the catholic church really stands for.
From the “sublime” to the “ridiculous” in 3 generations.
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PennyinCanada
Guest
The Church forced people to have large families?
That’s just how it was before the pill. My grandmother (not in Quebec) had 12 children but 4 died very young, no one knew why at the time. My other grandmother only had 3. They lived in log cabins, had an outhouse, no electricity, and a well they had to walk out to and pump water. Everyone was the same, and that was the standard of living. My parents didn’t see a chocolate bar or orange until well into their teens when they road in a wagon pulled by horses to town. We of course would not tolerate such conditions today but that’s how it was and I just don’t see how the Church should be blamed. They were all in the same boat. If my parents were alive, they would just be in their 80’s now. This isn’t that long ago.
Just adding one other thing. If a priest came around to visit once a year to baptize a baby that may have been born over the year, that was a blessing. My parents and their neighbors had an official record of their birth, provided by the record keeping of the Church, which entitled them to Social Security when they reached the age. Church records over the centuries has recorded for us our family trees, births, marriages, deaths. Try to resist the idea that he came around for some shady reason. The priest was providing a public service as well as a spiritual one.
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triumphguy
Guest
The Church in Quebec was very different from the church in the rest of Canada and really did control peoples’ lives.The Church forced people to have large families?
That’s just how it was before the pill. My grandmother (not in Quebec) had 12 children but 4 died very young, no one knew why at the time. My other grandmother only had 3. They lived in log cabins, had an outhouse, no electricity, and a well they had to walk out to and pump water. Everyone was the same, and that was the standard of living. My parents didn’t see a chocolate bar or orange until well into their teens when they road in a wagon pulled by horses to town. We of course would not tolerate such conditions today but that’s how it was and I just don’t see how the Church should be blamed. They were all in the same boat. If my parents were alive, they would just be in their 80’s now. This isn’t that long ago.
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Phemie
Guest
Yes, it wasn’t unheard of to have the priest point out a family from the pulpit and accuse them of using contraception because they hadn’t had a baby in the last 18 months.
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Phemie
Guest
How far away from the church did they live that the priest would come to them for Baptism? My experience is that the baby was taken to church at the first opportunity, usually the first Sunday after the birth if possible.
The priest visited once a year to do a parish census since that has to be reported to the Bishop. Often the annual dues were collected at the same time.
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Phemie
Guest
So much so that one archbishop felt it necessary to do a billboard campaign to let people know the meaning of the words they use to curse. So removed from the Church are they that this generation doesn’t know the meaning of words like tabernacle, ciboire (ciborium), câlice (chalice), etc., the curse words they learn in the cradle.
I grew up in a home where saying s**t wouldn’t get me into trouble, or at most would earn me a lecture about being vulgar and unladylike, but where “playing with the priest’s dishes” would earn me the belt. I don’t think I’ve ever uttered those words unless I was having a conversation about Mass.
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triumphguy
Guest
That’s right, the definitive swear word in Quebec is tabernac.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_French_profanity
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OraLabora
Guest
A very strong emphasis on human depravity and that we are all basically evil. Jansenism rose in France at around the time that French Canada was colonized. While not totally Jansenist, the local Church retained elements of it namely the focus on rigor and human depravity.
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OraLabora
Guest
Oddly enough the Protestants had much smaller families around here. What did they know that we didn’t?The Church forced people to have large families?
That’s just how it was before the pill.
As was pointed out the Quebec Church was very different than Catholicism in the rest of North America.
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malphono
Guest
A backlash to Jansenism isn’t really an unexpected phenomenon. I’ve always found it interesting that, while Jansenism rose and fell rather quickly in France itself, it took deeper root in Ireland and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in Québec.
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MorEphrem
Guest
Very nice picture indeed.
Isn’t it still in Latin rubrics to do a procession to a sick person’s house to give communion?
Isn’t it still in Latin rubrics to do a procession to a sick person’s house to give communion?
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Jon_Paul
Guest
That’s Original Sin 101. Jansenism is a very specific set of condemned heresies and positions. Did the Church in Quebec teach that grace did not exist outside of the Catholic Church? Did they say that it was impossible to follow the natural law? You may not have liked the culture and tone of the Church in that period but it is another thing to say that they were heretical.
On the matter of human depravity, look at Saint Louis Marie de Montfort. Saint Louis, and the rest of the French School, didn’t really think much of man. They all so emphasised our dependence on God because we are absolutely wretched and are incapable of much by ourselves. And they were also avowed enemies of the Jansenists. Saint John Eudes was hardly one to sit with a cup of tea and merrily talk about how you’re not really “that bad”. But he was no Jansenist.
And to be honest I would rather live in the days where the presumption of man was evil rather than the assumption that he is good. When left to his own devices, because of Original Sin. What is the great vision of “man is actually okay!” done for the world today? Man takes his every whim to be good because it came from him and haven’t you heard? He’s not really “that bad of a guy!” It leeches into a man’s mind and becomes a vehicle for permissiveness.
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