Popery

How is it possible that children are still being confirmed on a night like this? Clearly the Bishop is off his rocker.

Everything else is closed, but I guess it was too much to hope that the Catholic Church would wise up and confirm the kids next week.

Eat me Bishop.

I'm filled with unnatural amounts of irritation towards everyone and everything right now.

I totally forgot that the Bishop asks the kids questions before he confirms them. It's possible I was drunk/slept through my confirmation. Actually, I vaguely remember sweating and hoping the Bishop didn't call on me. He didn't, as far as I remember.
***
So now we're post-confirmation and I can honestly say...meh. The night, taken as a whole, wasn't the worst thing in the world and I really like dressing up Deanna and playing with her hair, like she's a large walking and talking doll. With opinions. Dinner afterwards was pretty nice too.

The service itself, however, was interminable. And made me interminably angry.

Every so often I find myself thinking about the Church with affectionate disdain, rather than, I suppose, only disdain. 'Sure they're crusty and misguided fuddy duddies' I say to myself, 'but they're MY crusty and misguided fuddy duddies.' I mean, I've been watered and oiled and ashed and communioned and confirmed...all the Rites of Initiation. Being Catholic means something to me, I tell myself, there's history there, and I like history.

But then. Then things like the Confirmation remind me why I don't go to church (beyond the requisite laziness come Sunday morning). The Bishop decided that he was going to take advantage of his huge captive audience to scold.

I get it, I really do. Going to church is important if you want to call yourself a Catholic and mean it and Thou shalt be guilty is like the Eleventh Commandment for Catholics. But seriously, Bishop Balls-for-Brains, you didn't make me feel guilty about avoiding church whenever humanly possible last night, you just made me angry that Deanna was being subjected to the bullshit spewing out of your mouth.

Deanna's smart and I know she probably knows better, but when he said things like 'you can't be a good and moral person without God' or, even more rage-inspiring 'today's culture is obsessed with worshipping the false god of science' or when he told girls that they had to be modest lest society objectify them, I just wanted to run down the middle aisle screaming and haul Deanna out lest any of that hogwash seep into her impressionable brain.

That Bishop and that mass is why people hate religion. Religion should make you feel like an integral cog in an ancient machine. It should make you wonder and marvel and celebrate.

But it's been a long time, if ever, since the Church has done that for me.

Negativity isn't the way to get people back to the Church and it certainly isn't the way to inspire religious devotion in children. Embrace science, embrace change, embrace women, Bishop Jerkface.

Or don't. Because I've sworn off of Confirmations and Bishops.