...brings back a memory & smiles.
Mom & Dad were married back in 1936 by a priest (Mom was very Catholic) but not in a church (Dad not religious) . Spin ahead 34 years as my now ex-brother-in-law/wannabe lawyer/ongoing a$$hole is about to be baptized in order to satisfy my sister's need for a good Catholic wedding/marriage (she got one of those).
As this typical, solemn, quiet, though echoing ceremony began, my father sat between me and the future b-i-l's father (a good man). Dad decided to describe his own version of this event to the future b-i-l's father...in a voice which was just loud enough for all around him to hear...it also resulted in my very loud belched laugh drawing even more attention to the words.
So Dad says...Roselyn & her family wanted me to get baptized before we got married. I went through the lessons, listened to the priest. When it came time to be baptized and was asked if I accepted all it required me to believe, I told the priest "no, there are already way too many hypocrites in the church".
Mom got the last word though...Dad was unconscious, on his literal death bed when Mom had a priest baptize him...no questions asked. When he came to, unable to speak because of a very bad stroke, he was told what happened & cried. Always wanted to read his mind those last couple days.
My mother was an Italian Catholic "illegal immigrant" who fled here with her parents in the 1920's. A WOP, as in "With Out Papers".
Fascist operatives wandered into her father's cabinet maker shop and pretty much told him at gunpoint: "Get out and live or stay and die, this is not your shop anymore."
My father was smuggled here in 1937 by his father in the belly of a steam freighter, fleeing Hitler. He was Jewish.
They met and fell in love, and when the time came to marry, my mom's family had to get special dispensation from the papal nunzio and still, at the last minute, the pastor refused to do the wedding in the church, thus they were married in the vestibule, apparently to prevent my dad's Jewish blood from besmirching the sanctuary.
I was raised Catholic but "fell away" at age nine when the pastor informed me that my salvation may be in question "as the product of an illegitimate union."
So you might understand that ever since then I've been skeptical of organized religion on the whole.
God is faith, God is love, mankind are the jerks who build churches where they sell God's faith and love like so many bottles of beer.
I'll get mine from the original source, thanks.
