To: Desdemona
maybe we should start teaching the culture again. I'm not sure "teach" is the right word exactly -- "inculcate" maybe? And, I think, with Catholics there was never just one "Catholic culture" except in the Platonic sense -- that is, Catholic culture was manifest only in various "sub-cultures" -- where I grew up, Irish Catholic, Italian Catholic, Lithuanian Catholic, Polish Catholic, for example.
Some aspects of "Catholic culture" the author menstions -- "like pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and Hot Cross Buns on Good Friday, the scattering of flowers before the Blessed Sacrament in procession" -- I never heard of. Well, I've heard of and even eaten Hot Cross buns, but only because we made my mother buy them once -- they weren't part of our own sub-culture (I think they're British).
Some of the things the author lists are more matters of doctrine and discipline than culture proper, not that such things don't influence and contribute toward the culture.
15 posted on
07/10/2003 7:40:54 AM PDT by
maryz
To: maryz
My mom used to make Hot Cross Buns. I saw the scattering of the flower petals for the first time on Corpus Christi. When I was in kindergarden, we dressed as saints. Every parish here has a May Crowning. That stuff I was exposed to, but not some of the others.
Yes, there are a lot of little cultures, but, even so, just the concept of chaplets was a new one to me when I discovered them. All the prayers, the saints, their patronage - hardly any of it is being taught in the schools. And I think this goes back farther than Vatican II. There are prayers and such I discovered my parents had never heard of (namely the Prayer to St. Michael which my grandmother says, but my mother had never heard).
When I told my mother all this and that I had never heard the term Doctor of the Church until last year, she was appalled. We went through Catholic schools and none of us can defend the faith correctly. We did get a good liturgical grounding, but even so, there are things that got missed.
To: maryz; Desdemona; St.Chuck
Catholic culture survives intact only among traditional Catholics and their small communities. Some conservative parishes keep some customs alive--but they are slowly being phased-out.
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