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Once again, I enter here where angels fear to tread.

There can be no doubt that life experiences and personal anecdotal experiences can color our perception of things. This can happen in the sphere of religious experiences in life, and of experiences in our familial history and in our professional life.

And we all know in just the living of ordinary lives that we have a “history” that has left footnotes in our memories.

I don’t need to give my personal history other than to say that I have memories of my childhood and adolescence in the Protestant (mixed Presbyterian and Methodist)milieu.

I have vivid memories of the “shunning” that was my lot with my two best friends in high school who were Baptist and pretty much went ballistic when I decided to become a Catholic.

My neighbor when I was raising my family was the principal of a Christian high school in my area. He had daughters the same age as my daughters, but told me that they could not spend any time together as they believed that they were to “come out and be separate” from Catholics, who were considered to be basically non-Christian.

I don’t choose to dwell on these incidents because the only person that is affected by any negativity about them is me. As my priest tells me: “Bearing grudges is like walking around with a dead fish in your pocket—you’re the only one who smells.”

As to bad or faulty catechesis: I was received into the Church as an adult in 1949. I think even then there was a need for a new look at catechesis and the catechumenate. But the one thing that made a difference for me (personally) was that I never wanted to stop learning about the faith that I had been baptized into. From the time I was baptized up to this moment, I made an effort to continually study and understand my faith.

Teaching in the catechetical programs I was working with I was required to take a lot of courses before I went into any classroom.

I also believe that the Dei Verbum of the VAT II Council documents was the catalyst for a very big up-take in Scriptural studies. It was the impetus for the sprouting of parish Biblical studies, which is now an on-going thing in parishes. I was very fortunate to have had two outstanding Scripture teachers.

It’s only right and good that each generation of those who profess belief in the Triune God and the Redemption of the Cross should always be improving the Message and the understanding and transmission of it.

I believe that this is happening now in the Catholic Church. Not only are we experiencing the uptake of Young Adult groups using the “Theology on Tap” program, but we are also seeing something new in the parishes; there are programs now in which whole families are engaged together in the catechesis of their children. They come together as FAMILIES to the catechism classes and these families and these children interact together on a weekly basis.

There are also small Catholic colleges springing up that are enjoying early accreditation and an enthusiastic student body—the latest one being a Catholic College in Utah.

There is always room for improvement in Catholic education and the on-going transmission of the Faith; and it’s not lacking now.

Meanwhile, the “lay” communities are growing so fast that sometimes there isn’t enough room to accomodate all those who wish to enter. In my Carmelite Lay Community alone there are already 10,000 members and the roster grows every year.

About that book about Mary posted by Quix:

I have a library of over 300 books, most of them the more or less “classics” of Catholicism. These books are some of the best we have in Catholicism, from Augustine and deSales and aKempis, etc., down to Sheen and von Hildebrand and Kreeft, to mention only a few.

None of these books place Mary in any other position than what is Scriptural and is perfectly presented in her “Magnificat” in the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
That one small book (which easily could be perceived as in excess),should be used as an iconic demonstration of Marian devotion seems to me to be the same kind of lop-sided “expose” as any complaint about the “misrepresentation” of the UFO phenomena.

Isn’t there something quite wonderfully Scriptural about the Lord’s words from the Cross—the important words of the dying Savior: “Son, behold your mother”-—”and from that day he took her into his home.” This is what we Catholics do to this day—we take her into our homes. We understand the literal words of Jesus spoken to John as surely as we understand “this day you shall be with Me in Paradise.”

I will concede that there is always a need and a time to improve catechesis. The ever-evolving social milieu and culture always calls us to look anew at the absolutes of our Faith and find a way to improve the understanding and transmission of them.

It is the work of a lifetime and from one generation to the next.

Deo gratias.

Interestingly, I never encountered the *us against them* mentality that existed between Protestants and Catholics.

I do recall being taught (and all the Catholics I grew up with believing), that Protestants were not saved and that there was no salvation outside the Catholic church, HOWEVER, there was more pity and compassion about that than condemnation and competition.

Neither was I ever exposed to the Protestant side of the issue with the *evil papists* and *Romanist* mentality. I never felt that I was on the receiving end of that kind of mentality either.

There just wasn’t the bigotry there that I ever encountered that many others have experienced. There were doctrinal differences, but I simply do not recall it causing hard feelings. Each side thought the other was wrong and on it’s way to hell, but just didn’t treat each other disrespectfully for it. It was just a fact of life.

There was no shunning going on because there were just too many other people of other faiths to be able to engage in it successfully.

My reasons for leaving the Catholic church are not my reasons for choosing to stay out of it after I left.