So you claim. If your wife was a Catholic for 30 years, as you stated she was, then she learned and publicly proclaimed that the Blessed Virgin Mary is a perpetual virgin. If she claims that that is not the case then she is not and never was a Catholic.
>.So you claim. <<
Well, I have lived with her for going on 13 years and come into contact with her family much more often than you do. I’ve also discussed this at length with her on many occasions.
All you have is a few brief posts. Just sayin’. :)
>>If your wife was a Catholic for 30 years, as you stated she was, then she learned and publicly proclaimed that the Blessed Virgin Mary is a perpetual virgin. If she claims that that is not the case then she is not and never was a Catholic.<<
I think she just learned the proclomation as a young person (while not fully understanding the actual context and meaning of what she was reciting) and, by the time she was an adult it just became so many sounds strung together.
I do know that she was very involved. In the youth group, one time she and some friends went to downtown Seattle to hand out leaflets to people going into dirty book stores and x-rated movie theaters. She got into a discussion with a guy where the guy got really heated and one of her friends yanked her out of the way just as the guy took a swing at her. He ended up hitting the wall behind where she had been standing.
What I think happened with her was that she was always a “Christian” but never fully got into the ‘uniquely Catholic” stuff. Also, as I said earlier, she was one of the only members of her family (large Irish-Catholic) that actually read the bible on her own. Again, when she brought questions to the church leadership she was given “pat” answers with sort of a “don’t you worry your pretty little head about that” attitude. I think it is to her credit that she broke the cycle of “that is what I was taught when I was young and I believe it, no matter how much scripture, as an adult, I read that contradicts it.” A lot of us fail at that to one degree or another.
So, my wife got back from Chicago last night and I asked her about what catholic chants she did, and if there was anything about Mary dying a virgin. She immediately started with her ‘...full of grace, blessed be the fruit of thy womb...” stuff and got to the end and said, no. And then she keeps mumbling until she says “...ever virgin...”, and stops and says, “Oh yeah, I guess that was in there.”
It is what I suspected. When kids are brought up from birth exposed to and doing a chant, the words lose their meaning. They are just sounds. She never really gave serious thought to what “ever virgin” actually meant.
I suppose a person that understands the bible and then sees that phrase in something they always said could think to themselves that the phrase “ever virgin” means something other than what the writers intended it to mean. I can imagine being a catholic like she was and then when someone points out that the phrase means Mary was ALWAYS a virgin I might say something like, “That’s ridiculous. I’m sure what is meant is that she will forever be known as the one who, as a virgin, gave birth to our savior. I mean, she was married, and Joseph was told not to have relations with her UNTIL she had given birth, so that is the only explanation that makes sense, right?”
I’ve actually had experiences like that with various organizations of which I was a part. Some obscure phrase they cling to means something different than what I thought it meant.
I’ll bet there are a LOT of devout Catholics that don’t know that the church teaches that Mary is perfect and she died a virgin.
BTW, If the Church really does teach that along with all the baggage I have seen attached to it here, then the church is much more flawed than I originally thought. Although many of its members may be Christian, I’m not sure its teaching is. It does fit in with why my wife left it. With an adult mind she read the Bible with an open mind and found she had to move on. However, because she was raised in it and they were VERY Catholic, she still has a “vestigal” need for the pomp. She misses it, but knows that it is mere reminiscing about her childhood culture, which is meaningless. Heck, I met an ex-Hitler Youth member that reminisced over his Hitler Youth days. But you can’t go back. Nor would you want to.