Is Catholicism ruining your marriage?

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Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (movie)

Monty Python's The Meaning of Life is a 1983 comedy film by the Monty Python comedy team. Unlike the two previous films they had made, which had each told a single, more or less coherent story, The Meaning of Life returns to the sketch comedy format of the troupe's original television series, loosely structured as a series of comic skits about the various stages of life, roughly based on the Seven Ages of Man.

Anyone see the above movie?

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Storks (Catholicism's explanation of everything)

vs

Parents (Most persons' explanation of everything)?

Catholicism ruins everything that is natural.

I love 'Meaning of Life', but my favorite bit is the 'Every Sperm Is Sacred' sequence. That song's just too catchy!

More seriously, as for Catholicism and marriage, I speak as someone who used to be married to an ostensibly non-practising Catholic with an extremely devout old Irish mother (and Irish Catholicism in people of her age tends, in my limited experience, to be very old-school and pre-Vatican-II in its views). She immediately hated me, even more so when it turned out her son and I were actually having an intimate relationship. The words 'fat', 'Protestant' and 'wh*re' turned up fairly frequently in her assessment of me. (Ironically, I had very little sexual experience and I was actually a broom-closeted Wiccan at the time, but that's a whole other story.) She was widowed, he was her only son, and they had...let's say, a less than healthy relationship in which he put her first even after he was married to me. You can gather what eventually happened.

I've known some very nice, loving, compassionate and tolerant Catholics...but they generally tend to be the ones who don't follow certain tenets of their Church. (One of my best friends 'fell out with the Pope', as she puts it, meaning JPII, over his decision to canonize some foreign bishop who'd never really done anything great and was way too friendly with the Nazis to boot.) I also love some of the old-fashioned Catholic imagery and ritual...but I think that like the majority of religions, there are parts of it which, when taken seriously, poison everything they touch.

My maternal Grandmother was a Prussian Lutheran who fell in love with my Grandfather, a Catholic Austrian/Bavarian. Well, his mother, who used to go every damn day to church, till her priest made her go home and take care of her family, needless to say, was none too pleased about their marriage. I'm sure it wasn't all about religion - after all, the Bavarians and Austrians despised the Prussians, and vice versa. But religion was a big enough part of it; my Great Grandmother was certain "that girl is going to turn my boy into a Lutheran." As it turns out, she did not. But because my Grandfather was in truth not particularly interested in the Catholicism he had been raised in, he told my Grandmother to take their kids (my Mom included) to her church.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer