Diary of a Catholic: How I Got Serious withe my Faith

I would like to start providing some very personal information about what it's like to be Catholic in today's modern world and I would like to talk about myself and about my experiences. This is the first in an ongoing series about my life as a Catholic and some of the struggles and joys that I get from it.

Right now I am 34 years old and I live in Canada. And for the most part my Catholicism really differentiates me from almost everybody I know especially people my age. There is a committed group of Catholics in our community and for the most part we stick together because overall there are not very many of us. We have a group called Catholic Young Adults of Newfoundland because that is the province where we reside. We have people in our group from many different ages between 18 to somewhat over 40. By and large we share one thing in common: our uniqueness among people our own age.

But really my journey as a serious Catholic begin during World Youth Day in Toronto in 2002. Obviously before this I was baptized and confirmed and received Holy Communion and Confession and so on. My parents are devout Catholics and so were their parents and so obviously it was quite natural that I too would follow in their footsteps and be a regular Mass attending Catholic each week.

But I became curious and wanted to really learn more. I felt moved to understand my faith better, to learn more about it, to get closer to God and when I was a little over 20 years old I decided to go to a meeting at our church about World Youth Day in Toronto. I think perhaps the first thing that drew me to this was the possibility of going to Toronto for free and also to see the pope. But at this point my faith was something that I had not really explored deeply.

Going to the first meeting I felt a little strange to be honest. I really did not know what to expect. As Catholics when we get into our later teens and early twenties there is a natural tendency to rebel against our parents and against our elders in general. And one of the mistakes I feel that was made and continues to be made is how older people in church will treat any relatively young person who is involved in things as some kind of goody two shoes. Like they are simply going to Mass and doing these things to please their parents because they want to be a good little boy and girl.

But this is the exact opposite from what real late teens and early twenties actually want. They do not want to be seen as Goody Two Shoe children who are just doing things to make Mommy and Daddy proud. At this age they are seeking to be independent to do their own thing and to be somewhat rebellious. I would like to suggest to anybody who is a little older who sees younger people going to Mass, going to confession, going to various things like this not to treat them like little boys and girls but to treat them like adults. Talk to them like adults. And as we know most adults are polite. They say "hello how's it going" but they don't act patronizing towards one another and I think that can be a huge turnoff for somebody in that age category.

So during my first meeting as I was walking to the church near my house I felt rather odd. I felt like I didn't really want anybody to know I was attending these meetings partly because of the reasons I listed above. Friends definitely do not understand when somebody their age wants to be religious. It's a weird misconception that people who want to participate in any form of religious observance or to become closer to God is just doing it because just childish and trying to suck up to their parents. But in reality young people are desperately searching for answers and reality and Truth.

Even to this day unless I am extremely comfortable with somebody and have known them for a very long time I rarely if ever will mention that I attend weekly religious ceremonies or that I pray the rosary every day or anything like that. In fact most of the time I don't even tell my relatives. And I think this is a real shame because our religion has been attacked so often so many times constantly whether in school or in the media or all over the place. Religion is constantly being attacked by dozens of sources.

In fact when I think back on it I think the church has almost always been portrayed in a negative light in public schools. One of the reasons is that the church competes with the liberal leftist socialist Progressive agenda of modern school boards which loath choice. One example of this is when the public school system savagely attacked and destroyed religious education in our province. It's like Jesus says you cannot serve two masters. And the school board decided to serve progressivism and try to destroy traditional Family Values.

Now as an adult I listen to and read our national public broadcaster and again in this arena they're constantly harassing and attacking all religion and all traditional Family Values. Anybody who dares speak the truth will have their character attacked ceaselessly. And we are forced at the end of a gun to pay massive amounts of money, billions upon billions of dollars, to have this hatred spewed upon us every minute of the day.

Probably the only reason that I even initially just a little older than 20 years old decided to look further into the Catholic Church into what it meant is because of the influence of my parents and their parents because the greatest teachers of the faith our parents. But this is also why Public School teachers, the government and public broadcasters and others constantly and viciously attack families because ultimately progressivists want to completely and utterly destroy all concept of families so that they can take the place of parents.

Sometimes people say public schools are not very effective they don't do a very good job in the field of Education. But I believe this is false. You cannot say that an institution is failing if you do not know its goal. The goal of the public education system is ironically not public education. That is in fact a misnomer. In reality the public education system is really a government propaganda machine. The goal of the system is to reshape people and to take away their allegiances to families so that opinion shapers and left-wing radical ideologues can indoctrinate the populace.

We can tell that the public education system is in fact doing this extraordinarly well. All you have to do is take a look at what's been going on in Canada's biggest provinces where now parents aren't even allowed by law to remove their children from classes which teach dozens of genders and create gender confusion and classes which give explicit instruction for immoral sexual practices to extremely underage children. I do not think that the authors of the Bible who saw so many horrendous things could even imagine the system that we have created in Canada.

This is the backdrop of where religious people come from. So you can imagine that if people and students and families are under continuous attack day and night from every institution of our malevolent overlords obviously people will be led astray. No company no organization can ever come close to the level of pure indoctrination that the government, media, and education system have created. I would estimate that every advertising created by every company in the entire world would form about 5% of the impact that these institutions have. So it is absolutely no surprise that there are very few religious people around my age left anymore.In fact it is downright shocking that there are so many even if they only represent 1% of people our age.

Nonetheless, we are a vibrant community. Stay tuned for more stories about my journey. Thanks for joining me.