I found it interesting that she had been baptized and raised Catholic and then I was astounded as she proceeded to note that the Church considers murder on a par with two teens sharing a deep kiss. Wouldn’t you think, she mused, the kids would get a few million years less time in hell?
Obviously, she was joking. And she was serious. Apparently she believed the Church considered a killer and kisser damned for eternity and she was taking a potshot at Catholicism for such silliness.
What amazed me was that some editor at her publishing house hadn’t read those lines and said, “Wait a minute? Is that right? Is that what the Catholic Church says?”
Then again, maybe the editor had. Maybe he had called over to the worker in the next cubicle and had read the paragraph out loud. Perhaps that resident “expert” — the guy or gal who had attended 12 years of Catholic school, the one who “used to be” Catholic — had only laughed.
Case closed.
I don’t think anyone should be surprised that a person — famous or not — might have inaccurate information if his or her religious education and association with the Church ended 35 or more years ago. What amazes me is that the person can make a statement in print (or on the air) and it’s pretty much taken at face value.
Imagine if the same thing happened in other areas:
“Yes, I’d like to make a comment on Alabama. I lived there in the 1950s until I was 12. I think it’s terrible that the law there makes black people use different drinking fountains.”
“No, I’m against having a computer in the classroom. I saw one when I went on a tour of IBM in 1965, and a computer, with all its vacuum tubes, would take up the entire room. There would be no place for desks.”
It could be that that nominal Catholic is relying on skewed information presented by a sincere but misguided pastor, teacher or parent: “Catholics think the Blessed Mother is Irish.”
Or that person may depend on a childish interpretation because when a lesson was presented, he or she was a child: “Catholics think they have to sit over to one side in a chair to make room for their guardian angels.”
None of this is to say that, historically, there haven’t been some superstitious Catholics. And, sadly, there still are. Some Catholics — clerics, nuns and laity — have had cockamamie ideas they presented as Church teaching.
And there’s no denying that some of the customs of local, national or ethnic churches have evolved into practices that can seem bizarre to anyone outside that circle. Or that some of those practitioners have kept the outer trappings of a ritual or custom long after the initial purpose or lesson was lost in the mists of time.
Coupled with all that is a general lack of knowledge of the Church’s idea of the development of doctrine. Simply put, that means the basic truth as revealed by Christ doesn’t change but our understanding of it grows.
(A good example would be slavery. What early Christians thought and taught about slavery is light years from what the Church says in our own time. As recently as the Civil War years, religious orders in the United States had slaves. Now that would be unthinkable.)
So what was the source of that actress/author’s misinformation? I suspect a worried parent, nun or parish priest warned her that passionate kissing can lead a young, unmarried couple into serious sin.
It can.
Or maybe that parent, teacher or pastor told her that type of kissing is a serious sin. And in her mind, using the vocabulary of the time, sins were either mortal or venial. If it was serious, it was mortal. The same as murder. Both meant hell.
I can understand her coming to that conclusion as a teen. And why, not having been further educated in Church teachings, she held fast to it so many years later.
The person I have a hard time with is her editor. It’s difficult to excuse that kind of sloppy work. There was a “fact” begging to be checked.
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Bill Dodds’ latest books are Your One-Stop Guide to How Saints Are Made and Your One-Stop Guide to the Mass (Servant Publications); and 1440 Reasons to Quit Smoking: One for Every Minute of the Day and What You Don't Know About Retirement: A Funny Retirement Quiz (Meadowbrook Press). His website is http://www.BillDodds.com. You can email him at BillDodds@BillDodds.com.
