CathNews New Zealand

I noticed a decided anti-Catholic bent at the AA meetings I was attending, but my sobriety has only benefited from my religious upbringing.

Forgive me for leading with a rather painful and obvious pun, but I have a confession to make: I am a member of Alcoholics Anonymous who is also a practicing Catholic.

I was born this way.

My godparents, Francis and Frances, as it happened, renounced Satan for me, and all his empty promises, when I was an infant.

My mother taught me to say the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary when I was three or four years old, and explained to me, in her way, the concept of the Holy Trinity.

It remains as mysterious to me now as it was then.

I attended a Catholic school.

The sacraments of Confession (now better known, perhaps more poignantly, as Reconciliation), First Holy Communion, and Confirmation were incorporated into my education.

Those roots took deep hold. But shortly after I graduated, I “got on” with my life.

Outside the odd wedding or funeral where my presence was required, a guilt-panged Easter or two, I was away from the church for the decades that dovetailed with my drinking and drugging.

I remember firing up a big joint before Midnight Mass one Christmas, and the utter horror of the “high.”

I almost fainted out of paranoia and anxiety.

I survived the decades I wasted on alcoholism and landed in AA, and without being too thin-skinned about it, I noticed a decided anti-Catholic bent at the meetings I was attending.

That sentiment has persisted.

Some pithy member will uncork a comment along the lines of, “In addition to being an alcoholic, I’m also a recovering Catholic” or kick off their story with, “I’m from an Irish Catholic family. I could end the qualification right there” to scattered titters of approval.

All in good fun.

No more harm in a lively Catholic bash than in telling a joke that ends in an anti-Semitic punch line, right? Continue reading

Source

• Harry Healy in The Fix

Harry Healy is a regular contributor to The Fix.

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News category: Analysis and Comment.