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An Interview with a Retired Catholic Priest

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An Interview With A Retired Catholic Priest
John Sixsmith
Axia College

An Interview With A Retired Catholic Priest
What is Catholicism? I come from a long line of Irish Catholics, but was never raised in the church because my father was excommunicated when he was 13 years old in his home country of Ireland. He never spoke of the church or his excommunication until I was an adult, and as a result, the Catholic Church was a mystery to me. Couple this with the fact that I was raised in a southwestern copper town that was populated predominatly with Mexican Americans who were of the Catholic persuasion. The attiutde amongst the people that I grew up with was that if y0our weren’t Catholic, then you were simply not in the club, and they were not willing to explain any of the “mysterious ways” of the Catholic Church to anyone not of the faith. I was sixteen years old before I ever stepped into a Catholic church for the first time, and that was for a schoolmate’s funeral. Nobody explained what a funeral mass was, and what was going on, so, as the only unelightened one there, I stuck out like a sore thumb. This paper is for all of those other “unelightened souls” out there who might have questions as to the Catholic faith. The interview section of this paper was conducted with Father Gregory Francis Patterson (ret.). A retired Catholic priest, who it was my privledge to be introduced to by a mutual friend. He still has a deep abiding love for the “Mother Church” as he puts it, and was a font of much wisdom and information, for which I am eternaly greatful.

Catholicism an outside view
Everyone in the civilized world has seen the Pope on television, whether it is from the balcony at the Vatican, perfoming mass for Christmas or Easter, on the news, or when a pope dies. Unless you are a Catholic, the whole thing can be as mysterious and quaint as tribal marriage rites.

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