Stupid Church!!!

From Galileo to the Crusades to the Spanish Inquisition, the Roman Catholic church has been the cause of many headaches around the globe. I was raised Catholic and have lived under the influence of my Catholic upbringing since I can remember.

While I am happy for the moral compass that the church has hardwired into my decision making process, I loathed the Saturday morning CCD classes of my youth and the weeknight CCD classes of the final years that led to my Confirmation.

Why? Mainly because it counted as an extra day of "church" during the week. The weekly masses rarely offered anything of value to the entertainment center of my brain, but once in a while I took something away from our Noon sessions at Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament that stuck with me.

That probably explains why I could count on one hand the number of times I attended mass after I left home for the U.S. Army. Were it not for Kathy and my transition from swinging single to happily involved father, that would still likely be the case.

Despite dragging my feet from the door to the pew, I take more away from mass as an adult than I ever did as a kid. In the past four years I've attended enough masses to critique the masses and form opinions of them and the people who preside over them. I think the part I like the most about the church is the sense of community.

Much like Buffalo, the majority of people in Saipan are Catholic. The locals here were assimilated into the faith by force from the Spanish who all but wiped out the indigenous population nearly 500 years ago while the folks from the mainland brought religion with them from Europe.

Now Magellan and his bible wielding conquistadors are invading my wedding plans. If wedding planning weren't already stressful enough, the change in service from non-Catholic to Catholic has upped the ante considerably.

Kathy and I went from a beautiful beach wedding plan to an apostolic nightmare, replete with an abundance of familial influence, cultural clashes between a landowner and the priest (to put it extremely kind without crucifying a certain angry woman who works for the church), and a boatload of scheduling and issues that have brought a typhoon of discontent upon us with little more than a month before we exchange our vows.

How bad is it? I am ready to scrap the church's influence from our wedding and walk away from the church forever. Seriously. Why won't I do it? Because I who would rather make Kathy happy and not add an all-out family revolt against yours truly.

The other reason is that despite all of my gripes, I would still rather raise our son with the same moral values that were drilled into my brain as a kid.

So what I'm left with is a pain in my ass the size of the Vatican and little more than a month to put it all together.