Roman Catholicism

absent I'm so sorry for your loss. You will be in my thoughts today

Absent your post has taken me right back to when my father died. Although he was in relatively good health he had told me a few weeks previously that he had had enough of living alone (3 years since my DM had died) and felt that the time had come to join his beloved wife and 'dance with her in Heaven'. My parents were wonderful natural ballroom dancers, so good that people would leave the dance floor to them and watch from the side. Latterly with M's arthritis and D's bad back they could only manage a turn or two round their living room.

Like you I do not believe in an afterlife, but my parent's did. I was heartbroken to let my DF go, but much comforted that he died happy and hopeful and would not wake up to be disappointed.

absent I am sorry to hear about your loss.

Strangely I don't see myself as a believer in Angels, a God or an afterlife, which sounds a bit vague I know. Perhaps unconciously I am hedging my bets!
My parents died 10 years ago within 2 months of each other. Dad first at 86 and then Mum at 82.

Some time after their deaths I dreamt that a sort of angel figure complete with white gown, came floating down from heaven, hand in hand with my mum.I asked my Mum if she had met up with my Dad yet! I cant remember getting a reply. In the dream I somehow knew that "the white angel" figure was my Mum's baby sister who died when my Mum was about 2yrs old.

This was the oddest experience I have had. Like most of my generation I have been steeped in heaven and angel imagery, but I have never had an experience or dream like that before or since!

When your MIL has her funeral, write down all the good memories and funny anecdotes you remember about her. If you can manage it read it yourself, or get whoever takes the service to do so.

It really helps to bring back good memories and funny anecdotes to relatives and old friends, and in particular to let people, who only knew that person in declining physical and mental health, just what they were like when they were fit and well. They can then remember, talk and laugh together about the happy times.

I wish now I had done this for my MIL whose funeral seemed rather flat.

my sincere sympathy and hugs too absentgrana

I can feel empathy lost my f i law nearly 4 years ago just before xmas and he was like a Dad to me.

As the others say you will have your memories, I am not sure what I believe, I did go see a spiritualist who came up with messages from my late f i law and my Mother, stuff no one could have known,
#
very scarey really!!
sorry this was just to send you sincere sympathy!

absent ((((hugs)))).

(((Hugs))) and absenta

Thank you for your kind thoughts. I have no worries about the state of not being when my time comes; it's the thoughts one has about the people one loves when their time has come. The loss is, of course, still raw, and it's almost instinctive to make up stories in one's head.

Sympathies absent - it is hard to lose someone and to know that there is no more. There will be good memories I am sure.

Because she is an atheist? Not everybody turned to god in the trenches!

So am I - I found your post very touching, absent.

How do you know they aren't, absent. It's a lovely idea and I'm very sorry for your sad loss

absent, and hugs. You still have your love for her and your memories.

That is sad for you, absent. I am sure your affection was very comforting to her.
I think it is likely that many people cling on to their religious belief because they cannot face the thought of just going out like a battery that has stopped charging.

absent and a warm (hug)

Oh absent I am so sorry to hear that. Your affection for her comes over loud and clear. And I know just what you mean - wouldn't it be nice.

Yeah – okay, a Disney heaven not a Catholic one.

I really do understand the magnetic attraction of religious belief and the way it fulfils the need for support and reassurance within the human condition. My much-loved mother-in-law died this morning and standing in her care home room seeing her dear little body it was hard to to come to terms with the knowledge that this is it. It is, indeed, what I believe, but how comforting it would have been to see her as reunited with my much-love father-in-law and envisage them still dancing together in heaven.

You are not alone, Nellie - some Gregorian plain song gives me goose bumps!
And,no, I don't think that means I am secretly still a catholic!
If I believed in the Christian god, I think I would be attracted to Quakerism.

Greatnan thanks for that perspective. Never having been subjected to that level of what appears to be very scary hellfire and damnation rhetoric, I probably cannot start to comprehend the lasting effects it would have on ones psyche!
From what I think you are saying the power and control the RCC had over the lives of so many enabled the organisation to maintain its control and doctrinaire ways?

As a Methodist I was always presented (In the 1950s) with an image of a loving caring, forgiving and very accessible God to whom who you could talk directly.

I think the lack of a hierarchical structure is what pulled in the early adherents of the Methodist church in droves. It seems to have appealed particularly to the industrial and labouring classes at a time when the C of E was obsessed with the class system.

“The rich man in his castle. The poor man his gate. He makes them high and lowly and orders their estate.”

However I still like to hear Verdi’s spectacularly terrifying Dies Irae!

Celeb - Limbo was the place for unbaptised babies to go until the day of judgement. Purgatory was the place for everybody else, except Mary, who got a 'get out of jail' card and was assumed into heaven. If you want to know catholic theology, ask a recovered catholic! - or Google!
Nobody wants to take away your comfort, this is just an academic debate between people who enjoy this kind of thing!
It is not academic, of course, if you are homosexual, or a woman needing a divorce, contraception or abortion.

Brought up as a Scottish Presbyterian in Ayrshire, which is about as close as you get, geographically and culturally, to Northern Ireland, I was vehemently though unthinkingly anti-Catholic. Our minister preached against the Catholic Church, our History teacher had Orange views and he used to send the Rugby players out to harass the kids from the RC school at lunchtime. Hockey matches against the RC secondary school were pretty vicious. If I had come home with a Catholic boyfriend, my mother would have had a fit. A 'mixed marriage' at that time had nothing to do with race, everything to do with religion. When a Catholic family moved into our middle class road, curtains twitched, never mind that the father had a PhD and worked for the same company as my dad and many of our friends and neighbours. Thankfully I left home for University and met lots of RCs who, to my surprise, were just like me!

whoa there far too deep for me!!

All I can say is that i gain comfort from the Catholic mass and our priest is a kind caring man and any help in this life is worth it!!

Allthe intricacies about purgatory and limbo do not really bother me, from what I remember in dim and distant past Limbo was where you went if dying with a sin? or was that purgatory gosh all too much for me!!!??

guess with a father Irish Catholic very strict is is inbred in me went to catholic schools also but my children tho baptised and brought up as catholics son was confirmed daughter always been alternative, and that is their choice!!

I didn't find her remarks fun - I was heart-broken and terrified. I look forward to the day when the church admits that its attitude to women, homosexuality and sex are also founded in medieval misunderstandings of science.

I don't think there is much point in my continuing to waste my time here, but just a point of information.

And, I'm certainly not here to address ad infinitum anyone's problems about Catholism! even if I could. However:

The then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in the 1990s 'limbo was a mediaeval hypothesis, it was never a truth of faith.'

Mediaeval theologians sought to make sense of the world as they knew it then. In the same way scientists sought to make sense of the world as they found it. Remember the phlogiston theory or Einstein's static universe? Now, along with many other theories, proved to be incorrect.

It's very easy to set up a straw man and demolish it. But having a pop at what some poor nun said in 1948 or whenever, might be fun, but perpetuating a false view of catholic doctrine is unhelpful.

And that really is my last word on the subject!

They just hung around 'outside of heaven' until the second coming and day of judgement. As they were not capable of having committed sin themselves, the church judged their souls to be blackened by 'original sin' - the sins of the fathers shall be visited on their children. What a delightful moral code!