Growing up, I never thought much about my own family traditions. As a family, we ate dinner at the table, watched movies and went to church every Sunday. I went to church school and went through all the rituals, but nothing I felt was out of the norm.
That was until my sophomore year of high school, when I decided I needed to go on birth control.
My father is Catholic and, for obvious reasons, wants to pass on his faith to his children. He’s always reading some sort of a book about Christianity aside from his other fantasy novels, and he goes to church every Sunday.
My dad, through his upbringing and somewhat paying attention to the pope, believes almost everything that is said as his own. He feels as though it’s his duty to go to church, bring his children to church and follow all steps to face judgment at the end. None of these traits seem to be bad. Following the church can give someone a sense of being.
It’s not until he strictly follows the beliefs of the Catholic faith when sometimes you can get taken aback. His views on birth control and women made me rethink submitting myself to the same beliefs.
How could I be going along blindly through the Catholic faith without thinking about how they view women as subservient?
At first, I went to church because I was little and didn’t want to get in trouble. Later, I went to church because I felt guilty and like a bad person if I didn’t. Recently, I go to church for my dad.
Does this make me subservient? Every now and then I feel like going to the adoration to get total peace of mind. My father must have planted this need to go to church in my head somewhere.
Yet, the fact that I have to hide that I take birth control or not discuss certain views with my dad just feels a bit strange.
I started to pay more attention to what was being said at church, listening to the readings and then noticing that after one of our priests passed away, the church had a very difficult time finding another priest.
One mass had to be shortened because there was only a pastor there, so the Eucharist could not be blessed. I then looked to all my church schooling and realized women taught all the classes and led the offices. There were very few boys in the school as well. You’d just see them if there was an event where there were heavy things to move or if there was a barbecue. Why? Perhaps it’s because the ideal of masculinity speaks of being the strongest or the one to support the family.
Being a “servant to Christ” would not sound appealing to these manly-men.
Women, on the other hand, are taught from an early age that they are servants to Christ as well as servants to their husbands.
But if being a servant to Christ in the present means to follow the church law, it’s a bit unsettling that these decisions are made up from an entirely male clergy with no option of ever hearing a woman’s voice unless speaking about the saints or of Mary.
Although my father does go to church, he holds his opinions true to the ways in which women’s inequality is perfectly sound under the name of God.
Caitlyn Manning is an art sophomore at UF. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
