Confessions of a Closet Catholic Discussion

Our group meet Monday at 3:45 and the majority of our discussion on the book “Confessions of a Closet Catholic” was centered around the topic of the representation of the different religions in the book. Since three of the five members of our group went to catholic schools and attend a catholic church we mainly focused on the representation of the catholic religion in the text, since we are more familiar with the customs and traditions of the church we belong to. We then thought about this representation of the Catholic faith and talked about the ways that this depiction might effect those who read the text. While reading the book we noticed some of the descriptions of the catholic religion that did not fit our own person experiences with the faith. Although we commented on the idea that there are many different traditions in the catholic faith and many different styles of churches that choose to emphasize different traditions more then others, so we noted that our personal experiences are obviously not the only ways to practice the catholic faith. The author seemed to frequently mention the ideas of guilt and deadly sins as important to the catholic faith. In my personal experience I do not view these things as essential or important parts of the catholic faith. The other things that we thought were interesting portrayals of the catholic faith that did not really fit our experiences were the idea of kneeling at the alter before communion and the practice of covering your head in a church. These practices are old more traditional catholic traditions which are not typically practiced in the church anymore at least not in any of our experiences. These things lead to a discussion about the idea of how the religions were portrayed and if the catholic faith was accurately portrayed in the text. Since our experiences with the Jewish religion are not as in depth we were not sure if these types of traditional depictions of religions occurred in both cases or not. We thought that is would be interesting to compare the depictions to see if they are both more traditional views or if the view of the Jewish religion was maybe more modern. We thought that this would have an effect on how the book was read because this might show a bias in religion through the parts of the faith that the author choose to emphasize.