What Has Been Your Experience of Being a Catholic?
An Appeal for Material for a New RC Catholic Liberation Journal
This is an invitation to all Catholics (raised, practicing, and former) in Co-Counseling to write for a new Catholic journal which we are planning to start. Help us get a more complete picture of who we are as Catholics and what our particular strengths and struggles look like.
In this Catholic journal we hope to show the diversity of the Catholic experience world-wide among a wide variety of cultures, racial groups, ages, class backgrounds, and sexual orientations, and among lay persons, priests, nuns, and more.
Your thinking and your particular experience is critical. Take a moment to put it down on paper. Writing is a great contradiction for Catholics-a re-emergent act! Don't worry about getting it perfect. It's more important to send in an imperfect page or two than to keep your perfect ideas secretly locked away in your mind.
Write down your thinking during your next session. Speak in your own voice about your life, your friends, your experiences, your beliefs, and your greatest hopes. There is no "right" way to be Catholic, and we need to learn and understand what you've figured out.
Send your life story; description of your support group; workshop reports; topic group reports; success stories and struggles in your liberation work; useful directions; poems, drawings, and pictures. What does being Catholic mean to you? What does it look like in your life?
One way to start is to write a couple of paragraphs about what you liked about being raised Catholic. Then, what was hard about being raised Catholic? How has the Co-Counseling process helped you to re-emerge and how can allies, both Catholic and non-Catholic, be helpful to you? Make us understand your unique Catholic experience.
You could write on early memories about particular aspects of our faith. I recently wrote a piece for our local RC newsletter called, "Catholic Liberation: Remembering Early Memories About the Rosary." I wrote about what was great about the rosary as a young person, what was hard, what the rosary means to me now as an adult, how Co-Counseling had helped me to re-emerge from my distresses surrounding the rosary, and how allies can assist me in continuing to work on this. You could do the same with any part of your upbringing in the Catholic faith.
Joanne Bray, our International Liberation Reference Person for Catholics, has asked us all to begin to write for our first journal. I will be collecting it-handwritten, typewritten, five sentences, or three pages-whatever you can do. You can write to us in your first language, and we will try to print both the original and the translation.
Try to get material to me postmarked by March 1st.
Ellie Tetterton Hidalgo
Washington, D.C. 20008, USA