Why you can never leave The Church (Interview with My Nannan and thoughts on Orlando)

Below is my nannan, my Godmother, Mrs. Jeanne Moreau.

Some notes before you watch:

-We are at the Fresh Catch in Marksville, so thanks to the staff for putting up with us.

-I don't know why Ibrahimia isn't in the shot, or why I am in the shot.

-Would have released this earlier but kept getting confused by videos of the French singer Jeanne Moreau.

-We missed translating a couple of things here. She talks about my grandfather who was a judge and St. Joseph's church in Marksville, so catch it if you can

-You're also going to get mad at me because I'm going to talk about Orlando

We have footage of Mrs. Jeanne saying The Rosary in French, but it wasn't conversational so we edited it out. I'll post it soon because of its cultural value. Ibrahimia says our Rosary contains different, older words that they don't say in France. Is there a Pope Pius IX society for Cajun French?

My buddy and I actually disagreed about putting the Rosary in or not. I conceded because he speaks French and I just quote Zydeco lyrics.

Ibrahimia is right in that busting out religious items at a restaurant it isn't conversational. At least from a modern point of view. But we aren't modern.

Whatever we are -Cajun, Creole, Louisianais- is about pulling out cards of Saints from your wallet in the middle of conversation, a Novena on a long car trip, Chaplet of Divine Mercy when an ambulance passes. It's about eccentric folklore from farmlands in France and rivers in Senegal that connect us to each other and our ancestors like the knots of rosary beads.

Whatever our culture is- French Canadian, Caribbean, West African, Native American- it is unmistakably Roman Catholic.

This flag is based on a hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas

Blogger-Theologian/cultural critic Artur Rosman calls this the Catholic Imagination. I don't think he ever gave a concise definition of it. I don't think precision is what Artur is after, but here's the gist : the cultural imprint of Roman Catholicism is also the cultural imprint of the cultures that preceded it. Likewise, the cultural imprint of Roman Catholicism doesn't leave a person, ethnicity, or nationality. It is inescapable and will infect your actions and thought patterns; whispering into your ear all you should feel guilty about and searching the fun only a robust concept of sin can allow.

But we don't really want to get rid of our Catholic Imagination, do we? Our state is 60% Protestant and 8% unaffiliated but we get drunk all the same on Mardi Gras. Our towns and parishes are named after saints. In the old towns you can see the arrangement is around the church building, and only later, in American fashion, did they construct around the courthouse square.

I know an Anglo-Protestant from North Louisiana with a tattoo of a Fleur-de-Lis on her wrist and I don't have the heart to tell her it's a French Catholic symbol for the Trinity.

What will Monroe do when they find out?

For its part, the Church in Louisiana has always been engaging other cultures Sometimes with success, other times not so much.

So it was no surprise to see the outpouring of compassion from the state's conservative Christian and Catholic community. Churchgoing folks stood in line to give blood, offered prayers for the victims at Mass, and marched at a memorial service on the capitol steps.

Historically, Catholics in the United States are no strangers to the kind of prejudice that would cause a massacre. There was time when the Protestants of Boston destroyed a Catholic monastery,  moving toward more modern times with the lynching of Italians in New Orleans, lynchings of Mexicans in the Southwest, or the resurgence of the Klan in the 1920s against Italian and Irish Catholic immigrants

A member of the Church with any appreciation of history should have an idea of what second-class citizenry means.

And so the outpouring of sympathy was touching, but it was easy.

Massacres are easy to condemn. Blood cries out to the heavens for justice. The visceral, the concrete evoke a reaction.

But what about the things that aren't easy to march for?

Right now, in our country, there are organizations devoted to kidnapping gay teenagers and re-programming them. Are Christians marching against this?

In Louisiana, any gay person can be fired from their job simply for being gay; no anti-discrimination protection. That is, they don't receive the same protections a Christian would receive from being fired based on her religious identity. Do Christians want the same protections for homosexuals? If so, where are the rallies?

Or when Louisiana's Christian conservatives defeated a bill designed to protect students from being bullied based on sexual orientation. I guess it's hard to march against a bill you've helped to write.

You really have no skin in the game when you stand up and say you don't want to murder people. I don't murder several people a day. But what about the slow death homosexuals in this state experience, the isolation, the lack of protection and legal accommodation that so many straight people take for granted?

I couldn't see most of the churchgoers I grew up with wanting to fire an employee for being gay, or bullying a child for questioning their sexuality, or aid in kidnapping a teenager. But I would expect them to stand up for those being kidnapped, kicked out of their homes, or discriminated at in the workplace.

I hope they do.