Okay, about that “old anti-Catholic slipper,” it’s not old. What I have been is appalled by the thought of how easily I might have been like everyone I knew around me when I lived the first 40+ years in my lfe in a nearly 80% Catholic Northeastern city, which is decidedly post-Christian. People eventually go to the Church for marriage and baptism, but there is no knowledge or love of God there. In people’s minds, as if they’re atheists or deists. And I grew up Lutheran, never hearing an anti-Catholic word, and in my twenties, accepted the Lord though I didn’t even understand it, because it was from reading the Gospels, and didn’t know where to go. And I tried the Catholic Church then (and also in my thirties, when I read the whole Bible).
And I truly shudder to think how things might have gone differently. I was Christian with confused beliefs, a university graduate in English, lived and identified as a lesbian, a Democrat, and around 2002 or so, even considered becoming Communist. (Cont’d)
I also come from the Northeast and in what was then the very Catholic State of Connecticut and City of New Haven. I am probably somewhat older than you are and that may give me some additional perspective on the pre-Vatican II Church and particularly during the time of Pope Pius XII who died a year before I graduated grammar school. In those days, Rhode Island was quite Catholic as was Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, and much of Maine and Vermont. New York, New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania were also rather Catholic. It was the Catholicism not only of Pope Pius XII but also Francis Cardinal Spellman and Richard Cardinal Cushing who were giants compared to many of their successors. Harder line than even they were was James Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles. It was also the time of Bishop Fulton Sheen whose Catholic religious lectures weekly in prime time on NBC were the most watched series on TV for all three years.
In those times, many of us confessed our sins weekly and attended Mass and received the Eucharist at least weekly. A lot of the fervor of 1950s Catholicism fell victim to the "spirit of" Second Vatican Council, an eruption of subterranean Church radicalism that had been suppressed for about five decades. The radicals waited for Pius XII to die (1958), elected the aged Angelo Cardinal Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, brought about that council and confused the Faithful beyond imagination. When, as expected, Pope John XXIII died after a short reign (1963), Giovanni Cardinal Montini was elected as Paul VI and was a singularly ineffective pope in many ways during his fifteen year term. He did come down hard against artificial birth control in Humanae Vitae but was unable to cause compliance among the Faithful. Those two popes and twenty years nearly drove me from the Church to Russian Orthodoxy. At the end of year twenty, John Paul I and then John Paul II were elected.
Your experiences and mine differ greatly and I could really only attempt to "sell" you on my Church and Catholicism face to face which is not likely to happen given my age and health. I note the message of your last paragraph in the post to which I am responding. I grieve for at least some of what you have experienced and I pray that those experiences will, by whatever route, lead you to heaven and to the eternal embrace of our Heavenly Father.
God bless you and yours!