#deeply malicious nonsense that has no basis in the current catho/ic biblical canon

[mjvnivsbrvtvs]

dont reblog obviously but just. musing on some things.

sometimes I’m like. hm. got some thoughts on catholicism bc it’s fundamentally very complicated and conflicting for me, but also kind of wild because you have the very fundamentalist conservative brand from the filipino side of my family, the side that’s also deeply invested in maintaining a violently transphobic level of gender essentialism. I wore jeans to mass one time and turned down one of those lace head coverings and my aunt called me a slur.

but also there’s the other half of my family, which isn’t catholic, but my dad briefly went to a catholic college where a jesuit priest talked about how you cant take the pope’s word on sex because he’s not fucking so what does he know about it.

my dad deliberately avoided converting when he married my mother so me and my sister would know that we didnt have to be catholic. he told us about how his co worker came out as trans, so we would have to update our christmas cards with her new name. his side of the family is a bunch of grass roots activists. he worked the night shift at a phone company which is where all the local lgbtq+ worked because it was safer.

my mom gave me stories about hell and how raising me and my sister was an obligation from god and god would always come before us. my dad told me that having kids didn’t mean you sacrificed anything, just that your priorities changed, and about how all the butch women he knew could fix your house better than anyone’s husband could.

you know. duality. I know that when I come out to my family, I’ll loose all ties to the filipino side of my family. it’s not a question, it’s a fact I’ve been told since I was like, 15, and got to see happen in real time when my cousin got outed as a lesbian and they disowned her. 

and while catholicism caused a lot of trauma for me, it’s also something that I can’t fully leave because the philippines is catholic in a very violent way. you dont convert an island to catholicism, you murder and pillage the culture until there’s nothing else left.

there’s also. hmmmm. I sought out unconventional catholics, i went to a theology teacher who was an italian catholic turned athiest, I hung out with a lot of jesuits, I spent a lot of time reading up on texts and writings from rabbis, anyone who could give me answers for how to reconcile this kind of conflict of self, conflict of culture, and conflict of history. it is, in a very odd way, home. I have a vague sense that it’ll at least exist there, even when I loose half of my family with deep cultural ties emphasizing family and ancestry and knowing where you’re from and what your legacy reflects. it’s kind of lonely, knowing that, but also really fucking funny that the religious institution that started me on this path is the same one they’ll claim to disown me in.

(if it wasn’t for seeing paintings that michelangelo did in my mom’s bible and my dad encouraging me to research literally anything that caught my attention as a child, I have no idea where I would have ended up. I wouldn’t have found machiavelli, and I definitely wouldn’t be alive typing this.)

and at the end of the day, when I couldnt openly ask for affirmation from anyone, I got it from a catholic priest who saw I cut my hair short, who remembered that I said I liked altar serving because I didn’t have to be a girl when I put on the robes, and every day I saw him, would smile and bring up the fact that we were both named after the same man.

anyway just. feeling a lot at 3am because I read something and now it’s like

I want to live so badly, and it’s a very sharp contrast to when I didn’t, but god, do I want to