I heard through the grapevine- and it's not the first time- that some people think that I have been brainwashed by the Catholic Church. This is highly amusing to me. I mentioned it to my devoutly Catholic mother in law, who laughed and responded with "So the Pope must be brainwashed, too!"
I wish people would think before they speak up sometimes. Have I been forced to believe what the Catholic Church teaches? Have I had to check my brain at the door? Have I been promised some awesome reward in this lifetime for buying into all the dogma? No, no and no! So, logically I am not brainwashed. And therefore, the Pope isn't either. Our current Holy Father is actually an extremely intelligent man who we would do well to listen to sometimes.
In fact, let's pretend for a minute and just say I was raised Catholic, which I wasn't, and back then in the 80's I actually had a clue who Pope John Paul II was and I actually heard his message to young people about God and about not being afraid and about our dignity and the beauty of married love and the responsibility of parenthood. Would I have been introduced to sex at such a young age? Would I have been so easily seduced by sin? Would I have become as vain and pleasure-focused as I was, starting very young? Would I have wasted many, many years searching painfully for an end to my pain, which came from those very "pleasures" the world promised would make me happy?
Perhaps that one man, the Pope, who represented the Catholic Church, in introducing me to Who made me, and what I was made for, would have given my that knowledge so that I could use not only my brain, but ALL my faculties to experience and be all that I am meant to be as a Daughter of God.
I am not complaining about my life, I am just using this as an illustration to prove that it was the media and the popular culture which "brainwashed" me and NOT the Catholic Church. The former promised a happy life and didn't deliver; the latter promises a meaningful life and has made me happier than anything on Earth.
"Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire."
-Pope John Paul II
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