Coming from the deep South you might assume we would be Baptists. Wrong! We were "Southern Catholics." Well, you might think a Catholic is a Catholic, no matter what region of the country they come from. Wrong! My family practiced a form of Catholicism that hearkened back to the Dark Ages of Europe.
Remember, I'm a grandson of German immigrants on my father's side. Now on my mother's side of the family, her father was also a son of an immigrant. But his father just so happened to be a French priest. Not sure what made him quit the priesthood and journey to the new land, but I'm sure he was escaping from something or someone that was very unpleasant. Like burning at the stake or having your head chopped off. The family never talked much about my grandfather, John Henry's, side of the family.
Now my grandmother, on my mother's side, was a convert. See, grandma was raised a deep-woods Southern Baptist. How my grandfather, this French Catholic Yankee, ever convinced my grandmother and her family to let him marry her and make her a Catholic had to be a true miracle of the first degree. But he did, and the two religious beliefs sort of merged with my father's Black Forest type of Catholicism and that's how we ended up being what I call "Southern Fried Catholics." A least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
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