The one, true, catholic (in small letters) church - God's sacred chalice in the vestry

As a youth I attended Sunday school from grade 1 to 12 in an Ethnic church which served my immigrant community. I taught Sunday school to fifth graders for the last 4 years of my early Christian education.
We were Protestant. The other church of my ethnicity in town that served my community was The [Ethnic] Holy Roman Catholic Church.

They were better than us, they thought. They were of the One True Church. They sometimes felt sorry for us, going to Limbo or Hell, never having had the chance to claim the One True Faith, so sometimes they showed us some small kindnesses like letting us jump for the chance amongst ourselves for the privilege of their lunch left-overs. Usually they just slapped us on the head or across our faces, and said our mothers conceived us out of wedlock - outside of wedlock as defined as not having been sanctified by Their church, or worse.

We were the same, back at them, I believe. We probably acted holier than them [which is a venial sin? - if I overheard right?] with our thick woolen coats sent over from the old country; we didn't practice True Sacrifice like His Son our Lord the Lamb of God would have wanted us to practice. (Then again, the Catholics in my town had nothing left to give.)

Did They consummate their teenage affairs in their sacristies, then? - we might have said back at them - with their vessels annointed by the Lamb of God brimming with Catholics waiting to be born? (Ever heard of the extremely premature-yet-thriving first-born Catholic youth? Subsequent siblings didn't seem to share this fate. Small mercies might be granted in a time of transgression due to the fact that new Catholics will be brought into the world for the further glory of God.)

My parents were of two separate Ethnic Protestant types of the backgrounds of their youth. They later became agnostic. Before that, when still making a fine show in front of our adopted community by taking the kids to Sunday school and services while they were young and impressionable, they had slightly different, but complimentary, values.

My mother's side (Lutheran and Baptist -Lamb of God, how did the two denominations ever lay together?!) thought hard work as one's Offering was paramount. But you didn't have to undignify yourself in the process; it should be hard work appropriate to one's standing. The cleaning was done from sunbreak to darkness but only under cover of privacy - labor mostly accomplished by children, but closely supervised by the trainers. If one's family once had had maids, one could keep some of the manners of a bygone, prettier era and act graciously as much as possible.

My father's side (Calvinist) thought you had to give up things and be poorer than a church mouse - but my father could never quite buy that line. My father eventually became prosperous, after having stayed with his primary nuclear family until everyone younger was out of the house, learning the trade of his father, improving his father's business through his own clever ideas, so that when his father died during WW2 (of drink! not through the hardships of the captors as was widely promulgated by one branch of the family ...), he was able to take over seamlessly as a high-school youth and support his siblings and mother in a finer style than previously.

My father took his scholarship to a foreign college only at age 30 when the younger ones were fully raised and started off in life. He contacted the foreign university he had gotten a scholarship to at age 18 to ask if his unused scholarship might still be valid - then when notified that it wasn't, he charmed the university officer, through letter, into opening a new kind of scholarship for my father's benefit. Clever, the man that lives by his brains! The Calvinists are also willing to look the other way in a few minor matters if the sinner can be seen to be acting on some native intelligence which benefits himself, his family and his community.

My father said he pretended to still hold Calvinism dear while a teenager, because he had achieved an advanced position in the boy scounts, and a god-fearing disposition was good for business - and he may be able to get a scholarship to the private high school academy in the capital city if he keeps on this good road. But privately, his boy scout friend already at this school - as the son of a diplomat - is slipping my father the literature of the intelligentsia of the day, and of the glory days just passed - Camus, Goethe, Kafka, Sartre - what is a young man with some native intelligence to think?!

My father, much later, called my brother - the Born Again one - "the church mouse" - while he called me - the geologist with the first field research area of the Mojave desert - "the field mouse". I took that as his mark of approval, for my father was an accomplished field mouse himself. I don't mind being called mousy because I'm brown-haired wild-type with the penchant for fading into the walls.

My father's goal was to become a scientist. A prosperous one, too! He accomplished those goals. He seemed to be the kind of guy that you couldn't be quite sure Wouldn't wish he had spent more time in the office on his death bed.

So, decades after WW2 - after much, much digression on my part (!) - his daughter is in first grade learning the basic and most common prayers of her religion. This is in the 1970s in a blue collar seaside section of Fairfield county, Connecticut.

The girl notices that the 23rd Psalm sounds somewhat different than the one the Catholic kids say at school before lunch at the public school - those lesser-in-standing Catholic families that can't afford to send their children to a proper private Catholic school with proper aging nuns. [The nuns should not be too young or too pretty because this might "conceivably" direct young Catholic boys away from the most honorable profession, the priesthood.]

But what's this?!

This one prayer we Protestants are meant to use has this line near the end of it?!

" ... the one true catholic church ..."
[catholic in small letters]

Are we really part of the Catholic (catholic) religion after all?

(Do we, by the grace of God, maybe get a second chance, as not-properly-knowledgeable unborn-souls, to claim the One True Religion before we fall away from the glimpse of the pearly gates?)

(Was the joke on us?! But we get a second chance? Is that how I'm to understand the end of this prayer?)
[Or is the joke on the Catholics, because in the end we include them with our religion in one of our most-used prayers?]

What means this word, catholic?
I am still learning this English language, at age 6; that's why I act quiet and studious at school.

This post ©reated by Ribonuff on October 30, 2007.

The above has been a work of Fiction.