It didn’t start all that badly, just lots of talk about corruption in school and how immoral the other kids were. Closer and closer supervision of the kids, forbidding contact with other local kids, suggestions that evolution is being denied, hints that dominionism is acceptable maybe preferable, moving out to the country to escape “bad elements,” then homeschooling because the kids weren’t learning but were being exposed to evils even in Catholic school, now Trick or Treat is inappropriate and harmful.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a compound were in this family’s future.
Is their opinion on trick or treating supposed to be the culmination of all of that stuff? Because honestly it seems like the least extreme item on the list.
Really? The other things, well, at least I can understand the thinking behind protecting your kids. But isolating them further and further and then denying harmless things like trick or treating just seems so over the top to me. I grew up Catholic. Trick or treat hysteria was something those nutty holy rollers did, not something Catholics did.
I agree with jsgoddess,when I was a kid (surrounded by Catholics) nobody acted like this. Has the church changed that much in 20 years? Sounds like they are turning into fundamentalist Protestants. I wonder how much of this has to do with political identiity.
Oddly enough, when I was a kid my mom was much less involved in church (Lutheran) than she is now and she never liked Halloween. She thought it was evil (little “e”, not “OMG TEH EVILS!”) and didn’t like the idea of her fat kids begging for candy door-to-door. I think her out-loud excuse was the former but her real motivation was the latter.
I was just musing the other day about how occasionally mom would let us go ToT with our cousins, who had a SUPER strict born-again mom. Their mom was totally cool with Halloween, except maybe wouldn’t let the girls dress up as anything evil.
Anyway the conclusion to my musing was that even though my aunt is a born-again Christian and thought My Little Pony unicorns were evil, Halloween is ok because her girls get free stuff. I’ve learned a lot about the materialistic nature of my aunt over the years.
I don’t know of any Catholics (being one myself) who are against Halloween. In fact, my parish is having an adult’s costume party with a cocktail hour.
Honestly, Catholics will be about the third group up against the wall in a Dominionist government, right after the atheists and the Jews. Didn’t they read the pamphlet?
There was a family like that in my hometown. Most of their nuttiness was about sex, too much suggestiveness & permissiveness everywhere, etc. Sex education is just encouraging kids to have sex before marriage. And they tended to go into diatribes about this at inappropriate times – someone at a party would mention that they had recently seen movie x, and the whole group would get a lengthy rant about ‘too much sex in movies’.
So one time I calculated the time lapse between their marriage and the birth of their first child – guess what, it was well under 9 months!
So then the next time they went off about ‘kids having sex before marriage’, I was able to point out a present example. But they didn’t seem to find it helpful. In fact, they mostly stopped talking to me, which probably made both of us happier.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks” – Shakespeare tagged it pretty well. Seems so common that those who shout the loudest are guilty. Like all the virulent anti-gay preachers & politicians who are eventually caught with their hands in some boys’ pants.
That’s so weird, and so not the Catholic line – evolution isn’t really an issue in the church, for example. We also had Halloween parties at school – we used to wear our change into our costumes at the end of the day and have a “parade” (although the 7th and 8th grade had a “dance” in the cafeteria).
That’s really weird. Do they still consider themelves Catholic?
Yep. But they’re taking it in directions I’m just not used to seeing, and I’m even related to people who rejected Vatican II, so hard-core old-fashioned Catholics aren’t exactly strangers to me.
In my opinion, it would depend on why someone has chosen to forbid trick or treating.
Forbidding trick of treating because the whole concept of a candy holiday is one that seems to me you could make an argument in favor of, without going into nuttery: I don’t like the term obesity epidemic, but that doesn’t change that there is a real problem with obesity for a lot of kids. A practice that encourages binge eating of candy is something I could see a lot of good reasons for stepping away from.
OTOH, the religious objections I’ve seen and heard to trick or treating range from, it’s disrespectful (Another argument that could be made to stand up, especially if emphasis is put on the inherent threat in the phrase “trick or treat!”), it’s irreligious, it’s pagan, to it’s barely disguised devil worship.
If someone talks about things like how jack-o-lanterns are Satanic images, or that costumes are deceitful, then I think they’re going far off into woo-woo land.
Lutheran? Southern Baptist? Methodist? Agnostic? UU? Opus Dei? Crystals-and-aliens? There’s quite a few ways one could go from mainstream Catholic, and not all of them even involve leaving Catholicism.
The objections to Halloween I’m familiar with are on cultural grounds, not religious grounds. “It’s a foreign thing” and “what moron decided that you can’t take the kid to visit the family’s graves at the cementery on Día de los Muertos because it will traumatize them, but it’s ok to have them dress up as Freddy Krueger?”
