As I have mentioned previously, my late wife was from South America. It goes almost without saying that she was Roman Catholic. I am Protestant, but it's basically the same Bible so, when she arrived here, I took her to the local Catholic church for Sunday mass. She didn't like it -- at all. She spoke virtually no English when she got here, the local church didn't (and doesn't) offer a Spanish-language mass, and the members of the parish didn't seem especially interested in welcoming a newcomer. I'm pretty sure we only attended on mass, whereupon she decided she didn't ike it and wasn't going back.
Awhile later I had to attend a meeting in a lawyer's office on Church Street in a nearby city. As I turned from Main Street onto Church Street, the corner was occupied by a lovely old stone church in the "church Gothic" style. Out front, there was a huge banner that read, "La misa en Espanol." Cool -- my Spanish wasn't great, but I could figure that out. I assumed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that it was a Roman Catholic church, and I mentioned it to my wife as soon as I got home. She decided that she wanted to check it out. For whatever reason, I was doing something else the Sunday she wanted to go, but she mad met another young woman from Chile who lived in the area, so the two of them made the trek.
When we all met up at home later I asked her how she liked it. She reported that she liked the church, she liked the people she had met, and that she really liked the pastor. Then she showed me the card he had given her. Oops -- it wasn't a Roman Catholic church at all, it was Episcopalian. My mother was Episcopalian, and she never referred to their church services as "masses," not did she ever refer to an Episcopal clergyman as a "priest." But, somewhere between my youth and 2004 (which leave a LOT of territory) things had changed, and the Episcopalians now refer to their services as masses, and their clergy as priests. But I digress ...
I showed this to my wife, and she said it was okay, the mass felt like the one she knew and she liked the pastor, so we became regulars at that church. A few years later, we learned that there was an actual Roman Catholic church a few blocks from the Episcopal church, and that they had a Spanish-language mass. My wife wanted to check it out, so we did. There were a LOT more people there, and it was indeed in Spanish, so my wife felt right at home. But she still liked Padre Armando from the Episcopal church, so for some time we ended up alternating weeks between the Episcopal church and the Catholic church. There was another couple we met at the Episcopal church who were doing the same thing.
And then one day I happened to buy a newspaper from that town, in which there was a huge article reporting that the pastor of the Roman Catholic church had been arrested. He was later tried and convicted. What was his crime? It came out that he had been telling the parishioners that he had cancer, and that he had to go to New York City every week for special treatments that weren't available in the small hospital in the local city. In actuality, it came out that he had embezzled over a million dollars from the parish. He spent the money supporting his homosexual lover who lived in ... New York City. His weekly trips weren't for cancer treatments, they were to see his lover.
Between that and all the news about pedophile priests, my wife said, "That's enough. I'm not a Catholic any more, I'll be an Episcopalian."
And so it was, from then until she died. I don't think she ever set foot in a Catholic church again except the day we attended the Eagle Scout investment (or whatever they call it) ceremony for the son of a friend of hers, which happened to be held in a Catholic church.
