Here to Represent......

I mentioned before in a past blog post about my psychology instructor being an anti-Catholic who really strongly dislikes Catholic priests. In my first class he went on a ten minute rant about how all Catholic priests were sexual predators and we should all be wary of every priest we meet... yadda yadda yadda.... I was caught totally by surprise with this attack on my faith that I did not know exactly how to re-act to my instructor, and without any concrete evidence and verifiable facts to back me up I did not respond to his attack. I was really frustrated with myself for this. Tonight was my psychology class, and even though I have a feeling if I did present verifiable facts to him about what he said last week, I do not think I would have gotten too far.

Instead of doing that, I kind of subtly showed him that I happened to be a Catholic in his class. I decided to wear one of my very Catholic retreat t-shirts to class. I own quite a few of them, so it was inevitable I would have worn one of them to his class whether I knew his position about my faith or not... So I wore it to class, and ended up finding out that about one third of my class is Catholic, which is kind of nice. Us Catholics started talking about how the last class went while waiting for class to begin. Our instructor was not in the room at that time, but many of the other students were and were listening to our discussion about how we thought he kind of overstepped his boundaries in trying to make Catholic priests look bad.

I think if I did not have my t-shirt on I would not have realized how many other Catholics were in the room, and we would not have started on that discussion. I think it was also good that the non-Catholics in the room heard our views on the topic of what our instructor said. I hope that they had a better out-look on the Church after hearing us. The best thing was, without the instructor in the room there was way more freedom to talk about our frustrations without feeling like we could end up getting a bad grade in his class. I still fully intend to write down an anonymous comment to him when they have us fill out the suggestion surveys towards the end of the semester. I think that if he wanted to put one religious group down for sexual abuse, he needed to make known the other religious groups that have had that happen too. It's only fair.....

Needless to say, I was sitting towards the front of the room, and he did see my t-shirt, and thankfully there was no more Catholic bashing from him tonight.