My Mom was raised Catholic. However, when I was about 7, and my sisters were 4 and 3, she received a letter from the Catholic church saying they did not recognize her marriage to my father because he’d been married before, briefly, right after high school. It lasted about 6 months. I think she was excommunicated….and somebody must have told on her her, the asshole.
I remember her ranting, “I’ve been married to the man for 10 years, have had 3 of his children and they don’t recognize it??” It was so ludicrous that she just washed her hands of The Church, although she remained a Christian. She attended four-square churches in the Pacific Northwest after she left us all.
After she slipped in to dementia she took a great deal of comfort from the Catholic rituals of her childhood, even started going to a Catholic church again, for the reasons @stanleybmanly said. It was familiar and comfortable.
When she died my sister took over the funeral preparations, rejecting all offers of help from me. She converted to Catholicism when she married her husband. She had the funeral in a Catholic church. It had all the warmth of reading a recipe for fried chicken. It was so cold and impersonal.
At one point the priest was walking around, mumbling to himself in Latin, swinging some sort of incense lamp about, streaming smoke behind him.
THEN he offered Mass! I turned to my cousin in a bit of panic asking if we were allowed to take Mass. She whispered back, with wide eyes, that she didn’t know either. Man. We didn’t want to screw up at my mother’s funeral!
The whole thing sucked. It was sooo medieval and magical and weird. I expected to hear demons groaning.
Afterward my cousins and I were talking and asking, “What the hell was that all about?”