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I was raised in a dysfuntional family and I believe our culture is dysfunctional. I often feel like we all live in an asylum.

Much to my horror upon returning to the Church I discovered I was a conservative Catholic. I had never in my life used the word "conservative" in a sentence that referred to myself and I fought against that word when it first popped unbidden into my mind.

I thought the Church was a misogynistic institution controlled by a bunch of old men in Rome who were seriously out of touch with modern day life.

When God first nudged me to return to the Church I thought I would go to an Episcopalian church because they have women priests. That sounded like a reasonable compromise to me until I met a female priest wearing a collar. My immediate, gut instinct cried out that it was wrong, oh so wrong! I then launched into a vehement conversation with myself that went something like this:

"She can't wear a roman collar. It's wrong."
"No it's not. Women are equal to men. Women can do anything men can do, and usually do it better."
"I don't care. It's wrong. It looks wrong. It's unnatural."
"But you're a feminist. That makes it right."
"No, it doesn't."
"Yes, it does."

You get the idea. I was confused with myself and my reaction to that woman. Having been an ardent feminist for years it never occurred to me that the particular brand of feminism I had adopted could be wrong. Women are equal to men in every way and equal means same. Period. End of discussion.

This was not the first time I had been confronted with internal challenges to my feminist ideology but it was one of the first serious cracks. The others had been fine, hairline cracks, easily repaired with a bit of exposure to radical feminist propaganda, but this time was different. This was not an intellectual crisis of belief, but something much more visceral, more instinctual.

I reluctantly decided that I needed to investigate the church of my youth a bit more carefully and educate myself about its principle beliefs and teachings.

The first thing to do, obviously, was to locate an actual Catholic Church. So, I went online to see what was available in my area and discovered, much to my chagrin, that I had been driving by the local cathedral every day for the past four years and that I worked one block away from it. Of course, I knew it was a church, but I was not aware it was a Catholic Church.