St Rose of Lima Catholic Church

This is the second time we’ve been to this church. As a visitor, it’s always nice to walk to a church and feel welcomed.
The church started in 1919 and its present location was dedicated in 1929.
Tonight we attended one or their Christmas services. The choir gave a beautiful pre-​mass performance. The service was beautiful! I love the reverence the staff have for Jesus and the Mass — everyone from the priest, deacon, Seminarian, altar servers, Eucharistic ministers, and lectors. Father Delphinus «Delly» Mutajuka, the Associate Pastor, gave a wonderful homily about Jesus’ humble coming into the world as a baby.

I just moved to Antioch from Milwaukee, where I had begun attending Mass after a 14 year hiatus. So much time had passed because the parish in which I grew up was extraordinarily hostile and judgmental; it took a long time for me to heal enough to return, tentatively, to the Church.
St. Rose of Lima has a Wednesday evening Mass, which worked perfectly for my current schedule. When I attended, I discovered that the call-​and-​answer patterns are different than what I’m used to. Maybe that’s specific to St. Rose of Lima, maybe it’s a TN or a Southern thing, whichever. It caught me off guard but whatever.
The gospel reading of the day was of Jesus healing the sick. The priest, whose name I didn’t catch, homilized that SIN CAUSES SICKNESS. He did say that original sin, from Adam & Eve, contributes to sickness — this isn’t the place to argue theology so I won’t say anything about that. But he also declared that one’s sins cause one’s sickness.
This, I can not abide. I sin all over the place: I’m a dyke, I’m a slut, I’m in porn, I swear, I create an X-​rated webcomic for a living — and yet I’m among the healthiest people I know. It doesn’t seem fair, following this priest’s declaration, that I’d be healthy while a child who’s never done anything wrong would suffer from leukemia, for example. One could argue that such a child suffers because of their parent’s sins; by that logic, every cell in my body should be infected with every disease in existence.
The attitude behind this homily is exactly why I left the Church so many years ago. How is that any different from the parish in which I grew up, which claimed that Columbine happened because the students weren’t Catholic? What really scares me is that there is a school attached to St. Rose of Lima: children are being taught this.