I hate plaid. Specifically, plaid skirts.
My distaste for this piece of clothing began in a local uniform store when I was 14 years old. I stood in a cramped fitting room, staring at my reflection, wearing a skirt with a crisscrossed green, red, yellow and blue pattern. After I stepped into it, zipped it up and tucked in my Peter Pan-collared blouse, one word came to mind: sham.
The hem of the skirt skimmed my knees and was paired with knee-high white socks and Wallabees. I wore this every day for the next four years at my all-girls Catholic high school.
Within the walls of my school, I studied biology, English, American history and theology — a mandatory course each year.
In theology, I was taught what it meant to be a Catholic woman, how to serve my community, how to devote myself to God and, most importantly, the grave sins I could commit throughout my life. Many of the teachings discussed how the first sin was enacted by Eve and how, for the remainder of our lives, we as girls must try our best not to fall to the same fate.
At 15, I sat through a lesson about the importance of marrying a God-fearing man. The discussion centered on a woman’s “true” role of serving her family, raising children and maintaining a household.
As I sat in class listening to my teacher, wrapped up in that plaid skirt, I wondered if this was the life meant for me. I looked at the girls around me, some paying close attention and others staring out the window. I began to envision the life I was told I should live.
I was raised Catholic, the whole nine yards. I was baptized, received communion and took on the confirmation name Theresa at the age of thirteen. However, there was an unadorned reality of making a lifelong commitment to religion and taking on my high school’s ideals of being a holy woman.
Some weeks, the whole school went to mass. I’d sit in a wooden pew with around 300 other teenage girls in the basement of a church for about an hour listening to the “Lord’s word” as told to us by a middle-aged male priest.
At one point, he would recite instances of a woman protecting their homestead or defending other humans in the name of God. At the end of his readings he would open his palms up to the sky and state “The word of the Lord,” and in unison, we would respond, “Thanks be to God.”
When I had time to sit and observe during mass, I admired the statues around the room. Most often I sat in front of Mary of Nazarath’s statue. I’d admire her blue and pink pastel coloring and the pristine nature of the porcelain.
While staring at the serenity of Mary, I often contemplated the idea of her being born without sin and conceiving Jesus through immaculate conception. I couldn’t understand why it was so important that Mary be a virgin and why this was the focal point of Catholicism. To me, it felt like a subtle form of misogyny to dictate that this woman’s only importance was giving birth to a son while being “pure.”
So, one day, while sitting in that all-consuming plaid skirt, I concluded that I didn’t believe it, that Catholicism was wrong.
Perhaps my realization wasn’t so abrupt but rather a build-up of prior experiences within the Catholic religion.
There have always been two sides of Catholicism. One familiarizes the Bible’s original beliefs of being merciful and “love thy neighbor,” while the other part of the religion is the teachings of right and wrong. As I have learned, these two sides are conundrums and typically contradict what the other is saying.
I was maybe 10 years old when I first heard about the scandals surrounding priests and their predatory behavior. I recall being in church with my family the Sunday after the scandals resurfaced in the early 2010s, confused about why we still attended church knowing such evils existed.
I can also recall discovering that many of the most popular teachings are built off prejudices and that the Bible was only a tool in which they defend unempathetic and dehumanizing beliefs. My second-grade Sunday school teacher explained the sin of being gay. It wasn’t until a few years later that I could understand sexuality’s innate nature.
People so often use the Bible as a device to push forth their degrading and immoral beliefs, which can be seen in modern American politics through religious nationalism. Many Catholics, or perhaps Christians in general, use the book as an all too obvious Trojan Horse to belittle different communities.
Sitting in that pew, staring at Mary, I pieced together why I felt so uncomfortable in my plaid skirt. I don’t believe in a system that creates a hierarchy of people based on their identity. I couldn’t get behind the idealization of a pure woman as the perfect woman. And I could never understand using religion as a political weapon.
So, I hate plaid skirts and all that they stand for.
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