At first, my blogs were talking about the Catholic and the Lutheran Faiths, and how they are similar in some aspects, but how they are very much different. I had interviewed some people about the Catholic faith and got a little more inside about the religion. I noticed that there are a lot of things that we have talked in our class and that is in our books that relate to the Catholic faith, like cultural spaces, religion or family rituals and traditions, and religion and cultural identity.
In this blog, I kind of narrowed down instead of doing only just the Catholic faith in the whole world, and I kind of decided to just do where I am from Wilber, Nebraska because it is what I based my whole idea of doing the Catholic faith idea came from. Since Wilber is mainly a Czech Community because it is the Czech Capitol of the United States. I wanted to see what or if there was a correlation to the Czech Community and the Catholic religion, because there are a lot of Catholics in our town and 80 percent of the people in Wilber is Czech.
In the Czech- American communities, the Catholic religion plays an important role in the rural areas; many Czechs in the cities supported progressive ideas. In Wilber there are three churches, the Catholic Church has the largest membership and plays an important role in the community and Wilber is located in the area that is covered by the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln.
Many Catholic churches in Nebraska Czech communities are named after Czech saints St. Wenceslaus being the most common.
In the Czech Republic Today, 39.2% of Czechs are Roman Catholic. As I mentioned in my earlier blogs was that there are 1.18 billion known Catholics in the world and half the world’s Catholics live in North and South America.
When I interviewed my friend Eric who is mainly Czech and is a very strong Catholic, I asked him what kind of family traditions he has, and he mentioned saying prayers before meals, not eating meat on Fridays, and going to stations when it is around Lent. I also asked him if he thinks the Catholic religion kind of dominates all other religions because of its popularity, and he said that maybe not always in small towns, but in the World there are so many churches and members that it is a possibility it dominates other religions, and he said it helps that they have the Pope, because he is so widely known that that’s how the Catholics can get there word out. Which kind of ties into Globalization, because the Catholic Faith had to start somewhere and it is so worldwide known and practiced so much.
“Religion is intertwined with culture, and therefore, cultural identity.” (from Martin & Nakayama 2010) I thought that this was a very correct statement that I found in our book. I think that culture has a huge impact in what our religion is. I think if I were born in a different area and was born into a different culture, that my faith would most likely be different.
Cited Sources
Interview: Eric Uher
Martin & Nakayama 2010
