<p>OP, I’m impressed by your willingness to change your point of view. Not to mention making the Hot Topics List!</p>
<p>You have shown phenomenal growth in the time that you first posted. I was going to suggest that you consult your parish priest. I think he would probably applaud your solution. I, like other posters, was forced to attend church as a young Catholic. It’s a pity because I’ve just never been able to find my way back. All the best to you and your daughter.</p>
<p>I hope everything works out loneranger. </p>
<p>If she opts not to go, you know that it’s not for nothing that most parishes have a “Catholics Returning Home” program :)</p>
<p>Has anyone seen “The Player”? There is a scene where Whoopi Goldberg (okay, Lyle Lovett) repeats “One of us”. </p>
<p>No one ever seems to know what I’m talking about. Perhaps a very loose association.</p>
<p>Is your daughter majoring in a science of engineering major by any chance?</p>
<p>Many of STEM majors (including myself) have turned against the notion of God because logic and scientific facts have proven to us otherwise. This may be the reason your daughter no longer wants to go to church. I think you are being very immature trying to force her to attend a religious event. Let her make her own decisions. </p>
<p>A good parent-child tuition contract would have terms like : maintain minimum GPA, no drinking, no drug use, or maybe even no boyfriend. But making church mandatory? What is this era? The witch hunt trail days?</p>
<p>Annoyinggirl, please see the OP’s last post.</p>
<p>She’s receiving $25,000 per year and all her parents are asking is she sit through 1 hour of Mass per week. I would have jumped at that opportunity instead of having to work 40 plus hours while going to school, trying to attend classes and study all at once. She will get out of Mass what she wants-- a lot, a little, or nothing at all. Why do people keep implying she’ll hate her parents if they make her do this? Atheists can attend Mass, doesn’t mean they’ll become Christians. What is there to hate? That she can’t sleep in on Sundays? Go Saturday evening.</p>
<p>No, no one can make anyone go to church. But they can’t make anyone pay $25,000 a year for their education either, even if they are their parents. So many people seem entitled to their parents money, but only with no strings attached, of course.</p>
<p>As a Catholic that strayed away from the church and then came back, I first only started attending Mass again because my future husband did. Our Priest believes by attending Mass with my husband, that “spark” of belief was relit. There was no talk of “being in a state of sin” as you say because I wasn’t really a practicing Catholic at that time. Anybody can attend a Catholic Mass, the church hopes one will and learn more about the religion and to dispel any myths about the church.</p>
<p>Hey annoying girl, no offense but sitting through one Mass a week is no big deal. I know the family has reached a compromise, good for them, but everybody doesn’t have to be in an uproar because this involves religion. This from a person raised Catholic, drifted away because I was “to smart” for God and have sense come back (mostly) to my faith. You don’t have to even listen at mass if you don’t want to. It is not like the “witch trial days” as you put it. No pressure is put on you. No one gets burned at the stake or hung. It’s a man talking in front of a group of people. I’ve attended many churches, a synagogue, a mosque, just to learn what people believe or think. No big deal. Why does religion scare everyone so much? You say things like no boyfriend or no drug use would be ok for parents to demand of their college age student-- well that would be a huge deal breaker for some I went to school with!</p>
<p>I want to comment on this, but I better keep my trap shut!</p>
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<p>I think that the strings parents attach to college money should be related to college. I do not think that just because I provide money for college that I can control all aspects of my son’s life. Since we are paying for his schooling we expect him to:</p>
<ol>
<li>Progress towards a degree</li>
<li>Maintain his scholarship</li>
<li>Keep in touch with us</li>
<li>Provide his own money for personal expenses.</li>
</ol>
<p>We do not expect to control every aspect of his life simply because we are paying for college. He is an adult and we treat him as an adult. We want to help him succeed in college not control his life.</p>
<p>Wow, there are a lot of really rabid and ripping posts on this thread. :(</p>
<p>You might not agree with the parents’ approach - but all of that is really pretty horrible.</p>
<p>AND, if you looked, you would see that 2 pages back the OP posted a very thoughtful and reasonable post saying that she has considered the things said here and has spoken with her daughter about the benefits she believes she might have from going to a new church, and has decided to remove the requirement for going to Mass because she would like for her daughter’s spiritual life to be REAL and be her own.</p>
<p>Awesome! I know how important my spiritual life is to my parents, and how important my childrens’ spiritual life is to me. I get that a lot of people don’t get that. No reason to be hateful. Try to understand/see it from the other side before just ripping into someone.</p>
<p>Good luck, OP! I think you’re wise to change your stance on this subject. 
</p>
<p>In regards to some of the other posts asking about Catholic beliefs–my entire, huge, extended family is Catholic and none of my relatives believe that you should attend church if you aren’t mentally “there” (you aren’t going to get anything out of it and it’s disrespectful to the other attendants), or that not going to Mass is a sin.</p>
<p>And another thing, AnnoyingGirl - you don’t speak for all STEM majors. A large number of scientists ARE religious - maybe not fundamentalists, but I know from my 30+ years in college, grad school and industry that many many scientists and engineers believe in God and attend religious services. In my last job (pharma research), my lab group included a large number of Catholics and Protestants, two Hindus, a Muslim, and two atheists. It made for a number of interesting conversations in lab.</p>
<p>Weird, I know, but people are complex beings, capable of believing in many seemingly contradictory things at one time. </p>
<p>To the OP: I know this was a difficult situation for you and I applaud your openmindedness and willingness to change. Like many college students, I too fell out of the church-going habit only to return when my own daughter was small. My minister likes to joke that that they often lose 'em at high school graduation but get them back when babies are born. Not universally true, I know, but it does hold a grain of truth.</p>
<p>I’m an agnostic, but I still don’t see why people think science and religion are contradictory beliefs. Why can’t a supreme being have created science as a way for people to discover and improve their world? Why can’t a supreme being have created the world … set it in motion but then just let it develop as it will? </p>
<p>I don’t know if there is a God but I do have a lot of friends who are religiously observant and believe what I’ve said above. Not every religious person is a fundamentalist.</p>
<p>And I know this is totally off-topic. The OP sounds like a great parent who really does have her child’s best interest at heart. She just needed to talk it out and get some feedback (and boy, we’re good at providing that! lol)</p>
<p>I will say that as someone pursuing both a liberal arts and science degree, I know far more atheists and agnostics in the liberal arts than sciences. I think it has more to do with the liberal and conservative leanings of each major.</p>
<p>For the sake of those that are reading the first post and skipping to the end to weigh in, I’m going to re-post something from the OP where they obviously have taken time to rethink their original position (post #139). It’s worth reading before you post and is being missed by many, resulting in some undeserved jabs.</p>
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<p>Rarely does a thread appear that is so electric, garnering so many responses, where the OP actually has a change of heart and comes back and posts their updated thoughts. I give loneranger a lot of credit of this…a LOT. This parenting gig is not an easy road. We do the best we can for the children we love so dearly. We make decisions with good intentions but we are human and don’t always get it right. It takes a very large open heart and mind to admit that maybe there is a better way, especially when it goes against something the OP feels so strongly about. I wish her and her daughter the best of luck.</p>
<p>Lone, if you come back, I have to ask- how is dad taking this? He seemed to take more offense than you.</p>
<p>Loneranger, I get where you’re coming from. My DD is a senior in high school, so we’re not quite there yet, but it would absolutely break my heart if she did not join the Christian fellowship in college and attend church. But I also recognize I can’t make her do this. I think the question you need to ask yourself is whether you want your daughter to attend Mass because of an obligation to you, or whether you want her do so because she personally feels an obligation to God. In the former scenario, she’s following rules; in the latter, she is a woman of faith, who obeys and worships God because she loves him.</p>
<p>I can tell you that when I was her age, I walked away from my faith for almost a decade and lived a rather, ahem, debauched life. But I came back, and I think that one day, your daughter will, too. I know that’s hard to hear right now but I think that if you’ve raised her in the Church, she will find how much she needs it at some point in the future.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I would discuss this with her. Ask her why she made a promise she did not keep. This is a character issue, so this might be a good place to start. But listen to her. You want what’s best for her because you love her, and she needs to know that.</p>
<p>Thank you, blueiguana. </p>
<p>Lonranger, good for you. I hope your H comes round to your way of thinking on this and doesn’t feel so badly.</p>