Good grief. Our girls go to a Catholic school ....

[2sugars]

... and today the whole school is going to Mass as it's All Saints Day. Which means dd1 is missing swimming.

When H found this out, he was fuming. I said (although I'm certain it's not)"It's All Saints Day. It's a Holy Day of Obligation"

To which he huffed and puffed and replied "It should be a holy day of education."

When we enrolled dd1 with the school, we were told in no uncertain terms that if we didn't like it we could take our children out? So why is it such a huge surprise to him now?

BTW I'm Catholic and he's very anti.

That's interesting, lemonaid - is it really the time spent in prayer or good works that counts, rather than there being higher weightings for particular deeds or prayers?

Not entirely sure -- perhaps it's "X years of averagely-good praying". I'll need to ask my brother to re-explain it to me.

I think limbo was recently deemed to possibly not actually exist (or something along those lines but more waffly), but purgatory is still current teaching of the Catholic Church but it's moved as a concept away from a place of punishment towards a kind of period of voluntary purification, I think. And it (or nebulous concepts of purification after death and the dead being somewhere it would do good to pray for them) were around in days of early Christianity, before the Middle Ages (which did rather explore the commercial possibilities implicit in the concept, certainly).