Stuff Catholics Like: Single Ladies & Beyoncé

All the single ladies, that is! Put your hands up, hands up! Because if you’re a single lady, and probably going to stay one for any foreseeable future, there is just no better place to be than the Catholic Church! Gobs of single ladies are running around every Catholic parish, because there doesn’t seem to be the stigma of being “gifted with singleness” that you find in Protestant churches. (Shout out here to Jon Acuff at Stuff Christians Like for developing a Surviving Church as a Single Scorecard.) Instead, being a single Catholic lady puts you in with some great company. Like Mother Teresa, Hildegard of Bingen, and Tasha Tudor! (Wait, she’s not Catholic? Oops! And I think I read somewhere that she did used to be married…yeah, cause she has kids. Crap! Well, two out of three ain’t bad! Well, she’s great anyway. Maybe she should become Catholic!)

Basically, unless you’re a Very Special Married Lady like Saint Monica, or Saint Gianna Molla, but if you want to become a woman saint, you’re going to have to be a single lady. (Good for me!)

I don’t know if Beyoncé had this single lady in mind when she wrote her song, but Saint Catherine of Sienna actually did get a ring! A mystical wedding ring, visible only to her, that she got from Jesus. THAT IS SO COOL! I wonder if it looked like the one Kate Middleton is sporting now. Nah, probably better, ’cause it actually came from Jesus himself. (And even though the Jesus in my children’s Bible had blond hair, He was definitely not as cute as Prince William, though I guess that’s to be expected, since Isaiah prophesied that Jesus would have, “no stately bearing to make us look at him, nor appearance that would attract us to him” (Isaiah 53:2b, New American Bible). I do know that if I starting making noises that I had received a mystical wedding ring from Jesus that was only visible to me, I would probably be put on some kind of special medication only available through a licensed psychiatrist. (Definitely one thing that sucks about not living in the “olden days,” although I think those particular olden days were called the Dark Ages.)

There’s been a lot of chatter over the past few years in Evangelical Protestant circles about seeing Jesus as some kind of Prince Charming, made especially popular in the works of, among others, Sheri Rose Shepherd. But Catholics have, literally, centuries of that stuff to go on. Hey folks, wake up and smell the incense already! I realize that He does ride a white horse in the book of Revelation, but I think seeing Jesus as a Prince Charming is honestly, not even close to good enough. Nope. What are the single ladies then, the Heavenly Harem? I’m not sure about that…

Any church that makes celibacy a requirement for its ministers is bound to have any number of single ladies who, as Protestants, would’ve probably married a minister. Unfortunately, all the ministers are “taken” (as it were) in this denomination, so right there there’s a whole bunch of ladies.

And we even have groups of single ladies, that band together to help each other—they’re called sisters! (You’re only a nun if you’re cloistered, FYI.) Once upon a time, a very long time ago, some ladies joined religious orders because they’d been jilted, but now that’s frowned upon. And too bad, in my opinion. You want an increase in vocations, let those bitter chicks join up, and we’d soon have a lot more stories about kids getting their hands hit with a ruler again. (And probably fewer in jail, but that’s another story!)

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