Putting all this research and analysis together

Over the past few weeks, I have been examining the Catholic faith through memes from an insider source. At first, I didn't have a lot of focus and was unsure which aspect of Catholicism I wanted to look into and critique. My sample of memes come from an insider perspective of a Catholic meme facebook page. I took memes that were mostly understandable from an outside perspective with a few that would only be understood by those within the faith. Honestly, I picked memes I thought were funny and at least semi-relatable. I didn't want anything too obscure or specific. I focused on general topics and easy to understand concepts. As the weeks progressed, my focus turned to Catholic authority, really the stereotype that Catholics view themselves as the superior faith even within the Christian sphere. 

Stereotypes: Catholics are arrogant, know-it-alls that out rituals over actual faith. Looking specifically at confession, they have many steps they say are necessary to live a genuine Christian life. It's their way or its the wrong way.

How it relates: Many of their insider memes outsiders down and view them as "holier", better then them for either living a better life or performing the rituals they believe you are supposed to. By presenting these ideas through an online source of memes, it makes a serious discussion, laughable. It takes an important point and dilutes it.   

Because Catholicism is a fairly rigid belief system, it has a plethora of offline standards and basis for actions. They have many acts and rituals that they apply to their daily lives and should permeate into everything. 

There are many sources that research and contemplate Catholic authority, I will be analyzing and using them to decide how accurate this stereotype is, especially for the difference between online and offline religion portrayals. 

The online religion definitely can challenge that by its tendency to joke about the serious. 

Online-Offline connection:

Breaking-away- holiness vs joking about the confess ritual. As I stated above, offline this is a serious issue of belittling and frustrating others while online, its all a joke for no one to take personally. Online they can joke about aspects of Catholicism, like confession; they make jokes about before, during, and after confession.

This meme a good portrayal of the joking side of the Catholic stereotype. This obviously isn't supposed to be taken seriously. Because there are so many holidays around Christmas, it can be difficult to be completely P.C. with those who have different beliefs. This plays on not being

 P.C. at all and trying to be funny instead and hopefully not offensive. 

I feel like this meme falls into the Catholic authority stereotype because it is literally pointing fingers at past mistakes. The top picture of this meme is referring to the Israelites roaming through the desert for 40 years before they came to the Promise Land. Here, they wanted something physical to worship so while Moses was on the mountain talking to God, Aaron created a golden calf that they worshipped. This blatantly goes against what the Lord told them about idolatry.
This meme pokes fun at this mistake, like they tend to do in their memes for those they feel are less then them.