u/FestiveAbyss

My daughter is developmentally disabled and recently had to spend a week in the hospital. She got to meet two different therapy dogs when she was there and it helped her immensely at a time when she was scared and having to undergo a lot of painful testing and treatment.

She's recovering at home now but keeps asking when she can meet a therapy dog again.

I don't know what to tell her, as I'm not aware of any programs outside of the local hospitals.

Does anyone here have any suggestions? Are there service dog programs that visit libraries or schools?

Basically what it says in the title.

How I ended up converting late in life is a long story.

Part of it was trying to reconnect with my identity. My family came from a country where Catholic Christians were severely persecuted. I lost them when I was young.

They were incredibly kind, brave, loving people. I felt like connecting with their faith was, in a way, connecting to the family I had lost and the values they had tried to instill in me.

I'd been through about a decade of one traumatic event after another...I was in a state of despair. A church that believed in predictable rituals, a loving God, in guardian angels and saints that pray for us and a tradition stretching back over a thousand years seemed comforting, stable and solid. It also appealed to my curiosity because the church has been around awhile, and it seemed like there was always something new to read or study.

Another part of it was volunteer work. There aren't a lot of religious organizations doing outreach with the poor, the sick, the homeless where I live. Except the Catholics. So I connected with a local church so I could try and do some good in my community.

At first people were loving, welcoming. OCIA was full of lively debate. I went to the Easter Vigil completely sure of my decision. It felt like coming home.

But within a week things started to change. Due to health issues, I couldn't attend mass every week and I couldn't take communion. People started making comments. When I tried to explain my situation, I was told to do what everybody else did. I guess praying silently in the back row and making the prayer of spiritual communion in this case wasn't enough, in spite of what I'd been told in OCIA. I was told to talk to a priest. Well, after a year of OCIA and many attempts to make an appointment, I've never been able to talk directly with a priest. I just got reminded that there's a shortage of priests and nobody is ever available.

I began to realize that if my condition worsened and if I ever needed anointing of the sick or last rites, there wouldn't be anyone available for that, either.

I tried attending adult education classes, and found the content and discussions very shallow. All the deep theology was replaced with "because this is the way it is and the way it's always been". I tried enrolling my kids in Sunday school and they had the same experience. It was basically handing out candy for them to show up, and parrot back a couple of trite phrases, but they learned nothing. When I went to church events I was treated as a pariah. Not cradle Catholic? You might as well not be Catholic at all. My non-Catholic husband got a cold reception. My youngest child, who has disabilities, was not welcome and I realized that the church had no way of integrating people like that into the community. They couldn't even deal with children who didn't attend the local private Catholic school. They could talk about being open-hearted and a diverse community on the surface - but they were only open to people who had never left or been outside of the church, only people who had always walked in lockstep with it.

After two weeks away, dealing with a serious personal crisis, when none of my church friends bothered to check in, I realized something.

I didn't make a choice to leave the church, but it seemed to have left me.

I know a lot of people will call me a fool or an idiot for believing in the first place. I just really wanted to believe that the part about loving and one's neighbor was stronger than the politics and the human tendency to embrace petty conformist bullshit.