Why I'm no longer Catholic - with a p.s.

I grew up Catholic. That’s not to say I was raised Catholic, however.  My parents drove us to church, went home, and then came back for us.  I was an altar boy – no I wasn’t molested – and sometimes helped the nuns out at their convent.  I had a good experience of Christian community there.  During high school, in my own rather tame rebelliousness, I became an agnostic, and no longer participated in church.  It was my senior year in high school when I decided that I wanted to return, that I wanted to find some kind of spiritual home and direction, and my first spiritual home seemed to make the most sense.  It was a conservative parish and I was a progressive, but we seemed to make things work. 

I went to college and was very active in campus ministry there. After graduation, I took a job with the church, and spent the next several years in educational ministries. From that period through about six years ago, I was very active in the various parishes my family found ourselves in.  They were good, nurturing Christian communities that provided a loving home for us as a family and for me, my wife, and my children, each of us individually.

That's all great. So, why would I leave?  

While I loved the communities I was a part of, and the institution I'd worked in for over a decade, I had always struggled with a number of issues in the larger Catholic community.  

I struggled with the older, Pre-Vatican folks who saw the church as more of an army than a spiritual community, valuing obedience and a certain siege mentality over engagement in the world.

I struggled with the ineradicable patriarchalism of the church.  Outside its doors, it spoke for the rights of women … to a certain extent, anyway. Inside, the male hierarchy refused to give women any power, de facto or de jure, in matters of governance. 

I struggled with the blind adherence to clerical celibacy as clergy numbers dropped, and of course, a complete refusal of the old boys to consider that women’s spiritual gifts might be equal to men’s, and that a female clergy could be anything other than anathema.

I struggled with the church’s adherence to a medieval sense of sexuality.  There are branches and branches here, but let’s just leave it at that overall statement.

I struggled with the new conservative turn that the already mossy hierarchy took under Benedict.

And, of course, I struggled with how badly the church continued to deal with sexual abuse in its ranks. Time and time and time and time ad nauseum, even with a bishop whom I loved and trusted as a faithful servant, the impulse was to circle the wagons, protect the “virtue” of the church, and marginalize, minimize, and cynically re-victimize the victims.  It was behavior that the church could see as un-Christian and reprehensible everywhere but inside its own walls. Even now, reforms are faltering and incremental and easily warped.  

All of these things had frustrated and troubled me over the decades, but I kept telling myself that I loved the people, and experienced real community, regardless of my reservations about the leadership, governance, and fragmentary moral focus.

And then I got divorced.  My wife was employed by the church, and by and large, she "got custody" of our community in the separation.  It was good for her. It was also good for me in that a portion of the grounds for our divorce were actually tied in with her engagement in church.  In part, I was soured by the awareness that church was the place she had gone to avoid me, both chronically in the long term, and acutely in the short term. There were also troublesome ties to other staff members. It’s not that I wanted to leave the community, but those facts definitely provided some distance and perspective for me.  For the first time, I wasn’t completely glossing over decades of frustration and moral excuse-making with my dedication to the people in a specific community.

I hopped from parish to parish for a while, and gradually came to understand that the overall Catholic church and I were also bound for divorce.  I’d spent too many years making excuses with others for the church, giving nuanced explanations trying to mitigate the very failings that bothered me.  It was the same posture I had taken in my marriage, extended to the church, and was equally bound to fail when enough light was cast on it. Eventually, I accepted the imperative to separate.

I loved my decades of live in the church, but at the same time, I’d finally given up on any hope I had that the church would, in my lifetime, significantly grow beyond its own self-made constraints.  I’d used up every “maybe” and “In due time …” I had.

In time, as my search broadened, I became an Episcopalian. I will confess now that I’m not currently active.  They are a more inclusive and welcoming community, and perhaps the one community that provides the spiritual equilibrium that most matches my own, but I’m on hiatus.  It’s not them, really. It’s me.

In a certain way, a part of me will always feel at home in the Catholic Church, though I can’t imagine myself ever again actually being home there.  The people, the liturgies, its general commitment to social justice, it’s connection to the early and simple church … I will always love those.  From a distance, now.

(p.s. - People ask, "But what about Pope Francis?"  Francis, Jorge Bergoglio, is one man. He happens to wear the mitre for now, but all things pass. John XXIII, Angelo Roncalli, was one man who wore the mitre for a while, and who made changes and opened windows.  Over time, many of those changes got swallowed back up inside the universal church and the Vatican body politic.  While I'm encouraged that the church will mature, I can only be highly skeptical about how much and how soon.)