Catholics Come Home: Why I Left the Catholic Church and Won't Be Going Back

My relationship with religion has been a source of pain and frustration for as long as I can remember. I went to a Catholic university and attended 12 years of Catholic school. For most of my life, I was in church every Sunday. I took my confirmation seriously, and aspired to die a martyr. I was obnoxiously, unceasingly devout.




Brick by brick, the Catholic church slowly destroyed the foundations of my faith. It started when I was eight and wanted to become an altar server. A progressive-minded priest decided it was high time our church include girls in Sunday services. But two weeks into my altar server training, our church got a letter from the archbishop informing us that it was "God's will" for girls to never be altar servers.

It turns out that the archbishop's interpretation of God's will was dead wrong, because a year later, he changed his mind. Nowadays, every church lets girls become altar servers. I remember sitting in the archbishop's office with my dad and crying as this self-styled man of God told me he knew better than me what God wanted for me and for the church. It wasn't what God wanted, though; it was what he wanted. And this experience left an indelible mark on me. I learned that church leaders used God to support their own agendas.

This theme was revisited over and over in Catholic school. When we talked about morality, we talked about sex and homosexuality; we never discussed war, poverty, or humility. Pam Stenzel, a chastity speaker, came to our school and told us that girls who had sex outside of marriage were damaged and dirty. This enabled a pre-existing culture of bullying to become even worse. Girls were shamed as sluts as teachers stood passively by.

Of course, I understand that the bad actions of men and women should not reflect on God, and the fact that a religious leader gets it wrong doesn't undermine God's message. I still believe in God, though my understanding of what that means exactly is constantly shifting. The problem is that the Catholic church insists on teaching its followers that believing in God is synonymous with believing in the Catholic church, alienating millions of Catholics.

So I was excited when I saw a commercial for an organization called Catholics Come Home. I thought I might have found an organization that was ready to address the concerns of lapsed Catholics. Instead, I found a website that listed only five issues on its morality page: abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, pornography, and contraception.

No matter what you believe about contraception, I have a hard time believing that God thinks using a condom is a more pressing moral issue than the death penalty, war, child abuse, rape, poverty, or political disenfranchisement. But here was this organization trumpeting the same blind ideology that alienated me in the first place.

A church that demands regular confession from its followers and absolute atonement for even the most trivial of sins continues to refuse to do the same. Sex scandals, nazism, misuse of church funds, and every other scandal in which the church has been involved are brushed under the rug. And this is why I will never "come home." I have completely abandoned any hope I had that the church might one day attempt to make amends to its followers. The fact that the church is desperate to recruit followers via Catholics Come home but completely unwilling to consider why follows have left in the first place was the final death knell for me.

I feel a lot like how I imagine child abuse victims feel. I finally realized that my church wasn't perfect and that many of its leaders had committed heinous acts. And the church responded by denying those acts and, when denial was no longer possible, claiming that they were somehow justified. The church's abuses are systemic. The church repeatedly tells us that we live in a fallen, flawed culture and blames this culture for the evils our society faces. When it has to look in the mirror, though, it blames a few bad apples. I can't get behind this kind of hypocrisy. So what would it take for me to go back to the Catholic church? A bunch of stuff that will never happen:

• The church needs to admit that it was complicit in the sexual abuse of thousands, if not millions of children. Bishops moved abusers from one parish to another in an attempt to evade prosecution, thus endangering even more children. Pope Benedict himself participated in the cover-up, and numerous governments and independent organizations have lambasted the church for allowing abuse to continue. This behavior cannot be excused nor brushed under the rug, and victims cannot be ignored. The church must do everything in its power to help victims, including listening to their insights on why the abuse happened in the first place. 
• Catholics need to get back into the business of real morality. I know the church will never change its position on abortion, but I can live with this disagreement. What I cannot live with is the fact that the church focuses on this issue to the exclusion of all others. Contraception lowers the rate of abortion, as does comprehensive sexual education. A culture that offered a way out of poverty would similarly lower the rate of abortion, and all faithful people have an ethical imperative to help the poor. Yet every anti-abortion Catholic charity I've ever encountered does nothing for poor, pregnant women aside from giving them baby clothes. What about medical expenses? Child care? Educational training? A way out of abusive relationships? The Catholic church is totally silent. 
• The church must re-evaluate women's role. Currently Catholics argue that Jesus only picked men for his followers and that therefore only men can be priests. It seems Catholics aren't reading their Bibles. What about Mary Magadelene? Martha? Mary, the mother of Jesus? Jesus had female followers and welcomed them into the fold. Even if the church is unwilling to make women priests, it needs to stop focusing on women as the source of all immorality by relentlessly talking about abortion and contraception. Why not start Catholic anti-rape organizations? Why not address the scourge of domestic violence? How about if the Church stops claiming that women and men are fundamentally different, a belief that contributes to the abuse of women? 
• The church needs to admit that popes aren't always perfect. It is laughable to claim otherwise, given the ongoing and historical abuses committed by popes. 
• The church needs to change its attitudes about sex. It will always endorse virginity until marriage, but making virginity the only indication of virtue means that non-virgins are worthy of scorn, alienating believers. Moreover, the church's interference with sexuality doesn't end with marriage. It also mandates that every marital sexual act must involve intercourse. 75% of women can't orgasm from intercourse alone, dooming female followers of Catholic dogma to a miserable, unsatisfying sex life. 
• The church is not God. God is God. I recently posted a brief rant about Catholicism on my Facebook, and my Catholic friends were enraged, questioning how I could criticize the integrity of the pope or the church. Meanwhile, I wondered how they couldn't. God commands us to love one another, to practice charity, to live peaceful lives. The church has not always done this, and when the church falls short of God's commands, it deserves criticism. Until Catholics learn a healthy sense of critical thinking, they'll continue to alienate people like me.