My ‘Escape’ From the Catholic Church
Holy Week starts this Palm Sunday and it was always a big part of my childhood. The pageantry, the hymns — it was awesome. Now it’s simply Palm Sunday and Easter dinner coupled with two fun days spent with my family, none of whom go to church. Religion in its strictest form is gone and I am happy that I made my escape.
Let me state that my parents and I were always what some priests call ‘lukewarm Catholics’. I was born a skeptic and so many rules and traditions that were taught by the church and their schools always made me question them.
For example, girls and women were seen unofficially, and sometimes quite officially, as not on the same level with boys and men. A perfect example of this is that even in 2023, women are still not allowed to be priests. That bothered me, not because I wanted to take holy orders but because it puts females on a lower plain than their male counterparts. Why were males somehow superior to females? I asked. Oh, well, I was told, it’s because God is male. I was actually told that God sees a woman’s soul as less than a man’s.
I felt somehow brainwashed by the church as a child. We were told by priests that we shouldn’t ever pray directly to God, oh no. Technically we weren’t good enough. Instead we should go to any intermediary, preferably a saint, to ask them to ask God for what we needed. And there was always a not-so-subtle hint that God was out to punish us if we strayed even a little from the teachings of the church. I learned to fear this male God which was a terrible burden for a child.
Antisemitism right now is at the highest level it has been for three plus decades, but I wonder if anyone realizes that the Catholic Church had a lot to do with the beginning of antisemitism. Since the fourth century, the Gospel of John, which is read during Good Friday services, has been used to justify anti-Semitism. Read chapter 19.
“Pilate said to the Jews, ‘Here is your King!’
They cried out, ‘Away with him! Away with him! Crucify him!”
This language shifted the blame for the death of Jesus from the Roman authorities to the Jewish people.
The church’s desire and demand to control a woman’s body was also something that made no sense to me. Women feared going to confess to a priest that they were using birth control because it was a ‘mortal sin for which they could go to hell. They were advised to get pregnant and not come back to confession until they did.
Then there is the old Catholic tradition of churching which is used to purify a mother after childbirth. Countless generations of women participated in it as ritual so they could be accepted back into the pew for Sunday mass. How is a woman somehow ‘dirty’ for giving birth? My skepticism about the treatment of women made me want to leave the church then and there. I stopped going to Mass when I was eighteen. There was nothing there for me, nothing but bigotry, misogyny, and cruelty.
But when I became engaged, and because Catholicism was the only religion I knew, and also because I did want a church wedding, I went to a priest. He refused to have me get married in the Catholic Church unless my husband-to-be, who was Methodist, converted to Catholicism. He told us that we would be “married in sin” if he didn’t convert. That was the last straw for me. I was marrying a good man, a decent man and his religion or lack thereof had nothing to do with ‘sin’.
I escaped the Catholic Church and never looked back. As far as religion goes, I see myself as more spiritual and that’s a good thing. I believe in a higher power but I don’t fear that power nor do I see it as purely masculine.
I also think this energy is a nice combination of male and female and very approachable.
