Why I Didn't Leave the Catholic Church
A reason for the hope that I have
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In 1 Peter 3:15, Saint Peter asks us to “in your hearts, revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.”
Recently there’s been a few articles floating around my newsfeed about why someone left the Catholic Church, and it got me thinking about how many of those I’ve seen lately. So, so many stories of leaving, of exiting, of shutting the door, gracefully or with a bang. Of middle fingers or waves goodbye or forlorn farewells.
When I see these, I often think of 1 Peter. In fact, it rang in my head for a few days, louder than any drum. Give the reason for the hope that you have. And I realized that my hope is in Jesus, of course, but Christ’s Church is a conduit of that grace and mercy and a foundational, fundamental part of my faith life. So while I know we have Protestant readers and Jewish readers and ex-Catholic readers, I ask you to indulge me today and let me give you the reason for the hope that I have (with gentleness and respect) while knowing you are welcome here.
Here’s why I didn’t leave.
It’s my experience that nearly all deconversion stories away from Catholicism fall into one of four categories:
I no longer have the time or inclination to care about the greater cosmos of the world and no longer think it matters what happens when we die.
I no longer agree with this particular church teaching and believe the church to be wrong about most matters of ethics.
I no longer believe that members of the church are good people and don’t want to be aligned with them any longer. (Church would be better without all of these idiots in it.)
I have experienced a vast, profound, deeply painful suffering and the church did not have the answers I wanted them to have.
I’ve always been the kind of person who thinks about wild things like where do we come from? and why are we here? so I can’t say the first point has ever tapped on my heart, but I could have peace’d out due to the bottom three at plenty of times in my life. Until I was about 20, I believed most teachings of the church were optional/stupid at best and flat-out wrong at worst. And the past three or so years I have faced a vast, profound, deeply painful suffering. I do not share the details of that on the internet because a) I’m still walking through some of it and b) it involves other people’s vast, profound, deeply painful suffering and those particular people did not consent to having their business shouted out about on the World Wide Web. And plenty of people around me were very unequipped to help me deal with this suffering.
Catholics are quick to criticize Joel-Osteen-vibe megachurches where health-and-wealth are preached. God wants you to be rich. God wants you to be skinny. God wants you to be a CEO. We rightly see the wrongness there; we correctly understand that God’s greatest desires for you have nothing to do with the size of your paycheck. And yet, who among us hasn’t believed so strongly that our lives deserve to be simple1 that that belief became an idol?
I did. I would not have said I did. I would have said that Jesus never promised happiness; that true faith is at times forged through fire; that Jesus told us in this world we would have troubles. But when push came to shove and the rubber met the road and I was being asked to suffer as never before, you can bet that I wanted to call God up and ask him what the hell he was doing.
When I was in my darkest moments, literally sobbing in a car in my garage so that my kids didn’t see, I would pray Psalm 77:
I cried out to God for help;
I cried out to God to hear me.
When I was in distress, I sought the Lord;
at night I stretched out untiring hands,
and I would not be comforted.I remembered you, God, and I groaned;
I meditated, and my spirit grew faint.
You kept my eyes from closing;
I was too troubled to speak.
I thought about the former days,
the years of long ago;
I remembered my songs in the night.
My heart meditated and my spirit asked:“Will the Lord reject me forever?
Will he never show his favor again?
Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?
Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion?”Then I thought, “To this I will appeal:
the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand.
I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
I will consider all your works
and meditate on all your mighty deeds.”
This psalm is a lament, followed by a question, followed by a remembrance.
A lament: where grief meets prayer. I cried out to God to hear me—What are you doing, Lord? Where are you?
A question: Will the Lord reject me forever—is this how it’s going to be, now? Is this my life? Will this sickness kill me? Did you forget about me, down here? Me, of all people, your faithful servant who was a goddamn missionary and now PREACHES YOUR NAME and EVANGELIZES and does SO MUCH for you2?! ME?! Is this because of the CUSSING?!?
A remembrance: I will consider all your works—I know who you are. I know who you are. I know who you are.
It reminds me of the book of Job, when Job basically asks God to send a bus. He’s had it. He’s ready for the afterlife. Wouldn’t it have been better if he simply hadn’t been born? And God does not respond with a list of facts and arguments, whipping out his theological defense attorneys. He basically says, “remember who made the dolphins?! Me!”
Because those arguments don’t work if you don’t have a perspective on who God is and who you are and how those two things relate to each other. All of the catechism classes or homeschooling or Catholic theology degrees mean nothing without that understanding.
My suffering suddenly took me to a new, wild place, a place where spoon-fed answers and storybook bibles weren’t going to cut it. Jesus and I had to encounter each other as if for the first time, in a way. I had to relearn my faith and understand what it meant in the face of a powerful grief. With so many of my physical, tangible blessings ripped away, I had to decide whether or not I would continue with the church not because of what its members were able or unable to give me but because of what it was: the visible sign of Christ’s kingdom here on earth. I would have to choose to cease being a hired hand who believed in order to receive her paycheck: health-and-wealth in Joel Osteen’s language; a simple, joyful, aesthetically pleasing life in mine where I generally felt like a good person. But instead, I could become a daughter who believed that her father was good, who had tasted and seen the goodness of God.
Perhaps this was where you were expecting a long list of apologetics. An explanation of the sacraments. And yes, those things are true—I’m Catholic because of the Eucharist. I’m Catholic because of confession. I’m Catholic because of the priesthood. But Scott Hahn and Trent Horn and Mary Healy say all of that better than me. There’s certainly a time and place for YouTubing “why do Catholics go to Mass on Sundays” or listening to the Catechism in a Year podcast, but I haven’t found those to be particularly helpful practices when confronted with the issue most deconversion stories take. I was being asked to suffer, and I didn’t want to. I was being asked to do something really hard, and it didn’t feel like what God would ask of me.
I am Catholic because of what it teaches that God does in the midst of my suffering.
I know, because of my Catholicism, that my suffering is not the perfect will of God, but it is the permissive will of God. My suffering is not part of God’s plan, but it is real and he will use it. That my suffering does not bring Jesus joy, but it does serve as an invitation to become more like him. That Jesus became what we were—humans, broken, beaten down—so that we might become what he was. We keep him on our cross, a reminder of the sorrow that will set the table for the greatest feast the world has known. No other church or group or social circle has ever been able to explain that to me in a way that made sense. Do what makes you happy is fine until it isn’t—until it hurts other people, or goes against God’s law, or turns you into a monkey willing to dance for a culture that will never, ever love you.
Because the world doesn’t understand suffering. It does not know what to make of it, or view it as purposeful. It’s why most people view being asked to bear suffering like a slap in the face. And the Christians (including Catholics) who believe God would want you to be happy, carefree, following your gut are simply parroting Joel Osteen whether they know it or not. They are still viewing God as the ATM they can appear in front of, hands out. A happy marriage, please. Four healthy children, please. A kind family of origin, please. Social comfort, please. A just wage, please. Health, please.
Our temptation is to turn God into a being that hates what we hate and loves what we love, whose main concern is our day-to-day contentedness.
I don’t believe in that God. I’ve never known him. The God I believe in is sitting in this shit with me, staring up at the stars.
Everyone is on a journey. That sounds like the pithy type of thing you put on a bumper sticker while smoking a blunt and saying yeah, man with your buddies amidst a hitchhike to Burning Man, but it’s the truth as far as I see it. Doubt is a part of faith. Yearning is a part of faith. Questions are a part of faith. Israel means to wrestle with God. To be a good Christian is not to yes-ma’am the pope at every turn. I look down on no one; I judge no one’s heart.
But I was asked to be prepared, by Peter. Asked to give reason for the hope I have. That reasons is Jesus, and the church he created. Peter, the rock on which he’d build his church. A church bigger than me and my own decisions—a place where I don’t have to have the answers. Jesus is my reason. He started this circus and I can’t leave it, no matter how much its members make me want to scream and break things. I know I am one of those members, those unruly sinners who are only scraping by the skin of our teeth. To be here is to have a complete joy, even when I’m sobbing in a car.
And if that doesn’t make sense to you, I understand—it doesn’t always make sense to me either. I’m in a new place, now, that wild-place I mentioned earlier. The place of surrender. If you haven’t had the opportunity to come here yet, this will sound like the ramblings of a lunatic to you. We are in different places. Okay. But if you have, then you’re here with me, nodding along. You read de-conversion stories and feel deep, gutted sadness.
In the Gospels, we read about Jesus explaining the reality of the Eucharist to the crowds. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Many in the crowds leave. Many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
Jesus asks the apostles in that moment what they planned to do. What was their game plan? Would they, too, walk away? In search of nicer people who voted the way you wanted them to, a sparklier life, greener pastures, a path that wasn’t so weird and wild?
And Simon Peter answered gave him by testifying to the reason for his hope.
He told Jesus, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
On My Nightstand
The Silent Knight: A History of St. Joseph as Depicted by Art by Elizabeth Lev: A must-read for any art fans or St. Joseph devotees out there.
Wintering by Katherine May: This was one of my favorite reads of 2023, and as the sun sets earlier and the chill gets sharper I felt it was time for a reread. Winter here is long + vast and my heart needs a bit of strengthening before we bust out the Christmas carols.
Why Happy Endings in Fantasy are a Requirement: I’m sorry, what was that? A Tolkien article on Substack? You know I clicked, you know I read, you know I loved. “The big takeaway here: Christians believe in happy endings. The blueprint of the Christian faith and narrative is that things are meant to be good and will be good again; there’s no such thing as a permanent sad ending. In the real world, Good always wins even if Evil prevails for a moment, and endings are always happy because God has made happy endings the default of reality. Even death has no power over God’s followers because death is just a doorway to something better.”
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Or if not simple, than breezy? Or only moderately difficult, in the ways we approve of?
I am very, very aware of just how unflattering this is.
Thanks, as always, for sharing your heart, Claire. I DID end up leaving the Catholic Church for 8 years after not being able to find the answers or community I needed. But the Eucharist called me back. And even through the crap interactions I've had since my return, the ones where I have to keep telling myself that priests are humans with flaws too, the scripture passage that stays in my heart is always "To whom shall we go?" Because I've lived that otherness and dang, it doesn't heal the wounds either. But then I'm alone with my wounds, rather than having Jesus cry with me and sit with me in the muck.
Yes, this is an at-times harrowing topic that I encounter often as well. My family was never going to enroll as third-order Carmelites, but we went to Mass regularly until about 2003, when I was 7, as the horrific truth about the sex abuse scandals reverberated through our Archdiocese - Boston. I vividly remember my Dad picking me up from elementary school and seeing a picture of Bishop John McCormick on the wall and how he became *enraged*. It sometimes feels impossible to explain to others how you could choose to go back to that, though I do think people have started to understand more in the past few years as the western world’s experiment with postmodernism has crumbled.
As to the deep suffering - I know the last thing you probably need right now is another book on your list, but I think you would appreciate The Brothers Karamazov. One thing I love about Dostoevsky (despite his anti-Catholicism, ironically) is how much he wrestled with darkness. He was sentenced to death at 27 and then served in a labor camp and then in exile. He met Jesus during this time but he never reached the serene trust stage of faith, he always struggled.
Brothers K is a big time investment but it’s the best attempt (in my opinion) that any human being has ever made to articulate the necessity of faith in the midst of profound suffering.