Religious ambivalence
More than a few people said that they simply drifted away from the Church through the influence of a dominant secular culture that is ambivalent about religion, at best. Bob, a 43-year-old attorney, was one of many who had slipped away from the Church after four years at a state university where he had no Catholic friends. “It all began to seem irrelevant,” Bob says. It was only after he married, in a civil ceremony, and became the father of three children that he and his wife-who grew up in a religiously indifferent family-began a search that led Bob back to his Catholic roots, and his wife along with him.
Some told of being offended or hurt by a priest or nun, including a few who were sexually abused in childhood by a priest-stories straight from recent national headlines.
I was surprised at the number of formerly alienated Catholics who left because they became convinced by biblical fundamentalists that the Catholic Church is at odds with the teachings of the New Testament. Linda, a 35-year-old accountant, spent 15 years away from the Catholic faith, active in a fundamentalist Christian sectarian church. Ironically, it was the minister of this sectarian church who led Linda-and about 60 other people-back to Catholicism.
“Our minister was a really studious guy,” Linda said, “and he studied long and hard about the history of Christianity, and after about three years the whole bunch of us, him included, just up and converted to the Catholic Church. For me, of course, it was a matter of coming home, back to where I started.”
Seeking structure
Some formerly alienated Catholics come home to the Church after years of buying into the currently popular opinion that “organized religion” is spiritually constricting. Judy told of growing up in a Catholic family, attending Catholic schools, but deciding in young adulthood that she believed in God but had no use for “organized religion.” For years, she rejected the idea of religious institutions, clergy, religious doctrines, and so forth. Drawing from various sources-often Eastern religions, New Age gurus, 12-step recovery programs, sometimes even Catholicism-such people put together a personal, eclectic “spirituality.”
Judy returned to a life of active Catholic faith after her mother passed away. “I had to attend the funeral Mass,” she recalls, “and something about the liturgy touched me deeply, and I realized that I had to come back. I realized that what I had been searching for all those years was right in my own backyard. Really, what I had to do was leave behind the childish ideas of what being Catholic is all about that I had lived with for so long, and move on to a mature, adult Catholic faith. I don’t expect the Church to be perfect anymore, and I don’t expect to get all the answers. Now all I expect is to live with the risen Christ and with his ordinary, sinful, everyday people, and that I get in abundance. I also soon realized that the Catholic religion is the most open, inclusive religion there is. That’s what ‘Catholic’ means, after all-universal and all-inclusive. It’s the other religious perspectives that, unintentionally, are often narrow-minded.”
High standards
One of the surprising trends among formerly alienated Catholics was the tendency to leave the Church based on experiences of the imperfect humanity of the Church and the sinfulness of its members. Catholics who grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, especially, seem to have been raised with a highly idealistic image of the Church. When someone who represented the Church failed to live up to that idealistic image, the disappointed Catholic would give up entirely on being Catholic. Dozens of times such people said in their interviews that they decided that “if that’s the way the Church treats people, I wanted nothing more to do with it.”
I remain astonished at how often alienated Catholics reported that they left the Church because it didn’t measure up to their personal standards. It seems that a significant percentage of lapsed Catholics are people who will not tolerate a Church that isn’t what they think it should be. Liberals stay away, for example, because the Church won’t change according to a liberal agenda. Conservatives stay away because the Church won’t change according to a conservative agenda.
Invariably, when alienated Catholics return, their coming home includes the realization that an adult faith includes the ability to distinguish between the Church as an imperfect human institution and the living Catholic tradition, one that mediates the healing and liberating presence of Christ in time and space. Some find it difficult to accept the idea of an imperfect Church, but once they do, it is a liberating experience.