On Leaving


Do I think people should leave the Roman Catholic Church?  On one level, yes, I do.  I left, and I do not regret my decision on any level.  The events of the last month or so have been public confirmation of the things that I came to believe about the structural brokenness of the Roman Catholic Church--things I have written about here, and here, and here.  I don't say this with schadenfreude, but simply a recognition that my concerns weren't simply in my own head or the product of some sort of anger or hostility.  And I am very happy and energized as a member of the Episcopal Church, optimistic about its future and its possibilities.  When I see so many people--good, decent people who just want to get on with the business of living their lives and practicing their faith--genuinely pained and suffering, there is a big part of me that wants to help out, to evangelize for the thing that rescued me from exactly the same place that these people find themselves.

But my real answer, upon full reflection and consideration, of the question "do I think people should leave the Roman Catholic Church?" is "not until they are ready."  When talking about people leaving, we have to confront a number of important realities.  The first is that the difficulty in leaving is directly proportional to the level and commitment to the Christian faith generally the person has.  No one becomes a "Christian" in a generic or general sense--it is always embodied in a particularized expression, whether that be Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or mega-church non-denominational or what have you.  If faith and the Christian message don't mean all that much to you, then it is easy to just drift away from whatever contingent manifestation of the faith you happened to start from.  But if you dig deep into the faith, you necessarily dig deep into a particular expression of the faith, with a particular form, particular set of concrete realities, a particular way of being.  Untangling yourself from a denomination or church requires you to at least pick at the threads of your faith on a fundamental level.  The stronger and more dear the faith is to you, the more painful that process is.

Rachel Held Evans writes very movingly of this process in her book Searching for Sunday.  One of the things she points to in that book, which is certainly true in my experience, is that the decision to leave is only tangentially related to holding to the intellectual positions associated with a particular faith.  Yes, generally speaking one must first come to question and rethink the propositional elements of your faith before you are in a position to leave.  But my experience is that the intellectual component is usually the beginning, rather than end, of the process of leaving.  Evans had her doubts about her conservative Southern Baptist upbringing and its doctrinal positions years before she was ready to actually leave the church she grew up in.  Same for me.  My doubts really got started when I left the Dominicans in '03; by the time you get to 2011 or 2012, I was basically intellectually where I am now as an Episcopalian from a doctrinal standpoint.  But it took four years, and one false start, before I was ready to worship full time in an Episcopal Church, and another year before I was received.

This is why it is basically useless, and often counter-productive, to make "arguments" to people to try to get folks to leave the Roman Catholic Church, or any church for that matter.  Anyone who is inclined to listen to any of the arguments has already considered them, and probably agrees with whatever you have to say.  There are thousands and thousands of Roman Catholics in America who are sitting in the pews every Sunday who are horrified by the church's positions on LGBT people, or are hoping one day to see their daughters up on the altar, or wish they had a say in who their leaders are, or any of the myriad of ideas you could come up with as "arguments."  They know everything you might tell them.  Their minds are not the things keeping them in the pews.

If not the mind, what is keeping them there?  One thing is identity.  Most American Catholics come to Roman Catholicism via some ethnic origin--Irish, Italian, German, Czech, Mexican, Colombian and a host of others.  Leaving the Roman Catholic Church feels like leaving that behind, abandoning family and relatives stretching back generations.  History is how you anchor yourself in the present, and leaving Roman Catholicism is throwing a part of that aside, now matter how you cut it.  And if you are a convert, the identity issue is if anything more acute--you have chosen this, publicly pledged yourself to this church, this tribe.  Walking away from that must feel humiliating, as if you are publicly exposed for being a fool and a rube.  Losing identity is always, always painful, and always, always scary.

For me, I was only ready to leave when I was willing to accept the idea that I wouldn't be Roman Catholic anymore.  For the vast majority of my life, I could not imagine being anything else other than Roman Catholic.  I couldn't even conceive of such a thing--it was like saying I would wake up one morning and be 6'6".  It seems like a fairy tale.  The development of an alternate identity is a slow and laborious thing.  First you try it on in your mind, like a new suit of clothes.  Then you try it out in public, by talking about it with others and living it out in your new community, all the while feeling like you are cosplaying something that you really are not.  In time, it becomes more and more comfortable, more reflexive.  Finally, as my Rector describes it, "the 'you' becomes an 'us.'"  All of the sudden, it's not scary or weird or fake.  But it takes time, and if there is a way to speed up the process, I am completely unaware of it.

There is also the fact the Roman Catholic Church, just as much if not more than evangelical churches. pushes the notion that it is the only real Christian church.  Yes, yes, Lumen Gentium talks about how other Christian bodies "subsist" in the Catholic Church, but the unspoken message is always that this is the only true game in town.  If all you have known is Roman Catholicism, it can seem plausible that there is no legitimate alternative.  The genuine desire to live an authentic Christian life, combined with the scariness of venturing into an unknown and the voice in the back of your head telling you that there is nothing to find even if you look, keeps many people in place.

But, I think the biggest thing that keeps people where they are is the love for the good parts of the Roman Catholic tradition.  Despite all of the horror and bullshit, it really is a wonderful faith, a thing that feeds the soul in a way that is very hard to give up. At its best, it is truly beautiful and inspiring.  And, if I may, I think the core of it is True, and from God in some often difficult to fathom way.  The instinct that keeps people attached to it is, in my view, a fundamentally good and holy one, no matter how much it can be twisted and manipulated and abused.

In my own case, I am an Episcopalian only because I have come to believe that it and the broader Anglican tradition is truly Catholic, and as a result I am not actually giving up much if any of the things I loved in the Roman Catholic Church.  I believe that, for all its faults and weirdness and at times incoherence, that the church I currently belong to represents a path not taken by the Roman church within the broader Catholic landscape, and a model for what might be possible if (admittedly radical) reforms were attempted by the Vatican.  If that weren't the case, if I didn't believe that, I would still be a Roman Catholic.  I don't mean to beat up on evangelicals here, but if my only options were the Roman Catholic Church and an evangelical church, there is no force on earth that would get me to pick the evangelical church--becoming an evangelical would be far, far too much of a sacrifice of those parts of the faith that matter to me to make it worth it.  I may not be a Roman Catholic anymore, but I believe in Catholicism just as much as I ever did.

So, I'm not going to tell anyone who may be reading this that they must run post-haste out of the Roman Catholic Church, and I would encourage anyone reading this (especially Episcopalians) not to do that either.  If you have friends or family that are suffering right now, all I can tell you to do is to sit with them.  Listen to them.  Share their pain as best as you can.  If and when they come to the point when they want to make a move, they will say so, and you can take their hand then.  But it will be on their own time, after they have worked through the identity loss and the dislocation and the fear.  And it may not come at all, for reasons that I can understand, and you should as well.

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