Autism, Faith, and Francis

When things absolutely need to make sense, stuff gets complicated

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It’s been about six weeks since I learned I was on the autism spectrum.

It took me half that time to just start accepting that maybe it’s really true.

But then I started looking into it, and so many of the things I am finding describe my experiences so well. Things I could never make sense of before.

As I come to terms with this, and learn more about what it means for me in terms of self-understanding, I’ll probably mention it a lot, so I apologize in advance. It’s causing a lot of re-framing and perspective adjustment for me in terms of the way I look at both myself and the world. There has been a shift in my realization that sometimes, it feels like others are doing something to me when in reality I’m just not understanding them. And sometimes, it’s vice versa.

Amusingly, learning about all of this has become one of my “hyperfixations,” which is itself a common autistic trait.

I’ve always had it, I just didn’t know why.

So, armed with this knowledge, and looking back over my tumultuous life, particularly the past five years or so, some pretty important things are beginning to come into clearer focus.

Like what the hell happened to my faith.

A Boat, Not A Car

People have pointed out to me that a late diagnosis doesn’t change anything about your life, but that’s not exactly true.

Here’s a terrible analogy: imagine you spend your whole life thinking you’re a car, but you’re actually a boat. Yes, you’re still a vehicle. You’re still a mode of transport. You still take on passengers and move them from point A to point B.

But if you don’t realize that you belong on the water, not the road, and that you have a propeller, not wheels, you’re going to struggle. And if you’re a boat that LOOKS like a car, others are going to expect you to function like one. They’re going to ask why you can’t move at the same speed as traffic, or why you so much prefer the water to the interstate. They’re going to expect you to behave in a way that feels entirely unnatural to you, even if you don’t know why.

And then, one day, you find out that you are, in fact, a boat. You stop pressuring yourself to try to drive on the road. You lean into your aquatic strengths. You accept the fact that you have a propeller, not wheels, and others in your life begin to do so as well, instead of insisting that you should just act like a normal car, like all the other cars.

Life doesn’t change, but it does. The expectations you and others place on yourself begin to shift to something much more realistic.

I told you the analogy was terrible. But it kinda, sorta works.

Autistic Burnout and My Midlife Crisis

One of my growing suspicions is that my mid-life crisis — more of a life implosion, if I’m being honest — that began in earnest in 2020 and culminated with me leaving 1P5 and Catholicism itself and moving to New Hampshire where I spent almost a year in a nearly catatonic state, was very likely all the result of a catastrophic form of something known as “autistic burnout.”

I was aware of this concept, but a reader here helpfully provided a link to an article yesterday that describes it fairly well, if in an understated fashion:

Research centering autistic voices and experiences has defined autistic burnout as “a highly debilitating condition characterized by exhaustion, withdrawal, executive function problems and generally reduced functioning.” Because burnout makes it more difficult for an autistic person to hide their autistic behaviors, burnout was previously thought of as a form of regression, but the autistic person still has their skills and abilities; burnout just prevents them from using these skills.

[…]

Although existing research on autistic burnout is minimal, the few existing studies and feedback from the autistic community indicate that burnout is caused by the stress caused from long-term efforts by autistic people to conform with neurotypical expectations and standards of behavior.

Many autistic people, especially those labeled as “high-functioning,” learn from an early age that they might be ostracized or punished for autistic behaviors. In an effort to fit in and be accepted, they mask these behaviors and may present as neurotypical. This is exhausting and wears the person down over time until they can no longer force themselves to mask, leading to burnout.

The symptoms for this “burnout” syndrome include:

• Fatigue or exhaustion: Autistic burnout often manifests as extremely low energy.

• Withdrawal: Autistic people in burnout may pull away from loved ones or stop engaging in things they previously enjoyed.

• Increased autistic behaviors: This symptom of burnout is not problematic on its own, but if an autistic person notices they are less able to mask autistic behaviors, this can be a sign of burnout.

• Reduced functioning or coping: Due to exhaustion, an autistic person in burnout might be unable to complete basic functional tasks they were previously able to do.

• Increased sensory meltdowns: Because burnout interferes with the autistic person’s ability to use regulation skills, those in burnout might exhibit higher sensory sensitivity and increased risk for meltdowns.

• Suicidal ideation: Autistic people going through burnout are at increased risk for suicidal ideation and may require hospitalization.

I am hyperverbal. I had a 200 word vocabulary at 18 months. I have published millions of written words. So when I tell you that there were times during my New Hampshire year when I couldn’t even form a sentence, please understand that this was inexplicable to me. Frightening. I had never experienced anything like it.

I see now that I had simply reached a point where my ability to ape normalcy no longer worked. Despite the fact that I knew my wife and I both really loved each other, my marriage had started coming apart in 2019. I never felt understood. There was so much needless conflict, and I felt like I was always on the defensive and had to explain everything five times. My own words would often come across in the worst possible way, despite communication ostensibly being my strongest skill. I was prone to blowups, and these were damaging to both my wife and kids. I was constantly accused of not being “present,” and of obsessing about my work to the exclusion of my family. And the work itself, focused as it was on covering the corruption in the Church, had led me down some dark roads were turning up contradictions to everything I thought I believed in.

In retrospect, I now see that these relationship issues are common for couples with differing neurotypes. The blowups are known as “autistic meltdowns,” and they affect adults, too, as embarrassing as that is to admit. (Throw in complex trauma from a childhood environment with a volatile/angry parent and a consequently hijacked limbic system, and it only gets worse.) I would go from 0-100 in a split second. From thinking I had my emotions under control to yelling and screaming and raging. I sometimes punched holes in walls. I threw things. I kicked things. I paced. I sped away in the car, only to turn right around and come back because I didn’t even know where I was going. I would start shit-talking to myself as I paced around. And I would drink alcohol in an attempt to calm nerves that felt like they were on fire.

I had NO idea why I was so out of control.

So as I did more and more damage to my personal life, I would dive deeper into work. But as I said above, the work I was doing was starting to make me really uneasy. I couldn’t reassure my audience anymore that God was in control, because I saw no evidence (and still don’t) that this was the case. I became increasingly convinced that “nobody is coming to save us,” and that the promise that the “gates of hell would not prevail” against the Church was nothing but a self-aggrandizing lie.

Another autistic trait is literal thinking and the need for “clarity.” If things don’t make sense, it’s incredibly hard for us to let them go. If someone is factually wrong, we feel a burning need to correct it. If something appears unjust, we are hypermotivated to correct the injustice. Structure, order, sensibility, logic, fairness, and known sets of rules and parameters are non-negotiables for us.

Otherwise, everything is chaos.

The more I come to understand all of this, the more I see it as partially explanatory of my crisis of faith.

My Need For Things To Make Sense in a Religion That Doesn’t

Since I was a teenager, I had experienced occasional bouts of severe religious doubt, and the awareness that Catholicism didn’t actually make sense to me, but before this time period (2018-2020), these had always been transitory. I would always find ways to re-center and come back to the core beliefs. Those beliefs provided that much-needed structure, order, sensibility, and logic after all. And the more orthodox manifestations of Catholicism, most notably Tridentine legalism and a systematic theology that seemed to have an answer for virtually everything, made me feel like the world was comprehensible. I didn’t have to rely on my own ever-shifting understanding of things, or count on my volatile emotions, or trust in my own opinions.

I could simply say, “The Church teaches X, so X is true.”

My attraction to traditionalism in my mid-20s, in light of this understanding, makes so much sense. It’s all rules, rubrics, and reactionary rhetoric. It fit the technical part of my brain like a glove.

So it stands to reason that I trace my own personal breakdown of belief to the discovery of irreconcilable contradictions in this seemingly very logical and comprehensive system. I’ll give you one story to help explain this:

When Pope Paul VI was canonized, I couldn’t accept it. He had done too much damage to the Church, and to my mind, his canonization called the entire idea of what sainthood meant into question. But the more I probed and challenged this, the more I ran into folks telling me that canonizations were considered infallible. And the more I questioned the mechanisms of infallibility, the deeper the rabbit hole got. I kept pulling on that thread, and the whole thing kept unraveling, until I was sitting in a pile of chaos that had formerly been the structure and meaning and identity I had relied on for my entire sense of self, and my place in the universe.

I quite literally lost all perspective on who I even was, and what was actually true.

There was a pivotal moment in my own journey out of the Catholic Church that began with this particular mode of questioning. I had become increasingly vocal about my doubts on social media, even if my posts were more diplomatic than I felt.

A dogmatic theologian I had been collaborating with was an expert in how magisterial authority works. He saw my posts questioning these teachings, and in September of 2019, he sent me an email:

"Hi Steve, Maybe I'm misreading it, but over on Facebook you seem to be flirting with outright rejection of Vatican I's teaching on papal infallibility. Please tell me that's not true. Even to doubt a dogma of the faith obstinately is heresy, which is a damnable sin. I'd love to help clear up any questions if I can."

I responded:

"Thanks for reaching out. I'm tired and don't want to give a rambling answer, so I'll wait on specifics, but I'm struggling with a lot of things right now. The situation in the Church has never been good in my lifetime, and it's gotten sufficiently worse that I'm questioning things. Infallibility strikes me as particular trouble spot since it seems so poorly defined that people interpret it in widely varying ways while reading the same source materials. It's given rise to the sedes, the benes [people who believed BXVI was still the true pope - SS], the papal positivists, and yet nobody seems to know where its true limits are or how it actually works. (The debate over the infallibility of canonizations hasn't stopped since Paul VI.)

I've not had a single person give me a coherent answer, for example, on the question of whether the negative protection is supposed to curtail a pope's free will, whether he will be struck dumb or dead, etc., rather than allowing him to teach error on faith and morals. All of which, by the way, makes it sound like magic.

And even that's an issue, because Francis DOES teach error on faith and morals, and then the technical justification squad shows up and says 'well yeah but he didn't do it in a way that binds the faithful' as though that makes anything that's happening better.

He's leading an apostasy and he's the pope. If this charism doesn't protect the Church from that, what good is it?

So am I having doubts? Yes. But I recognize that to doubt this is to doubt everything about the Church. So I'm asking questions and having discussions in the hopes I'm missing something, since the temptation to just throw my hands up and walk away has been very strong lately. I'm begging God to help me out, but so far he doesn't seem interested."

He didn't reply. For a YEAR.

When he finally did, in September of 2020, he began with, "Please forgive me for never responding to your last email about papal infallibility, over a year ago. Frankly, I was being petty. I thought you would dismiss me as part of the 'technical justification squad' and so decided not to respond..."

He went on to acknowledge that my concerns were valid without actually answering them.

I replied again, telling him of my frustration with him ghosting me, because by then, I already had one foot out the door. I had another close friend who was a dogmatic theologian as well, but he was knee deep in a family crisis over a wayward child, and every time I tried to talk to him about my desperate fear that I was losing my faith, he was too caught up in his (understandable) parental worry to make time for me. I had been working daily with high-caliber theologians for years, and yet not a single one of them seemed to be able to answer any of my increasingly pressing questions.

So after I receiving an apology, a year later, from my Magisterial expert colleague, I replied:

"The fact that you were willing to remind me of the damnable consequences of obstinate doubt," I replied, "but not offer any help on the sincere questions I asked, if I'm being honest, accelerated my sense of resentment towards the situation, and the seeming intractability of the problem...."

I went on, "When I speak pejoratively of the 'technical justification squad,' it's because telling people that 'well technically the speed limit is still 25' when everyone goes through the neighborhood at 100 and the cops don't pull anyone over really doesn't help. At that point, the fact that there's still a 25mph speed limit on the books is essentially nothing but academic."

I explained my concerns a bit further, and sent the email. The date was October 14, 2020.

I never received another reply.

I wouldn’t actually give up on all of it until the following summer, but I felt abandoned by knowledgeable colleagues and friends, and the handwriting was already on the wall.

My Old Nemesis, Pope Francis, Is Dying

Right now, in February of 2025, the pope has a respiratory illness that has landed him in the hospital. (An hour ago as of this writing, reports indicate his condition has worsened to double-pneumonia.)

I saw people on social media wringing their hands and offering prayers for his recovery, and they struck me like a gut punch.

I didn’t realize it until I felt that, but this is still deeply personal to me. He was the proximate cause to the shattering of my faith. And I don’t think I can ever put it back together again.

The reason I founded OnePeterFive in 2014 was because I felt that I saw Bergoglio for what he was the first moment I laid eyes on him: a demon in a meat suit.

You may scoff, as others have when I have talked about this before, but I refuse to deny the experience. It was profoundly unnerving. Even at the time, it struck me as exceedingly strange. I had no basis to form such an opinion, but there it was, clear as crystal.

I later learned that many others felt the same thing in that moment. Some became physically ill from the feeling. I don’t know what that was, or why so many people experienced it. I arrived at this moment with no expectations. I knew nothing about the man himself. I don’t think I even registered that he was a Jesuit. I brought no preconceived bias to his first appearance. I was a blank slate.

What I experienced was something visceral, intuitive, and perhaps even preternatural.

My faith was quite tepid at the time, and I was already growing exhausted from trying to be a traditionalist Catholic in a modernist Church. But something in me woke up when he stepped out on to the loggia and gave that hungry, contemptuous gaze to the crowd. It happened in the moment the photo above was taken, but I cannot perceive in the photo what I felt when it happened. I saw tremendous danger, and I wanted to protect my fellow Catholics from the storm I was certain he was about to usher into the Church.

I never thought that storm would take me with it.

Reading the news about his condition last night, I was struck with the feeling that unlike his other ailments, of which there have been a good few, this time it felt different. More likely to be the end. Or perhaps the beginning of the end. After all, he’s 88 years old. We started taking care of my father in law at 86. The decline picked up rapidly from there. I see the indications of that here, as well.

I read the news in the context of a thread about praying for his recovery. I found that not only could I not bring myself to wish for that, but I quickly grew upset with those who were doing so. He did so much damage to me, to the Church, and to so many other Catholics. I knew for certain that if this is his time, the Church and the world would be better without him in it.

Mind you: I don’t want him to go to hell. I just want him the hell off this planet.

I’m sorry if this sounds callous, but the animosity I feel towards him runs deep. I found myself snapping irritable replies at people who were wringing their hands over it. Something in me told me something deep in my psyche was being triggered, and that I should probably stop, but I didn’t care.

My wife is currently out of town, wrapping up the details of our now dead-and-buried assisted living business. So I texted her because I could feel my reactions sliding out of control.

I told her I realized, upon seeing the news, that I was still deeply affected by my adversarial connection to the man. A connection I thought I had left behind.

“He ruined my life,” I said.

On one hand, that was probably a bit of an exaggeration. As I noted above, my life fell apart for deeper and more complex reasons.

But he was pivotal in the loss of my faith, such as it was, and from the moment I made it my mission to fight what he was bringing into the Church I loved, I had unknowingly but inexorably set my feet on the path of my own departure. For years, I was his most vocal public opponent.

And I was taken out of the ring on a stretcher.

He was, as it turned out, the proximate cause for me facing the contradictions within Catholicism’s teachings, and for finding that I could not explain them away. In a way, he did me a favor. But I lost so much when I lost my Catholicism that I’m still reeling from it. I went from being the sole provider for my family doing work that felt like my life’s mission to deep depression, burnout, and begging for subscriptions and donations to help pay our bills. I left my battle for the soul of the Church critically and chronically wounded. And worse, I watched a bunch of grifting opportunists step into the void I left behind.

Instead of texting back, my wife called. She (and my 19yo daughter) were the ones who figured out I was autistic before I had even a clue. We’re all just beginning to get used to the idea and what it means. But she has begun to see things about me differently, just as I have.

Because I process the world through pattern recognition, external structures (truths, facts, rules, etc.), and a profound sense of justice and fairness, my framework is predominately systems-based.

My wife has always told me, vis-a-vis our relationship, that there are no boxes I can check to make her happy, or to feel loved. I do love her, but I don’t know how to make her experience that. It’s a deep internal emotion that I have been told does not come across well externally. My rejoinder has always been to say, "Why aren’t there checkboxes? You need X, Y, and Z, so if you communicate to me what those are, I can do them, and you get what you need."

She has never accepted this.

Now, she's realizing I'm not being obtuse, it's just how my brain works. That doesn’t make it easier for her, but it does make it make some kind of sense.

So when she evaluated my claim that Francis shattered my faith, she challenged it.

"I don't think you really had faith,” she said. “You had a system. You were raised in a way where you were told what to believe and how to act and to do these certain things and not do other things and you should get certain results from that. You didn't really believe."

I thought about that for a minute.

"Maybe," I said slowly, "but I certainly believed that I believed."

“I’m sure you did.” She said.

For me, the faith really WAS a system. It was an external structure within which I could operate with a limited degree of autonomy while understanding that it was my job to color within the lines. It gave me a sense of order and logic and "this is how things work."

Thinking back to the years when I was getting my theology degree, I remembered that I was only ever interested in systematics and dogmatics. I hated biblical studies. I can't stand reading the bible. I find it utterly tedious and impenetrable, and the God of the scriptures alien and unrelatable. Nothing about it makes me want to believe.

I have also never had anything remotely approaching a "personal relationship" with Jesus. I don't even know what the hell that means. How can I have a personal relationship with someone who isn't here, who doesn't talk to me, whom I’ve never seen, who I know nothing about except what other people tell me?

I don't have a single personal relationship with anyone else through third-party proxies. Why should this much more important relationship have lower standards?

But I already suspected that my wife was correct. Perhaps Francis didn't shatter my faith, he shattered my belief in the SYSTEM I was told was representative of divine truth.

Either way, it amounts to roughly the same outcome. I can no longer see the system as trustworthy, so I no longer have whatever faith-analog sustained me for most of my life.

My way of thinking and processing the world creates cognitive impediments to any ability to swallow the cognitive dissonance to accept the self-contradictory teachings I am required to accept to remain a Catholic in good standing.

I’m stuck. I can’t make myself unsee what I see, but I can’t be accepted until I myself accept what is asked of me.

I posted about this, in shorter form, on X. I received several replies from others who had discovered or suspected that they, too, were autistic, and found that they had similar difficulties with the Catholic faith. Some were still able to believe, others were closer to where I am. One person, posting under an account called Christianity on the Spectrum, said my experience is extremely common:

It was a consolation to hear that it’s not just me. But it doesn’t solve my dilemma.

If it’s true, I want to believe.

If it’s not true, I want to know what is.

When I ask God to help me believe, which I have now done for about 7 years, since my faith first started slipping away, he has remained utterly silent. I perceive no assistance, no insight, and no change. If he won’t help me believe in him, which is allegedly the very thing I was made for, logic dictates that he either a) isn’t there b) doesn’t care or c) won’t act for some reason I don’t understand.

I am starting to accept that the thing I called "idolatry of the Church" years ago when I first started writing about this was in fact my way of describing the realization that I worshiping the thing that was supposed to be the mediator between myself and God, not God himself.

But I see no hope of coming any closer, even with this realization.

If my intuition is right, and Francis is in his own final countdown, it will be intriguing to see what comes with that, for both myself, and the Church. I have no illusions that his replacement will be an improvement. But it will, I think it’s fair to say, be hard for him to be worse.

I don’t know where to go from here, but coming to this updated understanding feels like an important piece of the puzzle just fell into place.