"Why Did You Leave The Catholic Faith?"

The following is a free post. If you’d like access to all subscribers-only features, our full archives, podcasts, and every post, you can subscribe for just $8/month or $80 per year, right here:

Writing is how I make my so if you like what you see here, please consider a subscription so I can keep doing this!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to buy me a coffee to help keep me fueled up for writing, you can do that here:

Alternatively, I would gratefully accept your patronage at my Paypal. Your contributions have been a huge help during a very financially challenging time. Thank you!

---

Every so often, someone I interact with online or in person asks me the question.

“Why did you leave the Church?”

And my answer is usually along the lines of, “It’s complicated.”

Someone asked me again today.

“Serious question, why did you leave the Catholic faith?”

So I’ve decided to take the time to write up an answer, so the next time someone asks, I can point to it and say, “Because of this.”

The truth is, there’s no simple way to answer.

The short version is: I hit a point where I no longer felt any confidence that it was true.

The real answer is longer, more complicated, and maybe one I’m not even entirely self-aware of. Yet, anyway.

Even this attempt will be insufficient, but it’s a start.

My house was built on sand, so to speak. Indoctrinated from a young age in a family where being uber-Catholic was the only real currency for affirmation and respect.

Big father wounds. Desperate to be taken seriously. Highly intelligent but always being treated like a kid.

Being knowledgeable and articulate about the faith got me a seat at the men's table. Made me feel seen and respected.

But I was never Catholic because *I* loved it and *I* had come to the conclusion that it was correct. Instead, I backfilled. Lots of post hoc thinking. I was Catholic, and that was the most important thing, so I had to find reasons to justify why I was Catholic. And I was pretty good at that.

Underlying it was something many of us experience: I was made to feel not just guilty, but terrified of the idea of ever turning my back on it. “To whom much is given…” I grew up being told that it’s far worse for a man to have the faith and leave it than never to have had it at all. God’s judgment on that kind would be even more severe.

There were things I was good with. I liked the classical aesthetics. I liked the intellectualism of theology. I enjoyed the calm quiet and the idea-construed-as-sensory-experience that an empty Catholic Church was filled with a divine presence.

I also needed the system and the rules. Knowing, as I do now, that I have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), I think it imposed a kind of order into the chaos of my life. I had a volatile home, a chaotic brain and big feelings that often devolved into emotional dysregulation. And I grew up in small towns where nothing ever happened.

(I wrote about this aspect of my life recently, for those curious to read more.)

Being Catholic, especially once I started getting involved in apostolate and travelling and doing missionary work and the like, gave me a sense of something bigger; a semblance of meaning and boundaries and purpose. It wound up being my ticket out of the mundane.

It was also where I found friends who shared my values. I spent most of my life in public school, feeling like an outcast unless I vulgarized myself to fit in. I wanted to be a good man. Virtuous. Upstanding. I didn’t want to be a degenerate secularist. That kind of life had its appeal, but it always made me feel uneasy.

But the truth is, I never let myself really give it a hard look, and decide for myself it was what I believed. I started doubting when I was 14, and instead of really examining why, I looked for reasons to double down and re-commit. This happened a number of times as I grew older, but I was committed to begging the question, assuming that the Catholic Faith was the One True Faith established by God, “who can neither deceive nor be deceived.”

In my conceptual universe, it was not just the truest thing, it was the only true thing. I'd had that drilled into me. So any problem with the faith, therefore, originated within me. It was a failure stemming from my perception, my sinfulness, my limited imagination.

I would rebound from bouts of doubt and frustration by pouring more effort into my faith. My AuDHD brain toggled between distraction and pathological hyperfocus, but Catholic apostolate was the only thing I felt I could hyperfixate on and feel justified in doing so.

God mattered more than anything. More than work, more than family, more than stability, more than everything else in the whole world combined. And I wanted, no, I needed, to feel that he had called me to do something great. That I was a leading soldier in his army. That I was meant to win souls for Christ.

My entire sense of identity depended on that. I neglected everything else, including the people I claimed to love.

This all culminated in the founding of 1P5, which was an uncanny instant success. My entire life had led to the moment where I could combine every skill I’d picked up along the way to create and manage a publication that utilized my gifts to their fullest.

But in the seven years I spent running 1P5, writing up over a thousand articles and picking up millions of pageviews, I was spending all day, every day, staring into the abyss that is the institutional Church. I could not unsee the machinations of its kakistocratic leadership, nor its seemingly limitless corruption, hypocrisy, and self-contradiction, nor its contempt for those who were trying to live their faith most fully. And this started eating away at my confidence.

I was in a position where it was my job to reassure people that despite how bad things looked, God was in control, that things would get better, and that faithfulness would be rewarded.

But in my own life, that wasn't true. I was a disaster. A mess of unaddressed trauma, maladaptive coping behaviors, damaged relationships, an anger problem I couldn't get under control, and an inability to even feel happiness. I was sacramentally devout. I said many prayers every day. But I saw no efficacy of grace. Not in myself, and not in others. Some of the worst people I found myself dealing with every day were the most religious.

Faced with things happening in the Church that seemed impossible based on my understanding of its alleged divine guidance and protection, questions arose. Certain theological threads stuck out, and as I pulled on them, they just kept unraveling. Despite running one of the biggest trad publications in the world and having access to some of the best minds in Catholic theology, I couldn't find answers to the things that were beginning to trouble me. It was like everyone was playing a part in a movie, and nobody wanted to break the fourth wall and acknowledge that the only way anything made sense was if we accepted the fiction.

I would ask pretty fundamental questions, and my discussion partners would treat me like I'd grown a second head. "How can you ask that?" they'd say, or, "It's a mystery we won't have answered until we get to heaven." Thought-terminating cliches abounded. Sometimes they’d give an answer that superficially seemed substantive, but didn’t really apply, or was predicated upon a mere technicality.

Some of them dodged me and my questions. Others got uppity and told me I was toying with mortal sin. But nobody could simply convince me that the problems I saw had real, intelligible, satisfying solutions.

It seemed that having doubt about the entire enterprise was something none of them had seriously considered.

I'd been a trad for the better part of two decades at that point, dragging my family long distances to some of the crappiest parts of any given city to try to “give God the best.” What that meant in reality was going to Traditional Latin Masses that were often sub-par. I would find myself wondering why, if this was the true Church, I couldn't just go to the parish down the street from my house, or any of the 20 others we’d pass along the way, and get something decent and reverent and worthwhile.

I spent the last few years at a parish in the meth-zombie district of the city I was living in at the time, listening to a theologically-stunted young pastor with an ego far larger than his stature, drone on about whatever pablum he’d cobbled together from the flat screen televisions in the parish hall. Because of course, not only was our parish located squarely within our version of Skid Row, it several sizes too small, and the diocese didn’t care how fast we were growing. The pastor, despite this, couldn't stop kissing the bishop's ass from the pulpit, while my kids were forced to kneel in front of a big-screen LED Sunday after Sunday.

We were literally worshiping at the foot of a TV.

I started to grow increasingly angry. Started to really resent how all the people who tried hardest to stay faithful seemed to get punished the most for their trouble. I found the condescending homilies so grating I'd go for a walk, or spend that time in the bathroom.

All I wanted to do was leave.

When COVID came, we had a legitimate reason to stay home, because we were the primary caretakers of my elderly father-in-law, who was living with us on and off. My own health wasn't great, I had co-morbidities, and I couldn't afford to get really sick. So we started staying home and doing Mass on TV. And frankly, it was far easier to parish shop and find coherent or even spiritually-uplifting homilies when we had the pick of every Mass in the world with a livestream.

I needed that time away. I felt like I was in a suffocating relationship with an overbearing sociopath who demanded that we never spend any time apart. I needed time to think, to work through my doubts, to let some of the anger and resentment that had been building in me to go. So I gladly took the time of the dispensation to get some space.

When we started to come back, and needed sacraments for a couple of our kids, I was still in a rough place. My marriage was on the rocks, I was struggling more and more with my faith, and every priest in every confessional seemed to think the answer was to tell me to ignore whatever was bothering me. The ostrich maneuver. Hide from the problems, and maybe you can pretend they don’t exist. The only thing that matters is that you never entertain a doubt.

So when the time came for us to ask for sacraments — specifically, a baptism for our newborn son and a First Communion for our 8 year old — rather than hearing back from a parish excited to offer these spiritual gifts to the little ones, we got an ominous request for a meeting. No explanation as to why. We lived an hour away, had a new baby, and I was running a business. I wasn't going to come in without knowing why, because it had all the ambience of being called to the principal's office.

But we couldn’t get an answer. Father was too busy to communicate himself, so we got the run-around from two different parish secretaries. There was, as I recall, some talk about us having to do some kind of class.

I was not having it.

I had been fighting for traditionalism since this "pastor" had been in high school. My family sheltered the first FSSP priest of that parish back when the SSPX was trying to run him out of town on a rail. We were founding members. I wanted to know why we had to jump through neophyte hoops, and why the sacraments were being held hostage.

When the priest at last, months later, finally deigned to communicate directly, it was to simply tell us that we wouldn't be getting sacraments for our kids. He didn't believe we would raise them in the faith, since we hadn't been attending regularly during COVID. Mind you - my wife and kids were already going every Sunday again, but I was still holding back, because it was actively damaging my faith to be there and I needed to figure out why — and the general dispensation from the bishop was still in place.

I had been standing on the edge of a precipice, trying to decide whether to jump or turn back. And along comes this malformed young priest oozing clericalism from his pores, who had a famous (in trad circles anyway) parishioner, and he saw an opportunity to show everyone who was really in charge.

It was a pissing match. Pure and simple.

He never once asked me why I wasn’t there, if I was OK, or what was going on in my life. In fact, he never showed any actual concern for my soul at all. He was the boss, and the gatekeeper, and he wanted me to know it. He may not have realized I was on the edge of a cliff, but he did nothing to find out. So instead of gently talking me down, he shoved me as hard as he could, and he used my innocent little kids as leverage.

Big. Fucking. Mistake.

My simmering resentment instantaneously boiled over. I demanded an apology, and he refused. I told him he had no canonical basis for sacramental denial, and he didn't care. Every doubt, every theological objection, every fear, every bit of resentment for a lifetime of imposed religious guilt and spiritual abuse at the hands of various priests and bishops, every ounce of anger I had at God for never being there when I needed him, even when I begged for faith or help for my marriage or overcoming my vices and sins, every ounce of being tired of living in fear of his wrath but never experiencing his love, all came welling to the surface in a violent torrent.

I snapped. I was done. And when I wrote about it, a ton of people who used to support me turned on me. Colleagues and friends distanced themselves or stopped interacting with me altogether. My own parents never asked what happened, but expressed their disappointment and disdain in passive aggressive ways.

I realized I was part of a cult, that was much more concerned with putting the institution before all else, and never turning your back or asking difficult questions, than the spiritual wellbeing of the souls within. After all, they’re nothing but sinners who deserve to suffer, and should be grateful for their unmerited redemption.

Many people have misconstrued this catalyzing event as the sole reason I left. They have isolated this one incident from my life and assumed it was the whole story. But the straw that breaks a camel’s back is never the first straw. It is the one that is added when the burden has already grown too heavy to bear.

In that state, I could no longer hold back the intellectual objections to faith that had been festering somewhere in the back of my mind for decades. They all came rushing to the surface, and I found that with all my knowledge and all my considerable ability at defending the faith, I could not answer them.

So I walked away. I have not stopped asking those questions. I have not stopped asking God to show me what I got wrong. But nothing changes, and my issues have gone from something that could have been easily addressed to entrenched positions I cannot find a path to overcome.

It’s easier for me to believe that God does not exist, or if he does, does not care about us, than to accept that there is a personal God who treats those who try to give their whole lives to him like disposable playthings, who deserve nothing but suffering and contempt from the very institution that is supposed to be his Mystical Body and the path to salvation.

My specific theological objections are not trivial, but they don't tell the whole story. They are symptoms of a systematic collapse of belief and trust in something that turned out to be a far cry from what I always believed it to be.

I cannot honestly say the creed, so I believe integrity demands that I do not lie.

I cannot attend Mass without growing angry and destructive, so I choose not to go.

There is much about the Catholic Church that feels familiar and comforting, because it was my whole life. There are things I miss. Things I wish I could believe. But it's like driving by an old house where you used to live, and different people you've never even met live there, and they've changed the place so much you barely even recognize it anymore. The the yard wasn't as big as you thought, and the house wasn't as nice, and the tree out back was really just a large shrub. And then you realize that you only saw things the way you did because you had always looked at it with the exaggerated perception of a child.

In my religious days, I always said that if Catholicism wasn't true, then it was my opinion that no religion was. When I hit the point where I could no longer say with conviction that it was true, I acted accordingly.

I remain open to the supernatural realm, because I believe materialism is an insufficient explanation for our universe. Some philosophical arguments for God have merit, and should be taken seriously. And there’s too much weird and woo in the world to simply hand wave away. I’ve personally had some experiences I can’t easily explain.

But this is a far cry from a belief system, let alone a specific expression of faith. I have a lot to figure out before I could profess even what C.S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity.”

But I will never stop seeking the truth, and if it leads me back through some miraculous, unforeseen path, so be it.

For now, I remain lost in the wilderness, with no Virgil to guide me.