A GUIDE TO COMING, LEAVING , & STAYING

In the sociology of religion, relationships are far more important than beliefs.  People who go to church regularly and have religious networks of family, friends or small groups are far more likely to be healthy, happy,  and do good for others.  Those who go to church without religious networks have none of these benefits.   Beliefs have no relationships to any of these benefits. Sociologists have studied the process of acquiring a new religion. Whether in cults or interfaith marriages, relationships develop before changes of beliefs.  My summaries focus upon relationships, including imaginary relationships, rather than beliefs 

Why I Came (B.D. McClay)

A relationship with a married man started this woman’s relationship to Catholicism.  In a little Catholic chapel she asks Mary to help her with this uncomfortable relationship. She perceives that Mary did help her, since the man asked her to let him go. When asked by her therapist, she says “there are so many people there, you walk in and there are all these saints.  I reached backward into the past toward saints and mystics and felt them reach back to me.”   The saints are this person’s relationships.

Why I left (Jim Holt)

In his childhood Jim had Sister Monica, and Father Marcellus as relationships. However when he graduated out of parochial school into the world of public education, these were replaced by alternatives. This new world was ratified by Time’s Is God Dead? issue.   He confesses that his alienation from Catholicism was more moral and emotional rather than intellectual:  obsessive fears in childhood of committing mortal sin, his family’s reaction to his gay brother, his mother’s righteous anger against anyone not pro-life, antisemitism among rank and file Catholics,  a charmingly eccentric priest later  credibility accused of child molestation.  Just a positive relationships attract, negative repel.

Why I Came and What I found (Paul Griffiths)

 Griffiths conversion at age forty-one apparently was due in part to this admiration of John Paul II. Twenty-two years later he can’t imagine not being a Catholic in the same way he cannot imagine not being an English speaker.  His says his Pollyanna story is not the whole story. That the Church’s embrace has been both delight and harsh. He is pained by the hierarchy’s positions on marriage and on the beginning of life at the moment of fertilization. These are primarily intellectual pains.  But there is emotional pain, i.e. the practice of not receiving communion until after confession of serious sins

Why I came and will Stay (Ross Douthat)

Douthat admits that he converted in adolescence with his parents; therefore beliefs, while important, were not the reason for his conversion. His problem is that he does not like the papacy of Francis much like liberals did not like the papacy of John Paul II.  The alternatives do not seem to be any better.  The orthodox already admit divorce. The schism of the Society of Pius X has shaky leadership.  He seems to be hoping that movement will grow stronger within rather than separate from Catholicism.  His thinking seems to be at the service of maintaining valuable relationships. 

Why I left (Helene Staphinski)

This is a horrendous story of the betrayal of relationships by the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.   She was a volunteer in Alaska at the place where the Jesuits clear up to the Father General as well as the local bishop knew but concealed the systematic abuse of Native Americans by Fr. Jim Poole.  This is a story of a disillusion women who found out how bad disillusionment could become. She believes that church officials should be charged with racketeering for decades of lying and abetting some of the worst criminals in the country.  “I once covered the Mafia.” 

Why I left … and Yet… (William Giraldi)

When he had physically left the church, he thought he had left its intellectual beliefs. As a writer in his early thirties he unknowingly began drawing from the Catholic myth, pageantry, and rituals of his youth.  “Catholicism is for me a literary affair: drama, poetry, myth, tradition.  The clergy don’t have exclusive say over the sacred; it is the province of writers and poets, too.”  His Catholic relationships are Dante, Hopkins, Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Evelyn Waugh and Simone Weil. 

Why I Stay (Paul Baumann)

Baumann thinks his early experience of the practices and teachings of Catholicism made a lasting impression.  As a teenager and college student he went through a period of disaffection, as often happens when people discover relationship outside the Catholic orbit. After college he discovered Chesterton where he recovered his Catholicism.  Baumann begins his article with all the changes that have taken place where he grew up.  His attachment to Catholicism seems to be more rooted in connections to the past rather than developments in the present.

Why I left (Daniel Callahan)

“There was no eureka movement, no sudden insight, just a slow movement away  from religion over the last two decades in my early middle age.  I will try to reconstruct the journey, but it begins with strong and solid work within the church. During my early thirties it was a rich mix of personal piety, my marriage and professional work”  “Just when my loss of faith began is to this day not clear to me. I crept up on me and had little to do with my complaints about the church. Gradually, I also found the whole story about Jesus, his death and resurrection, implausible as well. I eventually ceased going to Mass as interest waned and my boredom increased.”  The shift caused deep problems to his marriage. His wife kept the faith and their marriage together.  I think there are many nonreligious men who vicariously relate to religion through their wives. 

Why I left (Jack Miles)

Jack Miles’ exit from Catholicism began when his exit from the Jesuits began.  Being a Jesuit was more attractive than being a Catholic.  A key event for him was a debate between a distinguished Jesuit and Charles Davis who had become an Episcopalian.  Davis maintained that the only unique claim of the Roman Catholic Church was the Papacy.  Again we see the great problems that clericalism causes for Catholics. In the case of Miles he found it very difficult to exercise the vocation of a Jesuit inside the Church, though in some ways he is doing as an outsider. 

Why I Stay (Dorothy Fortenberry)

Like many others, Fortenberry tries to explain her coming, leaving or staying in terms of beliefs. The challenges to her staying were the persecution of women religious by the hierarchy. She obviously values women in the church even if the bishops behave like they do. How could see leave them behind in the Church?   Fortenberry ‘s intellectual argument is in terms of bigness, both the physical size of Catholicism and the bigness of the gap between Catholicism and everything else.