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  Why I Left the Catholic Church

By Tom Regan
Christian Science Monitor
April 18, 2005

It didn't happen all at once.

It wasn't a sudden flash of anger, a hot moment when I decided that it was time for me to move away from my Roman Catholic roots. It happened over a much longer period of time, starting when I was in my early 20s, and climaxing in my mid-30s.

In my youth, I had been about as Catholic as you could be. I had been both an altar boy for several years and a lay reader at mass, sung in numerous church choirs, attended religious summer camps and 'separate schools' (as we called the Catholic -run schools them in those days), and taught the Catholic equivalent of Sunday school. For a short period, I had thought seriously about becoming a priest.

And then, one day a few years ago, attending a mass in Cambridge with my mother who was visiting from Nova Scotia, I knew I wasn't a Catholic any more. Sitting in that church pew, listening to the priest recite the liturgy, I felt ... nothing. I was a stranger in a setting where I had always felt at home. For me, that empty feeling was the final push out the door.

Finally deciding to leave the Catholic Church wasn't easy. It wasn't like walking away from a club that you didn't want to belong to any more. It was like tearing off a layer of skin - painful, confusing, scary.

There were numerous issues that led to this decision, but for the sake of brevity, I will only mention two: the church's attitudes towards women, and the sexual abuse scandals that have rocked the church in Canada and the US over the last 17 years.

No matter how many ways I looked at it, tried to justify it, sought to rationalize it, the church's attitude towards women always disappointed me. In the Catholic Church -- and in too many other religious denominations and sects -- women are second-class citizens.

One need look no farther than this week's conclave in Rome, a meeting to pick one of the most important leaders on the planet - chosen by a group of men, all over the age of 60. And while the Second Vatican Council pushed for a greater role for women in the running of the church, John Paul II pushed back even harder to make sure that didn't happen in any 'important' areas.

When half of all Catholics see "No women need apply" signs on the doors of churches all over the world, one wonders why women remain members at all, and just don't leave to find a denomination with a more welcoming message for them.

Then there's Mount Cashel.

Americans familiar with the stories of abuse by American priests in the past three years may not be familiar with Mount Cashel. It was a Catholic orphanage in St. John's, Newfoundland, on the East coast of Canada. I was born in St. John's and have family in the part of the province known as the Avalon Peninsula.

I have a very strong memory of four priests sitting around the dining room table of my Aunt Marge's house in Newfoundland, as she waited on them hand and foot. The church was the 'power behind the throne' for decades in Newfoundland, and priests were seldom questioned about anything they did.

Then in late 1989, the local newspaper, the St. John's Express, broke a story about sexual abuse by the Christian Brothers, the Roman Catholic order that ran the Mount Cashel orphanage. The story opened a floodgate. More than 300 former pupils eventually alleged they suffered physical and sexual abuse at the orphanage.

Worse, it turned out that local church and government authorities had known about the abuse for years and had ignored it or covered it up when it became too obvious to ignore. Ultimately, as details of more abuse by the Christian Brothers and local priests surfaced, the archbishop of St. John's was forced to resign.

Over the next few years, many priests and Christian Brothers were jailed for their actions, and millions of dollars were paid to the victims.

(The Star-Phoenix of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan reported in 2000, however, that "senior leaders of the Christian Brothers in Rome transferred ownership of some of the teaching order's assets out of Canada in order to prevent millions more dollars from being liquidated to pay compensation to the victims.")

But you had to see what it did to the small communities of Newfoundland at the time to understand the real damage. The news about the sexual abuse broke at the same time the fishery, the life and blood industry of Newfoundland, was being decimated by declining stocks.

Suddenly Newfoundlanders found that the two things they could always count on in the past - the sea and the Church - had betrayed them, each in their own way. It was devastating.

And now I live in Boston, where I have just lived through yet another priest sexual abuse scandal, where, once again, church authorities knew of the problem and covered it up, even after they had seen what had happened in Canada.

And I no longer have any doubt that John Paul II - the man who made sure that in the Catholic Church of his reign, all roads led to Rome - knew of this abuse, and either ignored it or permitted the coverup. For that reason, while I will always respect John Paul II as a great force for peace in the world, I will never, ever, consider him a saint.

So here I am, all these years later. I still have strong spiritual beliefs, which I practice in my own way. I don't hate the Catholic Church because it still does much good in the world. And the church is a strength to other members of my family and I'm glad that they can still experience Catholicism in that way.

But I will have no more of it. I do not want to participate in a church where my contact with the Divine is mediated by several layers of a clergy I no longer trust, nor believe in.

I hope, however, that Pope Benedict XVI can find a way to bring unity to the church without having to resort to a message that basically says "My way or the highway." But the former Cardinal Ratzinger is not known for his open-minded approach to church matters.

For although I left, I know there are many others who are hovering at the edge of the church, one foot already out the door, while they look back over their shoulders wondering what those white puffs of smoke from the Sistine Chapel will mean for them.