Why I Have Quit Catholicism To Become An Episcopalian

[eagle_eye222001]

 

From the Guardian.

 

 

The Catholic Church has a new pope, but for the first time in my life, he won't be mine.

 

When Pope Benedict XVI abruptly resigned last month, I made an enormous personal decision. I decided the time had come to change religions and leave Catholicism behind.

 

I was born and raised a Roman Catholic in England. When I say "raised", I mean baptized, then enrolled in a Catholic nursery school, which led to a Catholic elementary school and then a convent boarding school where, at the age of 11, I was sent for seven years. Like every other Catholic, I made my first confession and communion and was confirmed. At school, I prayed formally every day and attended mass at least weekly until I left at 18.

 

Some people are believers, others aren't. Some see light breaking through clouds onto a body of water and think "beauty", others think "God". I've always been in the God category. I'm a believer. I can't help it. It's just who I am.

 

I was happy at school. I was lucky to be educated by nuns who were intelligent, well-educated, compassionate and engaged in the world. They were good role models. A few years ago, they left the shady lawns of privileged private schoolgirls and went to work among much needier people. Their lives are now harder but richer. I know this because I am still in touch with them – 30 years later.

 

In our final year at school, we studied world religions. This led to the inevitable question of how did we know (how does anyone know?) that our religion was the true one? How could everyone be right? The nun who was teaching us came up with this image:

 

"Think about a diamond with all its different facets. Those facets are the various religions. If you put that diamond up to the light – God – it shines through every facet differently, creating a variety of beautiful colors."

 

I loved that image. I still think of it as a critical way of explaining religious tolerance.

 

If my experience of Catholic women leaders has been overwhelmingly positive, I cannot say the same for our male leaders. Who could? The hypocrisy we have been exposed to has been overwhelming. So has the intolerance. There's a joke currently doing the Catholic rounds that has the three members of the Holy Trinity each choosing where they'd like to go on holiday. When it gets to the Holy Spirit's turn, he says, "Rome – because I've never been there." That's the Vatican's reputation today.

 

My religion evolved, as I grew older, as it tends to. I was partly Catholic and partly a whole lot of other things, to do with nature and relationships, and being a woman. The church's positions on contraception and abortion were not for me, but for a long time, I felt able to ignore them.

 

Living in New York, I got married in the Catholic Church. And when our two daughters were born, they were baptized. My husband, who had also been brought up Catholic, had long left the church, but was prepared to come back for milestone events.

 

It is extraordinarily hard to bring your children up in a community with an entrenched tradition of pedophilia. Everything about it feels wrong. It is almost impossible, as a mother, to stay connected to a church where thousands of children were abused, and the response of the men in charge, those you have trusted all your life, has been to cover the crimes up.

 

But for more than a decade, I tried. I believed that the number of good people in the church outweighed the bad. I believed in the triumph of good over evil. I believed that the people in the pews around me felt as I did and we had a duty to persevere.

 

So I took my children to Sunday mass, spent two years preparing each of them for their own holy communion in weekly lessons and joined church after church in New York, hoping to find one that could feel like home. None of them did.

 

I would give money to the collection wondering where exactly it would end up. Would it pay off an abuser? Get laundered in Rome? Subsidize a hypocritical lavish lifestyle? For a while, I stopped giving, then out of habit started again. For a while, I stopped going to church, too, but I'd always go back.

 

At the age of eight, my younger daughter began to serve mass, and I was struck that, hierarchically, this was as high as she could go as a Catholic. That felt wrong. But by now, it all felt wrong. I was ashamed of my church. I had not lost my faith in God, but I had completely lost my faith in Roman Catholic leaders. The scandals grew and multiplied, going higher and higher up. Where would it end?

 

And then, the pope quit. The pope! He left. He walked out on it all. I watched him fly away from Rome and I thought, "That's it." In the few moments of his flight, I left too. I decided I could no longer be a part of this church. It was over.

 

I realized I didn't want this decision to be about leaving, but joining. I knew immediately I wanted to convert and become an Episcopalian. Why? If I were to trace this decision back, it would be to a summer I spent in Maine 11 years ago. Our closest church was Episcopalian, so I went there on Sundays. The vicar was a woman. Her sermons were eloquent, moving, compassionate and connected to the modern world. She spoke like my nuns.

 

So, as the world was introduced to Pope Francis I on Wednesday, I watched from a distance, both literally and emotionally. His problems are not mine. I saw the excitement in St Peter's Square and found it moving.

 

I felt excited, too, but for a different reason. This Sunday, I'm going to an Episcopal church where I've already talked to the vicar. Eventually, I'll be baptized.

 

It's a new beginning.

 

 

 

 

Basically, I've been lost for a while, and due to numerous fallacious ways of reasoning and thinking, I'm leaving."

 

Sad.  Another casualty of modern thinking.

[Evangetholic]

Dear Guardian Lady

 

IDC. I did the exact opposite of what you did during the same time period, because if Hell is anything like the disabling pains I have in my back and legs at times, then I'd like to avoid it. Good luck! :)

Edited March 15, 2013 by Evangetholic

[PhuturePriest]

So, in essence, the "Vicar" was nice and pleasant, and that's good enough for him to leave the Church Christ founded for a counterfeit. Good to know.

[vee]

prodigal daughter

[Apotheoun]

As an Episcopalian she should be able to know all the members of her parish personally. Heck . . . in another twenty years she may know all the members of the Episcopal Church throughout the USA personally.

[vee]

[CatholicCid]

It's an interesting article. It truly is amazing how people can be entirely immersed in a culture, but it never grows beyond that. It simply remains that: a cultural thing. I'm intrigued by her comment that, in school, she "prayed formally every day." Yet, prayer does not need to be approached as a formal thing, but as a relationship with the living God.

 

Her diamond analogy is interesting as well, though it seems to be missing a central point. That diamond itself is Catholicism, which holds the entire truth. To expand on the analogy, the various colors it creates when God shines through is the various, but incomplete, truth present in other religion. By becoming fascinated by the individuals color, you miss the most beautiful thing of all, the diamond itself. Instead, her form of the analogy seems to regulate Catholicism as no greater, no truer, than any other religion. 

 

Perhaps the ministry of His Holiness, Pope Francis, will be able to draw her back and, more importantly, draw her into a deep and intimate relationship with the Lord. Prayefully, might it.

[Nihil Obstat]

It sounds to me that she never really believed what the Church believes. For her, faith was simply "do nice things sometimes", and nothing more. So now she has found a community that fits her. No sense that perhaps she is a sinful person, that she is the one that needs to change.

It is easy to find a community that will affirm everything you want it to. It is much harder to accept that we, ourselves, are rather nasty sinful people in need of mercy.

[mortify]

Its actually better for us that she left, most haters stay within the church and work subversively. If someone no longer sincerely believes, thats fine! Let them take their pick in communities more on line with the world.

[Gabriela]

Let's not forget that the problems she mentioned are real and a lot of people leave because of them. It's sad every time.

[mortify]

Let's not forget that the problems she mentioned are real and a lot of people leave because of them. It's sad every time.

 

Interesting you mention reality because the incidence of actual "pedophilia" is viritually non existent. Very few, if any, cases fell under the definition of pedophilia. A more proper term is pederastry which seemed to explode around the time the Church modernizing her disciplines in the 60s and 70s. The reason why pederastry is not the chosen term is that it runs too close to home with regards to homosexuality, and besides creating a stereotype of a "pedophile priest" is just more effective. Just as an aside it's interesting to note that the historical evidence radical homosexuals use to justify their position are ancient cases of pedarastry. Always thought it interested when they decided to bring up certain Greek citystates, they were very careful to diminish the reality of the age gap! But to go back to the incidence one more time, the actual incidence of sexual abuse ran far lower among Priests thatn is popularly believed, something like a percent or so. Disturbingly the incidence among public school teachers is much, much higher! But again, the purpose of the campaign is to undermine spiritual authority and cause division among laity and priests. It's been pretty effective, wouldn't you say?

[Ash Wednesday]

Usually people that become Episcopal or similar usually are of that mindset already, at least that's my experience. The only reason they had remained Catholic is family history and a cultural attachment to the Church, nothing more. I will say for this woman, at least she was honest. And not all surprising given that she was raised on that "diamond" nonsense, this idea that religions are all equal facets on a big diamond. It's not the first time I've heard that analogy, and it's a load of feel-good new age verbal diarrhea.

It sounds like she has a bit of the "grass is greener in the other church" mentality. I had a cafeteria Catholic friend who stopped going to mass in favor of the Episcopal church, started out overjoyed to be attending a service with a female pastor. Then much to her annoyance she found that wasn't satisfactory to her, either, and she just lapsed from church altogether.

Edited March 15, 2013 by Ash Wednesday

[homeschoolmom]

Do Episcopalians not believe in a common baptism?

[Nihil Obstat]

Do Episcopalians not believe in a common baptism?

I also found that odd.

[Apotheoun]

Why is the Episcopal Church near collapse?

 

Prominent bishops are pulling out. Convention-goers were told headquarters had spent $18 million suing local congregations. Members are leaving at a record rate. This is no longer George Washington’s church – once the largest denomination in the colonies.

 

BY: Rob Kerby, Senior Editor

 

The headlines coming out of the Episcopal Church’s annual U.S. convention are stunning — endorsement of cross-dressing clergy, blessing same-sex marriage, the sale of their headquarters since they can’t afford to maintain it.

 

The American branch of the Church of England, founded when the Vatican balked at permitting King Henry VIII to continue annulling marriages to any wife who failed to bear him sons, is in trouble.

 

Somehow slipping out of the headlines is a harsh reality that the denomination has been deserted in droves by an angry or ambivalent membership. Six prominent bishops are ready to take their large dioceses out of the American church and align with conservative Anglican groups in Africa and South America.

 

“An interesting moment came at a press conference on Saturday,” reports convention attendee David Virtue, “when I asked Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies, if she saw the irony in that the House of Deputies would like to see the Church Center at 815 2nd Avenue in New York sold (it has a $37.5 million mortgage debt and needs $8.5 million to maintain yearly) while at the same time the national church spent $18 million litigating for properties, many of which will lie fallow at the end of the day.”

 

This is no longer George Washington’s Episcopal Church – in 1776 the largest denomination in the rebellious British colonies. Membership has dropped so dramatically that today there are 20 times more Baptists than Episcopalians.

 

U.S. Catholics out-number the Episcopal Church 33-to-1. There are more Jews than Episcopalians. Twice as many Mormons as Episcopalians. Even the little African Methodist Episcopal denomination -- founded in in 1787 -- has passed the Episcopalians.

 

Among the old mainstream denominations reporting to the National Council of Churches, the Episcopal Church suffered the worst loss of membership from 1992-2002 — plunging from 3.4 million members to 2.3 million for a 32 percent loss. In the NCC’s 2012 yearbook, the Episcopal Church admitted another 2.71 percent annual membership loss.

 

Convention attendees were told that they had spent $18 million this year suing their own local congregations — those which have protested the denomination’s policies by trying to secede. The New York hierarchy has consistently won in court – asserting that the local members signed over their buildings decades ago. As a result, some of the largest Episcopal congregations in the United States have been forced to vacate their buildings and meet elsewhere.

 

So now, convention delegates were told, the denomination is the proud owner of scores of empty buildings nationwide – and liable for their upkeep in a depressed real estate market where empty church buildings are less than prime property. It’s the classic “dog in a manger.” The denomination has managed to keep the buildings – for which it has little use. However, they made their point – refusing to allow the congregations which built the facilities to have any benefit after generations of sacrifice, donations and volunteerism.

 

 

Click here to read the rest of the article on Beliefnet