Why not? 
Go on, ask me.
I don’t need to ask. As another non-practicing Catholic, I already know. 
Did you start this thread because you were jealous?
Jealous of what? 
How’re you going to learn if you don’t practice?
Does anyone in the church really care what the Pope has to say?
Should I use canned ‘pizza sauce’ or some tomato and basil marinara for the pizza I am about to make?
Being non-practicing, I don’t give two hoots what the pope says, except to mock their continued stance on condom use. I know some people, however, who treat everything the pope says like it was handed down from god. Go figure.
I didn’t mention that I am part Italian, but somehow you figured it out and have asked me about pizza sauce. Well, heres how you make pizza sauce .
How old were you when you stopped attending church? Did anything in particular precipitate this, or was it just a growing sense of “This is bullshit” combined with a shrinking sense of “I’ll keep going to keep my parents happy”?
Would you consider Protestantism/some other religion, or did your disenchantment with Mother Church pretty much taint all organized religion?
'Cuz that’s how it was with me.
Why do you consider yourself a non-practicing catholic? What I mean is, why are you still identifying as catholic at all? Do you plan on a return someday, or are your reasons for not going to mass not strong enough to just call yourself a former catholic?
If you found yourself at mass, maybe Christmas, Easter, or a wedding, would you take communion?
As a Catholic and being of Sicilian ancestry, I assure you that any canned sauce is heresy and you will burn for it
I never did the “Church on Sunday” thing. Sometimes (every few years) my family would go to a Christmas mass.
Actually, for awhile I was kind of a born-again evangelical for about a year. Still didn’t go to church. I’ve always found the biggest hypocrites and unpleasant people are the most “church-going” in my area. I don’t like them. My parents were/are divorced, I lived with my mother for the most part, and she is also not practicing.
Because I was baptized Catholic, and I don’t go to church. I don’t follow the Church’s teachings (no I don’t run around murdering and adultering (Is that a verb?)). I use condoms, which is a big no-no (not to mention extra-marital sex to begin with). And my faith in god is questionable.
- It is very unlkely I would find myself and any of those places.
- No.
The Italian part of me is Genoan, but canned is still heresy.
I’m a recovering Catholic myself (also of the Italian variety (well, half-Italian)), so I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread and helping answer questions as well.
I stopped going to church pretty much as soon as I got away from home. I went to college in Wheeling, WV (a Catholic college, no less), and just stopped attending. I think I was only attending before that point because it was easier than going through my (Italian) mother’s drama if I simply flat-out said I wasn’t going. I’d been disenchanted for longer than that, though. Simply put, I don’t think I’ve ever actually felt anything that could be described as a religious experience in my entire life of attending church. It was just something we had to do on Sunday morning (and various feast days and first Fridays in Catholic school). So when doing so no longer entailed a very, very long and very, very loud altercation with my parents, I stopped attending. I think I set foot in the chapel on our campus three times, and two of those were for choral practice and a concert.
To quote my mother, there is no such thing as a “former Catholic”. Catholicism is as much a culture as it is a religion. Or rather, Catholicism is so imbedded in certain ethnic cultures that it’s almost impossible to be Italian without considering yourself Catholic, whether that’s practicing, non-practicing, lapsed or recovering. I have a soft spot for the rituals and the trappings of Catholicism, and I try to explain the whole thing on here when it comes up. I don’t plan to return. I’m an agnostic. I simply can’t see myself believing strongly enough to actually begin practicing again.
I have been to masses since I stopped attending church, mostly for weddings and funerals. I do not receive the Eucharist (not even at my father’s funeral). I may not believe that it matters, but the people around me do, and the Catholic position is that if the communicant isn’t in unity of belief with the Church, they may not receive the body of Christ. Since I respect that belief (even if I don’t believe that the Host is the body of Christ and therefore render the problem moot), I don’t take communion.
Likewise, for Islam. No real feeling for it, but still interesting.
I’d ask a question but my bf is an agnostic Roman Catholic with plenty of answers 
If you strip away the propaganda and the outer trappings, I bet you would find that deep down, Catholicism and Islam agree on the really important things.
Life is a gift to be valued, your life and the lives of others.
Be kind and generous.
Do the right thing, even if it is difficult.
Nope, not that much difference really.
Thanks for the answers all. I too, like many, many others on these boards Im sure, was raised catholic but am ‘not practicing.’
I feel the same about the Eucharist, however I do consider myself a **former ** catholic. Im not saying it isn’t part of who I am. I do think that by estranging myself from that culture I can label myself whatever I want to.
And I choose [trumpet blasts]Former Catholic.
To put it another way, “You can take the girl out of the Catholic church, but you can’t take the Catholic church out of the girl.”
With me, I just stopped attending Mass (and I was only going because my father gave me such grief when I didn’t) because it began to feel like I wasn’t getting anything-I would sit there, going through the motions, doing everything by rote-but I never paid attention, never really bothered thinking about it, etc. And I felt that was disrespectful. I was in early twenties, and I felt, hey, I’m a grown woman, I should be able to decide if I want to go to Mass or not. (Oh, my father STILL bitches about it!)
Basically, I don’t know what I believe, although I’ve always had kind of a “all religions have some element of truth and God doesn’t send people to hell” upbringing from my folks (NOT from Catholic schooling!). And then I realized that I didn’t really KNOW if I believed in the Christian religion (I still don’t know what to believe about Christ or not), so I figured I’d be lying if I called myself a Catholic, rather than a lapsed or non-practicing.
(Oh, and I’m of the Irish-Polish variety. All that guilt and the angry persecution complex too!)
Attributed to Martin Sheen while he was in a less-religious time of his life- “I’m a fallen-away Catholic. I’m not sure there is a God. but I still believe Mary was His Mother.”
good morning friends,
the end of a discussion on the legal ramifications with regards to obstruction of justice, withholding evidence and being an accessory after the fact to a felony with the priest at the catholic church i attended came when he suggested that “maybe it would be better for you to worship elsewhere”
while not formally an excommunication, he made it pretty plain that i was no longer welcome
lh, the epicopalian