I was brung up Catholic. Very Catholic – I was born pre-Vatican II, and my initial training was in a Church with Latin liturgy, with an altar rail between the Altar and the people, with the Altar facing away. You had to fast three hours before communion, and my parents told us that, in their day, they were told to shut off the water the night before so they wouldn’t inadvertently drink water in the morning before Mass.
I attended Catholic School for eight years. I’m of the last generation of Altar Boys who memorized the Mass in Latin. For a time, I thought I’d be a priest when I grew up.
My disillusionment came in part because of the clear disparity between what I was being told and what I could see. The nuns taught us excellent English Grammar and Math, but terrible Science (although I know that some of them were very good at it), yet the Baltimore Catechism warned us not to take science as the prime teacher of truth. But accepting the representatives of the Faith as prime teachers of truth seemed pretty iffy, given the howlers some of them taught. One of the nuns was a firm believer in psychic Jeanne Dixon, which was a major strike against her, to my mind.
OK, so nuns aren’t necessarily the best sources. But the Baltimore Catechism told us that the existence of God could be proven. Looking into the proofs, I wasn’t convinced, and neuiither, I learned, were a lot of other people. I was also told that the Bible as we had it was inerrantt and faithfully transmitted, but the existence of a great many famous Bible misprints retty clearly disproved that.
In Catholic theology, the Invisible World is carefully measured and parceled out. There are mortal sins and venial sins, actual and sanctifying grace, plenary and partial indulgences, Gifts of the Holy Spirit, Sorrowful Mysteries, Stations of the Cross, a plethora of Scapulars nd Medals, legions of saints, and a plan for unducting new saints. there are Seven Sacraments with all their proper ceremony and a procedure for blessing holy water.
at some point, you have to step back and ask “How do they know this?” How come this prayer is good for a partial indulgence of 144 days? Whose idea was this ceremony?
Looking into the origins of much of this isn’t helpful. the Catholic Church has tradition is spades, but a lot of it seems awfully arbitrary and very authoritarian. The more I looked, the more things treated as obviously miraculous seemed also to have more likely (to me) mundane explanations. Miraculous intervention didn’t seem to be a necessity. I found the explanations I’d been given – even the adult ones that you came upon in reading the Doctors of the Church or Catholic Church documents – not convincing anymore.
Besides this, most Catholics I knew didn’t seem terribly interested in any of this. atholics are notoriously bad at Bible reading. The Church doesn’t really encourage it – most people got little snippets at Mass every Sunday, with vast chunks never explored in that way. I didn’t read any books of the Bible through until I got to college. I’ve since read it all on my own.
But even those snippets are too much for some people. I recall in grad school, at the chapel, that the priest , after doing the reading, walked down through the crowd and asked them questions about what he’d just read. Unfortunately, nobody could answer – they obvious hadn’t been paying attention, or else forgot very quickly. In desperation, he looked to me (I was co-chair of the Education Committee at the time), and was relieved that I could reply. I got more tha a little annoyed that these people weren’t paying attention to their one hour of religion a week. I was particularly annoyed when folks like that couldn’t understand any problems I had with belief.
Ultimately, I coul;dn’t in all honesty go to services that required me to publicly state that I believed things that did not, in fact, believe. I don’t like lying. So I quit.
I have nothing against those who sacrifice for others, those who obtain solace from the Church, or who seek it. Their many charitable works do them credit. But cannot attend services whose ultimate purpose seems pointless to me and state that I believe things that I do not.