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Maybe better suited for the culture war thread, but I think I'm leaving the Catholic Church. I converted in 2022 for a number of reasons. I had already felt drawn to Catholic literature/aesthetics for almost as long as I could remember (I loved Silence and A Canticle for Leibowitz), was incredibly dissastisfied with the secular attitude towards spirituality and morality, and was drawn to the simplicity of Jesus' simplification of the Jewish Law: Love thy neighbor as thyself, and Love God. I choose the Catholic Church over other denominations because it was not woke, open to revising stances on scripture (evolution), and concerned more with works over just belief.
It's been three years since I went through RCIA and converted, and a combination of contradictions between the church and my other beliefs about the world has become difficult to resolve. This center around two big areas. The first revolves around veganism/animal rights/environmentalism. Although this certainly wasn't always the case historically within the church (St. Francis and the Benedictines come to mind), there seems to be this attitude at least in my parish that animals and nature were only created for us to do with as we please. This is backed up by an interpretation of Genesis that suggests that God created man to rule over animals and nature. Not only do I think this is wrong ethically, we know many animals have conscious experiences and shouldn't be treated "however we want" (not to say that they should be treated like humans necessarily), but it also seems to have led to disaster in relationship to our environment. Even if you don't believe Climate Change is a serious issue, we have replaced most of the vertebrate biomass on land with us and our (maltreated) farm animals. Certainly there are many in the Church who would see this as wrong (the Pope included), but it doesn't seem to be so in parishes I've been to, and to justify it scripturally it seems like you have to jump through a bunch of hoops.
The second issue has to do with the relationship between divine revelation, philosophy, and science. It's not the church hasn't historically changed its position on things (slavery, evolution, not doing everything in Latin), it's that any change has to conform to certain core dogma and be based in an interpretation of scripture. But the more I read of philosophy, the more I've started to believe that certain tenets of catholic theology don't agree with objective reality and are poorly argued for by the "greats" (Augustine, Aquinas). The problem is not necessarily that these tenets are wrong: more so that they can't be interrogated in a reasonable philosophical manner because divine revelation is unquestionable.
The final unrelated reason that I'm leaving is the people. When I first joined the parish, we had a much more vibrant young adult community that actually did stuff together, had interests beyond theology, and generally was much more concerned with works than beliefs. Through a combination of people moving away and/or leaving the church, it seems the only people really left are trad-caths who I find boring, close-minded, and fail to see the core of what Jesus was trying to say. The Dominicans who run the parish, while being excellent administrators, and kind people, aren't much better when it comes to intellectual openness.
Anyway, I'm open to coming back to the church when/if I move away from the current parish I'm in to more Jesuit-friendly pastures. But without massive reform, both philosophically and practically (being much more concerned with environmentalism and non-human life on this planet), I think this era of my life is over. I'm not sure where to go next spiritually, but hopefully that will come with time.
I like the idea of the Tree in Genesis being an endangered species; it is not in the consuming of the fruit of “knowing good & evil” that we damned ourselves, but in preventing its flourishing and multiplication; that our consuming it halted the spread of the knowledge of good and evil, which required the tree to remain in a virginal state carefully tended by God. The tree itself was, in a sense, monogenes — one of a kind, only-begotten. This then has environmental implications: the very first sin which doomed us was our harm to endangered nature in its virginal state. And we see how the Gospel factors into the story of salvation: the monogenes of God (and endangered Messiah of man) must perish on a dead tree, after spreading the seed of Moral Wisdom involving good fruit from good trees, to resurrect in the appearance of a gardener (to Magdalene).
I like this metaphor a lot! I'll have to use it myself.
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