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Notes -
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 think this would be a problem with any institution. It’s full of us miserable sinners. I find myself drawn to high church Protestantism and it’s the same thing. On paper or on YouTube videoed of the services far away from any real people messing things up it sounds great. The real people are not like the theoretical ones that populate that denomination in your head. So I think at some point, it’s better to find a church that you actually like and worry less about the aesthetics and denomination and theology and simply get involved.
Nice! What sort of church do you attend?
(I'm Presbyterian/Reformed.)
LCMS Lutheran, though im rather fond of the conservative Anglicans as well.
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