Why I Left the Catholic Church

By Colman McCarthy

If you’ve been scouting reasons to leave the Roman Catholic Church, the current pickings are good. If the pedophilia crises, plus evasions and cover-ups, weren’t more than enough, now there are bishops at the communion line telling pro-choice politicians to go away.

The latest host-refuser is Bishop Michael Sheridan who wrote a pastoral letter to his 120,000-member Colorado Springs diocese: “Anyone who professes the Catholic faith with his lips while at the same time supporting legislation or candidates that defy God’s law makes a mockery of that faith and belies his identity as a Catholic.” Voters who defy church teachings, the bishop said, “jeopardize their salvation.”

Not only could John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy, Tom Harkin and other Catholic pro-choice senators spend eternity in hell but voters will be burning with them.

That would have been enough to get me rushing to leave the church. Except that I departed decades ago, and without a day of regret since. It was a quiet exit, fueled by a slow awakening that Roman Catholicism, run by leaders-for-life, is not a peace church. As a pacifist, I cannot in conscience belong to it.

I know the counter arguments: stay and try to reform the church from within; don’t give the church’s hawks the pleasure of your absence; be a realist not a purist; if Pax Christi members are staying, plus the Catholic Workers, plus all the heroic religious people who year after year keep doing the works of peace and mercy in ways sung and unsung, who are you to be getting uppity!

That would be persuasive except that Bishop Sheridan is right: obey or go. Be a member in good standing or an outsider with no standing. Organizationally, Catholicism requires orthodoxy-- as does the Trump Organization and all others with autocratic CEOs, central headquarters and non-democratic hierarchical structures. The latest Encyclopedia of World Religions counts some 10,200 organized faiths, from Abyssinian Animism to Zoroastrianism. I don’t see much evidence that all this Godism has pacified the earth, and least of all Catholicism. Killing people in war can be just, it teaches. U.S. Catholic colleges host ROTC programs, chaplains are supplied to the Pentagon. Generals, admirals and all others in the warrior class are welcomed in churches, cross and sword in harmony.

Instead of a faith-based life, I’ve tried to live a peace-based life. No doctrines, no dogmas, no credos, no artificial ties to a headquarter, no “one true church’ smugness. Questions about God’s existence or non-existence are irrelevant: in our daily lives, what would we do differently if we knew one way or another? As the saying goes, follow those who seek God but avoid those who’ve found Him.

As a willing orphan of Holy Mother Church, I remain friends with, and an ardent admirer of, those Catholics who need the sacraments, liturgies and social services. How they square their spiritual fidelity with theological dissent is, to me, beyond understanding—another mystery of faith, I suppose.

My best wishes for those who stay with the Catholic Church, whether it’s in the Antonin Scalia, Pat Buchanan and Jeb Bush wing or the Joan Chittester, Maria Shriver and Nancy Pelosi wing. Be thrilling, wouldn’t it, if some Sunday at Mass they ended up in the same pew. And when they head for the communion line who’s there but two bishops, one a letter-of-the-law man, the other a spirit man.

Summon the ushers to handle the jostling. Get the senior usher. It could be nasty.