Raised Catholic,the church made me a spiritual refugee

Tom Moran
The Star Ledger (Newark, NJ)
Sept. 30, 2012

I was born into a devout Catholic family, the fifth of nine children. And one of my earliest memories is learning the catechism from my father, a sales executive who was in the habit of going to church every day before work.

He read me stories about the adventures of a boy who was nicknamed “Raggie” because his family was too poor to buy new clothes. Each story had the same basic lesson — good Catholics look after those in need, just as Jesus did. And there is no shame in being poor.

Sign me up. I memorized the prayers, received the sacraments and felt ecstatically cleansed after monthly confessions. I was all in.

In the decades since, I have fled a million miles from the church, and have never found a new religious home. I am a spiritual refugee.

One in three American adults was raised in a Catholic family, but fewer than one in four identify as Catholic today. No other church has shed so many followers, according to surveys by the Pew Charitable Trusts. So if I am a refugee, I am walking on a road that is crowded with others who feel the same way.

Which brings us to my recent conversation with Newark Archbishop John Myers, and his attempt to sway the election to Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

He didn’t say that, of course. But he wrote a letter last week saying Catholics have a “duty” to cast their vote based on opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights. Gay sex, he wrote, is a purely “selfish enjoyment” because it “lacks openness to the procreative meaning of human sexuality.”

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Finally, he (Bishop Meyers) said, all Catholic must embrace his views. And those who refuse should not take Holy Communion.

I’ve gone through stages when it comes to the church, bouncing between anger, estrangement and exasperation. It started when one of my six sisters, at age 10, wrote the Vatican a letter asking why she couldn’t be an altar girl. She never heard back. But the dinner discussions on that planted seeds of revolt in all of us. They flowered as I began to understand the church’s views on birth control and divorce, which put even my mother on the wrong side of the law, and taught us how Catholics cope with the hierarchy.

A decade after my father died, she married a divorced man, which should have barred her from receiving Holy Communion. Her local priest saw that she would be crushed by that and quietly told her that she was free to take Holy Communion in his church any time she wanted.

“That local priest was wrong,” Myers said when I told him the story last week. But my mother had no hesitation. Nor did she feel she was sinning by using birth control when she was knocked low by migraine headaches after bearing the nine of us. When she saw same-sex couples raising AIDS babies, she saw no threat to the moral order; she saw Christ’s love at work. She supported same-sex marriage before the New York Times did.

Her obedience to the church hierarchy was not blind, especially after it was exposed as complicit in the sexual abuse of so many children. She trusted her own compass, and in that way, she was a typical Catholic.

Most Catholics, like her, will never leave the church. They will sidestep the land mines and hope for change. They see the altar girls today and hope for female priests tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, men like Myers will drive millions more onto the refugee highway.

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What’s shocking to me is that this 15-page letter, single-spaced, brushes by the problem of poverty and says nothing of Romney’s plan to savage the safety net. “Catholic citizens must exercise their right to be heard in the public square by defending marriage,” Myers wrote.

I doubt most Catholics will see this election in such pinched terms. They know how to sidestep this land mine, too.

Because if you visit any poor neighborhood in New Jersey, you can see a more vibrant Catholicism at work in schools, hospitals and food pantries. I’m pretty sure Raggie would see this election through their eyes.

His was the Catholicism I was taught. And it was all about love.

Read full piece at The Star Ledger