CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING CATHOLIC

Part I

In one of my commentaries, I signed my name as a “Recovering Catholic.”  One of the online comments read:  ” welcome back, people do realize the advantages of being on the inside,” to which I replied: “you obviously are not familiar with the phrase. A “Recovering Catholic” is similar to a recovering alcoholic. It is based on the premise that religion ( such as Catholicism ) is an addiction. When you recover from it, you get away from it – not embrace it again.”

Like many in my generation, growing up in a highly spiritual community entails certain practices that become a habit, church-going being one of them. It was a repetitive, predictable, expected ritual of prayers, and recitation devoid of any conscious reflection. The whole experience was an exercise in submission. My experience did not include a “Sunday School.” Even if there were one, none would be expected to ask the dogma’s validity. The parish runs a parochial school in which doctrine was taught as fact. Then and now, critical thinking has never been a part of faith-based education.  If it were,  none of them would have flourished the way they have. You have no say, no choice, no dialogue, nowhere to go. In retrospect, it never was a cultivating place for a strong, independent, and thinking individual.  The entire community and home life leave you no choice but to conform.  It was my earliest experience of “groupthink.”

No place for skeptics; the brain gets used to being stifled.  There was a real fear of hell; you are always reminded of sinning, constantly feeling guilty.  You’re scared of the priest, fearful of death, afraid of missing church.  A constant childlike admonition to obey and a continuous feeling of being subjugated, even intimidated by church elders.  It is not surprising because the church’s leadership, down to the lowly religion teacher, is missioned to spread the gospel and affirm the dogma’s validity.

Then there are the sacraments, like going to confession (the sacrament of Penance). Of all the sacraments, this one has haunted me like no other.  Lining up a nine or 10-year-old child to a confessional box after a lesson on hell, fire, and brimstone is child abuse.   We can be comforted somewhat that this creepy nonsensical practice seems to have seen its day.  Many young Catholics do not share the idea of divulging one’s innermost secrets to another “sinner.”  Like many traditional practices in the church, the momentum of the “infallibility doctrine” keeps them until they can find a way around it. ( Limbo, another harebrained church concept been declared obsolete. As preposterous as they come, the literal Heaven and Hell will one day go as well.)  Many religious ideas cause emotional damage and fear in our childhood. Most recovering Catholics do not recover from these irrational torments, unable to escape these impaired ideological sinkholes.  He continues to meander and conform even as the rest of the world becomes secular.

“How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one.”

-Richard Dawkins

 Receiving communion and all that it entails requires a brain devoid of rationality. Here is where a total surrender of intelligence ( aka faith ) would be the only way anyone can go through this ritual.  The doctrine is very explicit about “transubstantiation.” One has to accept that communion is not symbolism; it is not a metaphor.  The host is the body and blood of the saviour.  We all survived this rite from one Sunday to the next because none of us paid attention to what it meant according to the church, or it was never taken seriously.

Then you have the homily. It takes only a few minutes into it before it starts glazing over your eyes and into the drone territory midway into it. According to whoever was not mentioned in the previous Sunday, traditional sermons do not address contemporary issues. ( not then, anyhow ) It’s a prescription for us to live our lives like those of the people of the first century: based on superstition, myth, legend, and folklore. 

There’s no reason and intellectual rigour in any of these liturgies.  Repetition drowns you, just as memorizing mysteries and responses kill your neurons one by one.  Like all religious rituals, the idea is to bring life to a story or a fable, thus making the fiction more real.  When we become participants in these rites,  we become all the more a slave to the ideology.

Many Catholics are not aware that gospels are recited “according to ” somebody because these gospels are not in agreement with one another.  Some of them are, in fact, in contradiction with each other.  The gospels are cherry-picked from hundreds that have been written.  The selected ones are the ones that bolster the church’s dogma. 

And so you come out of these services feeling like the clergy is either too lazy to craft anything that will make you think or give you a motivation to improve your life and be a better member of your community.  It is not a place of reflection and analysis.  As I recall, the sermon is when the menfolk goes out for a smoke and gossip. For some, it’s the end of service.  It is what happens when you have a submissive congregation.  There is no incentive for the priest to invite you to think and question and debate.  We were the sheep that were there to obey and further the conditioning process.  On reflection, I can understand Bill Gates’s declaration: ( when asked whether he attends church ), ” I have better things to do on a Sunday morning.”  

Coming out of a parochial school, I imagine every one of us went out of it feeling pretty much alike. I doubt that any number of us had any strong feelings about the validity of the religious doctrines taught us in 4 years of high school. Outside of sex, fifteen-year-olds do not typically spend time thinking about religion.  Fifty years later, in our homecoming, I found it weird that practically everyone stuck to the same religious mantra of the ’60s. Like no one left the neighborhood! Comfortable in my own skin, my exposure in the intervening years to fellow humanists made them look atypical.  Atheists do not have the respect that gays have gained through the years, even though church doctrine is firmly anti-homosexual.  But, why would an LGBTQ  individual even bother to become a member of a religion that openly trashes one’s sexual orientation?  It is another example of how reason and rationality becomes a casualty of fear and religious intimidation.  You can ask the same question as to why some catholic women will choose to become a nun.  Patriarchy and misogyny are other outstanding idiosyncrasies of Monotheistic religion.  To this day, nuns are still not allowed by the Vatican to say mass or bestow sacraments. ( and even being reprimanded for spending more time on social causes than spreading the gospel.  90,000 of them left the church after Vatican II )  Well, of course, it’s an old men’s fraternity! ( the 218 Cardinals has an average of 72 yrs.)

Catholicism, like all Monotheistic religion, are averse to sex.  Besides the Bible, there are proclamation and practices that skirts the idea of sex.  Even suspending the laws of nature to get around to having had sex.  The virgin birth is one such example.  Man had to invent a silly story because, in their heads, sex is dirty; they can’t imagine a god that is a product of sexual intercourse.   Poor Joseph had to give up the fathership of a son on behalf of a ghost! ( in as far as what the gospel says ). They have been cultivating us into believing that humans can self reproduce like worms…as long as God is part of the process.  End of story!  It’s another way of saying: “Stifle yourself!”

“One of truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.”

Richard Dawkins

There is no better example of the Vatican’s bellicose attitude to sex than the much-publicized anti condom use in Africa during the raging epidemic of HIV/AIDS in the 90s.  Both John Paul II and Pope Benedict campaigned vigorously against its use, arguing that a condom is a contraceptive device and a promiscuity license. Condom use, according to the church, is worse than the disease itself.  Only when the rest of the world was dead against the church stance did they find a way around to it. There is not enough mortal sin to go around on sex-related sins as defined by the church. By their definition, only the Eunuchs are not going to hell.

During my parochial years  ( grades  5 and 6 and 4 years of high school ), students were segregated according to one’s academic standing ( from the preceding year ). We can never fault those years’ practices, but It was nonetheless a shameful labeling of children.  There was no escaping being in the lowest section of my graduation year because you have a class picture that affirms your hierarchy position.  You stay with your cohorts all year; it’s the same Joe you’re seated with day in and day out. It wasn’t exactly an incentive to do any more than what teachers expect. Besides, the ones in the brightest group are the only candidates on the honour roll.  They are also the ones appointed into a literary activity and other curricular endeavors.  In a ” one size fits all” ( In those years, it is a presumptive system that everybody continues to a post-secondary institution ), its survival of the academically competent. My heart goes out to my cohorts, who, throughout high school, were thought of as nothing more than a trifling bunch, just as I was. Educators call this ” the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

Part II, explores:

— more on schooling in the 60s

— the impact of “Religious Colonialism” among Filipinos

— religion as an on-going stain in human history

–how the current pandemic is changing the face of faith

–to be continued on the Jan. 1st issue of BALITA

Edwin de Leon (edwingdeleon@gmail.com)