October 2022
There is something disordered and spiritually dangerous lurking in the Roman Catholic Church. Many people in many other religions are simply good and strive for holiness. Many atheists live with integrity because they are honest. The RC clergy is intertwined with something obscure and not good. See this blog post.
June 2025 Reflections
In the Roman Catholic Church there is a culture of treating people like they can be used. Yes it can be clergy abuse. More often than not it involves Catholic parents feeling like they can lord their power over their kids. It creates a culture of meanness.
We’ve moved numerous times. I’ve lived in several states and countries. Because of this, we’ve been members of many Roman Catholic Churches. The lack of welcome at these churches is stark in comparison to the kind of welcome you receive as a newcomer at most other churches. No one cares if you show up at a Catholic Church. A high percentage of the time, it doesn’t seem like the normal members even know each other. If there is a welcome comittee, their duties end at a “Would you like a bulletin?” If you step up to volunteer, you are told you need to wait a minimum of a year. You are told to be quiet and accept whatever structure already exists in the church. But be sure to donate! Don’t forget that.
When it comes to donations: we still get letters from almost all the dioceses we’ve ever lived in. The church may be negligent at basic niceness, but they aren’t negligent when it comes to DEMANDING money. I’ve even called several diocese and asked them to take me off the list. The Archdiocese of Washington, despite a massive embezzlement scandal in 2022, has the audacity to still ask for money.
I want to mention that there were some “nice” churches. They were nice because some woman in the office took it upon herself to be welcoming. But more often than not the nice and welcoming women in these nice churches were emotionally abused by their bosses who were also their pastors.
Emotionally abusive behavior amongst pastors is more common than not, it seems. Here are some examples:
In one case, a family of 15 people showed up for a baptism. The head pastor of the church got his panties in a bunch over something, and decided to cancel the baptism at the last minute after all the family members had already arrived at the church. The woman in the office called in a retired priest from a different location to do a baptism. It wasn’t kosher, I’m sure. But canceling a baptism at the last minute on this family was spiteful.
In another case, a woman I recognized from daily mass walked into the parish office. She said she had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. She wanted to receive the sacraments in the church. Could she talk to the pastor? “No” was the answer. She could not. People can’t just walk into the parish office and speak to the head priest. The secretary in the office told this cancer patient that RCIA started in 9 months and that she could begin her classes at that point.
On a road trip through Texas we stopped at a Catholic Church with my autistic nephew and my own kids in tow. Ours were the only kids in the entirety of the church. During the liturgy the pastor called us out for being too loud. (My autistic nephew was being so so good. We were all trying hard.) The pastor told us we needed to step outside if we were going to be noisy. But there was only a tiny little foyer and the Texas heat outside. So we left.
We moved to Maryland with a three week old. After several months, I thought I had jumped through all the hoops to get my baby baptized at the local church. We talked with the deacon. He made sure we knew what baptism was. We volunteered. We signed our kids up for religious ed. We tried to meet people. We handed over all of our own certificates. (We were trying hard!) We scheduled the baptism and had family traveling into town for the event. But we were a new family. Two days before the planned baptism, after our family had already made travel plans, the deacon informed me that the long-time parishioners who were going to have their baby baptized at the same time as ours decided they wanted the ceremony all to themselves. They wanted their baby baptized alone. (This means they wanted to exclude our baby, just to be clear.) We would need to get baptized three weeks later.
At that time we only had one car and there was only one Roman Catholic Church in walking distance. I went to the parish priest. He couldn’t be bothered to get to know us. He told me I had no right to ask questions. He said we should go to a different church. (This was St. Jeromes. It was described in Benedict Option.) This is a church with signs out front saying that they care about women in crisis pregnancies and they will help. Well I think a woman in a crisis pregnancy would be hard pressed to find a person who cared. It would be a real hit-or-miss kind of situation at that “pro-life” Catholic church.
Right before Covid I scheduled confession for myself and my kids. We waited for 45 minutes. Finally my kids went out to play. I stayed. The priest showed up and told me he could hear my confession if I could do it in under 3 minutes. At that same church, I was entrusted by the church to teach religious education on Zoom. Many of my students did not speak English. I was preparing the students for their first communion. My own daughter was 9. I was also teaching my own daughter at home as well as having her attend the Zoom classes. Two years of classes were required for my daughter to receive Jesus in the Eucharist. She had only done one. I asked the priest if she could please just make her first communion a year early. I promised I had been teaching her on my own. “No” was the answer. Of course there can’t be exceptions. It is just like Jesus said, if children want to come to him they have to try hard and attend Zoom meeting for years to prove their worth.
I don’t know many priests who think things in the church are going well. I think there are two camps. The first think the church is under attack and this is why things are not going well. So we need to double down and be faithful. The second camp seems to think that there is quite a lot of corruption and manipulation.
I can’t know everything. I have not attended every church, and I do not know every priest. But I’ve been Catholic my whole life, and I’ve been a part of more churches than most people. This is the culture I see.
I am mourning how much time I’ve spent putting up with this meanness. There is an opportunity cost. All these years, my family and I could have been part of churches that are just caring. We could have been members of churches where they call you to see how things are going. (And I know this happens. I’ve attended other kinds of churches with family and friends. There is a genuine kind of welcome that many of them have.)