CHARLO, New Brunswick, November 20, 2023 – I know someone, a lifelong Catholic, who once explained to me why she sticks with the Catholic church despite its brutal history and endless scandals. “It’s like a friend”, she said, staring rather pointedly at me, “who does and says some things you don’t agree with, but she’s your friend, so you overlook them.”

As charitable a gesture as that may be in terms of friendship, it doesn’t pass the smell test for the things of God. There should be nothing about God or anything related to God that you overlook or look past because, well, it’s God, so exceptions need to be made. There should never be a sense that you’re compromising some part of yourself to remain loyal to God. With God, there should only be a sense of homecoming and of all parts falling into place and fitting perfectly. With God, there should be no part of you that you hold back or any part of God that you agree to agree to but only while holding your nose.

I could never remain within an organization that alleged to represent God and yet committed crime after crime, most of which went unreported and unrepented. I would think that, after poring over and considering the presented evidence, I would remove myself from such an organization. When I was a practising Catholic for the first three and a half years after my rebirth from atheism, I lived and moved in what I can only describe as a Catholic bubble. Yes, I’d heard rumors about what all those priests had done, but I was sure it was mostly only rumors and if there had been any truth to the rumors, the issue would have been dealt with appropriately.

I trusted the priests in the churches I attended. I trusted the deacons. I trusted everyone who worked in the churches or their affiliated organizations. I attended mass every day, sometimes twice during the weekdays and always twice and sometimes three times on Sundays. I was besotted with God and Jesus, and the heady scent of incense during mass was to me like their aftershave cologne. I was convinced that God lived in the churches I attended because that’s what I’d been taught, as a Catholic, to believe. I wasn’t taught that God was with me – born-again me – through God’s Holy Spirit. No, I was taught that God was only in the Catholic churches and if I wanted God to hear my prayers, I had to go to church to pray, God being (by implication) rather hard of hearing.

God let me labour under the delusions fed to me within my Catholic bubble because at least I had a place to go every day where I could be a believer. At least I had a place to go every day where I could hear God’s Word being preached. The reading of scripture during the mass was always the highlight of my day, and sometimes I was invited to read – never the Gospel (only the priests were allowed to read that), but I could read parts of the Old Testament or Paul’s letters, or better said, God read them through me. The priests and parishioners liked it when I read. They’d say to me: “Something happens when you read.” The priests looked at me strangely sometimes, as if they were trying to figure me out. The parishioners, too, would approach me after mass and ask me why my faith was so strong, and I would tell them I was born-again. At the time, I didn’t realize that talking about being born-again was all but verboten in a Catholic church. One of the priests sniffed at me when I said I was born-again: “We’re all born again at baptism”, he stated curtly and then walked away.

When the evidence against the Catholic church started to present itself to me, my Catholic bubble began to deflate. I ignored the evidence at first, wanting to protect the “Mother Church” that had protected me during my spiritual infancy, but not all parents are loving and not all parents should be parents. The deeper I looked into the long dark history of Catholicism, the more uneasy I grew, and the more uneasy I grew, the deeper I looked into the church’s history. What I found both horrified and outraged me. I finally got to the point where I was even changing the responses I said during mass because I didn’t agree with their content. I remember the priests and deacons glancing at me quizzically when I did that, wondering if they’d misheard or I’d misspoken, but I refused to say something before God that I didn’t believe. It was during this end-phase of disillusion that, in answer to a prayer, God showed me how Catholicism was keeping me from doing his will. The minute he gave me this revelation I walked out of the church, never to return.

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I dreamt last night about the diehard Catholic I mentioned at the outset of this article. She was waiting for an elevator, and when it arrived, she tripped walking into it. Her head was inside the elevator and her body was outside, so when the door closed on her neck, she was decapitated. The elevator then went up and down with just her head rolling around inside. I thought about calling her today and telling her about the dream, but God said no, just write this. She won’t want to hear about the dream.

Just write this.

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Nothing about God should feel like a compromise. Nothing God does or says should make you uneasy or hesitant. God is Truth, and as born-again believers we’ve been given God’s Spirit of Truth that resonates with God’s every Word and Command. Jesus says that we live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He says “we live” – he doesn’t say we cringe or recoil. He doesn’t say we compromise or look the other way. He doesn’t say we give God a pass because he’s God – he says: WE LIVE by every word that comes from the mouth of God. There is nothing that God says that we should disagree with. Nothing. And if an organization that purports to speak for God makes us feel uneasy, ashamed, or compromised, we need to leave it.

With a friend, you can overlook bad habits, but not with a church.