Lilli! Are you a Catholic? Sorry for asking, it's just, having throughout my life met almost exclusively Catholics who are super conservative and bigoted, it makes me happy to see that someone I can relate to so much is of the same denomination. How do you deal with organised religion being extremely right-winged? Sorry if this is inappropriate, I'm having quite a crisis, feel free to ignore.
hi! no worries, i don’t mind you asking at all!
this will be something you’re probably familiar with, but making sense of the mess of feelings i have towards the catholic church has meant a lot of compartmentalising. to me, catholicism is an institution on the one hand, and my parents’ (in particular my mother’s) faith on the other. for myself, i completely reject the first, & am currently trying to learn how to embrace the second.
officially and on paper, i stopped being catholic in 2015 - not sure about the situation where you are, but in most parts of germany, leaving the catholic church is an act of official administration, so i had to secede via our local court. being gay, all the way left on the political spectrum, and just on the edge to agnosticism, on an institutional level, it didn’t make sense for me to stay in the church at all, and i’m glad i left.
on a personal level, having left still doesn’t feel right to me, which is why i still say i’m catholic when asked. catholicism is my upbringing, one of the largest sources of my mother’s and godmother’s strength, and the edifice of my childhood. i don’t love everything it left me with (the standard catholic range: guilt & shame, self-esteem issues, etc), but those things are all me no matter how i twist it. it’s not an aspect of my identity i can (or want to) just leave behind. my parents are both deeply critical of the institution themselves, so it was never them who instilled beliefs of hate or guilt in me. in consequence, there are many positive things i want to retain from my catholic upbringing - i love celebrating my name day; i love the feeling of stepping into a cathedral; i love the stories of saints. i love my mother’s easter bread. reconciling these parts with the institution itself is emotional work that i’m not entirely prepared to do yet, so for now, my denomination is kinda just “catholic but also, uh, complicated”.
sorry for the novel! if you ever want to come off anon to chat about any Catholic Crises TM, please feel free - as this reply makes overly obvious, this is something i’m always interested in talking about. much love to you! <3
