That Time I Briefly Converted to Catholicism

Root 45 - And my thoughts on the public perception of divorce.

Loneliness used to be my biggest fear. That’s what kept me trapped with my ex for so long. It was only when I was willing to choose loneliness over being treated poorly that I was able to leave. Still, loneliness wasn’t my favorite. And after I left my ex, I was the loneliest I’d been in a long time. Especially at the beginning, while my kids were gone. I yearned for connection. For community.

When I left my ex, I briefly converted to Catholicism. I was looking for meaning and purpose in my life. So often when I was younger, I’d found that in God. I’d been raised Protestant, and had only ever been to Catholic Mass once before. When the man I was interested in suggested I go to the local cathedral, and promised me there were lots of babies there, it didn’t take any convincing. I went.

Having visited a variety of Protestant churches through the years, I was shocked and pleased by how many people went to Mass. (Now I understand that Catholic doctrine says that missing Mass any given week is a sin, but I didn’t know that then.) There were, in fact, lots of babies, and I got to make funny faces at every single one. There were also lots of other people my age. The attendees weren’t 90% white-haired, as I’d grown accustomed to in Protestant churches. The demographics here weren’t so skewed, and I relaxed. I fit in.

Photo by ALEXANDRE LALLEMAND on Unsplash

I wrote before that I’d joined a cult. It was at that Mass that I met the leader. Alone in a sea of people, I started to file out after we were dismissed. But a woman about my age was standing at the door, looking ready to talk to those who would pass her. My introverted impulse of “don’t look at me” briefly warred with my need for community, and the stronger of the two won. I stopped to talk with her.

Did I want to join a Catholic book club with a group of other people she’d assembled? Why yes, yes I did.

At first, doing Catholicism was great. I had two social commitments per week with Mass and book club. The guy I liked was delighted I’d gone to Mass. We started to go to Mass together, and we started dating. I felt grounded in a place of love.

But then, I found out that according to the Catholic doctrine, I shouldn’t date until I’d had an annulment. On the one hand, I liked the idea of annulments. Liked that the Church would confirm publicly what I already knew–that God had not blessed my union to a rapist. On the other hand, I couldn’t get an annulment until my divorce was final, and my divorce was dragging on longer than I’d ever feared thanks to Covid.

The guy I liked was a good Catholic boy, so he dumped me.

I was still committed at this point. Planned to get my annulment, no matter how long it took, get back with the good Catholic boy, and live happily ever after. I’d drunk the Kool-Aid of the “so you want to be a Catholic” classes, studying the story of Mother Mary and writing what I’d taken from the reading. “Trust in God and be obedient,” I wrote, “because while it may be scary at first, what He has planned is better than you ever could have hoped.” This was a message I desperately wanted to believe in, given the dumpster fire of my divorce. My kids’ dad had turned them against me, and I was trying to believe in any way possible that everything would be okay in the end. It had to be. God was watching out for me.

But then there was a sermon that dulled my sense of devotion to the faith. The priest of the week stood up in front of the congregation and presented a straw (wo)man hypothetical. In this scenario, a woman talking to her friend says her husband was a good man, she just needed to live her truth, so she was leaving him. The priest went on for a while about how this scenario had grown all too common in recent years and…honestly, I don’t know what else. I was so caught up in anger and internal rebuttals I didn’t much hear where he went with this, but I doubt I missed much.

As if most of the time, women casually throw away a good marriage to a good man on a whim? Uh, no sir! I had spent months agonizing about whether I really wanted to end things with my emotionally and sexually abusive husband, who’d admitted (to me) that he’d raped me only to later deny it again. Divorce represents an enormous emotional and financial labor. You have to restructure your entire goddamn life. No one is like, “Meh, marriage isn’t for me, I guess,” and blows their whole world apart. You know what does happen? Women get advised, by lawyers and common sense, not to talk too much about exactly what the problems were in public. Doing so can cause further backlash from the community and the courts than the divorce alone. I personally have put the majority of the gory details of my failed marriage behind a paywall, so it’s not exactly public.

What a slap in the face, to dismiss the turmoil suffered by the one who walks away. And framing it as a shameful thing women do? Oh, I was boiling.

But this was just one priest’s bad take. I’d never seen him before, and the other sermons had been so great. Hopefully he wouldn’t come up too often in rotation. I still went through with my Confirmation, officially becoming Catholic. My new boyfriend, not a good Catholic boy, got me a Mary Magdalene medallion, recognizing that I identified much more with her than with Mother Mary.

Then I took my boyfriend to my Catholic book club. I introduced him as my friend. I wasn’t allowed to be dating, but there’s no harm in having male friends, right? He read the book we were reading (What to Do When Jesus Is Hungry) and came prepared with thoughts about it. I liked his points, and appreciated the critical thinking he’d put in. But his opinion didn’t line up exactly with the leader’s opinion, so she did not like his points.

I’ve always valued an honest debate. No one is right 100% of the time, so it’s healthy to be open to considering differing viewpoints. This was not the spirit of how she argued, though. Every time he expressed his thoughts, she frowned and contradicted him in sharp ways meant to shut him down. I knew that pattern well. I’d seen it for years in the way my ex had spoken to me. My boyfriend was not conditioned to shut up and kowtow, though. He stuck up for himself long after when I would have fallen silent.

The whole episode made me feel deeply uncomfortable.

I was already thinking my boyfriend should not come to another book club meeting. Then, as we were leaving, he touched my back as we made our way out. Somehow, this small gesture was correctly interpreted to mean we were sleeping together. The leader’s husband sent me a string of texts about how I was in a sacramental marriage, and so it was sinful to sleep with someone else. That was adultery.

My ex and his dad were also sending me messages about how adulterous it was for me to date again after leaving my husband. They came at it from a more Protestant stance, where there’s no unified theory on the rules, but lots of different things to pick from if you want to quote scripture. Never mind that the divorce had been ongoing for most of a year, or that my ex had also dated in this time. He hadn’t chosen to leave, so he wasn’t at fault.

Photo by Tom Pumford on Unsplash

This brings up something I’d never realized about divorce until I was in the middle of it. There’s this assumption that the person who leaves has wronged the other, and that the divorce is their fault. But the person who leaves is the one who noticed there was something irretrievably broken in the marriage–that there’s some rot so repugnant they can no longer stand it anymore. Unless we’re assuming, like the priest with the bad take, that the person leaving is often doing so on a wild hare (which I do not), then logically it follows that the person leaving is the one who has been wronged. That the other person is at fault, for creating an environment so abysmal that the one leaving has declared it can’t be fixed, and they’re willing to demolish their whole life to get out.

I was in a sacramental marriage. Or, more accurately, a marriage that was assumed by the Catholic Church to be sacramental. We had followed the Protestant form of marriage and gotten married in a church that matched our faith, so the Catholic Church would assume that God had ordained and blessed the union until such time as an annulment tribunal judged otherwise. This is when the annulment process started looking like garbage to me. When my mindset shifted from “I get the opportunity to have it publicly recognized that God didn’t bless my union with this rapist” to “I’m supposed to pretend God blessed my union with this rapist until a panel of men from the Church determine He did not.” I’d gotten out of one controlling relationship just to get into another, with the Catholic Church.

There was another sermon about “cherry-picking Catholics” that extolled the dangers of following some church doctrines but not others. “Don’t be a cherry-picking Catholic,” the priest said, “I get enough of those at Easter and Christmas.” Moodily, I thought, I’ll be a cherry-picking Catholic, or I won’t be a Catholic. But the true breaking point came when the sermons took on a political bent.

Churches are not allowed to “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office” if they want to retain their non-taxable status. We supposedly have a separation of church and state in this country. But it was now late 2020, and Trump promised Christians he’d stack the Supreme Court with judges who hated Roe v. Wade if they backed him, so despite all the morally corrupt behavior he’d exhibited, he became The Chosen One. The Spokane bishop didn’t name him, of course, that would be too blatantly violating tax law. The bishop did say, however, that Catholics ought to consider only one issue when filling out their ballots: abortion. That’s making a statement about an issue, not a candidate. But there’s still only one interpretation of what it meant. “Vote Republican, for God’s sake.”

After this sermon, I knew I couldn’t be Catholic. I wasn’t even pro-choice back then (as I am now). But I was not, even then, someone who would ignore the big picture (how Republicans more often legislate morality, increase military spending, and defund invaluable social safety nets) in order to address one small facet of the political landscape. There were irreconcilable differences in values between myself and the Catholic Church.

I didn’t fit in.

Then the leader of the book club texted me, reiterating the point of the sermon. Getting explicit that we all had to vote Republican, to fight for those unborn babies.

I took a deep breath. I could do what I was accustomed to, and be quiet in the face of a stronger personality. But despite the growing sense that she acted a lot like my ex, I wanted to give her the chance to be different. So I responded, saying politely that I didn’t agree. I said Democrats were more likely to help those who had already been born, supporting those who were hungry and in need like we’d been taught to do. That What to Do When Jesus Is Hungry was full of stories of lifting up those in poverty, which I valued more highly than forcing women to bring children into a world with defunded safety nets.

The leader of the book club did not prove herself different from my ex. She sent me a long rant about exactly why I was wrong, questioned my moral character, and guilt-tripped me for letting her sponsor my conversion when I was so faithless.

I felt embarrassed, but not because I let her guilt-trips land. I was embarrassed to realize that while leaving the cult of one, my marriage, I’d immediately fallen in with another cult. I prayed I could avoid doing so again in the future.

Looking back, I didn’t need to feel embarrassed. I was suffering from extreme loneliness both times I fell in under cult leaders. Thankfully, I’ve never been so vulnerable since. I’ve gained confidence in standing up for my own values. I’ve grown a community around me of friends and family that support me even if they don’t always agree with me. I don’t have to do Catholicism, or any other organized religion, to feel connected. I can just be myself.