One cannot really be Catholic and grown up

I've been an atheist for as long as I can remember, even though my parents tried to half-heartedly impart Catholic doctrine on me by sending me to CCD classes. In my young mind, if Santa Claus brought gifts and the Tooth Fairy brought money and the Easter Bunny brought candy but all of them ultimately turned out to be make-believe, why would I place faith in an invisible man in the sky who, at best, would bring me salvation but more likely would send me to a pit of fire for all eternity for breaking arbitrary rules?

The nun who conducted my religious education classes, Sister Mary Francis or Sister Peter Marie or Sister I Never Wanted Kids Because I Hate the Little Beasts and This Was the Only Socially Acceptable Way at the Time to Avoid That Horrible Reproductive Burden, was a scary woman. Even carried the holy ruler of knuckle rapping. When I returned to classes after missing a week, I noticed one of the other kids had a broken nose and I was convinced Sister had done it because Mike didn't stand quickly enough to recite The Lord's Prayer.

What confused me more was that my mom, who was raised as a Presbyterian and converted to Catholicism only for marriage, and my dad, who was raised Catholic (and once stole money earmarked for starving African children from a church-sponsored program), never went to church. None of my family attended regular services. If it wasn't good enough for them, why torture me with it? It was a question I asked often.

My paternal grandfather and his three siblings were raised Methodist by their Swedish mother, who was left to care for the kids on her own after her Irish husband froze to death after a night of drinking in their hometown of Dorchester, Massachusetts. You know, it's Boston. It happens. And my grandfather never missed a chance to badmouth the Church, although he'd agreed to raise all seven of his kids Catholic with his Italian-Portuguese wife.

In the 1960s, my grandfather suffered from a blood disorder and was in and out of hospitals for more than a year. Because he provided the sole income, the family briefly went on welfare to survive, but that didn't stop him from trying to donate money to the Church, which is what any respectable family who wanted to stay in the diocese's good graces did at the time. Except the Church didn't want his money, as he told anyone within earshot when a conversation even remotely touched on a Catholic-ish subject.

"Did you hear that Eva Marie is going to Rome for vacation this summer?" someone would ask innocently. "ROME?!" he'd answer. "Well, she can go spit on the Vatican for me because those bastards wouldn't take my $50 donation. Sent it back because they told me it wasn't enough. Not enough? Wasn't it enough that..." and he'd trail off, but all of the adults seemed to know the ending.

I wasn't a very good Catholic. I never made any of the sacraments. Not penance. Or communion. Or confirmation. But I was christened as a baby, so the Church still claims my soul, as my Polish-Catholic math teacher explained to me in high school. God'll get ya one way or another.

In third or fourth grade, a couple of years behind the other kids, I tried to make my penance, whose rituals are largely unknown to me but seemed to include admitting that I was a filthy, dirty human being who didn't deserve to bask within the glory of God but if I'd confess to my sins, maybe I'd have a shot when I got to the pearly gates.

After my mom dropped me off for penance rehearsal, I was utterly lost because although I'd attended CCD classes off-and-on for a few years, I'd never, uh, actually been inside of a church, at least not in any memorable fashion. So, when I saw other kids going inside a tiny booth, I assumed it was the bathroom and since I didn't have to go and I was getting bored of sitting around, I went to a pay phone and called my grandfather to pick me up.

That was the end of my illustrious career as a student of Catholicism, but certainly not the end of the stream of letters begging us to donate money to replace the church's stained glass windows and add to the coffers to fight or to settle the molestation-related lawsuits that were starting to be filed (and which have nothing to do with "gay" priests).

And as I got older and a little wiser and better at forcing gossip out of my family, I discovered the ending to my grandfather's sentence. "Wasn't it enough that... they let a priest go unpunished for molesting one of my kids?"

If I'd had any faith left at that point, knowing that my uncle had been abused by a man of God and had been coldly dismissed by the church that was meant to spiritually nurture him would have killed it. My uncle is only 12 years older than I am -- you know how those Catholic families are -- so I watched him grow up in a sense, and I saw how destroyed he was because of what happened to him.

I never understood why my parents or my grandparents or my aunts and uncles would want the next generation to be part of such an abusive, shame-producing machine, but that's the heart of tradition, isn't it? Doing something or believing something because that's how it's always been, no matter how much it flies in the face of past experience, logic, progress or one's best interests.

So, when I read that Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage legislation in California, passed and that the effort was supported in large part by the Mormon Church, and then later read about a Catholic priest accusing parishioners of being in bed with evil for voting for Obama, my initial reaction was, "Fuck you, you narrow-minded, backward mouthbreathers."

But after reflecting on it, is it that different from my family's response to a family member being abused? When you're raised in a faith and it's helped tie together your family and gave you comfort when the world seemed so confusing and dangerous, you're not going to change overnight. You're going to cling to what you know, to what makes sense to you, even if it makes no sense to others. I don't understand the mentality of those who think that gay marriage or legalized abortion are going to somehow destroy the fabric of society when thousands of years of true horrors have yet to cause the complete collapse of civilization, but then, how many of them would look at my family and wonder what the hell they were thinking? Because I still do.