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leaving catholicism...i know about this too. your situation sounds much like that of my mother, who was raised very conservative french/rosewater catholic and who decided (or was told--it's hard to say) when she and my father divorced that she was excommunicated. while i understood the "logic" of such a position, having to do with some notion of "god's will" and church rules as a reflection of that will, a situation that was always bizarre but went into the surreal in the 1860s when the pope declared himself "infallible on spiritual matters" which apparently extended to all rules...while i understood the "logic" i never understood the logic, if you know what i mean.
i'm sure i don't need to tell you about the myriad problems that have set the us catholic church against rome, particularly against the most recent sequence of utterly reactionary popes (j-p 2 and ratzinger) over the question of the us church being too permissive amongst the laity and not servile enough to rome. fact is that the situation of the catholic church has been changing, and profoundly, in the united states since after world war 2--it was knit into a way of being in a neighborhood, particularly in cities, what was wiped out by cars, by a different type of social mobility, etc. "permissiveness" meant adapting to changing circumstances, but on an ad hoc basis. the alternative was irrelevance. the vatican never quite seemed to get this basic fact.
whether you happened to be in a more "permissive" or conservative parish was chance-driven, and what resulted from that chance probably quite painful, if you were brought up catholic and believed, just in the way any protestant does, that the particular rituals that you were used to were the way to exercise your faith.
i know far more people who've left the church than who've stayed, and this for a huge array of reasons ranging from the silencing of liberation theology to positions on divorce and/or birth control and/or homosexuality that come out of some retro-nightmare to scandals involving priests to the arrogance of rome to matters of simple and direct loss of faith or interest in the machinery that for some at least generate it. and folk left in as many ways as they are folk. they're all the same in the end: you do what you feel you need to do.
for what it's worth, my relation to catholicism is mostly this: i like going to cathederals and once in a great while showing up for mass because i like the theater of it. but i don't believe any of it. i haven't believed any of it for a very long time. i find the structure of belief interesting but mostly as a logical or ideological problem. apart from the pretty clothes and ritual---and apart from occaisonal anger at this or that reactionary outburst from the vatican---it means nothing to me.
there are certain ritual points though that can be interesting---baptism is one of them---or not.
others, like funerals, particularly for a loved one, can be comforting.
in the end, i think people take from the experience what they need and leave everything else behind, one way or another.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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