There's also a personal article from the same newspaper in Baltimore where a Catholic woman whose family history is interwoven with the Church explains why she was alienated from Catholicism.
Quote:But when I am in a Catholic church, I also think of pain.
I think of the more than 600 people who told investigators with the Maryland Office of the Attorney General that they had been sexually abused as children by a Catholic clergy member. I think of the survivors of abuse who shared their stories with me. I will never forget the horrors they endured and the immense strength with which they fought for justice.
I am keenly aware that many see the Catholic Church, and the hierarchy that covered for abusers, as irredeemable.
For many of us who grew up Catholic, the allegations of clergy sexual abuse hit close to home. One of the priests included in the attorney general’s report was a friend of my parents who visited my childhood home several times. Another priest in the report reportedly groomed and kissed on the lips a teenage relative, who fortunately told his parents before things further escalated.
For years, I identified as Catholic, even though I disagreed with much of Catholic dogma. I don’t believe premarital sex is wrong. I think birth control is great. I do not believe life begins at conception. As a bisexual person, I believe that all loving relationships between consenting adults are equally sacred. I believe all of us are created in God’s image, and that trans and nonbinary people are just as divine as everyone else — if not more so.
When my husband and I got married, we asked Father Richard Lawrence at St. Vincent de Paul to perform the ceremony. I was familiar with Father Lawrence because I had seen him passionately fight for the rights of unhoused people. I also knew that he and his parish were staunch supporters of LGBTQIA+ people.
But that generation of liberal Catholic leaders is dying off, and hundreds of thousands of laypeople, like me, no longer feel comfortable calling ourselves Catholic. In the middle of the last century, more than 250,000 Catholics worshipped in the city, yet just 5,000 to 8,000 attend Mass at city churches today.
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/opini...BARTLPBOE/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
