Catastrophic loss of faith

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ChristMyLife

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Is anyone else going through a catastrophic loss of faith? My faith is totally gone.
 
Faith is a gift given by God. You received this gift at your Baptism, it was strengthened at your Confirmation and it is sustained by the Sacraments.

Are you currently practicing the Faith? Going to Mass and Confession?

Do you pray?
 
Can you explain a little more? Do you have a loss of faith as in you are struggling to believe in God, Jesus, Catholicism, or such? Or do you mean you have a big loss of faith in such things, and don’t trust them?
 
Sure. Sounds like a classic case of “Adulthood in a Secularized Society”.

For me, I believe because I choose to. Not because it’s somehow self evident.

I think the metaphysical exists (good, bad, truth, beauty) and as such I think those things require a source just like galaxies do.
 
Not currently, but I have. Multiple times. I even left Christianity as a whole for a few years when I was younger. Just last year, I had such a rapid, catastrophic loss of faith due to a theological issue I had been pondering, it lead to an existential crisis and emotional breakdown in the middle of a restaurant with my wife. Even now, doubts and uncertainties “darken my door” every day, even while I pray or read Scripture. It has become such a regular part of my spiritual life, that doubt has become an odd ally of mine.

My younger brother has, and he is just now slowly coming back to faith.

I won’t pry into your reasons. It isn’t my place to ask. Just know, you aren’t alone. The lack of feeling or certainty or confidence is hard and sometimes devastating, but what faith we have is from God, not ourselves. If you WANT to have faith, you still have a small measure of it, even if it is still so small that you feel like you have nothing.
 
Fortunately, I have not experienced this. I would hope I never do, but we can’t know everything the Lord has planned for us.

I will pray for you to please get an immediate transfusion of Faith from the Holy Spirit. Your job is to be open to this gift and to pray daily that you may receive it, until you get it.
 
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Best advice I have is don’t try to think your way out of it. Reading all the philosophical arguments and apologetics treatises under the sun isn’t going to help. It’s not an intellectual problem.

Just take a breath, pray, and be patient. And try not to freak out.
 
I’m with you. It started in August around the time of the Pennsylvania report followed by the McCarrick allegations and then the Vigano testimony. I tried to repair / restore my faith, but it gradually slipped away. I missed it at first, but now I’m relieved that I’m over it. To be quite honest, I felt like I was taken as a fool for decades by believing in these stories, miracles, etc. of the faith. These last few years have proven to me that the Church is nothing supernatural, but is just one of many religions started and led by mere humans.

I already know that we’ve always had sinners in the Church, etc. What makes it different this time is the Pope himself not really seeming to want to tackle multiple issues related to sexuality and homosexuality in the Church. And then, he (along with other Vatican clergy) went so far as saying those seeking the truth were “great accusers.” The Church these days is moving in a direction that conveniently aligns with many secular notions of equality and left-wing principles. The difference with the Catholic Church is that it just takes longer to get there.

And let me guess, ChristMyLife - have you had any kind of intervention from your “guardian angel” or the Blessed Mother to help you come back to the faith? I sure haven’t. Nobody really cares that we leave the Church.

Not trying to troll or cause problems, but I’m honestly to the point where if the whole Church just shut down tomorrow and disappeared from the face of the earth, I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.
 
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This bit from the CCC may help

31 Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of “converging and convincing arguments”, which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These “ways” of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.

32 The world : starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.

As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.7

And St. Augustine issues this challenge: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky. . . question all these realities. All respond: “See, we are beautiful.” Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?8

33 The human person : with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”,9 can have its origin only in God.

34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.10

35 Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.
 
I went through a catastrophic loss of faith in 2016. It was like something tripped a main breaker, leaving me unable to believe in God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Within a few hours, I went from a pro-life, God-fearing, Christian to an atheist. Over a two week period, following those hours, I came to realize that no matter how much I prayed, begged, and tried to appeal to my God to stay with me and not leave me, nor let me truly lose my faith, what I asked for was not going to be granted. It was truly hell.

Today, I am stuck with all the consequences of the life I created as a believer working toward holiness, except for one thing, I have no god. It’s not easy because I had been a catholic who honestly tried to live the teachings of the church.

My marriage had ended a few years before my loss of faith, leaving me a single mother of many living children. Some of those children have chronic health issues that developed in childhood/adolescence and another is developmentally delayed. I also have health issues. The marriage ended because my ex had no problem starting a new life with another woman and since I didn’t like his girlfriend, we separated and I filed for divorce. None of the pastors nor the bishop showed any concern for the situation and none were willing to offer any pastoral counseling. But I leaned on God and trusted that all things would work out for His greater glory because I loved Him. And then He left me too!

I dunno. Faith is a gift. I am so sorry for your loss, you have my deepest sympathy.
 
I can identify with bobperk a lot. I haven’t completely lost my faith but I just feel empty inside. Every now and then I’ll get some comforting thoughts but they don’t last very long. I had a pretty good night tonight but reading about Pell, about the failure of the summit, I just feel drained.
 
Kreeft, quoting Pascal in the first paragraph

If you are unable to believe, it is because of your passions since reason impels you to believe and yet you cannot do so. Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God’s existence but by diminishing your passions. You want to find faith, and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief, and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have. . . . They behaved just as if they did believe.

This is the same advice Dostoevsky’s guru, Father Zossima, gives to the “woman of little faith” in The Brothers Karamazov . The behavior Pascal mentions is “taking holy water, having Masses said, and so on”. The behavior Father Zossima counsels to the same end is “active and indefatigable love of your neighbor.” In both cases, living the Faith can be a way of getting the Faith. As Pascal says: “That will make you believe quite naturally and will make you more docile.” “But that is what I am afraid of.’’ ''But why? What have you to lose?”
 
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ChristMyLife said:
My faith is totally gone.
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Then just do the same things you would do if you had faith. Follow the commandments. Act in the best interests of the people around you – family, friends, people in your workplace and neighborhood.

Go ahead and pray, even if it’s like “God, I’m not sure you even exist, but if you’re out there, hear my prayer, and help me. And thank you.”

It’s kind of like sailing your small boat toward the land. If you can’t see the land, use navigation tools. If your navigation tools fail, watch for birds; they usually know where land is. Keep moving.
 
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Not true at all. The sacraments are means of our healing. They have produced many, many saints including many many who were never publicly canonized. It all depends on your disposition. I pray for those who have lost faith, but remember that faith often goes through a dark period, such as that experienced by Therese of Lisieux who, in the last year of her life, was in utter darkness and just kept repeating the Creed although as she stated she felt nothing about its convictions.
 
bobperk said:
And let me guess, ChristMyLife - have you had any kind of intervention from your “guardian angel” or the Blessed Mother to help you come back to the faith? I sure haven’t. Nobody really cares that we leave the Church.
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This is incorrect. Obviously, us posters on CAF care, or we wouldn’t be trying to encourage or persuade people to get their faith back and praying for them to get their faith back.

Who is to say that God, Mary and the saints and angels don’t work through or with us humans on earth who try to help and pray?

Just because you haven’t experienced any big dramatic resurgence of your faith or apparition or anything, and haven’t been persuaded by arguments on here, doesn’t mean that “nobody cares”. It’s really sad that you would say that in the middle of a thread with over a dozen posts from people who obviously care very much about the OP losing his faith.

Also, don’t you think it’s a bit wrong for you to be posting discouraging things on the thread of another poster who says his faith is almost gone? It’s one thing for you to say, “Yeah, I’m in the same boat too, I can relate”, but then you go on to say, “And let me guess, you haven’t heard from Mary yet, that’s proof that nobody cares.” Seriously? With an attitude like that, I wonder if you’re even fully open to receiving God’s gift of faith. At the very least, don’t take an extra swing at destroying what’s left of somebody else’s.
 
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I go through periods of dryness but I keep practicing and praying even if they’re short prayers. I went through a period of dryness and depression over the winter which was why I haven’t been on here a lot. Winter is never a good time for me.

Usually I just give it time because I find it comes and goes.
 
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When a remedy is efficacious, the testimonials of its effectiveness are visibles… If the sacraments acted as a effectively remedy against sins, and as a strengthening of virtues effectively, practicing Catholics on average would have a much more virtuous life than non-Catholics; and the priests would be the most virtuous people in the world, the bishops even more … And that would be visible, a virtuous life is visible.
 
A virtuous life is not always “visible” because people who are living truly virtuously are often very quiet, anonymous and unnoticed about it.

The people I see receiving sacraments daily and weekly are a pretty holy bunch, but they don’t go around advertising it and generally go unnoticed.

Many if not most priests I know are also very holy and are living visibly virtuous lives. Visibly because they are in the public eye of their parishes.
 
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The only provisions that are required to take the Eucharist with fruit, is to be in a state of grace, and, not to take the Eucharist for whimsical reasons
Our Faith asks us to believe that the sacraments are remedies against sin. But our experience proves that these are not effective remedies
 
I didn’t mean to take an extra swing or discourage the OP from anything. I was trying to relate. From the initial post, I couldn’t really tell if the OP was trying to restore / regain their faith or not. And I do know that people care on here. I have posted on here many times trying to help people with faith questions myself. So I do apologize for saying that; I’m sorry.

I feel a connection to the OP because I would also consider my loss to be “catastrophic” because I took this all so seriously for so long. Making sure to follow all the Church teachings, volunteering in my parish, reading usually 3-4 Catholic theology / spirituality books per month, praying the rosary daily, etc. The last one is what hurts me to be honest…how I faithfully prayed the rosary each day for years, sacrificing time where it would have been easier to just not do it. I thought it was supposed to give me some kind of “protection” or whatever you want to call it, but all it really was was a decision I made to say some words each morning; that’s how I feel now. There was not some type of “spiritual pull” to keep saying it, no sense of the “15 promises” of the rosary being fulfilled, etc. Honestly, my decision to stop saying it seemed as mundane as changing what I eat for breakfast each morning.

I think it’s important in a thread like this for folks to express what they are feeling and what led them to their decision. And I very much do feel in a way that at first, I didn’t leave the Church, but that it “left me.” I didn’t wake up one day and just say to myself, “hey, I’m going to stop believing today.” I just got tired of trying to justify the Church’s teachings against the sins of many clergy and what seems right now like the inevitable trajectory of a Church which doesn’t really uphold the truth, a Church which is being easily swayed by liberal / progressive secular culture. The last few years (to me) have framed the Catholic Church of the future as one that believes and will teach that it’s just one of many valid religions.

Again, apologies if I seemed to steer things in the wrong direction. But the OP asked if anyone else was going through this - I’m sure they appreciate the help, but I answered their question.
 
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