S
sdeco
Guest
I am a cradle Catholic who always used to love being Catholic. I had a strong faith from a young age. I always hear about people getting away from the church in their youth, but I had a strong faith all throughout my teen years and college years. In fact, when I was only 17 I broke up with my boyfriend because he was not Catholic and was absolutely not willing to raise any children Catholic if we ever got married. I was already committed to marrying another Catholic and raising my kids Catholic, even at that age.
My husband and I met when we were freshman in college, dated all throughout college, and got married one year after graduation. We were both practicing Catholics committed to premarital chastity, NFP, possibly having a large family, raising kids Catholic, and so on.
To make a very long story as short as possible, we used NFP for ten years and had four children, all surprises while trying to avoid pregnancy. I have a health condition – polycystic ovarian syndrome – that makes NFP extremely difficult. I tried so many things over the years to make NFP work - multiple methods, diet, medications, and having an erosion on my cervix cauterized. I’ve been going to an NFP-only doctor for many years. It took several years and multiple doctors just to get my PCOS diagnosed. Even the NFP-only doctors had a hard time diagnosing me.
Additionally, each pregnancy was connected to a traumatic event. When I was pregnant with my first I was fired from my job for being pregnant. (I know this because a former boss called and told me. We tried to sue but it didn’t work out – we didn’t have enough evidence).
When I was pregnant with the second I had a very dangerous complication (severe preeclampsia) that could have killed both me and the baby. I developed PTSD and panic attacks from that experience.
When I was pregnant with the third it was a huge crisis in my marriage. My husband, who wanted a large family before we got married, had changed his mind and only wanted two kids, and was threatening divorce if we didn’t use birth control.
When I was pregnant with the fourth the same thing happened, and my husband ended up getting a vasectomy. He has pretty much completely lost his faith at this point – in large part because of our experience with NFP – and is now agnostic. I kind of feel like his loss of faith was my “fault” to an extent, because my body betrayed me and just wouldn’t cooperate.
And then there were the multiple pregnancy scares I had – all the times I was sick to my stomach with worry because I thought I had yet another surprise pregnancy, and we had serious reasons to avoid.
And then there’s just the sheer physical brutality of pregnancy and childbirth and taking care of babies – the miserable morning sickness, the burning C-section pain that lasted for months, the constant sickness and health problems I had from the sleep deprivation involved with taking care of babies.
And ON TOP of all this I keep hearing about absolutely horrible things that can happen during pregnancy, things I never even knew existed before I had kids, like hyperemesis and HELLP syndrome and cardiac damage caused by pregnancy. The absolute worst case I heard about was the case in Phoenix a few years back where a Catholic hospital performed an abortion on a woman with pulmonary hypertension who would have almost certainly died if the pregnancy had continued. The bishop stripped the hospital of their Catholic status because they had performed an abortion.
I have always been very, very pro-life, and I have even been active in the pro-life movement, yet this case just shook me to my core. I had flashbacks to my own health crisis with my second baby. The thought that such a situation exists – where the only way to save the mother’s life is abortion – is utterly horrifying to me. I had always previously believed that such cases never existed. Can you imagine having a hospital stripped of the Eucharist and their Catholic status because of an action taken to save your life?! I don’t think I could be Catholic anymore after that. Now, a lot of Catholics were saying that abortion was actually not the only way to save this woman’s life, and I really, really hope they’re right. I just fear they are not.
And the icing on the cake is that fact that pregnancy seems to be central to Catholic theology. The fact that women can get pregnant is THE most important fact about them according to Catholic theology of gender. It’s central to the theology of the body, to JPII’s “feminine genius,” to the spousal imagery between God and his people. The fact that God created us this way on purpose, and that it is SO central to everything, makes me angry, quite frankly. It tempts me towards atheism. I mean, does God hate women? Did he deliberately create them to be lesser?
AND THEN there’s the fact that following church teaching on contraception has made me a “worse” Catholic in a lot of ways. The more kids I have, the harder it is to find time to pray, the harder it is to get to confession, the harder it is to pay attention at mass, the harder it is to go to mass period, and so on.
Sometimes I feel like my faith is hanging by a thread. Being Catholic was great when all of this was theoretical. Now, not so much. I feel like I always hear the opposite story, about how someone was away from the church and fornicating and cohabiting and contracepting, and then they embraced church teaching and everything became wonderful. What if you have the opposite experience? Has anyone else been through a similar crisis of faith?
My husband and I met when we were freshman in college, dated all throughout college, and got married one year after graduation. We were both practicing Catholics committed to premarital chastity, NFP, possibly having a large family, raising kids Catholic, and so on.
To make a very long story as short as possible, we used NFP for ten years and had four children, all surprises while trying to avoid pregnancy. I have a health condition – polycystic ovarian syndrome – that makes NFP extremely difficult. I tried so many things over the years to make NFP work - multiple methods, diet, medications, and having an erosion on my cervix cauterized. I’ve been going to an NFP-only doctor for many years. It took several years and multiple doctors just to get my PCOS diagnosed. Even the NFP-only doctors had a hard time diagnosing me.
Additionally, each pregnancy was connected to a traumatic event. When I was pregnant with my first I was fired from my job for being pregnant. (I know this because a former boss called and told me. We tried to sue but it didn’t work out – we didn’t have enough evidence).
When I was pregnant with the second I had a very dangerous complication (severe preeclampsia) that could have killed both me and the baby. I developed PTSD and panic attacks from that experience.
When I was pregnant with the third it was a huge crisis in my marriage. My husband, who wanted a large family before we got married, had changed his mind and only wanted two kids, and was threatening divorce if we didn’t use birth control.
When I was pregnant with the fourth the same thing happened, and my husband ended up getting a vasectomy. He has pretty much completely lost his faith at this point – in large part because of our experience with NFP – and is now agnostic. I kind of feel like his loss of faith was my “fault” to an extent, because my body betrayed me and just wouldn’t cooperate.
And then there were the multiple pregnancy scares I had – all the times I was sick to my stomach with worry because I thought I had yet another surprise pregnancy, and we had serious reasons to avoid.
And then there’s just the sheer physical brutality of pregnancy and childbirth and taking care of babies – the miserable morning sickness, the burning C-section pain that lasted for months, the constant sickness and health problems I had from the sleep deprivation involved with taking care of babies.
And ON TOP of all this I keep hearing about absolutely horrible things that can happen during pregnancy, things I never even knew existed before I had kids, like hyperemesis and HELLP syndrome and cardiac damage caused by pregnancy. The absolute worst case I heard about was the case in Phoenix a few years back where a Catholic hospital performed an abortion on a woman with pulmonary hypertension who would have almost certainly died if the pregnancy had continued. The bishop stripped the hospital of their Catholic status because they had performed an abortion.
I have always been very, very pro-life, and I have even been active in the pro-life movement, yet this case just shook me to my core. I had flashbacks to my own health crisis with my second baby. The thought that such a situation exists – where the only way to save the mother’s life is abortion – is utterly horrifying to me. I had always previously believed that such cases never existed. Can you imagine having a hospital stripped of the Eucharist and their Catholic status because of an action taken to save your life?! I don’t think I could be Catholic anymore after that. Now, a lot of Catholics were saying that abortion was actually not the only way to save this woman’s life, and I really, really hope they’re right. I just fear they are not.
And the icing on the cake is that fact that pregnancy seems to be central to Catholic theology. The fact that women can get pregnant is THE most important fact about them according to Catholic theology of gender. It’s central to the theology of the body, to JPII’s “feminine genius,” to the spousal imagery between God and his people. The fact that God created us this way on purpose, and that it is SO central to everything, makes me angry, quite frankly. It tempts me towards atheism. I mean, does God hate women? Did he deliberately create them to be lesser?
AND THEN there’s the fact that following church teaching on contraception has made me a “worse” Catholic in a lot of ways. The more kids I have, the harder it is to find time to pray, the harder it is to get to confession, the harder it is to pay attention at mass, the harder it is to go to mass period, and so on.
Sometimes I feel like my faith is hanging by a thread. Being Catholic was great when all of this was theoretical. Now, not so much. I feel like I always hear the opposite story, about how someone was away from the church and fornicating and cohabiting and contracepting, and then they embraced church teaching and everything became wonderful. What if you have the opposite experience? Has anyone else been through a similar crisis of faith?