Revisiting: Going to hell for leaving the Catholic Church (dealing with guilt 6 years later)

[jmcrae]

Hey everyone, right around this time six years ago I posted this thread topic:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=452733

At the time I didn’t think much of it. I was in college, not quite sure of my decision, and honestly was probably calling out for someone to tell me what to do. I hadn’t ever visited the forum before, so had no idea what people would say. The early responses I got were interesting, so I thanked the posters and moved on. I never used the account again.

Recently, someone in my family has died, and they were very close to the Catholic faith. This has caused me to look back through memories, and while rummaging through the old email address I used to register for this account, I stumbled across this thread. I had no idea the thread would continue on for much longer and become so popular. Probably most of the people who participated in that thread aren’t regular posters anymore (many are banned it seems), but I thought I’d revisit the topic with a new perspective, as I now have a family and am looking to establish a good foundation for our faith. I’m not quite sure if revisiting old threads is even allowed so maybe this will get deleted, who knows.

Fast forward 6 years, I’m still not a practicing Catholic. The church’s stance on certain social issues was the main driver in my departure.

I can’t think of a single current “social issue” that isn’t an assault on the family, and especially on fatherhood, so now that you are a father perhaps at some level you are rethinking your younger opinions.

My family and I belong to a different church, but as I’m sure many people end up discovering, it never quite feels like home. When you’ve spent the first 18 years of your life learning about the sacraments, Catholic doctrine, and living by the somewhat strict rules that Catholics follow, joining another church can feel kind of bland. I want my children to be close to God, but it’s quite hard to encourage my children to be as close to God as I was growing up, because I don’t have the same fire my parents did.

So, plainly put, I’m in a pickle. I want my children to know God, and have a good faith. I’m left with a guilt in my gut, as I left my original faith (and if I had full knowledge of that faith I can’t go to heaven).

Get back to the Church, and get back to the Sacraments. Assuming you have only been married once, your marriage can be made valid in the Church. Once that’s been arranged and a date set to do it, one good Confession means you’re back on the stairway to Heaven.

 

[AnneElizabeth]

…

TL;DR - How do you act as a spiritual leader for your family, when you have a somewhat overbearing guilt of leaving your previous faith?

The same way a man, through misfortune or fault, might not have a home for his children but still takes great measures to make sure they are sheltered in any way possible, using what he can to the best of his abilities. Teach what you know, and be honest about that which you are questioning,… I can’t imagine anyone faulting you for that. I think even the best of men out there if asked would admit to questions and doubts. Do what you know is best.

Until then, keep searching. I’m not sure the faith can ever be so simple to follow. May God help us all.

 

[Sy_Noe]

Yes, thank you Sy. Perhaps it’s because I don’t have any friends in my same situation, but I’ve never heard someone else describe my experience so well.

You’re welcome.

 

[Catholic1954]

Hey everyone, right around this time six years ago I posted this thread topic:

forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=452733

At the time I didn’t think much of it. I was in college, not quite sure of my decision, and honestly was probably calling out for someone to tell me what to do. I hadn’t ever visited the forum before, so had no idea what people would say. The early responses I got were interesting, so I thanked the posters and moved on. I never used the account again.

Recently, someone in my family has died, and they were very close to the Catholic faith. This has caused me to look back through memories, and while rummaging through the old email address I used to register for this account, I stumbled across this thread. I had no idea the thread would continue on for much longer and become so popular. Probably most of the people who participated in that thread aren’t regular posters anymore (many are banned it seems), but I thought I’d revisit the topic with a new perspective, as I now have a family and am looking to establish a good foundation for our faith. I’m not quite sure if revisiting old threads is even allowed so maybe this will get deleted, who knows.

Fast forward 6 years, I’m still not a practicing Catholic. The church’s stance on certain social issues was the main driver in my departure. My family and I belong to a different church, but as I’m sure many people end up discovering, it never quite feels like home. When you’ve spent the first 18 years of your life learning about the sacraments, Catholic doctrine, and living by the somewhat strict rules that Catholics follow, joining another church can feel kind of bland. I want my children to be close to God, but it’s quite hard to encourage my children to be as close to God as I was growing up, because I don’t have the same fire my parents did.

So, plainly put, I’m in a pickle. I want my children to know God, and have a good faith. I’m left with a guilt in my gut, as I left my original faith (and if I had full knowledge of that faith I can’t go to heaven).

TL;DR - How do you act as a spiritual leader for your family, when you have a somewhat overbearing guilt of leaving your previous faith?

The guilt you are experiencing is the Holy Spirit’s way of calling you back home to the Catholic Church. Your children (or you!) will never be closer to God than when they receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Get in touch with a wise and holy priest to have a nice conversation about your issues, cares and concerns with the Church’s stand on the social issues you find troubling. A little bit of understanding and a lot of prayer will go a long way to help you find what you are seeking.

 

[Sy_Noe]

Well maybe you could start another thread on a more specific topic of the social issues. The only reason I brought it up is because the term “social issue” is so vague it is hard to understand where you are going with this thread.

Not quite sure how the church could be holding you hostage on anything. Now that you are a father you will start to feel, how God must feel, when your children start to pick and choose which rules of yours they must follow. Bookmark this thread and come back to it in about 10 years when your teenagers start to justify why they don’t need to follow your rules anymore. Maybe that will help you come to terms with the social issues.

Someone once said you can’t pick and choose which parts of the Catholic faith you want to abide by. Once you come to terms with the fact that Jesus Christ founded the Catholic Church you need to follow her. If there is a part of her teaching that you can not come to terms with, it is up to you to keep studying until you can understand why she is teaching what you don’t agree with.

Maybe not understanding the why is the reason you are feeling the guilt.

But unless you were actually there at the time of Jesus, I’m not sure how you can truly know it as fact without at least some leap of faith and belief in writings, in interpretations, in a faith’s teaching authority and with faith that it has never strayed and that there is never need for reform or an evolving understanding of issues. I always think when Catholics go around proclaiming they know, that they would be more truthful to say they think or believe they know.

 

[Sy_Noe]

Guilt is something that a lot of people experience who were brought up in conservative Christian backgrounds and then leave the church they were raised in or leave Christianity altogether. As someone from a conservative Baptist background, I’ve experienced this, too. I’m much happier being in a more liberal Lutheran church (ELCA), but at times I can’t help thinking that it would have been better if I had grown up with no religion at all.

Thorolfr, you might have experienced it then even more than I have. As I actually wasn’t even raised a conservative. Still I at times too have thought it might have been better had I not been raised in the Catholic Church. Then I wouldn’t have known what it teaches until later on perhaps, if then. But I am grateful I was raised in the ecumenical progressive spirit in which I was. I got the way I am honestly that way.

 

[Sy_Noe]

I can agree with this to an extent, particularly right after you leave the RCC after a prolonged indoctrination as a minor (even a poor indoctrination). I don’t thinking having those feelings of “guilt” are necessarily unusual. That said the “guilt” should pass if you really feel you made the right decision in leaving the RCC. If it hasn’t passed, you might want to consider the reasons why you still feel guilty after all this time. It could be you might want to reconsider being Catholic, it might be you just haven’t necessarily found your spiritual home in your current church.

I think Redman gave a reasonable answer to this when he said, “because I’m not sure”. But then again without faith and belief I’m not sure anyone can be.

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

Hi Redman,

May God send people into your life, both Protestant and Catholic, who can “solid you up” on those specific points you and your family first need help with, in the sequence God knows you need them to occur, for He knows which first things are first for each individual, and it becomes vivid through the flesh and blood of others (and sometimes partly through things we read unexpectedly). Amen

I would say, ask for His inspiration to ask your acquaintances those questions which may come as a surprise to them, but which they may have a little bit of an answer to, over and above the “official” slant of their denomination, however slight or oblique that may be.

If there’s time to keep in touch with them, don’t cut yourself off from old acquaintances too quick if there’s a spark of earnestness in them. But ask God especially that the local Catholics will have sufficiently deep and practical answers to the things God sees to be first and foremost at this time in your lives.

Don’t moralise by proxy (i.e through your image of their attitude to you), nor be perfectionist. The Catholic, i.e true Christian faith isn’t an ideology. It’s more serious than that, it’s your journey, and it’s urgent in this day and age. It’s a relationship, are the other members sharing God’s spiritual gifts with you and helping you share God’s spiritual gifts with them? May your Protestant acquaintances latch on to more of that as well. Like me and my Protestant and Catholic friends alike, maybe we were sent into their lives for a purpose.

Every parable and every incident in the Old and New Testaments is full of non-textbook people.

 

[jmcrae]

But unless you were actually there at the time of Jesus, I’m not sure how you can truly know it as fact without at least some leap of faith and belief in writings, in interpretations, in a faith’s teaching authority and with faith that it has never strayed and that there is never need for reform or an evolving understanding of issues. I always think when Catholics go around proclaiming they know, that they would be more truthful to say they think or believe they know.

What was the point of Jesus coming to earth in the first place, then, if we can’t know now what the Apostles knew then? If the Tradition has not been preserved, and if we can’t be certain of encountering Him now through the Sacraments, then His coming was a complete waste of everyone’s time.

 

[Vic_Taltrees_UK]

Redman,

I’ve been through 120 posts and the interesting points that have cropped up are, about catechesis.

Years ago the very air your teachers, and maybe parents, breathed when they in turn were instructed will have had that structure to it, that when they were presented with an intellectual body of “knowledge” such as what is in the CCC, it seemed sufficient for them to live what they were told was a Catholic life, and no doubt it was in many ways.

God knows better than anyone that in 2016 we need to keep scratching below the surface.

“Not being very well catechised” doesn’t have to reflect on your willingness to go with what you were told, which may have been exemplary. Hence there was not necessarily an attempt to invalidate your account of your experience.

Our search must be to fill in what the CCC doesn’t say about relational and existential faith, about growth in sharing spiritual gifts, about ongoing conversion, about the things you have expressed an instinct for. co-leadership among the others around you.

In my observation the most deeply needed aspects of catechesis sometimes aren’t offered, even when asked for.

The better Protestant churches have remained to a degree near the Catholic in so far as they have held on to some things the Catholic Church gave them, such as many of the mainstream meanings in Scripture. (Scripture is a series of bullet-points, aide-memoires, on which true doctrine is hung.)

Every generation moreover will have had its challenges to grasping faith and maybe some of your elders haven’t let on what theirs were! Maybe they didn’t even understand what they were!

Have loads of hope, we are all on the best journey in the world!

 

[Sy_Noe]

What was the point of Jesus coming to earth in the first place, then, if we can’t know now what the Apostles knew then? If the Tradition has not been preserved, and if we can’t be certain of encountering Him now through the Sacraments, then His coming was a complete waste of everyone’s time.

You can believe you know by faith. In mine I don’t exactly consider it a waste of time to have come to sacrifice Himself on the cross for our salvation.

 

[jmcrae]

You can believe you know by faith. In mine I don’t exactly consider it a waste of time to have come to sacrifice Himself on the cross for our salvation.

We know that from the Holy Tradition, though. If you can’t rely on the Holy Tradition, you can’t know that that happened.

 

[Sy_Noe]

We know that from the Holy Tradition, though. If you can’t rely on the Holy Tradition, you can’t know that that happened.

I don’t know that he died for our sins. I believe it though. By faith. Otherwise I’d be Jewish or something other than what I am. You don’t have to be a practicing Catholic to believe that.

 

[MT1926]

But unless you were actually there at the time of Jesus, I’m not sure how you can truly know it as fact without at least some leap of faith and belief in writings, in interpretations, in a faith’s teaching authority and with faith that it has never strayed and that there is never need for reform or an evolving understanding of issues. I always think when Catholics go around proclaiming they know, that they would be more truthful to say they think or believe they know.

Yes you are correct, we all have to take a leap of Faith, but I consider my leap a logical leap of Faith. To me it is common sense, I am a father and a business man and a part time farmer. We are Gods children and my fatherly logic shows me that my children, just like us his children, will justify the rules to suit our needs. Not believing that Jesus left an authority here on earth is the only logical reason why it is possible for us to argue over interpretations of scripture. I also, raise sheep and have discovered there is a reason Jesus repeatedly calls us his sheep. It is not because sheep are stupid, it is because, just like us, they are somewhat helpless and will actually put themselves in harms way in order to get what they want. I had one lamb, standing in a full field of grass hang itself in an attempt to taste the grass on the outside of the field. Finally and most importantly I am a business man. I can grantee you that I am in no way even close to being as smart as Jesus. In my minuscule mind I can recognize that if I am not in charge and I let my employees handle things any way they like, my business will be doomed to fail. Why would I ever think Jesus would leave this world without leaving a visible Church to lead us? Once I am willing to accept the above to say that the original Church might have failed would be to call Jesus a liar.

Matthew 16:18
18 And I tell you, you are Peter,[a] and on this rock** I will build my church, and the powers of death[c] shall not prevail against it.[d]

Logically speaking if I were to believe Jesus was not capable of keeping the Catholic church from failing why would I be willing to take a leap of faith for any other church?

So yes I believe we should follow the original church Jesus founded, whether it be the Catholic Church or some other church you can prove existed from the beginning. But logic and common sense tells me that any gap in the existence of Jesus’ Church is a man made church. But I logically believe this, not because someone convinced me to believe this.**

 

[exnihilo]

But unless you were actually there at the time of Jesus, I’m not sure how you can truly know it as fact without at least some leap of faith and belief in writings, in interpretations, in a faith’s teaching authority and with faith that it has never strayed and that there is never need for reform or an evolving understanding of issues. I always think when Catholics go around proclaiming they know, that they would be more truthful to say they think or believe they know.

A lot depends on how you look at epistemology. We could be skeptical about everything. We could use the word ‘think’ or ‘believe’ regarding every possible historical event.

With regards to the Church if you start with the idea that the Church will not teach error then it is rather easy to know she hasn’t taught error. If you start with the idea that you are the authority on the Christian Faith then it is easy to determine she has taught error.

 

[Sy_Noe]

Yes you are correct, we all have to take a leap of Faith, but I consider my leap a logical leap of Faith. To me it is common sense, I am a father and a business man and a part time farmer. We are Gods children and my fatherly logic shows me that my children, just like us his children, will justify the rules to suit our needs. Not believing that Jesus left an authority here on earth is the only logical reason why it is possible for us to argue over interpretations of scripture. I also, raise sheep and have discovered there is a reason Jesus repeatedly calls us his sheep. It is not because sheep are stupid, it is because, just like us, they are somewhat helpless and will actually put themselves in harms way in order to get what they want. I had one lamb, standing in a full field of grass hang itself in an attempt to taste the grass on the outside of the field. Finally and most importantly I am a business man. I can grantee you that I am in no way even close to being as smart as Jesus. In my minuscule mind I can recognize that if I am not in charge and I let my employees handle things any way they like, my business will be doomed to fail. Why would I ever think Jesus would leave this world without leaving a visible Church to lead us? Once I am willing to accept the above to say that the original Church might have failed would be to call Jesus a liar.

Matthew 16:18
18 And I tell you, you are Peter,[a] and on this rock** I will build my church, and the powers of death[c] shall not prevail against it.[d]

Logically speaking if I were to believe Jesus was not capable of keeping the Catholic church from failing why would I be willing to take a leap of faith for any other church?

So yes I believe we should follow the original church Jesus founded, whether it be the Catholic Church or some other church you can prove existed from the beginning. But logic and common sense tells me that any gap in the existence of Jesus’ Church is a man made church. But I logically believe this, not because someone convinced me to believe this.**

I respect the above. But still after all that said, in the end when you get right down to it, it still simply reverts back to what one has faith and belief in. As you know Protestants don’t place the same faith in the interpretation of Matt 16 as do Catholics. As for myself, I personally am not even convinced that even if the Catholic version of the Church was so, that Jesus would never need to lead His church in a different direction along the way so that indeed those powers of which you speak do not prevail. It would still be His.

Humans exist here on earth with finite understanding. Their understanding of an infinite God, I believe, may evolve over time. The best we can do is to have our faith and beliefs as we walk this journey and we will truly know a) when we die or b) by sight if in the meantime by faith He comes again. God bless you all on your faith walks. Peace to all as we journey.

 

[PRmerger]

Guilt is something that a lot of people experience who were brought up in conservative Christian backgrounds and then leave the church they were raised in or leave Christianity altogether. As someone from a conservative Baptist background, I’ve experienced this, too. I’m much happier being in a more liberal Lutheran church (ELCA), but at times I can’t help thinking that it would have been better if I had grown up with no religion at all.

There’s nothing wrong with guilt.

Guilt, like pain, can be a sign that you’re doing something that is bad for you.

There is, of course, a mentally unhealthy guilt that’s not consonant with reality.

But it should be stated that there is nothing wrong the concept of having guilt.

If someone has it, it’s probably because he needs to re-examine his actions.

 

[PRmerger]

So, plainly put, I’m in a pickle. I want my children to know God, and have a good faith. I’m left with a guilt in my gut, as I left my original faith (and if I had full knowledge of that faith I can’t go to heaven).

Why don’t we start with whether you can provide a knowledgeable apologia of the Catholic teaching on divorce and re-marriage? What does she teach on this, and why?

 

[jmcrae]

I don’t know that he died for our sins. I believe it though. By faith. Otherwise I’d be Jewish or something other than what I am. You don’t have to be a practicing Catholic to believe that.

At some point along the way you need to have had practicing Catholic spiritual ancestors to know that, though.

I don’t think the Reformers even claim to have gotten their teachings from new revelation - rather, they took the Roman Catholic faith and simply shaved off the parts they didn’t like.

 

[PRmerger]

At some point along the way you need to have had practicing Catholic spiritual ancestors to know that, though.

I don’t think the Reformers even claim to have gotten their teachings from new revelation - rather, they took the Roman Catholic faith and simply shaved off the parts they didn’t like.

Indeed. Without the Catholic Church, one couldn’t know anything at all about what God has revealed.

(NB: It is true that we can use the light of our human reason and intellect alone to come to an understanding of God’s existence, and we can know that there is only One God, not many through the use of our reason alone…but as far as the truths of Christianity, we can only know these truths through an implicit submission to the authority of the CC).