Why Do Catholics Leave the Church?

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Three reasons? These will be broad, but here I go.
  1. A lack of understanding as to the truth of the Church.
  2. A failure to internalize their faith
  3. A refusal to even try to forego their own feelings of what is right and wrong and submit to the Church’s teachings
 
  1. Ignorance of the faith
  2. An improperly formed conscience
  3. Personal moral issues
 
  1. They received poor spiritual formation/catechetical instruction.
  2. They are unwilling to submit to authority.
  3. They fail to separate the sins of individuals from the constant and infallible teachings of the Church.
 
  1. From my perspective, divorce is #1;
  2. Refussal to submit to Church authority, i.e.
    misunderstanding of the real meaning of Pope’s
    infallibility;
  3. They don’t understand truth, depth and richness of
    the Blessed Mother, Communion of Saints and
    Holy Eucharist because of improper instruction in
    their formative years.
…The Blessed Mother’s Blessing:
I bless you with the blessings of the Blessed Mother and may the power of
the Holy Spirit come upon you.

Shannin
 
I’m only personally familiar with a few instances. These involved:
  1. Feeling rejected by a parish priest.
  2. Getting married and the spouse would not agree to be married in the Catholic Church.
 
  1. Does not understand Church teaching
  2. Does not understand Church teaching
  3. Does not understand Church teaching
Of course this only applies to those who go on to other ‘faith rich’ religions, there are masses who just back slide.
 
One big one can be summed up into PRIDE. Many average Joe Catholics believe they know religion better than the Magisterium (the very thought of this is quite preposterous), although, of course, if you ask them what the Magisterium is, they’ve never heard of it.

They cling to things such as believing that
  1. their spouse is more important than salvation
  2. a “woman’s right to choose” is more important than salvation
  3. “freedom” is more important than salvation
 
I’d say:
  1. Don’t understand or love their Faith (or choose not to - even if you don’t know intellectually about the Faith, you can still know it’s right)
  2. Have conversion experience outside the Church. People do need experience of conversion throughout their whole life, but many fall away then are snached up by protestants (whose churches seem far more ‘exciting’). They should have experiences of conversion through the sacraments (Cf. No. 1)
  3. Don’t have the humility to submit to the truth, even if they know it/come to know it in their heart.
 
  1. Poor catechesis
  2. Selfishness – too many worldly influences
  3. Better social life at the protestant church down the street.
Seriously, I do believe that it can all be chalked up to sin and / or poor catechesis. I couldn’t think of a #3, so I put down that answer about the protestant church b/c that is what my brother did. He had no theological quibbles with the CC, really – it’s just that he and his [baptist] wife both had lots of friends at an evangelical church. Perhaps fellowship sucks more Catholics into protestant churches than we realize.

But that vacuum only works on the poorly catechized. 🙂
 
LaSalle said:
1. Does not understand Church teaching
  1. Does not understand Church teaching
  2. Does not understand Church teaching
Click to expand...
  1. Amen.
  2. Amen.
  3. Amen.
 
  1. Ignorance
  2. Spouse/Significant Other
  3. Arrogance
Ignorance has to be the main reason. If every Catholic truly knew what they believed (and in some cases, why they believe it), no one would leave.
 
I left for twenty years and I know what my reasons were:
  1. Apparent deadness in the Church
  2. A priest who said he knew nothing of the Bible
  3. Evangelical radio and Baptist “friends”
In addition to this our Faith is very complex. It takes a lot to understand the Sacraments and why the Mass is Heaven on earth. Young people are not taught that as they should be. As a convert I was not taught that. As a result the Mass seems like dead ritual and the simplicity of Evangelicalism is attractive.

Keep in mind, Evangelicals have organizations such as “Missions to Catholics” and “Christians Evangelizing Catholics.” As long as they are so zealous to remove people from the Church and we poorly teach our young people, we will see our members leave.

Gloria
 
  1. Unwilling to obey church laws. 2. Not wanting to do anything within the church except to show up for mass once a week. 3. The attractiveness of some feel good evangelical churches.
 
Reasons why many leave the Church, given in no particular order.

(1) Run-in with a bad priest.

(2) Too lazy to be a practicing Catholic.

(3) Committment to immoral life style.
 
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gloryb:
I left for twenty years and I know what my reasons were:
  1. Apparent deadness in the Church
  2. A priest who said he knew nothing of the Bible
  3. Evangelical radio and Baptist “friends”
In addition to this our Faith is very complex. It takes a lot to understand the Sacraments and why the Mass is Heaven on earth. Young people are not taught that as they should be. As a convert I was not taught that. As a result the Mass seems like dead ritual and the simplicity of Evangelicalism is attractive.

Keep in mind, Evangelicals have organizations such as “Missions to Catholics” and “Christians Evangelizing Catholics.” As long as they are so zealous to remove people from the Church and we poorly teach our young people, we will see our members leave.

Gloria
Click to expand...
My father was a baptist minister, a good teacher of the Bible(within the Baptist context) and well-loved by the flock.
At his wake, my wife(a cradle Catholic) and I(a convert to Holy Mother Church) were standing in a reception line with my brothers and their wives(all protestants). A man from my father’s church walked up, introduced himself and then introduced his wife. He said she used to be Catholic until she “got saved”. I got a good grip on my wife’s arm and let it pass because of the sadness of the occasion, and the probability he had no idea we were Catholics. He assumed as a son of a preacher I would be also a Baptist.
Afterward, I asked the same question that this thread is asking. And I came to some of the same conclusions.
I would put it this way.
  1. We depend too much on schools for catechesis of the young
  2. When we teach the young, because our faith is so rich and complex, we may perhaps miss teaching the real simplicity at the core of it, ie. Love, which anyone can understand
  3. Protestant evangelicals have mastered the simple “one-time” salvation message, whereas the truth is that salvation is one day at a time, every day. In our quick-fix, take-a-pill world, the Catholic life is not an easy life.
 
Why I left the Catholic Church 16 years ago:
1. Knew literally no one my age (I was 17 at the time) who was truly practicing the faith
2. Knew many Protestants (a number of whom were former Catholics) who were practicing their Christian faith
3. Had nowhere to turn for a Catholic response to the (what appeared to be logical and biblical) Protestant arguments against the Church

Why I returned to the Church 2 years ago:
1. Became interested in a guy who happened to be Catholic, and wondered whether it was okay for me, as a Protestant, to date a Catholic, so
2. Surfed the net(!) and found the answers that I didn’t have when first confronted with evangelical believers (alas, no happy ending yet on that front–still single…)
 
A friend of mine left the Church because he said he needed "Bible Study and fellowship’. He said he NEEDED all that, he got it at a Protestant church and that his Catholic Church service was so dry. He lives quite a ways from me so I have no idea what his parish is like.

I am having a hard time remaining friends with him. I told him I thought he was making a mistake…he’s sent me an online message and I really don’t know how to respond to him. 😦

dream wanderer
 
  1. Worldliness more important
  2. Laziness
  3. Failure of the Catholic church to reach out to lax Catholics
 
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