Why Do Catholics Leave the Church?

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Timothy:
If you had to give three reasons, what would they be?
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1.The Priest said to “Go, to love and serve the lord”
  1. Because they turned off the lights after the Choir was done.
  2. Because they were serving donutsafter Mass.
Sorry, I could not control my self!!😃

Joao
 
My 3 reasons were
  1. Bad catechesis spawning indifference
  2. Most of my friends were Protestant
  3. Laziness to learn about the faith, seek the truth
My generic 3 reasons
  1. Unwillingness to conform to hard teachings
  2. Ignorance of faith
  3. The guy in the pew next to me
I am a revert. Returned this past Easter with my wife and now 3 kids.
 
JoaoMachado said:
1.The Priest said to “Go, to love and serve the lord”
  1. Because they turned off the lights after the Choir was done.
  2. Because they were serving donutsafter Mass.
Sorry, I could not control my self!!😃

Joao
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By far and away my favorite…

But seriously, our family has had many leave and these summarize most of the reasons.
  1. Married someone who was outside the Church and unwilling to go to those stupid classes. (who does the CC think they are?)
  2. It was Dad’s Church. Dad is the biggest sinner of them all and he hasn’t set foot in the place for 40 years.
  3. Unable to live in the framework of Catholic teachings on Morality.
    a, Want to live with boyfriend and experience sexual freedom
    b. Want to use birth control (who is the CC to tell me…?)
    c. Want to get divorce and remarry… Whada ya mean my first marriage is still valid??? Well, I’ll just go be a baptist then. They seem to have found a whole bunch of stuff that the CC is wrong about. It even says so in the Bible and their preacher will marry me.
 
I found out only 2 days ago that my best friend since I was 10 years old has left the Church. Not only has he left the Church, he is now completely anti-Catholic. I spent several hours speaking to him about it, without success. His heart is hardened.

I know he had a very weak Catholic formation. He recently saw his sister successfully get an annullment, only after his father wrote a check for $15,000.00.

I think his reasons would be:
  1. he’s been scandalized by the sins of other Catholics
  2. ignorance of the faith
  3. pride
 
I can tell you what events lead up to my leaving the fold.
  1. I started to question my faith, so I delved into apologetics, which at first I accepted but later rejected as unsatisfactory and sometimes laughable. For example, see Kreeft and Tacelli’s Handbook of Christian apologetics, to which I once clinged but now read when I need a good laugh.
  2. Reading skeptical literature on God, Christianity, religion in general, immortality, and the soul. The Secular Web’s library and discussion board aided me greatly in my deconversion process.
  3. I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and when I was Catholic, I had the moral disease of Catholicism called “scrupulosity”. About 3/4 into this this year and half of mental torture, my family had enough of my neurosis and decided to commit me to the mental ward of a nearby hospital. The lack of help and unanswered prayers from Jesus, Mary, and the society of Heaven throughout this hell coupled with the witnessing of the life of people with mental diseases and their personal suffering all made me to doubt the existence of God.
I am now an agnostic atheist.

Clarkal
 
I left the Church initially when I was in my late teens. The reasons I did were:
  1. Poor catechesis. The elderly nuns in the Catholic grade school I attended were past their teaching prime, to put it diplomatically, and were not an inspiration. The materials we had were of the “Kumbaya” variety: lots of pretty photographs; “let’s all love one another”; and more information on re-incarnation than on what it meant to be a Catholic. My parents were observant, but that was about it: religion was not discussed at home.
  2. Pride. I was an intelligent individual (or so I thought), and, like Clarkal above, was drawn to skeptical inquiry. I came to regard religion as something that very nice but probably not very bright people were attached to. Very devout people were kinda funny, kinda pathetic, but rather contemptible.
  3. More pride. I figured that if God existed, then He’d better prove that to me in a way that met my exacting requirements.
When I think back to that period, it’s a toss up between laughing at my shallowness or shaking my head in sadness. Laughing usually wins…

After that period of agnosticism and atheism, I realized how irrational the “no God” position was. I did not go back to the Church (still suffering from problem #1) but went to various Protestant denominations. I mean, the Catholic Mass was so-o-o dead—I was going to hang out with people that really cared about their faith! However, there was the problem of irrationality again—what was objective truth? The emotion was there, but where was reason? Faith without reason just did not appeal to me, as it became then merely subjective, as opposed to objective truth that one gives one’s assent to. After a while I disliked the emotional “whipping up” of some of the services I attended.

I came back to the Church as a result of searching for objective truth. Reading the likes of Aquinas and Augustine and Newman was eye-opening—why had no one told me about dem guys before? Then Chesterton, C.S. Lewis…The Catholic Answers show began to teach me the basics of the faith, and so now—finally!—I’m home.
 
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clarkal:
I can tell you what events lead up to my leaving the fold.
  1. I started to question my faith, so I delved into apologetics, which at first I accepted but later rejected as unsatisfactory and sometimes laughable. For example, see Kreeft and Tacelli’s Handbook of Christian apologetics, to which I once clinged but now read when I need a good laugh.
  2. Reading skeptical literature on God, Christianity, religion in general, immortality, and the soul. The Secular Web’s library and discussion board aided me greatly in my deconversion process.
  3. I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and when I was Catholic, I had the moral disease of Catholicism called “scrupulosity”. About 3/4 into this this year and half of mental torture, my family had enough of my neurosis and decided to commit me to the mental ward of a nearby hospital. The lack of help and unanswered prayers from Jesus, Mary, and the society of Heaven throughout this hell coupled with the witnessing of the life of people with mental diseases and their personal suffering all made me to doubt the existence of God.
I am now an agnostic atheist.

Clarkal
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Clarkal, I’m sorry to hear this story. Maybe you just need a little more patience. Try to be grateful for the good things in your life. Also, God doesn’t believe in agnostic atheists.

I think poeple leave the Church,
  1. Lack of knowledge about Catholicism.
  2. The task of just accepting Jesus as your personal saviour is so much easier.
 
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clarkal:
I am now an agnostic atheist.
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How can you be both truly agnostic and truly atheist?

Or do you just mean that you feel you are leaning strongly towards atheism but have a glimmer left of “but possibly…”?

I am sorry to hear of your tale, I have a similar story of my “pre-reversion time” 🙂 Though my period of agnostic thinking was pretty brief; I was involved with evangelical prostentants for a far more lengthy period of time.

My personal reasons for “leaving” the Faith were
  1. Culpable ignorance (I say culpable because my parents were pretty strong in their faith, the answers were all around me but I just didn’t care to listen)
  2. DCS - “Dead Church Syndrome” 😦 I do not remember how orthodox our little town parish was (I didn’t know or care what “orthodoxy” meant then, other than that the Church was “narrow”…), but I do know that as a kid and teenager I considered it “dead” and my protestant friends’ churchs “alive!”… this influenced me greatly, sad to say.
  3. Fear. Yeah, I guess, fear was a big one. Not GOOD fear, but more like pressured fear. I didn’t understand why confession was good, or why we HAD to go to Mass, or any of the other tenets of faith–at the same time, granted, I didn’t really want to KNOW why either, so I was both afraid of believing something without knowing why and afraid of knowing something and then having to believe it… there was also a good dose of societal peer pressure-type-action going on–protestant friends, non-committed and questioning relatives, confirmation classmates who scorned the faith with me and basically played off each other’s fears of the “big bad Church” who was out to limit our every move.
I drifted away from the faith and came back again without the whole sexual morality issues of the Church being a factor (This was in fact one reason that I think I was open to coming Home–morally, I remained Catholic but I discovered that I needed God and in particular the Catholic Church in order to justify my morality… in a backwards way, therefore, it was my morality that led me back to try to understand WHY I had this morality and believed so strongly in it). In conversation with other people who have drifted from the faith, or who are anti-Catholic, it is often both the sexual teachings and the teachings on the authority of the Pope/Magisterium that they are rebelling against. Well, that and the “my priest was mean to me so I left” situation… 😦

My prayers are with you, clarkal, as you seek truth!

+veritas+
 
  1. Not understanding the Church is a hospital for sinners. (Because men have not lived up to what the church teaches it therefore is of no value.)
  2. Poor adult catechesis
  3. Poor formation of conscience (the it’s between me and God syndrome)
  4. Failure to see the beauty of the Church and its certain teachings about how to live a fulfilled life by the will of God
  5. Selfishness and Pride
  6. No one will tell me how to live my life.
 
I pose another question. What keeps Cradle Catholics in the Church?

I would suggest:
  1. Knowledge of the Faith
  2. The Sacraments
  3. Love of God
  4. The Desire to know, love and serve God the best that we can.
Because of these things I could not leave the Church.
 
I left because it meant nothing to me to go. It was a meaningless ritual. I didn’t know Christ, and it was a waste of time for me. Later, after reading the Bible, and studying for awhile, I realized there were some deeper theological issues than a lack of fellowship.

My dad has quit going to church. The only reason he went when I was a kid was because the whole family went. My mother died 8 years ago and his 4 kids are all grown up and married off now, so there’s nothing to get him to church–and nothing to connect with while there. A great thing about being involved with the church I’m at is that when a person misses 3 weeks in a row…someone notices. They’ll call you and check on you. In the large catholic parishes I grew up in, we might see the same folks every Sunday in the pews around us…but we barely knew their names. There was no connection. We may even have had donuts after church with them…but nothing substantial to actually get to know the person.

So to sum it up, I’d say 2 big reasons exist why I am not catholic:
  1. Doctrinal errors.
  2. Lack of fellowship. Fellowship is a big, big reason why the early church grew as it did. Lack of genuine fellowship is what is hurting it today. Why do people go to bars on Friday nights? They want fellowship. They want to connect with someone.
 
I would define my position as being that I am agnostic in the sense that I do not know whether there is a god and find no compelling reason to believe in one. Furthermore, I am an atheist in the sense that I lack a belief in a god. Hence, I am an agnostic atheist.

I hope that explanation satisfies.

And thank you for your sympathies.

Clarkal
 
Spider-man:
A great thing about being involved with the church I’m at is that when a person misses 3 weeks in a row…someone notices. They’ll call you and check on you.
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A great thing about attending mass is that I get to receive the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ as I worship Him.

To each his own, I s’pose.

Peace in Christ…Salmon
 
  1. Sudden realization the the RCC is completely wrong and a majority of and needs to get back to Jesus, and Jesus only because Mary or the Saints have absolutely nothing to do with salvation…
  2. Found out about the absolute grousome acts carried out in Catholic organizations (convents, etc…) and they responsible for more deaths then 3 Holocausts combined that were deemed “in the name of the Lord” (How the RCC justifies mass murder, i’m still trying to research…)
  3. Constant prayer and asking Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, to show the truth and to lead in the direction of salvation and righteousness instead of idol worhip, legalism, pegan doctrine, falsification of doctrine, re-writing of God-inspired doctrine for false ideals, and other blatant abominations…
At least, this is why I left…

I expect to be “corrected” on my reasons. I assure you I could back EVERYTHING up that I say… unfortunately, the RCC has written many, many, many, many many-made laws and traditions that counteract any argument given by one who opposes the Papcy with pure scripture.

It’s a little ironic actually… When Jesus returned, he said to the Pharisees that all their man-made laws for proper worhip was, for the most part, wrong. And that was a majority of civilization that worshipped God, not Peganism (or the Gentiles). Jesus said “Hey guys!!! You’re Doing it wrong!!!” It seems like history is about to repeat itself… It really doesn’t matter to me though. When the times comes, the “church” does not pass judgement. Only Jesus.

“He who has ears, let him listen…”
 
JesusIsTheWay said:
“He who has ears, let him listen…”
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Based on what I read in your post all I can say is … be very careful to whom you’re listening.
 
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ncgolf:
Based on what I read in your post all I can say is … be very careful to whom you’re listening.
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And I say the same to you, my friend…
 
Mary has nothing to do with our salvation? :ehh:
  1. All Christians believe in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, Emmanuel.
  2. God chose Mary to be the earthly mother of Jesus Christ, and she was honored by both angels and men (Gabriel, Elizabeth, St. John) because of her fidelity to her vocation.
  3. It was Mary’s fiat, her free will, in cooperating with God’s will, that allowed the Holy Spirit to come upon her so that she conceived Christ in her womb.
  4. The question of whether Christ would have been born anyway had Mary not cooperated with God is a moot point, she did agree and it was due to her agreement with God’s will that Christ did become man.
  5. Therefore, all Christians should acknowledge that Mary does play a huge role in our eternal salvation, and should, in fact, follow the example of the angels and her kinsfolks by honoring her (not worship her!) and her fidelity and love of our Lord.
The Protestant zeal for removing all recognition of Mary is what does not seem to logically follow from Scripture and Tradition (yes, Tradition… not man-made tradition, but apostalic Tradition, which was both written and oral, and acknowledged as authoritative throughout the early Church)

As for man-made traditions… I will not deny that there are man-made traditions in the Church, along with Traditions (with a capital-T) that come to us from Christ, down through the apostles and their successors. Sometimes man-made tradition can be taken too far. Most times, the Protestant railing against tradition falls flat when it is compared to the actual Church teaching on the tradition in question.

I have to ask you, as a Protestant, can you explain to me why Protestants maintain such man-made “traditions” as altar calls? Where are altar calls in the Bible? For that matter, where in the Bible does the man-made tradition of sola Scriptura come from? Or the man-made tradition of saying that the Eucharist is only a symbol of Christ? That idea of mere symbolism didn’t even exist until the time of the Reformation, the Real Presence was without question in writings of the Church Fathers. Why did it take 1500 years for the “truth” about the Eucharist to be made known? And how is this belief in “symbol-only” not man-made, or even not-Biblical?

As for the rest of your tirade, I am not a Church historian, and this is long enough already, so I leave it to another forum member more knowledgable than I about such things to tackle 🙂

God bless you and your faith journey, may our Lord grant you the grace to persever and “finish the race” before you so that you may enjoy peace with Him forever!

+veritas+
 
Well said, Veritas.

JesusIsTheWay (ironically the unofficial motto of the Catholic Church)- I challenge you to learn what the Catholic Church really teaches, and then try to prove that it isn’t Christian truth.

God Bless.
 
I know of three people who left the catholic church. One Henry VIII, for convenience, secord my brother in law whos wife is Lutheren to keep the peace and my dad whos mother ( my grandmother ) convinced my dad the church dissed his dad and ruined his business. My dads dead now, I pray daily he will make it, but who knows only God and my dad.
 
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SwissGuard:
Well said, Veritas.

JesusIsTheWay (ironically the unofficial motto of the Catholic Church)- I challenge you to learn what the Catholic Church really teaches, and then try to prove that it isn’t Christian truth.

God Bless.
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I am well aware what the Cathiloc Church teaches. I have studied it for quite some time. I am well aware of the origins, history, conflicts, and doctrine. I don’t mindlessly accept what i see at face value. I hear a teaching or read something someone says. And if the Bible says otherwise, I have to disagree with the teaching. It’s common sense to me. So please… enlighten me…

And my username is hardly the unofficialy motto of the RCC… isn’t it “Mary is the Way?” (false by the way)
 
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