8.
“I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school for 13 years. It was very important to me when I was younger — there were several years where I wanted to become a nun — but I started to grow disillusioned as I got older. There was one final nail in the coffin for me, though.”
“I had gotten married when I was very young, and the relationship was not particularly healthy. After he cheated on me for the third time, we decided to separate. Quickly after that, I met someone else that I fell deeply in love with. After struggling with this for a few weeks, I sought counseling from my parish priest, who I had known since I was a child. Two sentences in, he stopped and told me I was ‘disgusting’ and ‘an affront to God for having an affair’ and in ‘a permanent state of mortal sin for a temporary feeling.’ I burst into tears and left the rectory.
Two weeks later, one of this guy’s other local priest friends was arrested for molesting children, and the priest that had made me feel so shitty made a huge deal during his homily the following week about how we need to forgive these priests for their mistakes in ‘the same way Jesus would forgive.’ The hypocrisy was astonishing — I was an affront to God for meeting a man without getting my previous marriage annulled, but the priest who molested a dozen children over 30 years was deserving of forgiveness. I haven’t been back to any church since, eschewing a second church wedding to elope with the man I had ‘temporary feelings’ for in a barn, witnessed by cows.”
—47, Pennsylvania
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