Well, there's no option for "sort of."yovargas wrote:60 views and 8 votes?
I was brought up Catholic by my very Catholic mother, who claimed she was nowhere near as devout as her mother had been. My father had been raised Universalist, but he hadn't practiced for years. And he was divorced. He used to come to church with us just for solidarity's sake (my mother said it was because I asked him to), and then when his first wife died (and my mother was all excited about finally getting married in the Church and being able to receive the sacraments again), he shocked the bejeebers out of us by converting to Catholicism.
As for me, I stuck with Catholicism for many years, but began dropping off in mid-adulthood when I started getting more deeply involved with people of other faiths, some were other Christians, some Jews, some Neo-Pagans. And the more I learned the more I backed off from my roots. And now I go most often to the local Unitarian-Universalist church, partly for the free-thinkingness, a great deal for the community; but I refuse to become a full member because I don't want to sever ties to the Catholic Church. I've disagreed with its policy of celibate-male-priests-only ever since childhood, and with its stand on birth control since college, and its stand on homosexuality (and sexuality in general) since somewhere in adulthood; but the closest thing in most places is the Episcopal church, whose policies on the above topics differ in my direction from the Catholics, but something in me (the amateur sociologist) balks at the idea that the Episcopal church is often the sanctum of the "upper classes" (egalitarian that I am). I do belong to a fellowship of Christians who draw members from all stripes and in many locations, and many of the group are in independent traditions that follow Catholic/Episcopalian forms but are quite free-thinking; unfortunately there are no groups like that in my area. But I've had quite a bit of Pagan training too.
So where am I now? At heart, a "Catholic-without-the-Pope," with certain Pagan practices and sensibilities. And somewhere out in the cosmos my father is watching me among the Universalists and laughing his socks off. My mother would have never understood that (though maybe by now she does, wherever she is); she differed from the Church a lot herself, but leaving it for any other church would have been treason in her eyes. I think that was the way with a lot of her generation. It was a cultural-identity thing, at the least. But she was very devout, more so than I'll ever be.
I was married in the Catholic Church, by the way, to a man raised Catholic but since lapsed. He's still lapsed from anything organized, though in his own way he's as spiritual as I am. And he still identifies with the Catholics more than I do, but my stance doesn't bother him.
I have a button that reads, "God is too big to fit inside one religion." Amen.
