God Vs Religion: The Great Catholic Rejection

Last updated on: May 7, 2017 at 9:08 am by Kerry Connelly

God Vs Religion: The Great Catholic Rejection 2017-05-07T09:08:20-04:00 Kerry Connelly

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As you know, right now I’m going through a thing. It’s an annoying and painful thing. It’s a thing where I can’t bring myself to go to church even though I’m still mad in love with Jesus. Between that and listening to massive amounts of Krista Tippet and On Being, I started thinking about what, exactly, it is I have against church, and the question Krista always starts off her interviews with on that podcast: what was your early spiritual formation like?

My earliest memories include church, and they include God, and they were very different experiences. This is the first in a series of posts I’ll write about how vastly different the two were, and in so doing, maybe I’ll figure out where I’m supposed to be now.

The Great Catholic Rejection

My dad is a first generation Irish Catholic, born in the Bronx in the 1930’s. He was an altar boy and a Catholic school student, subject to scary nuns who hit knuckles with rulers and kept children in their place with terrifying stories about God.

Dad still gets misty eyed when he speaks about the Bronx back then. He, of course, lived on the Irish street. The Italians were one street over, and one of my father’s favorite stories to tell is how, as a young boy, he got a job starting cars for one of the sharply dressed men who lived one block and many worlds away. The minute his mother discovered his new, seemingly easy job, she swatted him on the ear and said in her brogue, “Ya’ won’t be startin’ cars fer those people ever again!” Car bombs were frequent, apparently, and the value of a young, poor Irish lad low.

My dad was excommunicated by the Catholic church because he divorced his first wife. She admitted to adultery; he tried to have the marriage annulled in the early 1990’s, but the church refused. His Catholicism was as much a part of his identity as his Irishness; to have it stripped away was immensely painful for him. Although he hardly spoke of his excommunication, he did tell me stories about life as a young Catholic boy, and what he was taught by the nuns in school.

There was, apparently, a lot of blood-flooding of churches for Catholic boys born in the 1930’s. If he bit the communion wafer, the church would fill up with blood; if he entered a Protestant church, the church would fill up with blood. Looking back, the whole thing seemed more like a Stephen King novel than communion with the Sacrificial God. This Stephen-King-like God felt more arbitrary than loving, more legalistic than forgiving. This God, apparently, required you to be perfect before you met him, and if you weren’t, you might drown in the blood of retribution.

Although the church outwardly rejected my father, he still wears his saint around his neck, only taking it off for surgery (of which he has had many). I suppose you can kick the Irish Catholic boy out of church, but you can’t kick the Irish Catholic out of the boy.

Because we are all searching for an identity, and there is nothing a person wants more than to belong to something, I shared this Irish-American identity with my father proudly. There’s really nothing much more Catholic in New Jersey than an Irish-American. Maybe the Italian-Americans in New Jersey are just as Catholic, and in my town, you were either one or the other. So I bore my Irishness proudly.

There was only one problem: as much as I loved my Irish heritage, there was one very important thing that I was not: Catholic.

I was, of all things, a Methodist.

The rituals of the Catholic church seemed mystical and foreign to me. The few times I had to enter a Catholic church — for weddings, funerals, and the like — I was always uncomfortable and awkward, never knowing when to stand, kneel, cross myself. Worst of all, however, was communion. I knew I was not welcome to receive and wouldn’t know what to do anyway. What is it that everyone muttered back to the priest after he placed the dry wafer on their tongues? Which was worse? Sneaking up the aisle, pretending I was a Catholic and messing up the whole ritual, or staying behind in the pew, the heathen unfit for the wafer?

I kept my Protestantism quiet when I was with my friends, and prayed that we wouldn’t find ourselves in a situation in which we were supposed to cross ourselves, or, say, suddenly start praying the rosary. Once I was briefly dating an Irish football player over here for a tournament. We passed a cemetery and when I didn’t cross myself, he asked me why. In a flash of confident not-giving-a-shit, I told him I was Protestant. The next day, he broke off our little fling — through a friend, I believe, not even directly. I wrote him a letter calling him a coward and a bigot and thought, “Good riddance!”

The truth is, I didn’t care about him. He was simply there to keep me from being bored for those few weeks that summer. The rage I felt was less about his rebuff than what I believed was a rejection from the institution of religion. I’m not sure if I understood yet that institutions do a shitty job of representing God. Then again, perhaps my anger came from a deep, unnamed understanding that the God of the Universe rejects no one, even those of us who don’t cross ourselves when we pass cemeteries, even those of us who have been divorced because our spouses cheated, those of us who have slept with too many boys or buried our pains in carbs and too much wine and who desperately need a God who doesn’t need us perfect before we meet him.

Maybe my soul understood what my brain did not — that all the constructs we create to keep people out of our churches are the very thing that pain God the most. Every single ritual we can’t live up to, every single rule and regulation and the squares and circles we try to fit our triangle shapes into — all those machinations in which we participate in order to be worthy of God, they are all just another nail in the limbs of Jesus.

Mystical rituals are beautiful, but only when they lead to Jesus, not away from him. I believe souls in general long for what Jesus has to offer, but we’ve buried Jesus under a pile of Pharisaical rules and regulations, of constructs, of bars to be met and bars to be raised yet again. It’s exhausting, all this digging we have to do to get to the real Jesus, and it’s no wonder people leave the church or, like my father, are kicked out, never to return again.

Church has become the most fundamental of rejections. I was never a Catholic, and never really wanted to be one, but I felt the sting of the Great Catholic Rejection nonetheless. I didn’t fit into the Catholic mold even though I was supposed to, in my Irishness. I never once believed that if you bit a wafer or walked into the wrong building you would be swept away in a flood of plasma and hemoglobin, but the idea speaks to the nature of God, and what we believe about him. Those Catholic nuns took the idea of the great flood, made it personal and grittier, what with all the bodily fluids, and used it to terrify little children into being religious bigots or religious outcasts.

Eventually, I would become both.

This is the first in a series exploring my experience with God Vs. Religion. Next up: I’ll explore my experience as a Methodist.

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