There are a few ways you can lose your religion – in a slow drift where the time between mass attendance and sacraments like confession gets longer and longer, until you can't in good faith claim to be a member of the flock any more. And then there's the frank event, where something happens and you realise you cannot continue supporting the institution that has inflicted so much pain.
For many that moment of breaking off happened with the George Pell verdicts and during the royal commission hearing testimony from survivors of clerical sexual abuse.
Ripple effects of the royal commission and Pell's trials have spread from beyond survivors to anyone who identifies themselves as Catholic. In Australia, that's a lot of us – more than 5 million people.
