Daniel Reece attended church every Sunday as a child growing up in Connecticut, and he went to a Roman Catholic middle school. His parents are still deeply observant — his mother goes to Mass every day at noon, and his father is part of the church choir. Reece, who is now 37, still finds the moral values he learned through Catholicism to be profound. He feels, he explained to me, a sense of “awe of the sheer perfection that God has achieved with this planet.”
Yet he no longer attends church, and he did not have his daughter, who is now 4, baptized.
That’s because he finds the behavior of the Catholic Church, as an institution, to go against its own teachings. “The contradiction of the Catholic Church’s actions and scandals and obsession and reliance on wealth is something that simply confuses me,” he said. He felt dishonest practicing Catholicism when the institution couldn’t live out the values he was taught as a child. He was particularly appalled by the behavior of the church around the sexual abuse of children. “It really betrayed my trust just because it’s not just the scandals themselves, but the efforts to cover them up or to not be transparent about them.”
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