One of my more recent experiences with heartbreak was when a Catholic priest told me I wasn’t living a very Christian life. I was twenty-four years old, single, childless, and, according to him, too focused on my academic career. This was the evidence he used to make his final assessment at the end of my twenty-minute spiritual-direction session. He welcomed the next person in before I had the chance to process his judgment. I muttered a half-hearted, sarcastic “thanks” through tears. He responded with a smirk, and I ran out the door.
That brief session, that one priest, upended a life’s worth of regular Mass attendance and reception of the sacraments. My reflections on that encounter gradually, and then completely, wore away the already fragile thread keeping me attached to the Church I had been raised in.
Long before that day, though, I had ceased to agree with the Church’s positions on abortion, contraception, same-sex marriage, gender and sexuality, premarital sex, and cohabitation before marriage.
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