Catholicism and My Search for Infallibility<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Some readers have asked that I write more about my experiences with Catholicism, what drew me to it and why I left. So I thought I'd write about the first\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2011\/11\/catholicism-and-my-search-for-infallibility.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholicism and My Search for Infallibility\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Some readers have asked that I write more about my experiences with Catholicism, what drew me to it and why I left. 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{"id":214,"date":"2011-11-18T16:40:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-18T16:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2011\/11\/catholicism-and-my-search-for-infallibility\/"},"modified":"2012-08-07T21:59:31","modified_gmt":"2012-08-08T01:59:31","slug":"catholicism-and-my-search-for-infallibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2011\/11\/catholicism-and-my-search-for-infallibility.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholicism and My Search for Infallibility"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The Catholic Church claims infallibility. This made sense to me when I was leaving a sort of fundamentalist evangelicalism, as I had just realized that the Bible was not, as I had been taught growing up, infallible, at least in any literal or straightforward sense. The Catholic Church says that the Bible contains Truth but need not be factually true in every detail, and that I could live with. What worried me in this new understanding of the Bible, though, was the lack of some bottom line. If we couldn\u2019t take the Bible at face value, how were we to decide what was right and what wasn\u2019t? How were we to avoid simply picking and choosing? The Catholic Church had an answer: it had passed down true doctrine and traditions from the apostles and was authorized by God to promote this truth. This was very appealing.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

What first bothered me, to be perfectly honest, was the Catholic Church\u2019s teaching on sexuality. Birth control: sin. Masturbation: sin. Non-procreative sex: sin. This started to seem a lot like an attempt to control people\u2019s personal lives, and it began to feel all too similar to some of what I\u2019d been taught growing up, to my sexual repression and my belief that having an extremely large family, with pregnancy after pregnancy, was my role as a woman. What in the world could be wrong with a loving married couple engaging in oral sex, or with a loving, married couple deciding that three children was all they could properly care for and therefore having a vasectomy or tubal ligation? The Catholic Church does allow for natural family planning, but even this seemed contradictory. If birth control is wrong because sex is supposed to always be inherently procreative, isn\u2019t intentionally having sex only when the wife isn\u2019t fertile, well, cheating? <\/span><\/p>\n

One thing that had attracted me to the Catholic Church in the first place was its teachings on social justice. I loved that the Catholic Church cared deeply about improving people\u2019s lives in the here and now, about seeing that people have food, water, and health care. I loved having a faith that cared more about helping people than about converting them. But I began to see that in the Catholic Church social justice takes a backseat to controlling sex. How could the Catholic Church discourage condom use in Africa and watch while millions died of AIDS? How could the Catholic Bishops in the U.S. care more about trying to end women\u2019s birth control health insurance coverage than about organizing to support universal health care for all? Did controlling people\u2019s sexual lives matter more than feeding the poor, bringing medicine to the sick, and housing the destitute? <\/span><\/p>\n

The church I had found so beautiful started to fall apart for me on these points, and since it claimed infallibility, if I couldn\u2019t trust it here how could I trust it at all? My belief in the infallibility of the Bible fell apart when I found that a literal reading of Genesis doesn\u2019t stack up with science or archaeology; my belief in the infallibility of the Catholic Church fell apart when I found that it\u2019s teachings on sexuality just did not make sense. <\/span><\/p>\n

I could have kept trusting the Catholic Church anyway; I could have told myself that even if it made no sense it was still true because the church was infallible. But then, I could have done the same thing before, and trusted that young earth creationism was correct even though scientific evidence is completely against it, and that my father knew what was right for me even though what he said no longer made sense. But I didn\u2019t, because, well, that\u2019s how I roll. I ask questions and I use my brain. If someone tells me to shut up and turn off my brain, that\u2019s my cue to run the heck away. <\/span><\/p>\n

And so, little by little, I left the Catholic Church. My questions got bigger and bigger, ballooning from \u201cbut how can oral sex in marriage be wrong?\u201d to \u201cbut how could God be three persons and one person?\u201d and \u201cbut how is killing an innocent man for the wrongs of the guilty \u2018just\u2019?\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve given up my quest for infallibility. I suppose after leaving the Catholic Church I could have looked for another source for infallibility, but honestly, I\u2019m now okay without <\/em>having an infallible source of truth. Perhaps it\u2019s maturity or maybe it\u2019s just cynicism, but I\u2019ve given up my search for infallibility because I don\u2019t think it exists. Books aren\u2019t infallible, parents aren\u2019t infallible, governments aren\u2019t infallible, and religious organizations aren\u2019t infallible. And you know what? That\u2019s okay. <\/em>In some ways, life is more interesting this way. <\/span><\/p>\n

A reader once asked me why so many fundamentalists or evangelicals who become atheists or agnostics seem to go through a Catholic (or Episcopalian, or Orthodox, etc) phase. I think part of the answer (I\u2019ll write more on other parts later) is the quest for infallibility. Fundamentalism and evangelicalism seem to value infallibility and concrete answers above all else while many mainline Protestants are more comfortable with questions and not knowing. So for a fundamentalist or evangelical suddenly\u00a0disillusioned\u00a0about his or her own belief, a denomination that claims infallibility and direct ties to the teachings of the apostles is extremely appealing. They later leave these churches because they find that their claim to infallibility is just as shaky as the fundamentalist or evangelical claim. And since they were able to take the leap and leave the religious teachings they were raised in for a whole new religious world, taking that leap a second time for very much the same reasons is a ready and waiting option. Of course this is just my analysis made up on the spot based on my experiences and the experiences of friends. An actual study of this process would be interesting!<\/span><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"