The late, occasionally great Mad Magazine once published a bit that showed people's secret thoughts.

A scene looks one way from the outside but is very different and allegedly very funny on the inside.

The one I remember showed the inside of a church.

The congregation piously bows their heads, apparently engaged in placid worship. But on the inside, the well-to-do man is freaking out over gambling debt, the adolescent boy is slavering over a sexy fantasy and the teenage girl is desperately praying for a negative pregnancy test.

It is just as well I don't remember what the priest was thinking.

This was supposed to demonstrate that religious people are a bunch of hypocrites who pretend to be righteous and clean but are actually a mess on the inside.

Har har, religious people! Look how they live.

The cartoonist was, of course, not making this up.

When my parents had found Jesus but not yet the Catholic Church, my poor mother was perpetually humiliated when people visited our shabby, disorderly home.

She was overworked, outnumbered and struggling with undiagnosed thyroid issues. And their allegedly Christian landlord thought laundry lines made the outside of the house look tacky, so whatever my mother did, she did it fighting her way past a line of damp diapers drying slowly over the hot air vent. A poor substitute for the mighty wind of the Holy Spirit that they sought.

But conversion happens stepwise.

She knew her fellow Christians believed that outward disorder and chaos were caused by secret sin, so if anyone came to her door, she fell into the habit of making excuses.

"Sorry about the mess," she would say, and then explain that someone had been sick or they just got back from a trip; there was always some temporary, mitigating factor that explained the general chaos.

Then one day, she didn't.

Someone came over and saw their typical chaos, and what came out of her mouth was: "Sorry it's such a mess. This is just how we live."

I don't know how long after that moment she began to feel a pull toward the Catholic Church, but this moment in our family mythology feels like a very Catholic moment.

This is literally what the church is for: So you can have a house to be a mess in. It is your house; you are a mess. Why try to deny it?

This is just how we live, and it's not new. Chaucer, anyone? Dante's "Inferno"? The Gospels? This is just how we live.

If there were no mess, there would be no reason for the church to be built to house it.

If there were no sin, there would be no need for baptism and confession and the Eucharist.

If there were no human misery and wretchedness, there would have been no need for God to become human.

I know this, or I thought I did.

At home in the Catholic Church, we are a mess, and we cannot seem to help opening the door to show all comers our own weaknesses and sins and hypocrisies. Continue reading

• Simcha Fisher is a speaker, freelance writer and author of The Sinner's Guide to Natural Family Planning.

This week, Eli Matthewson talks about leaving the church.

What church did you grow up in?

It was Presbyterian by name but I don't know if it was fully Presbyterian by how it operated.

It was very much the modern church, with a rock band, a cafe inside the church, that type of vibe.

For youth group, you'd go to someone's flat and play Guitar Hero and at the end we'd talk about God for a little bit.

We were told at a youth group meeting that you should never masturbate unless you were about to do something much worse.

That was what we were taught.

Crazy.

I'm from a really big family, there are five kids.

My parents were youth group leaders when they were young and I was named after a kid they met at Bible camp.

I would head along to Easter Camp every year and be like, "I don't know if I fully buy this." I looked at Christianity's history of oppression and thought, "I'm not sure if this is my cup of tea."

Then I was in a play and the rehearsals were at the same time as church and that was the final nail. I was about 14 or 15.

Were your parents disappointed when you left the church?

Not really, they have always invited me to keep coming.

There was never really any anger or resentment, it was more like, "Hey, what are you up to this weekend, would you like to come along to church?"

I still go back for Easter or Christmas sometimes but every time, to be honest, it confirms for me why I don't want to stick around.

Everyone is pretty nice and pretty welcoming; it's more that I don't connect with the sermons in the way I feel I get value out of other aspects of my life.

I get spirituality and community from other areas.

When I go to church, I feel like I am walking into someone else's space.

What is it about religion that doesn't work for you?

The main thing for me is the people who are horrible to each other all the time, seeking forgiveness for their sins from someone who is not of this Earth, or trying to find spiritual fulfilment from something outside and they are distracted from the fact that we should be working together and caring for the people around us.

We didn't have a lot of money growing up - I can't believe that we survived, some years - and so many of the Christian houses I went to, they would have two storeys and two lounges and three TVs and two Rav 4s parked out the front.

Seeing that kind of wealth in a world where so many people need [help], I couldn't align myself with it. Continue reading

It was easy for those feeling demoralized by the hierarchy's condemnation of nuns, its thinly veiled political campaign for religious freedom and its ongoing, unhealthy preoccupation with matters of the pelvic zone to resonate with Keller's disappointment and despair.

The hostile takeover of the church by archconservative forces, best summed up in the rants of Bill Donohue, is a fait accompli, Keller concluded, and things are not going to change. Read more

Sources

• Jamie L Manson in National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Holy Name Church

Jamie L Manson is a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.

When people cite the pedophilia scandals as a key reason for abandoning the Church, I worry that they're setting themselves up for deep disappointment. The fact that priests abused children is an idea so horrific that one can hardly bear to think about it, and the fact that some bishops didn't take action to stop it is almost worse. But the chilling fact — perhaps so chilling that we don't can't accept it — is that this is not a problem with Catholic priests and bishops; it's a problem with human nature. A priest is no more likely to abuse a child than a male schoolteacher, and a bishop is no more likely to cover it up than a school administrator.

The problems may have seemed worse within the Church because it is a single, worldwide organization, so it's easy to link all the bad occurrences under one umbrella. But if, for example, all the nondenominational churches on the earth were part of a cohesive worldwide system, you would almost certainly see the same issues at the same rates. Instead of each instance being lost in the anonymity of disconnected communities, when they were all considered together it would seem epidemic.

Other organizations are no more safe for children than the Church — in fact, based on personal experience, I believe they are now less safe. Thanks to the pervasive stereotypes about Catholicism, people are lured into a false sense of security when dealing with other organizations, and end up adopting the dangerous mentality that "it couldn't happen here."

2. Are you sure your faith life would be better outside of the Church?

Keep in mind that leaving the Catholic Church means leaving the sacraments — sacraments with real power, which are not available outside of the Church that Jesus founded. If it brings you joy to commune with Jesus spiritually, how much better is it to commune with him physically as well? And how lucky are we to have the sacrament of confession, where you can unload all your burdens, hear the words "you are forgiven," and receive special grace to help you to be the morally upright person you strive to be? Continue reading

Sources

• National Catholic Register
• Image: Bondings 2.0