95 Theses: My Grievances with the Church and My Current Approach to Religion

A certain lady published in Klub Jagielloński a response to Bishop Jędraszewski’s pastoral letter, which criticized young people for the fact that few children are being born, because young people these days prefer to focus on travel and careers. The lady wrote back to him, talking about the difficulties young parents face, and with which the Church does not really help much. Leaving aside financial and housing issues, she also showed that it is easy to criticize, but what would be useful instead is concrete action, for example taking care of a toilet by the church, or making sure there is a changing table in it. We do not even have one in the Dom Ruchu 😛 Or that, as a form of support, parent clubs could be created at parishes, where there would be space for both parents and children, where people could sit together. Well, there was a bit more of that. A similar text pointing out the difficulties of contemporary parents was published a little earlier by another dude. Another lady responded to them with a third text, in which she points out that yes, parenting is hard, but “this too shall pass”, and that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers somehow managed even with more children, while at the same time failing to notice that expectations placed on parents have increased since those times. She ends her text, which I really did not like, with the remark that one has to be responsible for one’s words, and that when you write texts like this, especially on a portal read by young people, you can discourage them from parenthood, while you should be encouraging them and showing the beauty of parenthood. It immediately reminded me of this meme:

Because I keep thinking that I really do not like the approach of “say either what agrees with our church propaganda or shut up”. To be fair, the lady points out that publishing such a response to a pastoral letter on this particular portal probably will not change anything, because the bishop does not read it, and that it would be better to somehow deal with it with him directly, but damn, I think that in public debate a holistic approach is important, and so is the possibility of presenting different positions and personal experiences, and if parenthood in some way becomes a burden instead of something that brings happiness, then that problem also needs to be brought to light, so that people can look at it and maybe solve it.

Somewhere in these texts there was a line that once “may God reward you in children” was a blessing, and now it sounds like a curse. And I take it somewhat as an accusation that we no longer know how to be grateful, especially since “people once lived more from the perspective of gift”. But if that is not the case now, then the question is what this is about, did people suddenly become worse? In fact, I do not live from that perspective of gift, but again the question is, why? Sometimes I regret that in our times such a perspective is not more common, that when I read about practicing gratitude on various portals, it seems to me like some modern psychological trick-practice. I feel like it has disappeared from our society, and it is hard to blame our generation for not being able to just pull it out of thin air now. The lady from “showing the positive face of parenthood” writes that if we gave up various “necessities”, life would be better for us, that the current perspective is the fault of consumerism, that there are many things a child “should” have, even though they do not really have to. But it seems to me that much heavier than the sense of being able to provide a child with access to various material goods is the sense of being able to provide a child with good upbringing and emotional care. At least I personally, especially at the beginning of my parenthood, felt that I totally did not have enough time and emotional resources to take good care of Młoda. Because I have work, because I have to take care of the home, and somehow there is so little time left for the child. Now there will be even less, because when there are two of them, I will probably be working from the office, because I cannot imagine working remotely with two small children. Anyway, I constantly felt the pressure that “family is the most important thing”, that “when the child grows up, it will be too late for parenting”. Slogans that were positive in principle got into my brain and started causing a huge sense of guilt. “If you have a short break from work now, can’t you go to your family for a moment?”. “Can you really not take a short break to help your wife and finish this later?”. Combining work with home turned out to be a path on which I try to do everything at once, which absolutely does not work for me, and which led me, through guilt and helplessness, to the edge of depression. I am trying to change it, but the initial assumptions turned out to be largely wrong. And I do not think I could have been blamed for that, because at the start I had no way of changing my thinking based on experience. I was building on what had already been put into my head, not only by my family, but also by the Church and by various slogans I believed in. And now, after some time, I am starting to see how naive they were, and harmful in the long run.

One of the attitudes that harms me a lot, and which I also learned from various church-adjacent slogans, is submissiveness. One such slogan is “being right or being in relationship”. Of course, as a good Christian boy, I always tried to choose relationship, because that is what love is about, because relationships are good, and the alternative is egoism and sin. So I let go of many things I did not like, for the good of the relationship. The relationship with my parents, with J. I preferred there to be a “relationship”, for things to be nice, rather than for us to argue. And again, now I see how destructive that was, how all that time, through not setting boundaries, resentment and anger grew in me. Unfortunately, I also let go in matters that were important to me, because I knew how important “gentleness” and “patience” were, in quotation marks because these were concepts I understood wrongly. And again, this was also one of the depression-inducing factors, because I saw that my life was going in a direction I did not really like, and that I could not influence it, because I had to accept it, be grateful for it, and “carry my cross”.

The trigger for writing this post was that response to the response to the bishop’s letter, but I also wanted to write more generally about how my thinking about faith, religion, and the Church has changed, because at this point I am very Church-skeptical, in the sense that everything I hear in the Church I sift through several sieves and look at very carefully, suspiciously, to check whether it is something valuable, or whether it is only sweet-Catholic hakuna matata for beautiful souls. So you could say I am going through a pretty serious crisis, and I do not know when it will end, or how, whether with becoming firmly rooted in the Church, or with cutting myself off from it. There is a lot of talk about how it is not worth leaving the Church because of people, because people are sinful and the Church is holy, but I also feel deeply disappointed by the Church’s educational and teaching function, from whose teachings I now have to heal. I do not want to put the blame on it unequivocally here, because obviously I accepted and understood many things wrongly because of the baggage of my personal experiences, but still, “the bad taste remained”.

It is amazing how much nonsense like this still lingers in common Catholic thinking, like that explanation that “one should avoid everything that contains even the appearance of evil”, which results in a tinfoil-hat approach under the title of looking for demons in Hello Kitty and My Little Pony. Under this link you can, for example, find an article about the main truths of faith that I learned as a child, which seem quite dogmatic, but in which the statement that “God punishes evil” is wrong.

Or something strictly from the Oasis movement, that together with joining the Crusade for the Liberation of Man you commit yourself to daily prayer, and not only fasting. I once talked about this with our Łódź moderator, who in turn talked with some priest responsible for KWC, who also said it was nonsense. “Buuut you have to pray for fasting to make sense”. Sure, fine, but I did not commit myself to that, I carefully read what was there, on that little sheet of paper I signed.

The reason why it is worth staying in the Church is definitely the Sacraments, but again, despite so many years in the Oasis movement and trying to go deeper into it, I have the impression that my faith here is more “installed” than accepted, and now, when I am starting to approach what the Church offers and contains with distrust, I am starting to analyze and judge its profession of faith and the Sacraments in the same way, wondering whether this is something that is true for me, and whether I want to accept it. And again, this may end either with accepting it, deepening and strengthening it, or with leaving it. Right now I see myself not as a disciple of Jesus, but as someone who listens to him and wonders whether he would like to follow him and his teaching. I have to get to know him and decide. A kind of step back.

I would like to go to some evangelization retreat, maybe we will manage to go to one with J. this year, maybe one organized by the Domestic Church, which I am still in, and which for now I do not intend to leave. Although at the moment the light at the end of the tunnel, and something that attracts me spiritually, I see more in the Neocatechumenate.