Confession: Raised a Catholic, Trained to Raise Questions

Time for a confession, and what better day of the week.

I was not entirely honest in my Friday column, when I wrote about Catholics who have encouraged me to keep banging on the church door and asking for answers.

It’s no lie the mailbag is full, with many readers relating personal tales of abuse, if not demanding an end to the church’s decades of silence on the matter. Silence that unjustly taints so many good priests.

But other Catholic readers are less thrilled with my work, which they find unforgivably biased, and it doesn’t seem fair to ignore them.

Depending on the mood of the writer, I am a knave, a rat or a turncoat--how dare I question the church? I am alternately being prayed for, cursed or condemned--an army of God’s soldiers is prepared to deliver me to the tortures of the damned.

One unsigned letter began:

I resent having to use this paper, envelope & stamp but would like to tell you what a repulsive creep you are.

I turned the other cheek, then went on.

What do you think you are, an attorney, delving into things? ... Well all I have to say is you will get yours. Saw your picture in the paper & you are ugly too.

Not very Christian if you ask me.

Now here’s another typical missive from a reader named Donn:

Clearly you are an ex-Catholic with an ax to grind. Why don’t you take some of your own ranting advice and come clean with your hate for the church and what caused it.

OK, Donn, here we go:

I don’t really care whether it’s a church, a temple, the White House or the next-door neighbor. I write about users and abusers wherever I find them. But yes, I was Catholic once, and I suppose I still am. Here’s the story:

I grew up in the St. Peter Martyr parish in the Bay Area town of Pittsburg. My parents were married and I was baptized at St. Peter, and I wore a uniform of gray cords and a purple sweater to school.

Although Sister Roberta once smacked me in the head with a spelling book in front of my sixth-grade class, I probably deserved it. Other than that, I don’t recall any traumatic episodes except for when our class had to sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (did I spell it right?) at the grand opening of the new police station.

When I was old enough to drive, I told my parents I was going to church every Sunday, but I lied. I actually drove my little brother to Sears in Antioch, where we watched NFL games in the television department.

So I probably never was a hall of fame Catholic. But nothing drove me away. I was never abused, nor did I ever hear of anyone who was. As an adult, when I did consciously drift away, it was because I found the church’s attitudes about contraception out of touch and its anti-gay preaching repugnant. But to tell you the truth, I later regretted walking away from what was good about the church just because of the things that bothered me.

In every city I’ve lived in, the Catholic Church does more good than any other institution. In Philadelphia, my short list of heroes included two nuns and a priest who tirelessly served forgotten communities, and I wrote about them often.

Peter Boyle, the actor who plays the cranky old dad on “Everybody Loves Raymond,” has also had an on-again, off-again relationship with the church, and we’ve talked about it. Boyle, who once was a Christian brother, left the church for some of the same reasons I did, but went back in recent years.

Ritual is comforting, he told me. The standing, the kneeling, the casting about for heavenly meaning. Despite his political differences with the church, he’s home when he smells the candles burning and hears the footfalls echoing off the rafters.

I respect that, even though I’m the kind of guy who--to borrow a well-worn line--finds more religion in a summer rainfall than in a year of Sunday sermons. I respect anyone’s faith, whether it’s motivated by true belief or fear of death, so long as it isn’t used to justify hatred and genocide. So long as it isn’t entirely blind.

Dozens of people have told me, over the years, about abuse by clergy. Almost all of them, when they can rise up from their torment and self-hatred, talk about two shattering betrayals.

The first is when a priest uses church authority to have his way with a child. The second is when the church calls the victim a liar.

For decades, the church has merely transferred known molesters to other parishes, or sent them to drive-thru therapy, and then recycled them back into the care of future victims.

I don’t have words adequate to the task of describing that violation of trust and failure of basic human consideration. And the failure goes to the very top ranks of an institution that every Sunday preaches Christian morality.

So in the end, yes, I’m completely biased against, and intolerant of, hypocrisy. And without apology, I fully intend to keep banging on the door.

Blame it on the nuns. They said you should always ask yourself: What would Jesus do?

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Steve Lopez’s columns will now appear Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.