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Roseanne T. Sullivan's avatar

I sympathize. I returned to the Church in my mid-30s after leaving in my late teens. The Church I came back to was gone. And it took me years to find people who believed the teachings that I had learned as a child. And then the shock was finding coldness and social exclusions even among the "doctinally sound." I wasn't excluded because I took the wrong side in some community dispute. I was excluded because human beings, even most people who call themselves Catholic, are mean and don't reach out to people outside of their comfort circle. But they are not the Church. And I'm in it because Jesus is.

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Annelise Roberts's avatar

I appreciate reading this! I’m not Catholic, but the portrayals can be rosy (especially from converts) and I think the question I find myself grappling with recently is, if all these churches — every single one (because it is every single one, I’m just more familiar with the evangelical flavor of dysfunction) — are going to have broken people screwing things up and hurting people, then where is there enough truth, goodness and beauty that when those storms come, there will still be something left to build on? I think that’s the fundamental question — not which church can do it perfectly, but what has roots deep enough to survive.

I’m sorry for your experience, and yet it seems that so many of us attend church, but because we haven’t been hurt, but because we can only say, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life”

There’s no other place to go.

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