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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The universities, the churches/cathedrals, and yet I never meet any Catholics out in this area at all.

What gives? [/quote]

This is a hard town to be openly Catholic with people that you don’t know well. Although the majority of US Catholics and Catholics in this area particular, are not social conservatives, you will be tar-brushed as right wing.

Before the pandemic, I volunteered for years with a nonprofit that did art therapy. In 2019, someone joined the board who assumed that I and another volunteer would be anti-LGBTQ because of our religions. She demanded that we quit because she said it made her feel uncomfortable and she was certain we made the population we served uncomfortable. She only knew I was Catholic because she asked to change a meeting to accommodate her religious holiday and I said I couldn’t attend the new date because my religious holiday was the next day.

When I was told I had to quit because I was Catholic, I fought back a bit, pointing out that 1)one of my kids was an out lesbian and very active in our parish, 2) the witnesses at my wedding were a gay couple, and 3) I had been the volunteer who brought in a trans masc artist (a friend’s partner) to work with our Haitian clients.

It didn’t work. The knee jerk on her part was that as a Catholic, I had to be a bigot so I had to go.

Since then, I have been hesitant to identify myself as Catholic. When it happens online, I see that same knee jerk response even when I am clearly protesting socially conservative policies and ideas. [/quote]

Same. I could not be more liberal, but when people hear where I went to school, they immedialtey asusme the opposite. Do people not know Catholics historically have been evenly split in U.S. politics? Kennedy anyone? Biden, Pelosi?[/quote]

Sorry but the Catholic Church has done so much harm to so many people (abuse cover-ups, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, curtailing women’s reproductive freedom, the untenable priest celibacy requirement that leads to repression and covert expressions of sexuality) that it’s hard to to see practicing Catholics as complicit or as not being troubled by this.

I was raised Catholic and can’t fathom practicing now. Also, Kennedy was a complicated person individually and full of the contradictions and buried flaws just like the Catholic Church writ large - not sure that’s a great example…[/quote]

That is BS and you know it. Apply that to any other group where some in it, it's leaders, have done great harm or hold views you don't agree with. Are you denouncing your citizenship because of the evil done by our government?[/quote]

No of course I’m not denouncing my citizenship, but I think it’s fair for people to be a little wary of  institutions that have a track record of massive cover-ups (like the government, or any organized religion) and untenable internal contradictions.

Fwiw I think the example above where a poster was kicked out of something simply for being Catholic is certainly prejudiced and egregious.[/quote]

And you can keep your faith while joining the argument against things you find wrong in the instituion, right? Look at all the wokr that has been done to get Vatican II and since the 80s with the child safe reforms, etc. [/quote]

You can also keep your faith by joining another religious institution that doesn't do the sorts of wrong things that your current religious institution does. Or you can drop religion entirely, as more and more people have done.  [/quote]

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