Week 3
I had already started to distance myself from Catholicism and organized religions when I left the Catholic school system in favor of public school, but I think the final nail in the coffin was my father and his family. As I said before, my father’s family was extremely big on religion and Catholicism, which makes their reactions to what happened to my family so infuriating and, at the time, shocking.
My father, despite being raised by a family who attends church every Sunday, was not only unfaithful to my mother and our family, but had a child with this other woman. To make matters worse, him and my mother had stayed together for a good while after this was revealed, only for my father to completely abandon the child. He had talked a lot about what the baby meant for the family, how my brother and I would grow up with her, how we would make space when it was his weekend, then it all stopped. No explanation, nothing… then he did the exact same to us for a completely different woman.
For my father’s family being so deeply rooted into the Catholic faith, I learned at that moment just how hypocritical and false it all was. My grandfather was an alcoholic that chain-smoked at the very least two packs a day, one of my aunts forced her husband to abandon his son because she refused to care for him, then there were my grandmother and other aunt. My other aunt was different. She took in her boyfriend’s kids like they were her own, but somehow, she ended up being the worst of the bunch. During the early days of the divorce, she would show up at my brother’s elementary school to harass him during lunch. He was just a kid, a little kid at that, barely even six. My other aunt was a teacher there which meant she had access to my brother as well.My father’s family spent most of their days shaming us and my mother for having the nerve to have a rational response to my father’s infidelity, refusing to admit that he was in the wrong, and in turn, were turning on their morals. Everything they swore was important, suddenly wasn’t important. Everything was turned on its head, including my ideas about religion. After all, if the most religious people I knew weren’t even following the ideals of the religion they claimed, what exactly was the foundation of this organization based on? My father was an adulterer and they rallied behind him. The disconnect between me and organized religion started there and only continued to grow the closer I looked at it all.