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I was heavily involved in the Catholic church during my high school years (1997-2001). I was still not a fan of the church's treatment towards women (amongst other things), but I loved the social service aspects. I loved JPII's reaching out towards other faiths. And when I say "involved", I mean putting in about 8 hours a week in a CYO youth leadership council, with volunteer projects on top of it all. Quite a bit for someone who had never gone to Catholic-school proper, had an agnostic father, and was debating even getting confirmed.
Yeah, the church needed to be more progressive with women (esp. contraception) and the sex-abuse scandal - a hella lot more progressive - but we were making good progress. And we were a-OK with evolution, and very anti-death penalty, so I figured it was going to happen in baby-steps. We did some awesome things, got more people involved in the church, great service projects in Detroit... I was finally loving the church I was born and raised in. And the pope was always a constant and generally respectable presence the whole time. Hell, I'm of Polish ancestry. The first "concert" I ever went to was seeing Pope John Paul II giving mass when he visited Michigan.
... and then he died. And I saw the complete jubiliation of my very old-school conservative Catholic lab partner, and knew it couldn't be good.
And it hasn't been. I'm ashamed to even say I'm a lapsed Catholic when stuff like this surfaces - although moreso at the Auschwitz incident, especially as plenty of my Polish relatives went down in WWII with their Jewish neighbors.
There were about 30 of us in that leadership group. I'd say about 20 have completely left the church, save visits home to the family. Way to go. The church is all worried about losing its hold in the US - well, you lost 2/3rds of your best and brightest and most dedicated from a tri-county area, and only 3 of us actually came out as gay. The rest just saw where things were going, found ways to incorporate what we loved about the church in other service-oriented projects, and backtracked the hell out. ... Congrats.
