Catholicism And The Catholic Church

Growing up in New England suburbia, Catholicism has been a prevalent part of the society in which I grew up. I was baptized into the Catholic Church at just a few months old, though it was more a gesture for my grandmother who was in hospice than it was about my parents’ passion for the church. As a child, I was not interested in attending Mass on Sundays, nor was I engaged in the Catholic school I attended for three years, until third grade. I spent years resisting the socialization that was trying to mold me into an obedient little Catholic girl. Starting as early as third grade, when I transitioned back into public school, my classmates were aggressively trying to convince me that my lack of religion would land me in Hell. At only eight …show more content…
I was supposed to have been baptized, made my First Communion, my Confirmation, and one day get married in the Catholic Church and eventually bring children of my own in to be baptized. It was a role that was laid out for me by the families who were my neighbors, my classmates and fellow PTA families, and my teammates. These people made up my community, and they had established this social norm long before I came along. I was not breaking any laws by deciding that the Catholic Church was not the right fit for me. I had not harmed anyone, and I had committed no crime. I had, however, inadvertently become a social deviant, and I experienced firsthand the intensity of informal sanctions. I was different from the people I spent the majority of my life with, and they had trouble relating to and understanding me. In my immediate community, there was no deviant subculture. I did not have a network of other non-Catholic friends or families to bond with. Catholicism was a not majority in the sense that over half of families were practicing, rather they were a majority in the sense that my family was the only family in my neighborhood who did not attend the Catholic Church on our block. “Catholic” was an overwhelmingly common social identity in my community and choosing to self-identify as “nonreligious” was not a decision I took lightly. My decision says a lot about the debate over agency versus