In all my writing and speaking about the deconstruction of my faith so far, I have been deliberate in emphasising that the deconstruction was of "my Catholic faith as I have known it". This was not a phrasing I would have used in the past, as I had the impression (as so many Catholics do) that there is only one correct understanding and explanation of Roman Catholicism.
Whatever subculture of Catholicism you may have grown up or been formed in, it is likely that you have just as much a certitude as I used to have that the Catholicism you knew (or were converted into) is the measure of what "orthodoxy" in Catholicism is. It was only relatively recently that I gained clarity that what I had experienced as "the Catholic faith" my entire life was only a sliver of and one particular version of how the entirety of the Catholic faith could be possibly interpreted, understood and lived.
In the previous entry to this newsletter series, I quoted a maxim of St. Thomas Aquinas': "Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver." In that same entry I had explained that my experience of deconstruction began not with my faith but with everything I had believed about family. This is significant because in many ways, my relationship with God and my understanding of the Catholic faith were shaped within and in response to my experience of family. As much as I used to believe that learning about the Catholic faith and Church teaching should form my views about family, I never realised how much the cultural and intergenerational scripts in my family life shaped how I could even experience God and Catholicism.
This interrelationship between my experience of familial relationship and my Catholic faith was never apparent to me until things unraveled at an accelerated pace for me in 2022 when it hit the news in Singapore that a prominent Catholic figure had been charged with (and eventually convicted for) sexual assault against two teenage boys.
Until this moment in time, while I had also been distressed in reading about the sex abuse scandal in the global Catholic Church, I had always had an expectation (a naive one, now, in hindsight), that when it came to the moment of testing for the local Church I belonged to, we would be able to handle it better because we have had plenty of examples of how NOT to handle it from the other countries and dioceses we had read about in the news. I was mistaken.
I was not shocked that there had been a charge of sexual abuse against a prominent Catholic figure - I had already expected that Singapore could not be the only exception in the worldwide Church. Surely there would have been cases that had never surfaced before. But at the time, I still believed that if something was thrust into the light, that the Church leaders I knew and trusted would be able to respond with integrity, moral courage, humility and gospel-centric care for those who have been wounded. Again, I was mistaken.
Back in February 2022, I wrote a piece on my personal blog to express my disappointment, distress and frustration about what was happening. Back then, it took a lot of courage for me to write it because I was a "Church insider" still. A part of me knew that I would risk my belonging by breaking my silence.
Read my blog entry: "We Need to Talk About Bruno"
I waited as long as my conscience would allow me to wait to see how the leadership in the Church would respond. The total silence and how Sunday masses went on as usual without any mention about this case infuriated me even as I wrestled with disbelief that this was how the leaders I had trusted were responding. It was an experience of what I now know to be a form of institutional betrayal.
Read: "What is Institutional Betrayal? And How Does It Relate to Church Abuse?"
In the weeks that followed, I was informed through contacts that someone had sent my blog entry to the archbishop along with an angry complaint about my having written it, and how I had betrayed the Church by doing so. I later heard that this same email had been forwarded or circulated among some clergy and diocesan staff. From another contact who was in the know, I received a message to "tread carefully" because the Church leadership was upset with me. Words cannot express what all of that made me feel at the time.
Now that I have the vocabulary, I can name what I experienced as moral injury. That is a psychological injury that happens when the very people you trusted to protect you and uphold the values they taught you act contrary to those values instead.
To understand the gravity of moral injury, visit Awake Community's blog entry: "Rooted and Rising: Understanding Moral Injury" and The Sisters of the Little Way's bonus podcast episode with Dr. Marcus Mescher on Moral Injury.
At the time, what was hard for me to deal with was how so many of the very clergy who so often referred to themselves as our shepherds were failing to shepherd us. I struggled with how they still preached the gospel from the pulpit every Sunday while being blind and deaf to the suffering of their sheep who were looking for direction, consolation and witness as we grappled with the news that a prominent and trusted religious figure had been charged with the sex abuse of minors.
As time passed, the few responses that eventually came from Church leadership were mostly tepid, spiritualising and self-protective. It left me feeling extremely discouraged, disappointed and also confused. It left me wondering if this was the best witness the Church could offer. I questioned how it was that in a Church with so many priests whom we call "father", I felt so fatherless. The reaction to my speaking up about the pain that I and others I knew felt did not reflect Christ's words, "I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you." (John 14:18) Not only did no one reach out to me in pastoral response, I was instead complained against and politely silenced.
There was something discombobulating yet strangely familiar to this entire episode. I felt a great deal of anger and grief in spurts interspersed with inchoate numbness. The level of emotional dysregulation I felt in those months was so great that I sought out a new trauma-informed, somatically trained therapist (I had been seeing a counsellor for the years prior to this). And even then, it took us at least five to six sessions before I was ready to explore my emotional response to this incident.
I had realised by then how the dynamics that had played out in the Church over the sexual abuse case were so triggering to me because they closely resembled the dysfunctional familial dynamics that I had been trying to heal from. That feeling of looking towards someone I trusted to protect me in a time of distress and finding no protection or attunement but an adult / leader who left me on my own was deeply familiar to my inner child. So was the experience of being silenced or sidelined for refusing to pretend that everything was alright.
Eventually there was one therapy session during which a very significant differentiation experience happened: I had an embodied realisation that I had felt unsafe with the adults of my childhood and with the clergy and leaders of the Catholic Church at large, but my nervous system had actually come to feel safe with God the Father through the years of healing and interior integration I had undergone in the years prior.
In an imaginative experience that played out like Ignatian contemplation, I felt God the Father invite me to go to him and be held by him. And as I was held in the Father's embrace, I watched as the other "father figures" shrank from towering figures in my perspective until they were little children.
as I was held in the Father's embrace, I watched as the other "father figures" shrank from towering figures in my perspective until they were little children.
I realised in that moment that both in my family of origin and in the Church, I had, like a child, naturally looked to the "adults" in charge of my care with unearned trust and an expectation of care to which every child (biological or spiritual) has a right. But the reality was that they were not capable of giving the kind of care that is needed for a child of God to mature and thrive.
A lot of the time, these parental figures are themselves fearful children who have not developed the integration and emotional maturity required for leadership and parenthood. Yet that did not mean that I had to feel like an orphan, because without my realising, I now had a new embodied, "earned trust" with God the Father that I didn't have before.
By this time I trusted God not because "I should" but because I had actually had repeated experiences of his unconditional love and mercy regardless of my behaviour and performance in virtue and spirituality. I know it must sound strange to many people, but God earned my trust through letting me experience his steady, unwavering presence when I felt most unworthy. Held in this secure love of the Father, I no longer felt so threatened by the crumbling of my trust in the Church.
This experience of embodied differentiation between God and the Church stabilised me and gave me an anchor from which to reflect critically about, investigate, and process my relationship with the Catholic Church and my Catholic faith in the following years. It was the steady anchor of the Father's love that enabled me to recognise and reject many assumptions I had previously accepted unquestioningly - both with regard to my family of origin and the Catholic Church.
(To be continued in Part 10 of Being Catholic After Deconstruction)
You may wish to listen to or watch my Becoming Me episode: "EP 167 | Deconstruction as Differentiation and Individuation"
Personal Note:
I have written this entry to illustrate the interior journey I went through. As such, I have sought to keep my writing tone as fair and precise as possible without including any details that may lead to the identification of individuals.
Journeying with you,
Read Part 1 .
Read Part 2.
Read Part 3.
Read Part 4.
Read Part 5.
Read Part 6.
Read Part 7.
Read Part 8.
Responses