So who are you? Whatever that means to you.

My name is Paul. Pronouns are they/them. I’m an artist. I’m here with you because my practice revolves around deconstructing and rebuilding Catholicism for myself. That means I’m making paintings and sculptures that are often pulling from Catholic symbolism and also combining them with magic and more modern supernatural phenomenon. I’m really into UFOs and how that connects to the Bible.

What was your experience growing up with Catholicism?

I was raised really Catholic. My dad is actually Presbyterian, but my mom is Catholic. He was pretty much non-practicing by the time they got married, so my mom was in charge of the religion and she was raised really Catholic. She’s one of eight in a good Irish Catholic family. In retrospect I don’t think that she even knew what she was doing. It was just what you’re supposed to do. Because now her and I are actually on the same page, where we’re just these recovered Catholics.

At the time I think she was just doing what she knew she was supposed to do, which kind of meant we did all of it. I didn’t go to Catholic school, but she was my brother and sister’s catechist. We were all in the choir, and I actually was the cantor for a few years. I was getting up in front of the whole 9:00 a.m. Mass and leading the songs. My brother was an altar boy, the whole thing. We were in there, we’re volunteering. We meant it. Even in retrospect we really believed that. I can remember believing in it in maybe a more abstract way than was really allowed. I remember asking questions that I shouldn’t have asked. It was always like, “Why did God make us in the first place?” You’re not really supposed to ask that one.

Until I moved out for college, it didn’t occur to me how much damage it had done to me. I realized I’m figuring out my own queerness and also that there’s genuine trauma built around being afraid of sex and all of those things that you don’t realize you’re being indoctrinated in when you’re a middle schooler.

Now I’m at a point where I’ve actually come back around to it. First, because I just continued to really love the aesthetic of the art. At first, my practice was more focused on being angry. Now it’s morphed into creating my own faith through my art that builds the things in Catholicism that I still connect to today.

What is the “that” you believed in?

I remember vividly during Easter Mass, you renew your vows to the Church. All the, “We believe in this one God that’s in the Bible, and we believe that Jesus is our savior, and there’s a devil that’s trying to tempt you.” We said prayer before dinner every single day. And you say a prayer before bed. It really was the Nicene Creed through and through.

Belief in God and/or belief in the Church?

Both. Not only the God that the Church puts forward to be believed in, but also being invested in when we’re picking a new pope.

My family also said prayers before bed. We would all sit on the floor in front of the bedrooms and say a prayer and say what we’re thankful for that day, which is honestly a nice practice. For a while I was like, “Oh, that’s so weird that we did that,” but actually it’s really nice to be like, “This is what I’m grateful for today.”

That’s where I’m at with a lot of it. When you divorce some of those things from actual dogma and fear, they’re nice. I actually love the concept of sitting around and talking to God, whatever that might mean.

When you were younger were how did you feel around saying those prayers and the act of going to church? Did you have any questions about that?

As a young child, I felt it’s definitely just a chore, and mom is real serious about us going and doing this, but I’m bored. Then as I matured, there was something about it I enjoyed because it was meditative. There was also a part of me that started to enjoy it in the sense where I needed to be so good at church. Everyone in this church needs to know that I mean it, and I’m singing these songs, and I know all the words, and I’m doing all of the motions and the choreography of Catholic Mass.

There is genuinely a fear of this God that’s looking down at you. I vividly remember being in church trying so hard to be good, and then inevitably getting these intrusive thoughts of being bad because I was trying to be good. And then it’s like, “Oh my God, now God knows that, and I’m a bad person.” That was the part of it that needed to be unpacked—the fear and guilt and belief in being a bad person.

Where do you think that fear and guilt and shame comes from in Catholicism?

To me, the biggest driving force behind that was when priests do their…I just forgot the word for it…but when they yap about the scripture after…

The homily.

The homily. Thank you. That was the biggest part of it where that came from. Maybe it depends on the church. Maybe some priests are chiller than others. But that was the part where I felt like the priest would be like, “I’m gonna talk to you about what this means, and what that means for how you have to act.” There were even times where the homily would tie into homosexuality and being queer or abortion and would explicitly be like, “These are things you cannot do.” Which I don’t agree with.

I’m interested to hear if you had more thoughts on this kind of performance of goodness at church. It seemed like you felt this pressure to perform goodness by knowing all the songs, all the lyrics. You were a leader in the church.

What’s funny about it is that my mom never made me do those things. I’m the one who was like, “We should do the choir,” and “I wanna do the singing.” Because also I loved singing outside of church. A lot of life at that time, when you’re so connected to the church, felt like, “How do I take my hobbies and bring them back to the church?” It was this sense of not wanting to make my mom look bad and realizing that I was becoming an adult and I genuinely thought that this was something I might stick with so I need to have good standing here. It really is this kind of unspoken social pressure.

Most of those people in there were strangers, but I was very concerned about how they thought of me, which was quite damaging. If I could draw a line from adulthood anxiety back, it’s like that kind of thing. But it’s hard to say concretely where it comes from other than it just is.

Was there a turning point for you when you became, you said you and your mom were “recovering” Catholics, so what was that trajectory?

I grew up on Long Island, so it’s also relatively conservative. I always knew I was gonna make my escape to the big city the second I could. I came here at 17 and never went back. I always knew I wanted to do something creative. The turning point starts there because like all of a sudden I’m on my own and I’m not going to church every Sunday and I’m realizing that I don’t want to. I even remember early on at college my mom literally was like, “Make sure to tell your grandma that you’re going to church and which one you’re going to because she’s gonna ask.” I remember searching, “What is the nearest Catholic church.” But I wasn’t going to church. It wasn’t a conscious decision. I was just doing other stuff. I would go home for holidays and still go, and I would still sing in the choir when I was there. It was still a community that I was part of.

As I came into my own personhood and was more accepting of my own queerness, I realized that was incompatible with…well, if you ask me, they’re not incompatible. But the community would have believed that being queer and being Catholic were incompatible.

So all of a sudden I was like, I can’t be a part of this community anymore because I’m gonna have to go there and pretend to be someone that I’m not. Me and my mom are super close, and I think she saw that and realized that there were other options. She really was like, “Actually, I have a queer child who I’m like insanely close with and love so much. And if this community is not gonna be accepting of that, then we can’t really do this.” This was never a conversation that anyone had, but this was just how it went.

This feeling that your queerness and the church community were not meshing…where did that feeling come from?

Nothing specific. I just suddenly had more freedom than I’d ever had in my life and I was like, “Great, I’m gonna get my nose pierced and dye my hair pink.” Right after you do those things you’re like, “I can’t roll up to church like this.”

That’d be scandalous.

Exactly. I was already an anxious young adult and I have no interest in going to church and causing a scandal.

Now being older, do you think there is room for queerness in Catholicism?

I personally do. Maybe not in the way that it exists as an institution. We’ve had a succession of popes now who have come off as more liberal and have still doubled down on not doing any of that. But I think that in an internal belief way, yes. I actually think I’m going to do this pretty soon, I think that I could probably go to a Mass and keep to myself and it’d be fine. I do think there’s a way to hold both beliefs even if maybe the community at large doesn’t agree. But I guess that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned is that my beliefs are my own and I can do whatever I want with them. I think there’s a lot of examples of queerness within Catholicism.

Did you have anything in mind?

There’s an obvious one to me at least is St. Sebastian.

Remind me which saint that is again.

He’s the one who got tied up and they shot him with arrows. He’s become this off-brand queer icon because the paintings of him are always very homoerotic. There’s nothing in the story, but it’s due to artistic tradition. If you ask me, there’s a lot of queerness in medieval Catholicism specifically. I’m particularly drawn to this motif that pops up every once in a while of Jesus’ side wound. It’s very vaginal and yonic.

There’s also this whole talk of Jesus as mother of the Church, as birthing the Church through his side wound. And a whole tradition of monks and male priests who say that they are wife to Jesus. There’s a long tradition of becoming a priest or a nun because you’re actually queer in the Middle Ages.

How did you begin to start seeking out all that?

Like I mentioned earlier, my artistic practice started as more angry. I was trying to subvert Catholic imagery in a simpler way, in a very inverted cross way. It felt hollow. I wasn’t mad at anyone specifically. I wasn’t even mad at the Church. What really shifted me is Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, which is the piece where this crucifix is in a fish tank of literal urine. He talks about how it was not meant to be a piece that was a protest or even angry. He wasn’t trying to be sacrilegious. It really did come from a place of being Mexican and being raised Catholic. That is where my art comes from now, where I’m digging deeply into Catholic histories to find the things that speak to me, like Jesus having this vaginal side wound and this concept of a trans Jesus. I can dig into these histories and these things that are canonical and dogmas to find things that speak to my experience as a queer person. Which I think is really beautiful. I get to renegotiate my relationship on my own. So that is where all of my knowledge comes from. I’m just going down rabbit holes, finding these things that I wasn’t told to reform my own faith. I tend to run around calling it post-Catholicism, which started as a joke and has morphed into a system of beliefs. Not that I’m like out here praying to Jesus and being like, “Oh, my God, I’m gonna be saved by Jesus.” But there is a set of beliefs. There’s a comfort in forming my own Catholic polytheism. There’s a lot of polytheism built into Catholicism, if you ask me.

How do you feel your art deconstructs and then reconstructs? It kind of reminds me of the Resurrection.

I have latched onto this vision of Jesus’ side wound as a top symbol. It only appears occasionally in medieval work and I’ve latched onto it as a symbol of a faith that’s inherently queer. It’s about the connection between pain and transformation, that the physical and emotional pain embodied by Jesus’ crucifixion is a portal to personal transformation, which to me is the most queer thing ever. So I’m rebuilding the faith around that. Instead of saying that Jesus died to save us from our sins and what that means is we need to be good and follow his teachings, instead I’m using it as a metaphor for queer transformation. I’m also writing Catholic spells and doing these paintings considering modern mythologies in connection to ancient Catholic mythologies, like what do UFOs have to do with visions or apparitions and things that aren’t in the Bible at all. But if people were just as Catholic now as they were in the Middle Ages, how would they explain those things? So I’m rebuilding an alternate timeline Catholicism.

What is happening in this alternate timeline?

In this alternate timeline based on our current timeline, things are not going so great and it’s kind of post-apocalyptic. People are out here reviving these beliefs because everything seems so hopeless and terrible. I had this vision of making devotional statues to Mary, but out of rusty metal. Or we’ve rededicated Mary as a patron saint of more modern things, like digital electronics or decay and mold. It’s about seeing God in death and decay and not only in life.

How do you identify now religiously?

It’s complicated because part of me would say that I’m my own sort of Catholic. I almost wanna check the Catholic box if I were to be given a census, just because for me now, I get to choose what that means. But in reality it’s an agnostic belief system. I definitely take all of these things in a very spiritual way, but I don’t hold dogmas per se. I take Catholic symbology as examples of human nature. There’s always going to be a mother figure in any theology and there’s always gonna be a god of light and a god of darkness. It’s not like I genuinely hold these beliefs, but it almost is the way that I’ve chosen to frame my interaction with the world and the universe and whatever spiritual powers lie therein.

That’s so interesting to hear that you’re like, “I call myself Catholic because of this framework, because of how I was raised.” I really admire you for claiming this in your own way and realizing it doesn’t have to be tied to dogma or church-going. It can be based on something more spiritual and mystical. Because I do not feel like I can have my own interpretation of Catholicism. If it’s not in the Bible or in whatever Church dogma or doctrine, then you can’t claim that Catholicism. The very act of me questioning belief structures and questioning the Church as an institution some people view as anti-Catholic. But that’s not what I’m doing. I just want to deconstruct and then make it a little more personal versus dictative. It’s really cool that you seem to be doing that. Why do you feel you’re able to do that?

It started where I was like, do I believe in these things strictly? No. But do I still think this art is beautiful and there’s a lot of really beautiful things built into these beliefs? Yes. So how can I reconnect with them on my own level? A lot of it comes from reframing Catholicism not as a religion to be adhered to, but I’ve started seeing it as a culture. I’m still Catholic because I’m still interacting with Catholic culture. I’m here talking to you about it and making the art.

What is Catholic culture?

A lot of traditionalists would say that Catholic culture is a pious adherence. You go to church every Sunday, and you do all of your volunteer work, you’re singing in the choir, like the way that I used to live it. But if you ask me, Catholic culture is and should be more of a liberal culture. There’s a deep history of Catholic workers starting strikes and there’s a deep history of the beliefs of Jesus actually being about the dissolution of borders and redistributing wealth. That is Catholic culture, even though that’s not the way the world at large sees it.

More traditionally, Catholic culture is beautiful churches and a lot of gold and drama. I feel like this original culture should have been a culture of love and liberalism. Where things probably went wrong was colonialism and the Church as an institution. But it could be something different, and that’s what I get at with my alternate timeline.

Do you think if it were perhaps less tied to the Church as an institution that holds so much wealth and authority it might have looked different?

I do. I think that’s where my interest in Gnosticism comes in. If this were the dominant belief system, what would the culture have been instead? I’m interested in history because I come at Catholicism from a history perspective and a lot of history is chance. It’s just by chance that the Church ended up this way. There’s a million options for Catholicism not existing at all or not being the dominant culture or the Church not being so rich and wealthy or if Constantine hadn’t converted.

What is the point in this sort of speculation?

For me, it’s personal. It’s a way of me coming to terms with, I guess this is also a bleak answer, but I’m trying to make sure that everything I did as a kid being Catholic isn’t for nothing, that I don’t have to be divorced from decades of belief.

At the end of the day, I am a pragmatist. I don’t have any belief that the Church is gonna change deeply and suddenly we’re all gonna be accepted. But in a more optimistic way, I hope there could be a cultural understanding of the true teachings of Jesus, a true understanding of loving thy neighbor.

There are social movements that are doing that. I get emails from Catholic Workers of America, and there’s more Protestant movements probably built around this as well, where they’re digging into what are these actual teachings and treating immigrants well and things that are really important in this specific moment.

To get into the whole Catholic revival and this larger cultural interest in Catholicism…what are your thoughts on that? I feel like calling it a revival is dramatic. I don’t know if people are converting, but there’s definitely a revival in interest. We were talking earlier about a return to ancient belief practices and what that means for the future and for here and now. What do you think is drawing people to this ancient religion?

The issue with the current interest in Catholicism is that it is, at least from what I’ve seen, a conservative interest. I see JD Vance as the ultimate figurehead of it. It’s like you convert to Catholicism for conservative clout. Meanwhile I read something from him where he literally said the Pope was wrong about scripture, and I was like, “That’s rule number one of Catholicism.” I was genuinely mad. I was like, “You can’t be talking like that. You’re not a Catholic. That’s fake.” So that’s the problem with the current revival. It comes from a conservative place.

There could be a revival that comes from the liberal places of this faith. But in either case, I think these interests are revived in times of despair. You look around and the world is utter chaos and nothing makes sense anymore and it’s the natural conclusion of human beings doing everything wrong the whole time. If you’re a conservative you’re like, “We have to tear apart some kind of theoretical conspiracy,” and if you’re liberal usually it’s like, “No, we need to rebuild our institutions.” But they come from the same place. It’s the same with Catholicism where the interest comes from the same place in that you’re looking around at the world and it’s horrible and you need something to believe in. But there are two approaches to it where you can dive in and be like, “The world’s horrible so I need to live piously so that at least I’ll go to heaven.” Or you can be like, “The world’s horrible and the words in this book say that it’s always been horrible and we should just be nice to each other.” I guess that’s also in relation to your earlier question about what’s the point of all this speculation. The point is there is a potential to position a religious revival for good.

Do you hope that your art provides a perspective on what everything could be?

That’s exactly it. I wouldn’t even want a conservative Catholic to see my work and think that I’m some insane, angry heretic because that’s not where it comes from. My hope is always that people could see it and build connections. I’m working a lot in connecting the martyrdom of Catholic saints to the martyring of queer leaders who met early ends due to homophobia. I would hope someone would see that work and not think that is sacrilegious but really think, “Wow, there is a lot of connection there.” If I believe a saint is holy because they believed in something so strongly and were willing to die for it, maybe other people in this modern age are the same.

I have a couple more questions. This is a philosophical question: What is faith to you?

Faith to me is the things you are willing to hold onto even in the face of violence and hardship. That doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. For example, Marsha P. Johnson had faith that trans people would be liberated one day. That was a faith she was willing to experience violence for. So to me, faith is the beliefs that you hold so strongly that you will still hold onto them even upon punishment.

Which is so Catholic.

Oh my god, totally. But that is the whole thing for me with this post-Catholicism thing is reframing that deeply Catholic belief and being like, “Okay, but I can insert other faiths into that.” I have faith in the inherent goodness of people, that kinda thing.

For you personally, what is your own faith?

My own faith would be a belief that things could be better. It doesn’t have anything to do with Catholicism or religion, but it is where the art comes from. Believing that if we can meet people where they’re at, they might start to understand. This kind of thing might get me in trouble with the other communists, but if you could meet a conservative where they’re at in terms of being like, “Okay, you hold these beliefs because like you’re afraid, and I’m afraid of the same things. Let’s talk through that.” I try to believe in that being possible.

The ultimate failure is if we all stopped caring. Then nothing is ever gonna get better. That is the baseline of religion as a whole—having something to, no matter what, that you continue to care about and keeps you going, and striving to build a better community.

Paul was born in Queens and raised in an Irish Catholic family in the suburbs of Long Island, New York. They studied French Literature at the City College of New York with a minor in Fine Art. For their four years at City College, Paul was annually shown at the CCNY Spring Photo Show (2015-2019). In 2020, after graduating, Paul pivoted to a practice based around painting and sculpture and has since been exhibited in multiple group shows such as Volume 0 in the East Village of Manhattan (2021), Truth and Madness in Brooklyn (2025), The Queer Experience at the Islip Arts Council (2025), and at Bitch Gallery in Brooklyn (March 2026). Paul lives in Ridgewood, Queens.

The “Good Catholic”

Throughout these conversations and especially the ones with people in their 20s and 30s who don’t identify as Catholic anymore, a recurring motif was that of the “Good Catholic.” The Good Catholic doesn’t just silently attend Mass, but actively participates by being an altar server, a reader, a Eucharistic minister, or singing in the choir. The Good Catholic makes most if not all of their sacraments and credits any of their talents, skills, or abilities as “God-given” in order to avoid a display of anything that could be viewed as braggadocious. The Good Catholic cultivates a public image of holiness because perception is very important within their community. As one interviewee said, “They really care a lot about keeping up appearances. Like for me, one of the ways that showed was going to Mass every Sunday. There was always this sense of you were going more for other people.”

In Catholic communities across the country and across the pond, there’s a sense of competition surrounding this upkeep of appearances and subsequent judgment of who is performing the best Catholicism, executed on the public stage of Mass. People I spoke with shared how they felt a mostly unspoken expectation often from their families that they participate in their religious communities in a specific way, presenting themselves as a model Catholic. Alongside this sentiment, they expressed a sense of hollowness, aware even at a young age that the act of being up on the altar or distributing communion wafers was in service to public perception rather than any real conviction of belief. These are the people baptized into the Church, but who have since distanced themselves due to not really vibing with the institutional authority and unwavering expectations of goodness. In his book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that if people are taught to follow a certain code of goodness simply because it is what their religion (or religious community) says they ought to do, then they “will be discouraged from asking…if they ought to do what they supposedly ought to do,” and subsequently divert from questioning and transforming communal norms. A little convoluted, sure, but this argument to me is at the heart of the “Good Catholic” motif. If you’re doing the right thing—or rather, the expected thing—for optics, then you are robbed of choice.

Interestingly, the lapsed or questioning Catholics did not mention expectations of serving others or loving thy neighbor or giving to the poor as correlative to maintaining status as a Good Catholic, all core tenants of Catholicism. One faithful interviewee offered a perspective on this: “Worship of God is about caring for our neighbor and doing justice. That’s a part of our faith that’s really important and people often miss out on at church.” If religious expectations are confined to how one presents oneself at church rather than going out and being in the world, being a “Good Catholic” feels self-serving.

Culture and Catholicism

There’s much speculation that Catholicism is experiencing a revival. The Washington Post claims that Catholicism is surging with Gen Z as they grasp for meaning in a world of uncertainty and dioceses across the country are announcing significant upticks in conversions, like the Archdiocese of Newark which reported that 1,701 individuals were preparing to join the Church earlier this year, up 30 percent from 2025. Instagram Explore feeds and TikTok FYPs are populated by fan edits of Pope Leo’s “most iconic moments,” exaltations of the mystical Catholic aesthetic, and memes of waging a holy war against data centers. In my conversations, people noted some sort of spiritual vacuum in society that is informing people’s search for meaning in something greater than themselves. The systems around us are crumbling so people are seeking comfort in what has been consistent for thousands of years: religion, but more specifically the Catholic Church. The Church offers something to believe in, rules to live by, and it is the visibly glamorous thing. It’s the well-trodden path and the one with the Sistine Chapel no less. Catholicism and other religions offer meaning to our lives beyond the cult of self that dominates our society.

Now, it’s easy to latch onto whatever trendy bandwagon is rolling by at any given moment with a prescription for spiritual fulfillment, but I want to know if the Catholic influencers spreading the Good Word through Instagram Reels about the best Mass to meet your future husband at are actually invested in the collective accountability religion demands of us. In an essay for her Substack “Religion, Reimagined,” religious scholar Liz Bucar writes that religious traditions ask you to consider what you owe not just yourself, but also your community, the natural world, and, yes, sometimes God. But, “they don’t just ask what you believe. They ask what you’re willing to do, consistently, when it’s hard, when no one’s watching, when the results aren’t immediate or guaranteed.” The spiritual vacuum discussed in many of my interviews is real. But what I’m curious about is if people are turning to Catholicism simply as an aesthetic choice rather than a real spiritual one. Like Clavicular, who explained on a livestream that he views religion as necessary for “keeping people in line.” This leaves me wondering: Is the renewed cultural interest in Catholicism about seeking spiritual fulfillment or a last grasp for stability and order?

I haven’t developed any conclusions about these themes. All I know is I have more questions about the role Catholicism is playing in the 2020s and beyond, and that I’m curious what people across the Catholic spectrum think makes one a Good Catholic. I have a hunch that there are connections to be explored between these two themes…

Hardly a party goes by where I don’t find myself chatting about Catholicism with a stranger at some point in the night, cigarettes inevitably in hand. Us Catholics—lapsed, faithful, otherwise—want to talk about it. I plan to continue these interviews and continue meeting people to learn about their relationships with religion and spirituality. If you’re interested in speaking with me or think someone you know would be a good fit, let me know.

It was the most spiritual I’d felt in a church in years.

Easter Mass at St. Vincent Ferrer’s on the Upper East Side caught me off guard. Maybe it was the soaring vaulted ceiling, the jewel-tone stained glass windows, or the spectacularly elaborate altar, but I felt transported in a way I’ve rarely experienced in institutionally religious settings. Gothic Revival just does something to me.

The Church of St. Vincent Ferrer stands regally at Lexington Ave. and 66th St. across from the Park Avenue Armory, a Dunkin’, and a Wonder. The current church, designed by Gothic Revival daddy Bertram Goodhue, was dedicated in 1918, though the Parish of St. Vincent Ferrer has served the area since 1867 in the hands of the Dominican Friars. Its Google reviews and Wikipedia page tout Andy Warhol as a former parishioner. In 1984, the church was added to the National Register of Historic Places and rightly so: the facade features a rare external crucifix beneath the enormous rose window, inside the Stations of the Cross are depicted in oil paintings instead of the usual statuary or relief, and every single surface is so ornate I felt like I was in a Hieronymous Bosch painting. I found a new detail everywhere I looked and couldn’t stop cranking my head around to catch new glimpses of the stained glass. While we were waiting for Mass to begin, my mom pointed out the small replica of Michelangelo’s Pieta off to our right.

The space was awe-inspiring, but without the spectacle of the service itself, the ambiance would be incomplete. The performance of the Mass leaned into the old-world splendor and mysticism of a deeply traditional Catholic Mass. Think: women wearing black lace veils, overwhelming incense, and Latin chanting. To locate the priest, all I had to do was look for the plume of incense smoke wafting above the heads strung together like rosary beads in the crowded pews. When I do attend Mass with my family, I often feel like an outsider, despite having grown up Catholic, because I choose not to participate in most of the prayers or songs. At St. Vincent Ferrer, I felt that pressure alleviated since most of the congregation couldn’t participate in many of the songs since they were sung in Latin by the professional choir. Cumulatively, all these attributes—the architecture, the art, the solemnity, the incense—created an atmosphere of otherworldliness that tipped my experience into something transcendent. I could see why medieval peasants trembled in awe.

Liturgy of the Word

Unlike those peasants, it was not my first time in a church, not even in a particularly beautiful historic one. I’ve been to the Sagradia Família. I’ve sat through Masses at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago and Techny Towers in the suburbs. Perhaps the reverence I felt at St. Vincent Ferrer that has been lacking for me in other churches was due to the absence of emotional baggage tied to the building. At St. Vincent Ferrer, I was a stranger. I could have been anyone, maybe even an out-of-towner visiting a relative in the city. That sense of anonymity allowed me to look at the church with fresh eyes, to see it as a place of beauty instead of judgment. This was not the church where I had mechanically performed four of the seven sacraments or where I spent 1-2 hours a week during grade school under the watchful eyes of teachers, parents, and classmates.

Although my experience at St. Vincent Ferrer was beautiful, it did not boomerang me back to Catholicism although it did stoke a deep appreciation for the mystical tone of Gothic architecture. While the space itself and the sanctity of solemnity resonated with me, the testament aspect did not. In the typical Mass, you affirm your belief through the Nicene Creed, but on Easter, a Holy Day, you get to renew your baptismal promises.1 This is when participants renounce Satan and profess belief in God, Jesus, and the Catholic Church as a call-and-response with the priest where the priest asks the questions and participants reply, “I do.” Matrimonial, if you ask me. Personally, I don’t like being told what to believe and would rather experience belief for myself.

Recently, I read an interview with Lamorna Ash in Worms. Ash is a British writer whose book Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion covers the state of Christianity in the U.K., told through interviews and personal reflection.2 In the interview, Ash cites David Bentley Hart’s proposition that we experience God as being, as consciousness, and as bliss, referencing the Sanskrit words that describe the experience of Brahman, the ultimate reality underlying all creation: sat - being, chit - consciousness, ananda - bliss. “That idea of God as bliss or beauty, as ananda, [Hart] suggests we discover in moments of extraordinary beauty, when we are made aware of…something that feels outside of our ordinary, mundane, cluttered experience of the world,” Ash says. At St. Vincent Ferrer, I felt that veil of mundanity lift briefly in a way I’ve felt before, standing ankle-deep in a river upstate or while watching a durational performance piece. I owe this experience to the church’s environment rather than to the words spoken by the priest. Whatever divine force is to me is not found in words, dogma, or doctrine, but rather in satchitananda.

Liturgy of the Eucharist

On Easter, when the time came for almost everyone in the church to file towards the altar for communion, those of us sitting in the center pews were confused. We wondered if we should walk up the center aisle or one of the side aisles instead and pondered if we should return to our seats down the same aisle we walked up or loop around down a different aisle. Ultimately, everyone did something different. I walked up the center aisle and then returned the same way, keeping my eyes down, hands clasped, walking quickly to avoid making eye contact with the people moving out of my way. While the building itself did not know I’m a lapsed Catholic, I felt that people in the pews would notice I was taking communion out of habit or maybe it was simply out of respect for tradition—all the wrong reasons.

Perhaps I feel so alienated from Catholicism because there’s a certain rigidity of belief, a lack of fluidity that feels restrictive to me. There are criteria one must meet in order to be accepted as a Catholic—doctrine and dogma to be followed, sacraments to be undertaken, earthly expectations to meet—otherwise “you can’t sit with us.” I’m averse to going to Mass because if I don’t say the prayers or do the sign of the cross, then I don’t pass the litmus test. I feel like any belief I do have isn’t enough, or it’s not the right one. The thing is, though, I do believe in something, and that something centers on the existence and experience of the extraordinary, whether it’s found in the Catholic Church’s teachings or not. In that same interview, Ash says she stopped going to church for a bit after the publication of her book because the church once again became a “quite frightening threshold that outed me as a fraud every time I went in because I didn’t believe enough.”

This notion of falling short I find deeply, painfully relatable, and it is why I now call myself a lapsed Catholic. What I don’t call myself is a non-believer. I’m an agnostic, not an atheist. I do believe that an underlying force courses through everything in the universe. This force, divinity, higher power, God, whatever you want to call it, is actively present, and it doesn’t need an institution to distill it. You can walk down whichever aisle you choose.

Concluding Rites

In one of my recent interviews for this Substack, I spoke with another lapsed Catholic who chooses not to participate in Mass rituals because she said she doesn’t want to feel fraudulent. At the same time, she mourns the connection she has lost to her family because she doesn’t participate. What do we lose when we determine our own beliefs, especially after growing up in a religion? We feel estranged and judged. We question if our commitment to our own understanding of spirituality is worth it. But maybe one day we’ll find ourselves looking up at a stained glass rose window and feel a breath of certainty.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

To start off, could you tell me about yourself? Who you are, where you’re from, and what’s your experience with Catholicism.

I’m Amanda. I’m a dance artist based in Philadelphia and I’m originally from Long Island, New York. Both sectors of my family come from Catholicism. My dad is Irish, so there’s the Irish Catholic, and then my mom is from Poland. My relationship with Catholicism has always felt like that was just part of my culture. And then growing up, developing my thoughts, freeing myself from my conservative household, I began to question religion in general and authority. Why do we give certain people or things or entities power over us? I didn’t like it.

Blood memory is something that comes up a lot in my artistic practice, especially knowing that I have a whole other side of my family that lives in a different continent. There’s so much charged energy there. Catholicism has started to burst out in my artistic practices, questioning that further. There are things that I don’t feel quite healed from.

Could you tell me more about what your religious upbringing was like and how religion was viewed in your family?

I didn’t go to Catholic school because Catholic schools were private on Long Island, so it would cost more money. But we would go to church every Sunday when I was in kindergarten.

My grandmother thought I should sing in the youth choir because that’s how Elvis got discovered. I wanted to be discovered so I joined the youth choir. Then from there, I did religious education like once a week. I made all my sacraments up until after Confirmation and then I was like, actually I don’t want to go to church. But before that I was an altar server for eight years. My family is still really invested in the church, I’m the only one who isn’t. But I think there’s something somber about their specific relationships to Catholicism. When my mom married my dad, it was her second marriage. When I was growing up, they never took Communion because it was a second marriage, so it was deemed unholy or whatever, until Pope Francis changed that.

For all my time in church, it felt like they were always trying to make up for the fact that there was this one thing they couldn’t do that’s deemed the most important part of Mass. It was weird to take Communion, but my parents couldn’t. They would still walk up and they would do this almost public humiliation ritual. They would come up, but then they would reject Communion.

Do you think that experience at a young age, witnessing your parents’ shame in such a public manner, had an impact on you?

Totally, it made any form of love feel dirty. I’ve grown past that now, but there is something about the image of being dirty that comes up to me when I think of it. It felt like everything we were doing was always to make up for the fact that we came up short. I felt it specifically for my mother because she would always want me and my sister to do things to also help absolve the family name and be like, “Look at the girls. They’re so good. They’re altar servers.”

Did you feel like there were any explicit expectations around how you were showing up as a family in church settings or was it all unsaid?

It was mostly unsaid. A bunch of families did it too, competing to be the holiest. It felt like a reality TV competition sometimes. But we all are a little bastardized in some way. We’re not this perfect image of holiness. Like one person’s son would be gay and they would be like, “Okay, we’re going to go at this even harder. We need more eucharistic ministers in the family.”

Was there a particular moment or experience that led to you not wanting to return to church after your Confirmation?

What I remember is feeling like the Catholic Church wasn’t quite for me. One of my older brothers had moved to the evangelical scene, which he’s a missionary for now. One time, they were doing a special ceremony for him, so the whole family went to support and I was like, “Wow, God is here, actually. He’s not in the Catholic church.”

I made that switch and that was pretty chill for the most part. But then I was at a service one day and they were talking about prostitution, but it was shameful towards women. I didn’t like how they were talking about it. I was talking about it with my dad afterwards and he was like, “If that’s what’s in the Bible, then that’s what’s true.” And I was like, “I guess I just don’t believe in it.” I remember that feeling distinctive, like I’m choosing to believe something or not to believe something and having agency in that. I don’t agree with this, so why would I believe it? That’s when I decided I wasn’t going back to church.

Were there any similarities or differences you noticed between these two sects of Christianity that struck you?

Something super interesting about the confessional aspect is for Catholics, you go into a small little room and you say it in private and for my family, we had to go to confession before church so that way we could have the Eucharist. We were preparing to be holy. There is something interesting about how the evangelicals wear their confessions on their sleeves.

The big pastor of the church had an affair and it came out. But he pulls up and he does a whole sermon and he’s like, “I was battling with the devil.” And I thought, where is his agency in all this? It’s the devil when you do something wrong, but when you do something good, it’s not God going through you. I don’t like authority like that. I’m making a work surrounding Catholicism and I have questions of who is the authority, like the relationship between performer and audience. I’ve been thinking about power dynamics in that way.

You described the performance piece you’re working on as, “a ritual leading to the resolutionary baptism for my late great grandmother.” I’m interested to hear more about the piece and why you’re drawing from your Catholic heritage for this.

It all comes back to blood memory. I’ve constantly felt a connection to my ancestors and my lineage, despite all the disconnections that happen between me not being part of the Church, which is really important to them. And also specifically a connection to land. The energy in the soil is supercharged whenever I go to Poland to visit my family.

The piece started being about moving through language, moving through soil and earth, and then birds was something that came up a lot. Then I got my energy cleansed from a master Reiki practitioner and she talked about my connection to my ancestors. She talked about how I was going to start seeing a lot of birds. And I was like, “I just did a piece about ancestry, but I used birds a lot.” There were these coincidences that she started threading for me. This energy cleansing situation was big. Something else she said was that there was a desire that I should build an altar for my ancestors to build a relationship. And I was like, “You know what? Yeah.” And so from there, this idea of an altar started forming into the idea of baptism and Catholicism because I felt I wanted to honor [my ancestors], but I also wanted to purge them. Catholicism is my closest gateway to them without actually being there. Because I don’t have that connection to the land [in the U.S.], but I at least have that connection to their faith.

I feel like there is a theme of apology that’s presenting itself in your movement work here. That makes me think again about how when you were growing up, everything your whole family was doing, you said, felt like it was to absolve yourselves of something. Do you think this thread of absolution is showing up in your art?

Apology is definitely big. I’ve been working through the idea of penance and I’ve been doing a lot of repetition practices where it’s feeling like I’m doing ten Hail Marys. In the Mormon church, there’s this thing where you do a baptism for someone who died. You have to absolve people who have died. So this idea of a baptism for someone who’s not alive came up for me because it’s kind of full circle. It’s the first sacrament you make. So yeah, absolving them, absolving myself for them, for myself. It feels like anything I do to myself, I’m also doing for them.

I and other lapsed Catholics that I speak with feel an underlying sense of guilt, but we aren’t really sure what for. I’m curious if you feel that same way and maybe if you have any insights into where that guilt is coming from?

I definitely feel guilt is present. It’s probably coming from so many different things. There’s this constant shame and guilt from my mother’s side of the family, specifically. It trickled down from her, like feeling like you don’t exactly fit into your community or this American world. Where I grew up, everyone had the same experience growing up besides me who had a different cultural influence. That always felt a little shameful growing up.

I was a good kid and I’ve never really had instincts to do bad things. It felt like the only thing that was kind of guilt-worthy of me was feeling shame for what I believe in or questioning it. I do feel disconnected and I think that is a deep guilt. I feel super disconnected from my family and from tradition and how they celebrate because I’m disconnected from the Church. Whenever I go home for Christmas, I can’t really relate to them anymore. So I do feel guilty then where I’m like, should I just go to church? Because they want me to, and that would mean a lot for them. But also, I feel like I can’t go because that’s not who I am.

Is this trade-off worth it for you?

I don’t know yet. I’ve always felt strongly in what I believe and I know that if I were to go to a church or a service, I would feel fraudulent and I don’t like to feel that way, that’s a type of dishonesty I can’t get behind. But as I get older, I do feel it’s tradition that I can’t partake in anymore and I feel disconnected from my family in that way.

Do they respect your choice?

My dad does. He’s just like, “You’re a good person, that’s all that matters. I’ve met a lot of good atheists, I’ve met a lot of good Christians, and I’ve met a lot of bad of both.”

My mother, however, campaigns for me to get back into the Church. For my graduation, she gave me little baby Jesuses. And she’s always bringing up the priest, and putting me on the phone with him and telling me, “You should come back, he’s waiting for you.”

Would you ever go back to the Church?

I wouldn’t go back to the Church, but I would go back to a church. I have urges to perform my work in a church. Last time I was in a church, I had a bodily reaction to it. I think that will kind of play with the geophysical aspects of things and blend it even more. I don’t think I’d go back to a church for service, actually. Only for research purposes. I want to feel how my body is responding to that kind of stuff now versus my memory of it.

Could you describe the bodily reaction you had?

This was in Philadelphia. I started crying. My boyfriend speaks fluent Spanish and he wanted me to go to Spanish service because it’d be helpful for learning Spanish. But then he started leaving and that felt like I was so bastardized that I needed to go to church and I needed to get tricked into it. Obviously that wasn’t his intention, but it was intense. A little after that, I went back to the church I grew up in and I felt a similar feeling, but I felt guarded because I was in a place that I spent so much time as a kid but I felt foreign to it. It’s kind of sad to encounter a past version of yourself.

What’s the most “Catholic” thing about you?

I think it’s the way I serve others. Growing up having to constantly go do things for other people in the name of Jesus or be an altar server…I have to do things for other people.

Amanda Rattigan is a Philadelphia based freelance dance artist. Her work and movement is alchemised through themes of womanhood, metaphysicality, and surrealism. She studied at University of the Arts in Philadelphia until their unforeseen closure, she then finished her degree at Bennington College under Donna Faye Burchfield. Her recent collaborations include Opera Philadelphia, OmenThrice/Sydney Donovan, Eicherling, Sharedelusion, Curt Haworth, and Ally Wilson.

As I enter year three of Lapsed Catholic, I’m looking to take this Substack in a research-oriented direction and, hopefully one day, expand it beyond this digital platform. So I want to hear from you, my readers. Why do you read Lapsed Catholic? What, if anything, resonates with you? And going forward, what do you want to see more of from me? Drop a comment or message me.

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What was your religious upbringing like?

A chapter in my book would be “I have always been like this.” I’ve always been spiritual. I grew up in both the Catholic and Greek Orthodox faiths, and always felt comfortable in a church. I felt very connected to nature, too, and that is what my understanding of a higher power is in terms of beauty and miraculousness. But there was something about being in a church that felt comfortable.

My mom was of that generation of, like, you had to go to Mass every Sunday. So she directed my faith and I’m grateful for that foundation. I’m also grateful over the years to have discerned my own understanding.

One of the things my mom told us was that anytime you feel lost or homesick wherever you are, you can always find a home in a church and familiarity with the Mass. This wisdom is always comforting and has been true over the course of my life.

Like me, you have a Catholic mother, Greek Orthodox father, so I’m wondering what you felt about the relationship between those two religious sects.

Any kind of dogma didn’t really resonate with me, but it also guided me a little. I don’t believe in a hell, but I think that concept was somewhat helpful and kept me out of a little bit of trouble.

But in terms of the difference between the Greek Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church…as a kid, I wondered why we would go to the Greek Orthodox church. I didn’t understand the language, so I got more out of the Catholic church growing up. I appreciate Jesus being one of the masters and, even if you don’t believe in the Resurrection and all that, he was an ascended master that taught us how to live and love one another.

Did you go to Catholic school?

I wanted to. But in our neighborhood on the northwest side of Indianapolis, the public schools were better and bigger than the Catholic schools and had more to offer. But I was involved in our CCD (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine) and stuff at church. I’ve always looked at the stars and thought there’s something else out there.

I worked for Catholic hospitals [as a nurse practitioner] and I loved that. When I worked at St. Joe’s, we started the day with a prayer at 8:00 AM and had a closing prayer at 8:00 PM. It was run by nuns and it was run so well. Nursing is a career where I could get paid for taking care of people and truly caring for them in mind, body, and spirit.

Why did you want to go to Catholic school?

Whether I knew it or not, I was always talking to God and I felt like there was some ethereal direction. I don’t think I’ve ever been really grounded in this life on this earth, because I feel like I remember what heaven was like. But I know I have to stay here on this earth to do the work I’m supposed to do. I also have always had this core knowing or feeling of our own inner divinity, whether I knew it or not as a kid. I wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to learn more about it and connect more with that feeling of peace and love.

What has been your journey with faith and spirituality over the course of your life?

I’ve studied The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and I’ve been interested in all different faiths and faith journeys.

But as I said, I’ve always felt comfortable in a Catholic church. I always want the familiarity even if the Mass seems rote. There’s so many differences between different churches. Some of them can be gloom-and-doom, or some of them are chest-pounding. I’ve done my own discernment to feel that’s not our god, that’s not our higher power or how we’re intended to be. We’re not intended to be full of shame and fire and brimstone and gloom.

When I was a junior at Indiana University, one of my best friends, Michelle, was diagnosed with Acute Myelocytic Leukemia. Michelle promised us that she would tell us what things were like on the other side if she was able to when she passed. She didn’t speak German and Spanish, but when she was dying she was singing German nursery rhymes and speaking in Spanish, it was so trippy.

About six months after she passed, I was on the phone with her mom and she said, “I just read the most wild book.” And I said I did too. Then her two other best friends had read the book as well. It was a book called Many Lives, Many Masters by Dr. Brian Weiss. The book talks about the ability to speak another language in dying you haven’t been able to speak in this lifetime because of prior lives. We recognized that this is probably what happened to Michelle and that’s why I got into studying reincarnation and past lives.

I’ve done past life regressions myself, and it also took me down the Buddhist route because that made sense to me. Most faiths are based on that same foundation of love and service to others. I know God to be a loving, compassionate presence that we don’t have to fear and that we can pray to about everything.

That’s so interesting that you feel strongly about reincarnation because I feel like there are many Catholics who would be like, stop right there. How do you square that with your Catholicism?

You know how Catholics don’t really study the Bible, right? But it’s my understanding that there’s inferences [to reincarnation]. Here’s my litmus test that I learned from my spiritual director: If a thought or a feeling or a belief comes with love, peace, wisdom, joy, or truth, then that comes from God. The Catholic Church as a foundation doesn’t tell us to go do anything against any of those things or to harm another. So I’m down with that still.

Also, doing what I do, I’ve been witness to so many births and deaths that it is, at the very minimum, my understanding that we are the breath of life. Your soul comes into your body, you move through life, and then you take your last breath. In the meantime, we’re here to bring our gifts and love one another. Catholicism has never told me anything different.

You’re right, everything that Jesus is saying and everything that’s being taught, it’s all about loving each other and caring for ourselves and each other and the earth and everything on it. But I think why I struggle with Catholicism as an institution and as a structure is because I see the Church acting totally contradictory to that in many instances.

Like the Crusades, or all the sex abuse stuff. It protected predators. Yes, all this love sounds so nice in theory, and I do believe that. But I can’t get on board with the Catholic Church because I don’t see it act like that. How do you rationalize still being Catholic?

I think many of us are hungry for what we know the Catholic Church can and should be. And it’s sad. That’s also why I pick and choose where I’m going to church. I don’t go to church when I’m in Indianapolis.

It’s funny, anytime humans take anything and institutionalize it, it automatically becomes something different.

So. You’re a spiritual director. What does that mean exactly?

It’s holy listening and coaching to nurture that relationship with God, because that’s all God wants to do is connect with us.

How do you go about doing that?

One of the questions that we come back to in spiritual direction is where do you see God in whatever happens?

When I was in a car accident in December, I saw God in all the angels and helpers that came to help me out. The truck driver, the fact that I’m not afraid of my own mortality, but at the same time I recognize I’m not ready to go yet. When we have trials, remembering that we can pray about everything. Spiritual direction is helping others remember that. There’s an aspect of mindfulness called beginner’s mind. If every moment’s new, every moment is an opportunity to begin again.

The other day I was up between two and five in the morning. It took me until five where I was like, I can pray about this. Then I fell fast asleep. I can honestly say I’ve never had a prayer not answered. It’s not always the answers we expected, but if I prayed about something, I’ve never had it not answered in some way.

What are you praying for?

Right now?

Whenever.

Everyday I pray for my kids.

It’s hard for me to separate and remember that they are on their own journey and they have to figure their stuff out and the gifts they’re going to bring. One of the things my spiritual director says is that as much as we love our kids, God loves them even more and God’s got them. I also pray prayers of gratitude.

What do you think is the role of spirituality for people?

It’s what we are. We forget our own divinity. Ram Dass is a wise teacher. You know how he says we’re all just walking each other home? Remembering that is spirituality.

Angela Thomas-Santos is a holistically certified Family Nurse Practitioner, Spiritual Director, and Mindfulness Teacher (MBSR) who bridges the world of clinical medicine with profound spiritual insight. Drawing on her personal journey as both Catholic and Greek Orthodox as well as her respect of and interest in other faith traditions, Angela has cultivated a mission to help relieve suffering and be a channel for Grace and Love. With decades of experience across diverse healthcare settings—including emergency care, family medicine, palliative, and hospice care—she brings a deeply compassionate and holistic presence to those navigating life’s most profound transitions. She is the founder of Holistic Heart of Healing, where she provides peace in mind, body, and spirit for individuals and their loved ones facing transitions and challenges.

Christmas pageants are nothing new for Christian communities, though the Nativity plays I took part in as a child were significantly more subdued compared to “The Gift of Christmas.” When I say “subdued,” I mean every actor was under 14, there were no musical numbers except for a verse or two from “Silent Night,” and the performances took place either in church, on the school gymnasium stage, or in someone’s garage. As a kindergartner, I played a shepherd keeping watch over my flock clad in a colorful tissue paper tunic over my plaid uniform jumper and collared shirt. In eighth grade, I played an angel in the living manger scene, the culmination of a tradition dubbed “Follow the Star” at my grade school.

You may be wondering what exactly a “Follow the Star” is so I’ll explain. On the final day of classes before Christmas vacation, my entire school, from the littlest kindergartner to the too-cool eighth graders, bundled up to brave the Midwestern winter. While the rest of the student council members got in costume for the living manger scene, three select boys decked out as Wise Men led the student body on a pilgrimage around the neighborhood following—you guessed it—the Star, which was really a hand painted wooden replica on top of a long rod, kind of like the cross altar servers carry. This of course was a reenactment of the biblical story of the three kings who believed the appearance of a certain star in the sky would direct them to the birth of a special child. Bible readings about the birth of Jesus from Matthew or Luke were sprinkled throughout the cold, snowy journey, and though it felt like we walked for hours, toes and fingers growing numb, I don’t think it was ever more than 30 minutes.

But the big reveal was whose garage held the Nativity scene with the shepherds and angels and Mary and Joseph, and whose baby would be Jesus. Yes, a real live baby was out there in a drafty garage in the dead of winter. But don’t worry: He was wrapped in swaddling clothes. When I played my big role as an angel, I stood as still as I could wearing a white choir robe with a tinsel halo on my head, my hands held in prayer. As a seasoned actor—I’d dabbled in children’s theater productions—I took my role seriously even if I wasn’t totally sold on the scene’s historical accuracy.

The first Nativity play is attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. In the 13th century, Assisi staged a reenactment of the manger scene in Italy, perhaps an attempt to add some intrigue to a regular old sermon. Inside a cave, Assisi preached Jesus’ birth in front of a live manger scene complete with animals and a baby. Biblical plays beyond the Nativity were common in Europe during the Medieval Ages as they sought to engage a largely illiterate population in the miracles of Christianity, but when the Protestant Reformation rolled around, these theatrical displays declined with the Puritans even going so far as to classify them as sacrilegious. But in Catholic countries, Nativity plays persisted.

Some Protestant churches now seem to have totally reversed their stance on dramatizing Biblical stories as we see with “The Gift of Christmas.” In Fritz’s County Highway article, the folks from Prestonwood contend that the birth of Christ is spectacular, so why not celebrate it with spectacle? In my own experience, “Follow the Star” is a fine tradition meant to actively engage children in the Bible. God knows religion loves tradition. Arguably, there’s a performative element to any religion, even just showing up to services so your devotion is witnessed by the community. I realized that more than ever as I gazed down at some parishioner’s fresh baby in the arms of my classmate, the eyes of dozens of children glancing over my haloed stature as they rotated to get a good look at the Nativity scene. It felt like when you walk down the church aisle for Communion, the Christian version of a red carpet.

For much of my life I played the part of the believer, much like I did that of an angel. I said grace before dinner, mechanically gestured and sung my way through Mass, fulfilled all the sacraments expected of me. Perhaps, in part, it’s this disconnect with true faith that has led me to be so disaffected with Catholicism. Despite following my cues, I failed to convince myself of my own act. And still, my hands perform the sign of the cross after any “Amen.” I’m left wondering what, if anything, do I believe? A recent Washington Post article describes a small resurgence in young people attending worship services: recent Gallup polls found attendance among adults under 30 is up from 19% in 2020 to 25% this year. Clearly, young people are looking for something beyond our increasingly unstable, next-day-delivery, AI-saturated world. I guess my question for those people—and specifically those who turn to Catholicism—would be why do they think they can find this stability in religion? Anyways, catch me at St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village doing research next year.

Like the Big Three in astrology, people’s Top Four films also illuminate certain qualities and characteristics about them. Ask anyone with a Letterboxd, those four rectangles at the top of your profile matter. Does the guy you’re hooking up with include Wolf of Wall Street or 500 Days of Summer in his favorite movies? That’s your sign to walk calmly away. Does the girl you met at a friend-of-a-friend’s gallery opening list Girl, Interrupted or Suspiria (2018) among her favorite watches? She’s probably hot and collages in her free time.

Pope Leo doesn’t have a Letterboxd, but he did proclaim his favorite films of all time in an official clip from Vatican Media. So what can we deduce about him?

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

• A Frank Capra classic with the inimitable Jimmy Stewart. Stewart plays an ambitious young man who progressively becomes a jaded, slightly older man. Despite having helped scores of people over his life and settled down with a loving family, Stewart’s George Bailey regards himself as a failure and contemplates taking his own life only to gain perspective with the help of his guardian angel.

The Sound of Music (1965)

• I’m starting the rumor that Pope Leo is a musical nerd, or maybe he just has a taste for the greats as both It’s a Wonderful Life and The Sound of Music made it on American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time list. In case you don’t know this one (though I’d be shocked), Julie Andrews stars as a novice nun in Austria who becomes a governess to seven children. They sing, dance, warm their strict father’s cold heart, and ultimately escape the Nazi regime.

Ordinary People (1980)

• Funnily enough, this movie takes place in Chicago’s North Shore suburbs where I’m from. Perhaps this is a nod to Leo’s own Chicagoland roots? It follows a splintering family in the wake of one of their son’s accidental deaths and the other son’s attempted suicide as the remaining family members connect, separate, and grieve.

La Vita Bella (1997)

• This is the one movie on Pope Leo’s list that I haven’t seen, but a quick search tells me it’s about a father and son interned in a Nazi concentration camp. The father, played by Roberto Benigni, makes many sacrifices and creates a game for his son in an attempt to shield him from the horrors.

It’s interesting to me that the volatility of family dynamics feature heavily in all four of these movies as well as the nature of sacrifice, especially for loved ones. What are we willing to give up in service of others? Though generally these movies are hopeful, they aren’t all “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” as Scott Simon remarked on NPR. Each film offers a nuanced portrayal of the inherent suffering we experience in life and the darkness that can creep up within humanity. But there is joy to be found even in moments of great pain. Though that may sound overly simplistic and trite, these films remind us that hope, faith, call it whatever you want, is critical especially in times when hopelessness threatens to swallow us whole.

No doubt these uncontroversial films were carefully selected with the help of the Vatican’s PR team, but I’d like to think they are also somewhat representative of Leo’s own taste: popular, middle-of-the-road, dramatic, and maybe something of a 20th-century history buff. If I saw these movies listed as someone’s Top Four on Letterboxd, I would think they are concerned with palatability but harbor a desire to flex their cinematic knowledge. These movies are all considered “great.” Can’t believe Leo didn’t include Conclave though.

What do you think these movies tell us about Pope Leo? Let me know in the comments.

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How did you grow up? What was your religious upbringing and background?

My mother is Jewish. My father is Irish Catholic. I grew up in a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Boston. I went to Catholic school. I sometimes went to church, but my dad had been previously divorced so he was barred from the church in our neighborhood. We ended up going to a different church called St. Mark’s. St. Mark’s was led by a priest named Fr. Finn, who I’m named after and who baptized me. He has done a lot for protecting immigrants in the neighborhood. My mother is Jewish and we did do Passover. We did a lot of Jewish celebrations, but neither of my parents were really religious. Religion was always a weight that was hanging over us that we wanted to shake off. It wasn’t until I was in architecture school where I became interested in 20th century avant-garde art and architecture. A lot of the artists and architects that I was fascinated by were Jewish. That was the first time I ever learned about my Jewish family history. My middle name is my mother’s maiden name from my Jewish side, which is Jonas, and growing up, the antisemitism was so bad in Boston that starting in the third grade, I started to tell everybody that it was John because I started to hear, “Jonas the Jew.” So starting in third grade, I would sign Daniel John Roche. And it wasn’t until I was about 20 that that stopped. One time, my mom found a paper that I had signed and she was like, “That’s not your middle name. Why did you sign that?” And I was like, “It’s just been something I’ve been doing so I don’t hear jokes.”

Did you feel confused when you were young?

So confused. Many of my friends that I went to elementary school with, they’re still my best friends. But I was never a Catholic to them because I was Jewish. I was the only Jewish kid in the whole school. That always made me feel like an outsider. I harbored a lot of resentment to the Catholic Church. That being said, all the good things that Fr. Finn was doing, I always really admired him.

I feel like there’s a stereotype that Boston is hardcore Irish Catholic. So what, in your experience, makes a Boston Catholic?

My first year of college, one of my best friends had a job that summer cleaning up trash on the side of highways for local public works. It sucks, it’s disgusting. He would always joke, he was not religious, but he would always joke, “I’m doing God’s work.” I’ve heard that again and again among people doing hard jobs that are not pleasurable at all. I think a lot about how one of the many differences between Judaism and Catholicism is ideas about the afterlife. Catholicism you will be rewarded in the kingdom of heaven, but Judaism so much of it is about improving the world as it is right now and building a utopia in this world. That has huge implications for everybody that’s in those religions.

In the tradition I was raised in, it feels like we take God very personally, like there’s a belief that God intervenes in the world. People will always be like, “Oh, pray for so-and-so to find a job,” or whatever. It’s almost ontological.

With Boston Catholics—and I think this applies to all Catholics—it feels like everybody is so repressed. There’s this feeling of keeping everything pent up. When you’re raised Catholic, the only chance you’re given to vocalize problems is in confession. When I think about Boston Catholics, I think about serious repression of emotions.

Do you feel like that atmosphere of repression affected you?

For a long time, I had to hide half of my identity. When I was coming out of that, one thing I felt upset about was that I never consented to any of this. My first loved poet was this guy Jim Carroll. He grew up in Inwood, part of a working class Irish Catholic family. He was closeted and also a brilliant poet. I remember being 17 and reading this line that he says about the Catholic Church: “They’re fucking up minds they do not own.” That hit me like a ton of bricks. Jim Carroll’s poetry spoke to me on a level that I have never, ever encountered. There’s something like mysticism in his thinking. He never abandons his belief in God, which I find so interesting. I haven’t either. I don’t know what I believe.

Would you still call yourself Catholic or do you identify differently now?

I identify as really confused.

So what has your journey with religion and faith been like?

After Catholic school, I did a master’s in Moscow. On my mother’s side, my family came from Belarus. I think this has huge implications for my politics as well, but a lot of my family members on my mother’s side are Zionists and I never even for a second felt uncomfortable questioning that, being an anti-Zionist. Because I grew up in this uncomfortable space where I was not fully a member of anything. As confusing as childhood was and as it is now, I’m really grateful that I was never exposed to just one worldview.

This is a whole other rabbit hole, but did you ever see Spotlight?

Yeah.

That was my high school.

Oh my God, really?

Yeah. So I went to that high school and, again, I was like the only Jewish kid there. But by that point I wasn’t even thinking about that. In theology, it was the first time I learned about Óscar Romero. That was the first time I ever heard a critical take about the U.S. and that made me really interested in the liberation theologists. What that impressed upon me about the institution was when the nation-state isn’t acting in the interests of the institution, we’ll critique it. That was the first time I ever saw this conflict. But the sex abuse crisis in Boston…I was born in 1993. A lot of the abuse was still happening when I was born. It just wasn’t talked about. To see what people are willing to compromise about themselves in the name of preserving an institution…They’ll completely just kill off whatever for the sake of the continuity of this thing that’s been around for millennia.

You keep returning to this idea of repression. Why do you think Catholicism and Christianity specifically have this culture of repression? So much so it’s become meme-ified.

My friend Tessa Solomon is Syrian Orthodox Christian and we were at dinner a couple months ago talking about the difference between Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism. Tessa said what she’s observed is that in Syrian Orthodox Christianity, guilt isn’t used as a weapon. Shame isn’t used as a device to control thoughts or behavior. In Roman Catholicism, this repression is like self-policing. I do think that the role of the Catholic Church is to exert control. It’s to keep the unruly body politic morally in check.

There’s this revolutionary proverb in Kenya that I learned. It goes something like, “When the British arrived, they told us to close our eyes and open our hands. When we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land.”1

As an architecture writer, do you feel like Catholicism or more generally faith intersects with architecture in any specific way?

I’m working on a book with my friend Andrew who is a Catholic from Miami. Andrew loves this liberation theologian named Franz Hinkelammert. In the eighties, when everybody’s talking about late capitalism and the end of utopia and everybody’s really cynical and jaded, Hinkelammert never abandoned utopia. And as a Catholic, I think that that’s where that comes from. The book we’re working on is called Antifascist Architecture, and the conclusion is this defense of utopian thinking that we’d like to see resuscitated.

Another thing that I think about too is where cathedrals have a specific formula that you need to follow in order for it to be a cathedral, synagogues don’t have any fixed spatial system. It can be whatever you want it to be. I’ve always found that interesting.

For Tiny Cutlery, you wrote about a priest exorcising your family’s house before you were born. Was that family lore?

Not even lore, just something so banal. That’s just what you did.

Do you feel like your experience of Catholicism was rooted in that dedication to tradition?

Yeah, but then sometimes you find kernels of beautiful wisdom in that tradition. My dad is really interesting. He grew up one of nine in the same neighborhood as me and he went to Catholic school. He got a full ride to study urban studies at UMass Amherst, but he had to drop out after his first year. Inevitably, he took some courses with some lefties from the New Left in the sixties and started to read Lenin and Marx. His transition into that was so seamless because of his Catholic upbringing. He’s now the most jaded, cynical person when it comes to politics, but he still says things like, “You know, Jesus was a socialist.”

I definitely agree with your dad on that. Socialism takes care of people.

Then there’s the problem of JD Vance whose inner version of Catholicism is so warped and self-serving. But there are so many incredible, badass people on the Catholic left. Have you ever heard about Fr. Berrigan? He was a priest in Philly and during the Vietnam War, he burnt down the drafting office.

Even today, there are so many priests and advocates fighting for immigrants because that is so foundational to Catholic teaching. If you’re not advocating for the rights of immigrants in this country, I’m sorry, I don’t think you can call yourself a Catholic.

Not at all.

Do you feel a tension with your Judaism and Catholicism now?

Up until age 18, I was raised in a hardcore Catholic place. Between 18 and basically now, I’ve been fully embracing my Jewishness. But now I’m so alienated by Zionism. I’ve always felt alienated by it. So now I’m figuring out what spirituality means to me devoid of camps.

I feel similarly. I’m trying to figure out what spirituality is when no one is telling me what it should look like, feel like, how it should behave.

In Judaism, the hallmark of a great student is how strong your questions are. It’s not whether or not you can recite a passage from scripture. Whereas in Catholicism, it’s more about internalizing dogma. But in Judaism, you’re not going to get answers. You’re just going to ask and be asked really hard questions. That’s what I love about it.

Dan Jonas Roche is an editor based in Brooklyn. His forthcoming book with Andrew Santa Lucia and Lane Rick is titled “Antifascist Architecture” (Park Books, 2025).

I haven’t dropped recommendations in awhile, so here are some things I’ve read or watched and enjoyed lately:

1. John Paul Brammer on the ridiculous Cracker Barrel saga and what it says about sacredness in America.

2. Lauren Jackson on the Catholic Church’s adoption of influencers.

3. Mary Karr’s “Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer.” Karr converted to Catholicism after being a staunch cynic for most of her life. In this essay, she compares both poetry and prayer as sacred languages and I think that’s beautiful.

4. A video from my friend which I have distilled into two images since Substack won’t let me embed a video:

5. Tony Ginocchio on the Catholic Church’s finances. Tony’s writing is stuffed with personality and snark and this essay is no exception. Big fan of Grift of the Holy Spirit over here.

6. Jeff Baena’s The Little Hours. Kind of one-note, but hey, sometimes it’s fun to watch a silly movie about wild 14th-century nuns yelling profanities. Also Aubrey Plaza stars in it.

Mass is the organized liturgical service parishioners attend on Sunday mornings if they’re rule-abiding, Sunday nights if there are teenagers in the family, or daily if they’re my grandma. Mass exists in its contemporary form thanks to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which officially allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular and for priests to face the congregation, fostering a participatory environment. The order of Mass is as follows1:

Introductory Rites

• Entrance Procession, Greeting - Self-explanatory.

• Penitential Rite - After the priest and altar servers process into the church and the priest gives his initial greeting, he leads the congregation in asking forgiveness for our sins.

• Glory to God, Opening Prayer - There is one God, guys, and he is so high! He is the highest guy.

Liturgy of the Word

• First Reading, Responsorial Psalm, Second Reading - The First Reading is usually from the Old Testament while the Second is from the New Testament letters.

• Gospel - The priest reads this one and it’s always about Jesus.

• Homily - When the priest interprets the Gospel for the lay people. Warning: Homilies can be the driest, longest speeches ever leaving you exchanging looks with your sister in between zoned out spells. Sometimes they can be interesting, though!

• Profession of Faith - The congregation declares belief in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Oh, and also belief in the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” How did that get tacked on?

• Prayers of the Faithful - We pray that suffering is alleviated framed in current events.

Liturgy of the Eucharist

• Preparation of the Altar, Presentation of the Gifts, Prayer Over the Gifts - The bread and wine are brought to the priest who arranges them in a way only known to priests. If you were ever an altar server and assisted with preparing the altar the priest always adjusted the items you placed, I promise.

• Eucharistic Prayer - The priest presents the bread and wine to the congregation and in this moment the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus. Yep, you read that right, it’s called consubstantiation.

• The Lord’s Prayer - This is the prayer that begins, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” If the priest really wants to jazz things up, he’ll chant it.

• Sign of Peace - You make awkward eye contact with people around you and then shake hands with those brave enough to return your gaze.

• Breaking the Bread, Lamb of God - You know how Jesus is often depicted holding a lamb? That’s because he’s the sacrificial lamb. But he’s also the shepherd and Catholics are the flock. It’s a little confusing.

• Distribution of Communion - This is when baptized Catholics and some special cases process up the aisle, eat a cardboard wafer, and avoid drinking alcoholic grape juice from the same chalice as a hundred other people.

Concluding Rites

• Announcements - “The parish rummage sale will be held the last week of the month. Email Judy about volunteer shifts. More information can be found in today’s bulletin.”

• Final Blessing and Dismissal - The priest encourages churchgoers to “go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”

• Recessional - Usually the music director plays a chipper, invigorating final hymn to end things on a high note after all that repentance and solemnity.

The climax of the Mass is the Liturgy of the Eucharist which can be traced back to Jesus’ Last Supper when he shared a meal with his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion. Imagine you’re at a dinner party and a guest picks up a loaf of She Wolf bread, tears a chunk off and holds it up so all at the table have no choice but to pay attention saying, “This is my body, which will be given up for you.” That’d leave you wondering what was in the wine. And that’s how the Christian liturgy began.

But the word “Mass” comes later. It was first traced back to St. Ambrose in the 4th century and stems from the Ecclesiastical Latin Missa which itself is derived from the Latin mittere. Mittere means “to send, release, let go.” I’m no etymologist, but it is interesting that “Mass” is literally about dismissal, a sending forth of the people instead of a reference to celebration. Catholics can demonstrate their commitment to God by partaking in the Eucharist, but that consumption only means something if one then brings Christianity’s teachings out of the church and into the world. This definition of “Mass” directs Christianity as a fundamentally evangelical religion much to the detriment of other faiths and belief systems. We see this missionary ambition exemplified across history from St. Paul evangelizing during the Roman era to St. Francis Xavier’s mission to Japan in the 16th century. In the present day, young Christians of all dominations are encouraged to take part in mission trips often under the guise of service. Christianity is so certain it’s the “right” religion and everyone has to be on its side.

Service is GOOD! Don’t get me wrong on that. The part where I get hung up is using service to hide proselytization. This is not ubiquitous in Christianity, but it is a reality. Yes, go and set the world on fire2, but don’t burn your fellow humans in the process.

I am curious as to how a Latin word found in the Dismissal came to define the whole service. There’s a significant theology there that’s perhaps connected to Matthew 28:19-20:

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.

This sentiment of going forth and proclaiming the gospel further emphasizes Christianity’s evangelical nature, which over the centuries has become egregiously politicized. There are some sects of Christianity that value obedience and conformity to the faith over the actual teachings of it, resulting in atrocities like the Native American boarding schools. Nowhere in the Bible does anyone say, “Go convert your neighbor and if they have their own beliefs, ignore those and forcibly convert them. In fact, subjugate them.” “Mass” should not be a call to homogeny, but rather spur just and charitable actions towards all. Don’t let evangelization eclipse truth.

I’m not here to rehash Vice’s rehash of the New York Post’s rehash of a viral TikTok, but I have some thoughts. For my attempt to participate in the discourse like a good Substacker, I will be answering the question, “What are Gen Z women looking for while on these retreats?” I’m a Gen Z woman myself so I do have some authority here. Tackling this question made me think about the conversations I had with Jack and Fr. Peter for this newsletter. In both of those interviews, we discussed how young people are increasingly dissatisfied with the consumerist state of the world and are looking to fill the spiritual hole capitalism has scooped out of us. In a Wall Street Journal opinion column earlier this year, college students explained what’s driving them to Catholicism which can be summed up as they are seeking an antidote to a hollow world.

For those who adore strict rules, social norms, and lauding their moral high ground, organized religion might be the answer to their prayers. For the ones who practice yoga, have done The Artist’s Way, and drink natural wine,1 a summer retreat on spiritual grounds—be that monastery or convent—sounds like the perfect place for connecting with something greater than Instagram follower count. Political organizing offers still another approach to be part of something MORE. Just look at Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign. At 50,000 volunteer signups, it stands as the largest volunteer operation in New York City history, one that energized tens of thousands of new voters to the polls. And when you look at voter turnout, those aged 18-39 were the age group with the biggest increase since 2021.

We are absolutely starved for meaningful communal participation beyond hanging out on a bar patio (though I do love that). At convents, all are welcome with the only expectations being respectful quiet, thoughtful reflection, and maybe some light labor if what I’ve seen on TikTok is true. Every active convent I’ve been in, and it’s been at least four, is refreshingly welcoming. Nuns are probably my favorite part of the Catholic Church because they seem to me the least tethered to doctrine and the most mystical. Feminine spirituality—not limited to nuns—diverges greatly from the traditional patriarchal structure of most organized religions, and this atmosphere proves alluring to young women. Not in a celibate, pledge-my-life-to-Jesus way, but in a more contemplative, grounding, liberating way.

So what are Gen Z women looking for at the convent? Yes, they want to slow down, but it’s far deeper than that. The convent offers an opportunity to pause the performance of our lives and a chance to connect with something greater than ourselves, something beyond the physical realm venturing into the spiritual. Suffice to say, the opposite of the Love Island villa.

It was a strange moment for me to hop on a video call with a priest whose presence underscored some of my formative (and probably most awkward) years. I felt apprehensive in the Microsoft Teams waiting room, like I was awaiting a verdict or test results. But as we eased into conversation, I steadied myself in my lapsed Catholicism and the spiritual curiosity that stems from it. Telling your former priest you no longer identify as Catholic feels like a nasal rinse: slightly discomforting, but ultimately cleansing and refreshing.

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Can you tell me a little about yourself?

I live in Lincoln Park, Chicago, but I grew up in Poland. I moved here when I was 23. I went to the seminary here in Mundelein, in the suburbs of Chicago. I spent a few years in Wilmette, and at the same time I learned how to be both the chaplain and ethicist in a hospital. I spent 13 years at Lurie Children’s. Then I spent seven years supporting the structure of the Church. In 2020, I was appointed a pastor at Saint Clement.

What was your religious upbringing like, or just your upbringing in general, in Poland?

My grandmother was very religious and I always admired the peace that she had and what was a strong relationship with God. I don't think my parents had that way. In the summers, I went to church every day because I stayed with my grandmother.

I was there every morning for 7:00 AM mass. I think I will get one extra point in heaven just for that. I didn't enjoy getting up, but I did enjoy the routine of going to the church and seeing people pray.

What really attracted me to become serious about faith was seeing the depth and level of contentment that my grandmother had that I’d seen very few people around her have. I couldn't attribute it to anything else because nothing else was checking out. Everything else in her life was exactly the same as it was in the lives of other people, except for her very serious faith. And so I thought, that's what I would like to have.

Did your grandmother's faith and dedication contribute to your decision to become a priest?

That probably was the biggest driver of it. This whole idea of longing for something deeper and more peaceful. When I was growing up there was a lot of change in Poland, after communism and all that. In the world everything changes almost instantly. Our hearts crave something that is much more eternal or that is lasting. I think that probably was attractive to me in the whole idea of the Church when you look at the societies and cultures and everything else changing. The Church stood the same for 2,000 years.

Joining the seminary, you have six years to make up your mind whether this is where God is calling you and it's not only you, it's the seminary that has to make up their mind too. On both sides you can say, well, we don't think it's working, or, I don't think it's working. And you can step away from it.

I was talking with a coworker who asked about priests and he was like, “Can someone be a priest for three years and then go and work in marketing or something?” I have never known or heard of anyone who does that. I was curious if you had a perspective on that.

Once you get ordained, you always will be a priest whether you want it or not. To some extent just as you get married. You are always in that situation. But the bishop who oversees you could decide what would be good for you to do in order to get better.

After I graduated from Northwestern, I did consulting because the cardinal said, we want him to have experience of working with other industries so he brings that experience back and can enrich the Church.

What is your goal or vision for Saint Clement? I've noticed you're incredibly active on social media and you have a podcast.

It really doesn't matter what vision you have as a pastor. What really matters is God's dream for that specific place because every place is different. And God has a heart for his people, right? In the scripture, there's clear evidence that Jesus has a heart for people who surrounded him.

God has a vision and we have to discern it. Here at Saint Clement, we did a fair amount of discernment with a small group of people. We engaged in a 12-week process of understanding.

We did one big survey and then said, what is God revealing to us? We landed on our purpose is to build a kingdom of God. In the end, everything that we do—our mission, vision, values—might change. What doesn't change is your purpose, why you are in this part of the world and why God put you there. We are here to build a kingdom of God and everything that we do really informs that.

Right now, our parishioners are split. Half are school families, people who are in their fifties, some who are in their sixties and older. And then half of the people are in their twenties. That's the fastest growing group that we have are Gen Zs.

Why do you think that is?

One side of the coin is Gen Zs are the least religious social group we ever had in this country. And yet there is a flip side of it which says the Gen Zs are the fastest growing Christian group and actually the fastest growing Catholic group.

Barna is going to release a new study in the next few weeks that actually says that out of any Christian church in the United States, the fastest growing group is the Catholic group of young. Especially driven by young men. And the reason is that young people look at the world and they say, okay, in the last 40 years in United States, we try to substitute God with a lot of things. Thomas Aquinas talks about four substitutes of God: power, money, pleasure, and selfishness. And we tried to substitute God and it doesn't work. We are the most depressed, the most isolated, and the loneliest generation we ever had in this country. Therefore, substituting probably doesn't work.

In this year, we welcomed 70 new people into the church. I would say 80% of them are in their early twenties. We would call it a revival of young people having another look at faith and at church.

That's so interesting to hear that younger people are coming to the Church. Because I feel like myself, and a lot of people who are my age, who were raised in the Church have become disaffected with it.

It comes with being born Catholic and there's nothing bad about it. But Catholicism, especially in the areas like Chicago, is so culture, right? There's 44%1 of people in Chicago are Catholic. What happens is, we know a lot of things about God or about Jesus. But a lot of Catholics—people will crucify me for it—they have a great knowledge of Jesus, but they don't have relationship with him. You won't stay in any relationship unless you're in love. It becomes dysfunctional. If you want to be Catholic, if you want to be Christian, you need to be in love with Jesus.

This disillusionment seems to be very specific to young people who were raised Catholic. My partner is Jewish and they went to Jewish day school. They aren’t religious, but they do have this personal relationship with their faith and with spirituality that I feel like I don't have. That’s just an observation.

Do you have any thoughts about the new pope?

I'm excited that we have a pope who is a missionary. You don't become a missionary to shrink the Church. You have a mindset of growth, of sharing the message of Jesus with people who don't know it.

How do you think the Church could adapt to meet our current cultural, social, political moment?

We have to know the culture and understand how to accompany people in the culture because the culture changes from generation to generation. But in the end, the goal of the Church is not to be affected by the culture. If the Church’s stance or teachings or ideas would be the ideas of the city square, why would you go to the Church? I don't think the Church is going to adapt or change based on the culture of the day because the culture of the day came and went.

Even just religion in general continues to survive across the world for thousands and thousands of years in a way nothing else does.

Has your faith ever wavered or have you ever had a crisis of faith?

Everybody does. The whole idea behind the saints is that every saint had a past and every sinner has a future.

There are moments where my faith is really strong and there's moments where my faith is really weak. I can clearly point out strong and weak moments of my faith or my doubt. Good news is, it doesn't stop God from loving us. The dryness of faith is something that I experienced many times. I probably will again.

Is there a specific moment you could speak to?

Last year losing my dad, I was like, well, where is God? Why is it now? I have so much stuff going on, why is this happening now? But then that's where I find scripture and tradition helpful because it's like, well, maybe the whole world is not actually about you. I'm part of this whole experience of humanity in which there's love and there's suffering, there's peace and there's lack of peace, and I just keep moving.

But surely those moments of loss are probably the times when I struggle the most.

Fr. Peter Wojcik is the pastor of Saint Clement Parish and Pastoral Strategy Leader for the Archdiocese of Chicago. He also teaches negotiation and change management at Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University and is a member of the board of Alpha USA as well as the Vatican’s Centesimus Annus pro Pontifice Foundation.

He was ordained a Catholic deacon by Cardinal Francis George in 2007 and then a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2008. Fr. Peter holds an undergraduate degree in human behavior and philosophy from the Catholic University of Lublin, an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, an MA in Theology, and post-master certifications in medical ethics, spirituality, and preaching.

Even the front page of the Chicago Sun Times announced:

Incredible headline.

I personally received six messages congratulating me on the Chicago pope, though it’s important to note here that both Pope Leo and I are each from towns approximately 30 minutes from the Loop. This is what happens when you’re a former Catholic from Chicagoland who writes about said identity.

Of course, my various family group chats have been popping off with excited chatter about Pope Leo. There’s been much discussion about whether he’s a Cubs or a White Sox fan (White Sox of course, he’s South Side) and comparisons of him and my dad in adjacent photos (they don’t look THAT much alike). Pope Leo and my sister also happen to share the same alma mater. If you’re part of the greater Chicago area Catholic community in any capacity, you probably know at least one person who went to Villanova.

A friend asked me what I thought about the new pope and my answer was, “I don’t really care.” Because, to be honest, I don’t. He seems like he’ll be a decent one: He has already called for a ceasefire in Gaza and Ukraine and is a vocal supporter of migrants, the poor, and the environment. He’ll probably continue Pope Francis’s generally progressive work, so that’s something. I hope Pope Leo will be an inspiring, caring, and thoughtful spiritual leader for the 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, but ultimately I don’t care because he’s not my spiritual leader. He’s just one more powerful man on Earth.

We did get some good memes out of the papal election, though. Who would’ve thought we’d see a time where the Vatican has an anime mascot and Malört is satirically heralded as the Blood of Christ?

And by the way, has anyone seen the HBO series The New Pope?

1. Dialectical materialism keeps popping up for me as I toggle between different online platforms. Renée Darline Roden’s response to a New Yorker article argues that it’s imperative to the human spirit to believe in something beyond the material. Agreed.

2. I love when writing intertwines ideas or subjects that are often considered taboo. Gabrielle Sicam’s essay on the pleasure of kneeling in both sacred and secular contexts for AFM does just that. Gabrielle explores the physicality of kneeling as well as the situational dynamics at play writing:

   The marks left on one’s knees from minutes or hours of pressure can be perceived through a lens of true faith rather than pain—a souvenir of labor, of commitment or devotion.

   You’ll get those indents, whether you’re on your knees for a lover or for God.

3. And while we’re on the subject of kink…A Mexico City exhibition was suspended after sparking multiple protests and criticism regarding the paintings’ depictions of clergy and nuns. You just have to see for yourself ;)

4. How do we document miracles? Apparitions, sacred visions. Chia Amisola tackles this question through the lens of Mary as vessel.

5. John Paul Brammer’s definitive ranking of Catholic hymns is *this close* to convincing me to be a paid subscriber.

6. Full disclosure I did not read this whole article but the first sentence is, “As far as we know, Jesus never said anything about gay sex.” If you have a New Yorker subscription please share it with me so I can read the whole thing.

7. The Deseret News reported that the Catholic Church is breaking up with the U.S. government. The current administration halted funding to critical refugee programs run by the Church, which now has to reorganize these programs in order to continue serving people in need. Honestly, kind of makes me wonder why the Church was so conjoined with the U.S. government in the first place.

Before you experience your first Eucharist, you have to atone for your sins through the sacrament of Reconciliation or confession. Practicing Catholics should technically confess before each time they receive communion, but most don’t. You want to be as pure as possible before you consume the body and blood of Christ and admitting your sins to a priest is a surefire way to (temporarily) cleanse your impure soul.

So there I am, seven years old, sitting in a church pew waiting for my turn to step into the confessional booth. I’m exceedingly familiar with these pews. I sit in them twice a week: on Tuesdays for school mass and Sundays for mass with my family. I spend a lot of time staring at the massive, medieval-looking light fixtures and considering the aftermath should they come crashing down. But this time it’s the middle of a school day and the space is quiet. There’s no organ music, no cantor, no lively rustling as parishioners whisper to each other or sneak out to the bathroom. Only my second grade class sits silently in the stiff wooden pews, spaced out so there’s a child on each end and one in the middle.

We’re supposed to be quietly praying, contemplating our sins and preparing to admit them to one of the priests. Classmates disappear behind the confessional’s curtain, reappearing minutes later and kneeling at their assigned seat to whisper prayers. I wonder why they’re seeking absolution. What horrible, dark secrets possess my peers, compelling them to seek sanctity from a priest lest they face God’s judgment? Mostly though, I’m absorbed by the light pouring through the stained glass windows.

I have no idea what there is for me to confess. Like I said, I’m seven years old and “sin” is a word heavy with the devil. I don’t consider anything I’ve done in my life to be a sin. Errors, mistakes, sure, but a sin? Even at that age the concept of a sin feels abstract and dramatic. But I can’t show up to the priest empty handed. I have to bring an offering of my human incompetence, but nothing I come up with seems too egregious. I haven’t murdered anyone or committed adultery, a word I understand even then as tied to the Ten Commandments. Maybe I can say I was mean to my sister, I think. When my turn comes, I march to the confessional, toss aside the curtain and sit down on yet another hard wooden pew. After I confess my lame non-sin and vaguely discuss it with the priest wondering if he knows I made it up (I’m sure I was mean to my sister at some point, but I’m not thinking of a specific moment), he prescribes me ten Hail Marys and tells me to be more understanding of my sister. Back at my seat, I kneel and whisper the prayers to myself, hands clasped together. I don’t feel absolved, but I also don’t feel burdened. Then again, I never had.

A common theme that I’ve realized has appeared in my writing on this platform is that many of the Catholic rites I partook in felt hollow. There is a certain element of Catholicism and indeed of many religions that is performative, a way to solidify your status and justify your place within a community. By participating in specific actions like Reconciliation or Communion or attending mass, you prove your worth as a Catholic. You demonstrate your apparent goodness, even if, maybe, you’re not acting so holy in your everyday life. Going to confession allows some people to check a box, say a few prayers, and continue behaving as they always have. I’m sure I was mean to my sister again after my inaugural Reconciliation.1 But doesn’t being told you’re good by someone who is in a position of authority feel scrumptious, like receiving a dessert on the house? The pleasure of confession reminds me of the famous Fleabag scene. Yes, the “kneel” one. More on that to come.

Maybe I’m too much of a humanist, but I think that’s why I struggle to see the value in Catholic traditions, confession in particular. To me, it seems self-serving, a way to temporarily make yourself feel better. Unless coupled with worthwhile, concrete actions, what is it actually doing? I have confidence in the human capacity for empathy and compassion for the sake of this earthly existence rather than for the carrot of potential Eternal Life. I feel more compelled to act in the here and now for just that: the present. Catholics—former, practicing, and some other third thing—I’ve spoken with seem to feel this conflict too. The Catholic religion feels so tied to these individualistic aspirations of goodness for the sake of acceptance that it distorts the spiritual intention.

Why should I be acting in service of a potential higher power when I can simply be acting in service of others’ wellbeing?

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What were the expectations surrounding religion from your community, from your parents?

We would go to daily mass a lot after my mom converted because we were homeschooled so we could and we did morning prayers together. We had a set routine of morning prayers and Latin flashcards. I don't know how to answer that question because there really wasn't anything almost outside of it, which I think is difficult.

I do think a lot of people who convert—and this describes my mom in some ways—they want that certainty of, oh, I was bad before, but now I'm good. It can create this fissure between you and your past, or between you and the rest of the world. This is where Jesuit Ignatian spirituality comes in so helpful because it's about finding God in all things and reading the signs of the times and very incarnational of okay, we're in the world and God is here with us versus okay, we're now part of this pure, chosen Orthodox group.

I went to a Jesuit high school and I feel like the education I received there encouraged so much questioning of beliefs in society and culture. I credit that education for why I am the way I am now, and my parents are like, who radicalized you? And I'm like, literally the Jesuits.

Earlier in our conversation you mentioned an experience with God's love when you were young. What was the experience?

I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I had a very strong intuition around 16 or 17 that we are made by love for love, and that was a deep revelation of who God is and what God does and that love is the realest thing in the world if it is the only explainable reason for why we're all here. I think that intuition has been the core belief on which I've hung my faith.

Have you been pretty consistently faithful or religious?

Yeah, I think I'm very boring in that way. Catholicism, for better or worse, it's what I was given. So much of what faith is is just can it grow with you? Can it allow you to become who you're meant to be and who you want to be? Does it have space for all of that? In my life, Catholicism has found spaces for that.

That doesn't mean I'm never angry. I remember going to confession once with a priest, maybe a couple years ago, and there were questions he was asking and the way he was approaching the confession was wrong. I knew it was wrong. It made me uncomfortable. As I walked out, I just said, “I'll pray for you.” And I didn't want to go to confession again for a very long time. But I haven’t been pushed away. I think it comes from a very strong sense of, this is my church, and misbehaving, patriarchal men with shitty homilies can leave.

This is the tradition I'm a part of. They're welcome to go wherever they would like, but this is mine.

So you feel like, I don't want to say ownership, but like, standing your ground, where you're like, this is what I stand for, and I'm not gonna let shitty people who corrupt the messaging in this way take it over, because people like you exist.

Yeah, exactly, I think that's really important. I think that's what's so toxic about the way so many of us are formed in Catholicism. Like it drives me up the wall when a priest gets ordained, he's 27, and people are like, Father this, Father that. He's still 27, first of all. You can be ordained, you can be a leader, but that doesn't mean you are a bucket of spiritual wisdom. I try not to call a priest Father unless he is actually one of the many beautiful spiritual figures of wisdom in my life who is a real sort of spiritual father, or spiritual mother.

A lot of Catholics have been pushed away because of the abuse crisis and the very toxic nature of the Church. There's a problem where we make priests as professional Catholics and that's not a bad system if we're thinking about division of labor, but it's not what we're called to as a community.

We're all baptized into the priesthood of Christ. We're all called to be Christ together. There's no professional Catholics and then regular Catholics.

One of my siblings was like, oh, I should try this church thing again, and she went and there was a homily about how trans people are going to destroy our culture and everyone has a right to have a gun because guns don't kill people, people kill people. And she was like, never mind. Because what does that have to do with Christ? What does it have to do with the Gospel? And also the message you've sent is only a certain type of person is welcome.

Why do you think priests give bad homilies?

I think preaching is hard. I will give priests that. It's hard to do well. I want to be careful not to blame individual parish priests because I do think we're dealing with a lot of systemic harm.

I think clericalism is a trauma. The priests are living in a decaying, unhealthy system of clericalism as the foot soldier. Whereas if you didn't structure parishes that way, like pre abuse crisis, you could have a lot more shared ownership of the parish.

The lay-clerical divide is difficult on a systemic level as well. So they're busy, preaching is hard, and also the Gospel is really challenging. You have to be a very healthy person to open yourself up to being challenged by it every single day. This is what Pope Francis would call spiritual worldliness. But the opposite could happen where you're a priest, you have this authority, but you have insulated yourself from the challenge of the Gospel. So in that situation, you're very susceptible to ideology. You make something else the problem so you can preserve that secure boundary of everything out there is wrong. And here we are, we're safe. We're safe in this very comfortable way of thinking that doesn't challenge us.

Catholicism plays a profound role in your writing. It is what you write about. Why do you feel it’s important to write about it?

One of the things I got from studying scripture and theology in grad school is we love to talk about how scripture is inspired. It's the word of God and then you start to dig into what that means, especially when your professor is pointing out how a gospel contradicts a statement.

These texts are so contingent. There's so much there to write about. Basically what you're saying is that the content of your faith is all of human history. That's something that God is at work in. I think that's why I love writing about Catholicism because I think about it a lot, but also I think it's a very big pool to play in. In order to talk about it, anything I see is going to teach me something new.

Is that also why you use such intentional imagery and attention to nature in your writing, too?

I have a lot of ecological concern about us not being in touch with our environment. If you read good writing and if you read poetry, that’s the main way that people have made art by noticing nature and reflecting on it.

That's also the way most humans throughout history have accessed the divine. Like mountaintops or sacred groves or whatever. If you read the Psalms, they are really great pieces of poetry because they use all this ecological imagery. So that's probably informed that a lot too.

I had a question about a particular piece of your writing. It was something you wrote in December for the Catholic Artists Connection, and you wrote about the “wasting disease of normalcy.” I was curious to hear more about your thoughts on that.

That's a Dan Berrigan quote. It's from his book, No Bars to Manhood, which he wrote in prison. He's talking about how we all want peace, but we're not willing to make that change to make peace possible.

There was a lot of liberation being promoted and offered in 2020, and I feel like since the pandemic, the world has moved on. They're like, we want to go back to the wasting disease of normalcy, even though it's unjust, and it kills our brothers and sisters, and it exploits people, and it's unlivable for most people.

We can’t see a better alternative. For me during the pandemic, that's when I discovered the Catholic Worker. I could see a community that was still living in the way that my friends and I had lived in the pandemic where we were caring for each other.

I grew up in a white suburban neighborhood, so I remember the first time I realized that I wasn't going to live in a suburb. I remember the first time where I was like, oh, the world is not just where you go to college and then one day a house is delivered to you with a quarter acre lot. I remember realizing this isn't normal and you might not need this and you might not want this.

This was presented to me as normal, but it's actually the wasting disease of normalcy. And if I keep going, all my other convictions or desires or hopes for my life may wither at the root.

What do you think other Catholics who might not be familiar with the Catholic Worker Movement or other people in general could take away from it?

The Catholic Worker answers a lot of the questions we have about how to have a functioning society. I think Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and the founders took the Gospel seriously. Dan Berrigan said that Day lived the Gospel as though it were true, and I think we're yearning for examples of that.

For me, one of the beautiful ways in which the Worker has resolved a long tension in my life is learning to live in solidarity with the poor. Living in New York, I would see people on the subway and I would feel so bad or I would be like, I don't know what to do.

I wouldn't look at them because I'm a woman out in public. It's not safe. There's all these messages I got about what to be out in the world. The Worker cut through a lot of those messages and helped me practice how to be in relationship with my neighbor, no matter who they were.

We're all yearning for that. We've been so segregated into suburbs and cities and different pockets. The Worker houses are great spaces for encountering people that you might not otherwise encounter and spaces of fostering belonging.

Is there a difference between broadly identifying as Catholic versus being part of the Church? Actually, a better way of saying that is what does it mean to be Catholic?

Theologically that means you're baptized and that you've received sacraments of initiation, communion, confirmation. That might be a really boring answer. What would you say?

I was baptized, confirmed, did all that stuff. So formally I am still Catholic. In some ways, it's not something that you can just not be anymore because these things happened and…

Wait, can I stop you? Sorry. Do you feel Catholic?

In a lot of ways, yes. I guess I feel Catholic in the sense that I'm like, oh, I struggle with Catholic guilt and all that. That’s a whole thing. I don't know. I guess my answer is I don't know.

In terms of what makes me feel Catholic, because I do, I've always gone to daily mass and that's just a part of my prayer routine that I love. And liturgy, the Hours, and the Psalms. I don't know if that's what makes me feel Catholic, but it is an outlet. Those are the ways I express my faith. I think that's also what's really powerful about the Worker is that our faith is about worship of God, but worship of God is about caring for our neighbor and doing justice. That's a part of our faith that's really important and people often miss out on at church. That's something the Worker offers.

And also the saints who offer a model of how to live. There's a lot of strong saints like Joan of Arc or Dorothy Day or Teresa of Ávila. These are women who clearly have found this interior freedom. That’s what also makes me feel like I belong where these people are hanging out. These very free, powerful people who don't seem to buy into the bullshit or the wasting disease of normalcy. That's where I want to be.

Renée Roden is the author of the forthcoming Tantur: Seeking Christian Unity in a Divided City, (Liturgical Press). She is an editor for Roundtable, a newsletter covering the Catholic Worker movement, and she currently lives at the St. Martin de Porres Catholic Worker in Harrisburg, PA.

An assortment of recommended reading for your consideration, all pertaining to Christianity, Catholicism, general spirituality, or religion as a concept. Timeliness isn’t super important here.

1. Amid the Trump administration's threat of mass deportations, this 87-year-old Irish priest turned lawyer and his staff continue to help New York immigrants obtain citizenship. There are good people doing good things as the rich and powerful prey on the most vulnerable.

2. Tony Ginocchio’s essay “State of Clay” definitely does not engage with JD Vance’s dumbass comments about how it’s okay to be Catholic and deport people. What Tony does write about is an Adult Swim claymation series from the mid-2000s called Moral Orel and how the show amplifies the absurdity of religious perversion. Spoiler: JD Vance is more comparable to the villain of Moral Orel. Another snarky masterpiece from Tony who writes the Substack “Grift of the Holy Spirit.”

3. I may have to take a trip to Williamsburg, Virginia to catch 25 of Michelangelo’s drawings for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and another fresco. The drawings’ rare U.S. appearance are the result of a 13-year-long effort by curator Adriano Marinazzo and will be part of an exhibition at the Muscarelle Museum of Art from March 6 to May 28.

4. In Michelle Lhooq’s brilliant critical analysis of rave culture’s co-optation of religious terminology, she asserts the need for ravers to grapple with this “cringe” to form new semantic patterns. I’ve said, “The club is my church 🤪” for the last time.

5. St. Francis College in Downtown Brooklyn is facing an uncertain future, plagued by poor leadership, layoffs, and the college president’s harsh cost-saving measures. The school was founded in 1859 by Franciscan friars and heralded as a beacon for first-generation college students.

6. Christian San Francisco tech leaders, including Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, are encouraging tech workers to incorporate faith into their work and life. I’m pretty sure in Matthew 19:26 Jesus says, “With AI, all things are possible.”

7. This video essay on medieval Christian body horror is on my watchlist.

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But Joan of Arc’s story has eclipsed those of Agatha and Lucy, ascending to a level of cultural stardom perhaps only seen by Jesus Christ himself. The 1948 film Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman won Oscars and the 1928 movie The Passion of Joan of Arc has been dubbed “a classic of the silent age.” Beyond the silver screen, Joan holds a heavily mythologized place within culture, her vibe invoked even at the Met Gala in 2018 when Vogue dubbed Zendaya “a modern Joan of Arc.” But why Joan? Why not Lucy or Agatha? Perhaps it’s just recency bias—Joan died in 1431 while Lucy was killed in 304 and Agatha even earlier in 251. But that’s too simple. Cleopatra has a similar cultural legacy and she died before Jesus was even born. So what is it about Joan that compels people to make movies about her, write fiction about her, and dress as her while performing at the VMAs?

Here’s the basics of her story: Joan was born into a farming family in France in 1412. Importantly, this is about 75 years into the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. In early adolescence, Joan began experiencing visions of saints and made a vow of virginity to these specters. In 1428, she successfully petitioned for an audience with Charles VII claiming she was guided by saints to help him save France from the English. At 17, Joan was sent by Charles to the siege of Orléans as part of a relief army. Shortly after, the English abandoned the siege, a win for the French. Joan then led the French to another victory at Patay. Thanks to that success, the French advanced on Reims unopposed and Charles was crowned as the King of France. But following the coronation, Joan participated in two failed sieges and was then captured by Burgundian troops. She was handed to the English who put her on trial for heresy. As we all know, she was found guilty and horrifically burned at the stake. The rise and fall of a French farm girl.

While the general public’s awareness of Joan is on par with that of Mary and Mother Teresa, the latter two lack connection to youth and tragedy. Mary was probably very young at the time of the immaculate conception, but once she became a mother, her lore became that of domesticity and quiet virtue. Laying siege is decidedly more sexy than motherhood. Mother Teresa died at the ripe old age of 87 after leading a life of service and charity complete with a Nobel Peace Prize. There’s nothing sexy about old age either. The value we place on youth and the beauty attached to it elevates Joan to a status beyond Mary and Mother Teresa. Not only is she revered in the Christian faith, but she’s idolized within pop culture, too.

But then there’s Lucy and Agatha. Similar stories, though they have not been afforded the same recognition as Joan. Lucy and Agatha’s stories are not so malleable or acceptably dramatic. Neither went to war. Agatha was martyred for refusing to renounce her Christianity even after she underwent brutal torture including her breasts being ripped off. Lucy distributed her dowry to the poor and for this, her betrothed denounced her to the Roman governor of their region. When told to burn an offering to the emperor’s image, Lucy refused and her throat was cut. By some accounts, Lucy’s eyes were gouged out as part of the punishment. Perhaps our fascination with Joan stems from her power and the dignity with which she died. After all, she actually got a trial while Lucy and Agatha had no such opportunity for salvation. Their stories illustrate the tragic dehumanization of women at the hands of men whereas Joan’s, at least initially, subverts it. She is listened to. And when it all falls apart, she radically stands by her conviction and her faith even in the maw of flames.

But TikTokers aren’t donning 4th century garb and carrying disembodied eyes around on a plate à la Lucy (wait…), but they are dressing up as Joan with Etsy-bought chainmail and tiny silver skirts posing to the Smiths song “Bigmouth Strikes Again.” “And now I know how Joan of Arc felt,” Morrissey sings. It’s unfortunate that Joan’s legacy has been reduced to vague thirst traps scored by music from an English band no less, her image stripped of the tremendous sacrifice she made in order to become an aesthetic, iconography dissected from meaning. We worship at the altar of aestheticization. No need for any critical nuance or historical understanding. Visual-first social media has convinced us we only need “vibes.”

I’m not saying we should dismantle the cultural shrine we’ve built for Joan. In fact, I think we should continue honoring her courage and indeed her passion. There’s so much more depth to her being than simply a bob haircut and chainmail. In a 2024 CNN article about pop culture’s enduring love for Joan of Arc, Tacita Quinn writes:

Joan was a saint, a witch, a martyr, a heretic and an ingénue—a mess of contradictions that centuries on render her both human and relatable.

It is Joan’s subversion of norms (she even dressed in men’s clothes for battle) that captures our collective imagination and leads her to surpass Lucy and Agatha in recognition. She embodies courage, resistance, and devotion to a cause, admirable qualities we would all do well to channel, especially now. Jesse Paris Smith commented in a Substack essay last year on Joan’s birthday and reshared this year on Joan’s bravery and selflessness despite fear. We can draw inspiration from her “fleeting and valorous life,” Smith writes. And we should. So, wear the sexy chainmail costume for Halloween—but if you really want to know how Joan of Arc felt, consider
fighting for something.

What was your religious upbringing like?

Religion has always been part of my life. I grew up in a Filipino immigrant community in South London. Everyone was Catholic. Everyone went to the same Catholic school, same parish, same Bible study.

Both of my parents grew up very religious in Davao City, Philippines. My mother’s side was Catholic and my father’s side broadly Christian, though certainly culturally Catholic. So raising me religious was quite natural to them. It was the basis for discipline, punishment, stuff like that, but also how they taught me to be a good person.

This only really started proving a problem when they realized that I was prone to questioning everything. This was really, really difficult for a while. I took everything very seriously as a kid and felt quite tormented about religion. When it was time to go to secondary school, I decided to go to a secular grammar school in the next town instead of the local Catholic school. I had my First Communion but I was never Confirmed—to some I guess that doesn’t make me a Catholic at all. I didn’t know at the time but my parents were struggling a bit in our local community which could get really toxic and gossipy, so we ‘left’ around the time I started secondary school. It got easier after that.

As I got older, I realized that my parents had more of a flexible attitude to religion than I had been raised with. I told my mum I was agnostic on a trip to Lourdes in 2023. She was very understanding about it. I spent most of that trip walking around and eating cheese while my mum attended mass.

Now we’re able to have candid conversations about religion, God, issues in our community and things like that. Sometimes I’ll accompany them to church on a Sunday, if they’re traveling up to town, or I’ll wait until after and meet them for dinner. It’s all very lax. It’s nice.

What were the expectations surrounding religion?

I had to be a good Catholic, not just a good person. Those aspects fit in a single Venn Diagram circle. I had to spend a lot of time thinking about and talking to God. I was a reader at Church and I went to Bible study and I did choir for a bit. I was probably a model Catholic kid on the surface. My achievements were tied to my religion. There’s a report I got at the end of primary school where my teacher calls my reading and writing ability ‘God-given’, which is a funny thing to say about one of the most taught things ever.

Why did you decide to go to a secular secondary school?

I was just so surrounded by one kind of view. I found it really stifling. I wanted to meet different kinds of people and figure out what I believed for myself.

You mentioned that attending secular school separated you from other Filipino Catholic kids. Can you speak more about that? What separation did you feel?

My social circle changed. There were very few Catholics in high school. I made friends on the basis of having similar interests rather than being raised in the same way. I got a lot weirder.

When I was younger we’d go to a lot of Filipino parties which were usually held in church function halls. A lot of girls had debuts when they turned 18, sort of our answer to the quinceañera. There were lots of dances to learn and things like that. I think I was reckoning a lot with my neurodivergence and socializing at these events often made me feel like Lilo at the beginning of Lilo & Stitch. I stopped really going around the same time I started going to a different school, especially since my family had taken a step back from being involved in the community. I felt freer but lonelier whenever I came back. It was a difficult thing to reconcile.

There was definitely judgement, especially from other parents in the community, around kids who chose to go to non-religious school. Because they’ve chosen to go to a place that approaches values and pedagogy differently. I remember hearing and being subject to a lot of gossip, usually spread at these parties, about how so-and-so had dyed hair or piercings, or how they were seeing someone that wasn’t Filipino, or (god forbid!) had decided they were atheist. There was a lot of weariness around the kind of conscience that ‘leaving’ the community so young requires. It seems dangerous, or portentous, I guess.

When we first spoke, you mentioned the tension between Filipino pagan beliefs and Catholicism. How would you describe that tension and how did you feel about it?

There’s definitely a tension, but also it’s a kind of happy and interesting idiosyncrasy. Filipinos can be really, really orthodox, following some of the most obscure rules in the Bible, whilst also maintaining that that bug in your house is actually the ghost of your dead ancestor. Or that you have to protect your pregnant relative from predatory aswang by staying awake all night. It’s been described as a kind of folk understanding of Catholicism/Christianity. It was confusing to me when I was younger, but now I think the tension makes our culture richer. There’s such a backlog of stories and figures, so much to uncover and think and respond to.

How would you characterize the trajectory of your relationship to Catholicism?

Wavering and colored by guilt for a long time. Then a cool, co-existent, ever-so-slightly fizzing plateau.

Would you call yourself religious now?

I don’t think I would, as I don’t practice it. That’s not to say I don’t encounter religion a lot. I self-described as agnostic for a while.

I’m not really sure if I believe in God, even though He crops up everywhere. But I see most things in my life as inflected with a religious residue.

Was there a specific turning point in your life when you stopped identifying as Catholic?

I can’t put my finger on a moment. I’ve blocked a lot of things out. But it’s been a very long time.

How do you feel like desire and its ties to Catholicism influence your writing? That seems to be a theme you return to.

I think Catholicism gave me a narrative to explain away a lot of my questions about desire growing up. Desire is good if you want the right things and bad if you want the wrong things. Still it’s not quite as simple as everything coming from a lack, because supposedly God is up there and He gave you everything, once. Instead you are given a compelling tale of Original Sin and this kind of sexy, evil Other Force working away at you without you even knowing.

I think I fell for the stories—and they all seemed to be borne out of desire. What I really picked out of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, what I can remember at least, were the different ways people interpreted their desires, how this drove them to do the wrong/right things. The divine punishment that usually followed just colored it all tragic in my young and dumb eyes.

Do you think the guilt and shame present in Catholic teachings impacted your own desires? How did you come to terms with that?

I think it bore room for a lot of contemplation. But that is naturally so internal—it directs inward and can be damaging in that way.

I think I put up with a lot of harmful sexual dynamics initially, because it felt like I was already committing a sin. Even when I’d moved past the idea that sex was sinful, there was still a self-exploiting element that I put upon myself. Philosophizing about what I deserved in sex: if I deserved good sex, kindness, if I deserved protection, even. That kind of hyper-awareness of myself, especially through the prism of sin and self-punishment, sort of fucked up everything a little bit. I’d be perceiving myself in the act a lot, which is fine, but the lens with which I was viewing myself was really out-of-body and kind of looking for harm. I think some part of recognizing sin requires a high level of self-perception. It’s so easy for religious authorities to exploit that predisposition.

So, after all that, I got a little older, learnt more about myself and became a bit more used to healthy casual sex. I think (maybe this is a little mean) that having sort of average experiences helped(!). Then I met my current partner, who is much better at communicating than I am and was also raised religious. They’ve helped me sort of open up the discourse happening in my head, which has been really great.

Keeping on this theme of desire because I think it's super interesting, how do you desire?

I desire quite intensely! But I’ll go a while without processing feelings properly, and suddenly it’ll all hit me. I try to write it down if I can, because otherwise it can sit in my body for ages. Sometimes this is a wonderful woozy feeling. Sometimes not so.

Last year I worked on a long essay about aesthetics and Aubrey Beardsley and Vernon Lee. Vernon Lee kept these diaries where she logged gallery visits with her lover. She would take note of how her body would react to works of art: changes in breathing patterns, gestural mimicry. I’m really interested in this kind of desire, kind of sleeping inside us, resurrected through physical encounters.

Are you working on any specific pieces now that you can give us a taste of?

I’m working on an essay for a magazine about the eroticism of genuflection and its connotations of worship in religious and sexual settings. I’ve been thinking about and testing this since last summer so I’m glad it’s got a home now. I’m also working on a short story for a friend. And attempting to stitch together the early stages of a novella, which, for the moment, follows a woman writing a shoddy hagiography of a distant relative put up for canonization.

You mentioned the London art scene seems infused with guilt and Catholic influence. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on that. Any specific exhibitions you’ve seen?

I was very lucky to write on Ellie Cotton’s solo show at General Assembly, “A Study of Saint Francis,” which had such a witty and playful take on the saint in the social media age. I don’t write crit so much anymore but I really like the work of lots of young galleries at the moment. “God Willing” at Shipton Gallery looked great—a friend sent over some pictures of Marta Burhan’s kneeling performance after I mentioned my essay. How she wholly, almost hyper-embodies the submissive and enduring aspects of genuflection is really rigorous and fascinating work.

There was a beautiful poem published in The London Magazine recently: “Medieval Margery Kempe in Tesco” by Laura Varnam. I think about it a lot.

Also, not London, but I love the religious atmosphere of Greg Mendez’s self-titled. I listened to that album and MJ Lenderman’s on repeat last year. I wrote a tiny, never-to-be-published review of Manning Fireworks that references St. Augustine. Kind of glad that got lost in my Google Docs.

Why do you think there’s this larger cultural interest in the Catholic mentality?

We talked about trad-Cath briefly and yeah, I think a lot of people have been turning to Catholicism because they need something to believe in and have chosen the well-documented ‘glamorous’ thing. But I also think people of Catholic experience are looking for and testing new ways of articulating those experiences. A sort of thing of ‘I may not be this anymore, but God, I was for a while, and I think it’s held major stakes in my life’. A charged urge to document life within a concrete meaning-making structure, rather than a touristic want to engage in a cool thing.

Catholicism is a religion flush with extremes and drama. Have you seen that manifest in other parts of your life?

Ideas are big. Love is a mess. I approach it very nakedly but also, in the early stages at least, have a penchant for holding back any feelings with all the will of a nun who’s made a vow of silence.

How do you think growing up Catholic affected who you are today?

I really admire conviction. I think it now takes a more secular moral form in my own life. But I still think about faith a lot, and appreciate how it manifests in others.

I think growing up Catholic made me a more dramatic person, definitely more readerly, sensitive, hypocritical. Deciding I wasn’t religious so early on, and then having to live within that world for much longer, maybe made me more empathetic towards it, towards different livelihoods and ethical systems. I grew up with a certainly imperfect but thick understanding of the good by way of worming through what others conceive of it.

One of my favorite relatives was a nun who passed a few years ago. When I was younger, I visited her in her convent in the Philippines. I remember it having yellow walls and everyone being really friendly. She spoke about how much fun she had, her travels to America. I think I grew up with a more dynamic, interpretative approach to Catholicism than most did. It’s a little more joyous. I was given a bit more grace.

Are you testing new ways of articulating your experience?

Aside from writing, I’m trying to get back into painting. I’m not very good, but I really enjoy watercolor. Usually I’ll use my own body as a reference. I’ve been very into Leonora Carrington lately, so would love to paint some weirder things.

Gabrielle is a writer and bookseller from South London. She is working on a novella. (gabriellesicam.com)

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