I was raised Catholic, but no longer identify myself as such. And that seems to be true for a lot of people in my generation: making our own decisions about religion once we are old enough to differentiate our parents ideas from our own.

My family would go to church every weekend and my sister and I would go to PRE every Sunday morning. I played basketball, soccer, and T-ball at church. It was a huge majority of my social circle when I was a child.

For a while, I was really into Catholicism.. up until Confirmation, that is. Confirmation is when you are seen as an adult in the eyes of the Church. When you are baptized as a child, your parents promise they will make sure you are raised in the Catholic faith. Confirmation is when you take that faith into your own hands. 

At the beginning of the Confirmation process at my church, I was excited. Until I got the sheet of all the mandatory events and classes we had to attend. There was a mandatory retreat that was the same weekend as my 8th grade class trip to St. Louis, which I had been looking forward to for years. While it was fun to be with many of my friends from Church, the most exciting part of the evening was sitting on the cold marble floor of the sanctuary, praying... for two hours. The next event on the calendar was a test. We had to memorize the Our Father, Hail Mary, the Glory Be, the Beatitudes and the Fruits of the Spirit, among other things. If we didn’t pass then we couldn’t be confirmed.  

Finally, the weekend before Confirmation, everyone had to go to Confession. They did everyone one at a time so if someone felt uncomfortable they could go behind the screen and did not have to confess their sins face to face with the priest. Unfortunately for me, I had to miss the parish-wide Confession, which meant I had to make an appointment. The way making an appointment for a confession works is that you have to be seen by whichever priest answers the phone. Lucky for me, I got the new priest who had just come from Eastern Europe. 

That day, my mom checked me out of school early, and down we went to church. As I walked in, the church was dark and the priest was playing the organ. I should have known at this point things were going to go downhill, I guess. I walked in and said the customary “bless me father for I have sinned” and began to confess. However, I was in 8th grade and had not really done anything of note so after “I was mean to my sister” and “I didn’t turn in my math homework” I was pretty much done with Confession.

However, that’s when the Catholic guilt kicked in and I felt bad that my mom had driven me all the way down to church and I didn’t have much to say. So, in my infinite 8th grade wisdom I decided sarcasm was the best answer.  

Me: “Well, I didn’t kill anybody” 

Priest: “Well, I would hope not” 

And then I got a 20 minute lecture on the 10 commandments that culminated with the question:

“Why are you Catholic?” 

“I don’t know, I’ve always been Catholic. I’ve…” 

“No, why do YOU believe in Catholicism?” 

At that point, I was extremely flustered and deflected the question well enough to leave. During my Confirmation a week later, I was sitting in one of the front rows of the cathedral, enjoying the beautiful artwork when I began thinking about my time at Confession again. Why did I believe in Catholicism? And that’s when I realized that until I was asked why, I really didn’t know that I was unsure about my religion. Confirmation was asking me to take my religion into my own hands and I could not do that with a clear conscience. All religions deserve to have members that want to be there and can offer something in return, and at that point, I could not do that for my church.

All in all, I have learned that in order to become the best person you can be, you need to make your own informed decisions about the paths you take in life, not where you've been lead to by others. I was so young when I was Confirmed that I had been unable to learn for myself about the many different systems of belief that are in the world. That was the point in my life that I began questioning everything that I had "believed" for a long time. Some things I came back to, but other things I changed my ideas completely. Even though I do not identify with my childhood religion anymore, that doesn’t mean it is wrong that other people do. Even though it’s scary, it is a good thing to question what you've been taught to believe and ask if you believe it as well. Otherwise, there will never be any new perspectives.