The white collared shirts were usually hand-me-downs.
They came from cousins, neighbors, church families, or boxes my mother somehow found through the invisible trading network working-class families seemed to have back then. The collars were always a little too tight or a little too loose. The sleeves never landed where they were supposed to. No matter how much my mother washed them, there was always a faint yellow around the neck from somebody else’s life already lived inside the fabric.
The black pants were stiff and uncomfortable. The dress socks were usually borrowed from my father. Getting dressed for church never felt natural to me. It felt more like preparing for a role everyone else already understood.
Sunday mornings moved with military precision in our house. My mother yelling from another room. The smell of coffee, hairspray, and clean laundry. My father getting ready while one of us searched for a belt or a missing shoe. Drawers opening and slamming shut. Someone always running late.
And underneath all of it was pressure.
Not spoken directly, but always there.
You were expected to become something.
A good son.
A good Catholic.
A young man.
A worker someday.
A husband someday.
Nobody asked if those things fit.
You just wore them like the shirts.
The strange thing was that church itself often felt peaceful to me.
I loved the quiet of it. The candles. The stained glass glowing when sunlight pushed through it in the morning. The echo of footsteps across old floors. The smell of incense drifting through the sanctuary during Mass. Even as a kid, it felt like stepping outside the noise of ordinary life for a little while.
I even miss parts of it now.
Not necessarily the doctrine, but the rituals.
The rhythm of the seasons. Advent leading into Christmas. Lent leading into Easter. Fish fries during Lent. Midnight Mass in winter. The feeling that time itself carried meaning instead of simply passing. Religion gave structure to the year and reminders to stop, reflect, gather together, and think about something larger than yourself.
I understood why people held onto it.
What unsettled me was not faith itself.
It was the growing feeling that human beings had wrapped fear, guilt, power, and control around something that was supposed to bring peace.
By the time confirmation classes started, I already knew something felt wrong about the idea that everyone else seemed so certain. The adults talked about growing up like life was a straight road everyone naturally understood how to follow.
School.
Church.
Work.
Marriage.
Children.
The path was already laid out before you were old enough to question it.
I remember feeling out of step with all of it somehow, though I could not explain why at the time. Everyone else seemed comfortable stepping into the next version of themselves while I still felt uncertain about who I was supposed to become.
Then came the phone call.
I still remember my parents answering the house phone and calling me downstairs.
The priest was on the line.
Even before I picked it up, I knew this was not really a conversation.
It was a decision already made for me.
My parents had everything planned out. My brother was supposed to stand up for me during confirmation. I was supposed to go down to the church immediately, take the classes, learn what I needed to learn, and continue along the path that had already been laid in front of me since childhood.
The priest spoke calmly, but the message was clear.
Either I came in and committed myself fully to confirmation classes right then, or I was no longer Catholic.
There was no space for uncertainty.
No space for questions.
No space to simply not know.
I remember standing there holding the phone, feeling every adult in my life waiting for the answer they assumed I would give.
And for the first time in my life, I realized something important.
A choice made under ultimatum does not feel like a choice at all.
I do not remember thinking through the consequences. I do not remember planning rebellion or trying to make some grand statement. What I remember most clearly was the feeling that everyone else had already decided who I was supposed to be before I had even figured it out for myself.
At the time, I do not think I was rejecting God. If anything, I still believed deeply in something larger than myself.
What I was rejecting was the feeling that belonging had conditions attached to it.
The older I got, the more I separated spirituality from institutions in my mind. I still believed in God, or at least wanted to. But I also began learning more about history and how power, politics, and religion had become intertwined over centuries. Christianity itself had once been illegal until rulers like Constantine transformed it into something tied to empire and authority. Traditions merged. Holidays evolved. Faith became organized, structured, and controlled by human hands.
And throughout history, few things had justified more violence than people believing God was on their side.
The Crusades. Wars. Persecution. Entire groups condemned by institutions claiming moral authority while causing suffering themselves.
That contradiction stayed with me.
How something capable of creating peace and community could also be used to divide, control, and destroy.
My parents were not cruel people. The church was not filled with villains. It was filled with tired families trying to survive another week, mothers trying to hold households together, fathers carrying stress quietly, and children trying to become whatever everyone hoped they would become.
But inside all that goodness was a silent contract.
You could belong as long as you followed the path laid out for you.
And for the first time in my life, I realized I might not be able to do that.
So, standing there in my parents’ house with the phone pressed against my ear and my entire future seemingly already decided for me, I said the only honest thing I could think of.
“Well then, I guess I’m not a Catholic.”