oh god, that’s always such a struggle isn’t it? Your religious belief versus what’s happening in the world? that’s partly why i say that it’s an alter ego who writes my fics, because when I say that it’s me and I wrote it, the hugely catholic part of me rears up and makes me feel guilty
anyway I digress! the problem with catholicism for me is that nobody deigns to question its tenets, nobody deigns to question its beliefs. they always just take these beliefs as final, as unchanging, but that shouldn’t be the case—people and society are always changing, are always growing, and are always learning, and so certain beliefs have to get re-evaluated (for example, two men being in a romantic relationship). not only that, but Catholicism also has this elitism—you HAVE to be catholic in order to be a good person, which, no, I don’t agree. Anybody can be a good person regardless of their beliefs.
As someone who’s also grown up in a catholic school (13 years) and as someone who once read the Bible (on the toilet, idk if that cancels out the fact that I read the Bible 😥) I more or less take a lot of the religious beliefs I take seriously from my own understanding of it. Jesus was an activist and a reformist—he was doing things (aside from the miracles) that made a lot of people go “wtf????” There were ideas he forwarded that were so advanced during his time but so normal to us now. At the time, for example, nobody could ever fathom that God would love samaritans. Then he came out with the parable of the Good Samaritan and like it was the first time people were exposed to the idea that there are people that aren’t catholic that can be good, or even better than the people who are???? I stan.
The fact that Jesus’ image is now used to reinforce the more traditional beliefs in society would probably anger him, if he found out haha. Or I believe so. He was always pushing for reform, for change. And the fact that the Catholic Church is reinforcing these beliefs and making themselves look like the pinnacle of holiness and use those pinnacles of beliefs to do so many horrible atrocities would make him furious.
I am a catholic, but—maybe this is radical and bad—I believe Catholicism, like all ideas, should grow and develop. It shouldn’t remain stagnant, the way more traditional people are pushing for now. We as a society are constantly rediscovering new ways to be “good”, and sooner or later we’ll have a society that doesn’t fit within the bounds of their beliefs.
In the end, I always just go back to what Jesus Himself deemed the one of the most important commandments: Love your neighbor as you love yourself. If all of us truly applied this, if we all cared for each other’s well-being, if we, 100% no questions asked acted like this, even though no one’s looking then we’d have a good, proper society.