What people here who demand Catholics leave their church don't understand.

[ButterflyBlood]

110. I'll admit what you say is true, but there's still one large thorn in the whole thing for me:

You're not ever going to hear a woman speak. Well OK you will, perhaps reading selected verses or making some type of announcement about Bingo night or whatever, but never give a homily or her own serious thoughts.

Even in my conservative hometown the homilies mostly were apolitical, to be honest I don't remember most of them and found them quite boring. The most political charge done I remember was a screed against physician assisted suicide at a time when Jack Kevorkian was big in the news. But yeah finding out the church was against any type of birth control, even for married couples was a shock to me, and honestly I think that made it all the worse. If it had been something I was aware of at a young age but eased into with "But you know most people don't follow this" I might've accepted it a bit better. Being hit with at age 12 a side note in a CCD class (the only time I ever heard of it being spoken off in religious education) is a tad different and shocking and shook my already weak faith in the institution.

But at the end of the day, you have a discriminatory institution where only one gender is able to give their views on things, and that's something I just can't handle or accept. And it bugs me because while I hear of people fighting for women's ordination and protesting things like the all male conclave, that doesn't change the fact that the equal opportunity doesn't exist RIGHT NOW and if some woman in the church did want to actually become a priest/pastor she would no choice but to leave. I think of a friend of mine who was raised in a rather conservative Protestant church and wanted to be more active but was told the most she could be was a children's pastor, which she left behind as a pastor today in a non-denominational church. And if she had been Catholic, she would've have had to do the exact same thing.

Ultimately fundamentally that's just too much of an obstacle for me to overcome, and it's why I simply can't be comfortable involved in this type of institution in any way. So for me, leaving is also the only option.