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America: The Whole World Isn’t Red vs. Blue
How American solipsism obscures the news
The death of a pope is a weird moment for somebody like me.
I am one of the half of (former) American Catholics who have drifted away from the church of my childhood. I grew up in the church — my family attended mass every Sunday without fail, and I went to Catholic school from kindergarten to 12th grade. I even went to Catholic college (although the religious orientation of the college was not a major factor in my choice) and kept going to church, more or less, into my 20s.
Then, for a combination of practical reasons (hauling little kids to church on Sunday mornings was no fun at all) and spiritual ones (thanks in part to the excellent Jesuit education I received, I found it increasingly hard to accept many of the supernatural claims and social positions of the church), I stopped being a Catholic.
It has been interesting to have the Catholic Church appear on my radar so much in recent days, as it’s activated parts of my brain that had lain dormant for years. You can’t purge decades of education and cultural experiences, nor would I necessarily want to.
Even though I don’t attend mass or even think about the church all that much, I still believe that the Catholic…
