Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast. I'm your host, Catholic Answers Apologists and speaker, Trent Horn.

And today I want to talk about an article I read a few months ago called Why I Just Quit the Catholic Church.

Now, this was written back in May of 2022. I remember reading it back then, thinking, oh, man,

I really want to talk about this. This really stands out to me as a bad reason to leave the Catholic

faith. But, you know, life happens. I sometimes have come across all kinds of articles and videos, I want to talk about them here on the podcast, and life happens. I got a debate

to prep for, or I'm traveling or personal reasons. Not able to get to it. But today I thought,

you know what, I do want to talk about this. This is something that's important. And when I hear

people say, I'm leaving the Catholic faith,

I try really hard to be empathetic. I'm not, I don't always succeed in that. I'm a fallible human

being. I can be unempathetic and fail in that regard. But I try, and I think we all should try,

if someone says, I don't want to be Catholic anymore, and they give a reason to try to understand

where they're coming from. I think there's a big temptation, especially people who want to

dramatically change church teaching, and then say, I'm mad that the church upholds traditional

teaching, so I'm leaving. There's this temptation to want to say, okay, don't let the door

hit you on the way out, buddy. Now, on the one

hand, I understand the sentiment behind that. I mean, think about St. Paul when you had the man

who was engaged in incest with his stepmother in 1st Corinthians 5, and he said that he blamed

the community for tolerating that behavior. And he said the man needed to be handed over to Satan

that maybe would knock some sense into him. So on the one hand, if you want someone to be, that's why we have excommunication, right?

It's a medicinal punishment to help people see the gravity of their sins. But I think a lot of times it's more of a self-righteous thing.

Like, ha ha, I'm the good Catholic, you're the bad Catholic. See you later, buddy. Nobody needs you

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