It's time for a new Catholic Church

May the next Pope rebuild this church in the spirit of Frances

It’s complicated being Catholic.

Ask the ones who stay.

Ask the ones who left.

We are legion.

The New York Times once wrote, “If ex-Catholics formed a church of their own, it would be the nation’s second largest, outranked by only the Catholic Church itself.”

Right now, 20 percent of American adults identify as Catholic.

I’m in the unclaimed religion category, like an abandoned suitcase on the luggage carousel at Faith Airport, waiting for some religion that doesn’t exist to claim me.

I want a new Catholic Church. One with the saints and the mystics and the sacraments I love but without the pedophile priests and coverups and antiquated attitudes toward women and gay people.

I was baptized a Catholic, received the sacraments of confession, Holy Communion and confirmation. I chose the name Frances to honor my aunt Francie, my confirmation sponsor, and to align myself with St. Francis of Assisi, who so loved the poor.

My full name is Regina Maria Frances Brett.

I grew up in an Irish Catholic family with ten siblings. I have 54 first cousins. We slept with a rosary under the pillow and a sacred Heart of Jesus badge pinned to the bed. I went to 8 years of Catholic school.

Catholicism wasn’t just our religion, it felt like our nationality, the core of our identity. That rosary was a lifeline for a poor family from Ireland whose religion gave them faith enough to cross the sea in steerage for the hope that was America.

I tried to pass on my religion to my daughter, but before confirmation she questioned all the things I should have been questioning all along. Why were women treated as second class? Why weren’t gay people welcomed with open arms?

When she refused to get confirmed, it made me question why I stayed in a church that won’t allow women to become priests.

For a while, I identified as a “recovering Catholic” having endured first grade catechism that told 6-year-old me that my soul was black when I sinned.

Then I identified as a “cafeteria Catholic” and picked the parts that fed my soul and left the rest behind. Then the tsunami of sexual abuse stories hit.

All those innocent children. All those endless priests who molested and assaulted and raped children. Children. It still haunts me. Still shocks me.

The Pope’s death brought to the surface the sadness I feel over what this church became, or what we discovered it was all along. Sick. Absolutely sick.

I took a sabbatical for years. As more child sexual abuse stories unfolded, I couldn’t return.

I grew up in the 60s right when Vatican II arrived. My altar boy brothers played records in Latin to learn their parts for Mass. We sang a song, “Why do we tip our hat to a priest and why do we call him Father? He’s like Christ and how do we know? Holy Orders made it so.”

The priests taught us to revere them. Then so many of them abused that trust to lure children into their darkness.

I didn’t leave the Catholic Church, the church left me.

Left me questioning how hundreds of priests sexually abused thousands of children in countries all over the world. Left me sick that so many bishops knew and simply shuffled them to other parishes where they found new victims.

Left me stunned and shocked and sad for every child abused by a man who the sacrament of Holy Orders elevated up a spiritual ladder no woman is allowed to climb.

When I saw the movie Conclave – and I’ve seen it three times – I fell in love all over again with the parts of being Catholic that I once so loved, that deeply shaped my spiritual path.

I even thought about going back to Mass until the very next day I saw a story in the New York Times with the headline, Vatican Punts Question of Female Deacons at Major Meeting. A meeting that was four years in the making ended with them saying the ordination of women required “further study.” Seriously? Four years wasn’t enough time?

As for the sexual abuse of children, the Church never fully cleaned house.

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who was accused of covering up cases of abuse as archbishop of Los Angeles, was given the honor – honor -- of closing the casket of Pope Francis.

The New York Times wrote: “Cardinal Mahony and others worked to protect abusive priests from punishment and withhold evidence of sexual abuse from law enforcement agencies. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the largest in the United States, also sent priests who had molested children out of state for treatment, in part because therapists in California were legally obligated to report evidence of child abuse to the police, according to the documents.”

Days before that, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo agreed to a settlement of $150 million with more than 800 victims of sexual abuse.

Eight hundred victims — and that’s just in Buffalo.

I’m not blaming Pope Francis.

He was so close to being the perfect Pope. There was so much to love about Pope Francis. He was so bold that Newsweek once posed this question on its cover: Is the Pope Catholic?

He was called a lot of names, and not all of them holy. Socialist. Leftist. Marxist. Communist. He was affectionately called the “Slum Pope” and “the People’s Pope” for his work with the poor and marginalized.

He was a radical Christian, which is really the only kind of Christian to be. He walked the talk. Of course he stumbled along the way. He was, after all, only human.

Pope Francis lived the words attributed to his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”

His passion was crystal clear: he was a champion for the poor, the planet, and for peace, the kind that surpasses all understanding.

The Catholicism that Francis preached matched what the Jesuits at John Carroll University taught me back in 1996 when I got my master’s degree in religious studies, back when liberation theology was still embraced as a way to lift poor people all over the world.

U.S. politicians talk about the struggling middle class, but few risk standing up for the poorest of the poor. Our poor are not the center of any party’s platform.

They were the center of the Pope's platform. During his visit here, he visited a Philadelphia prison, a school in Harlem and a homeless shelter in D.C. And he wasn’t even running for office.

He called out his own cardinals for “spiritual worldliness” and for putting dogma before divinity. He declared a Year of Mercy and asked every Catholic parish in Europe to take in Syrian refugees.

He relaxed the rules on annulments and said divorced and remarried Catholics weren’t excommunicated.

He opened his heart to gay people: “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

There are many good priests who touched and transformed countless lives. The priest who picked out my name, Father Mark Zwick, left the priesthood to create a ministry at the border to serve immigrants and refugees. He died in 2016 but his work continues at Casa Juan Diego, a Catholic Worker House of Hospitality.

So many priests have blessed my life, men like Jim Lewis, Joe Zubricky, Clem Metzger, Tom Schubeck, Jim O'Donnell, Tom Fanta and Joe Fortuno. Kevin Conroy and Paul Schindler live by the motto “Start with the poor.” I miss the sermons of Father Howard Gray and Donald Cozzens, such wise souls, both gone too soon.

As Pope Francis is laid to rest, I will pray for this church that built people like me but also destroyed so many others.

I will pray that God chooses someone like Francis, not Pope Francis, but the saint whose name he chose. That Francis left behind riches to follow the voice of God who called to him, “Rebuild my church.” At first Francis started repairing actual buildings, like the church of San Damiano. But God wanted something much deeper. Something much harder.

Reform the church’s spiritual and moral foundation. Build a church whose core is humility, simplicity, service, love and compassion for all beings.

For years I prayed for this Church to hit a bottom, for every new horror story to bring it to its knees, to bankrupt it once and for all so this infested institution falls like a house of holy cards so it can be rebuilt.

It's time for a divine intervention. For Vatican III.

It’s time for someone to blow open the door and let fresh air sweep away every priest, bishop and cardinal who engaged in child sexual abuse or its cover up.

We need a grand reckoning, a sweeping apology and ongoing amends to every culture wiped out by the spread of Catholicism, for every child forbidden to speak in a native tongue, for all those silenced by nuns and priests who stole their culture in the name of Catholicism.

We need a Pope who will rebuild this church. We need to start from scratch. We need to build a new foundation. Every building block should start with love.

Love for all of humanity. Love for women. LGBTQ+ people. Poor people. Children.

Especially children.