The question isn't why they leave, but why they ever stayed

When some people leave the Church, the real puzzle isn't so much why they do so, but why now. At least, that's what occured to me as I wrote this up for The Catholic Herald:

I’ve often sat with people to puzzle over a loved one’s abandonment of the Church. As people detail to me the reasons a friend or loved one gave for leaving, and ask me to help them understand them, one thing very often occurs to me. The fundamental question isn’t “Why did they leave?” It’s “Why were they Catholic to begin with?”

I don’t mean the obvious here, that they were baptized as an infant and raised in the Church. I mean what reasons did they adopt at the age of maturity for remaining in the Church? By what logic did they take ownership of what they received in the nursery or Sunday School? Did they ever even take such ownership of their religion?

Read the whole thing here.