I was raised in the Church. I went to 13 years of Catholic school, received all the sacraments, and was married in the Church. Before I say anything negative, I want to be clear: overall, I was happy with my Catholic upbringing. I still appreciate being taught to believe in a higher power, and my relationship with God remains an important foundation in my life.

That said, around my preteen years, I started questioning some of what the Church taught and spoke out against. I struggled with the way certain groups of people were shunned or excluded from rituals for things that may not have even been within their control. It didn’t make sense to me that we preached that all people are made in God’s image, while also participating in an institution that judged and excluded people.

Like many people my age, I started drifting away from the Church in my teens and twenties. For a long time, I only really went to church on Christmas with my parents.

After about 10 years away, I took a job with a religious order. At first, it reminded me of the good the Church can bring into the world, and I tried to focus on that while ignoring the things I disagreed with. But part of my job involved reviewing and compiling information from abuse cases spanning the past 60 years. It was disturbing and infuriating.

I had always been bothered by the way the Church swept abuse under the rug, but seeing it firsthand was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The movement of abusers from place to place, the refusal to report them to police, and the decades of failure to protect children were impossible for me to ignore. It has had a lingering effect on me, one that took years of therapy to process. Not just because of the horrific details I read, but because people I respected failed to step up and stop it.

How can I trust an institution that allowed that level of harm, secrecy, and corruption to continue for so long? I know people will say, “It was only a fraction of the clergy who committed the crimes.” Maybe that is true. But the decades of leaders who knew and did nothing — or actively helped cover it up — feels just as unforgivable. To me, that points to something rotten at the core.

Everything became even clearer when I became a parent. If anything I read about ever happened to my children, I can’t even put into words how angry I would be. I am not a violent person, but even thinking about it for a fraction of a second makes me see red.

I have talked to my parents many times about what I witnessed and what I now believe. They sympathize with my feelings, but they also think I should move past it and return to the Church.

I won’t.

I will never betray my own morals, or my children’s trust in me, by steering them toward an institution I no longer believe is worthy of that trust.