Leaving Religion in Boston

Boston is one of the most important Catholic-exit cities in the world because of what happened here in 2002. The Boston Globe Spotlight investigation published in January of that year documented decades of clerical sexual abuse and systematic cover-up by the Archdiocese, and the cascade of investigations and revelations that followed permanently changed how American Catholics, especially Boston Irish and Italian families, related to the institutional Church.

The Boston Catholic exit since 2002 has therefore had a particular shape. It is rarely a doctrinal break in the abstract; it is a moral rejection of an institution that protected predators against children, layered onto a culture-deep guilt machinery that does not switch off just because Mass attendance has dropped. Many Boston Irish and Italian families have de facto left the Church while continuing to keep the family rituals — the baptism, the first communion, the church wedding — with a kind of grim cultural inertia.

The pillar page on Catholicism, the page on funerals and weddings, and the page on the guilt that lingers will fit many Boston readers closely.

Elder X has been through the religious exit himself — the family rupture, the guilt that would not stop, the psych wards, the isolation of being the person nobody in your family understands anymore. If you are in Boston and that description lands, reach out. Not therapy. Personal advice from someone who made it to the other side.