Most people who are from, or whose ancestors are from, lands that were colonized by the Spanish empire have long-standing family ties to Catholicism. These ties continue to have a strong presence in the lives of many millennials of this background, even as the generations become more secular. I am no different. But unlike many now-secular millennials, I do not consider myself as having “grown up Catholic.” I rejected Catholicism when I was 6 years old.
The only step of Catholicism that I completed is the one that’s involuntary. Baptism. I was 3 years old, on a trip to Mexico with my mom, when she decided that I should be baptized then and there, in the church right up the road from my great-grandmother’s house. My mom tells me that she had grown tired of my dad insisting that they had to wait until he could afford enough beer for the party.
My earliest memories of going to church and participating in Catholic traditions took place in my grandma Lony’s house in East San Jose, where my mom, my brother, and I lived when I was 3 – 4. I remember Christmas in 1997, the house was packed full of my tias and tios, my Abuelita Monica, and a giant gaggle of cousins. My grandma was one of 8 siblings, and by the late 1990s, all of them were living in the United States. Abuelita Monica, my great-grandmother, split her time between California and her home in Durango, Mexico.
I don’t remember many details, but I remember how the house felt. It was cold outside, but inside was warm and full of people, joy, laughter, music, and hot, delicious food & drink – tamales, menudo, empanadas, chocolaté, and ponches. I remember recognizing that all of it was because of Christmas, and that Christmas was about a baby, but also a man, named Jesus.
A few months later, Easter came. That year we went as a family, my grandma, my mom’s siblings, my first cousins, my mom, my brother, and I, to the Easter play at the Cathedral of Faith megachurch. We were near the front, and I remember feeling terrified by the dramatic lights and music, and by the fact that the main character of the play, this man Jesus who my grandma loved so much, was murdered. And then I remember feeling confused by him emerging from a cave a short while later. I’m not sure how I made sense of this in my young mind, but I think that I recognized the play, the story, the figure of Jesus, as being similar to Barney and Baby Bop – not real. Whatever it was, I was happy enough to get back to my grandma’s house and receive an Easter basket full of candy.
After we moved out of my grandma’s house, we would go to church with our family occasionally. I don’t remember sitting in mass as much as I remember running around afterwards and eating free pan dulce while my grandma gossiped.
My grandma’s house in San Jose was at the end of a culdesac, and the families who lived in the culdesac at that time had been there for decades. Every Christmas, they held a big posada, where they would pick two kids to play Mary & Joseph to re-enact the night before Jesus’ birth, and the neighbors would take turns being the house that let them enter and held the party. When I was 5, my brother and I were chosen for the roles of Mary & Joseph. I don’t think I recognized the significance of what we were doing, but I know my mom and my grandma were filled with pride. They made us some long gowns and dressed us up for the walk around the block. A crowd of people followed behind us, singing hymns, as we walked up to several houses, knocked on the doors, and were turned away. The residents of each house would join the crowd after we knocked. Eventually we arrived at the party house. The crowd of people burst into the house with shouts of joy and laughter, turned the music up loud, and began to celebrate. My mom must have helped my brother and I change out of the robes at some point. My most vivid memories of that party are of the host’s giant Christmas village, which seemed to take up an entire room. It felt like I stared at the little houses and walking, dancing, ice-skating figures for hours while I munched on buñuelos and cookies.
Not long after that Christmas, my mom decided to take my brother and I to live in Mexico, in my Abuelita Monica’s house in rural Durango. We made our way down there in early 2000, and my mom enrolled us in school, and in catechism. We began attending catechism classes in the church where I had been baptized a few years before. The woman who taught the class was rigid in her belief, and very particular about how we practiced ours. She insisted that, when making the sign of the cross, where you cross the thumb of your right hand over your index finger to form a cross, one must keep the remaining three fingers of their hand upright, straight, and pressed tightly together. She said that otherwise, we leave an opening for the devil to come in.
By this time I was already feeling bored with Catholicism, but the intensity of these catechism classes and the woman who taught them provoked my first feelings of dislike toward the church and its teachings. For the next several months the young people pleaser in me continued to say yes when my mom asked if I would be willing to read psalms at mass on Sunday. I arrived in Mexico knowing how to read and speak Spanish relatively fluently, and I imagine it gave the churchgoers a lot of joy to see a 6-year-old girl reading from the bible during mass. I was told which psalms to read, called up to the pulpit and the microphone, and would stand up there reading from the bible, hardly understanding what I was saying.
My faith was truly rocked after my Abuelita Monica returned from California. She was an incredibly devout woman, and would get dressed up, put on lipstick, pull a shawl over her hair, grab her cane, and slowly make her way up the hill to attend mass three times a day. I remember watching her as she went, wondering what it was that drove her to go through such effort.
For a few nights, I shared a room with Abuelita Monica, who was getting older. My mom thought it would be helpful if I was there in case Abuelita Monica needed anything in the middle of the night. The first night that we shared a bedroom, each in our own twin beds, Abuelita Monica turned to me before turning out the light, and reminded me to say my prayers. She said that, if I don’t say my prayers before bed, the devil would come and take me in the night. A terrifying thing for a 6-year-old to hear before bed. I remember hurriedly uttering a Padre Nuestro/Dear Father under my breath, and then feeling relief that I would be safe. As Abuelita Monica settled into sleep, my young anxious mind was working at high speed. The initial feeling of relief turned into confusion, as I realized that I had gone most of the past 6 years without saying prayers before I fell asleep, and the devil had not, in fact, snatched me from my bed. Not the night before, or on any other night. As I lay there, I must have thought about the Easter play, about the catechism teacher, and about Abuelita Monica. I recognized what she said to me as a lie, and I wondered how a woman who attended mass three times a day could lie, when it was clearly forbidden by the 10 Commandments. In that moment I settled on the truth that had been sitting in my brain since the Easter play – that God, Jesus, the devil, heaven, hell – none of it was real.
In the years that followed, I kept my doubts a secret. I continued to read the psalms at church. When we returned to California, I continued to attend church whenever we went as a family, although that became less frequent as my family was now split between Lodi, CA and San Jose, CA.
I began to find evidence of God not existing, at least not in the form taught by the Catholic church, in stories of death and grief in Chicken Soup for the Kids’ Soul books that an aunt gifted me. I stopped saying “God” when we recited the pledge of allegiance every day at school. I would say, “One nation, under…indivisible with justice for all.” I began forming my own conclusions about morality, about what happens after we die.
When I was around 11, I learned the word atheism. I realized that, even though my entire family, on both sides, was Catholic, it was possible to actually not ascribe to any religion. I decided that I didn’t believe in God, but I did believe in love, and the power of love to push human beings to be and do good. I supposed that this made me an atheist.
Not long after coming to that conclusion in my mind, I felt the need to share with someone. It felt agonizing to continue to attend mass occasionally, even to continue to say “amen” at the dinner table, while sitting with this secret. I decided to confide in my older brother, Nick. One day we were with my mom as she was running errands. We arrived at the post office, and she told us to wait in the car while she went inside. I turned to him then, and said that I had something to tell him, but he couldn’t tell our mom. I said that I didn’t believe in God, and I wanted to stop going to church. He was incredulous. The second my mom got back into the car, he betrayed me. He said, “mom, guess what Marly just said. She said she doesn’t believe in God.” My mom turned around in the front seat and looked me in the eyes. She asked, “is that true?” I said yes. She asked, “then what do you believe in?” I said love. She nodded, remaining silent for a while. And then she said, “well, I guess that’s okay.”
My initial anger and hurt at my brother’s betrayal turned into warm relief upon hearing that my mom was not going to disown me.
Over the next few months, however, my mom’s acceptance changed somewhat. Her then-husband was not at all okay with this, and decided that we needed to start going to church as a family more often. My mom shared this aspect of my identity with my grandma and my tias, who were shocked and angered. I have a distinct memory of my brother calling me a heathen, saying that the next time I walked into a church I would burn. After this, one of my tias started exclusively giving me religious-themed gifts for my birthdays and Christmas. I received “Not of this World” t-shirts, a promise ring, a leather-bound bible for teenage girls, etc. This went on until I moved out of California to attend college.
As I entered adolescence my atheism became a key driver of my rebellious actions. I began to refuse to go to mass when my stepfather insisted we must go, opting instead to sit and wait in the van while everyone else went inside. I accepted that this belief of mine was something that alienated me from my family, and I was willing to accept that in order to live in my truth. I knew that rejecting Catholicism did not make me a bad person. I learned, by accident, about the Catholic church’s history of protecting pedophiles, when I was in middle school. I went to the movies with a group of friends, to see what we thought was a horror film called “Deliver us from Evil.” It was, in fact, a documentary about the Catholic church’s practice of playing musical chairs with priests who were accused of sexually harassing or assaulting children, and which specifically covered the misconduct of priests at St. Anne’s in Lodi, CA, the very church that my family attended. We walked out of the movie early, proclaiming it “weird,” but it was enough time for me to solidify my belief that the church was not just misguided and hypocritical, but actually harmful.
I confronted my mom with this knowledge, I think I even told her that she better not even think about enrolling my sister in the pre-school at St. Anne’s. My mom acknowledged the truth of the information I came to her with. I think it may have been around this time that her mindset began shifting. When we all sat together to watch Nacho Libre, and Eskeleto declared, “I don’t believe in God. I believe in science,” my mom laughed a deep belly laugh and said, “that’s you, Marly!”
When I was 15, my mom began practicing Aztec dance. She stopped agreeing with her husband about the need for us all to go to church. She began to learn more about indigenous peoples and their history, about how the Catholic church made a concerted effort to erase the Mexica peoples’ culture by forcing them to convert to Catholicism. She learned about the struggle generations of maestrxs had gone through in order to preserve and restore the songs, the drum beats, and the dance steps that their ancestors used to honor the elements and their Creator. She stopped using the word “God,” and replaced it with Creator. It felt vindicating to see this transformation. My mom asked me repeatedly to practice with her and my sister. I told her that I could not and would not, because I saw this practice as a different type of religion honoring the same God, and I did not believe in any kind of God. My thinking here has changed, and I now recognize the practice as a different kind of spirituality than Catholicism, one which is rooted in preserving and honoring the Earth, the elements, our ancestors, and each other.
Since moving out of my mom’s house, out of California, and away from my more insistent Catholic family members, my secular beliefs have not taken up nearly so much space in my life. While I continue to happily participate in the joy, celebration, and family time that surrounds Catholic holidays, I have now spent most of my life without being under the influence of the church. One of the most important aspects of my relationship with my husband is that he, also, has pulled away from it’s influence. I knew that if I were to raise children with someone, they must be willing to raise them to value and honor the power of love, to have empathy, and to care for the Earth.
I am forever grateful to 6-year-old me and 11-year-old me for trusting my intuition, and being brave enough to live in my truth. This experience taught me that I am resilient and determined. It taught me the importance of speaking your truth.
Marlena Sauceda 