I’m Sending My Kid to CCD Because I’m Scared of My Mom

I stopped attending church years ago, but I’m sending my kid to catechism class (CCD) anyway. / Illustration by Brian Rea

It’s a hot day in the middle of July, 100 degrees, the sort of heat that makes the air feel heavy, and I’m standing with about 40 other parents, nannies, and grandparents in the lobby of our local Catholic school. We’re all here waiting for our children, who have begun to file out of classrooms and into the cafeteria, where we will scoop them up and take them home. I haven’t been in a proper Catholic school since high school — my son, Quinn, is in second grade in public school — and so the posters stuck to the cinder-block walls of the hallways are jarring. There’s an illustration of a resurrected Jesus extending his hand, palm sliced open, to a terrified woman on her knees. There’s another showing a small boat about to be capsized in an awful storm, a terrified bird tangled in the twisted sail, a dozen screaming men about to drown, waiting for Jesus to calm the storm. (Spoiler: He does.)

Quinn has been here for three hours, stuck in a classroom while his friends splash about in pools and run around in sports camps, learning all about God so that he can make his First Holy Communion later this year. It’s not all bad for him, though. He has a few friends here, and I drive two of them home. The three pile into the back seat, one carefully holding aloft today’s craft, a sort of dreamcatcher thing with “the spirit of the Lord” written on it.

“How was camp today?” I ask, doing my best to sound excited and interested.

“Gooooood,” they say in toneless unison. I ask them what they learned.

“I learned how to do the hand thing,” says the little girl, who is in the first-grade class. She demonstrates the sign of the cross, which is mostly correct except for the very end when she puts her hand on her heart like she’s saying the Pledge of Allegiance. Close enough, I guess. Her brother, who is in Quinn’s class, pipes up.

“We learned the Hail Mary,” he says. And then he and Quinn start to recite it, getting through the first three lines before scrambling the words and devolving into seven-year-old antics: “… and blessed is the fruit of thy poop.”

Okay, I think to myself with a twinge of relief. I haven’t lost Quinn yet.

You see, I’m sending my son to PREP (short for Parish Religious Education Program, known as CCD or Sunday school) not because I’m a practicing Catholic, or because I strongly believe in the tenets of Catholicism, or because I am very religious. I’m sending my son to PREP because my mother has told me in no uncertain terms that if her grandchild does not receive the Eucharist she will die. It is a scary threat, one she delivers with grave sincerity. But what’s even scarier?

I believe her.

It wasn’t always like this, my tenuous connection to Catholicism. I went to Sunday school every weekend, where we’d recite the Hail Mary and Apostles’ Creed and Glory Be until they were burned into our brains. I went to church with my parents every Sunday morning, filing into uncomfortable oak pews, genuflecting on kneelers lined with blood-red cushions (red, the color of martyrdom), using my tongue to dislodge the Communion wafer stuck to the roof of my mouth. My sister and I would sit there, hoping for a short homily and studying the backs of people’s heads. We had nicknames for all of them, and not particularly godly ones. There was Mr. and Mrs. Tall With Their Three Tall Children, Mr. and Mrs. Loud With Their Two Whiny Brats, Bad Toupee Man, Ugly Sweater Lady, and Elvis, named thusly for his unnaturally black swoop of hair.

To be fair, there wasn’t much else to look at. Our church was a singularly hideous building built in the early ’80s, with a drab brown brick exterior and a drab brown roof that jutted out at strange, harsh angles. There was none of the beauty of old Gothic or Neoclassical cathedrals, with their muraled ceilings, grand stone columns, beautiful stained-glass windows, and sculpted marble altars. Ours had gray carpet and institutional white-brick walls with some oddly tall and skinny stained-glass windows. A giant statue of Jesus on the cross presided over it all, his ribs protruding, blood seeping from the crown of thorns on his forehead, from a gash on his chest, from the nails hammered through his hands and feet. No wonder little kids cried so much. (There was actually a glass-walled, soundproof “cry room” in the back, which, in hindsight, is pretty weird.)

The chapel in my Catholic high school was far prettier, which made going to Mass more pleasant. I prayed a lot back then, sometimes visiting the chapel alone during the day to be still with my thoughts and talk to God. I found peace there. But I also found cracks. Instead of open conversations about contraception and sexuality, we had to carry around flour babies — literal sacks of flour wrapped up to look like babies — to dissuade us from engaging in any sort of premarital shenanigans. (Alas, it didn’t work for one girl, who fell pregnant our senior year and wasn’t allowed to walk at graduation. She named her baby Jared after Jared Leto. It was the ’90s.) Homosexuality was a sin, and so was all abortion, and so was divorce. We confessed our teenage sins to a man hidden in a box, and then we prayed them away on our knees with a rosary.

Around that time, there was gossip brewing about my childhood priest, something about him molesting an altar boy. The boy, who happened to be my future husband’s classmate at the parish school and a fellow altar server, was one of two children who eventually came forward. The priest was convicted, and he died five months after the Vatican defrocked him.

But Father Mike wasn’t the first priest at my old church to be embroiled in sexual assault crimes. At least four other pastors from St. John the Evangelist have been similarly accused, including the notorious James Brzyski, who preyed on as many as 100 boys in the late ’70s and early ’80s during his tenures at my old parish and at St. Cecilia’s in Fox Chase. He was the poster priest for the worst of the Philly archdiocese sex abuse scandal, his crimes covered up until he was finally sent to a Catholic “treatment center.” (He was allowed to leave, of course, because it wasn’t prison, and so he fled to Texas, took a new name, preyed on more boys, and eventually married a 21-year-old from Australia, who was later found to have maybe been only 15.) The whole thing was horrific — both the abuse and the church’s systemic hide-it-and-pray-it-away response — but it never cut me so deeply until I had my son. It could have so easily been my husband sexually abused instead of his friend. It could so easily be Quinn.

I’ve since learned that Brzyski wound up dying in a seedy Texas motel in 2017, exactly four days before I baptized my son. The coincidence isn’t lost on me.

Maybe it’s because we find community elsewhere, or maybe it’s because we’re finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile our social values with religious teachings. Whatever it is, we’re not going.”

But of course my husband and I baptized our baby. It was never a question; once again, my mom’s life depended on it. She took me shopping for a christening outfit for Quinn, my husband and I asked my sister and a dear friend to be godparents, and we threw a big party in our back yard afterward.

And then we stopped going to church.

We’re not the only ones who stopped going. A 2022 study found that the churchgoing habits we develop in childhood fade in adulthood — 67 percent of people went as kids; fewer than half of those now go weekly or nearly weekly. Maybe it’s because we’re busy, as I’ve told my mother. Maybe it’s because there are simply fewer churches; at least four in the area were shuttered last year. Maybe it’s because there aren’t enough nuns left to remind us to go. (Analysts predict that at the current rate of decline — old nuns are dying off and young women aren’t joining — there will be fewer than 1,000 nuns left in the country by 2042.) Maybe it’s because we find community elsewhere, or maybe it’s because we’re finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile our social values with religious teachings. Whatever it is, we’re not going.

But our kids? That’s a different story.

“Both my kids made their first Communion because I’m afraid of my parents,” my friend Erin tells me. Like me, she’s 42, a full-fledged adult who pays taxes and runs a household and has a job. She’s too old to be grounded, to be sent to her room, to be in big trouble the way children can. And yet the fear of parental wrath looms large. Erin pulled the plug on Catholic education after her kids made the sacrament, but she still hasn’t come clean to her parents.

“They probably won’t know until my daughter doesn’t get her confirmation in a few years,” she says. It will be a bitter pill for them to swallow: Erin’s dad works at a church, and her mom attends services daily.

I find the same with nearly all of the other parents I know who trudge their kids to PREP. They’re not doing it out of some deeply ingrained need for salvation, or even because of the heavy burden of Catholic guilt. They’re doing it because, well, parents are scary.

My mom and I are on the phone, discussing the fact that my sister hasn’t yet baptized her six-month-old son. She’s going to, you know, once she gets around to it. But she’s been busy taking care of baby Colin, getting him into a good daycare, doing countless loads of laundry, keeping him fed and clean and happy.

“Mom, chill. She’s going to baptize him,” I say.

“But when? It’s already been six months! Quinn was baptized at four months!” I pause to soak in this acknowledgment of my devotion to her. But then we have the same conversation we always do: Why don’t I take my son to church? Do I teach him how to pray? Does he have any God in his life?

“Yes, Mom,” I tell her, again. I remind her that we pray almost daily at dinnertime, that we talk about being kind and accepting and loving to all people, that we talk about heaven, especially the fact that Grandmom — my mother-in-law who died a year before Quinn was born — is up there now, looking over us, our guardian angel. She visits us every day in the form of a cardinal (red, the color of love) who never seems to leave our back yard. We might not be religious, I explain for the hundredth time, but we are spiritual.

“Well, I told him about hell,” my mom says.

I nearly drop the phone. “WHAT?”

“He asked!” she says defensively. “What was I supposed to do?”

I press further. How, pray tell, did my clueless seven-year-old who only ever talks about baseball and Rubik’s Cubes suddenly think to ask about hell?

“We were driving and a guy whizzed by really fast. I said that he was driving like a bat out of hell, and then Quinn asked what hell was. So I told him,” she explains. “I said it’s where you go when you die if you’re a bad person.”

“Nice, Mom. Thanks for that,” I say. Now on top of worrying about second grade and the braces he’s getting soon, Quinn can also worry about spending eternity in a fiery pit. I was terrified of death as a child, so much so that my parents marched me to the rectory, where a priest (not the pedophile one, thankfully) had me write a letter to God about it. He brought the letter to the altar with him that Sunday at Mass and offered up my fears to the Lord. I don’t remember if it helped, but at least I know now where my preoccupation with death stemmed from.

Fears about hell aside, I often think it would be nice to reclaim more of my religiousness. I miss the hymns of church, beautiful songs like “On Eagle’s Wings,” “Angels We Have Heard on High,” and “One Bread, One Body.” There’s a lyric in “Be Not Afraid” that always makes me cry: Be not afraid / I go before you always. And I believe this, deeply. But at some point, I stopped feeling peace in church. I started feeling something closer to anger — about the hypocrisy of the Catholic institution, its homophobic and transphobic teachings, its archaic stances on social and moral issues. Sure, maybe it’s a little righteous, but it’s anger all the same.

“I was raised Catholic, and I even went to a Jesuit college,” says Sue, a 40-year-old woman with two young children. “After college, I kept going to church in Manayunk. And then at one of the services the priest said that homosexuality is one of the seven deadly sins. I walked out and never went back.”

Her husband occasionally takes the kids to his mom’s Unitarian church, just to keep the peace. But Sue doesn’t go.

“It’s a little too loose for me there,” she says. “If I’m going to go to church, I at least want some incense.” Same.

Unitarianism doesn’t seem like it’s for me either. There is something to be said for tradition, a bit of formality and ritual. I don’t want a “cool” preacher, or a Christian rock band, or an altar that looks more like a pop star stage. I’ve taken lots of “what Christian denomination am I?” quizzes, and it seems I’m most aligned with the Episcopalians and Methodists. But even the Methodists are splitting into two factions now. It’s all very messy. My mom thinks I’m making it too complicated. She just wants baptized, Communion-ed, confirmed, Catholic grandkids who know their prayers and go to church and understand heaven and hell. For the love of God, is that too much to ask?

But it’s not just Catholics who find ourselves saddled with this guilt. It happens in other religions, this fear of rocking the boat and pissing off your elders.

“A lot of Jewish people will say they’re culturally Jewish more than they are religious and observant,” says Hannah, a 40-year-old mom of two. (Her name has been changed because she too is scared of her parents.) By the time she had her children, she and her husband — who were both raised in Conservative synagogues — hadn’t belonged to a synagogue in years. When they started looking, her mother-in-law had … thoughts.

“She was like, ‘You will not join a Reform synagogue,’” Hannah says, referring to the most liberal of the major denominations of Judaism. “We said, ‘Be happy we’re taking them to synagogue.’” In the end, they chose a Conservative synagogue for a single reason: “They offered a discount on preschool.” (And that’s when she asked me to change her name.)

But it occurs to me that it also goes beyond religion, this upholding of traditions for the sake of our parents. It’s why we cram into cars to schlep to our in-laws’ for Thanksgiving, even though everybody would probably rather stay home. It’s why things like Grandmom’s fruitcake and gefilte fish still show up on dinner tables even though they’re often left uneaten. For years, my mom served a Jell-O mold at every holiday dinner until we finally persuaded her to stop.

It’s why we pass down heirlooms and wedding dresses and family names. My very white sister grew up assuming her kids would have classic English middle names, like Elizabeth or Jane or Christopher or James. But she married a Portuguese guy whose family has for generations used a family name. Neither my sister nor her husband particularly likes the name — maybe no one ever did — but it’s tradition, non-negotiable. And so my nephew Colin’s middle name is Manuel. (“Can you believe I have a child named Manuel?” my sister laughs. My mom laughs too, before sliding in a kicker: “I wonder what confirmation name he’ll pick.”)

We’re all looking to leave a legacy, I guess. We all want something to outlive us, a little slice of immortality. It helps make the unknown a little less scary. After death, what comes next? Maybe nothing, as some people think. Maybe heaven — or hell, as my mom would gladly tell you. Maybe your soul visits loved ones in dreams, or through sunsets, or in the form of a red cardinal. It can be a scary thought, death, and it’s something that is still a great fear of mine. And yet, despite all my religious misgivings, I guess I still find peace in tradition: Be not afraid / I go before you always.

Published as “God, Me … and Mom” in the October 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.