Uncharitable practices chased me from Catholic Church: Chimamanda

Peoples Gazette

Novelist Chimamamda Adichie says she stopped attending Catholic Church as she felt alienated by some uncharitable practices of the church.

She listed harassment of women and how the poor who could not pay church levies were denied burials as some of the uncharitable practices in the church she disagreed with.

Ms Adichie revealed her grouse in her recent article published in L’osservatore Romano.

Ms Adichie said though she cherished her Catholic identity as a teenager, she grew up to disagree with some of the practices in the church.

“I remember my first moment of recoil from the church, when a gentle and devout couple was banned from communion because their daughter had married an Anglican.

“It felt to me not only uncharitable, but unnecessarily so, as did other subsequent incidents, such as poor people who were refused burials because they owed money to the church,” she penned.

Ms Adichie, a feminist and an advocate for women’s right, said women were being harassed and barred from church over their dressing and were also demonised in sermons.

“Women of all ages were often harassed, men barring their entry into the church unless they wrapped themselves in shawls to hide their shoulders and arms (which apparently would cause men in the church to sin),” she said.

“Entire homilies were dedicated to the wiles and evils of women. How unsettling to sit through Mass feeling as though one, simply by being born female, had become inherently guilty of a crime.”

“My alienation deepened; I had become a person in a place that my spirit had outgrown. Even if I attended Mass from time to time, it brought no meaning. And I’ve come to believe that meaning is what makes life worthwhile,” the novelist wrote.