Presenting: Exodus
a strongly worded letter to the Roman Catholic Church in honor of my defection
This past Friday, I debuted a new piece titled, Exodus, at the National Liberty Museum in Philadelphia. I have been working on this piece for several years. It is my formal defection from the Roman Catholic Church.
I was raised deep in the Irish Roman Catholic Church of Boston. When I say deep, I mean deep. I attended Catholic school from 1st – 12th grade (all girl’s high school). I had nuns and priests as teachers. I was in the choir, a lecture, a eucharistic minister, there was even some liturgical dance thrown in for good measure. I went to church at least once a week. We often went to church as a school. I have played the role of Mary, Mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene in several religious performances.
Catholicism was the overwhelming pervasive lens through which I was taught to understand and process the world. I was profoundly indoctrinated. Yet I felt great internal conflict with the hypocrisies that I encountered at seemingly every turn. That said, the threat of eternal hell is a brilliant tool of manipulation and subjugation. Then, the sex abuse scandals began to come to light, and they touched every church in the Boston area. Things began to unravel for me.
In college, I began the process of leaving the church. It is not such an easy thing to do when all of your rituals, holidays, celebrations, and family are tied to the institution. It was a process. It made a lot of people very uncomfortable, and many relationships were sacrificed in service to my truth.
Ironically, I felt more passionately as a feminist that I needed to leave the church than as a queer person. At least I knew where they stood when it came to my queerness, it was clear and defined and transparent. The misogyny is much more insidious. There is profound grooming, and it took me a long time to be able to identify just how much the Roman Catholic Church does to oppress and subjugate women.
The more I learned to think critically the more none of this made any sense (thank you college).
Over the past 20 years, I have worked to unlearned and de-program. I have been free from religion and religious institutions for as long. However, I reject that the church still gets to claim me as one of their own because I was baptized and confirmed. I went about exploring how to formally defect from the Catholic Church.
Guess what? You can’t.
In 1983, the Code of Canon Law introduced formal acts of defection and in 2010 Pope Benedict XVI did away with them. For the period of time that this law existed within the church, the required actions included a formal letter that stated your desire, the reasons why, a formal denunciation of the church, its leadership, and its doctrine. This letter had to be signed and witnessed and include your baptismal information. The letter then had to be sent to the archdiocese where you were baptized at which point, they were to go into your records and mark you as no longer Catholic. It then required you to make your decision public and inform your family, as you were no longer allowed to receive any sacraments or be buried in a Catholic cemetery.
I found samples of templates that had been created by folks who had built systems to support people in submitting their letters during that period. One of the most notable was the work of an Irish activist group known by: NotMe.ie
I wrote the letter. I had it witnessed. I sent it to the archbishop where I was baptized. I informed my family. And now, my friends, I have made it public.
So, if it isn’t acknowledged by the church why even do it?
One, because it’s madness that there is no formal way to withdraw your membership to this faith institution and I wanted people to be aware of it.
Two, everything that happens in the church is symbolic, and I refuse to allow the church to claim ownership over my soul. I have created my own symbolic act to take back my power and reclaim what is mine.
This piece, Exodus, is my formal defection from the Roman Catholic Church whether they acknowledge it or not. Thanks to capitalism, I purchased some holy water blessed by the Pope and consecrated this piece because whether they like it or not, I found a way to get their blessing. Ha! Two can play at this game.
This piece took me several years to conceptualize, source, and hand-stitch. In that time, I used the stitching process to think on and explore the rituals that I would invite in, in place of the sacraments and rituals of the Catholic Church. I made choices about my life and my death. I wrote a will and power of attorney. I spoke with my friends and family and made known my wishes. I designed my end-of-life celebration. It was liberating and fun!
Normally, if I’m stitching something quite serious, I stitch in silence. However, this piece took so very many hours that I found myself bored in the quiet. I decided to watch documentaries that invited me to think about life, death, rituals, and choices that are normally driven by and governed by one’s religion.
Here’s a list of the one’s I took the most away from:
Moment of Death
Alternative Endings
Coma
Life After Death
End Game
Far from the tree
Tell me who I am
Life according to Sam
Surviving death
Crazy not insane
Extremis
Friends of god: a road trip with Alexandra Pelosi
Cults and extreme beliefs
Going clear
One of us
Marketing the Messiah
Questioning Darwin
The actual process of making the piece was another beast entirely. I knew my “public announcement” as required by the church, would be a piece of art. I also knew it would be embroidered (that is what I do after all). I knew I would stitch the letter. A large body of my work is done on antique textiles so I went poking around eBay thinking I could find some old liturgical textiles. Several weeks in, I stumbled across a church in Michigan that had been shut down and was selling their inventory of objects. That is where I spotted the funeral pall. It all clicked. Nothing made more sense than stitching my letter onto a used antique funeral pall from a shuttered church. I paid $30. I immediately had it dry cleaned and I smoked it out with incense and invited any ghosts to kindly carry on.
I spent weeks figuring out how to scale the text to fit the pall. There were many a laser involved.
Still, I was only able to get the lines onto the piece before I moved into my RV and began traveling. I didn’t have room to do the prep work to get the words onto the piece until I landed in Austin, TX. I was doing work with the Neill Cochran House Museum, and they gave me a space to map out and transfer the words onto the piece so that I could begin stitching.
I then spent hundreds of hours hand stitching it using a 7” hoop inside my RV. I stitched it in: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina.
(I am under there)
Once I finished stitching, I didn’t have space to rinse and dry the piece until I arrived in Winston-Salem, NC. I am teaching a class at Salem College and the art department very generously gave me a sink and floor space.
This piece was a beast to stitch. The material is a nightmare. I went through dozens of stick-on thimbles each time I worked on it. There was a great deal of blood involved. Ironic I know. When I rinsed the piece the first-time yellow stains appeared everywhere from the stabilizer I used to transfer the text. I soaked it in Polident and dried it again. Better but still there was this horrible adhesive residue that I could not get off. I tried everything. I had to repair stitches and re-stitch parts as I had to keep rinsing and re-rinsing. In the end, the residue, some stains, some very imperfect stitches all remain. And isn’t that just like Catholicism? No matter what I do, some of those marks will always be with me. So, I have embraced those imperfections. I see the process and the result as a reflection of the personal journey I took in my Exodus.
But let’s be honest, I know I’ll make a second one that is pure and clean and closer to perfect just to prove something to myself. I may or may not have already bought another funeral pall. ; )
When the museum asked me to have a show of my work, I asked them if I could debut this piece. I was certain they would say no. Institutions tend to fear my work. I sent them the copy of the letter and images of where it currently stood. It wasn’t done yet. To my great surprise they said yes. And in my meeting with the exhibit team, I mentioned I would love for it to be displayed on a casket. Again, to my surprise they were thrilled and had been having similar thoughts. They created the most perfect display for Exodus and I am beyond thrilled with it.
Exodus is on exhibit at the National Liberty Museum now through February.
I hope you can make it.
Strength and Love,
Shannon