I'm a liturgically-lapsed Catholic. I wouldn't say I've fully left the Church, but I'm not fully participating either. I was very motivated to go regularly (more than weekly) to communal liturgies when I was living close to a very authentic and active parish. I'm still doing some of the individual practical things - legal aid volunteer work for refugees helping with humanitarian visas. When I lived close enough to another genuinely eucharistic community, Sant'Egidio Community's church in Amsterdam, I was going semi regularly, but even there I didn't feel so much part of the community because everything is in Dutch and tbh when I actually needed some support I wasn't seen as eligible, I felt like because I sound like I'm culturally middle-class and white etc. so I should be always on the giving side. I was also very discouraged, despite trying not to be, when I was rejected in applying to a Catholic Worker adjacent residential community and in their reply why it was ambiguous whether they meant "someone more stable"/ implying I'm unstable in the sense of not planning to stay more than a year or referring to the fact I'd disclosed I have a latent, stably in remission for years, neurological health problem which can manifest with psychological symptoms, if I didn't keep on taking good care of myself. So I guess that fits under the category of how churches deal with mental health issues. I feel like my main problem of why I don't keep going to participate in a parish community now is about the lack of relevance. Maybe this etymology is inaccurate, but I remember reading somewhere that the root of the word 'liturgy' means something like preparation. Preparation for going out and acting ecstatically and eucharistically loving. When it's reduced to only a ritual with no practical expression beyond the liturgy, I feel like it's not the real thing and it's quite irrelevant. And more of a Catholic problem than an Evangelical typical problem - far too many parishes have become more like old people's clubs devoted to rehearsing their particular brand of nostalgia (e.g. one symptom of this is when some of the most meaningful parts of the liturgy are performed in such an ornamental, sentimentalist way that it's impossible to hear the words and follow the meaning, even if one understands Latin and some Greek, as I do. I feel like they do this in order to *avoid* paying attention to the meaning.) than being authentic and developing a church community which is growing into what it is supposed to be, remembering the future more than the past. I also have problems with the general prejudice against LGBTIQ people and the weird negative obsession with sex as if strict traditional sexual morality, judged by broad categories of external actions not by the quality of interpersonal relationships, is the main area of struggle between sin and salvation. To my mind that's a distraction used by mediocre celibate priests to rationalize their supposed superiority. I think the really important moral criteria are the five questions in the biblical passage about the final judgement, which are all about ethics from the point of view of the other person, from the point of view of the victim of an injustice, more objectively about transgressions in terms of just relationships, not just voluntary sins, and not primarily about what the individual who's being judged and subjectively understood and intended at the moment of a sin. That's more reflected in the Greek Orthodox confession formula which says "all transgressions, voluntary and involuntary". I do think carefully and seriously about the sexual area of ethics but I believe the quality of interpersonal relationships is more important than the external form of acts or whether the people involved are formally married or what sort of social categories they're in. I'm also discouraged by the fact that when I have drifted away from the two communities I have previously participated in and felt are very genuine they still don't make any move to reach out to me again. I feel like that's a pattern in my whole life not just about relationships with religious communities, and I'm slightly oversensitive and honestly a bit resentful about it. I'm also just moving around too much, so even if I participated in a parish community again I'd lose contact again soon.