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MD, when I was in high school, I read the book, The Power of Positive Thinking. In it, the author quoted passages and verses out of the Bible, referencing them by book, chapter, and verse.

It was the FIRST time in my life that I had seen that. I had NO clue what he was talking about. The names sounded like Eastern mysticism writing.

The way he referred to them indicated that he presumed that it was common knowledge that people would know where to look for those works. It kind of annoyed me that he’d refer to something without telling someone where to go to find it. I had NO CLUE that those works were books of the Bible.

I honestly cannot recall that we had a Bible in the house. I don’t recall ever seeing one. I bought my first Bible (KJ was the only option in those days) when I was 22 and it was the first time in my life that I had any exposure to Scripture outside the readings in the mass, which were approved of by the Church.

I basically started from ground zero in my learning about Scripture. It was almost all new to me except for a few passages I recognized from the mass.

As I said before, what the priest (in essence the Church) said was it. You didn’t need to know anything else and certainly were not encouraged to know anything else and you did not dare question it or seek to understand because we were told we were incapable of it. They’d do it for us. And of course, ultimately, it wasn’t worth the consequences.

It wasn’t until I realized that the threatened consequences (going to hell) of challenging the church did not apply to me any more, that I could do it and learn myself. It wasn’t until I was free of the fear of condemnation for exploring that I could explore.

I’ve pinged a few others only because I know there are a lot of former Catholics in that list who have had very similar experiences and can verify that it is not all that uncommon.

Your Catholic experience is the one that seems to be so out of the ordinary. I suppose that we all tend to think that what we experience is normal for most people, but I’ve met precious few Catholics who can relate to your kind of experience.