Thank you for writing this.

James 1:27 “…. to look after the orphans and widows in their distress …”

Yeah. I never held it against my 31 year old father for making the hard decision to relinquish me into adoption less than one month after my 30 year old mother died. He was a devout Catholic and followed the advice of his parish priest.

It is the PRIEST who I fault. He said to my father at my mother’s funeral, “The baby needs two parents.” Sure, if you look only at the constant care of an infant, but wouldn’t it have been so much more loving, so much more caring and helpful if the PRIEST had offered help in the form of suggesting that volunteers from the church come in and help to care for me and my older siblings? How about donations of food, clothes, diapers, money? My grandparents were sick. Other family members had babies of their own. My father was stretched to the limit. He gave away his 5th child because a PRIEST put the idea in his head.

Oh, and, minutes after the priest spoke, a woman came up to my father and said, “I know someone who will take your baby.”

Her brother became my adoptive father.

Nice going, lady. Swoop down on a grieving husband and father. Take the baby off his hands, free up one more child that he didn’t need to feed so that you could pride yourself on procuring someone else’s baby for your brother. Nice going, Aunt Gertie, mighty Christian of you. May you rot in hell along with that priest.

This is not to say I didn’t love my adoptive parents, this is to say that my adoption was arranged by Catholics who were anything but Christian. I remain, and always will be, a “good without god” atheist; how I became adopted is just one of many reasons that I am no longer “a believer.”