Two women pray before a shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in this file photo. Contributor Catalina Morales Bahena always felt that her late paternal grandmother and Our Lady of Guadalupe "were so important to my formation as a Catholic woman. I know they both guide my path in my ministry work. Send your thoughts to Letters to the Editor. Learn more August 8, Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Email to a friend Print Even as hundreds of thousands of young people were in Lisbon, Portugal, last week for World Youth Day, here in the United States and other parts of the world the reality is that many millennials don't attend church anymore.
In some ways, I don't blame them, yet I have struggled without them. As a weaver, it's as if a piece of our fabric was torn off and the strings that are left hanging by themselves are those of us still in the pews β half there, half ripped apart. As a young Latina, throughout my 20s I was talked down to a lot in church: by those older than me, by deacons, by priests β those who I had trusted to guide my faith journey.
Yet, I understood that God still wanted me to stick around, perhaps not at that parish anymore but to hold firm in my faith, even in the church that had let me down. This summer, while at a conference for Catholic women, I came to the realization that I have been lonely, lonely for so long that on the last day of the conference I just began to cry and I couldn't stop.
In one of the closing sessions, we were asked to practice listening and being witness to other women. My table was immensely diverse in generation, and one by one we went around listening to each one of our experiences that brought hope and those experiences that have broken our hearts. I was second to last and by the time I went I just broke down in tears. I realized at that moment how lonely I had been for a decade.
I had never, in my time in the church, been around so many Catholic women at once where we were just honest with each other about what we have been going through.
