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What My Life in a Cult Says About America
I emerged from a cult and into the real world at the age of 23, a destitute mother of three children. I was 14 years old when I went into the cult, but my childhood years before that had been anything but normal.
My mother’s mission to ensure my salvation began in the months after my birth in February of 1977. She gazed at me in my crib, contemplating my innocence and the seriousness of her responsibility in the eyes of God. In that tiny bedroom in Prince Georges County, Maryland, I became the reason she fully understood the preciousness of an eternal soul.
My mother had grown up with eight siblings in a fanatically religious Catholic household 1960s. When the Second Vatican Council opened in 1962, my mother was seven years old, the age at which most young Catholic children receive their First Holy Communion. The early 1960s marked a turning point for the Catholic Church. The Second Vatican Council was bringing radical changes to both the Church internally and its demands on the lives of everyday Catholics.
When he called the council, Pope John Paul XXIII was looking to present a friendlier face to the rest of the world by taking the teeth out of Catholic doctrine’s legendary severity, at least on paper. The Catholic Church would now present itself as a more welcoming and far less judgemental space.