A woman I know has been wrestling with her relationship with the Catholic Church for years. We met over 20 years ago at our Catholic university, where we both studied theology, threw ourselves into ministry opportunities and formed tight-knit relationships based on our common faith.

But when we reconnected a few years ago, I learned that one of the main threads in her life was that she was seriously questioning the church’s claims of authority. The breadth of the sexual abuse crisis in the church was a large factor. Her personal experience with smaller, yet still devastating, church scandals was another, along with watching her most familiar Catholic circles embrace Trump-era, right-wing politics. She began having panic attacks at Mass.

Shortly after we got back in touch, she stopped going to Mass at all. She had a child in Catholic school, she still believed in the Eucharist; but for now, being at Mass was too much, and she felt at a loss when it came to other church teachings. She needed to step away, she said. In her words, she needed to “deconstruct.”

Religious deconstruction is nothing new, but the prevalence of the term as podcast fodder or Substack topics is fairly recent. In 2016, a former evangelical coined the description exvangelical, and according to Google Trends, search interest in that term and terms like “deconstructing faith” has been on the rise, especially since 2020.

For some, religious deconstruction means a wholesale rejection of faith; for others, it is a cautious stepping away. Some treat deconstruction as an investigative phase to grapple with every claim of their faith tradition—no assumptions taken for granted. Another image is that of untangling: a pursuit of core truths to hold on to, while shedding subjective (and possibly damaging) interpretations that have become intertwined with them over the centuries.

These varying experiences, though, have one thing in common: Deconstruction hits the very foundation of a person’s faith and identity as a Christian. Whether the doubter upends and abandons their faith or takes stock of the exposed foundation in order to make loving repairs, it is brutal, exhausting and sometimes even terrifying work.

The first time I read the opening of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, I was surprised at how matter-of-factly he describes the existential stakes that intense doubt raises in a believer’s life. Referring to the faith and doubt of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, he writes:

Someone here suddenly catches a glimpse of the abyss lurking—even for her—under the firm structure of the supporting conventions. In a situation like this, what is in question is not the sort of thing that one perhaps quarrels about otherwise—the dogma of the Assumption, the proper use of confession—all this becomes absolutely secondary. What is at stake is the whole structure; it is a question of all or nothing. That is the only remaining alternative; nowhere does there seem anything to cling to in this sudden fall. Wherever one looks, only the bottomless abyss of nothingness can be seen.

This account strikes me as much more honest than the tendency to see doubt as a phase that can be entertained, but only when done the right way. (The church welcomes questions! But be careful to stay within these bounds.) When doubt is viewed as something merely to be experienced the “right way,” there is an implication that the antidote to doubt is catechesis, and that with time and docility, things will fall into place. There is also a temptation to quickly move the doubter along to restored faith, as if all she has to do is avert her gaze from the abyss and look to Jesus. Both examples treat doubt as a symptom antithetical to health. And if it seems to be a warning sign of contagion, some feel justified in cutting it—and the doubter—off.

When the woman I know confessed her doubts to her oldest Catholic friends, they responded with caution. When she admitted she was not attending Mass, they pulled away. They would pray for her, they said, but they stopped including her when it came to sharing their own lives. When they did check in, it was to ask if she was back at Mass.

The message was clear: She was too damaged, too dangerous, to hold close.

But Ratzinger isn’t fazed by doubt—not even when it stares into the “bottomless abyss.” In fact, he goes further, connecting uncertainty to mature belief: The serious, “sufficiently self-critical” Christian who strives to live as a faithful witness “will clearly recognize not only the difficulty of the task…but also the insecurity of his own faith, the oppressive power of unbelief in the midst of his own will to believe.”

The abyss will always be there. Doubt acknowledges its presence—not as a warning sign to turn back without confronting it, but as a marker assuring travelers they are still on the right path, even as it takes them to the very edge.

On the Cusp of Falling Away

When I read these passages, I was finally crawling out of the spiral of my own spiritual crisis, one that looked very similar to my friend’s. I kept going to Mass but would escape to the back, overwhelmed with the sense that everything I thought I believed was crashing around me. Ratzinger’s image of the believer dangling above the abyss of unbelief was very familiar, and I was terrified that admitting it would send me plummeting.

At one of my lowest points, I was on the phone with a friend who is a religious sister, recounting wounds and confessing thoughts like, “I am teetering on the edge of believing I can trust Jesus” through a snot-tinged, cracking voice.

In the silence that followed, I waited for a loving, yet wary reminder to come back to safe footing. But she did something different.

First, she affirmed that the harm I had experienced in the church was a real cause of suffering, and that my response—to be scandalized, to push back, even to wonder despairingly whether anything I thought I had believed was true—was reasonable, not overreactive.

Then she went on. It was edifying, she said, to hear my unfiltered thoughts and doubts. She felt privileged to see the messy process by which God was leading me to him and to deeper faith.

This took me aback. Was she not alarmed at what I’d just said? I was on the cusp of falling away from faith. How could she see this as a path to God? And yet the deep, aching compassion in her voice told me something else: This was what hope looked like. This was an echo of the Good Shepherd, who did not fear chasms, but only sought to place the lost lamb across his shoulders.

I recognized that echo again in the future Pope Benedict’s writing. Hearing him gently categorize the experience of shattering doubt not as an abnormality but as a feature of an engaged life of faith was like finding a doctor who took my symptoms seriously while reassuring me I would be OK.

Tenderly, he describes the moment when a questioning faith finds meaning not just in an idea, but a person: “I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the ‘you’ of his mother.”

I do not know the experience of every doubting or deconstructing Christian. But I know the balm that Ratzinger’s words were to me, and the love I felt in a religious sister’s embodiment of them. In my despair, they told me that God was not afraid of my fear. That even when I felt suspended over the void, I was still in the arms of love.

And that, even if I were to fall to the bottom, love would find me there.

This article appears in June 2026.

Elizabeth Hansen is a writer and editor in Michigan, where she lives with her husband and four children.