I was a girl who was raised to love Jesus. A girl who wore a white lace dress and veil and participated in a ritual of the Roman Catholic Church to receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the eating of Christ’s body and the drinking of his blood at seven years old.

 

I don’t think I truly understood what I was participating in, but my mother allowed it, and I trusted my mother who was trained to trust the priest, the representative of Jesus on Earth. The preparation for this ritual was intense, and I remember being overwhelmed with everything that had to be memorized to earn the right to wear that white dress and be accepted into the flock. But I did it because I loved Jesus with all my heart, and I was going to succeed in reaching the altar where he was waiting to receive me. 
 
I had no idea, at that moment, that two life-changing events would occur within the year— events that would radically change how I viewed the religion I was born into.

 

The first warning came when, at the insistence of the priests, nuns forced me to place a piece of tissue on my head in order to participate in a special mass at a large downtown Winnipeg cathedral in Manitoba, Canada. This was 1965, and women were required to cover their heads when ‘approaching the table of the Lord’; I had forgotten my scarf.

 

The second event involved my mother. The church would not allow her to leave my alcoholic father and seek a divorce, although she believed this would provide a better life for her children.

 

Even at the tender age of eight, these two events showed me, with stunning clarity, that I did not belong in this church with my head bent in front of men dressed in black robes.

In 1965, I was too young to understand how the Roman Catholic Church had become the powerful entity it is today and what they had perpetrated to attain that position. A Church that over the centuries has accumulated vast assets and, in 1942, established its own banking system, commonly known as the Vatican Bank. Over the years, this bank has been plagued by numerous scandals, including accusations of money laundering and fraud.[1]

After I left the church, I lost my faith but not my love for Jesus. It would take nearly fifty years for me to fully understand the inferior status of women within Catholicism—a journey for truth that led me to uncover hidden knowledge that, once revealed, would expose the layers of deception bound within it. 
 
While on this journey for answers, I also discovered a woman named Helena Roerich, a Russian mystic and theosophist who, in the early 20th century, along with her husband, attempted to create a new religion that would be led by a Mother of the World.  Helena’s own quest was centred on restoring the role of women within secular and religious organizations, and she shares that belief in a letter saying: