You Call Yourself a Catholic?

This post is a part of the Patheos Catholic Channel series, “Catholicity: Identity and Its Discontents.” Read more here.

Oy, what a question!

Okay, I know that’s not exactly the best way to start an article about being Catholic. But it’s apropos, actually, in this case. I’ve mentioned before, in posts like How NOT to Evangelize–from a New Convert with Love and Hope and The Cure for the Post Baptism Blues that I’m a very new, non-cradle Catholic convert who attended a predominantly Jewish high school on the far South Side of Chicago.

In fact, those happy years in a school full of proud Jewish youngsters who could trace their history—and names–back to the Bible itself was, paradoxically, one big step down the very long road to my recent conversion.

So I think I’ll let that and similar experiences open this little list of ways I make cradle Catholic friends shake their heads and sigh sometimes. And let me warn all the conservative Catholics in the house that right about here would be a good time to click on another link. Any other link. Fast.

The rest of you, fasten your seat belts. There’s a 64-year-old “student driver” at the wheel—double trouble. But here we go:

1. I see other religions in ours. Sorry, but I do. Raised Baptist, mostly, I later dabbled in and even dove right into a few other religions and “disciplines” before making it home to the one I was meant to follow for the rest of my life. Sometimes, as with the Baha’i Faith, voluntarily. Other times, as with Judaism and Native American spirituality, due to extenuating circumstances—marriage, in the latter case. And one of the things that really sealed the deal for me during my RCIA period was how many themes and practices from those other religions I could see in Catholicism.

I’d feared that I would be turned off by Catholic dogma, but it dovetailed perfectly with my life experiences and, in fact, tied up lots of loose ends. And because Jesus was my BFF even when I was out there trying to “find myself,” I was happy to be back in His House, where I felt far more comfortable than I had in any of the more exotic spiritual disciplines and religions I’d researched. So Catholicism’s rituals and beliefs fit me like the proverbial glove because I’d tried other things, not despite that fact.

The Second Vatican Council, through the Nostra Aetate, (Declaration of the Church to Non-Catholic Religions) actually seconds that emotion. Speaking specifically of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam, it says:

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men…

The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men…

Would you like some Scripture with that? Well, of course there’s the centurion Jesus said had more faith than his own followers. And the woman with the dying daughter whose faith helped Him decide that his healing power was not just for Jews.

But here’s a smidgen of Scripture—there’s a lot more where it came from, of course:

In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us. Colossians 3:11

2. I’m not “down with” Mary yet. I know she’s the Mother of the most important Man in my life, but I was raised in a family that was scandalized by the idea that Catholics “worship” Mary. I know better now, but I’m still having “mother-in-law” issues, I think. Maybe I’m just jealous.

But I think it may also be that the ethereal image of Mary I see most often is an idealized version of motherhood I can’t relate to. The mothers on my block were strong, sassy Black women fresh from the Great Migration up from the South. They were the embodiment of that “I’m a woman, W-O-M-A-N” song who really could bring home the bacon and then fry it up in that pan after a long day’s work, too.

Which explains why the Mary I like is the one I imagine giving her Son one of those withering “mom stares” when He refused, at first, to help out with the wine situation at the wedding at Cana. I could definitely talk to the Mary whose “Do whatever he tells you” to the servants was also an implicit, “Okay, enough! Let’s do this,” to her reluctant Son.

I can almost see the resulting smirk, sigh and “eye roll,” can’t you? Oh, come on, if you’re a parent who has ever ordered a sulky kid to do a chore, you know exactly what I mean. The Mary who handled that situation is the one I could turn to in crisis or confusion and say, “Mom, can we talk?”