Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic

[annabenedetti]

Thinking today, about the past years in which I've been a reluctant Catholic. About how maybe "reluctant Catholic" was a good enough way to describe it, and then wouldn't you know, it's already out there, findable in a search, written about in a way that comfortably fits and better describes being a reluctant Catholic than what I could've done. So here she is, Alice McDermott. It's very long, so here's a little bit, but it's enough.

Alos: This is for anyone who wants to understand how a lot of Catholics believe. Who doesn't understand why we do. So I'm not gonna spend time arguing Sola Scriptura. This is for the curious, it's not for the haters.

Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic​

... And I, after years of semi-indifference, occasional rejection, political objection, and unshakable associations (no other cure for a sleepless night than a rosary counted off on your fingers, no better solace for unnamed sorrows than a candle lit in an empty church), find myself at middle age a practicing Catholic. A reluctant, resigned, occasionally exasperated but nevertheless practicing Catholic with no thought, or hope, of ever being otherwise.​

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I must confess (it’s a genetic thing, no doubt) that it occurs to me that it doesn’t bode well for our church at this millennium to have the likes of me as any kind of standard-bearer, and I offer this account of my own religious history only because it strikes me that it is similar to the religious history of many of us now middle-agers born into the Catholic faith. I offer you my own religious evolution not because it illustrates a triumph of faith but because it provides, perhaps, a place from which to talk about what brings us back, what leads us middle-aged born Catholics finally to choose the faith we were given from the very first moment of our lives. To a church we have, at various times in our lives, seen as flawed, irrelevant, outdated, impossible, and impossible to leave behind. . . .​

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Catholicism, I began to see, was also mine, inextricably mine, the fabric of my life and my thoughts. It was the native language of my spirit, the way in which I had from the beginning thought about faith. And while I could acknowledge that there were indeed other languages for faith and that it may well be that those languages were more effective, less burdened by nonessentials, perhaps even superior to the language the Catholic church had provided me, I would have to live another life entirely in order to know them and to feel them as deeply or as inevitably as I knew and felt my Catholic faith. Resignation and delight: I am a Catholic after all. My only obligation, my profound obligation, is to make the best of it. . . . .​

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It is not always easy to love the church, but then again, in my experience, it is not always easy to love anyone.​

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