The Story of How I Became Catholic and Why I Wouldn’t Choose Another Faith

I grew up in a home that was fairly hostile toward “organized religion”. It was really just my father who felt so strongly about it, but my mother had some issues inherited from her father regarding the final disposition of my grandmother’s soul, so we weren’t a God-friendly family, and we all just kind of fell in line with my dad, whose will was the strongest. He was raised Protestant, and my mother grew up in an Italian Catholic family, but if there was ever a god in our lives, it was that vague, feel-good, television god that’s so popular in unreligious circles. He’s not a bad fellow, I’ll admit, and he makes for some good family drama, but he’s not enough to fall back on when the going gets tough.

Our family home was right across the street from St. David’s Episcopal Church, and when I was eight years old, a new minister moved into the adjacent house. His six year old daughter and I became best friends and I spent many a Saturday night at her house, and many a Sunday morning in her church. That is my first conscious memory of liturgy, and I liked it. I liked the rituals, the candles, the singing, and the community, even without knowing anything about God. Later, I worked at the same church building for a Reformed Jewish community, but by then, I was old enough to know that I didn’t belong, that the community and the traditions weren’t mine, and I felt a little lonely. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way, but it was probably the first time I recognized my loneliness for what it was.

I can look back on other incidents from my childhood now and see in them my longing for a real God, but also, I can see that He was always seeking me, too. I remember, more as impressions than events, a sunny day in bed, a sick day, with a children’s bible and my favorite stories of Jesus calming the storm and Peter walking on water; a Christmas, all of us feeling poorly, laying on the living room floor, watching a movie about Jesus; names on an elementary school blackboard, a list of the special children who rode the special bus to CCD on Wednesdays after school. One day, when I was in middle school, a classmate asked me in the lunch line what religion I was. I didn’t know, but I asked my mother after school, which is how I found out I was a baptized Catholic. I was the only one of my sisters and I asked her years later why she’d done it. She just shrugged and said it had seemed like the thing to do at the time.

(Time to milk the cow. If you don’t mind, I’ll come back and tell some more later.)