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Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children.
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Irish Elk
 
Thursday, October 22, 2009  


Why Catholic?

Apropos of the Pope's recent remarkable invitation to the Anglicans, an inquiring friend writes:

If you weren't raised Catholic, would you be Catholic?

My reply is that is an excellent question. If you'd asked me 10 or 12 years ago I would have said not necessarily or probably not. Today I'd say definitely.

The reasons for this are many and not that easy to articulate, but I'll try to provide a few, via a sort-of jumbled shorthand:

* Looking into my infant child's face and knowing there must be a Creator at the heart of all, and that I am grateful to Him;

* The idea that this Creator so loved us that He would come among us and share our existence and our suffering, and offer Himself for us; that the Divine would thus touch and ennoble the human experience; that He would have us see Him in one another and in all things, and that His message would be one of sacrificial love;

* The remark by, I believe, Chesterton that if you look into the mirror of the universe and all you see looking back is yourself, it's a pretty shallow existence;

* The connection with the "seen and unseen"; the Communion of the Angels and Saints; the Blessed Virgin;

* The Real Presence; the idea that the Church asks you to believe something that is not perceptible to the senses but that is taken on faith; the realization that the most enduring and important things in life likewise cannot be seen or touched;

* The description – Chesterton again – of the Church as an institution that does not move with the world, but that moves the world;

* St Christopher; St Bernadette of Lourdes; St. Dismas, the Good Thief; Fr. Willie Doyle, SJ; Jesuits and Oratorians, Passionists and Marist Missionaries;

* My family;

* Taking Communion to Mozart's 'Ave Verum Corpus' sung by the boy choir at St. Paul's in Harvard Square, or kneeling at the altar rail in front of a statue of the Virgin at the old Holy Trinity German Church in the South End.

The list could go on, but there is a website that does the job far better, a blog by North Shore writer and publisher Webster Bull called Why I am a Catholic.

He describes the site thus: A friend, a fellow convert, asked me out of the blue one day, "So, Webster, why Catholicism?" I was at a loss. I couldn't say. So I started this blog. Each post is a partial answer.

The result is a remarkably eloquent work in progress, well worth a visit. (Via America.)

* * *

Above:

Jesuit Father Alfred Barrett, teacher-poet, reads aloud from a book of his poems to students on the lawn at Fordham University ~ From "Jesuits in America," photos by Margaret Bourke-White, Life Magazine, October 1953.

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