Because of beauty.
There's such awesome beauty in the Catholic Church down through the ages.
There's story. Imagination. And, more.
There are marks of the Church: One, holy catholic and apostolic.
Perhaps, also, an added mark of changing, reforming, growing as a living organism must, or. . .
It dies.
Why am I a Catolic?
The short answer is that I was born a Catholic, and baptized soon after my twin sister and I emerged from my mom's tabernacle.
Raised Catholic.
Educated at Saint Thomas the Apostle Schools on Detroit's east side. Catholic Sisters of Saint Joseph of the Third Order of Saint Francis of Garfield Heights, Ohio, formed me with my mom and dad, godparents, and a warm caring community.
Small faith groups were part of the reason for being Catholic. . .still.
Speak up sessions in Synod '69 after the ecumenical Second Vatican Council that marks one hundred years now since its start in 1962 at the Vatican.
Stained glass windows of living saints equipped with the armour of God to motivate and inspire.
Incense.
It would rise to the heavens at daily Mass I attended as a youngster in grade school. It enshrined the importance of routine and regularity in a spiritual life.
Great women and men shaped this infantile soul through more than six decades.
They are what used to be called the church militant before they become the communion of saints.
Catholics like being Catholic.
That's what the research shows.
And, that included me.
A pope once said that Catholics are like one's relationship with one's other: You love her or hate her.
That's me.
Multiple feelings at the same time, in fact, I love and I hate her at the same time for the humanity she is comprised of by pilgrim people, so to speak.
Not being Catholic seems unthinkable for me.
It's in my DNA, in fact, and, in my blood and bones and being.
The Eucharist, the Word and the Madonna are reasons I'm Catholic also.
We're a rich community of faith that has it all, it seems. Fullness in many forms and ways, if not in story and in imagination we're deplete of at times when it comes to a shortage of personnel, for example to lead this great Catholic Church.
Young adults, youthful marriages, and more, seem to enjoy only (anti)-social media, tweeting, Facebook, and so forth, yet there are sprinklings of evergreen hope in mushrooming prayer groups among teens and others popping up everywhere it seem when I ask. Such social media is a community when committed believers join in "chat rooms" to share why they're Catholic, and the cry for incarnating Catholic social teaching of the great Scriptures and tradition.
Catholics were here with the early "way" of Jesus before the name Catholic was assumed to identify us. We go way back, first in fact with our elder Jewish sisters and brothers. After all, Jesus was a Jew, and, we organized his truths to tell the world with joy in fullness of faith.
Beauty.
Truth.
And, the Catholic way of Jesus.
I'll drink of the precious cup of blood to that to the end!
And, I'll take in, and be, and make of my hands, a throne for the Body of Christ, who I am, to recall the morphed Saint Augustine of Hippo, in present day Africa.
To Life!
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