Why I remain a Catholic<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Yeah, everyone at Patheos Catholic -- or many of us, anyway -- are writing on this topic. but I'm afraid that I don't have an inspirational story to tell\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/06\/why-i-remain-a-catholic.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why I remain a Catholic\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yeah, everyone at Patheos Catholic -- or many of us, anyway -- are writing on this topic. but I'm afraid that I don't have an inspirational story to tell\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/06\/why-i-remain-a-catholic.html\" \/>\n<meta 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{"id":2107,"date":"2015-06-03T21:40:48","date_gmt":"2015-06-04T03:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=2107"},"modified":"2015-06-03T21:40:48","modified_gmt":"2015-06-04T03:40:48","slug":"why-i-remain-a-catholic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/06\/why-i-remain-a-catholic.html","title":{"rendered":"Why I remain a Catholic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Yeah, everyone at Patheos Catholic \u2014 or many of us, anyway \u2014 are writing on this topic.<\/p>\n

but I\u2019m afraid that I don\u2019t have an inspirational story to tell you.<\/p>\n

Sure, I could tell you the story of how I came to be Catholic in the first place. \u00a0But that\u2019s not the topic. \u00a0The question is more on of: \u00a0at whatever crisis of faith you\u2019ve experienced, be it sexual abuse scandals or indifference of those around you, or whatever else it might be; \u00a0why did you stay?<\/p>\n

Now, I can\u2019t really point to a deep crisis of faith, so much as the week-to-week challenges of small children on Sundays, especially in Germany \u2014 including a Sunday when my kids were particularly noisy and, afterwards, I got scolded by an old lady in Germany, to whom I dearly wanted to say: \u00a0\u201csorry, but the fact that you don\u2019t welcome children at church is a large part of why American families still go to church and German families don\u2019t\u201d and, well, I stumbled through something but my German wasn\u2019t great at the time, so I wasn\u2019t particularly persuasive. \u00a0(Other Sundays, we went to the English-speaking church, which was quite kid-friendly, and we eventually found that rare bird of a kid-friendly German church<\/a> \u2014 they\u2019ve since then merged with the neighboring church and have abandoned the weekly \u201cfamily mass\u201d as a result.)<\/p>\n

But the reason why I didn\u2019t give up on churchgoing during those years with small children is simple: \u00a0at Easter Vigil, back in 1994, I made a commitment.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also the reality that a consequence of the way my mind works, is that in the back of my mind is the awareness that Christianity isn\u2019t particularly logical and dosen\u2019t necessarily always make sense. \u00a0But still: \u00a0commitment.<\/p>\n

Yeah, I know that seems kind of dorky or maybe even a little show-off-y. \u00a0(\u201cUnlike the rest of you who aren\u2019t true to your word, I am.\u201d)<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s what it is.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"