Patheos Prompt: Why I’m Catholic?

Patheos wants to know why I’m Catholic, in 200 words.

The most honest answer is this:

I don’t know—who really knows why they are who they think they are?

I don’t have evidence or arguments, just a hodgepodge of experiences and feelings and thoughts and circumstances and guesses and doubts and fears and beautiful things and love and my family and pain and suffering and stories and fortune and hope.

The better, shorter, and even less satisfying one-word answer:

Grace.

(You should read Unamuno’s “My Religion” if you’re into this stuff; I’d quote him here if I wasn’t writing with word rations.)

And why assume that I am Catholic?

“Why I’m Catholic” sounds too much like “Why I’m the universe.”

There’s no such thing as being Catholic in an individual unit of one.

Catholicism is a we thing.

Trinity, Church, communion.

For Augustine, becoming Catholic was a struggle where even the self becomes a community.

“My inner self was a house divided against itself.”

I am not Catholic in some static, fixed sense of being.

I cannot be Catholic, I can only become Catholic.

Conversion.

New question.

Why are we becoming Catholic?

It’s a mystery, that’s why.