We can’t help ourselves: What does it mean to be Catholic?

This is the third post in a conversation between me and Eve Tushnet. You can read the first post about what we like about Catholicism here, and the second post about what we don’t love here.

Many of you may know Eve Tushnet from her blog here on Patheos, where she writes about being gay, celibate, and Catholic (along with World Figure Skating Championship costumes and other events of note). Eve grew up “somewhere between agnostic and Jewish” and

converted to Catholicism when she was a sophomore in college.

I did the inverse: I was raised firmly Catholic and started drifting away from “the Church” in college, when I just couldn’t stomach my church’s position on women priests and gay marriage, among other things, and eventually ended up at a social-justice-oriented spiritual community.

I thought it would be fun to talk about why, despite our seemingly large hurdles (background, political beliefs, sexuality), we still really like the Catholic Church. (Even though my new church is Methodist, I still say that I was “raised Catholic.”)

Today, we’re talking about what makes a Catholic a Catholic.

Alicia: What do you think it means to be Catholic? Your Catholicism seems much more intellectual than mine ever was, and I considered myself a fairly committed Catholic. Does Catholicism require us to understand some/most of it? Or is it enough to go through the sacraments and say that you believe in the Nicene Creed (even if you don’t think about it all that hard)?

Eve: I don’t really think I have much of a definition of what it means to be a Catholic, other than “baptized in the Catholic Church.” The definition from Monty Python’s “Every Sperm Is Sacred” has a lot of wisdom in it (as does that sketch in general, lol):

You don’t have to be a six-footer,

You don’t have to have a big brain.

You don’t have to have any clothes on;

You’re a Catholic the moment Dad came.

The image of the “bad Catholic” really resonates with me: someone who acknowledges that she needs to be in the Church even though she

doesn’t accept it all or can’t live it out. There’s a powerful witness in that person’s perseverance, her willingness to wrestle angels from within the Church. We hear about people who went decades without receiving Communion, because their beliefs or their life situations were not in harmony with the Catholic way of life. That’s tragic on one level, and intensely painful for the people involved. But their decades of kneeling in prayer while everyone else goes up to receive are also decades of witness and humility. (I wrote a bit more about that here.)

Alicia: I think I agree with you that whoever is born Catholic or converts to Catholicism is Catholic. Am I interpreting Monty Python correctly there, or is the song telling us that everyone is Catholic? (edit: the song is not saying that.) I don’t believe everyone is Catholic. But I do feel that no matter how long I stay in my current church, even if it’s for the rest of my life, I’ll always feel more comfortable identifying as Catholic. Maybe it’s part of the secret-club thing, but I feel like Catholicism is a part of my identity. Catholicism makes sense to me and I know that it doesn’t make sense to everyone.

I also think that obedience to the church or God even when you’re feeling excluded or angry, sad, or unhappy with the church is admirable, regardless of denomination. I think everyone has doubts or parts of their faith that they don’t understand, or standards that they don’t live

up to. My progressive church would say “No way!” but I think we would say that you have to care about certain things to be a part of our church, and to some degree, you have to act on them. You have to at least want to be part of the solution to say, institutionalized racism. But–both in my church and the Catholic church–there’s an acknowledgment that we all fail constantly and deserve to be welcomed back. We all deserve mercy, forgiveness, and understanding, from ourselves and from others.

Obviously, I think there’s a point where you can leave if you’re unhappy enough–I did–but I think it’s worthwhile to fight it out for a bit, to make sure that it’s really not you, it’s them.

This is getting off base…I guess I’m saying that no, you don’t have to know every single piece of Catholic catechism to be a Catholic (I mean, the book is inches thick, for Pete’s sake). You don’t have to totally understand it to be a part of it. You don’t even have to like it, as I think we have shown. You just have to want the label.

Many thanks to Eve. If you missed the first two posts in this three-part series, you can check them out here and here.