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I have long respected OMalleys work and find his clear, concise, and direct manner truly beneficial for pastoral leaders and
those we serve. Choosing to Be Catholic is perfect for so many
who seek deeper understanding of our faith.
Leisa Anslinger
Founder and Director
CatholicLifeAndFaith.net
If you are a spiritual seeker, this book is for you. An experienced teacher and writer, OMalley deftly guides the reader on
a journey that tackles key issues of modern belief, such as the
nature of the soul, the existence of God, and the value of religion. Because it is a journey that challenges us to rethink our
deepest values, it is one well worth taking.
Neil A. Parent
Author of A Concise Guide to Adult Faith Formation
Contents
Preface............................................................................................vii
Introduction.................................................................................... x
1. Uncertainty: The Meaning of Faith........................................1
2. The First Conversion: Humanity......................................... 13
3. Conscience..............................................................................25
4. A World without Enchantment: Atheism.......................... 41
5. The Case for God...................................................................54
6. The Other Faces of God: World Religions...................... 66
7. Your Basic Christian................................................................85
8. Why Be Catholic?.................................................................. 98
9. Scripture from Scratch........................................................ 114
10. The Hebrew Scriptures......................................................129
11. The Gospel Becomes the Gospels................................. 141
12. The Church..........................................................................156
13. The Sacraments................................................................... 175
14. The Days of the Lord........................................................ 205
15. Praying.................................................................................. 224
For
Preface
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but because they simply are not being spiritually fed. Any wise
person should be thinking, Dont invest in that church! So
when I recommend Choosing to be Catholic to those who have as
yet had no real commitment to religion or to those who have
stopped short in their commitment wondering whether it is
worth continuing, I am asking a lot! I am asking people to invest their very soulsthe essence of what each of them is, their
proximate and ultimate values, the motivation of their career
paths, their marriages, and the moral and spiritual formation
of their very children in a Church that often seems to be helplessly falling apart.
However, there is one critical problem with the investment
metaphor. It is completely unjustified, too easy-to-hand, and
not just limping like all analogies, but crippled. In a word its
wrong. Acceptance of and allegiance to a manifestly imperfect
Church is no more irrational than acceptance of and allegiance
to a manifestly imperfect nation.
I find a host of unpleasanteven utterly repugnant
choices made by those who have directed the United States of
America in my eighty years as a citizen. Richard Nixon was
forced to resign for suborning perjury and Bill Clinton was
impeached for having sex with an intern in the Oval Office.
Factor in the heinous tragedies of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Consider the lack of fiscal control and unchecked greed
of money managers that led the whole world to near financial
collapse. Then add lawmakers who are held willing hostage
to lobbyistsdigging in their heels and insisting on curtailing
services to the inculpably poor while refusing to fix laws that
continue to give unfair advantage to the rich. The unborn, the
elderly, and so many of our children and adults in real need remain unprotected by our laws and by our courts. But although
I despise what these people have done to our country, I have
no intention of packing my bags and winging off to Tierra del
Fuego.
Preface
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Introduction
Introduction
xi
part: just saying hello. The process from that moment to the
weddingand far beyond thatis dramatic only in rare moments, and not all of them pleasant. Like falling in love and
only gradually moving to greater and deeper commitment,
conversion is a process with its ups and downs.
Saint Paul, on his way to Jericho to root out Christian heretics, was apparently struck down and overwhelmed by an experience of the risen Jesus. Such conversions are rare indeed.
By far, the majority of conversions are far slower and much
less dramatic. Im a cradle Catholic, but my experience of the
conversion that was the call of my vocation, was surely not
that stunningand by no means that clear and certain. Of all
the words in the Gospel, what I find most difficult to accept
is that when Jesus stopped by the future apostles boats and
said, Come, follow me, they immediately left their nets and
followed him. Unless they had considerable previous dealings
with Jesus (and the gospels at least dont say they did), that is
really hard to accept. I mean, there were these hard-handed,
practical men, in the middle of a workday, and a stranger just
arrives and tells them to come along, and they do? Just like
that? No questions like who is this guy? What about my family? Where are we going? Or what we will eat? Not even why?
Not me. When I felt the first urges of a vocation, I did exactly
what the prophet Jonah did when Yahweh came and told him
to go and convert Nineveh: I ran the other way. I knew what
that call was asking me to give up, and I avoided it in every
way I knew how for two years. The poet Francis Thompson was
also Catholic from infancy butswamped among the dregs of
humanity and self-hatredhe shuddered when he felt the first
whispering of the call back to God.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
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Introduction
xiii
hundred plays and musicals (so far), and from fifty years of
teaching theology to skeptical high-school seniors, college
freshmen, and adults. I never presume they listened to what
they were taught before or thought it valuable enough to remember, much less that they accepted it and internalized it. So
at every gradual step of the way in this text, I hope youll face
the questions as I haveskeptically. Now wait just a minute,
how can he say that? After all, this process is asking you to
reassess the basic values of your life.
In one Peanuts strip, Charlie Brown says to Snoopy whos
typing on top of his doghouse, I hear youre writing a book
on theology. I hope you have a good title. And as Charlie
walks away, Snoopy says, I have the perfect title. Has It Ever
Occurred to You that You Might Be Wrong? Unless youve honestly examined ideas that challenge your own ideas, you can
never be confident in them. If there are five ways of getting a
job done, and you know only one way, you dont take that way
freelybecause its the only one you know. At the end of this
process, I would hope we will no longer be talking about the
faith, but about your faith.
So this text starts a long way before the place most texts
for Christian initiation or returning begin: with apologetics,
not apology in the sense of Im sorry, but in the sense of
a defense of the very basics upon which any relationship with
God (religion) founds itself. Presuming nothing but good will
and mutual respect between student and teacher, I would like
to begin with terms for realities most texts presume we understand: faith, soul, pride, conscienceas if we all knew what
we meant, even the teachers. Lets have at least tentatively satisfying understandings of what these fundamental realities are
and what responses they call for, before we start barging into
problems like the validity of Scripture and the nature of the
sacraments.
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Introduction
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1
Uncertainty: The Meaning of Faith
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that the tears are not a threat but a kind of cement to the bond
of friendship.
Marriage is also an act of faith. In fact, marriage is not just
the dramatic commitment at the altar but also an uncountable
series of acts of faith. It begins from the very first date, when he
stares at the suddenly intimidating phone, wiping his palms
on his pants, trying to get up the courage to call or text. He
thinks to himself, Oh, God, she wont even remember who
I am! When he reaches her, she paces and thinks to herself,
Hes nice, but his friends are weird. The acts of faithand
the related risksmultiply in number and escalate in intensity
as the two date, get serious, announce their engagement, and
on their wedding day vow to stay together forever. Even then
they dont know its going to work out; theyre betting it will.
That is faith.
And thats by no means the last of it. After the (more-or-less)
blissful honeymoon period, when reality stops by in the form
of bills, household chores, ingrained habits at cross purposes,
career conflicts, and all the other frictions that naturally arise
when two once-autonomous individuals try to form a partnership, spouses have to face the real act of faith. Now they
need to keep loving one another without the constant supportive help of thumping hearts, lusty urges, and the love potion that once made her seem like Cinderella and him Prince
Charming. Thats when romance can turn into love, which is
considerably less dramatic than being in love. Married love
becomes stirring-the-pasta-sauce love and letting-go-of-thegrudge love. In a very true sense, this maturing love with all
its many acts of self-emptying is a more profound expression
of genuine faith than was expressed on the wedding day.
Later comes the titanic act of faith required when having
a child. Husband and wife commit themselves to raising another fragile human being for the next twenty-plus years and
to raising at least a quarter of a million dollars to support that
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child. All this they dosight unseen and without any chance
of an exchange! Day after day and week after week, there are
acts of faith: investments, job changes, and school choicesad
infinitum. On the couples thirtieth anniversary, they are a lot
more married than they were on their wedding day because of
all those acts of faithtrusting one another through thick and
thin, titanic and trivial. Faith grows incrementally as each new
act of faith is easier because of all the previous acts of faith that
proved to be worth the risk.
At least for me, this gives a more solid basis for understanding faith than the usual dictionary definition: belief that is
not based on proof. If you had proof, what need would there
be for belief? Seeing isnt believing; seeing is knowing. Its also
better than Saint Pauls definition of faith as the realization
of what is hoped for (Hebrews 11:1). In my waning years, I
think I have better insight into the difference between faith
and hope than I did when I was younger. Hope is the gut
urge to cling on even though all the evidence seems to undercut
that option; faith is the gut urge to cling on even though the
evidence for it is persuasive but not compelling.
A lifetime of belief has convinced me that real, genuine,
and authentic faith still doubts. It must doubt. Otherwise its
not faith but witless conformity. When I ask people what faith
means, almost without exception they say, a blind leap in the
dark. Just think for a minute what a blind leap in the dark
really means. Putting your lifes savings on a single lottery
ticket is a blind leap. Buying land in Mexico sight unseen is
a blind leap. Hi, weve just met; lets get married is a blind
leap. And these are preposterous choices! If thats what most
people think faith isholding hands and jumping off a cliff
then its not surprising that having faith is so difficult.
Whats more, that blind leap business flies directly in the
face of what we know from our own personal experience about
those other acts of faithfriendship and marriage. Those acts
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part). Then at least for a while you have to give yourself to the
decision to find if it is, in fact, right.
In the case of friendship, one takes a greater risk at each
stage of the relationship, often trusting the other before one is
really certain the other is up to it. The same is true of marriage
and the scientist in her lab: each act of trust fulfilled provides
an even firmer basis from which to take the next leap. There is
a risk, all right, just as there was for diver Greg Louganis when
in 1988 at the Seoul Olympics he hit his head on the concrete
high platform in the preliminaries. After he was patched up,
he climbed the ladder and dove again with a concussion. It
was a leap, all right, but it wasnt a blind leap. It was based on
the advice of his coaches, the approval of his doctor, and the
track record of those countless thousands of other successful
dives. It was an act of faith: a calculated risk.
Most of us would like things clear: its either this or its that.
But reality fails to conform to our desires (one more proof that
we are not God). For example, philosophers have always neatly
defined humans as rational animals. But this is far too simplistic, too reductionist, leaving out evidence that is not only
crucial but that definitively separates us from other animals.
There are distinctively human activities that simply cannot be
reduced to rational or to animal, to body or brain, or to a
combination of the two. Take for example displaying unselfish
sacrifice even for people we dislike; acting with honor when
we could easily get away with something; needing purpose
and meaning; and using understanding, wisdom, or good humor in the middle of terror. All these constitutively human activities, which no other animal has, defy reduction to body or
brain. They are solid evidence of a third human power: the
soul. And thats where faith happens.
The principle of complementarity requires a greater tolerance for ambiguity than many people are able to muster. They
want clear simplicities. The action in Goldings classic novel
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11
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2
The First Conversion: Humanity
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people on a subway, slack-jawed, shrouded in blank indifference, and merely coping. All of those older people were once
exactly like those babies. What got lost?
A lot of things: vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder, to name
a few. It may sound silly at first, but I think the death of the
soulwhat makes us humanbegins around second grade.
After the innocent self-absorption of infancy, when parents catered to a childs every need, the world continued to be fascinating. A three-year-old is startled into wonderment every five
minutes even by such things as an empty box, the swaybacked
nag in a fairy tale, or raindrops trickling down a windowpane.
Preschool and kindergarten are intriguing, too, exciting. So is
first grade: Look, Daddy! I wrote my name!
But after that, weve got them. Learning becomes a serious,
efficient business, pointing toward those SATsand beyond to
the dog-eat-dog, its-a-jungle-out-there, rat-race world. Dont
ask questions or make waves. You get this material. Dont ask
why. Its required. The kids who still retain their curiosity, still
have hunches, smell rats, and ask why, become colossal headaches because they get in the way of the syllabus. Education
real learning, being curious, following the truth wherever it
leads, reasoning on your ownyields to schooling, whose sole
purpose is to get you into a good college so you can get a good
job. Most of the time, this is the way the system works. But at
least by seventh grade, youve learned how to beat the system:
Cliffs Notes, the Internet, and faked outlines. Thats life: beating the system, doing the minimum, and getting by. You tread
water and tread water and tread water. Then you die. But is
that really all there is?
The sole purpose of education ought to be mastering the
skills to answer the only truly important questions: What are
people for? What will help me live a truly fulfilled life? What
does success really mean? I have only one time around; how
do I get the most from it?