Smoky Mountains Sunrise
Showing posts with label Catholicism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catholicism. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Contours of the Catholic Mind

By Julia Smucker

One year ago, following about six years of will-I-won’t-I agonizing, I finally made it all the way into the Catholic Church. In my ongoing immersion into the Catholic world before and since (call it mystagogy, call it acculturation), I have observed a number of interesting patterns I might characterize as quintessentially Catholic ways of thinking. Of course, this is emphatically not to say that all Catholics think alike – we’re as far spread all over the map as anybody, to be sure. And I am more and more convinced that there is no such thing as a typical Catholic. And yet, paradoxically, there are certain recognizable tendencies I’ve picked up in this oddly fascinating process of developing a Catholic mind, several of which, I find, seem to suit me surprisingly well. Here are a few of those tendencies as observed after a year of being Catholic.