I Like Being Catholic

Pundits, actors, and ordinary folks reflect on why the Catholic Church is special to them.

BY: Michael Leach and Therese Borchard, editors

Reprinted from "I Like Being Catholic" with permission of Random House.

What I like about the Catholics is that they have this sort of mussed-up human way. You go to church, there are people of all different colors and ages, and babies squalling. You're taking a stand with these people. You're saying: "Here I am. One of the people who love God."
--Annie Dillard, author

As a child, I was obsessive about religion. I wanted to get leprosy and be miraculously cured. I used to sleep with a little plastic cross. One morning I woke up with an imprint on my chest, and I knew I had the stigmata. I ran to my mother and said, "Mom I've got it--the stigmata!" She said, "You fool--you've slept on your crucifix."
--Mary Gordon, author

I derive my strength from Mass.
--Vince Lombardi

I really don't discuss religion or my beliefs. But when Stanley [Kubrick] died, I had an extraordinary night. I actually went alone to St. Patrick's Cathedral and spent an hour and a half in the church. It was candlelit, the wind was whipping around that night, and I left at nine, when they close the doors. I thought as I came onto the street: Well, I suppose once a Catholic, always a Catholic. It was very humbling. I received such solace.
--Nicole Kidman, actress

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
--Flannery O'Connor, novelist

The church is unique in that it is governed by a vision that has not changed in two thousand years. It tells us, in just about as many words, that we are not accidental biological accretions, we are creatures of a divine plan; that the God who made us undertook to demonstrate his devotion to us as individual human beings by submitting to the pain and humiliation of the cross. Nothing in that vision has ever changed, nothing at all, and this is for all Christians a mind-shaking, for some a mind-altering certitude, with which Christians live in our earnest if pitiable efforts to clear the way for a love that cannot be required.
--William F. Buckley Jr., author

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