I converted to Catholicism in April of 2025, though I dislike calling myself a Catholic convert. The phrase suggests conservative politicians like J.D. Vance, who wield Catholicism to achieve harsh and immoral aims which both Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have condemned.
The church was also not new to me. I had been to Catholic mass many times in childhood at a couple of different churches. I took communion too. Nobody ever told me not to. Sometimes we went to the same church for years, but the religious habit never really stuck in my family.
My parents married in their friend’s backyard when I was four months old, and they did not consider baptizing me or my younger brother until I was 10 and he was 7. The attempt failed when the priest who my mother met with questioned her about having a secular marriage, and then asked that we attend catechism class for two years before being baptized. My mother left the meeting incensed and offended, and we stopped going to mass altogether.
Free from the influence of religion, I grew into a passionate teenage atheist. I now think of my former atheism as a byproduct of nihilism. An unfeeling, meaningless world must, logically, also be a godless one.
I can tell you the moment I started believing again—in the last quarter of my senior year at UCLA, I signed up for a class on witchcraft, which at the last moment was cancelled and replaced by a class about “Transnational Islam & Feminism.” I found myself surprisingly interested in studying religion, and a few weeks into the course, discussing the Muslim conception of god, who is considered genderless and inhuman, I realized I didn’t actually have a problem with god at all. I had a problem with the Big White Man In The Sky.
What do you see in your mind’s eye when you hear the word god? Do you write it as god, God, or g-d? Did you, like me, always imagine god as depicted in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam? An old white man with a long, white beard? An amalgamation of Santa Claus and Zeus? Some stern, powerful, and disapproving elderly man who is entirely unrelatable to a teenage girl living in Oakland, CA in the ‘00s & early ‘10s?
I began to understand god as a force, an entity, and a power greater than myself. I did not immediately return to Catholicism. After college, my roommate was a witch who attended the occasional Satanic mass, so I set intentions by candlelight and drew tarot cards.
Years later, feeling in need of spiritual guidance, I went to a regional park on a full moon with a friend, some candles, and a full bottle of red wine, and followed the instructions from a black book I’d purchased at a wiccan store to “initiate myself into witchcraft.” We were supposed to ask the spirit’s permission to be there. The spirits felt hostile. We were supposed to assert our connection to the land, but all I could think about was settler colonialism. We got scared in the dark and quickly returned to my car.
* * *
I had made previous attempts to connect with the spiritual which had also fallen flat. When I was still living in Los Angeles and selling shoes at a department store on La Brea Ave., I used one of my rare Sundays off to attend a Unitarian church service. I didn’t like it. The room was barren and cold. There were only a dozen people there and despite what I had heard about Unitarian mass, that they accepted everyone and didn’t even care if you believed in god, there was still an insistence on Jesus Christ, which at 22, I did not understand.
My co-worker who ran the men’s clothing department was also an evangelical Christian who attended the lightshow church that rented out the El Rey on Wilshire every Sunday. Sometimes I’d wander by on a Sunday afternoon, enroute to buy ibuprofen at Walgreens, and spy the large, black, collapsible, baptism tank out on the sidewalk. I’d half-joke during our slow shifts that “I needed god” and he’d invite me to come to church with him. He was 25, already married, and a believer in both Christ and the far-right conspiracy theory, PizzaGate. I never went to that lightshow church with him.
A few months later, now deep into an existential and mental health crisis that led me to quit my job, run out of money, and move back in with my parents, I found some comfort in John Milton’s Paradise Lost while freaking out about Climate Collapse after reading David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth. We were 6 months into Trump’s first term. I had a B.A. in Gender Studies and seemingly no prospects for meaningful work. The mechanisms of adulthood confused and overwhelmed me. I was new to resumes and interviews and didn’t know where to look for jobs and who might want to hire a recent graduate with a humanities degree. I knew my current life made me miserable, but not yet how to change it.
Over two years, I dug myself out of that hole. I didn’t have much time for god while depression’s grip loosened. But I found some good substitutes, which fed me for a while—therapy, a low dose of Sertraline, poetry, and even teaching.
* * *
I joke that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop finally drove me to Catholicism. And it did. Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day during my first year. Trudging through the PedMall in my big pink coat, past the Trump 2024 sign, onto the English Philosophy Building to teach midwestern freshmen about rhetorical devices, I saw a sign for “Ashes to Go” and felt my heart sing. I wanted those ashes. I needed those ashes.
While enrolled in my MFA program, I’d also started taking Italian language classes and recently learned that Dante wrote The Divine Comedy while in exile from Florence, separated from his wife, children, and every friend he’d ever known. Iowa, especially in the winter, felt like a similar exile. Making friends had been difficult. I cried in the bathroom of Dey House after my first poetry workshop. And now, me and my thin Californian blood were enduring our first true winter, carless, in a college town of 75,000 with few distractions.
I did not go to church the next Sunday. But, that summer, I overheard some friends discussing church and asked if I could join. That church was in a strip mall, and the pastor showed a clip from Star Trek during the service. I didn’t go back, partially because I couldn’t walk there and partially because it didn’t seem like the right fit. Whatever latent memories I had of crucifixes and thuribles couldn’t find comfort in a church with a house band whose musicians played drums and electric guitars.
My religiosity was latent, and Iowa was both a place where it was more socially acceptable to be religious, and the first time in my life that I was almost totally cut off from the secular world of coastal California that I was born into.
Still, why I chose to spend three months every Sunday morning in the basement of the Newman Catholic Center in Iowa City, learning about the bible and the catechism, eventually leading to my baptism on Easter, has been prodded. Once, after poetry workshop, surrounded by 10 or so other poets, a 23-year-old colleague asked WHY WHY WHY? and I think I said what I usually say: “It helps me, I find comfort in it.”
I’ve also been asked why I didn’t convert to Islam or Judaism, and if I have to be a Christian, why choose the problematic CATHOLIC church?
I feel a sense of belonging in Catholicism that I don’t feel when I go to other churches or religious services––some beauty and wonder I couldn’t extract from that Unitarian service or that strip mall church. And yet, I don’t have much desire to socialize with other Catholics, and most of my friends aren’t religious at all. I sing in the choir at 10am mass every Sunday, and attend practice on Tuesday nights, but I’m not looking for belonging with churchgoers. I feel this belonging with my ancestors, and with God.
Most of my ancestors were practicing Catholics, because they were Southern Italians, where Catholicism, even now, is inextricable from the culture itself. Ferragosto, a day where everything in Southern Italy is closed, is also the celebration of Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. I’m also half German, and my mom is pretty sure that both her fraternal grandparents were German Catholics.
“I take great comfort” is saying the same words they said (albeit through translation), in crossing myself with holy water, like they did, in knowing that I’m enacting a ritual that goes back centuries.
* * *
I invited two secular poets from my MFA program to my baptism at the Easter vigil mass. To my surprise, they both showed up to witness my full immersion into the baptismal font. After my soul was cleansed of all sin, I emerged in a white polyester gown, which was not unlike a graduation robe, holding my lit baptismal candle. Over the next hour, I also received my first Holy Communion and Confirmation rites. News of my baptism spread to my other classmates, and even my professors.
The next day, my grocery checker, who was also my classmate and a student in the Non-Fiction MFA program, asked me about my baptism while ringing up my items. I was taken aback, almost mortified. I’d had a crush on this oblivious man for almost a year and even tried to ask him out in a text which he’d never replied to. And now, he was asking me about my relationship to God. I can’t remember our conversation in full, but at the end, he said, “The secular world still has a lot to figure out.”
I’m not suggesting you also convert to Catholicism. But there too might be something in religious practice that you connect to, that might help calm or heal a part of yourself that needs tending.
Every Sunday I sing dona nobis pacem with my choir. I attended a May Day protest in Iowa City where an undocumented woman told the crowd that when Highway Patrol detained her and her co-workers on the side of the road, it was a group of Catholic nuns from Davenport, Iowa who met and extricated them from police custody. I chose Joan of Arc as my confirmation saint because even though the Archangel Michael didn’t speak to me in a field in Northern France when I was 13 years old and ask me to fight a holy war against England, I can relate to feeling like the obstacles in front of me are insurmountable. That I am very likely to fail. And then finding the courage to move forward despite all.
