I can imagine what an ordeal it must have been. Most churches only require a profession of faith to join their fold, but those seeking confirmation in the Catholic church must submit themselves to a bureaucracy over a thousand years in the making.

I can attest to the fact that it takes a great deal of commitment to become a Catholic, although at least in your case you already knew the rituals and responses necessary for the Mass (after two years I still don’t have all of that down).

Peace to you, and best wishes.

Or should I say… pax vobiscum?

Like all my brothers and sisters, I was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in infancy and was raised in the Catholic faith. However, when it came time for me to take my Confirmation classes, I fell ill with a prolonged bout of asthma and missed so many classes that my pastor decided I would have to be confirmed the following year, after repeating the whole course.

Unfortunately, I formulated the notion in my silly adolescent brain that it would be embarrassing or humiliating to repeat the course with a younger group of kids. I imagined that I would be mocked and scorned as a flunk-out.

And so, when the time came the following year for me to enroll in the classes again, I lay low and kept quiet, hoping that everyone would forget I was supposed to sign up. My plan worked. Everyone did forget. I was spared the indignity of being confirmed with a younger group of kids. However, I had only succeeded in outfoxing myself. The result of my subterfuge was that I denied myself full initiation into the Roman Catholic community — an error which haunted me for decades.

I spent the next thirty-odd years drifting hither and thither on the winds of spiritual modernity, dabbling in everything from Buddhist meditation to Biblical fundamentalism (along with a goodly number of less wholesome pursuits in between).

Fleeing from God can be tiring. You can run, but you can’t hide. By 2003, I had grown weary of it.

Inspired partly by the story of Danny Thomas, I made a petition on July 5, 2003 to St. Jude — a saint known in Catholic lore as the “help of the hopeless”. Simultaneous with my petition, I made a pledge to St. Jude that I would finally receive the sacrament of Confirmation, and that, God-willing, I would remain faithful to the Church to the end of my life.

St. Jude granted my petition, I am happy to say. Now I am working on my end of the bargain.

I fulfilled a big part of my pledge when I received Confirmation this past May 27, on the Feast of Pentecost, after nearly four years of bureaucratic hurdles and other sorts of delays. The rest of my pledge will be the work of a lifetime. By its nature, it cannot be completed until the day I die.

P.S. The upshot of all this is that you ended up being confirmed before I was! Congratulations.

Both of your “Bad Catholic” books are sitting on my desk, ready for action. I intend to read both, from cover to cover. What an excellent Confirmation gift they made!

Many thanks to you and your lovely young lady for attending my long-overdue anointing.

It was great seeing your Confirmation, Richard. Congratulations again!

You might enjoy the discussion of Descartes in two chapters of my The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Wine, Whiskey and Song, which I know you have because I handed you a signed copy. Check out the entry on “Loreto,” which details Descartes’ errors, and on “Organic Wine,” which traces their implications.

Cheers,
John Zmirak

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