The exact moment I decided to become a Catholic...

I don't scribble a lot of personal stuff here (except for opinions, of course ;-) — but this is the day before Holy Week, and that's a big deal for those of us who have been plodding patiently through Lent and several preceding weeks towards Easter Vigil a week from today, and our initiation into full communion with the Catholic Church. (So easy to use the jargon, these days!)

I'm in RCIA, the Rite of Catholic Initiation for Adults. The reasons I'm in RCIA are many, mostly happy, but if you're interested in what spark struck my now-Catholic soul to bring all this about, that goes back a few years.

Face it, most of what we all know about real life we didn't learn in school, but on school yards. This was my particular first knock of dissonance, and it passes for a kid's jape:

Q. What's the difference between Protestant puppies and Catholic puppies?
A. Protestant puppies have their eyes open.

Fr. Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to some of the past gas and heavy atmospheres I grew up inside.