I first cared about being Catholic, not out of any profound love for the person of Christ, but out of a profound distaste for my other options. That Jesus came, died, rose, and established a Church under the authority of the Apostles united under Peter – I’m still learning it. That I’d sooner cut my own toes off than live life as, say, a self-proclaimed “freethinker” – that was an immediate judgment of taste, something akin to not wearing Crocs.
My Catholicism only bubbled up from this realm of sensibility to one of genuine commitment during high school, where, among other misadventures, I was asked to use CE and BCE instead of AD and BC as the approved acronym with which to divide history in half. The switch was explained as a secularisation of “Anno Domini” (In the Year of Our Lord) and “Before Christ” to “Common Era” and “Before the Common Era”, one which enabled us to refer to periods of history in continuity with the historians of the past – all without bringing in any “religious stuff”.
