I was born in 1943, at a time when being Catholic in America meant one thing when it came to religious education: the Baltimore Catechism. We didn’t question it. We memorized it. The nuns would call on us in class, and we were expected to rattle off answers without hesitation.
“Who made you?”
“God made me.”
“What is the purpose of life?”
“To know, love, and serve God in this world, and be happy with Him forever in the next.”
There was a certain security in those questions and answers. They were crisp, clear, and unbending. The Church, at least as it was presented to us, spoke with certainty, and we—children of immigrants, grandchildren of the faithful—were expected to carry it forward. In those days, Catholicism was a system of rules and obligations, and the Baltimore Catechism was its handbook.
But times changed. Vatican II swept through the 1960s like a strong wind, unsettling some and liberating others. By the time the Catechism of the Catholic Church was published in 1992, I was no longer the wide-eyed schoolboy repeating answers in a classroom. I was an adult—seasoned by life, shaped by questions, and not always satisfied with the neat lines of my childhood faith.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church was different from the Baltimore Catechism. It didn’t read like a child’s Q&A drill. Instead, it unfolded like a story—rooted in Scripture, enriched by the Church Fathers, attentive to the complexities of modern life. It spoke of dignity, conscience, and even social justice. It was still Catholicism, but it had grown up, and perhaps I had too.
As I matured, so did my hunger for Spirit. I discovered that doctrine, whether crisp and simple or vast and nuanced, could only carry me so far. What I longed for was not merely answers, but an inner peace that transcended the questions themselves. That longing carried me beyond the walls of catechisms and councils, and eventually led me to A Course in Miracles.
When I first opened its pages, I recognized something startlingly familiar, yet profoundly new. Here was not a book of rules or even a manual of belief, but a path of practice. It spoke of forgiveness not as penance but as liberation. It reminded me that guilt was never God’s will, that love is the only reality, and that peace is my natural inheritance. The words, “I am not a body. I am free. For I am still as God created me” (W-pI.201.1), struck me with a clarity that no catechism ever had.
Where the Baltimore Catechism asked me to memorize, the Course invited me to release. Where the Church of my youth insisted on sacrifice, ACIM whispered: “God does not forgive because He has never condemned” (W-pI.46.1). Forgiveness was no longer about sin and punishment, but about seeing rightly—about letting go of illusions and recognizing the love that had been there all along.
Now, as an old man, I find myself living through yet another turning point. In 2025, the cardinals elected Pope Leo XIV—the first American-born pope. A son of Chicago, of all places. He is an Augustinian, a man shaped by fraternity and a life of service far from the gilded halls of Rome. And already, his papacy carries a different tone. He shares apartments with fellow friars. He welcomes dialogue with reform-minded Catholics, even groups once kept at arm’s length. He speaks calmly, without bombast, and sets his sights on peace, ecology, and inclusion.
As I watch this unfold, I realize my Catholic story mirrors the Church’s movement over the last century. The faith of my childhood was one of rules. The faith I rediscovered in the 1990s was one of story. And the faith I live now, in the quiet companionship of A Course in Miracles, is one of Spirit—an inner recognition that God was never outside me, but always within.
I am no longer the memorizing boy of 1943, nor the searching adult of the post-Vatican II years. I am a witness to a Church that continues to change—not abandoning its roots, but discovering new ways to live them. And my own path has changed alongside it, leading me to a practice that points me beyond doctrines and institutions to the eternal truth within.
After all these years, I have come to see that faith is not about clinging to the rental car of any one catechism, but about the journey itself. The answers change shape, the teaching adapts, the popes come and go—but the underlying call remains the same: to love, to forgive, to awaken. Or as the Course gently reminds me, “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God” (T-In.2:2–4).
In that call, I have finally found my most comfortable home.
robert@dinojamesbooks.com