The question I have raised with myself is: am I really a Catholic?  I was baptized, received my First Communion, and have been confirmed.  But that all happened before I reached high school.  14.  That's how old I was when I became  a "full member" of the Church.  If I could go back in time, I would ask my 14-year-old self to do some research into what I was getting into.  I feel my whole initiation process into the Church happened too early and too quickly.  Most of the kids I went to school with were in a similar situation.  I think that this is where one of the major problems with the Catholic faith stems from.

My grade school classmates were "required" to go through all of these holy rites of passage.  Sure, they told us what was going on, but none of us really knew.  I know I didn't.  Take the bread, right hand under left, pick it up with the right one and eat.  Don't chew it.  For me, these rites were more like a part of school rather than something to do with my faith.  And so when we graduated 8th grade, we were all new members of the Church. And this is where the problem lies.  No one really cared because no one really knew what they got into.

My mom made me go to church all throughout my childhood.  It became such a intrinsic part of my life that nowadays I feel guilty for missing mass.  I always wondered why I never saw any of my friends in church on Sundays.  I still don't.  No one goes.  There is a severe lack of church attendance in the Catholic faith, especially for people my age.  And I think that this lack of attendance is caused by the initiation process.  For a lot of kids growing up back home, being Catholic was kind of a given.  We all went to Catholic school, we all had to go to mass every now and then, we all had Easter and Christmas off.  That was all it was.  But that's  not what it is.  So when we all grew up and were not forced to go through these motions (like church), we didn't go through them any more.  Church is boring anyway.  The Catholic mass has been boring since I was little.  My first memories of mass are terrible, which I think all contributes to the attendance problem.

It's hard to get excited about your faith when you're sitting with a few old people in an empty church listening to an even older priest talk about how much of a sinner you are.  I want to want to go to church.  Since I've been in college, church has gotten a little better.  But it's got a long way to go.  I want to relate to the mass.  It's not that mass is unrelatable, it's just too hard.  Whether it's better public speaking from the priests, or introduction of new media, the mass needs something more.

I have the sense that the Catholic faith is declining.  Maybe not for others, but for me it is.  All around my home there are Catholic churches closing down and merging with other parishes due to lack of numbers.  I thought a third of the entire world was Catholic?  I can't see that being true.  I don't want it to decline.  I want it to flourish.  I want it to adapt, to change, and to grow.  I want people to be as excited about being Catholic as I sometimes am.

I thought I could get this all out in one post, but it seems that this thing is much too large for just one.  I'll think about it.