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This morning, two Boy Scouts from my troop were awarded their Ad Altare Dei medals. The phrase is from Latin and means “To the Altar of God.” The medal is awarded to Boy Scouts of the Roman Catholic faith who complete a rigorous 6-8 month course of religious study. Despite the fact that Boy Scouting lists “duty to God” as one of its guiding principles, fewer than 4% of all Scouts earn their religious medal. So I felt it was important for me, their Scoutmaster, to be on hand to congratulate them.

These medals are usually presented in a ceremony before the Scout’s congregation. This being a Catholic medal, it followed that the ceremony would take place in a Catholic church. This presented a bit of a problem for me, an ex-Catholic.

To say that I am “ex-Catholic” is like saying that Pete Rose is an ex-baseball player. 20 years ago, I left the mother church and never looked back (having remembered the story of Lot’s wife). Today, I am a very happy and productive member of a decidedly non-Catholic church. Nonetheless, this morning was greeted by the sight of me stepping into a Catholic church for the first time in many a year. Much to my surprise, I didn’t burst into flame in the foyer.

Perhaps I should go back and explain a few things.

I was raised in a devout Roman Catholic household by two loving and committed parents. However, this wasn’t your average American Catholic home. My mother was raised on the island of Guam, which spent most of its written history as a possession of the Spanish Empire. As a result, my mother was a “Spanish Catholic,” despite the fact that she spoke not a speck of Spanish, nor did she have a thing about cooking with olive oil.

Spanish Catholics can be the most devout of the devout. For instance, take the “sign of the cross.” Most American Catholics practice this with a simple touching of forehead, heart, and shoulders, kind of like a first-base coach giving directions to the man-at-bat. Not so with Spanish Catholics, who hold their thumb and forefinger in the shape of a miniature cross and use it to cross themselves (sometimes two or three times). Then, they kiss it to show their devotion to the cross. This illustrates the over-the-top goodness of being a Spanish Catholic - if American Catholics are a steak dinner, then Spanish Catholics are the garnish, the seasoned salt, and the overtipped bottle of A-1 Steak Sauce.

My parents even spent a good chunk of their change to send me (and my brother and two sisters) to private Catholic school. My “three R’s” of readin’, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic were supplemented by two other R’s — rites and reconciliation. I also learned a healthy respect for nuns, especially the short ones (it makes them meaner).

Unfortunately for my parents, my parochial high school education spelled the beginning of the end of my Catholic career. Oh, I was a good Catholic kid: I knew all the proper responses to the Vatican II mass; I was an altar boy; I underwent the Sacrament of Confirmation; I could toss out a “Hail Mary” faster than most kids could recite their name and address. However, Catholic high school exposed me to the meaty underpinnings of the faith. My young mind began to explore things that most Catholics know only in passing — church history, doctrine, councils, bulls, papal infallability, and 101 different ways to sing “Alleluia.”

The more I studied, the more I realized that I was in the wrong crowd.

This realization didn’t come to me all at once. After all, I had been raised in this faith. I considered as much a part of me as my legbones, and equally as important to my stance and bearing. But something didn’t feel quite right. I would sit there, dutifully filling out my essay question about papal infallibility (the pope is always right), and a little voice inside my head would be saying, “C’mon, are you really buying this 15th-century Inquisitional stuff?”

So I did what any deeply-conflicted teen Catholic would do. I waited until college, where I stopped going because my parents were no longer there to make me go. That was me — slacking my way to religious freedom.

My parents were bitterly disappointed in me, but what child doesn’t bitterly disappoint his parents at some point in life? I could have been worse — I could have started doing drugs or joined the Young Republicans. My parents yanked my siblings back out of parochial school, reportedly to save some money, but part of me wonders if they were trying to prevent my siblings from catching the same anti-papacy bug that had bitten me. If so, then it worked — to this day, I’m the only family member to openly break my ties with Rome.

Fortunately, the salvation of my immortal soul would not stay in purgatorial hock forever, thanks to the lovely woman that would eventually become my wife. I fell in love with a lady who not only had a high double-take factor in the looks department, but she also had a good relationship with the Lord. She was more than willing to bring me back to His table for a good chat. The only snag was that she wasn’t a Catholic — she attended a Christian Church (one of the many Stone/Campbell Restoration variants) — and my mother always wanted me to marry a good Japanese Catholic girl (of which there are scant few in this world).

Fortunately, my mother let this slide. I had already given her plenty of wailing and gnashing of teeth when I left the church. Next to that, marrying an American Protestant was a gnat bite. It helped considerably that my wife was otherwise perfect in every way (he says, earning his brownie points for the week).

After bouncing around a few years between agnosticism, “I want to sleep on Sunday-ism”, and a couple of Christian Churches, I demonstrated my ability to give up one issue-filled denomination for another by joining a local Church of Christ. For the past 13 years, I have been a very happy child of God and brother of Christ, even if you count my time as a volunteer for Vacation Bible School.

Over the years, I have visited Catholic services on a handful of occasions — the weddings of my siblings, the baptizings of their children, and the occasional midnight mass. However, all of these visits were out of duty and love for my family, and not for any sense of nostalgia or hidden yearning for a good kneeling or two.

This morning’s sojourn was my first non-family Catholic encounter in over 20 years. My wife and son were also in tow. The event passed in fairly quick order, and I was amazed that I could still recite my portion of the mass without even a glance at a Catechism. The perversity of memory is astounding — I can still recite the Profession of Faith, but I can’t remember where I last put my car keys.

Afterward, I asked my son (who recently earned his own Scouting medal for the Churches of Christ) what he thought of the mass, which contained an unusually high number of über-Catholic touches like Gregorian chants, incense, and even a Confirmation ceremony. He surprised me by saying he liked it. When I asked why, he thought about it and said, “They take it very seriously. They act like it’s really, really important. It’s a ceremony.”

He’s right, you know. As happy as I am at my quasi-Protestant church, I do miss the pomp and pageantry of a good Catholic high mass. Sometimes, I think that non-Catholic Christians get so caught up thinking of God as “that great big buddy of mine in the sky” that they forget the majesty that goes with the whole God-worship racket. Catholics never once forget that the God they worship is holy, all-powerful, and deeply mysterious.

While I enjoy the intimacy of a deep, personal relationship with God and Jesus, I need to be reminded occasionally of the grander, more awesome spectacle of “God the Father” and “Christ the Lord.” While I’m not ready to run back into the confessional and beg the forgiveness of the archbishop himself, I won’t be so shy about future visits to House Catholic. A little pomp in my circumstance might do me some good.