[OpusatFR]

“If you were to join some Protestant church, you simply. . .go to church...”

Some do. Some attend mass and other devotions for decades before they finally enter into full communion.

It has nothing to do with brainwashing. That’s a bit much.

It has everything to do with God calling you to enter into eternity.

That’s what the Eucharist is.

I’m sorry my poor words can’t make it any plainer.

I am Catholic, not because I have been born into, brainwashed, or coerced or any other nonsensical thing one can mention.

I am Catholic because it is simply the faith.

[Mad Dawg]

Swirls before pine.

I'm just thrilled more and more to be in the company of the brainwashed fools who recovered Euclid and the rest from the Moors and worked on Aristotle and Plato and all those guys, who developed for the western world the concept of the hospital and then made it happen, who produced Dante and Giotto, who laboriously and painstakingly copied the scriptures and the fathers and who preserved literacy as Europe sank into chaos, and who did all this before the printing press.

I'm delighted to read John Damascene, Dominic and Catherine of Sienna and Eckhart (I said "read" him, not "spell" him) and Augustine and Ambrose and Anselm and so on. I look at Kolbe or the Martyrs of Uganda or Kateri Teckakwitha or Fr. Jogues .... Wow!

If that's brainwashing, not only my brains, but my feet and my head and hands also!

[William Terrell]

That's up to you. I'm saying that to be a Catholic one must believe and follow practices that depart so far from the simple message of Jesus in seeking the Father that preconditioning has to occur.

It doesn't matter if you do it yourself or attend orientation.