Originally published at The Catholic Thing
I recently saw a request on social media for people to say why they were Christians in five words or less. I was tempted to paraphrase Chesterton’s reason for his Catholicism and use three words: “It is true.” Then I remembered novelist and Catholic convert Walker Percy, when asked why he had converted to Catholicism, responded: “What else is there?”
Is there any greater mission statement, which every parish seems to require, or a better blueprint for evangelization? There is, of course, only one real mission statement, the “Great Commission” of Christ in St. Mark’s Gospel. When you view the alternatives offered to twenty-first-century man – the green religion, sexual revolution, nihilism, or a return to Communism, indeed any false hope in a political solution to man’s needs – “What else is there?” stands up well as expressing the truth of the Catholic faith.
The ”what else is there” of Catholicism implies a passionate belief, not only in the dogma but, as Dorothy L. Sayers would have it, in the “drama.” At the heart of the drama is the liturgy, the Divine Mysteries. Without the dogma, there is no drama. So robust orthodoxy, as Chesterton described it, is the fuel
