CATHOLICI SUMUS
PECCATUM FUTILE
BAPTIZARI PARATE

I wish ... I don't know, I wish a lot of things. Right now, I'm wishing I'd never met her. Maybe. My mind has too many different and opposing opinions ripping through it. I wish I could latch onto ONE. Even if it was the wrong one, at least then, I could hopefully be convinced of its wrongness. But, as it is, I don't know what to think.

We'd been seeing each other for over four years. I, a conservative Roman Catholic, she, a fallen away Catholic who'd dubbed herself pagan. I told her that if we dated, it was an audition for marriage. I told her I would never marry a pagan. I told her that God had nudged me to tell her that "It is time to come home." Home to the Church. And through the Church to the Grace that all mankind long to feel flowing through it--the Grace which, while it could never come to full fruition until the next world, could teach us and begin the process of making us whole.

She said she'd think about it, that she'd try to return to the Faith in which she'd been brought up.

But she'd been taught badly. Her misconceptions about the One True Church were apalling. She'd left when she was 16, or so she said, but I'd gathered--from all of our conversations over the years--that she'd never really been a part of the Church. I knew that her parents were converts. Her father was English--orphaned early--and her mother American--taught from birth that Catholicism was the religion of those lesser ones who lived on the wrong side of the tracks.

She herself was the instrument of her father's conversion. Having been born three months premature, she was not expected to live. Her father, from what I've gathered, made a deal with the Father, that, if He would save her life, he would allow Him to save his soul. Obviously, she lived.

Her mother, I gather, converted for the sake of religious unity. But having heard some of the advice she'd given her daughter, the woman whom I was in love with, this woman was not in her heart a Catholic. She, for example, upon seeing her daughter lonely, once suggested that she simply go on birth control pills and shack up with whomever would make her happy. Unbelievable in so many ways.

I don't pretend to have perfect knowledge of the Faith, but I helped the woman learn some of the things she'd missed as child growing up in what might as well have been a pagan household. In the process, I learned much myself. She started praying with me, going to Mass with me, even--on occasion--going to Mass herself. We even began praying the Rosary together. I thought ... I hoped that we could make a life together.

For years, things between the woman and myself were ok. At times things got bad and we had many arguments, mostly over faith and sometimes over morals. But there were many good times as well.

For the last six months, however, things were more bad than good. Our phone conversations, which at times had been four hours long, became short and filled with uncomfortable silences. I feared making her angry and so, I held my tongue when the things I wanted to say would only shock and provoke her. This became too much.

I drove 70 miles (I live in another state) to go see her, to see if we could salvage the relationship. I prayed the entire way down. I never realized that, in her heart, she'd already left me.

She'd always been an avid writer, mostly fan fiction. But she'd remained curiously (mostly) free of the disturbing trend in much fanfic to write pornographic scenes between the characters. She'd written romance pieces but never with the explicite detail that so pervades the majority of the "shipper" (relationship fiction) that is out there. She'd always been "a fade to black kind of girl."

Until March.

I cannot begin to express the feeling of betrayal that poured into me upon my discovery of the pornography that she'd written--the distaste, the anger, the pain. She'd left me long ago. If she was ever truly with me.

I wished I'd never met her.

As Frodo said, "I wish the Ring had never come to me."

It's not like I could destroy this ring--these opinions, these fascinations with darkness, these beliefs in things untrue--that so many I know hold onto like a drunk holds onto his bottle, even when he knows that drinking will destroy him. Those who hold such things--do they know that these things--these concupiscences and daliances with evil--are wrong? I can only assume that they must. Do they know that they'll lose everything over them? Do they know that, in holding onto these things of shadow, they give up things that are solid? Do they know that the things the shadows *represent* and *resemble*--the real, solid, eternal things of which all of these things are merely copies (and shoddy copies, at that)--are theirs for the asking? If only they let go the copies and the shadows and embrace the actual things which they, in truth, long for?

What kind of a mind does it take to make someone clasp a fantasy (and a dark and twisted fantasy it is) so tightly that, when something real and good is in sight, the mind won't release the twisted darkness to reach out for that which is infinitely better? You see, I think I've finally come to terms (just now) with why this hurts so much: she (and many like her) would rather hold a mis-shapen and dirty doll in her hand than be forced to drop it in order to reach out to clasp something REAL. She, indeed, as my friend Jim told me, chose. She chose the ability to write filth without the complications of a conscience over the possibility of having something pure and good and more fairy tale-like than anything she could experience reading or writing pornographic tales. She chose a mythology that she knows isn't real over a Creed which is Truth itself. She chose the slavery of never truly *dealing* with her problems over the freedom of working them through and finding the truth. I would have given her all that I had to give. I'd already given her my heart. In asking me not to judge her actions, her pornography, she showed that she also wanted me to surrender my conscience.

So, in the end, what was it that I was supposed to DO with this ring? I'm not fit to carry it, nor capable of destroying it, so why was I even ANYwhere near it?