Jodi Shaw

"There is a phrase in the Catholic Church for a certain kind of believer: the cradle Catholic. It means the one who was born into the faith, baptized before he could speak, raised inside the rituals so completely that he never had to choose them. He did not convert. He did not study his way in or have a come-to-Jesus moment that brought him to the church door as a grown man. The cradle Catholic was simply always there. And the church has a quiet worry about him, an insecurity, because the thing you are handed in the cradle is the thing you are most likely to take for granted. The convert had to earn the faith and so he knows exactly what it is. The cradle Catholic risks practicing out of habit a thing he has never once had to defend. "I have come to think there is such a thing as a cradle American, and that many of us now are one. We were born into freedom the way the cradle Catholic was born into the faith. We did not convert to freedom. Most of us under seventy did not serve in the armed forces or march for it or risk our families. We were born into this land where the rights were already written down and the laws made. And like the cradle Catholic, we are in danger of losing the greatest thing we have ever been given, because a freedom you have never had to defend is a freedom you do not know how to defend." Link below.