ArcaMax

Catholics don't like converts, not really. We don't trust converts. Converts annoy us because no convert to Catholicism can resist finding a real Catholic and explaining the Catholic Church to him.

Enter JD Vance, the latest convert to explain my own religion to me.

How long's this guy been Catholic? Maybe 30 minutes? In that short time, he's learned what the pope should say, and what he should do.

Shaddap!

People who write about the Catholic Church call people like me "cradle Catholics."

What that means is that, for me, baptism was almost a formality.

Before my family was Catholic, they were over in Europe, worshipping trees and asking some hairy druid to read the future by looking at the guts of a goat.

In the broadest terms, if you're a convert, do not attempt to explain the Catholic religion to anyone whose last name begins with an "O" and an apostrophe, or anyone whose first name is Carmine, Casimir or Jesus. The same thing applies to anyone with a priest in the family, or who calls the gold chain around his neck a "baptismal chain."

Vance took the bait. Having but recently joined a 2,000-year-old religion, he's all over the faith of my ancestors like blood is all over the statue of Christ crucified in a Mexican church.

And we don't like it, not all.

We've been cradling this thing for generations, and we know that the Catholic Church is not overwhelmingly concerned with politics because politics are temporary. America's vaunted upcoming 250th anniversary had not been heard of when monks scribbling in cold libraries lived on bad beer and hard bread and kept scholarship alive. All that is in the heavy weight of the gold St. Christopher medal around a construction worker's neck.

And JD Vance, who still smells of ham gravy and snake handling, frolics in Catholicism as a means of social climbing. He used to be of the wooden church in the holler, and the preacher who hadn't graduated high school, but "heard the call," and was now working his way up to megachurch status.

Having fled that for the thinner air of Catholic theology, Vance's mind is now filled with the Pieta in gleaming marble, and old parchment, and all that glorious, incense-scented history.

He's an ambitious lad, is Vance, and having already achieved total understanding of the fire that sent my ancestors on Crusade, he now draws his sword against the pope, a man who wears The Shoes of the Fisherman.

I am a going-forward remnant of dirty, misshapen peasants who left huts in the Old Country and roach-infested tenements in America to walk to church and step into a blaze of candles, and a statue of St. Michael with his sword, and the calm, loving gaze of the Virgin Mary in stained glass.

And we begged. We begged for the life of a wife sick after childbirth, for a child with a terrible cough, for a son away in a king's war we didn't understand and couldn't find on a map.

We always understood begging. It was a skill we needed in and out of church.

Vance, the new Catholic, will not go on his knees to the pope. Vance crawls to Trump, a saint whose only miracles are a couple of razor-thin election victories and the ability to sell golden sneakers to people who can't afford medical care.

The pope is, to say the least, dismissive of Vance. Leo answers Vance and Trump politely but firmly, with a certainty that comes from being in the job for life, and from being able to read in books what happened to others who railed against the pope.

There have been bad popes and good popes, and there will be again. There have been dictators and strongmen, and there will be again.

But when the dictators and strongmen are gone, the pope remains, and the Church remains along with the steady gaze of the statues, and the candles, and the brown Catholic air that drifts up in the corners of the old cathedrals.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.