I tell the boys in school that they should be a priest because every boy wants to wear a cape and a cool hat and do amazing things, and what other profession is there today in which you can wear a cape (except being a French policeman) So capes and hats and feats of derring do is what I want, and what’s wrong with wanting to be a superhero?

That is to say, I want to be a super- natural hero–a hero of the supernatural is what I mean, and this all came to me this morning while I was celebrating Mass.

I realized suddenly again in the midst of concentrating on the words and the actions that I totally completely, utterly without reservation and without doubt and without any shadow of misinterpretation believed the whole thing. All of it. The Creation of the World by God the Father Almighty, the Incarnation of his Son Jesus Christ our Lord who took human flesh from the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven. I believed and trusted fully in the Divine Mercy, the saving work of Jesus Christ on the cross, the redeeming Blood of the Lamb of God–a sacrifice once offered for my sins and the sins of the whole world, and re-presented on the altars and only on the altars of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I fully and totally believed in the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who is risen ascended and glorified and now sits at the right hand of the Father in Glory everlasting.

There’s more. I believe in the rest of the stuff too. The incorrupt bodies of saints and apparitions of the Queen of Heaven to peasant children. I believe in the stigmata and the miracles in the Bible and the Book of Revelation and the Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem and the Shroud of Turin and levitating saints. I believe in answers to prayer and if you push me I will even confound you by believing that a big fish really did swallow Jonah and spit him up angry and smelling of vomit and that Elijah was fed by ravens and Moses split wide the Red Sea and that God does miracles today.

Now you might say that this is nothing really very special, and that this is, after all, what all Catholics should fully and totally believe, and that it is certainly what a Catholic priest should believe, but when it hit me in the middle of saying Mass it also hit me how bizarre and unusual this way of looking at the world really is. Read more.