I ended up a Catholic sort of by accident: I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in college, it didn’t work for my spouse after I got married, so I pivoted to a tradition I thought would provide an easier meeting place (the pivot was kind of slow: for about a year or two prior, I was attending Catholic Masses on the regular). On paper, I’m an Eastern Catholic, though in practice, when I can make it to a liturgy, it’s virtually always a Western Mass.

I’d say for the first 3.5 to 4 years of my Catholicism, I was unhappy to be Catholic. I felt my Orthodox liturgical life had been superior (it was), that the theology and mysticism of the Eastern Churches were richer than the Western Churches (they are), and that Eastern Christianity had retained a more traditional ethos than the West, including Rome. (On this last point, I cared less and less as my own traditionalist phase was coming to a rapid close; I look back on it thankful to have escaped before things got as toxic as they would become in American Orthodoxy in particular.) I felt for awhile like I’d basically been trapped here against my will, and I searched for any niche form of Catholic life or any alternative to it I could summon.

But for the last two years or so, I’d say I’ve been progressively happier to be Catholic. Not because the liturgy is usually very fulfilling (it isn’t, in my experience), nor because Catholicism’s institutions are always or even often well-run (it’s a vigorous meh on that front), nor because I think Catholicism answers all my problems or my questions (somewhere, a copy of Denzinger has just wept). I’m a historical critic of some of Catholicism’s favorite ideas about itself, too, and so I have exceedingly thin patience for apologetics (especially those that surround conversion stories) and for performative piety. There are other perfectly satisfying and wholesome ways to be Christian than being Catholic, and in many ways, other Christians have preserved in their separation from Catholicism elements of Christianity more central than what Catholicism majors in. The Christian East, in particular, is forever the mystical heart of Christianity: Syriac is the Church’s true language of prayer, Greek its true language of the mind, Latin merely the language of its law.

But I’ve come around. I’m Catholic, and happy to be so, for basically two reasons: first, it is quite obviously where the energy and long-term trajectory of traditional Christianity is; second, its institutions, while deeply flawed and imperfect, possess organs of reform that can be meaningfully deployed in such a way as to keep Catholics together and steer them in something like an actual direction.

To the first point: far as I’m aware, the fastest growing kinds of Christianity in the world are Pentecostal or Charismatic in profile, but among the traditional Christianities—Catholicism, Orthodoxy, the Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox, “Nestorians,” Old Catholics, and Anglicans—no one is competing with Catholicism’s rate of growth. Within the Christian world there’s a not improbable future where the common profile of a Christian by, let’s say, the end of this century and into the next one, is that they are either Catholic or some variety of evangelical Protestant with Pentecostal/Charismatic leanings. This is a polarized outcome, and we could talk about what that means and how to assess it and so on, but one takeaway is that other forms of specifically traditional Christianity just aren’t growing at the same rate. There are many factors—some of them are political and social rather than purely “religious,” many are cultural, many are simple old-fashioned demographic decline—but basically, there are not going to be as many Eastern Christians or Anglicans around in a century as there will be Catholics, and even though this doesn’t automatically mean decline or disappearance by any stretch (there will probably be even more Anglicans than there currently are, for example), it does mean that, statistically, these other traditional churches are not going to be the driving forces in world Christianity.

I don’t have a theology of Roman Christianity’s special destiny as bearer of the Church’s mantle from the very beginning: history just doesn’t uphold that narrative. But I do acknowledge that, if God is involved in the Church’s history and in the Church’s future prospects, then God seems to have set up the Catholic Church to be the global face of Christianity for the foreseeable future.

And so, to the second point: I am happy that that communion, to which I belong, has instruments of self-regulation, reform, and action that work. Other Christians are better than Catholics at many things, and other Christian Churches succeed where Catholicism fails on many points. But other Christianity can boast the same level of individual institutional competence as Rome: Orthodox models of synodality and, effectively, confederated polycephaly have left Eastern Christianity a giant administrative mess both in the traditional homelands and in the Americas; Anglicanism is internally divided on doctrinal and moral matters, but while the temptation would be to write off the liberal Western wings in England and America as dead branches on the communion’s tree, in reality, many of the same questions and debates endure in nuce in Anglicanism’s more conservative majorities, and sometimes rear themselves; miaphysite and “Nestorian” communities are by now very marginal on the global stage and are effectively small ethnoreligious communities today. Catholicism is a community capable of acting in and as 1.46 billion people through its still-evolving functions of synodality and primacy. This is not to say that Rome should not reform in alignment with where ecumenical dialogue and history have encouraged reform on both institutions of the synod and the papacy—it totally should!—but it is to say that its virtue as an institution has always been a genuine ability to keep most of the band together and most of the band moving. That remains its greatest strength today, and in a future where the primary alternative form of Christianity it is going to share space with will be evangelical/Pentecostal in profile, that strength will stand out all the more as an instrument of real communion, togetherness and connection across differences, in the face of evangelicalism’s radically individualist theology and ethos.

Perhaps these two reasons to be Catholic amount syllogistically to a third: Catholicism is the only Christianity both solid and flexible enough to be a catalyst for the synthesis of the authentic genius of all Christianities. Modern Catholicism already proves itself capable of something analogous to this with respect to its internationalist, globalist, cosmopolitan profile, a Church of every “nation, tribe, people, and tongue” (Rev 7:9) and already partly attempts this as a communion of 24 distinct Churches with distinct liturgies and theological traditions. Catholicism’s internal dialectic, its path of ongoing becoming that which it proposes to formally be, has both real bona fides as well as real failures to launch. But among available Christianities, there simply isn’t a comparable Christian body engaged in that same work to that same degree. One would have to go outside of Christianity altogether to find such analogues: the Islamic ummah and the secular world are in this regard more apposite to what the Church is than many of its Christian sisters, as visions of what it would look like for a differentiated humanity to be unified. And in a world of rising authoritarianism, the decline of an international rules-based order, populist resentment, and novel conflicts, to self-consciously belong to a community of Christ’s disciples that is self-consciously drawn as an ecclesia ex gentibus has a prophetic tone to it that the endless variations of American Protestantism simply doesn’t, and that integralist dreams of triumphalist imperialism in Byzantine quarters doesn’t either. (To be fair, there are also plenty of integralist Catholics.)

Ultimately, I am Catholic because I am a Christian, and a Christian because I believe in and love Christ (even on days where my prayer is “Lord, I believe: help my unbelief!”). But, knowing there are many non-Catholic ways to do that, these are it seems to me the best reasons to endure in the res Catholica, warts and all.