Googling the words “Why I am Catholic” turns up 627,000,000 results. A search for the opposite phrase, “Why I am not a Catholic,” yields a mere 582,000,000. This suggests that all the negative publicity of recent years surrounding the Catholic Church hasn’t driven everyone away, though it also implies that scandal after scandal have led a lot of current and former Catholics to write extended defenses on their decisions to stay or go.

Susan Dolan is one such apologist. In the vein of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, G.K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man, and Garry Wills’s Why I Am a Catholic, her slim volume, MASS CONFUSION (Why I Rejected The Church For So Long And What Changed), which won both an IndieReader Discovery Award (IRDA) and an Illumination Award bronze medal, is Dolan’s soft-spoken manifesto. “If anyone should not be a Catholic, it’s me,” she begins, and then explains her reasons: she is a divorcée; she has dabbled in other religions; she has ridiculed the Church (for example, by likening Mass to a game of Twister: “kneel, stand, sit, repeat”). She became an attorney, and then a hospice nurse, helping patients die with dignity. One thing she was not was a practicing Catholic.

Forty years after drifting away from the church, Dolan has come back. Growing up, she chafed against her parents’, and especially her father’s, devotion. Now, she celebrates that devotion, as well as its corollary: her father’s sense of justice, fairness, and peace. These qualities gave him his purpose, which is what Dolan has searched for all her life. She finds it in a return to her Catholic roots. Dolan knows the Church has countenanced or concealed horrible acts, yet she asks her readers to bear with her while she describes its warts-and-all appeal.

Veteran narrator Susan Bennett has recorded audiobooks for a number of bestselling writers–Charliane Harris, Diane Chamberlain, Jude Devereaux–and she reads MASS CONFUSION with a sense of majesty and wonder, which is perfect. To listen to this book is to imagine oneself in a lecture that is equal parts intellectually stimulating and personally comforting. Anyone who is on a similar journey of self-discovery, even if it isn’t a religious one, will derive inspiration from Dolan’s plain-speaking, yet artful memoir.

Short but salient, Susan Dolan’s MASS CONFUSION (Why I Rejected The Church For So Long And What Changed) makes a strong case for embracing Christianity in spite of its many flaws.

~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader