I’m a very, very bad Catholic. I just want to get that out of the way.

I don’t attend Mass, I eat meat on Lenten Fridays, most of my Sunday School memories are from a Baptist church, I’m not confirmed and I basically never attend Confession.

That being said, I attended Catholic School from Kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. I consider myself to have been Catholic my whole life, and Catholicism has a way sticking with you.

After all, in the words of Dara O’ Brain, “…there’s no real way to stop being Catholic. Even not believing in God isn’t regarded as sufficient reason to get out of the Catholic Church.”

But I’m not so bad of a Catholic that I don’t care about Pope Francis visiting the U.S. for the first time.

On this historic trip he faced protests from all the usual places, but interestingly and not historically usual, also from the Right Wing.

This is because His Holiness has kind of changed the tone and range of issues that the Papacy focuses on.

Basically, what this means in practical terms is that there is slightly less gay bashing and more focus on the poor, the environment and lots of other stuff that a 2,000-year-old religious institution should be concerned about.

As part of this shift in tone, Pope Francis has reiterated the Church’s condemnation of capitalism, called on parishes to accept refugees and has called for action on climate change.

There have been conservative Catholics who have criticized the pope, which is mostly fine with me. After all, I have no shortage of complaints about the Catholic Church.

However, among the most verbal critics of this new tone are Right Wing Protestants who have called the pope a “leftist” or “Marxist.”

This is extremely aggravating.

The Catholic Church is definitely not socialist. That being said, it isn’t capitalist either.

Rather than fitting into an overly simplistic American political category, the Church is a 2,000-year-old religious institution with doctrines and teachings touching on nearly every facet of life.

And, as is to be expected, these teachings are old, complex and have been thought out over whole centuries in some cases.

Pope Francis hasn’t moved the Church to the left nor is he a Marxist.

Heck, he’s not even really a progressive; he’s fully in line with Catholic teaching.

He’s simply emphasizing different things than previous popes did.

The Protestant Right Wing don’t get to critique the pope’s “politics.” They are constantly making the choice to not acknowledge him as their spiritual leader, so they don’t get a say in what he emphasizes. I don’t even get a say. Other Catholics don’t get a say. Only His Holiness gets a say in what he does.

The Catholic Church isn’t perfect and I will always disagree with a lot of its stances.

But the Catholic Church doesn’t exist for my agenda, just like it doesn’t exist for the agenda of the Right Wing.

The Pope knows what he’s doing.

Stop trying to tell him how to be Catholic.

Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.

But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others.

While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment.

There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.

Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being.

Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.

What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.

And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above.

Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.

Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against.

Because of that, religion without true belief is weak.

Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.