Cradle Catholic   What keeps me drawing me back into the pews each Sunday morning — did baptism seal the spiritual deal? Friends find it amusing, this churchgoing — medieval, unreal, pointless. They’re right, of course. What can I say about the Catholic Church — a palimpsest of millennia, a morality play, a hospital of hope for the oppressed, God’s office on Fifth Avenue, and all seven deadly sins incarnate. The bells, the smells — ridiculous. I get that. Call it a living fossil, a moribund shell, an unburied corpse. I suppose I come because it feels like family, like home.     © Michael Fleming Dummerston, Vermont December 2023