Compass and yeast

"I believe in . . . the holy catholic church."

I recently had new reasons to ponder what all "catholic" could mean in the Apostles Creed. I was doing research for a paper and evaluating those of others written for the International Thomas Merton Society conference in Chicago last month. The restless writer's conversion to Catholicism was among the most celebrated of the last century, a point conference-goers took for granted. Trying to make sense of his conversion from the margins, as it were, I asked this: to which Catholicism--to which kind of Catholicism--did Merton convert?

With little time at the conference and even less space here, I chose and choose to pick up on a distinction, or a dual definition, that has stayed with me 60-plus years since I sought and accepted tutelage from Jesuit father Walter J. Ong of St. Louis. Let me pass it on anew.