“Any Catholic will tell you that above all other things what holds him to the Church, in spite of doubts and manifest evils is the sacramental system. In the rites of passage—the fundamental activities and relationships of life—birth, death, sexual intercourse, eating, drinking, choosing a vocation, adolescence, mortal illness—life at its important moments is ennobled by the ceremonious introduction of transcendence; the universe focused on the event in a Mass or ceremony that is itself a kind of dance and a work of art. This is the real significance of religion. We think of religion today as something to believe, the Westminster Confession, the Athanasian Creed. The virtue of Catholicism is that it has never lost the anthropological religion, which it shares with the Northwest Indians, or the Bushmen or the Eskimos—it is something you do.”

—Kenneth Rexroth