What Makes Us Catholic: Eight Gifts for Life

What makes a Catholic a Catholic?

According to Thomas Groome, an expert on the essential ingredients of Catholic Christianity, Catholics share certain vital features of life and identity. What Makes Us Catholic explains and illuminates that character, and invites Catholics of all kinds to connect more deeply and imaginatively with their own culture and spirituality.

Groome locates this heritage in an outlook that perceives divine grace active in the ordinary rhythms of daily life.

The chapters explore eight core gifts of the tradition, examining how communities balance personal conscience with communal prayer and ancient scripture with living tradition.

Addressing cradle believers, returnees, and seekers alike, the author shows how these perspectives shape an active faith, connecting personal reflection with commitments to social justice.

The volume presents these gifts not as rigid dogmas, but as an open spiritual treasury for contemporary living.

• Catholic Teaching: Explores the historic shift after Vatican II from external regulations like Friday meat abstinence toward a mature faith grounded in the church’s hierarchy of truths.


• Sacraments: Examines how the seven liturgical rites, from baptism to anointing of the sick, serve as communal celebrations of the grace already at work in daily human life.


• Spiritual Growth: Outlines a realistic, life-affirming anthropology rooted in the thought of Bernard Lonergan, treating human nature as wounded by fallibility yet fundamentally defined by original grace.


• Daily Practices: Details concrete spiritual disciplines for contemporary households, including the contemplative reading of lectio divina, daily foundation prayers, and an evening examen of consciousness.


• Also by This Author: Will There Be Faith?.