I’ve been feeling a lot better about my Catholic upbringing lately.

Catholicism and I have hit some rough patches. In high school, my theology teacher, Mr. Petrie, once declared me insubordinate because I didn’t “get” transubstantiation. In his defense, I distinctly remember being quite a handful in his class.

An aside: Mr. Petrie eventually quit teaching to become a carpenter. Seriously.

In a second instance, my calculus teacher, who was a nun, slapped me right in my face because she said something racist, but Iwas the one who laughed. She was right to do it.

That brings us to a trip to New Orleans with some friends a couple of years ago. There were some protesters angry about gay people. I asked one what he was so honked off about.

“I’m Catholic, and I don’t care what gay people do in their free time,” I said.

“Well, if you’re Catholic, you’ve got a lot of other problems you need to get to first,” he explained.

“Oh,” I replied.

So there I was, rejected by other Christians for being Catholic. Rejected by Catholics for not being particularly interested in it.

But last week, Pope Francis, upon hearing someone yell out, “There’s no one like you!” shouted back, “There’s no one like you!” Since then, I’ve started using that occasionally when I say goodbye to someone.

People love it. And if you find it uplifting when I say it, imagine hearing it from the pope, who’s moderately more influential! It’s certainly more memorable than standards like “See ya” or “Adios, mofo.”

Also, the other day, my colleague, Eric, learned that I attended Catholic school. He then began peppering me with questions about how much of my day was “school” and how much was “religious stuff.”

“It’s a real school,” I explained. “We had lockers and everything.”

He then asked if I was taught evolution or creationism.

“What kind of stupid question is that?!” I chortled. “Of course we were taught evolution. What is this, 1927? We also learned that the earth revolves around the sun. And we only burned, like, three people at the stake during my whole four years in high school.”

I felt pretty good turning a co-worker’s genuine interest in my beliefs into a chance to mock him. It turns out, though, that Eric had a reason to be curious.

The Catholic Church accepted evolution in 1950. That sounds kind of late, but consider that Eric is a product of the public school system in Kansas, which apparently was still teaching creationism as an alternative to evolution as recently as 2005.

In Kansas’ defense, it’s not alone. Washington D.C. and 13 states, including Texas, allow charter or private schools to teach creationism.

Score one for Catholicism. We once dug up a dead pope so we could put him on trial, and we’re still more forward-thinking than much of the southeast!