Wednesday I received a good Catholic beating.

No, my teacher didn’t rap my hands with a ruler nor did my fellow students throw stones at me in the street after class. I didn’t get martyred — I didn’t get hurt at all, really, except for the part where a tradition in my faith was laughed at. No, the beating was all in my head, and I was the one inflicting it.

You see, the class discussion had turned to Mary (as in Mother-of-Jesus Mary). When critiquing a student’s work, our teacher related a story about his elementary school celebration of May Day, a day when many Catholics host ceremonies to honor Mary by placing a crown on her statue (as was his case).

At this point, my internal Catholicism alert system raised to level orange. The room filled with puzzled comments on Catholicism’s strange attention to statues, Mary, the saints, etc., which in turn made me squirm in my seat, aching to clarify their misperceptions with a well-reasoned, doctrine-backed explanation of Mary & Co.

Except I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the right words.

And I beat myself up for it, because this wasn’t the first time that non-Catholics or even Catholics themselves seriously doubted this particular part of my religion, and I wasn’t able to respond articulately. And I know it won’t be the last time, either, because quite frankly it doesn’t make sense to many people to put a crown on a statue and to pray to the person that statue represents.

So, if you’ll allow me, I’ll explain some of our beliefs and practices here as best as I can.

The Church — by which I mean all Catholic Christians, not the physical place I attend (that’s lower case) — pays special homage to Mary because we believe her to be the person chosen by God to give birth to Jesus. Most Christian churches respect her, too, as does the Islamic tradition.

Catholics believe her to have lived without sin and to have been raised body and soul into heaven (I know, right?), and we pray to her not as an act of worship — she was only human, after all — but rather to ask her to intercede our prayers. That is to say, we ask her to pray to God for us (since she’s in pretty good standing up there, we figure her prayers are powerful in a way that transcends our human limitations).

We do the same thing with saints, or the souls we believe to be in heaven. We don’t worship them, heavens no, but we certainly ask for their help. Having statues of Mary and the saints serves as a visual reminder for us to emulate the lives of faithful people.

Another commonly misperceived practice is our closed communion ritual. Communion is offered only to Catholics, because we believe the bread and wine we consume to be the actual body and blood of Jesus. If a non-Catholic took it, they might consider it as just a symbol of Jesus, and that’s not fair to our faith or them. It would be like thinking you’re drinking water when you’re actually drinking Sprite (the horror).

Also, the Church is against the use of condoms, birth control and — perhaps most adamantly — abortion because we gather our beliefs from natural law, meaning that we think life should run its course as nature (and thus, God) designed it. Impeding life in any way is unnatural, offensive and sad to us Catholics.

I know there are other issues I could have addressed — are Catholics trained to love alcohol? Why’s the Pope’s hat so big? Why no pew cushions? — but I have only so much space, and I’m still searching for the right words. Plus, one beating is enough.