You Might Be Catholic If... (Writing Edition)

1. You stop in the middle of a chapter and ask yourself how likely it would be that this character would be beatified.

2. You ponder, furthermore, that if the character would be beatified, does that make the character a Mary Sue?

3. You accidentally refer to the main church/temple/whatever in the novel as St. Peter's Basilica--and don't notice it until re-reading it a few months later.

4. You wonder if your fictional characters are good apologists for the Faith. You then remember that they are, in fact, fictional, and have nothing to do with the Church, seeing as they're in a different world--and you still wonder if they're good apologists for the Faith.

5. In any given chapter, there is bound to be a mention of oral and written Tradition.

6. You take your villain's moral culpability into account, what with their mental state and all, before finishing up.

7. You take your hero's moral culpability into account before they make That Inevitable Bad Decision For Dramatic Purposes.

8. That Inevitable Bad Decision is always repented of swiftly, because you don't want your characters to go to Hell.

9. When considering things for the villain to do in order to seem more villainous, you look at the various ways the Martyrs were executed.

10. You wonder if your villains are demonically possessed.

11. You take care to make sure the climactic battles and their results are perfectly in line with Church teaching.

(yes, I have done all of this. Most of it subconsciously. Go figure.)