Things You Should Know Before You Convert From Eastern Orthodoxy

Brief Overview

• Converting from Eastern Orthodoxy to Catholicism is the most theologically nuanced of all conversions, because the two churches share the same sacraments, the same apostolic succession, the same seven ecumenical councils, and an overwhelming common inheritance, yet remain divided on specific and serious questions of authority and doctrine.
• Your Orthodox baptism, chrismation, and Eucharist are all recognized as fully valid by the Catholic Church, which means you will not be re-baptized or re-confirmed, but you will still need to make a formal profession of Catholic faith before being received into full communion.
• The primary theological issues dividing the two churches, papal primacy and infallibility, the filioque clause in the Creed, the Immaculate Conception, and purgatory, are not minor doctrinal footnotes but substantive questions that require serious intellectual engagement before you commit.
• The Orthodox community and often your own family will likely regard your move to Rome as a theological betrayal, a capitulation to what many Orthodox theologians consider the principal source of the division between East and West.
• The Catholic Church explicitly teaches that Eastern Orthodox churches celebrate a genuine and valid Eucharist and that their members are genuinely united with Catholics in many bonds of real, though incomplete, communion, which makes this conversion one between sister churches rather than between Christianity and something else.
• Depending on your background and the diocese you approach, you may be offered the option of entering the Church through an Eastern Catholic rite rather than the Latin rite, and that option deserves serious consideration rather than automatic dismissal.

You Are Not Moving From Error to Truth in the Same Way Other Converts Are

The very first thing to understand clearly before converting from Eastern Orthodoxy to Catholicism is that this conversion is categorically different from any other kind of religious conversion. When someone converts from atheism, from Islam, or from most Protestant traditions, they are coming from outside the full sacramental tradition of the ancient Church. When you convert from Eastern Orthodoxy, you are moving between two traditions that both possess valid apostolic succession, valid orders, valid sacraments, and a shared inheritance of the first seven ecumenical councils. The Catholic Church is unambiguous on this point. The Catechism describes the Eastern Orthodox churches as those that, though not in full communion with the Catholic Church, celebrate the Eucharist with great love and in which the apostolic succession has been maintained, making their sacraments genuinely efficacious (CCC 1399). The Church also teaches that with the Eastern churches a real, though imperfect, communion already exists (CCC 838). This means that when you move from Eastern Orthodoxy to Catholicism, you are not being rescued from a community devoid of grace and sacramental life. You are moving from one genuine expression of the apostolic Church to the expression you have concluded is the one true Church established by Christ. That distinction is not merely diplomatic politeness. It is theological precision that shapes everything about how you should approach this transition, how you speak about it to your Orthodox family and friends, how you understand what you are gaining without falsely implying that you were previously in spiritual poverty, and how you relate to the Orthodox community after your reception. Honoring both the continuity and the genuine distinction between the two churches is one of the most intellectually and spiritually demanding aspects of this particular conversion.

Your Sacraments Are Valid and You Will Not Be Re-Initiated

This is an important practical and theological point that surprises many people considering this transition. Because the Catholic Church recognizes that Eastern Orthodox priests and bishops possess valid apostolic orders, it also recognizes that the sacraments they celebrate, including baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist, are genuinely valid. When an Orthodox Christian seeks to enter full communion with the Catholic Church, they are not treated as an unbaptized person or as someone whose prior sacramental life was invalid. They make a profession of the Catholic faith, and in most cases the reception is accomplished through that profession alone, without repetition of baptism, chrismation, or any other sacrament previously received in the Orthodox church. The practical process typically involves a relatively brief period of formation focused specifically on the theological differences between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, particularly the doctrines distinctive to Catholic faith that are not accepted in Eastern Orthodoxy, followed by the formal act of reception at a Mass in which you publicly make the profession of faith. This shorter process reflects the Church’s recognition that you are not someone who needs to be introduced to the sacramental life, the liturgical tradition, or the basics of the faith. You already have a sophisticated theological formation and a mature experience of the Church’s liturgical and spiritual inheritance. What the formation period focuses on instead is the specific Catholic teachings you are being asked to accept that your Orthodox tradition either rejects or has not defined in the same way. Know clearly what those teachings are and work through them honestly before your reception, because the profession of faith you make is a complete and unconditional acceptance of the Catholic faith in its entirety.

Papal Primacy Is the Central Issue and It Is More Complex Than Either Side Usually Admits

The most significant theological difference between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy is the question of papal authority, and anyone converting from Orthodoxy to Catholicism needs to work through this question with more depth than most OCIA programs provide. The Catholic Church teaches that the Bishop of Rome, as the successor of Peter, holds a primacy of authority over the entire Church, including the authority to teach infallibly on matters of faith and morals under specific defined conditions (CCC 882, CCC 891). Eastern Orthodoxy acknowledges that the Bishop of Rome holds a certain primacy of honor among the patriarchates, a primacy often described as first among equals, but firmly rejects the idea that this primacy includes universal jurisdiction over all bishops or the capacity for infallible definition independent of an ecumenical council. This is not a minor organizational disagreement. It reflects two genuinely different understandings of how Christ governs his Church and how doctrinal certainty is established. The Catholic argument for papal primacy rests heavily on Matthew 16:18-19, where Christ says to Peter that he will build his Church on this rock and give him the keys of the kingdom, combined with John 21:15-17, where Christ commands Peter to feed his sheep, and on the testimony of early patristic sources regarding the prerogative of the Roman church. The Orthodox argument responds that these texts do not require the specific juridical primacy that Rome claims and that the early Church’s understanding of the Petrine ministry was more collegial than the medieval and post-Tridentine Catholic development of the doctrine. Both sides marshal patristic evidence, and the debate is genuinely complex. You must engage this question with intellectual honesty and reach a genuine personal conviction rather than simply accepting that Rome must be right because you decided to convert. Your conviction about papal primacy is the theological foundation of your Catholic life, and it needs to be solid before you build anything on it.

The Filioque Is a Real Theological Dispute, Not a Historical Technicality

The filioque controversy, the dispute over whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone as Eastern Orthodoxy teaches or from the Father and the Son as the Latin West added to the Nicene Creed, is often dismissed by people unfamiliar with it as a historical quarrel about a minor word. It is neither minor nor merely historical. It touches on the most fundamental question of Trinitarian theology, the question of how the three persons of the Trinity relate to each other within the divine life, and the two positions reflect genuinely different theological visions. The word filioque, meaning “and from the Son,” was gradually added to the Latin version of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed in the Western church from the sixth century onward, becoming standard in the Roman liturgy by the eleventh century. The Eastern church regards this addition as both theologically erroneous and canonically illegitimate, an unauthorized alteration of a creed defined by an ecumenical council. The Catholic Church has responded to this dispute in several ways. It has acknowledged that the addition of the word to the Creed was done without Eastern conciliar agreement and that the original Greek text of the Creed remains the authoritative form. It has also produced ecumenical clarifications, including a joint Catholic-Orthodox statement from 1995, affirming that the Eastern and Western traditions are speaking about the same divine reality from different theological perspectives rather than describing fundamentally contradictory realities. The Catholic Church accepts both the Greek text without the filioque and the Latin text with it as legitimate expressions of the same Trinitarian faith. For a convert from Orthodoxy, accepting this does not require abandoning the Eastern theological tradition on this question. It does require accepting that the Catholic Church’s handling of the filioque, including its historical insertion into the Western Creed, was within its legitimate authority, which is itself part of the broader question of how you understand the Church’s teaching authority.

The Immaculate Conception Is Defined Catholic Dogma and Orthodoxy Rejects It

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, defined as dogma by Pope Pius IX in 1854, holds that the Virgin Mary was preserved from original sin from the first moment of her conception by a singular grace of God, in view of the merits of Christ her Son (CCC 491). Eastern Orthodoxy does not accept this doctrine and has not defined an equivalent teaching. The Orthodox theological tradition honors Mary as the Theotokos, the Mother of God, and holds her in extraordinary reverence, but it does not define the precise manner of her preservation from sin in the same way the Latin West did. The Orthodox objection to the Immaculate Conception is partly theological, arguing that the Western doctrine of original sin as inherited guilt, developed by Augustine and refined through the medieval period, differs from the Eastern understanding of ancestral sin as an inherited weakness and mortality rather than an inherited guilt, and that the Immaculate Conception makes more sense within the Western theological framework than within the Eastern one. For a convert from Orthodoxy, accepting the Immaculate Conception as defined dogma means accepting not only the specific doctrine but the Western theological framework within which it was defined, and also accepting the authority of the papal definition itself as a legitimate exercise of the teaching office the Catholic Church claims. This is one of the places where the acceptance of papal primacy and the acceptance of a specific Marian dogma are directly connected. You cannot accept the Immaculate Conception as binding while rejecting the authority by which it was defined. Work through the full interconnected set of implications rather than treating each doctrine in isolation.

Purgatory Is Defined in Catholicism While Orthodoxy Holds Only a Partial Parallel

The Catholic doctrine of purgatory, the teaching that souls who die in God’s grace but are still imperfect undergo a final purification before entering the fullness of heaven (CCC 1030-1032), is another point of genuine difference between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Eastern Orthodoxy does pray for the dead and holds that the condition of the dead can be affected by the prayers of the living, which is why Orthodox liturgies regularly include prayers for the departed. But Eastern Orthodoxy has never defined the doctrine of purgatory in the systematic way that Catholic theology has, and many Orthodox theologians explicitly reject the Western understanding of purgatory as involving a temporal punishment that must be satisfied through suffering before entry into heaven. The Orthodox tradition tends to speak of a process of ongoing growth and purification after death in more open-ended terms, without the specific framework of temporal punishment and satisfaction that characterizes the Latin theological tradition. The Council of Florence in 1439, which temporarily achieved a reunion between Eastern and Western Christianity, addressed purgatory in terms that attempted to accommodate both traditions, acknowledging that souls are purified after death without insisting on the specific Western framework of satisfying temporal punishment. For a convert from Orthodoxy, accepting the Catholic doctrine of purgatory does not necessarily require accepting every element of the later Latin theological elaboration, but it does require accepting the basic teaching that a real process of purification occurs between death and the full beatific vision, and that this process is connected to the Church’s practice of indulgences, masses for the dead, and the treasury of merit, all of which are distinctively Catholic teachings that Orthodoxy does not share.

The Eastern Catholic Rite Option Is Real and You Should Seriously Consider It

One of the most significant and least discussed aspects of converting from Eastern Orthodoxy to Catholicism is the fact that the Catholic Church is not a single monolithic rite but a communion of twenty-three churches in full communion with Rome, including numerous Eastern Catholic churches that preserve Eastern liturgical traditions, theology, canon law, and spirituality within full Catholic communion. If you are Greek Orthodox, there is the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. If you are Russian Orthodox, there is the Russian Greek Catholic Church and the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. If you are from an Antiochian tradition, there is the Melkite Church and the Maronite Church. These Eastern Catholic churches celebrate liturgies that are very close to or identical with the Orthodox liturgies you have worshipped within, they use the Byzantine theological tradition, and in many cases they permit married priests in the same way that Eastern Orthodoxy does. When an Orthodox Christian seeks full communion with the Catholic Church, Church law actually suggests that they should by default be received into the corresponding Eastern Catholic church rather than automatically into the Latin rite. The practical reality is that in many parts of the world, Eastern Catholic parishes are few or difficult to access, which is why many Orthodox converts end up in Latin rite parishes. But if an Eastern Catholic parish of your tradition is reasonably accessible, entering through it rather than through the Latin rite will give you a form of Catholic life that preserves the liturgical and spiritual heritage you have already been formed in, while adding the full communion with Rome that your conversion is seeking. This is not a lesser option. For many Orthodox converts, it is the most honest and spiritually coherent path into the Catholic Church.

Your Orthodox Community Will Likely View This as a Betrayal of the East

This is a reality that deserves direct and honest treatment rather than diplomatic softening. Eastern Orthodoxy has a specific theological and historical narrative about the Great Schism of 1054 in which Rome is the party that departed from the authentic tradition of the undivided Church, not the East. In this narrative, which is genuinely and sincerely held by many Orthodox Christians including serious theologians, the Catholic Church added doctrines to the faith, including the filioque, the Immaculate Conception, and papal infallibility, that represent theological innovations without authentic conciliar grounding. When an Orthodox Christian enters the Catholic Church, they are, from this perspective, not completing or perfecting their faith but submitting to what many Orthodox regard as an ecclesial innovation that the East rightly resisted. Your priest, your family, and your community are likely to experience your conversion not merely as a personal religious choice but as a theological statement that you regard the Orthodox church as deficient in ways they do not believe it to be. The emotional weight of that experience should not be underestimated. Unlike conversions from most Protestant traditions, where the theological questions are more straightforward, conversion from Orthodoxy to Catholicism places you in the middle of a dispute that has lasted nearly a thousand years and that involves the deepest questions about how the Church governs itself, how doctrine develops, and who has the authority to define it. Be prepared for sustained theological conversation, for genuine arguments from serious and well-informed Orthodox interlocutors, and for the possibility that some of those arguments will challenge your convictions in ways that require ongoing intellectual and spiritual maintenance rather than a one-time resolution.

The Theological Debates Between the Two Churches Are Serious and You Need Real Answers

Anyone converting from Eastern Orthodoxy to Catholicism who has not engaged seriously with the Orthodox theological tradition’s critique of Catholic claims is not ready to convert. This is not meant to discourage conversion. It is meant to ensure that the conversion is built on genuine intellectual conviction rather than enthusiasm, aesthetic preference, or the particular persuasiveness of a Catholic apologist whose arguments you have not tested against Orthodox responses. The Orthodox critique of Catholicism is not the same as the Protestant critique. It is not about sola scriptura versus Tradition, or faith versus works, or the role of Mary. It is specifically about ecclesiology, about how the Church is structured and governed, and about whether the doctrinal developments that occurred in the Latin West after the Schism represent authentic development of the faith or innovations that departed from the genuine Tradition. The Catholic case for the papacy, for the doctrinal developments defined after 1054, and for the specific form of authority the Catholic Church claims draws on patristic sources, on the history of the councils, and on the theological tradition of figures like Aquinas, Newman, and Ratzinger. The Orthodox case against those positions draws on equally serious sources, including the early patristic tradition, the conciliar history of the undivided Church, and the theological work of figures like Georges Florovsky, John Meyendorff, and Alexander Schmemann. Read both sides seriously before you commit. Talk with Orthodox priests and Catholic priests who know the debate well. Work through the specific points of disagreement with as much theological rigor as your formation allows. The conversion that survives the first serious Orthodox theological challenge to your new Catholic convictions is the one that was built on genuine engagement rather than untested enthusiasm.

The Latin Mass Experience Will Be Very Different From What You Knew in Orthodoxy

If you are entering the Catholic Church through the Latin rite, as most Orthodox converts in the Western world do for practical reasons, you are entering a liturgical tradition that differs significantly from what you knew in the Byzantine liturgy, even though both draw on the same ancient Christian inheritance. The ordinary form of the Roman rite, celebrated in the vernacular with the priest facing the congregation from behind the altar table, will feel far less like Orthodox worship than you might expect from two traditions that claim the same apostolic inheritance. The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom or St. Basil, with its incense, its iconostasis, its chanting, its theological density, and its sense of the sacred breaking into the ordinary through the liturgy, is an extraordinarily rich worship experience. Many Latin rite Masses, particularly in ordinary parish settings, will feel comparatively stripped down, occasionally informal, and liturgically sparse. This is not a universal reality of Catholic worship. The extraordinary form of the Roman rite, what is popularly called the Traditional Latin Mass, is more formally structured and ceremonially rich, though still quite different from Byzantine worship. Some Latin rite parishes celebrate Mass with exceptional beauty, reverence, and liturgical care. But you should not assume that the Catholic liturgical experience will match what you experienced in Orthodoxy, and you should be honest with yourself about how much the beauty and depth of Orthodox worship shaped your spiritual formation and how much you may miss it in a Latin rite parish. This is another reason why entering through an Eastern Catholic church, if accessible, is worth serious consideration rather than automatic default to the Latin rite simply because it is more common in your area.

Development of Doctrine Is the Key Issue That Divides the Two Churches Underneath Everything Else

Underneath the specific disputes about the papacy, the filioque, the Immaculate Conception, and purgatory lies a more fundamental disagreement about how Catholic and Orthodox theology understands the development of doctrine over time. Eastern Orthodoxy tends to hold that authentic doctrinal development must be grounded in explicit conciliar definition by an ecumenical council received by the whole Church, and that doctrines not so defined cannot be imposed as binding dogma. The Catholic Church holds that the Holy Spirit guides the Church’s ongoing understanding of the faith in ways that can legitimately result in new doctrinal definitions, even without an ecumenical council, and that the papacy possesses the authority to issue such definitions under specific conditions. John Henry Newman’s famous essay on the development of Christian doctrine provides the most influential Catholic account of this process, arguing that genuine developments deepen and clarify what was always implicit in the faith rather than adding genuinely new content. The Orthodox response to Newman, articulated by theologians like Georges Florovsky, is that the Catholic account of doctrinal development allows for innovations that cannot be verified as authentic developments of the original deposit of faith and that the criterion of reception by the whole Church, including the Eastern churches, is a necessary safeguard that Catholic theology effectively bypasses by attributing definitive authority to the pope alone. For a convert from Orthodoxy, accepting the Catholic position on doctrinal development is not simply accepting a list of additional doctrines. It is accepting a different epistemology of doctrine, a different account of how the Church knows what it knows and who has the authority to say so definitively. That is the deepest level at which this conversion operates, and you need to have worked through it at that level before you make your profession of faith.

You Will Be Called a Uniate by Some Orthodox, and That Word Carries Real History

If you enter the Catholic Church through an Eastern Catholic rite, you will likely encounter the term “Uniate” used by Orthodox Christians to describe Eastern Catholics. The term is generally considered pejorative in Catholic and Eastern Catholic circles, because it carries the historical weight of the Union of Brest in 1596 and similar unions in which Orthodox communities were, in some cases under significant political pressure, brought into communion with Rome while keeping their Eastern rites. The Orthodox theological tradition has a specific and strong critique of the Uniate model as an ecclesiological problem, arguing that it treats Eastern Christian communities as branches of a Roman institution rather than as expressions of a genuine and self-governing Eastern Church. The Vatican’s own 1993 document Balamand Statement acknowledged that the method of creating Eastern Catholic churches out of Orthodox communities, called proselytism in the document, is no longer an acceptable approach to Catholic-Orthodox relations. This history is real and it is relevant to how your conversion will be perceived by Orthodox Christians, particularly if you enter through an Eastern Catholic church. Understanding it does not invalidate your decision. It does equip you to engage honestly with Orthodox interlocutors who raise it rather than being caught off guard by historical arguments you are not prepared to address. The creation of Eastern Catholic churches has a complex history that includes both genuine religious conviction and political manipulation, and acknowledging that complexity honestly is part of the integrity that serious theological engagement requires.

Life in the Catholic Church Will Offer You a Different Kind of Certainty

One of the genuine motivations that Orthodox converts to Catholicism frequently describe is the desire for a clearer and more stable form of doctrinal certainty than Orthodoxy, with its more dispersed authority structure, provides in practice. Eastern Orthodoxy has no single authoritative teaching body equivalent to the Catholic Magisterium. The various autocephalous Orthodox churches, Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Antiochian, and others, sometimes disagree with each other on theological, canonical, and pastoral questions, and there is no mechanism for definitive resolution of those disagreements short of a pan-Orthodox council whose authority is recognized by all the churches. Recent disagreements within Orthodoxy, including the schism between the Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Russian Orthodox Church over the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, illustrate that the Orthodox communion can fracture on serious canonical and ecclesiastical questions in ways that have no clear resolution mechanism. The Catholic Church offers, in contrast, a single authoritative Magisterium with a defined head, the Bishop of Rome, whose decisions on faith and morals under specific conditions are considered irreformable. For someone who values clear, authoritative, and definitive answers to theological questions, this represents a genuine advantage of the Catholic structure. The cost is accepting the specific Catholic claims about papal authority that make this certainty possible. Whether that cost is worth paying, and whether the Catholic account of authority is actually what Christ intended for his Church, is the central question your conversion asks you to answer. The certainty is real if the Catholic claim is true. The question is whether you are genuinely convinced the claim is true or whether you are simply drawn to the kind of certainty it would provide if it were.

The Saints and Spiritual Tradition of Orthodoxy Remain Yours as a Catholic

When you enter the Catholic Church from Eastern Orthodoxy, you do not leave behind the saints, the spiritual fathers, the theological tradition, and the liturgical heritage of the Eastern Church. The saints of the undivided Church, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, Seraphim of Sarov, and many others, are honored by the Catholic Church as well as by Orthodoxy. The hesychast tradition of Eastern Christian spirituality, the tradition of interior prayer and contemplative practice developed by the Desert Fathers and systematized by Gregory Palamas, is a genuine inheritance of the universal Church that Catholic contemplatives have drawn on throughout the centuries. The Jesus Prayer, the tradition of the Elder or spiritual father as a guide in the interior life, the theology of theosis as the goal of Christian life, the rich iconographic tradition as a theological language, all of these are part of the Eastern Christian heritage that Catholic converts from Orthodoxy are not asked to abandon. The Church does not ask you to become a Western Christian in your spirituality when you enter full communion with Rome. If you enter through an Eastern Catholic church, the liturgical and spiritual tradition of your background will remain fully intact within a Catholic context. Even if you enter through the Latin rite, the Eastern Christian spiritual tradition is available to you through Eastern Catholic communities, through the writings of the Fathers, and through the long tradition of Eastern Christian influence on Catholic contemplative life. Bring your Eastern formation with you as a gift to the community you are entering, not as something to be set aside in order to fit in.

The Intellectual Tradition of Both Churches Has Resources Worth Knowing Deeply

A convert from Eastern Orthodoxy who enters the Catholic Church brings one of the richest theological formations available in Christianity, and engaging seriously with the Catholic intellectual tradition from that starting point produces some of the most substantive Catholic theological thinking possible. The Catholic intellectual tradition, with Aquinas at its center but extending through Augustine, Bonaventure, Newman, de Lubac, von Balthasar, and Ratzinger, approaches many of the same theological questions that the Eastern tradition addresses, often from significantly different methodological perspectives. A convert from Orthodoxy who knows Florovsky and Meyendorff will find Ratzinger and de Lubac’s dialogue with Eastern theology genuinely illuminating. A convert who knows the hesychast tradition will find that John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila address similar terrain of interior prayer from a different but complementary angle. The Catholic intellectual tradition tends to be more systematically analytical and philosophically formal than the Eastern tradition, which is more apophatic, meaning more inclined to speak of what God is not rather than building positive theological systems. Neither approach is wrong. Both have genuine strengths and genuine limitations. The Catholic convert from Orthodoxy who engages seriously with the Western theological tradition rather than simply carrying Eastern theology into a Catholic institutional context will develop a theological perspective that is genuinely richer for having access to both, and will be in a position to contribute something valuable to the Catholic Church’s ongoing engagement with its Eastern heritage.

The Commitment Is a Serious One and You Should Make It From Genuine Conviction

Everything said in this article points toward the same honest conclusion. Converting from Eastern Orthodoxy to Catholicism is one of the most theologically serious decisions a Christian can make, precisely because both churches share so much of the same inheritance and because the differences between them, while genuine and significant, do not involve the same fundamental gulf that separates Christianity from other religions. You are not choosing between truth and falsehood in any simple sense. You are choosing between two serious and ancient claims about how Christ governs his Church and who speaks for him with definitive authority. The Catholic claim is that Peter’s successor, the Bishop of Rome, holds that authority in a specific and binding way. The Orthodox claim is that authority resides in the collegial witness of the episcopate received by the whole Church without any single bishop possessing jurisdiction over all others. Both claims have serious theological support and both have been held by sincere and serious Christian thinkers for nearly a millennium. Your decision to enter the Catholic Church is a decision that you have found the Catholic account of authority and doctrine more convincing, more historically grounded, and more consistent with the evidence of Scripture and Tradition as you have understood it. That decision needs to be made from genuine intellectual conviction and genuine spiritual discernment, not from aesthetic preference, practical convenience, or the persuasiveness of internet apologetics. Make it carefully, make it honestly, and make it with the full weight of what it costs, because the community you are leaving is one that possesses genuine sacramental life and genuine Christian faith, and the community you are entering asks you to acknowledge that truth even as you commit yourself fully to the one you have chosen.