Leaving the Mormon church for good

The one and only obsticle of joining the Catholic church for me is getting the nerve to tell my Mormon mother that I have decided to become Catholic. My mother has been Mormon virtually my whole life, and still believes in the church. She's somewhat active, although she does take a Sunday off or two to do personal things with family and whatnot. She still smokes and drinks coffee, which are huge No-No's in the church.

I don't think she's anti-Catholic per se, it's just that TBM's (true-believing Mormons) believe that once you've gone through the temple, you're pretty much as committed as you can get. And I've been through the temple. I took out my temple endowments, which is a HUGE HUGE thing in the Mormon church. So for me to not only stop wearing my garments, but to completely renounce my Mormon heritage and convert to Catholicism would be quite a shock to her.

But I have to be baptized a Catholic. I feel very strongly that I have to do this. There's not a lot of Want involved in this - it's like a compulsion at this point. I have to do whatever it takes to be closer to Christ. I want to have my name taken off of the records of the Mormon church, but I fear that if I do, my mother will find out and be very unhappy. Plus if they find out that I am leaving the Mormon church to become Catholic, they might excommunicate me. Now, I don't mind that per se, as long as they stated on my paperwork that I was excommunicated due to herecy because I was converting to the Catholic church. But I fear they would just put Heresy on my records next to the excommunication verdict, or nothing at all, and my mother would find out and I'd have some questions to be answered.

Plus a lot of times, when you ask for your records to be removed, they send someone over from the church or they decide to hold a Court of Love for you (which is MormonSpeak for a group of men who are going to excommunicate you) instead of just taking your names off the record.

The closer I get to baptism, the more I want to get my name taken off of the rolls of the Mormon church. Maybe I'll go ahead and do it and to krunk with the consequences.