Marco the Mormon?

When Marco Rubio dies, there'll be no Mormon rush to baptize him by proxy.

And no, it's not because he was a Jewish victim of the Holocaust.

BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins recently revealed Florida's junior Senator and senior conservative as a childhood Latter-Day Saint. Rubio's first cousins said that "at around the age of eight" the son of Cuban exiles was baptized a Mormon. From trips to Utah to idolizing the Osmonds, as Rubio's cousin Michelle recalls, Marco was "totally into it."

But by the age of eleven, Marco ditched the Book of Mormon and returned to the Roman Catholic Church. "He really convinced the whole family to switch religions," Michelle told BuzzFeed. And though Marco was receiving his First Communion and Confirmation, his name appeared (and still does) in the Latter-Day membership records. Marco, his spokesman confirms, never requested to have his name removed.

No one ought to speculate as to why the Rubios left their Latter-Day faith, at least until Rubio's forthcoming memoir An American Son is released, but Marco's bizarre faith journey should be a lesson for Catholics everywhere.

The Church's shepherds clearly need to getter a better handle on their sheep. Faith, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, who was coincidentally talking about freedom, is not something our children genetically inherit. If parents are unable to nourish their child's faith development, then it is up to the Church and its Bishops to effectively catechize. In short, the Catholic story doesn't end at baptism.

Catholics have been roaming for other reasons, too. See, for instance, how Marco describes what piques his worship interest nowadays:

"We've also established a relationship with a non-Catholic church that we've enjoyed going to services there for years," the Senator told Politico's Mike Allen. The pastors at Miami's Christ Fellowship "just do a great job of teaching the written Word." Later, Rubio admitted that he "enjoyed their sermons" and "the way they teach."

Christ Fellowship is loosely affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention -- or now, the Great Commission Baptists. From the looks of its website, Christ Fellowship's services must be a blast! Perhaps Marco would find himself among friends with Steubenville's charismatics.

Albeit uncomfortable to conservatives, all is still fine. What might finally trip up Rubio, at least among conservative Catholics, is Christ Fellowship's interpretation of Scripture. As copied verbatim from the Southern Baptist Convention, Christ Fellowship believes Scripture is "a perfect treasure of divine instruction," one "without any mixture of error," and therefore "totally true and trustworthy."

As my friend and editor Jeremy Lott pointed out in Crisis Magazine, Rubio isn't the only Catholic to get swept up by this Biblical fundamentalism. Tim Pawlenty left the Church for the "dynamic relevance of Scripture" at his wife's Baptist church. Lott warned that if the Church does not do a better job of communicating the importance of Scripture, "it's going to create an evangelistic difficulty for the Church."

First, the Church needed to set Scripture readers straight. The Pontifical Biblical Commission's 1993 document "The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church" forcefully rebuffed the "dangerous" fundamentalist reading of the Bible as one that "invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide."

Catholics can certainly hope Marco sticks to enjoying the "way" Christ Fellowship teaches, and almost nothing else.

And for now, he still seems committed to the Catholic "what." Rubio also told Mike Allen that he finds daily Mass and confession "very useful." Ultimately, Rubio understands his Catholic faith as a "source of strength and a source of clarity and gives everything some perspective. When your perspective is eternity...you get a better perspective on what matters and what doesn't."

Unlike the Mormons, Catholics don't baptize by proxy, so the time to get and keep converts isn't so long.