It's not particularly good style, IMO. The reader has to constantly remind themselves what your particular definition of try and catch do (in particular, what their side-effects are).

Such temptations exist in other languages as well ... have you ever had to maintain e.g. C code where the original programmer decided to #define their own aliases for standard C keywords, perhaps in imitation of some other language?

eval {} and if ($@) {} may not be quite as attractive, but it is immediately clear to anyone with appreciable perl experience what they do (including side-effects). Fewer bytes too. ^_^