There is nothing that has been done by an Eastern religion that has not been first done by either Catholics, at some point in history, or by our Jewish ancestors. In the 70’s and to this day meditation is seen as an “eastern” thing but almost all of the doctors of the church meditated deeply. Mantras are the words that those in the East use to describe a phrase repeated over and over again…but we have ejaculations and other prayers that we do exactly the same thing, too.
I had a great campus minister in college who actually was fascinated by the fact that the “Catholics did it first” and did a Ph.D. dissertation on that. He didn’t do this at a top Catholic theological school but at a highly secular but highly well-ranked college. Not Ivy league but up there. He said that his was the first thesis in the professor’s memory that successfully put Catholicism in a favorable light and brought new information to them that they’d never heard.
He was raised Catholic and began his research as a joke in college when a professor said that an Eastern religion “invented” something he knew from Mass. He needed extra credit and wrote a paper disproving the professor’s claim. The professor was amazed and thanked him for the correction, but he kept at it. He wanted to know if all of these crazy ‘amazing’ new age and eastern things could be traced to something similar in Catholicism. Something that developed independently.
And he did. And he said thats when he discovered that the Catholic Church had the whole truth…because there’s nothing that one of the saints had not tried.
