LOL…well Petrus you can always be sure you are at CAF when you are told you’re not really a Catholic. Folks here would reduce to Church to 1/10th its size, but they would all be robot followers without a question about anything. That apparently is what they desire,since they tell us we are not wanted so often. I must be told that at least 10 times a week. No religion I know tries so hard through its members to reduce their numbers. It’s another of the oddities of fundamentalist Catholicism. Pretty much in line with the great unchurched fundies who tell most everyone they are going ot hell too. Fundamentalism makes for strange strange bedfellows.
SpiritMeadow, your gentle take on things is so refreshing! And you are right about the fundamentalist Catholics, or “Integrists” – there is a bunker mentality at work, and I suspect they are very upset to discover there are people like us inside their bunker. This may be particularly true of recent converts from Protestantism to Catholicism, who resent that the Church isn’t the archconservative bastion they might have expected to find it.
I’ve taught thousands of students and worked with hundreds of faculty members since 1980; I’ve worshiped in and contributed to many Catholic parishes; I’ve participated in dozens of fascinating international conferences with theologians, philosophers, historians and scientists. I had never once told I was not a Catholic until coming to Catholic Answers and voicing an opinion outside the rigid framework followed by the Magisteriobots.
C’est la vie.
On another note, I’m interested in the phenomenology of fundamentalism, and why it crops up in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity, in various strains of Islam, in Judaism, and in still other religious traditions. I think it has to do with people needing institutional security in a time of great social, political, and scientific upheaval. Bill Shea points out that opposition to Galileo had to do in part with a “crisis of confidence in the seventeenth-century Italian mind.” Since Rome had just lost half of Christendom to Protestants, and since the Holy Roman Emperor’s troops had besieged and sacked Rome, and since the Florentine Republic had collapsed, Rome was not in any psychological state to entertain yet another novelty (heliocentrism) that might serve as a destabilizing factor.
I suspect a similar problematic is at work today, with global warming, the rapidly approaching end of oil, growth of religious pluralism, proliferation of everything the Internet has to offer, decline of priestly vocations, plummeting of Church attendance, etc. In such a climate, the Integrists regard any dissent from the Magisterium – even on the part of faithful Catholics – as a looming threat that will destabilize the status quo, and therefore to be opposed at all costs.
I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.
Faithfully yours,
Petrus
Peace