That’s true, but lax rules will make spiritual things less important or make God into a sort of doormat.
On the other hand, draconian rules turn God into a tyrant, and few people are on board with that. This is a good example of why a “via media” is an attractive proposition.
Great reasons. I think the Anglicans might agree they are muddling their way though. After all they have switched back and forth on the same issues, so they have to admit they can be and even frequently are wrong about some things.
I think the experience with fallibility has been emerging for the last 100+ years with the acceptance of contraceptives to ordaining women to actively celebrating homosexual relationships among the members and clergy. It’s actually a mess. Some Episcopal churches call themselves Episcopalian even though they are not in communion with TEC anymore.
That IMHO is a huge problem with Catholic Catechesis. I’m a cradle Catholic but didn’t get alot of questions answered until High School until I had a ‘Social Justice’ class that was really a philosophy class. The teacher there was a Basilian priest who was frankly the best teacher I ever had. He would field any question from us 17 year old know it all boys and answer with logic and reason. That class did more to strengthen my faith than almost anything before or since.
You make a very good point. Admittedly, it’s one I don’t understand; but my thinking has been described as quite linear and black and white before.
I have always felt that those kind of churches try to screw too much into your mind; that they can have the sort of “Jesus is my imaginary friend” mentality people like Bill Maher find so ridiculous. I prefer a structured liturgy that gives the congregant the room to make sense of Jesus on the terms that are most helpful to him.
While I do agree with this there have been Sundays I wouldn’t have gone to Mass if it hadn’t been an obligation. I have never regretted going afterwards. I think of it like eating vegetables: kids eat them because the parents say so, but that in no way diminishes the fact that Vegetables are healthy for them.
You’d be amazed by how many people in the Episcopal church I attended wanted to be there and attended consistently.
This - THIS! - is what I crave in my faith. Fortunately, it’s possible to find in the Catholic Church among the clergy and deacons. I do what I can to attend our parish adult ed lectures and make sure to read up on theology. It’s the laity that tends more to fall back on “because-the-Church-said-it-so-there!” We need to overcome this streak of anti-intellectualism. We’re a historically a Church of scholars, philosophers, and scientists; we can do better than those glib answers.
I attended RCIA and chose to remain Episcopalian, as did my sister at a neighboring parish, and we both came away with the impression that RCIA was a bait-and-switch. They told us what they thought we wanted to hear.
Via media seems to me like a good long-term strategy, but one that results in short-term errors. There’s a course-correcting mechanism built in, but a via media approach kind of implies that swerving out of one’s lane is going to be something that happens occasionally… just not so much as to run off the cliff.
No, they didn’t say it was OK not to believe it. They said that faith was a “journey.” Perhaps they had journey-to-see-things-our-way in mind, but I was misled to believe that there would be time to sort through all of those issues.
First off, all disagreement is willful. Nobody can involuntarily disagree with something. Second, it’s absolutist statements like this, (“believe it, or else!”), that do, indeed, cause me to question whether or not I should remain Catholic.