Thank you for your recommendations. A couple of those books are sitting on my desk right now. They are interesting, but when I ask what I need to learn in order to be a good Catholic, “all of it” cannot be the answer. I’ve never met anyone at church who knows all of it. Next to none of it is required for the rites of initiation.
What I am looking for, which I think I have been clear about, is what specific things I need to learn so I can live as a Catholic, fulfilling all of my obligations, without neglecting anything due to ignorance.
A good catholic first is a good christian. That means to be an ardent follower of Christ…not because he judges you, but because He loves you. Everything you do should be done out of love for Jesus. 1 Cor 13 is the famous description of love by St Paul. It describes a number of characteristics of one who loves…a perfect love is all of these. Only God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) is a perfect love. We can strive to be like God (as Jesus suggests in the Gospel) in love, but we must accept the fact that God’s love is totally a “Giving of love,” not a receiving of love. To that end, continue to seek ways to love as God loves us. We will never achieve perfection in this life. Again as Paul says in 1 Cor 13…Love will become perfect when we see God face-to-face.
OK. So far it seems the Catholic Church doesn’t enter in to my recommendation. But you will see that it does in the same way the tools of the carpenter enter into his profession. Of themselves they cannot build or repair, but when taken up by a carpenter, first as an apprentice then as a skilled workman.
The Church then in a broad sense has been the tools Jesus left us (with His gift of Mercy and Everlasting life before He returned to Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.
The Church from its beginning with Jesus and then His apostles was place here by them to strengthen His followers and enable them to bring others to Him. A beautiful gift left us by Jesus and fostered first by His Apostles, then by those who knew Jesus or knew Him through their personal familiarity with the Apostles. They passed on what they had learned first by speaking directly to the new followers of “The Way,” then later, as the Church grew, by letters (epistles and Gospels). They struggled against the tyranny of non-believers, and against the heresies of misinterpretation of Jesus’ message. Ultimately, they collected the writings that truly reflected Jesus’ Word, and discarded the rest as being tainted with heretical views.
Over the millennium, the Church has despite pressure from without, and pressures from within has grown and survived, not just because of what was done by men in women, though many have been lifted up as examples as “saints” most of which were converts like you. No, the Church survives and grows because Jesus Himself assured us that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against His Church.
Through the millennia, the Church has suffered the pain of separation of brethren, but his should not be construed as a separation of our brethren from Jesus or salvation. Though they are separated from the Church, they be so because they have rejected some of the various tools that Jesus and the Apostles gave us, the Mass (still essentially the same form that it was when instituted at the last supper, and formulated by the Apostles and early Church Fathers Reference Dr Scott Hahn (a searching convert like yourself) at
www.Scotthahn.com/books. I recommend you start with his search “Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism.”
Other tools discarded by those who turned away from the Church, but not from Jesus, are the Sacraments…very strong tools to strengthen we apprentices of the Lord. Reference another convert Dr Brant Pitre, especially his “Jewish Roots of the Eucharist.” You’ve perhaps had enough books to go find and read. So first go to
Youtube.com and search on “Drbrantpitre.” One of the first on the list you will find is his presentation of “Jewish roots of the Eucharist.” There are others I could recommend, many of them converts to the Church. You could almost envision God strengthening His Church by the energy and experiences of the converts that come to the Church. And having been deprived of all of these gifts of the Church are more appreciative of their value than we who have been here from birth.
There are still plenty of heretics out there writing books and claiming to know the real message of Jesus, but it still comes down to …if you want to build up the following of Jesus, and out of love for Him continue His ministry here on earth, wouldn’t you want to use the most complete bag of ‘tools’ that have already been proven by many master builders who came before us??
All of that comes down to, I don’t think you will find a list of things that make you a “good Catholic.” unless a list of minimums as you suggested earlier. I sometimes wish there were a precise list of “how to get to Heaven.” But then that is exactly what prevented the rich man from doing what Jesus told him in order to become His follower. Without love, even if there were a list, you would be dangerously close to being like the Pharisees that Jesus was critical of, not because they were irreligious, but because they relegated Heaven to a list of Merit badges.
Rather, strengthen your ‘carpentry skills’ by utilizing the tools of the Church, the Mass, the Sacraments, the Community. Then be the hands and feet of our Lord here on Earth to continue His ministry with all you encounter. As good carpenters, we kind of build our own stairs to Heaven! Stay blest, little brother. Welcome Home.
Just follow the congregation as well as you can, and don’t worry because everyone has been through not knowing what’s going on when they go to Mass on vacation, for instance, and they have different rules about kneeling.