Does the Richness of the Catholic Faith make it harder to explain to non-Catholics?

[T.A.Stobie_SFO]

I have found that many non-Catholics have difficulty understanding the richness of the Catholic faith including how its many tenets are highly interrelated.

The Catholic Faith is infinitely rich with unlimited depths built on the totality of God. We can examine the faith at many different depths with differing answers, all truthful, to many questions. I try to discern the depth of the question and give an answer at the depth, but often the asker wants to span mulitple depths on different parts of the question and this can bring in a lot of confusion.

To consider an aspect you need to consider its relationships to other aspects and often, when you do, you are hit with but that is outside of what I asked, when it is not. For true understanding, you often need to understand the relationships to other aspects as they help fully define what the aspect in question is.

Has anyone else encountered this phenomena?

 

[mkw]

Explaining the Doctrines and the “rules” (for lack of a better word) is really quite easy. But how can you express in just words the richness of a faith that has been in place since Jesus walked among us! As a recent convert, understanding the doctrine of faith was not difficult at all, but exsperiencing (spell check please lol) the great beauty of 2000 years of rich history will take me a lifetime, and then I still won’t fully have a grasp of it all.

I thought I envied cradle Catholics at first. I mean to have grown up with the true faith and in the Church that Christ established, what a wonderful blessing. But I find, sadly, that so many of them dont fully appriciate it, or at the very least, take it for granted.

I don’t know if I have any gifts/talents/good works to bring to Mother Church and offer to God, but I do know I have a Passion and an immense zeal for my faith, a love that I never thought existed in my heart. I get told to “tone” it down a bit, but it took God 41 years to finally get my attention, and I’m not about to hide my love and zeal for Him.

Back to topic. Expressing the richness of 2000 years of our faith is difficult at best. Teach and explain the faith, let the Holy Spirit work on the feelings and warmth offered by Holy Mother Church, the ONLY church which Christ established here on earth.

OOPS!! there I go,got a little carried away again.

God’s love and peace to all…

my apologies for spelling,blasted spell check button broken

 

[Hesychios]

I most certainly can, and does, make it harder to defend the faith! Particularly when the questioner is hostile and looking for simple black/white types of resolutions.

If the “questioner” is already predisposed to take a negative view of anything “Catholic” they can easily skirt from one thing to another, looking for one-word responses and refuse to admit that there is an integrated system thought, where the entire concept is in harmony.

We must remember that the Apostles themselves were constantly confused by Christ, wanting to hear one thing and hearing something (at times) totally unexpected that they could not work into their own predispositions (for example when Our Lord commanded them to eat His flesh, the idea was like “chew or munch” on Him, what a surprise!). Yet these were not hostile listeners, they were His friends and students, imagine how perplexed they must have felt defending what Jesus would say when they did not yet have a complete understanding themselves!

We live in an age of disbelief and scepticism. I really think that some people feel that trying to destroy a Catholics’ Faith, or preventing someone (anyone) from understanding this Faith, or obstructing the public from genuine encounters with it, is a form of “progress”! Some people actually think that the world would be better served if it was rid of us, the church is mocked and ridiculed, problems are exaggerated and misrepresented.

Yet, the world is starving, and genuinely hurting for lack of Christian Spirituality. Look how many forms of “substitutes” there are for genuine Catholic-Orthodox spirituality there are: Alchoholism-drug abuse; Materialism; sexual promiscuity and experimentation; New Age and pagan mythology taken seriously; Astrology and the black arts (attractive to young people mostly); escaping to Far Eastern Religion or cults; even Masonic fellowship etc.

Society today lacks a sense of Objective Truth, relativism abounds, people are rootless and unhappy. Eventually many if not most will discover how empty and unfulfilling these other paths have been for them, and feel that their values have betrayed them. How unsatisfactory is a life without Christ!

Ours is the Faith of Cyril of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, John Cassian, Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, El Greco, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Mother Theresa of Calcutta, etc. etc.

Our Faith is sooo deep and rich, so profoundly nourishing, that people will refuse to see it for what it really is. They fear the Faith, it makes them uncomfortable. Their first impulse might be to run, otherwise to attack it, but if they would just open their hearts and minds, listen to the message and explore the spirituality they will be drawn to it…

 

[Della]

If by “richness” you mean “fullness”, I agree. Protestantism is, by its very nature, a denial of the fullness that Christ wished us to have. The source of this denial is the idea that everything of the flesh is intrinsically evil while everything of the spirit is good. Each Protestant denom functions, more or less, on this premise.

So, while the Episcopalians (closest to Catholic of the Protestant denoms) have all severn sacraments, they do not believe what Catholics believe about them. For example, they deny the theological concept of transubstantiation for a more consubstantiation model that is not clearly defined as such. It is a tacit denial of the flesh of Christ due to a distaste for things of the flesh in matters of religion.

Evangelicals see the flesh as intrinsically evil to an even greater degree. It is why they have so great a problem with Marian doctrines, for instance. They don’t want to think that our salvation was brought about through Christ taking the flesh of Mary, in the form of her egg, as his own to become the Son of man. There are those who will argue quite strongly for the idea that the Holy Spirit implanted a specially made egg into Mary just to avoid admitting that the flesh of Mary is the flesh of Christ. They think that Mary was contaminated by the sin of Adam–they will not accept the Church’s teaching that she was immaculately conceived because to them ALL flesh except Christ’s is intrinsically evil.

So, the teachings of the Church that necessarily deal with the flesh are the ones that have been jettisoned or explained away by most Protestant denoms. Their minds cannot conceive of the fullness of Christ’s Incarnation and ALL that it means because of their distaste for the flesh and their wanting to limit God’s actions of love to what they can understand or feel comfortable with. If we understand this fact, we can try to help them get past this mistaken idea and attitude, but since it is, ironically, a fleshly one that they cling to believing their salvation depends on it, it is hard to shift their thinking and open their minds to the fullness of the faith that embraces the flesh and sees it as fallen but not totally bad.