The Catechism seems to say that I am already Catholic but just don’t know it yet (by virtue of my baptism). But then there are these annoying quotes by these dead popes.
You are “in” the Catholic church in by virtue of a valid Baptism, as are all Christians. But you are
not Catholic in the sense of affirming the Faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” Faith in this sense is both a conviction of the heart and a public affirmation of Christ. For Catholics, the Church is an essential ingredient in the adult appreciation of the full enchilada.
You haven’t yet summoned up the desire, the will, the confidence, the guts (or whatever it is that you need) to say: “Lord, I surrender. I believe this is Your Church and I want to live Your faith on Your terms.”
By the way – just supposin’ – if someone from an OSAS tradition were to think that affirming, “I’m Catholic!” and getting himself confirmed would clinch his case in OSAS terms, I would remind him that even the narrowest view of “no salvation outside the Church” does not promise salvation merely by the fact of being
inside the Church. I am sure you would agree that the unfitness for salvation of some of our membership is legendary.
Now scholarship in any other discipline would be that the most recent sources would supercede the older sources. So woohoo, if I use normal scholastic methods, I am already Catholic and just don’t know it yet.
But I’m not sure Catholicism works that way. From my understanding that in Catholicism you start with what is incapable of being incorrect and work backwards from that. So maybe you do have to start with these really annoying quotes by dead popes. If I do that (since I am certainly not invincibly ignorant), I must certainly go directly to hell.
I dunno. Starting with those scary dead popes worked for me. Of course, I did not come into the Church because of what some “dead pope” said. I just came to the point where what the Catholic Church taught on all kinds of stuff I had previously disagreed with ultimately made a whole lot more sense than my objections. It made a whole lot more sense that the Church AS the Body of Christ should be a reliable promulgator of the faith AND a reliable avenue of His grace than that it should not.
What I am totally unable to do is to read the Catechism and then read these quotes by dead popes and then come out with anything that begins to make any amount of sense. But since they it all has to make sense, my only logical conclusion is that I must be severely reading comprehension challenged.
Yeah. “Reading comprehension challenged” pretty much says it.
The Catechism takes a broader, more theological and mystical view of the boundaries of the Catholic Church than the view the dead popes were working from in their statements.
The dead popes were responding to contemporary heresies and (prior to the discovery of the New World) answering the question:
What does it take to be saved?
The Catechism looks at the question:
What is the Catholic Church?
It stands to reason that while the answers might overlap, they might not be exactly parallel. The view of the *Catechism *is much broader than that of the dead popes whose question was fundamentally narrower.
