Is Catholicism really mysterious?

  • Thread starter Thread starter fakename
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
F

fakename

Guest
That is, is Catholicism a religion that is more focused on the mysterious or not?

For me, I always tended to think of Catholicism as being more real and intelligible than secular things -for me the secular is mysterious and strange but religious and philosophical things are actually really tangible.

Does anyone else feel this way or not? Why or why not?
 
It isn’t that we focus on the mysterious at all. Rather, we focus on God. It just so happens that God is a mystery to us as we could never understand Him.
 
I don’t know what it is but Roman Catholicism does have this sort of mystic allure to it, I think its how elaborate the church services are because iconography makes me think of God as a powerful Lord and God is mysterious, also people think of rosaries when you talk about Catholicism and in a rosary there are mysteries and a lot of non Catholics don’t know how the rosary works so it is mysterious.
 
Good question, my friend. Deo gratias!

I recommend this encyclical for you.

vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html

It is by Blessed John Paul II. It is about Faith and Reason, about how both are necessary, and how they both work together.

You could say it is about the relationship between the Supernatural and the Natural.

It opens with these lines:

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”

May your human spirit rise on these wings!
 
There’s a cool connection between mystery and sacrament and plan.

We do not find the word sacrament in the Bible. Sacrament is a Latin word. The origins of our Christian Scriptures, however, are in the Greek language. Hence the word for sacrament we find in the Bible is the Greek word mysterion, “mystery.”

Today the English word mystery is frequently used to mean “something we cannot understand.” (“How she could have all that money and still be so unhappy is a mystery to me.”) The Greek word mysterion is usually translated in our English Bibles by the word plan. The wonderful, mysterious plan that God had before creation began to take flesh in Jesus and to draw all of creation into unity and a harmony so spectacular and breathtaking that the very idea is too wonderful for us. This plan is something we never fully understand. This is the fundamental meaning of sacrament found in the Bible.

americancatholic.org/Newsletters/CU/ac0893.asp
 
It is because God took this Woman as his bride. He gave her his life, assurance of prevailence, and immunity from error, and total Love, which is unity.
 
I agree with all the reasons here, it’s just that it’s not a mystery that we have mysteries and that’s my problem; people seem to talk about it out of proportion to how much is really beyond our understanding (we understand for instance, that God is out of our understanding so it shouldn’t be a source of wonderment for us).

It’s the same problem I have when people call themselves a sinner. We already know that we are sinners (mostly, it’s possible for some people to be perfect) so why mention it so much?

I simply doubt the reasonableness behind these aesthetic choices.
 
fakename said:
I agree with all the reasons here, it’s just that it’s not a mystery that we have mysteries and that’s my problem; people seem to talk about it out of proportion to how much is really beyond our understanding (we understand for instance, that God is out of our understanding so it shouldn’t be a source of wonderment for us).

It’s the same problem I have when people call themselves a sinner. We already know that we are sinners (mostly, it’s possible for some people to be perfect) so why mention it so much?

I simply doubt the reasonableness behind these aesthetic choices.
Click to expand...
There is a progression to knowledge.

At first, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Later, after some initial discovery, you come to the realization that there is much you do not know. and can even identify some of those things you don’t know (such as: how an airplane flies). From there, it is possible to set out on discovery. However, every further discovery reveals that there is something else of knowledge that is just beyond reach and the process starts again. That is what mystery is: something new waiting to be discovered, deeper than what had been known previously.

When we talk about mystery in the Church, it is not to hide things from view. Rather, it is to encourage the believer to dig deeper and discover more. This is one reason why people read mystery novels. They want to discover as much as they can before the revealing. At the end of the novel, they will know what they discovered and their reward for reading will be that much greater.

Similarly, when we enter Heaven, God will reveal everything. Our reward will in part be based on how much we discovered about Him while we walked the Earth.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top