Why do Catholics need to discuss the quality of the faith lives of other Catholics, to put them into categories? Why are we so fascinated with looking at other people’s religious behavior and giving it descriptive terms?
Oh that’s right; we’re all programmed by the media that we should categorize and focus on each others’ faults because that makes Good News stories.
Alan
First because we are to instruct the ignorant and admonish the sinner. We can’t do that without communicating, and communicating in instructional or admonishing situations often requires words.
When I hear Catholics say *during Mass *that a woman whom they opine has too many children should have her tubes tied, I see a Catholic who has been poorly catechized and who has learned more from the likes of P&S than from the Church. When I hear a young person say that abortion is all right because look at P&S, I know they need instruction.
And when I write to someone about the situation, some phrase can be necessary.
And in a way it is better to have a phrase like this which people understand because then we don’t have to personalize it by bringing specific people in as illustrations of what we are talking about. If I could simply say “The advicacy of abortion by liberal Catholics confuses many of our young people as to the teachings of the Church,” then I don’t have to drag people like Edward Kennedy into the discussion.
I would not to have to clarify these issues for my children. I would have loved for them not to know about abortion and SSM until their teens, which is when I found out about them. But this is not the situation. I need to teach my children, and for that i need words.
I don’t care about these people’s faith lives. That is their business. But when they put forth the idea that a Catholic can support legal abortion, when they cite St Thomas Aquinas in support of that stance, when they attack the Church like Sebilius does, Catholocs need to be able to discuss the wrongness of what they are doing. I’m not saying liberal Catholocs are going to Hell, but i need to be able to say that they are confusing people, doing the wrong thing, etc.
And none of us would even know liberal Catholics were Catholic if they didn’t do things like saying that their Catholic Faith impells them to support a woman’s right to choose to hire someone to kill her unborn child, as Caroline Kennedy did recently.
We are not the ones dragging Catholcism into the discussion–they are.
) you are incorrect here.
