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Mystophilus
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I would call my friends who are women priests and those who are gay Anglicans, clergy or lay, and ask them how they were going.
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Nine_Two
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I’d wonder what made the Pope change his mind and look forward to hearing his name read out in the diptychs at the next Primatial Divine Liturgy I attend.
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kookieduck
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I would rejoice! I’m working toward converting to the RCC and would love it! Please pray for me that I will be a Catholic soon! I’m praying the Rosary and reading Catholicism for Dummies, The Word Among Us, Catechism of the Catholic Church and the New American Bible trying to educate myself all I can.
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MartinJordan
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Beautiful! I hope you will consider going to a Catholic church for Mass.
Godbless you on your journey
MJ
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Godith
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Apologies if I sounded arrogant, brother.“I” “I” “I” That’s a lot of i’s in there my friend. Why not reflect on the possibility that 2000 plus years of Divinely protected and guided Sacred Tradition (coupled with Sacred Scriptures) knows a heck of a lot more than you or me? The reason the Catholic Church has stood the test of time is because it has always stood for Truth. It has always stood for Christ. In almost every age that meant standing against the opinions and ways of the worldly societies the Church was present in. Not trying to sound antagonistic but asking and hoping that you might deny yourself and with a humble heart take a closer look at Catholicism. Christ is right here within her. You don’t need to look any furtherGod Bless.
It wasn’t my intention to place my personal take on things above that of learned theologians. The OP was asking what we personally would do, so I answered that.There is much of beauty and Truth in the Catholic Church. Christ is there, absolutely. My friend who is Catholic has taken me to Mass a few times, and I have sensed the Presence of God. He is the same God who is present in my own church. If it were not so, the decision would be easy - become Catholic straight away. However, since I can both meet with God in my own church, and not be asked to sign up to doctrine I have serious doubts about, I’m staying put.
Btw, for the poster who wasn’t sure, I am a she.
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Malachi4U
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Welcome home! I nearly got a divorce when I came home to His Church. The preacher in our old Baptist church and all our “friends” told my wife it was more important to get a divorce than to try to stay married to a Catholic! Anyway, God does not believe in divorce so I carried my cross and 10 years later we are still married. In fact, when she got over her bigotry of the Catholic Church and actually found out what they actually believed, not what her preacher told her we believed, she is currently trying to get into RCIA. Praise God! I never tried to talk to her about the Catholic beliefs because it always started a fight so after a few attempts 10 years ago while still in that Baptist church I stopped. Over the next few years we never talked religion at home. She gradually started asking what I believed about this or that. She later told me that she discovered that what the Catholics believed actually made sense, did not contradict itself, and is what she discovered early Christians believed! An open mind and a few facts is leading her home too.
Gods peace,
Dan
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Contarini
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What document?
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Contarini
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Well, at the point described in Matt. 16 Peter was very much a member of the Church Militant, and had several embarrassing defeats in his future, including one just around the corner. . .
Agreed entirely. It’s not an either/or. The point is that there’s a right ordering to the covenant community, according to Catholic teaching, and that order centers on a personal successor to the person with whom Jesus initially made the covenant establishing the Church. I don’t claim that Matt. 16 proves this–I’ve frequently argued against the folks who say that Protestants think “Jesus lied” and nonsense like that–but I think the Catholic interpretation (at least in its more Eastward-leaning version–what the Coptic Catholic poster Mardukm would call “High Petrine” rather than “Absolutist Petrine”) makes better sense of Matt. 16 than the alternatives do. I cited the Long article because I think he makes a very nice case for this.
Certainly it could. It’s an attempt to express the truth of which this hyper-clericalism is the distortion.
Well, of course Peter isn’t the only member–that’s a bit of a straw man. And of course it’s not Peter’s body. But in the Catholic view as I understand it, we do need to be in communion with Peter in order to be fully members of Christ’s body. The alternatives as I see them are
- to make communion something purely “spiritual”
- to dismiss doctrine entirely, or
- to make communion dependent on doctrinal agreement, which subordinates personal relationship to intellectual constructs.
Right. But either this confession is doctrinally shaped or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then you have a church in which doctrine doesn’t matter and in which the word “Christian” comes to lose all meaning except “a nice person recognizing a theoretical tie to Jesus.” If it is, but you reject the Catholic view, then you always put communion under the sword of Damocles–you are always, at least in principle, watching to see if your brothers and sisters goof up and need to be separated from.
I have trouble with universal ordinary jurisdiction as well. But the “certainly not” assumes that we can find either the assertion or rejection of such a concept in the early Church–and as with many issues involving doctrinal development, I don’t think that’s true.
Edwin
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Contarini
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And that may be because you and I have different specific theological convictions–without more details I don’t know where our disagreements might lie.
Right. I’m not 100% sure what you’re talking about–are you talking about the privation theory of evil, basically? I certainly think that that’s the most promising approach to take. Of the three figures you mention, I’m most familiar with Augustine’s approach, and I think there are serious problems with it–as William S. Babcock has pointed out, Augustine traces evil back to Satan and then really can’t explain how Satan’s created will would turn away from God in the first place, without making God the author of evil. That may be where the “apophatic” aspect comes in–but surely one could make a case that this is a version of “making mother good.”
First of all, when I said that Catholicism can handle an amazing degree of internal critique, I was speaking more of what Newman meant when he said that Catholicism can assimilate all kinds of diverse, apparently hostile elements into itself. In other words, internal critique doesn’t make Catholicism as a paradigm dissolve–it makes it stronger and richer. I was not talking about how the hierarchy handles dissent. That has varied, but has certainly erred more often on the side of undue harshness than of undue laxity. I don’t see the present policies of the Vatican as being anywhere near as draconian as many people claim. Relatively few people are disciplined, and these people often face no practical negative consequences from being censured. In some cases, to put it cynically but realistically, theologians censured by the Vatican actually profit career-wise from the controversy. I don’t want to play down the anxiety, frustration, and internal conflict that these folks feel when they are condemned by the Church they love and desire to serve, or the often misguided and heavy-handed ways in which the CDF goes about communicating with dissident theologians, or the serious inconvenience many folks face from such disciplinary action. But there are many, many theologians, parish priests, lay religious educators, etc., not to speak of ordinary parishioners, who routinely and openly dissent from official teaching without the slightest negative consequences. (Indeed, one of the injustices of the system under which the CDF operates–an injustice pointed out by Charles Curran–is that one person may get in trouble for teaching something that other theologians are also teaching without the CDF taking official notice of them at all.) And in fact nearly all the dissenters are dissenting on a narrow band of specific hot-button issues, and in most cases have quite obviously and self-consciously set themselves against longstanding, well-established teaching. There’s plenty of exploration of controversial issues around the boundaries of church teaching that goes on with the apparent full approval of the Vatican. Fr. Raymond Brown, for instance, has been blasted by conservative Catholics for his supposed “liberal” scholarship, but he was honored by several different Popes for that very scholarship, and as far as I know never faced any negative consequences except the disapproval of certain of his fellow-Catholics.
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Contarini
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Indeed, I would argue that the presence of doctrinal boundaries which are policed at least to some degree (though often inconsistently and in ham-fisted ways that do not well reflect the demands of Christian charity) makes intellectual inquiry livelier and more productive. It’s very easy for religious thought to become nebulous and narcissistic, simply expressing what one feels (based on one’s temperament and culture) ought to be true. Obviously one could argue (and atheists do) that the rigor and precision and intellectual complexity of Catholic theology is nothing but an elaborate fantasy. But if one accepts the premise that divine revelation is possible, then it’s possible to interact with its premises in a way that provides “pushback” in a manner somewhat analogous to the physical sciences. By this I mean not that theology is a matter of deducing propositions from facts (as Charles Hodge claimed, though perhaps he wasn’t as entirely wrong as it’s now fashionable to assert), but that when a scientist does an experiment there are tests that will show whether he or she is right or wrong. If you are a rocket scientist and you design the rocket based on false assumptions about the nature of physical reality, the “pushback” may be quite spectacular and catastrophic. (Note: I’m not denying Kuhn’s conclusions about the importance of “paradigms”–as he says, one can always keep producing “epicycles” to explain a theory that doesn’t provide satisfactory practical results. The point is that there are practical results with which a theory has to interact, and which provoke modifications to the theory.) Since revelation is a gracious act of God giving us knowledge of the divine surpassing our natural capacities (and thus not susceptible to empirical verification), authority provides the “pushback” in the case of theology. If you interpret the deposit of faith wrongly, at some point the Magisterium will rap you on your knuckles and say, “try to put this a bit differently.” And if you are an obedient Catholic, that’s what you do. This produces far more interesting results than simply saying, “I’m being oppressed, I’m being oppressed,” and soaring off into the stratosphere of your own private speculations. Hans Kung came up with a very interesting idea–indefectibility–as an alternative to infallibility. The Magisterium said, “Sorry, infallibility remains Catholic teaching.” Instead of going back to the drawing board and asking how indefectibility might provide a proper context for infallibility (a subject which I think still needs further exploration), Kung thumbed his nose at the Magisterium and began functioning, in all essentials, as if he were a Protestant theologian (including teaching on a Protestant theology faculty). It’s not clear to me that he’s produced any very interesting ideas since. Most creative Catholic theological work is done in a zone around the borders of orthodoxy, in the gray areas (just as with a Kuhnian scientific paradigm). Stay well inside the borders out of fear of being a heretic, and you simply repeat established conclusions (which has a good deal of value but isn’t something people are going to want to read in 500 years). Ignore the borders entirely, and you may still say much that has value, but a lot of your effort will be wasted in the long term, and as likely as not you’ll just wind up saying the obvious things that anyone of your culture would say.
Vatican II is a splendid example. The theologians whose work contributed to that Council were in many cases people who had been censured by the Church at some point. But instead of just ignoring the Church’s strictures, they continued to work within the Church’s boundaries and produced a renewal movement that remained faithful to historic orthodoxy while opening up lots of exciting new frontiers.
Vatican II is a splendid example. The theologians whose work contributed to that Council were in many cases people who had been censured by the Church at some point. But instead of just ignoring the Church’s strictures, they continued to work within the Church’s boundaries and produced a renewal movement that remained faithful to historic orthodoxy while opening up lots of exciting new frontiers.
Either one of us is seriously mistaken in what we think we’re observing, or you have radically different standards than I do.
What experience? I just don’t see how you can look at the chaotic, conflicted, seething reality of contemporary Catholicism and conclude any such thing. Are you sure you aren’t basing your judgments on this forum? (Even then I think that’s unfair–this forum is an incredibly exciting place as Internet forums go, where serious, deep issues are debated, often with a good deal of care and nuance. But lots of folks here do want pat answers. Most people do.)
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Contarini
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I find that a rather confusing set of claims. You acknowledge the reality that the inquiry you’re talking about does happen. But because you aren’t aware of an official statement saying that such inquiry is OK, you think that those who say it isn’t must be right. But that of course is to assume the principles of the “conservatives” from the start. Again, we probably have different standards here. I think that JPII’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae clearly puts a stamp of approval on intellectual inquiry, but you could point to his strong demand for fidelity to Church teaching as an unacceptable limit on such inquiry.
I don’t think it’s that inquiry is only tolerated to a point, but that answers are only accepted as legitimate if they don’t obviously violate previously established conclusions. You can ask any question, but if your answers ignore the conclusions to which the Church has already come, then the Church is going to rule your answers out of court. Given the absence of empirical verification in theology, as I said above, I think that such limits are necessary and that they foster rather than stifling creative work in theology.
Vatican II answers your question, I think. It came at the close of a period of far greater doctrinal strictness than the present one.
Academic inquiry always takes a long while to trickle down. It has a much better chance of doing so in Catholicism than in Protestantism, precisely because of the Catholic understanding of the unity and authority of the Church.
Fr. Robert Barron is a remarkable example of someone who is both an academic theologian and a popular communicator. There’s a lot of this kind of thing going on.
I’m not sure what you mean. If you’re expecting most Catholic laypeople do be doing exciting theological work, I think that’s an absurdly high standard. Reading the Catechism–which is a lengthy and complex work summarizing centuries of rich tradition–is quite a feat for most folks who aren’t academics. I’m very happy to see Catholics citing the Catechism–I wouldn’t dismiss that at all. The RCIA program I’ve just started attending is based on the catechism, whereas the one I attended in the 90s was much more liberal. The level of intellectual rigor and serious discussion that goes on in this one is much, much higher than in the more liberal one, where people just sort of emoted and the priest running the program made bizarre, sweeping statements that often contradicted Catholic doctrine and seemed to represent a highly garbled, simplistic version of things his seminary professors had taught him out of Rahner or Schillebeekx.
I don’t see that even based on the evidence of this forum. And I’m not sure what you mean by not talking on the record. Catholic theologians make their views quite publicly known.
Try this blog by a number of youngish Catholic moral theologians, many of them friends of mine from grad school. They range from moderately conservative to moderately liberal–they are often critical of the Magisterium though they are generally committed to staying within the parameters of Catholic orthodoxy. And they are clearly committed to communicating with non-academics.
I need to go have lunch with my wife (and prepare for my afternoon class and do lots of other stuff I should be doing) so I’ll have to leave it here. I hope to respond to your other points sometime, but the above is the issue I really wanted to make sure and address.
God bless,
Edwin
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mercytruth
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As a Catholic with reservations, I would paraphrase the words of the apostle Paul,
“can one part of the body say they have no need of the other?”. Are we to assume that that the Eastern Orthodox, the Anglican, the Lutheran, the other members of Christ’s body are not needed?
I am now reading a book by a Protestant minister who bravely endured years of torture for his Christian faith. Richard Wurmbrand was a Jewish man who converted to the Christian faith and suffered 14 years of imprisonment and torture in Romania.
**100 Prison Meditations **is brilliant in the way he is able to insert the wisdom of Catholic saints, Jewish scholars, philosophers and others in his short homilies.
Having met this most holy of saints before he died, I can tell you without reservation that it would be a sin against God for the Catholic church to ever say that they do not need this member of the body of Christ, even if he himself could not concur with everything that is of the Catholic faith. How then, do we relate with such members of the body of Christ, who are not of the Catholic fold because of their differences?
Is not this the question we should be asking?
God’s peace
micah
“can one part of the body say they have no need of the other?”. Are we to assume that that the Eastern Orthodox, the Anglican, the Lutheran, the other members of Christ’s body are not needed?
I am now reading a book by a Protestant minister who bravely endured years of torture for his Christian faith. Richard Wurmbrand was a Jewish man who converted to the Christian faith and suffered 14 years of imprisonment and torture in Romania.
**100 Prison Meditations **is brilliant in the way he is able to insert the wisdom of Catholic saints, Jewish scholars, philosophers and others in his short homilies.
Having met this most holy of saints before he died, I can tell you without reservation that it would be a sin against God for the Catholic church to ever say that they do not need this member of the body of Christ, even if he himself could not concur with everything that is of the Catholic faith. How then, do we relate with such members of the body of Christ, who are not of the Catholic fold because of their differences?
Is not this the question we should be asking?
God’s peace
micah
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domandcarols
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Marybeloved
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I’m just curious, Edwin, was this a deliberate choice on your part of a more conservative RCIA class? I’m just wondering if this is a sign of an increasing focus on orthodoxy in American Catholicism in the 14 years since you’ve been…I guess I’m just looking for a reason to celebrate something, that’s all.
Also is this a Roman or Anglican parish?Other than that, I wish you Our Lady’s guidance and protection. (Which…come to think of it, I don’t remember reading many posts by you directly related to piety and devotion, so that may be too presumptuous of me) I really have no clue about your leaning in that departmant. I know you love the Divine office, but not much beyond that. Either way, all the best!
Peace.
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Contarini
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It wasn’t a deliberate choice. Insofar as I had one I chose the relatively less conservative of the two parishes in my town. Though I certainly wouldn’t call it liberal–I’m not really sure in what way it’s less conservative but that’s the reputation. Mostly I chose it because it’s on my street (though the other one is only a block or so over, for complicated reasons having to do with Irish-German ethnic disputes in the 19th century, I believe). And yes, the fact that there are two Catholic churches within five minutes’ walk of my house is one of the things that has kept tugging at me for the six years I’ve been living in this town. . . . Mind you, the Episcopal parish I attend is even closer!
Also, this has always been a more conservative diocese (Fort Wayne-South Bend) than the one where I originally attended RCIA (Raleigh). The parish in NC was run by some very liberal Franciscans. I didn’t pick that one either–again, I went to the one closest to my house.
I think American Catholicism has come to focus on orthodoxy more (or, in another way of putting it, has become more conservative–I don’t think these two things are simply identical, but I also don’t think, as some folks on this forum do, that the words “conservative” and “liberal” don’t apply to Catholicism) in the past decade and a half. (Raleigh has a much more conservative bishop now, I believe–I don’t know how Immaculate Conception parish is handling this.)
Meanwhile, I’ve become relatively more liberal (emphasis on relatively–I still had a good deal of the fundamentalist in me in 1999), so it’s a whole new ballgame.
If you mean is it Anglican Use, no it’s not. There is no such parish in my area, and I wouldn’t want to join one if there were, if that meant driving some distance and not worshiping with people in my community. If my existing parish (Christ the King Episcopal Church) were to show any interest in accepting Pope Benedict’s invitation, I would of course be delighted to be part of that. In fact, the establishment of the ordinariates (even though I have all kinds of issues with the practicalities of it, as establishing a new level of bureaucracy and further breaking down the already endangered parochial system) was one of the things that put the writing on the wall for me. I had been hiding for several years behind statements by the Pope that seemed to endorse the project of corporate reunion pretty strongly, and I had said for some time that if the Pope were to invite me as an Anglican to reunite with Rome without waiting for my fellow Anglicans, I’d probably comply. Then, in the fall of 2009, he basically did (not personally of course).
Thanks. (I have no problem at all with devotion to Our Lady, though you’re right that it’s not something I talk about a lot.)
Edwin
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Contarini
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I think it is the question Catholics should be asking. Clearly we all need each other.
Vatican II established that Protestants are “separated brothers” who do indeed have a real relationship with the Church. I agree that Wurmbrand is an excellent illustration of this–I never had the privilege of meeting him but I traveled in Romania quite a bit in the 90s and knew people who had known him, and I read quite a few of his books.
Edwin
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John_Lazarus
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The Orthodox don’t believe in transubstantiation? What do they believe happens at the Consecration?
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John_Lazarus
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Most Catholic parishes I have been to have coffee and donuts after Mass. Or tea and lassy buns.
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andrewstx
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This Orthodox beleives in transubstantiation!
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John_Lazarus
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I had to laugh at this bit. I get a mental image of someone trying to breaststroke in a frozen river while a guy in skates standing next to him is yelling encouragement.
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