Throughout my year or so here I have been disabused of a great many preconceived notions regarding religion, both Catholicism and other. But for the first time, starting about a month ago, I’ve actually come to disbelieve in something I previously believed in rather self-evident and hence elemental manner. That is to say, it seemed too obvious to need to be questioned. Given that I’d never even questioned it previously, I’m not quite sure where to go from here, or what it means overall for my faith.
I myself have quoted paragraph 841 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church on numerous occasions, and defended the position expressed therein quite strongly. It states:
I no longer believe this. I know, I know, so what, plenty of Catholics on here don’t accept this and not every sentence in the CCC is dogma, so why is this a thread…
Well, a few things bother me about the implications of this realization:
- The CC has clearly taught error here in what can be reasonably deemed to be an official capacity. The implications of this vis-a-vis the veracity of other Catholic doctrines should be obvious.
- While it does seem somewhat trivial in a way, the inclusion of such passages says a lot about the philosophy of some within the Church, and a lot of that makes me fairly uncomfortable (to put it diplomatically);
- in other ways, however, it is NOT at all trivial. There is no triviality at all in what we believe about God, because the proper worship of God is supposed to be at the heart of everything that we do as Christians and everything that we believe as a Church. For example, we can say that God truly is as He is in the Christian Trinity and we are to worship Him as He has commanded us to in Christianity, or we can be mealy-mouthed in our approach to this dimension of our faith and say that anyone who gets a part of it right (whether that part is in number, or in form, or however else you can think of it) is somehow also to be included on an equal footing with Christians when it comes to the question of who is worshipping what God.
I have always maintained that the Muslims, for their part, get it right in terms of number ONLY (and only superficially so at that), as it is a basic truism of Christianity that there is, in fact, only one God. So, I thought to myself, as there’s only one God to begin with, it stands to reason that anyone who worships God must be worshipping that same God, however uncompletely or incorrectly. I can no longer hold this overly simplistic view, especially in light of the position I have expressed in threads like
this one. I believe that the Trinity, and the CHRISTIAN Trinity at that, is the one true God. Not Islam’s Allah or Hinduism’s Vishnu or anything or anyone else. So I cannot, for the sake my own soul, say that these other gods, which are not the eternal and uncreated unity that is the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Spirit, are somehow also my God.
I’m not so much concerned that this will have any practical effect on my relationship with Muslims or any other non-Christian, but unfortunately it and other incidents like it have already had a great effect on my relationship to my own Church. To be blunt: the cognitive dissonance created in the process of trying to make all this work is killing my faith in the Catholic Church.
Were it just about Muslims and whether not they’ll be saved, I probably wouldn’t have taken the time to write any of this. I think it is really symptomatic of some deeper problems. I just don’t really know how to deal with them.
Am the only one who feels this way? Not necessarily about this issue, but…just the Church in general? I don’t want to be a dissident or a heretic. I want to be a good Catholic. I just don’t know what to do.
