What is your solution? Leave everyone to work out everything on their own?
Really, isn’t that what happens anyway? Mankind is, say, 40K years old as Homo sap. Two thousand years ago, “Christianity” starts. Today, about a sixth of the population is nominally Catholic, statistically half of those not really fully practicing, or at odds with some fundamental tenet such as transubstantiation or dogma such as birth control. Serendipitously, I just found 14 major creation myths from different cultures, the Abrahamic being only one of them. So there is a “wedge” of Catholics in the population from 0 around 1CE to about, nominally, one billion today, but about half that given deviation from Teaching. And most Catholics are now in the lesser educated Southern hemisphere as Catholic population by% in the US, and Europe, I suspect, decline in lay and clerical numbers. See
here.
The practicing Catholics I know constitute a variety of belief systems that loosely agree on some points of the mainline teaching of the Church, and having gone through the Catholic school system through high school, I know darned well that there were few who are truly devout “traditional” Catholics and all those mostly continued in their disparate paths to this day, as far as I know. That is not even to mention the many psychologically bizarre groups claiming to be Catholic such as “Los Penitentes.” So whatever “strength” of numbers the Church claims, I personally have my doubts about it.
We can add to that that we know from the early days and the writings of the Church Fathers that the
first task the Church had was to distinguish itself from the paganism that they admitted it was hard to tell themselves apart from. The ones who admitted to the similarities were in many cases conveniently anathematized. As for the body of the Church, it grew in this differentiation by proceeding with everything from slander and discreditation, through book burnings and bannings of cults, to downright death camp pogroms of non-Christians. All this got a boost when it became politically expedient in what, the third century? to be Christian by order of the Emperor. Now there is an holy, divinely sponsored advertising campaign to admire.
Let us go further and visit some of the great Saints. Eliminating all the ones in the roster who were imaginary, and discounting ones that were possibly wonderful people, the really great ones were fundamentally mysitics. If you read their words dispassionately they have transcended the form of the Church, having gone “direct,” one might say. And in fact, their statements are very uncomfortably identical with the words of mystics from other traditions, and even more uncomfortably to the words of men and women to this day who have arrived independently at nearly exactly similar conclusions through means other than devotional. If one reads such works as
Love Poems from God, edited by Daniel Ladinsky, the introduction to
Basic Self Knowledge by Harry Benjamin,
The New Man by Maurice Nicoll, and many, many others, this becomes pretty clear even without having come to the fruition of the interior exercise of self observation as recommended from ancient times.
That Stream of congruently proponing mystics, the Saints and Sages of the ages, and “accidentals” have been with us from time immemorial. So for my part, I contend both from experience and study that God is everywhere and always available as Divine Self to those willing to go “beyond the mind” through difficult work, which includes seeing through any particular religious paradigm one finds themselves in, or through Grace. Let us again remember here the last days of St Thomas Aquinas, and his statements about his own work, which statements are not dissimilar from that of other Sages upon their physical demise. There is excellent and practical reason for such remarks.
The Way of
that Stream includes everyone at
all times, and is based on what you might in Catholicism call being “made in the Image and Likeness of God.” In other words, the facts of the matter are interiorly present
always and everywhere to each one as the structure of Soul. And this is why, my dear friend, I contend, again from experience with my own seeking at the time of my life altering/altaring experience, that faith as adamantized habit can be a mental obstruction to actual spiritual progress. Think, please, about the phenomenally momenteous tendency we have as humans to maintain our sense of being “right.” It is far more pervsive than one could imagine, and why it has always been said by Sages to “know thyself.” And again, this is why it often takes a shock to dispace habit in favor of receptivity to actuality, and why it is used in many mystical disciplines.
Having had the shock, and re-examining the structure of the Gospels, a number of things become clear about why the Church is the way it publicly is, and why it teaches what it does. But especially it becomes clear why there constantly needs to be the statement made that the actions of the members of the Church do not represent the teaching of the Church. The proponents of what you might name, though it is unnamable, as the Perennial Philosophy, have never had need to make such a statement. That would be impossible, given what it is.
I don’t expect you to agree. But it is a perspective consistent within itself, as is the story of the Church
from within its own doctrine. Only thing is, the story I propose spans a wider and deeper comprehension of Relationship with the Divine and even includes congruency with the Identity statements of both the OT and NT. So go figure. At least it is a darned interesting tale, and it works and has worked for me these past 45+ years with increasing grace, practicality, and elegance.
