except that since you’re not Catholic, you wouldn’t know why many Catholics find certain value in the CE
Sorry, but I think I do know. You can of course claim that I don’t know, and I can claim that I do know, until we both go off to Purgatory and the Lord straightens us both out. So let’s drop this fruitless line of argument.
which has nothing to do with statements about Buddhism.
Catholics on this forum routinely cite the CE in order to support their prejudiced opinions about non-Catholics generally. More often this has to do with Protestants and Orthodox, but I see exactly the same pattern at work here with regard to Buddhism. The conservative Catholics who dominate this forum don’t like the more moderate and nuanced and generous tone of more recent Catholic theology and scholarship, and combined with the easy accessibility of the CE, this consideration gives it a much greater degree of authority in their/your eyes than it deserves. (Not that it should be ignored–I consult it regularly myself.)
The vast majority of Catholics born after 1911
have learned about Buddhism from non-CE sources, but rather from modern literature, including from practicing Buddhists.
I don’t see a lot of sign of this in the present discussion, including your facile claims about Buddhist and Christian views of suffering, which show little understanding of what Buddhist writers and non-Buddhist scholars of Buddhism claim “dukkha” means.
It remains a fact that Buddhism and Catholicism are essentially opposed in central assumptions about life, suffering, death – and most importantly, the notion of a personal God.
That latter point certainly appears to be the case, and may well be the case. However, the CE was not written at a time when such a determination could be made, given the distorting bias of early Western scholars such as Max Muller. I am not sure that we’re ready to make such a determination even now. The Indian concept of a “god” is so radically different from our concept of God (and the Hindu concept of “Brahman,” while having many similarities to our concept of God, is still not quite the same thing, particularly in its apparent moral indifference) that I think it’s problematic to assume that what they deny (that any personal “god” in the Indian sense is the ultimate cause of the universe) and what someone like Aquinas or Maximus the Confessor affirms is actually the same thing. I think the two traditions will need to talk to each other for a few centuries more before we are really sure just where and how we disagree.
Patience is a virtue. Hasty syncretism and hasty declarations of incompatibility are both intellectual vices, though the former is more amiable.
Pretending otherwise is either not to understand one of these two traditions, or to distort Catholicism and/or Jesus Himself.
I freely admit that I don’t understand Buddhism. I have yet to see any evidence that you understand it any better than I do.
There is no such thing as a Catholic Buddhist or a Jesus Buddhist in any authentic way.
There may well be no such thing as an authentic “Catholic Buddhist” in the sense that the implications of orthodox Catholicism and the implications of taking refuge in the Triple Gem are incompatible with each other. Certainly the one example Ahimsa has offered of a Catholic who has taken refuge, Paul Knitter, is not an orthodox Catholic or indeed an orthodox Christian in the broadest sense (given that he has joined John Hick in calling for a “Copernican revolution” within Christianity from Christ-centeredness to “God-centeredness”). However, as I said, I think that a few more centuries at least will go by before your blanket claim will be justified. Perhaps it won’t be justified in this world at all, and only in the Eschaton will we really know the truth of the matter (and of all other matters that matter). Meanwhile we should hold fast what we have received, which is the truth of God Incarnate in Jesus Christ, and not compromise or water it down. I’m entirely with you on that, though we probably disagree on just what it means.
To say that one can’t be a “Jesus Buddhist,” though, seems a lot less justified, particularly given how vague that phrase is. One can certainly be a Buddhist who reveres and seeks to follow the example and teachings of Jesus.
Edwin
Suffering is the path to personal redemption in its fullness, the path to holiness, the path to union with God.