I didn’t know where else to post this, and I TRULY DO NOT wish to offend anyone, but I have made an observation over the last 48 years of my life that puzzles and saddens me…
HOW can so many Catholics be so ignorant of not only the faiths of others, but esp. their own?
I only have my own theories on the subject. I grew up where we learned the Baltimore Catechism. I was shocked by how much less kids knew who didn’t have that background, but even in our neck of the woods, there was not a shortage of misconceptions about our faith. I’ll talk about us. This will be long, so bear with me.
Well, first of all, you’re a Jew, the People of the Book. You are not likely to run into a religious-ethnic group as devoted to the connection between scholarship and spirituality as yours is. Feel lucky on that point.
IMHO, I guess your first answer will come by looking back at Judaism. Lots of Jews not only do not know any Hebrew but do not come from families that observe one iota more than they have to in order to keep Gramma from getting on their case. In other words, Jewish observance all over the world falls somewhere between just showing up for family events all the way to keeping strictly kosher and never thinking of marrying a shiksa. It depends on who your grandma is, and how much pull she has. For better and worse, grandmas are losing pull everywhere. This is to the detriment of religious observance and formation everywhere.
Like Judaism, there can be a huge ethnic component to being Catholic, which means that there are going to be some of us in the “hatch, match, dispatch” crowd, who would only show up for those events if required. The difference between Judaism and Catholicism, of course, is that for many Jews essentially only the High Holy Days are “required”, once you become a bar mitzvah. All Catholics are required, by canon law and therefore by grandmas everywhere, to assist at Mass every Sunday. Protestants don’t have this requirement. In my experience, regular church attendance is a better indication of personal strength of adherance in Protestant churches than in Catholic ones. I think that is why. Also, weak and non-observant Catholics self-identify as Catholics all the time…again, just like Jews. They may not darken the door of a Catholic Church for 40 years, and they will say, “I’m Catholic.” Weak Protestants don’t generally do that. They may say, “I was raised Baptist” but they won’t call themselves Baptist.
Also, Catholics have pretty much ONE body of knowledge, and it is substantial. For instance, as you noted, a Catholic needs to understand the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception, and the difference. Many Protestants don’t even believe the Virgin Mary has any particular quality that any of the other saints don’t have. A Catholic needs to understand the meaning of each part of the order of the Mass. Protestant services are far less dense in their ritual meaning, and in many congregations may be made up essentially on the spot by the pastor. And so on…in Catholicism, there is simply a lot more to be ignorant of.
As to being ignorant of other faiths, this is not a Vatican II thing. It wasn’t that long ago that Catholics did not feel at all encouraged to dabble around in the religious thinking of other faiths. There was a time when, if you weren’t going to seminary, you were not encouraged to think a lot about
our faith. You just memorized it and lived it. I don’t mean the Church, necessarily. I mean Grandma. As far as Grandma was concerned, there was only trouble in the direction of religious inquiry and debate. You learn our faith, buddy, and never mind about theirs, and you won’t go wandering off into their heresies. OK, Grandma, trust me, I won’t bother learning theirs. Since when I grow up, everybody will assume we all know and believe exactly the same thing, I might not bother learning any more of ours than I have to without having Sister tell Mom and Dad.
Then there is the business of ignorance about the Bible. Unlike Protestant churches, Catholic churches only have missals, which conveniently give only the isolated Scripture readings that go with each Mass. If you’re going to go paging around in a Bible, that will be on your own time. Not a few Protestants, on the other hand, are sent scurrying from this passage to that during their weekly worship service, and are expected to attend age-appropriate Bible study on Sunday morning.
Also, Protestants have a handy little thing in their Bibles called a concordance…you can look up the little phrase you have in mind in an index in the back, and it will help you find the passage you want. Catholic Bibles, by and large, don’t have one of those. Even those of us who are Bible readers don’t read the Bible that way, going around looking for “proof texts”. Our “proof” is that the Magesterium teaches it, not that we can find some line in the Bible that seems to prove our point. Catholics are far more likely to use the Bible as a starting point for prayer and reflection than they are to use it as the starting point of an intellectual debate. Again, this isn’t a Vatican II thing. If anything, Catholics are more likely to attend an organized Bible study now than they ever were before Vatican II. I think that this is because there were not a few grandmas who were of the opinion that if it weren’t for Bible studies, there wouldn’t
be any Protestants.
I make this all about the grandmas in a bit of a tongue-in-cheek way, but let’s face it: as the grandmas went, so went religion. Not so anymore. It wasn’t their fault, but even when they ran the Catholic families, outward observance and compliance were much more important than comprehension. It was rare that someone was going to quiz you. If so, tell them, “Oh, Go ask Grandma. She knows all that better than I do.” That will hide a rather shocking level of ignorance.
Again, this is all just my theory.
