Proposing Catholicism
John Paul once said the church cannot impose anything. It can only propose the Catholic faith and pray that people accept it. I see that he and Benedict have done a good job of proposing the Catholic faith to Catholics. Many Catholics in the west had lost their faith or had seriously watered it down. Slowly I can see the spirit working in many Catholic institutions and being joyfully embraced or angrily rejected. It has to happen. As GK Chesterton said, our founder knows his way out of a grave so when the church dies it miraculously rises again.
At the same time I see many people, particularly in the US, proposing Catholicism to protestants. As a protestant convert that is something I feel I can help with. Again the spirit is provoking a lot of strong reactions, both positive and negative. This is a good thing. It is like the parable of the sower. You get some that don’t really interact with what you are saying. Some have deep, rock solid tradition that does not get penetrated. Some are to focused on minor issues to fully surrender to God’s word as taught by His church. Finally you have those that accept it and produce 30, 60, and 100 fold. I want to be one of those.
I wonder about what is the best way to approach things. Protestants and Catholics certainly have a lot in common. A lot more than most protestants realize. So many times the difference in language and style makes small gaps seem huge. There is also a long history of discord that has gotten better but has not disappeared completely. So we often have bad motives by Catholics and Protestants that have emotional reasons for painting the other side as black as they can. I try and avoid those but I am not totally immune. My family is strongly protestant so both positive and negative feelings get drawn in quite easily. Still we need to dispel many of the false notions we have. For me, going on a retreat with some Catholics made a real difference. Just getting to know them. Praying with them. Helping evangelize nominal Catholics. It did not convince me one bit that their theology was right but I knew their heart was right. That opened me up to listening to their theology years later.
The trouble with emphasizing the common ground is people get the idea that the difference between Catholics and protestants is not big deal. There are a few things around the edges where we differ but the heart of the faith is the same. Well it isn’t. The difference is in the very foundation of the faith. I know some protestants are bothered by Mary, relics, holy water, etc. but those are minor. I probably should spend more time defending those but if those issues dominate someone’s decision to become Catholic then they don’t understand the big issues. The big issues are around the word of God and the sacraments. These are the two primary ways in which we receive the grace of God in our lives. If we don’t get them right we have a very serious problem.
I think we all know we have a very serious problem. The church has been in decline for the last few generations. If you look at it in terms of theology you can trace it back several centuries. In term of the spiritual life of the average layman, that was no seriously impacted until later. Still, ideas have consequences and cracks in the foundation of Christendom have eventually caused the whole thing to shift. It is only a matter of time before it comes down.
So what was so wrong. Well, like all heresies, it is a matter of using one catholic truth to defeat another. So you have the idea that respecting scripture requires you to deny the church. This leads to creeping individualism. As long as I can convince myself that what I believe is OK with scripture then I can have whatever theology I please. Over time this restriction of having to be OK with scripture became less and less limiting. People found creative ways around even the most obvious passages. Religion became a place where we could hide our prejudices and our perversions and call them holy. Reason became the weapon that God would often use to set people back right. But then people got the idea that human reason was good and God’s revelation was bad. That the ultimate goal was for rational thinking to replace faith entirely.
The other great heresy was using the importance of faith and grace to deny the effectiveness of the sacraments. This leads to creeping Gnosticism. Sure protestants affirmed Jesus as true God and true man and the resurrection as a physical reality so they didn’t go nearly as far as the early Gnostics. Still the idea that the spiritual and the physical don’t interact much is very deep. It is not the physical sin that matters but the spiritual attitude behind it. It is not physical bread and wine that matter but what God does in your heart. It is not the physical priest that matters but the spiritual contrition. In each case it both the physical and the spiritual that are important. Keep the faith spiritual really keeps it personal and private. It lead to the idea that faith is something for comfort but not something for the real world. It doesn’t really matter if it is true or not because it all happens in your mind anyway.
So the heresies, once they are full grown, are very serious problems. The solution is to go back to the true faith. The Catholic church is still alive and well even though it’s demise has been predicted by protestants for centuries now. The trouble is we can’t see the church as one more personal way of reading the bible. It needs to be seen as the only place we can get true doctrine and true sacraments. Anything less and we lack the ability to resist the secular view of religion. Faith needs to be something we have confidence in. It needs to stand up under reason. It needs to be objective and not personal. It needs to be historically significant and incarnation. The Catholic church at least claims all these things. There is still the matter of whether or not the claims are true but if they are they will matter.
Most protestant churches just claim to be one of many fallible interpreters of scripture. They all claim to be pretty accurate but still not the ultimate source of God’s word that we can have total confidence in. Even if that claim is true, and for many protestant churches it is true, that is not enough. We still don’t know for sure what is right. We only know what gives us comfort. It is subjective and therefore does not have to be take too seriously. Sure protestants believe God is working in society as a whole as well. But that is kind of disjoint from their personal faith and church life.
