The Ass rears his ugly head again. Surprise, surprise.
Good luck, Mr Berlusconi
You have a better chance of turning water to wine. The weirdness of these things lies in the implicit assumption that there is no internal coherence to why Catholics do things. We just sorta have arbitrary rules and laws and injunctions etc. If we felt otherwise, we could simply change a few things. Accomodate the latest fads and trends. Like Episcopalians. The thing about the divorce-remarriage-communion issue is that I typically feel that those in Catholic authority tend to skirt around the issue a bit. Heck, I’ll be honest. I think some recent popes have skirted the issue a bit. Obviously, it’s a pastoral problem, and one wants the remarried to participate in the Mass and other activities to the extent that they can. But this participation is never explicitly stated to be what it actually is (that I have seen): namely, undertaken with a view to repentance from mortal sin. The reason you can’t receive is that you are in an adulterous relationship. You are in a state unworthy to receive communion. That’s why you can’t receive. Yes, we want you in our midst, but you have to understand that you need to remedy your situation. Somehow. It’s not like everything is OK…you just can’t receive. Things are actually quite bad, and that’s why you can’t receive. And all this talk about “we want you here…don’t leave”, while good, is misleading without the full information. And I think this misleading information is, in part, responsible for the perception of the Mr Berlusconis of the world. That if they just lobbied hard enough. If they just had the right connection. Maybe…just mabe…
Insecurity
“In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls us beyond our fears and insecurities.” This was this week’s particularly mealy-mouthed gloss on the Sunday Gospel reading:
Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So every one who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven; but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.
Calls us beyond our insecurities? Really? Sounds more like a repudiation of our enemies through acceptance of martyrdom, lest we be denied before our Father. Which, by the way, is the scariest verse in the entire Bible. But I shouldn’t be insecure about my pimples too. That’s true.
Oh. And our parish has recently (apparently; no real announcement yet) decided to curtail adoration of the exposed Blessed Sacrament to the hours of 9-1 during the summer. 1-7 is temporarily cancelled. Putatively because there were a few spots that they couldn’t fill. And I suppose they will try again once people are done gadding about during the summer. But this upsets me. Could we not have at least tried to fill the spots? Other than through announcements in the sparsely-read bulletin? Like, maybe a couple of calls from the altar for some extra adorers. Because, you know, adoration is kinda important. But no, all we get are calls to buy Football Mania tickets. I see the priorities.
Bottom line message conveyed to our parish: Jesus is not as important during the summer months. Ice cream is very important. Adoration of Jesus, not so much.
A great article
On contraception, by Elizabeth Anscombe.
Suffering and God
So to put my thoughts into a little better alignment, based on the last post.
The human mind perceives the suffering of the innocent as an injustice. This sense of injustice presupposes another entity, Justice, in the mind of the individual. If Justice is a real thing to which the universe sometimes does not conform, then this Justice lies outside the meaningless flow of matter in the materialist universe. Otherwise the sense of Justice is meaningless. But we confess that it has meaning. Therefore, the existence of Justice annihilates the atheistic theory of a materialistic universe. Something (Justice?) or somebody (God?) exists outside the chain of causation, something or somebody to which/whom we appeal against apparent injustice. So, far from disproving theism, suffering, or more specifically, our reaction to it, hints at the existence of something or somebody outside of nature.
This is then the jumping point into Lewis’ argument that only Christianity or Dualism appear to explain our predicament, which is: living in a non-materialist universe, cognizant of evil and longing for good. But on further analysis, Dualism doesn’t provide the solution either. At the core of Dualism is the notion that two separate powers are the sources of Good and Evil. But the nature of evil is parasitic: it depends on Good for existence. For to be active, the evil Power must have existence, intellect and will. And these are goods. Thus, far from independent entities, Evil is found to be dependent on Good for its existence. And thus Evil cannot be God, for he is not the source of his own existence. So despite the presence of evil and suffering, God is found to be good.
CS Lewis on why evil does not disprove a good God
And, of course, that raises a very big question If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling ‘whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn’t it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren’t all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?’ But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.
[...]
A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of every thing, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market. But it has a catch in it.
The two powers, or spirits, or gods–the good one and the bad one–are supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity. Neither of them made the other, neither of them has any more right than the other to call itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and thinks the other bad. One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and mercy, and each backs its own view. Now what do we mean when we call one of them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying that we happen to prefer the one to the other–like preferring beer to cider–or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now if we mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment. If ‘being good’ meant simply joining the side you happened to fancy, for no real reason, then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right.
But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up–than either of them, and He will be the real God. In fact, what we meant by calling them good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him.
The same point can be made in a different way. If Dualism is true, then the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are cruel for one of two reasons–either because they are sadists, that is, because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get out of it–money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean, of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong, way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong–only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We called sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted. It follows that this Bad Power, who is supposed to be on an equal footing with the Good Power, and to love badness in the same way as the Good Power loves goodness, is a mere bogy. In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order to be able to pervert them. But if he is bad he cannot supply himself either with good things to desire or with good impulses to pervert. He must be getting both from the Good Power. And if so, then he is not independent. He is part of the Good Power’s world. he was made either by the Good Power or by some power above them both.
Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now beg to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things-resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why Dualism, in a strict sense, will not work.
But I freely admit that real Christianity (as distinct from Christianity-and-water) goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe–a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.
St Simon of Cyrene
May 12 is his day:
Heavenly Father, whose most dear Son, as He walked the way of the Cross, accepted the service of Simon of Cyrene to carry his physical burden for him: grant us each the grace gladly to bear one another’s burdens, for the love of him who said, “As you did it to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me,” your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Acedia
Through a web search, I discovered this wonderful summary of the sin/condition of acedia. Acedia is something I became aware of a couple years ago, and then promptly forgot about it. Somehow it was brought to mind again, and a quick read through several sources is indicative of the fact that I need to pay more attention to it.
From Evagrius’ Praktikos (12):
The demon of acedia which is also called the ‘midday demon’ is the worst of all. It attacks the monk at about the fourth hour and lays siege to the soul until the eighth hour.
First he makes it seem as though the sun hardly moves or has stopped, and the day goes on for fifty hours. Then he makes the monk fix his eyes continually on the window, to leave his cell, to watch the sun to see if it near the ninth hour, and to look about him to see if a brother is not coming. Then again he inspires in him disgust for the place where he is, for the life that he leads, for manual work. After that he puts into his head the idea that charity has disappeared from among the brethren, and there is no one to console him.
If it happens during this time that someone offends the monk, the demon uses this too to increase his distress. He prompts him to desire to live elsewhere, in a place where he can find what he needs more easily, follow a less arduous calling and one which brings greater success. He then suggests that it is not the place which pleases the Lord; according to the Bible God can be adored everywhere.
On top of all this, he recalls to the monk’s memory his family and the life he led in the world. He puts into his head the idea that life lasts a long time and asceticism is very laborious. In short he does all he can to persuade the monk abandon his cell and run away from the struggle.
No other demon follows this one. If the soul triumphs a state of peace and inexpressible joy comes over him.
CS Lewis and St Jerome
In Reflections on the Psalms, CS Lewis makes the following statement:
I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical or scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation “after the manner of a popular poet” (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction. The real reason why I can accept as historical a story in which a miracle occurs is that I have never found any philosophical grounds for the universal negative proposition that miracles do not happen.
I am most interested in the bolded statement. I have occasionally tried to track down the source of that St. Jerome quote, because it could be used as a compelling part of an argument that the “poetic” interpretation of Genesis predates the whole Evolution debate. In other words, the poetic interpretation is not some late-breaking fudge factor designed to weasel our way out of the implications of the theory of Evolution for the Genesis narrative. In fact, if you google “after the manner of a popular poet”, you will find CS Lewis quoted all over the place as having said this. Furthermore, you will find some people dropping the Lewis reference altogether and simply attributing the quote directly to St. Jerome. What you will never find is a primary reference to St. Jerome.
And I think this is the reason why. I don’t think he ever said it. In that google search above, you will find a few references to the same quote having been uttered by John Colet. He apparently wrote some Letters to Radulphus on the Mosaic account of the Creation, ca. AD 1497. In these letters, he says:
Thus Moses arranges his details in such a way as to give the people a clearer notion, and he does this after the manner of a popular poet, in order that he may the more adapt himself to the spirit of simple rusticity…
This is by no means conclusive. But it is certainly quite possible that CS Lewis got his authors a little mixed up. And I suppose John Colet could still be used as an example of how the “poetic” interpretation of the Genesis narrative predated the Evolution debacle, but he is certainly not as well known as St Jerome, and lived about 1000 years later.
Catholic beauty
Beauty was something that made me Catholic. In my old haunts, that kind of statement might be considered to smack of sentimentalism or anti-intellectualism. But I admit that there are many roads to Truth, and beauty is one of them. And this is a particularly difficult topic to broach because, having become Catholic, I find that much of the Church has been on a crusade for the past 40 years, or so, to rid the Church of beauty. Once beautiful sanctuaries have been “updated” in the Spirit of Vatican 2. New churches look like barns. Ancient and glorious hymns have taken a back-seat to camp songs. Chant has disappeared. Candles have been replaced by “candles”. Etc, etc. The list is a pretty long one.
So the question is, how did beauty draw me to the Church, when much of the Church is at war with beauty? I am not sure. Certainly, beauty remains. Not all sanctuaries have been defaced. And so, as mentioned before, St. Matthew’s parish church is gorgeous. Entering that placed filled me with Heaven. The Philadelphia Cathedral is also gorgeous. Let us not forget that I grew up in the south of France, where gorgeous little parish churches (see “L’eglise”; alas, I don’t think I ever went in it) are at the heart of every village. I have always loved statues and icons and hymns and chant and incense and vestments and…
But none of these things were ours. It was all an add-on to the bare bones of Protestantism. Except the hymns. Which Protestant hymns are the only hymns you will ever hear in a Catholic parish. I wanted to be part of such a grand tradition of beauty, without feeling like a cherry-picker. I wanted my senses to be filled with God. And so the reality of current parish life has been somewhat of a mortification. Nevertheless, it is ours and it will be reclaimed. In time.
The witness of the Church Fathers
Hundreds of books have been written about the Church Fathers. So I will labor to keep this short. Once I was aware of the fact that there was a historical component to Christianity that pre-dated AD 1517, I became very interested in the types of things they believed. Of course, I attended a Calvinist Presbyterian church for a good while, and so I was aware of the fact that one of the greatest Protestants of history was St. Augustine. Besides the name, though, I knew precious little of what he said. And the thing is, he said an awful lot.
But before I even got interested in him, I had received as a gift (I think) a book called the Apostolic Fathers. It was published by some Orthodox outfit, whose study bible I had also purchased in order to get a better feel for “early Christianity”. This book contained some of the earliest non-canonical Christian writings. Of special interest were St. Ignatius (~AD 107), St. Clement (~AD 100) and St. Polycarp (~AD 140). Barnabas and the Shepherd were also in there, as I recall. These dudes weren’t Protestant. Obviously. I mean, Protestants didn’t come along until much later. But these early figures also espoused much that Protestants repudiated.
Before I get into that, though, who were these fellas? Well, they were disciples of the Apostles. Clement is possibly the Clement mentioned in one of St. Paul’s epistles. He writes to the Corinthian Church from Rome. Ignatius is the third bishop of Antioch (you know, where Christians were first called Christians), and was possibly ordained by St. Peter. Polycarp of Smyrna was a disciple of St. John. So, these guys have street-cred. They learned the Faith at the feet of the Apostles. They walked and talked with the Apostles. The Apostles.
Excellent. So what did these guys believe? Well, that salvation comes through Jesus Christ. That would be foremost. So these guys were Protestant! Take that, Catholics. Not so fast, young tiger. Starting chronologically with Clement, first, the fact that he, writing from Rome, feels he has the authority to command assent to his desires in a Pauline church (i.e., Corinth) while St. John was still possibly alive says a lot about the role the local church of Rome played in the wider universal Church. In other words, while the papacy is yet undeveloped, you have the seeds of the papacy right here at the turn of the 2nd Century. He also embraced apostolic succession as the means of preserving the Church.
In St. Ignatius, you get the first written name for the early church: the Catholic Church. What you also get is a very strongly hierarchical church, with the bishop ruling the local church with authority. United to the bishop are priests and deacons, with the laity. According to Ignatius, Gnostics are heretics who abstain from the Eucharist because they don’t believe it is the body of Christ. So the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is attested at the turn of the 2nd Century. Co-redemptive suffering is also mentioned by Ignatius.
Polycarp’s lone surviving letter is a pastiche of Scripture, essentially, except for the key fact that he recommends the writings of Ignatius to be read, as they are sound. So here an person who learned the Faith from St. John bears witness to everything Ignatius had to say.
Many Protestants are able to look this evidence in the face and claim that these fellas were more in line with Protestant teaching than Catholic teaching. I suspect this has more to do with an abhorrence of the Catholic Church than a fair reading of the documents. In any case, it seemed pretty clear to me that the Apostolic Fathers would not have recognized the version of Christianity known as Protestantism. Which was unsettling. At this point, there is a fork in the road, and people may take one of several paths. Admit that the early Church was not Protestant. This means revising your interpretation of much of the New Testament. For if the disciples of the Apostles interpreted the Scriptures differently than you on some key points, maybe you have something to learn from them. Another path involves claiming that the Church did not have a full canon of Scripture to work from at that point, so they could not have known the full truth (nevermind the implications for Sola Scriptura here, or the fact that they actually talked to the Apostles…they didn’t need letters). Another path simply involves claiming that the Apostles were pretty dumb in selecting the people they entrusted their mission to. I.e., these guys were just plain wrong. They departed, not 15 years after the death of the last apostle, from the teachings of the Apostles. I suppose there are other paths one can take also. The mind can be pretty creative.
In any case, for someone who already had a healthy distrust of his own opinion on things, it seemed pretty evident to me that these giants of the Faith were right, and that I was wrong. More importantly, my church was wrong. Moreso yet, all Protestant churches were wrong. Apostolic succession, tradition, the Eucharist were nowhere to be found. At this point, there was no going back. A disquiet had settled into my soul that could be healed in but one way. I had to leave.
Now this is but a brief summary of some of the teachings of the earliest of the Fathers. Within the first few centuries, one can find a host of other imProtestant teachings being lived out by the Church, while she battles the various heresies. In other words, these teachings were nowhere thought to be novel and strange: veneration of the martyrs, seeking their intercession, praying for the dead (i.e., purgatory), regenerational baptism, the importance of the bishop of Rome, Mary as the New Eve and all that implies, the Mother of God, her perpetual virginity, her sinlessness, the possibility of losing the state of grace, faith and works, merit, penance, monasticism, virginity as a charism etc. The list, literally, goes on. And on. And on.
First Holy Communion
Somewhere along in the process (Spring 2002?), we attended the first Holy Communion for my wife’s mom’s cousin’s (sister’s uncle’s friend’s former roommate’s) son or daughter. I had never met them before. Apparently they attended our wedding. Anyway, we received the invitation to the party and were surprised that there was no information as to where the first Holy Communion was to be occurring. Apparently, Catholics only show up for the party? In any case, we called her and tracked down the location of the event, and decided it would be an interesting thing to see what goes on in a Catholic church. So we went. It was at St. Matthew’s Catholic Church.
At this point, I believe we were attending the Episcopal Church, which is also liturgical in nature. But our basic knowledge of the Anglican Liturgy had not prepared us for this service. We were clueless as to what was going on. People were sitting, and then they were kneeling, and then they were standing. And they didn’t need a Book of Common Prayer to follow along. So clearly we stood out. People were genuflecting. Huh?! In hindsight, I presume it was simply a decked-out Mass. But our impression was that it was some kind of special service. Surely they don’t do that every week. I mean, it’s, like, Christ-centered and stuff. Where’s the Mary worship? I guess they act Christian for special services.
In any event, the place was drop-dead gorgeous. Stunning. The beauty itself drew me in and would have made me Catholic. I don’t remember much else from the actual Mass, save some angelic being dressed all in white, singing what I presume was the Responsorial Psalm. Which would have made me Catholic too. The kids parading in their tuxes and gowns was very cute. But by and large, we were simply too overwhelmed to really have a clue what was happening. I remember the beauty, though. And something drawing me.
I remember the drawing precisely because I remember sitting outside the church, killing time before the party, trying to make sense of what we had just witnessed.
I am unsure how much I had been reading at that point. I presume I was already pretty sympathetic to the Church, if only because I was interested in going to what turned out to be a Mass. And as a side note, it is this gorgeous Mass that led us to attend one other Mass. This other Mass was just your ordinary Saturday morning daily Mass, that we decided to check out before we entered RCIA some 18 months after that first Holy Communion Mass. After all, what was a real, regular, joe-schmoe Mass like? Surely not like that other one?
I remember we sat in the back of the little St. Mary’s Chapel at our current parish. Some lady sitting next to us had a cast on her leg, and couldn’t get up. She was blocking us in, and kept insisting that we somehow get past her to receive Communion. Over and over again, “Come on, get up!” Sorry, we’re not Catholic. I remember a young-looking priest (who turned out to be Fr. Rogers), talking briefly off-the-cuff about the Gospel. But I highlight again that this was a Saturday Mass. Because at least some Saturday morning Masses are offered in commemoration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And in fact, at this time, our Saturday morning Masses were also combined with Morning Prayer, which would also have been Mary-focused. In any event, the overwhelming feeling that we took away from that Mass was a confirmation of the original point. Regular Catholic Masses are about Mary worship. Little did we know we had simply come on the wrong day. And, of course, it wasn’t Mary worship at all, anyway. Just hearing the word, Mary, was enough to confirm all of our darkest suspicions.
Where did the Bible come from?
Somewhere along in this process of conversion, I started frequenting some internet discussion forums, where Catholics were vigorously defending their faith from a multi-frontal attack. It must have been somewhere in the middle of this whole process. I had obviously passed from not knowing or caring about the Catholic Church to being interested in some of the things she taught. But I still was not in the least bit interested in becoming Catholic. I was just curious. And bored at work.
One conversation that I happened to eves drop upon was regarding the origins of the bible. Where did it come from? How do we know which books are part of it? I had no idea. But it’s not even that I didn’t have an idea as to answer. It’s that I didn’t even know it was a question. I am not sure what I would answered before I happened upon that conversation. God gave it to us. The Holy Spirit inspired it. Both true, but also both evasions of the core of the question. God didn’t give to us like he gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. And though the Holy Spirit inspired the canonical books, that doesn’t get us any closer to understanding how those books were selected from among the hundreds of candidates. Was it the odor of sanctity? Did the canonical books smell different? Was their a tingling in your breast when you read inspired material? Who selected them? When? Why? I don’t think I was alone in simply never having considered the question. One just took it for granted that these books were supposed to be there. An amazing gap of knowledge, considering how much we talked about the bible.
So I discovered several things that day, and over time. It turns out that it was St. Athanasius who first got the New Testament “right” in AD 367. It would be a few more decades until official local councils around the Mediterranean got the entire canon “right”. A council under Pope Damasus in Rome seems to be the first published version of this canon, in the 380s. Councils in Carthage and Hippo followed similarly in the 390s. The canon contained 7 newfangled books in the Old Testament. Up until this time, certain canonical books had been excluded from the canon in some circles (e.g., Hebrews, Jude). Other books had been included in some canons, like Clement to the Corinthians and the Shepherd of Hermas. It clearly wasn’t an obvious sensation in the breast. The canon was developed in order to establish which books could and couldn’t be read during the liturgical service. It was established, basically, according to tradition. Traditions about authorship. And which books contained data in conformity with the tradition.
There are several implications in all of this, most of which didn’t occur to me for a while. The first (and this isn’t really an implication) is that, simply, the Catholic Church gave the world the bible. The bible was established based on tradition. So, far from repudiating tradition, the bible was founded on it. And there were plenty of other traditions floating around in early church (e.g., the Eucharist *is* the flesh of Christ). The bible in its final form came about at a fairly late date. Therefore, the Church existed before the bible. Therefore, Sola Scriptura could not have been the principle of revelation in the early church. The final canon of Scripture came about after practices like seeking the intercession of the martyrs were already widespread. So no more arguments about the “lateness” of such abominable unbiblical practices. The canon was established in early councils. If early councils have no authority, then the canon of Scripture has no authority. If they have authority, they have a sizeable amount of things to say about other topics besides the canon of Scripture, which must then be also considered authoritative. Then there’s the matter of my bible missing some books. And the fact that early church worshiped liturgically.
It’s no wonder Protestants don’t often think about this question. There follows upon it a whole Pandora’s Box of wild implications.
At this point, I was seriously starting to doubt the credibility of Sola Scriptura. Once that is gone, the game is practically over.
Who arbitrates between conflicting theologies?
Who indeed? But the answer to this question never dawned on me for a very long time. I’m not even sure if the Catholic answer to that question was even on my radar. I will say, though, that the question generated a decent amount of humility when it came to biblical interpretation.
The thing is, we visited and were members of so many Protestant churches along the way that the question, “who is right” was bound to pop up. And when it did, I did not know the answer. Was I right, and everyone else wrong? Was my church right and all others wrong? It seemed like a staggering claim to make to say that my church was the one that was completely right. And yet, what is the other option? That my church is not completely right. Then why am I there? And here we get to the crux of it. I am there because I don’t believe that these things, when the rubber hits the road, really matter.
Does baptism do anything? How is it to be administered? To babies or not? Is it necessary? Can it be repeated? So many conflicting opinions. And we’re talking about baptism, fer crying out loud. Kind of a central little dealio. So central I was “baptized” three times.
Nowhere was this “humility” more in evidence than in various bible studies, where 20-something financial planners were confidently professing that their understanding of such and such verse was obviously the correct one. The Baptists know not of what they speak. Nor do the Catholics. Or the Methodists. Only me. Or my little bumbleweed bible church. This attitude eventually bred in me a severe distrust of any interpretation of the bible. To the point where I really gave up trying to figure out what the bible meant. How was little old me supposed to know the answer to these questions if the learned all contradicted one another. I was a 20-something environmental scientist living in the late 20th century, in some little backwater of Pennsylvania. I didn’t know Greek or Hebrew. I didn’t have time to read 20 different commentaries. I didn’t feel confident making any decisions. The process was doomed before it started. Why start?
Eventually the question arose: is this how it is really supposed to be? Is this what God intended? Did he give us a bible and tell us to go and do what we can to figure it out? Were we really intended to be at such loggerheads about such critical issues? Life and death issues. Heaven and hell issues. Given the revelation of a united Christendom that I had received from St. Hilaire, it seemed to me that things hadn’t always been this way. Christians had been united in a common understanding of the truth. Except for those Christians that weren’t. And their name was “heretics”.
What changed? The Reformation and its repudiation of all authority outside the bible. But see, however beautiful and inspired, the bible is a book. And books need interpreting. Without an interpreter, Protestantism happens. Confusion reigns. Chaos ensues. Gradual erosion of truth…happens. But I didn’t know that then. I just knew something wasn’t right. And it had something to do with authority.
Hilaire Belloc and The Great Heresies
I have a hard placing this particular event in the sequence of the various things that happened to open me to the thought of Catholicism. I presume it must have happened while still attending the non-denom church, because, as I recall, it originated out of a little e-spat on the non-denom church singles ministry (NDSM) discussion forum. The NDSM was planning a little ecumenical get together with the local Catholic singles ministry. And of course, certain members of our group couldn’t contain their wild enthusiasm to present the Gospel to the lost hordes of single Catholics. So they started sending around calls for prayer for the opportunity to present the Gospel to some Catholics. This was, of course, sniffed out by the local Catholic group, who took umbrage at this, given that this was supposed to be a simple ecumenical worship service. I remember feeling really drawn to speaking with some of the Catholics at the event, but like everyone else, stayed comfortable ensconced in my own camp.
One of the good outcomes of this little e-spat was that some Catholics felt compelled to defend some of their practices that were under attack. I remember that one of them in particular was the intercession of the saints, especially the Blessed Mother. And these Catholic apologists handled themselves very well. Their argument made perfect sense. We don’t worship Mary. We ask her to pray for us, just like y’all ask others to pray for you. And then they linked to a few websites to counter the anti-Catholic websites that were also being bandied about. I don’t remember which set of sites I was reading, but I eventually, through a series of links, ended up here, a metabook of The Great Heresies, by Hilaire Belloc. Never heard of him. Never heard of this book. And more intriguingly, never heard of any of the chapter heads, save Mohammed and the Reformation.
I was, as I still am, bored and underworked, so I set about reading a chapter here and a chapter there. Clearly, I wasn’t going to read the chapter on the Reformation, as I already knew about it. And Catholics can’t be trusted anyway. But I think I read the chapter on Islam. And was instantly hooked, for it presented something I was completely unfamiliar with: the history of religion. How did we get here? And amazingly, I discovered that Islam was a (particularly pernicious) Christian heresy. So I then proceeded to read about the Arians and Albigensians, things which were described as potentially civilization-destroying. And then I finished. And was disappointed there wasn’t anything else to read. So in a fit of boredom, I decided to read the chapter on the Reformation.
Nothing would be the same. I thought I knew something about the Reformation. But like most people, I had a vague impression that things were pretty bad, Luther made them better, and we have never looked back. But this chapter gave details. And it gave a coherent view of the details from the Catholic perspective. Things indeed had been bad. The papacy responded too slowly to the crisis. A first generation of Reformers really had sought to reform the Church. But once a second generation who had never tasted the former unity arose, it was over, and all that remained to be decided was who would control which territory. Furthermore, though Luther was no doubt motivated by a very great sense of scandal, nevertheless, there arose other powers on his heels whose motivations were not entirely spiritual (to say the least). The overarching feeling from this chapter was a sense of loss, of losing the unity I had never had. A Christian civilization. A Christendom. The world had been united. And now it was in shatters. It was the first time I had the experience of discovering that the world hadn’t always been the way it is, and that it had been better. These experiences have multiplied as I have entered more and more into the vast heritage that belongs to Catholics.
But there was another, more radical challenge that was presented by this great book of Belloc’s, and it is this. I agreed with him that the Catholic Church had been right to condemn the Arians, the Muslims and the Albigensians. By extension, I also agreed with the Catholic Church when she condemned the Montanists, the Marcionites, the Gnostics, the Monophysites, the Nestorians, the Donatists, the Pelagians, etc, etc. The Catholics were right and they were wrong. Horribly wrong. Insidiously wrong. And yet, what an amazing stroke of fortune that the one time the Catholic Church was wrong in condemning a heresy was the one time when I was the heretic. It seemed almost too convenient. Was there another possible explanation? With this thunderbolt, the blinders were thrown off. I was aware that the universe I had inhabited was not quite so simple as the good-guy-bad-guy story I had bought up until that point. The reality of the history of Christianity was much more complex and nuanced. It wasn’t so one-sided as I had been led to believe.
And so the history of the Church became an instant fascination to me.
A Vague Feeling
We were attending a non-denom church. In fact, it was the church where I met my wife. We had lots of great friends. We were in a wonderful bible study. It was about a half hour drive to get there, which was a bit much. But everything was very nice and comfortable there.
Slowly, though, a general malaise started to grow over me. We had been attending the evening worship service, which consisted of singing several praise songs to the accompaniment of a fantastic band, heard a sermon based on some section of Scripture, prayed a bit, sang a bunch more songs, and then went home. Communion was maybe once per month. Since my wife and I really loved the old classic hymns, we decided to start attending one of the morning services. The hymns were there, but this church was not as good at classic worship as it was at the newfangled. No matter which service you went to, you were likely to run into a worship leader, wildly gesticulating, trying to squeeze a little emotion out of the experience. As I said elsewhere, a vibrant faith was the same thing as crying during a hymn.
I don’t think I had read Merton yet.
Anyway, something was wrong. Was this really all that worship was about? Songs and sermons? And to be honest, though the sermons were generally good and challenging, I wasn’t really getting all that much out of them. By the time I came the next week, I hadn’t a clue what had been said the week before. Which, clearly, is my fault. But is this all that it really was about? It seemed to reduce worship to a wild combination of cheap emotionalism and ethereal thought. Sing for a while and get riled up. And then listen, learn and apply. I never was able to really put my finger on it. But something was missing.
My initial guess was that it was some of the formalism of my previous Presbyterian church that was missing. So my wife, who shared my feelings, and I cast about for another Presbyterian church. And we found a good one that slightly closer to home. The preaching wasn’t as good, but it was a solid congregation, very active, very engaged and engaging, very friendly. There was a little bit of liturgy, but not enough.
Somewhere along the line, I had determined that more liturgy was the answer to my problem. If I can’t remember the sermon from week to week, at least I will be able to derive profit from the parts of the liturgy that are identical from week to week. Slowly over time, went the thinking, the liturgy will change me, even if the sermons don’t. Trouble is, where are the liturgical churches? Catholic? Never. Orthodox? There are none. Episcopal? Aren’t they just wild gay orgies? Turns out: no.
As Providence would have it, we were invited over for dinner to some Presbyterian friends’ house. And casually, as an aside during dinner, she happened to mention this giant Episcopal church down the street, which she had attended for a Christmas concert. And something to the effect that, despite the fact that it was a liturgical church, it was nevertheless alive with the Spirit. In those circles, liturgy is frequently associated with “rote”. Which means, dead.
So this time, we attended this Episcopal church one Sunday. Nothing would ever be the same again. My wife and I were both in tears at the astounding beauty of the liturgy. And not only did we get the liturgy, but also hymns. Glorious hymns, gloriously played and vigorously sung. And the Eucharist every week. (I had read Merton by now). This is what had been missing. The Eucharist as the center (though not the object) of worship. And fantastic sermons based on huge Scripture readings from a lectionary (i.e., not at the whim of the pastor). Sure, I was a little bugged by the woman “priest”. But man, that was a small price to pay. To this day, worship has never been more aesthetically beautiful than it was there.
A couple of priests visited our apartment. I got to tell them how Merton had led me to them, in inspiring me with the desire for sacramental worship. And we figured we’d be here forever.
And we would have been if Prophet Gene hadn’t gone ahead and done his thing. Though I am anticipating the story a bit here, because, by that point, I was merely using the Prophet (pbuh) as an excuse to take the plunge across the Tiber.
Philip Yancey
Catholics may not be familiar with Philip Yancey, but he is a fantastic Protestant author (despite being alive). The first book of his that I read was The Jesus I Never Knew. I was instantly hooked. Mostly by his candor. He has a way of looking at an issue very honestly, whether it’s Jesus, prayer, grace, whatever. I profited greatly by his thoughts, but the thing that was very interesting about him is that he quotes very liberally from other authors, irrespective of the tradition from which they come. As long as they have something good to say about the topic at hand, he will quote them. And so many times, his books turn out to be Greatest Hit collections of excerpts from a multitude of writers, be they Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. And as far as Catholic authors go, he was never interested in rehashing the long and tired debates of the 16th Century. In other words, he quoted intelligent Catholics, and didn’t feel the need to caveat the quote with the usual disclaimers. Briefly, to him, Catholics were Christians, and so what they had to say was pertinent.
This had an immeasurable impact in opening my mind to the Catholic Church. Firstly, I have never been particularly anti-Catholic. I certainly wasn’t raised that way. But from the years I spent in the various Protestant denominations, I had certainly imbibed a certain amount of the latent skepticism regarding Catholicism. It was just in the air. I didn’t know much about it, but I knew it couldn’t be trusted. Yancey went a long way towards diffusing some of that.
Secondly, the authors he quoted (especially, but not only the Catholics) spoke of things I had never heard of. And they spoke of things I had heard of with such compelling depth that it was difficult to resist going straight to the source, and buying their books. Especially intriguing to me were GK Chesterton (whose Everlasting Man I had already read), Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. I have actually never gone to the source with Nouwen.
I requested and received for Christmas one year, from my wife, The Seven Story Mountain. And nothing has ever been the same since. That book opened to me vistas I had never yet imagined. I immediately wanted to join a monastery. OK, so I was married, so I had to temper that a bit. But what really stood out in my mind was the sacramentalism of it all. I don’t remember much of the book anymore, but I do remember him traveling around somewhere, from church to church, receiving the Blessed Sacrament everywhere he went. I remember a reference to the Little Flower, and not knowing what he meant. This book created in me a very tangible longing for something, I knew not what. But it turned out to be the Eucharist.
And with Chesterton, I just remember the joy and humor, and remember thinking he had something I wanted.
CS Lewis
Continuing in this little attempt to list some of the reasons for becoming Catholic, I come to CS Lewis. As I said elsewhere, CS Lewis was probably single-handedly responsible for me taking Christianity seriously. I developed an interest in it from him, and was formed in it by him. And although he is deeply loved by Evangelicals as a preacher of Mere Christianity, he was a person who was deeply formed by the ancient Faith of the Catholic Church. And so, as I was being formed by him, I was being formed by a much richer and deeper Christianity than was popularly available at your local non-denom church, which I was attending at the time. In fact, while I remember it, I might add that, after I had long since started to feel the official tug of the Church, one of my main reasons for remaining Protestant was that, well, CS Lewis remained Protestant. He was a smart Protestant who held to these various Catholic beliefs. Why couldn’t I do that? Overcoming this attachment to him was a big step I would later have to face.
So CS Lewis was a crypto-Catholic. Wait. What? He was? Well, yes. He is most known for his Narnia Chronicles, which I haven’t read. He is also very well known for his Mere Christianity, but that book was essentially a stripping back of Christianity to those elements which all Christians of good-will have in common. It didn’t represent the fullness of his belief and practice. And yet even in that irenic ecumenical book, there are things in it which, upon further reflection, would have been outright rejected by most Evangelicals if they hadn’t a priori been smitten with Lewis. I think especially of his analogy of faith and works as twin blades of a pair of scissors. Neither blade can do the work alone. So right there, in the first serious book I read about Christianity, I was already being formed in something other than sola fide.
CS Lewis was a turn-of-the-20th-Century Anglican, which means that he was alive when that denomination started the long decline to what it has become today. But it also means that he was very familiar with Cardinal Newman. And so, somewhere, CS Lewis embraces the doctrine of purgatory, praising the way that Newman framed the doctrine. So purgatory was a part of my Christianity from the start. Later in his life, he went to confession weekly, and though that wasn’t part of my practice, he planted the seed of my longing for that sacrament. He confessed in a letter somewhere, that his view of the Eucharist was almost “magical”, so I began to seriously consider the possibility of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist because of him.
Some other things that aren’t specifically Catholic, but which, in embracing them, distanced me from the more Evangelical/Fundamentalist view of things… In The Problem of Pain, he sets forth his view of a theistic form of evolution, describing St. Jerome as having compared the Genesis narrative to a folktale (though I have never been able to track that reference). Being a graduate student in the biosciences, this helped me tremendously in the reconciliation of faith and science, and also primed me for the Church where such views are not viewed with raised eyebrow. In fact, his views of Scripture were also not of the literalistic kind one frequently finds in the circles I was running. Which is something else which primed me for the Catholic views of Scripture.
He also spoke in various places of the value of suffering, and how any suffering could be redemptive, not just those associated with the faith. He was very strong in decrying a false sort of sentimentalism for the early joys of conversion, choosing rather to embrace the aridity of later years for what they are: God’s way of growing us up. This was especially helpful in understanding my increasing discomfort with the way a vibrant Christian faith was often equated with certain feelings.
And of course, the guy loved his beer and was practically a chain smoker, which gradually led me to a more precise view of the goodness of the created order. Alcohol and tobacco weren’t sinful. Humans were who misused these things.
CS Lewis also held some pretty strong anti-Catholic views. As I said before, overcoming these views of his was a difficult task for me later in my journey. However, early on, they were “the perfect cover”. They enabled to learn the Catholic faith, all the while suspecting I was actually becoming a better Christian, by which I meant, of course, Protestant Christian. In fact, it is precisely these anti-Catholic views which make him, in my opinion, such a great Catholic apologist. Most Protestants trust him implicitly. Little do they suspect he is our Catholic Trojan Horse.
Old books
CS Lewis somewhere said something to the effect that it was important to read old books because in them, you will discover the blind spots of your particular generation. Makes sense. And it is something I took to heart. My mantra jokingly became that I would refuse to read a book if its author was still alive.
In practice, this initially meant reading everything (literally, except Narnia) CS Lewis ever wrote or said. One could spend ones time doing worse things. As I read his books, I became aware of something in them that was different from the modern spiritual books that people would recommend to me. If I had reflected on it for any period of time, I doubt I would have come to the conclusion that I have now eventually come to. At the time, I think I ascribed it to old books, reinforcing what CS Lewis had previously said. I just assumed that there was something about the way dead people spoke that was more interesting, relevant, stimulating, whatever, than live people.
But this thesis of old authors being better than new ones was tested once I got to the end of the CS Lewis train. What to read now? CS Lewis had mentioned somewhere that GK Chesterton’s Everlasting Man had had a tremendous impact on him while he was still an atheist. So I picked up a copy of that at the library, and devoured it. Wow, these old guys are great! OK, but now who do I read?
Well, as Providence would have it, I started reading, online while bored at work, early works of various authors of the Reformed tradition. In fact, I also had been gifted earlier with a Puritan work. Old books, right? They were no doubt marvelous, right? Wrong. I simply couldn’t read them. They were dull in style and cold in content. There was none of warmth and vigor that characterized Lewis and Chesterton. I think I chalked this up merely to stylistic differences, or the books being too old, but I now think that there was much more to it than that.
In reading Lewis and Chesterton, I was being exposed to much more than old books. I was being exposed to Catholic Truth. Chesterton was Catholic, though I didn’t know it at the time. Lewis was a crypto-Catholic (more on that in a separate post), but I knew it not. And more than being exposed to Catholic Truth, I was being formed by it. It is no exaggeration to say that I learned Christianity, while in grad school, from CS Lewis. And so when I read non-Catholic old books, or new books from the local Christian bookstore, I was disappointed to find a form of Christianity that was alien to that which I had learned. And not only alien, but not as attractive, not as expansive, not as glorious. It was much more cramped and stale. In a word, boring. Trite. Cliche.
But again, at the time, I was unaware of any of this.
Anti-Catholicism
In the various Protestant circles I used to run in, I invariably ran into people who had strong and quite negative opinions about the Catholic Church. This is understandable. I don’t begrudge anyone their opinions. Fair enough, yes? I never had any opinion, whether positive or negative. I believe that I was impartial. I had no desire to hate the Church, nor to join her. I simply didn’t know anything about her.
But as I was exposed to these various (and oft-times contradictory) opinions, it slowly began to occur to me that maybe these people were wrong. Out of a desire to be fair (and maybe a little bit of a fly in the ointment), I decided to check out some of these wild claims people were making about Catholics. “They re-sacrifice Jesus at every Mass.” But surely that can’t be so, I reasoned, for it is one of the plainer things of Scripture that Christ was sacrificed “once” for sins, as the book of Hebrews states. And surely they ain’t so dumb as to come right out and say, hell no, Hebrews is wrong. After a modicum of investigation, it turned out they didn’t claim to re-sacrifice Jesus at all. They just presented the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ to the Father at each Mass.
Huh. So the anti-Catholics were wrong on that. What else were they wrong about, I wondered?
Turns out, quite a lot. Another early one was that “baptism erases Original Sin.” After a little more investigation, it turns out that the phrase itself does semi-adequately describe an aspect of the Catholic position on Original Sin. However, it wasn’t as ridiculous as it initially sounded because Catholics understand Original Sin differently than Protestants. So, even though Original Sin is canceled out by baptism, Catholics didn’t thereby mean that they were spotless, or didn’t struggle with sin, or weren’t sinners.
Huh. So the anti-Catholics weren’t specifically wrong, but the two groups used language differently, contributing to misunderstandings. Where else might that be occurring? In not a few places, it turned out. And mind you, the mindset wasn’t one of coming to agree with what Catholics believed. It was just a coming to realize that Protestants often misconstrued or misrepresented what Catholics believed.
All of this happened quite early in the process, and produced in me no desire to be Catholic, but a little curiosity about why people seemed to be perpetually in a knot about Catholicism, while knowing so little about it.
Why did you become Catholic?
When people ask this question, there are always multiple different answers that could be pulled out. I have always wanted to compile my own set of reasons, just for the sake of archiving. I will link this list to the side and add to it as I remember things. I also hope to link to each item in the list and write a little more about each one. Over time. And now the list:
- Anti-Catholicism
- Old books
- CS Lewis
- Philip Yancey
- A vague feeling that the worship service I was attending wasn’t what it was supposed to be
- Hilaire Belloc and The Great Heresies
- Who arbitrates between conflicting theologies?
- Where did the Bible come from?
- First Holy Communion
- The witness of the Church Fathers
- Catholic beauty
- The Innocence Mission
- The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
- An Introduction to the Devout Life
- GK Chesterton
- Pipe, pint and pew
- My Grandmother
- Ancient tradition and rootedness
- Prophet Gene
My Own Heart Let Me Have More Have Pity On; Let
My own heart let me have more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst ’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
’s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile.
From The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins | 1918
The kind of thinking that drives me nuts
If you really want to make progress in the spiritual life, it seems that one really needs a firm and determined purpose to make changes. But how can one achieve a firm purpose if one is so attached to various things that he does not desire to let them go? It would seem that one would need to detach before making one’s purpose firm. But how can you ever hope to detach without a firm purpose already in place? One seems to be stuck in an endless circle. How to break out of such a circle?
Is it simply the old adage that one needs to pray not only for the strength to make changes, but also for the desire? For I confess, I want to live a life of virtue, but I desire it not.
“Purify your hearts, you men of double mind.”
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. “
Drive them out
I am not versed in the specific references, but I have heard Scott Hahn state that the early Church Fathers have a spiritual interpretation of some of the Old Testament texts relating to driving out the inhabitants from the Promised Land. Such we find in Numbers 33:
“Say to the people of Israel, When you pass over the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their figured stones, and destroy all their molten images, and demolish all their high places; and you shall take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given the land to you to possess it. [...] But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as pricks in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell. And I will do to you as I thought to do to them.” Numbers 33:51-56
Apparently, according to Hahn, the Fathers saw in verses such as this a post-baptismal call to drive out sin from our lives. Passing through the Jordan is a type of baptism. By baptism, we possess the Promised Land. And yet the call remains to drive out the sin from our lives. Or else these sins shall remain as pricks in our eyes and thorns in our side to trouble us. To rob us of peace, to rob us of joy, and scarily, to dispossess us of the Land, if it comes to it. For the Lord will do to us what he thought to do to them.
And now, on to the book of Joshua.
