Non-Catholics typically look at the well-known practices & beliefs of Catholics and think of them as an eclectic, jumbled hodgepodge of unrelated and eccentric ideas and behaviors. A veritable grab-bag of nonsense invented or accumulated in pack-rat fashion over the centuries. I mean, just look at them:
Papal infallibility, praying to saints, fish on Fridays, “the Mass” as a
sacrifice, penance & personal mortification, confession to a priest, rosary
beads, mortal & venial sins, crucifixes & statues, holy water,
condemnation of contraception, marriage tribunals, priestly celibacy, the whole
Mary thing, sign of the cross, seven sacraments, yada, yada, yada ….
That’s the outsider’s view.
But once a person makes the decision, moved by grace, to take the teachings and practices of the Church seriously and begins to look into their meaning and history, it’s as if he takes the huge pile of fabric he once mistook for a “grab-bag” and begins to open and unroll it and takes a hard look at it. He then realizes that it is actually a tapestry, ingeniously woven in a seamless integrated pattern. The images depicted on it are not random and confused, but interconnected, historically organic & rationally sound. (Venerable John Henry Cardinal Newman said to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.)
And as he looks more closely, he begins to notice certain threads in the fabric that can be traced from one doctrine to the next, to the next … tracing them all the way to the central figure: Jesus Christ, true God & true man, His life, passion, death and resurrection. It’s called the unity of faith.
Everything, no matter how remote it may seem at first, eventually relates to and takes its meaning from the person of Jesus Christ. Catholicism, properly understood, is a unified whole, not a random mishmash. This is why, once you begin to “tug” on a particular thread (say, you think there’s nothing wrong with artificial contraception), you very soon start to see that one thread, once pulled out of place, begins to mar and distort the others nearby (e.g., the total gift of self in marriage, the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of human life, reliance on divine providence …). Before long, the whole pattern starts to come undone, just because you thought “one little thread … way down here in the corner” wasn’t to your liking, wasn’t necessary, and it was OK to pull it out.
It doesn’t work that way, though. “Cafeteria Catholicism” (the practice of picking and choosing the doctrines you like and skipping over the ones you don’t) is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Once you reject the magisterial (teaching) authority of the Church, in effect making yourself the final judge of the way things should be, you cease to be Catholic and become, well, something else. Politicians (to use the most common example) who claim to be Catholic, yet maintain that it is desirable to protect the heinous practice of abortion by every possible law are lying. They are not Catholic because they dismiss fundamental Catholic teaching on the sanctity of human life (and a whole lot more besides, because you can’t reject one without implicitly rejecting a host of others).
On the other hand, once, through the operation of grace, you make the act of faith that you “believe and profess all that the Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God,”* while you may not understand every detail of every article of the faith, you still believe, on the word of Jesus, that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church (Matt 16:19), that it would never formally teach an error as truth to be believed by all. And, if you choose to dig deeper into any of the individual tenets of the faith, that truth is always borne out to an amazing degree, bringing with that understanding a deep sense of peace and satisfaction (and even love) that an “outsider” cannot know.
* (part of the Profession of Faith made by adult converts)
No comments:
Post a Comment