Posted on 07/23/2007 3:36:15 PM PDT by annalex
Sunday, July 22, 2007
As a young Catholic I was unaware of the amount of irrational hatred that was directed toward the Catholic Church and Catholics themselves. Growing up in Los Angeles I was not subject to the Fundamentalist “tracts” being placed on my family car while we were at Mass as I would have been had I lived in the “Bible Belt”. My exposure to people of other faiths was frequent and always positive. The majority of my friends growing were Jewish as were the girls whom I had the honor of dating. My babysitter growing up was Mormon, as was my Paternal Grandfather. My Paternal Grandmother is a Methodist and my Father was an atheist for most of his life. My Maternal Grandfather was a Presbyterian from a family that produced many deacons. However, my Maternal Grandmother was an Irish Catholic and thus my Mother was a Catholic and therefore we were raised Catholic. None of this was seen as a conflict. None of the above people in my family ever acted as though anything was “wrong” with my siblings and I being raised Catholic.
In my college years I essentially fell away from the faith. I still called myself a “Catholic” but had no particular belief in any of the dogmas that makes one a Catholic. I just knew that I was of Irish ancestry and thus was “Catholic”. My beliefs were for the most part agnostic. I thought that true believers were absurd (I included both theist and atheist true believers as absurd).
While in college I heard all about how the Catholic Church was responsible for the Dark Ages, the destruction of the Native Peoples of the Americas, the Holocaust, the Inquisition, pimples on teenagers, Milli-Vanilli and just about everything else that negatively effected anyone anywhere at anytime everywhere. I learned how peaceful and wonderful Muslim societies were and how Christians lived very well under Islamic rule. And how the Crusades were an evil move by a corrupt Pope to throw off that wonderful balance and have a huge land grab for greedy Churchman and Nobles. I heard how nothing good happened in the Christian world and no good men were produced in the Christian world until Marin Luther and later "the Enlightenment". I look back now and marvel at how I remained a Catholic even if it was in name only. All my history professors with their fancy PhDs thought Catholicism was a force for evil in the Western World who was I to disagree? Of course I just went along and got good grades and degrees not really challenging the idiocy that I was being taught.
There I was just a young guy going through life not contemplating the great issues of life and certainly not contemplating being a Catholic when I had the misfortune to meet a Rabbi that was a friend of my wife’s family. During our discussion, the rabbi told me about things that Christians “buy into” like the Trinity and the fact that Jesus was God. I was told that I could never understand Jews and their suffering at the hands of Catholics. I was told that I “would never know what it is to be a Jew or how it feels to have your children forced to sing Christmas carols (oh the horror! the horror!)”. I would never know what it is like to look at someone like me and see the Inquisition and the Crusades. Now, anyone who is not a self absorbed bigot would know that talking to a person who is half Irish and Catholic knows a little something of prejudice and persecution. My ancestors could not own land in their own country. They had to pay taxes to a foreign English master and support his foreign Church that was a parasite on their own land. They had real persecution. If they could have gotten off with simply singing Church of Ireland songs rather than pay taxes to and be persecuted by the British, I'm sure they would have gladly accepted. But why look past ones on victim-hood in order to see truth, when victim-hood is so much more of a commodity in our modern society.
At that point I made a commitment to understand my faith. I would never let someone attack the beliefs of my ancestors as this rabbi did without making a strong defense. My ancestors were willing to be persecuted (the real kind of persecution not the Christmas Carol kind) rather than abandon their faith. The least I could do is understand what they found so important as to endure what they did. Thus starting my journey toward becoming a passionate believer. The irony of a anti-Catholic bigoted rabbi bringing me closer to the truth of Christ is absolutely wonderful.
I started reading books by the usual authors that are sold at Borders and Barnes & Noble like George Weigel. While informative they were, upon reflection, very superficial. However, I happened upon a book called “Catholicism verses Fundamentalism” by Karl Keating. I thought it was simply going to be an analysis of Catholic beliefs versus Fundamentalist beliefs. What I had purchased was a wonderful combination of satire and apologetics. It has become the definitive apologetics book produced in the last 30 years. The title of the book itself mocks Jimmy Swaggarts silly book “Catholicism and Christianity”. Throughout the book I was baptized by fire into the world of anti-Catholicism. I learned about such Fundamentalist writers and “thinkers” as Lorraine Boettner, Alexander Hislop, Jimmy Swaggart, Jack Chick and others. Keating dismantled their arguments so thoroughly that one wonders how these people are not all routinely dismissed even by honest Fundamentalists. Sadly, low rent bigots like Hislop, Boettner and Dave Hunt are still widely read in Fundamentalist circles. Swaggart has fallen out of favor as we all know. Keating opened up a new door to me. I now was ready for the next step and started buying every book by Chesterton and Belloc I could find as they are the greatest apologists for the Catholic faith in the last 100 years.
The Holy Spirit has a funny way of working. I became friends with a wonderful guy who happens to be a Fundamentalist Christian. As we would talk he would mention some of the things that Keating talked about in his book. I was informed that Peter never went to Rome and that the Church was founded by Constantine the Great, and that Easter is really “Ishtar” and other scholarly insights that occupy the minds of Fundamentalist writers. I was told all about Catholicism and how it is really just paganism re-written. To his and most Fundamentalists credit, they literally do not know they are repeating lies. These books are sold at Protestant Book Stores and Churches. Also, he informed me of these things out of love as he believed my soul was in peril. So he could not process the refutations that I would make to him and just go on to the next attack. Most Catholics know about this tactic that Fundamentalists use. They will tell us what we believe and how stupid we are for believing it. 99% of the time they are wrong. The problem is that they have been told by Dave Hunt (his bio is from "rapture ready") or James White that the Calumnies that they are stating are Gospel truth.
After a while I began to pick up more and more apologetics material to refute my friends claims. I also decided that I would no longer play defense with him. I would attack his belief in sola scriptura (scripture alone) and sola fide (faith alone). When I would press him and ask about where those teachings are found in the Bible he would have no answer. This lead to his anger that I was asking too much to show me where the Bible taught either one of those Protestant Traditions (Traditions of men, not of God I might add). I would also repeat what he would say to me but re-phrase it to see if he really was willing to stand by it. For instance, he once told me that he was passionately anti-Catholic. I responded “Really? So if I were Jewish would it be okay for you to tell me that you are passionately anti-Jew?” He was taken aback and responded “Of course not!” I then responded “I guess some hatred is acceptable while others is not”. His response….silence. And then move on to the next attack. That is generally the tactic of the anti-Catholic. Never acknowledge that they are wrong, just move on to the next attack until they find something that the Catholic cannot answer. Usually it ends with some obscure Pope from the 7th century that no one knows about.
Anti-Catholicism rots the mind. It blinds people and they become obsessed with the destruction of something that they cannot destroy. People have been trying for 2000 years. Churchmen like Roger Mahoney have done their best. But the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it. So this leads to desperation. Which then leads to all kinds of ridiculous theories and outright lies about what Catholics believe and do. It does not stop with Fundamentalist Christians though. Before we think “well that’s just those weird bible-thumpers” let’s examine some things that people just “know”.
People "just know" that the Catholic Church did nothing in the Americas but persecute the indigenous people and massacre them. We "just know" that Priests never stood up to the Spaniards. Of course this is untrue. It is true that there were Catholic Priests who conducted themselves terribly during colonial times. However, it was Catholic Priests who sought to make life better for the indigenous people. Jesuits armed Indians against the Spanish in Paraguay, Francisco de Vittoria pleaded with the Spanish King in defense of the Indians. Most people in the Americas have never heard of Bartoleme de las Casas. Las Casas, a Spanish Dominican Priest has been called the Father of anti-imperialism and anti-racism. There is also Antonio Montesino who was the first person, in 1511, to denounce publicly in America the enslavement and oppression of the Indians as sinful and disgraceful to the Spanish nation. There of course were villains in the Spanish system but so were there in the American and English systems that were dominated by Protestants. We don’t hear about the brutality of Protestant lands in the US. We hear about those backward Spanish Catholics (who built the first Universities in the Americas) but not about the theocratic police state established in Geneva by John Calvin or the massacres carried out by Anabaptists in Munster.
In some cases anti-Catholicism is not only profitable it can allow for common bullies to slander and desecrate the memory of men finer than themselves without repercussions. Take the case of Daniel Goldhagen. He has made a career out of slandering the Catholic Church. Commenting on Mr. Goldhagens slanderous book A Moral Reckoning, Rabbi David Dalin, described Goldhagens work as "failing to meet even the minimum standards of scholarship.” He went on to say “That the book has found its readership out in the fever swamps of anti-Catholicism isn't surprising. But that a mainstream publisher like Knopf would print the thing is an intellectual and publishing scandal." This statement is absolutely correct. Let us be honest though, Goldhagen simply represents the double-standard that exists in our society. He is a left wing Jew who attacks the only group that it is acceptable to attack in modern American society, the evil Catholics. If a right wing Catholic were to make his living by attacking Judaism and slandering a prominent rabbi while blaming Judaism for the Marxist massacres under the NKVD he would be an out of work “conspiracy kook” and a anti-Semite. He would certainly not be published in the New Republic. Goldhagen has made the absurd statement that Christianity is anti-Semitic at its core. Imagine if one were to say that Judaism is anti-Gentile to its core. They would be isolated as an anti-Semite. The message is clear. A Jewish bigot like Goldhagen gets published by Knopf and the New Republic while his mirror image would be isolated and vilified.
I would like to wrap up with some other observations. All Catholics are told endless stories about Catholics persecuting people. Generally it starts with a Catholic King who orders the persecution of a group and despite the Bishops or Pope condemning it, "the Catholics" are to blame. An example of his would be during the Crusades when Crusaders massacred Jews along the Rhine. That was “the Catholics” despite the local Bishops hiding and protecting Jews. When a Protestant barbarian like Oliver Cromwell slaughters Catholics at Drogheda and sells the women and children into sex slavery or sacks Wexford that’s not “the Protestants”. That’s just Cromwell.
Much is made about Hitler being a baptized Catholic by ignoramuses like Dave Hunt. Other bigots like Goldhagen argue that Nazism was an extension of Catholic bigotry through the ages. Yet these people do not mention that Karl Marx was a Jew and that the ranks of the NKVD, some of the greatest murderers of all time, were filled with Jews. By using Goldhagens logic should we not attack Judaism and Jews? If we Catholics are and our faith are responsible for a former Catholic who later went so far as to persecute the Church, should not Jews be held responsible for Karl Marx and Genrikh Yagoda and the fact that some of greatest murderers of modern times were Jewish. The answer is of course not. Your Jewish neighbor has likely not heard of the NKVD, Yagoda let alone support what he and they did.
As I wrap up my thoughts on this I should say thank you to all of the people that I mention above. Especially the Rabbi who started my journey. Had he not been a self absorbed bigot, he would not have angered me and I would not have explored my own faith. I would have continued in my ignorance and would not have understood the faith that built Western Civilization and sustained my ancestors. I would not have understood the faith that Christ taught to the Apostles, that was passed on to their successors, our Bishops. I would not truly know the joy of being a Catholic. His ignorant statements brought about my reversion back to the true faith and my wife’s conversion to it. For that, I will literally be eternally indebted to him.
Cool it on the puppy thing until the Michael Vick thing blows over.
There is a sale this week on doves at Pet Smart. I recommend those for the uninitiated. Jackals are getting harder to get. My contact in Morocco told me the price went up by 300%.
F
I’ll go for the doves!
IXNAY youay uysgay!!! Don’t talk Arymay orshipway shop-talk in front of these (spit)pure Christians(spit)!! Use our secret forum, “Ivatepray Eplyray”.
Reegardsfay
The only reason I jumped in was to attempt to present something that was not irrational; clearly I failed. Please let me disengage gracefully.
Tá brón orainn. Níl Spáinnis againn anseo!
Well if it was me, I'd try to clarify just what it was we were arguing about before I started with the arguing. So yeah, working to reach some kind of understanding of terms would be good.
But the purpose of many here is not understanding or dialog. It is condemnation. I was told by one of our separated brethren that he already KNOWS what we believe. Alrighty then! He went on to say that he didn't seek dialog. The purpose of his interactions was to show his brethren how right he is and how wrong we are. Something like that anyway.
So that would explain why there is no interest in engaging in the kind of ground clearing normal before a serious discussion among adults.
Come on, you know as well as I that anyone who says what these people say we think of the Eucharist is not interested in knowing what we really thing. Half an hour with Aquinas would put an end to some of the more bizarre charges. But, as I say, giving up bizarre charges in favor of the truth, even the simple truth of the mistake we do make rather than some other mistake we don't make, that's not part of the plan.
You have a very low threshhold for proof when the matter under question is whether Catholics are fools or not.
But the point is good. How could Saul be "dead" and his summoning by the witch of Endor be a bad thing while Jesus says "... all live to Him."
What do you think? I mean, I know you think WE'RE wrong. Do you think Jesus was wrong? And as has been pointed out, when Moses and Elijah appear at the Transfiguration is that kind of a pantomime, a shadow play, or is it real? If it's a pantomime, then shouldn't the Bible say there appeared with him IMAGES or Visions or "Something a lot like" Moses and Elijah. But it says they appeared with Him.
We don't want to say it's necromancy; we don't want to say God is fooling: We don't want to say the Bible is wrong: we don't want to say Jesus is wrong. How do we find our way through this? I like the question a lot.
But if it's a prayer then by your argument I really needn't notice it, desire it, ask for it or be grateful for it, because Christ is my Advocate, the only one I need, so your good will or prayers add nothing.
But I disagree with you about that consequence or conclusion. Even though the work of Christ is "all-sufficient", I am comforted by your good wishes and, I believe, somehow benefitted by your prayers.. I don't understand it but I think it's good for us to pray for one another and reasonable to ask for one another's prayers.
May God bring us all closer to one another in His love as He brings us closer to Him and may He ever teach us to pray better and better until there is no space between the Spirit's sighs and our prayers.
Sorry, my Immaculate Medal microchip is not working and my scapular back-up decoder is not missing.
Please send the message again on Rosary decade 4.
Well Vatican II redefined it and the recent letter from the Pope straightened it all out.
Phew!
Ooops,
not=now
I would say you don't know that two elephants are still both elephants even if one is big and the other little. All who do the will of His Father are mother and brother and sister, yep. But certainly this is not true in all respects, since not all were greeted by Gabriel or embraced By Elisabeth, not all gave Him birth and suckled Him. Not all were in the upper room on Pentecost. Many can be saints. Not all can be the pre-eminent saint.
The Basis of my thought is that God is the REAL Father. I am a father, but only a very poor version of REAL fatherhood, because I have a child, and really most of what's splendid about her is either unrelated to me or in spite of me. But everything that's splendid about creation is all from God. It happened just as He intended.
If I as a poor, smudged simulacrum of Fatherhood want my child to have everything I have and more, can I not think that the God whose Son called us "Friends" before He died for us and turned the universe upside down to save us -- can I not imagine that He wants to share everything with us? And among the things to be shared is the ministry of reconciliation. Different ones may undertake different aspects. Some plant, some water, God gives the increase, if increase there be. But we ALL share in the work of Christ.
Or try another tack: Our Lord said that he who would be greatest among us must be servant. Then He showed us what real servanthood is all about. He called us to be like Him, and died and rose to share the core of Who and What He is with us.
So, it seems to me, one way to view all this, and especially Heaven as we -- I dare to hope -- come closer to it, is like a grand country dance, a Virginia Reel say. We all dance, we all move to the head of the line, and dance down before our friends as they clap and laugh and joke and love us. And then we move down to the bottom of the line where it is our joy to clap and laugh and joke and love all those who dance down before us.
The point is it is our joy to dance down the middle and be loved and supported by our fellows, AND it is, if anything, our greater joy to hold up our fellows when they dance down the middle.
And you know if you've ever done such a dance (and if you haven't then Unam Sanctam applies in all its rigor, and you are in very deep spiritual trouble) that some beautiful and talented couple will dance down the middle, and you love and wonder at their beauty and gracefulness. And then some of your friends, maybe not the most graceful, maybe a little thick around the middle, maybe sporting a few more chins than absolutely necessary, then they dance down the middle, and you love them because they are your friends and because they love each other, and because they are who they are -- and tonight, because the punch is good, that is more than enough reason to love them.
And because you were lost in the fun of seeing your friends dance, you didn't notice that it was YOUR turn to dance down the middle. So hastily, awkwardly, you bow or curtsy, and are bowed or curtsyed to, then you grasp your beloved. And down the middle you go - amidst music and laughter and wine punch and love as thick in the air as cigar smoke at a convention.
This is a poor image, as my fatherhood is a poor image of the True Father, of how we mediate and are mediated for, how we serve and are served and how it is our very real joy to minister and to be ministered to. This is how we all mediate for one another: Some better, some worse, some one way, some another. Yes, priests have a special mediatory responsibility. But I have a special responsibility to plead to God for them as well as for others -- as only I can, however poor that may be. I dance down the middle the way it has been given to me to dance, and they dance down the middle the way it has been given to them to dance. I clap as I can, and they clap as they can.
As for the rest: HECK no! I talk to God. I talk to the Father. I talk to His Son. I talk to the Spirit. I talk to just about anybody who will hold still. I'd like to see some priest try to stop me from talking to God.
You, Mad Dawg, are a Catholic.
What a wonderful analogy of life in the spirit you have painted with your Virginia Reel!
God bless you!
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