Posted on 05/12/2015 5:40:02 AM PDT by NYer
Ping!
What a pathetic and weird reason to leave any church: sodomy, oh, excuse me, that beautiful act of love.
Well, at least they had the character to leave, rather than staying to poison the well.
Hmmm....I really ought to read “The Divine Comedy.” But I think I would need an annotated version to appreciate it.
Any recommendations, Freepers?
Wasn’t Michael Coren initially a Jewish convert to Catholicism?
Good riddance to the degenerate heretics. Now if only the other heretic would leave the Catholic church, i.e. the current Pope.
I believe that Mr. Dreher will find that any other church he chooses to join will also be run by flawed and sinful men.
If you search the world for a flawless church, your search will be in vain. Our Savior is perfect. We are not.
I’d get one that has the Gustave Doré illustrations.
http://www.worldofdante.org/gallery_dore.html
FReegards
I think the difference is that disagreeing with the church is practically a sacrament in Protestant churches.
Opposite-sex attraction isn't a sin either, but acting on it outside of marriage is a sin. His argument doesn't make sense.
All the labored intellectual reasoning in the world can lead you to belief that suits your mood of the time but if the Bible is your resource you may see truth. It seems other books, writings, philosophy, traditions have more influence on some people and denominations than the word of God.
We used the Dorothy Sayers translation in college — very good and heavily annotated!
And while digging I found another Dreher piece
Here's a snip to, perhaps, whet appetites for a long, possibly fruitful read...
I was lost, but lost in a familiar way. When I was 17, as a restless, anxious teenager, I wandered unawares into the Gothic cathedral at Chartres. The wonder and beauty of that medieval masterpiece made me realize that life was far more filled with joy, with possibility, with adventure and romance than I had imagined. I did not walk out of the cathedral that day a Christian, but I did leave as a pilgrim who was onto something.
“I need to see Chartres again,” I recently wrote to a friend. What I meant was that I needed my vision renewed, my spirit revived, my world re-enchanted by what I perceived there in 1984 as a world-weary American teenager who thought he had seen it all, but who in truth had no idea how blind he was until he beheld the most beautiful church in the world.
And then, killing time in a Barnes & Noble one hot south Louisiana afternoon, I opened a copy of Dante’s Inferno, the first of his Divine Comedy trilogy, and read these words (the translation I cite in this essay is by Robert and Jean Hollander):
Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood,
For the straight way was lost.
How Dante Saved My Life A midlife crisis is cured by The Divine Comedy
It seems to me that Dreher is now expressing regrets about leaving the Church, realizing that he was expecting a "Community of the Elect", Ivory-Snow Pure, rather than the real Church on Earth described by Our Lord as a field where wheat and tares grow together until the Last Day, and a dragnet which brings up all kinds of fish, good and bad, and strange ugly things from the Deep.
I respect Dreher and give him huge credit for seeing this, and I wish him well as he makes his pilgrim away toward his Master and mine.
Coren, on the other hand, seems a much shallower and shiftier fellow. He apparently is a convert to the LGBT line, and dissents from the Catholic moral objection to contraception. At least there's consistency here, since if it's OK for straight couples to reduce sexual intercourse to sterile jiggery-pokery, then it's OK for homosexuals to do the same.
I thought Coren's book "Why Catholics Are Right" --- which I presume he has now abjured? --- was poorly organized and superficial, and now it doesn't surprise me that he's left.
Frankly, he seems to me a weak and vacillating man. But weak and vacillating men need salvation, too. I'll pray for him, and hope that those who see my faults will pray for me.
It does not need to be an either / or proposition.
Luke 10:27 King James Version (KJV)
27 And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.
For clarification, I think some of the commenters were under the impression Dreher left out of support for sodomy, he did not. He initially left because the RCC diocese where in he resided had become spiritually poisonous and the pedophile scandal which he had covered as a reporter had left him deeply scarred. He was also concerned that it was not a spiritually safe environment for his family. Nor is he a Protestant. He joined the Orthodox Church.
My favorite translation is that by Dorothy Sayers (yes, THAT Dorothy Sayers, the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery stories). It has very thorough notes.
"It seems to me...." is the proper way to couch that thought. I don't find "regret" - perhaps you can. Rather, I find him sharing his deeper understanding of exactly why the corruption so deeply affected him. And it's about the healing of his own soul.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.