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To: Mad Dawg; Amityschild; Brad's Gramma; Captain Beyond; Cvengr; DvdMom; firebrand; ...

Not sure when I’ll get to a detailed response.

To me, briefly, those are very shallow rationalizations that hold not a molecule of water—holy or otherwise.

Perhaps others will give a better and sooner response than I can manage.


1,626 posted on 07/09/2010 1:41:19 PM PDT by Quix (THE PLAN of the Bosses: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2519352/posts?page=2#2)
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To: Quix
To me, briefly, those are very shallow rationalizations that hold not a molecule of water—holy or otherwise.

This seems to be a claim to ignore an interpretation of the statements because they are rationalizations.

What if I were to say that your calling them rationalizations is a rationalization of your gut unwillingness to confront the fact that the Church doesn't teach what you think she teaches?

The characterization does not hold to my experience because I was not always in full communion with the See of Peter. That means I had to think my way into this bizarre Mary cult.

I am a parent myself. I know how kids change their parents, or a little of it. It seems to me that, as I said many years ago, non-Catholics end up reducing Mary to a vat. They do not consider the totality of parenthood, of mothering.

And I think I can make as strong a claim to THEIR rationalizing as can be made about us. We ALL are saturated with anti-Catholic propaganda. It is everywhere. There is ZERO cultural pressure to become Catholic any more.

At least some decades ago there were a few films that presented some Catholics as kind of quaint and superstitious but lovable. Not any more. Everyone "knows" about the Spanish Inquisition, though most of what they think they know is false. But who knows about, say, John of Cologne who was hanged this day in 1572 for believing in transubstantiation? Few, because the multiplicity of little non-Catholic groups serve the purposes of the liberals and intellectuals.

The towering intellects of Aquinas and Bonaventure are not easily denied, while the great non-Catholic Christian intellects, like Tillich, play wonderfully into the hands of the secularists. Our culture is uncomfortable with any Christianity, but it is especially opposed to Catholic Christianity.

Before the accusations of whining begin, let me say I like a good fight, and I relish this one with the ignoramuses in the secular world.

But I mention all this just to add evidence to the argument that is not unlikely that finding my interpretations, endorsed as they have been by at least a couple of Catholics in this thread, to be rationalizations is itself a culturally conditioned rationalization.

You know the little facial tic you observe when you tell someone you are a Christian. I get it not only from non-Christians but from Christians when I say I am a Catholic. A young lady, proud in her ignorance, asked me to justify this "new" Catholic teaching on "birth control". She was astonished and non-plussed when she learned that ALL Christian groups were against contraception until 1930. She just knew what the culture said about the issue.

To such people, a lot of what we teach seems like rationalizations. So it goes.

1,700 posted on 07/09/2010 8:31:13 PM PDT by Mad Dawg ("I tried being reasonable. I didn't like it." -- Dirty Harry)
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