Posted on 07/31/2002 9:27:40 AM PDT by Polycarp
| Title: | It Came From The Roman Church . . . |
| Author: | David Mills |
| Title: | It Came From The Roman Church . . . |
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| Larger Work: | This Rock |
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| Pages: | 12 - 15 |
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| Publisher & Date: | Catholic Answers, Inc., San Diego, CA, April 2002 |
| Includes: | Identical text with no graphics. |
| Description: | Catholic horror stories told by Evangelicals (and ex-Catholics) and how to respond to them. |
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"It Came From The Roman Church . . . "
Don't Flee From Catholic Horror Stories
By David Mills
In the brief time since my family became Catholics, some of my Evangelical friends have gone out of their way to tell me Catholic horror stories. They will tell me about some near-pagan example of Catholic folk religion they once saw, or an oppressive priest (reactionary or liberal) they once knew, or a Catholic family next door who went to Mass regularly but didn't know anything about the Bible and the faith, or a married friend who happily carried on a long affair supposedly by going to confession after each visit to his girlfriend.
Some of them like to talk about "recovering Catholics" who were supposedly so horribly damaged by growing up Catholic that they just had to become Protestants. (They are always surprisingly unskeptical about these stories.) These people suffered by being made to feel guilt and shame about everything they did or to feel that they could not ever satisfy all the rules God insisted they obey before he would love them.
This is both a personal and an evangelical problem for Catholics. Almost any Catholic who talks very long to a serious Evangelical will be told in some way that though the Pope is a wonderful man, and some Catholics really love the Lord, and thank God for the Catholics in the pro-life movement, the average Catholic parish is either a den of iniquity or simply dead spiritually.
The Evangelical will often claim, by contrast, that Evangelical churches are alive, and, since our Lord said we shall know them by their fruits (Matt. 7:16), Evangelicals are the real Christians. (This ignores, of course, that what Jesus said applied to individual teachers, not to movements or theological systems.) The implication is that if you're a Catholic you've been had.
It is probably worse for a convert, because his friends sometimes speak as if he were either a dullard who hasn't noticed the problems or a romantic who refuses to see them. "You won't live in Rome, you know," one close friend told me — meaning, I suppose, that the Catholic faith I would encounter wouldn't be pure — as if this would be shocking news to me, the mere stating of which would bring me to my senses.
What To Think
How can one respond to this line of argument?
First, you must admit that the Evangelical has enough facts to make a reasonable charge. The truth is that many Catholics do not lead a visibly faithful life. Most, for example, do not obey the Church's teaching on contraception. Few (amazingly to me) go to confession.
On the other hand, many Evangelicals and their churches appear to be models of faithfulness. They study Scripture, try to order their lives by its teaching, share their faith with others, and at some sacrifice minister to the world in many ways. We can learn much from them.
Second, you must listen with sympathy yet question the horror stories. Most of us have trouble doing this, because something in our culture trains us to accept any story of suffering without question and to assume that the Church must have been guilty of almost anything it is accused of.
Take the stories of "recovering" Catholics. Of course, some people have suffered real abuse and have been treated badly. But most of these stories I have heard from the allegedly "recovering" Catholics themselves do not ring true.
What I hear, beneath the emotion and the anger, is usually one of two things. The first is an unwillingness to grow up and forgive what seem to be the sort of offenses we have all suffered from parents or teachers or pastors. The second is an unwillingness to live the Catholic life, leading to a desire to blame the Catholic Church rather than admit this. I say this because the offenses they describe were often surprisingly minor, even trivial, and were often simply attempts — some clearly clumsy or unkind, but some apparently not — to get them to live a fully Catholic life.
For example, many (I do not know how to put this delicately) left the Church when they wanted to remarry after a divorce, and the conjunction of their remarriage and their enlightenment is too convenient for me to accept the latter at face value. (In my experience, it is rare to find an ex-Catholic in Episcopal churches who is not divorced and remarried, and friends tell me that this is also true in many Evangelical churches.)
And of course the Catholic life is a difficult one to live and some people do not want to try. My wife works a few hours a week in the nursery of a budding megachurch nearby, and several of the other women she works with were once Catholics. They have all told her they left the Church because they "found Jesus" elsewhere. I suggested she look them in the eye and say, "You're using contraception, aren't you?" (She didn't.)
Now, I do not mean that you ought to tell the "recovering Catholic" that you do not believe his story. That would be unkind and perhaps drive him yet further from the Church. I suggest only that you have a mental reservation, based on a reasonable reading of the evidence.
Hard To Argue With
Third, you must remember that the Evangelical has a different idea of the local church. He is comparing apples with oranges and complaining that the oranges aren't red enough.
For the Evangelical, the local church is primarily a gathered community of those of like mind and social class that forms a fairly complete alternative community for its members. For the Catholic, the local church is primarily the place we — people of different minds and classes — gather to meet the Lord in the Mass and from which we go out to exercise our vocations in the world.
The Evangelical church will therefore produce lots of public ministries, from Bible studies to short-term mission trips. The Catholic church may or may not have a lot of these ministries, but in either case they are not essential to its life and not stressed in the way they are in the Evangelical church.
The time and energy Evangelical put into their churches' public ministries Catholics may be putting into other, less visible religious activities. They may go to daily Mass when the Evangelical would go to a midweek Bible study, but for some reason going to Mass is not counted as a sign of "life."
Fourth, you must remember the practical differences between Catholics and Evangelicals. There is less attachment to a particular local church in Protestant circles because these churches are more transitory: They get created, split, and cease to be much more regularly than do Catholic parishes.
The Evangelical church therefore has to provide its people with the nourishment that deeper roots provide those who have lived there longer. The type of social interaction that the Catholic may have in his extended family the Evangelical may have to find in his church. The Evangelical church will seem livelier, though it is only giving its members what the Catholics have already. Its social homogeneity helps a great deal as well. There is more potential for interaction among its members due to greater similarities, interests, goals, et cetera. More diversity — which you find in many Catholic parishes — means less potential for interaction.
Because the two churches are different in theory and in practice, the Evangelical church can be presented as livelier than the Catholic church next door, because its life is much more public, while the life of the second is largely hidden from view. The Catholic parish may be producing saints by the dozen, but it may not produce enough visible efforts to get credit for "life."
Fifth, you must remember that as a Catholic you are tied down in a way the Evangelical is not. Anyone who doesn't meet the standards of holiness or zeal required in a particular Evangelical church may either leave or be disinvited to attend. The Evangelical can simply declare that the offender is not a "true Christian." But Catholics cannot disown bad Catholics. A Catholic is stuck with every other Catholic in the world, no matter how badly he behaves.
Besides this disadvantage, the Catholic Church does not even get to claim her own saints on her own behalf. Because they feel any good Christian must in some sense be one of them, Evangelicals will often adopt a Mother Teresa as a sort of honorary Evangelical and try to take credit for her as well. (This, I should make clear, has happened to me in discussions with my Evangelical friends.)
The Evangelical World
Sixth, you must realize that though there is much to admire in Evangelicalism, things are not exactly as they seem. A Catholic will have to note that even the most conservative Evangelicals have capitulated completely to the contraceptive mentality and for the most part to the divorce culture as well. Almost all neglect the sacramental life, and though they all recognize the authority of Scripture, they are enmeshed in intractable disagreements over what it means.
And even one of their own pollsters, George Barna, has found that they are doctrinally a confused body. Over one-third do not believe in Jesus' physical Resurrection, and over half do not believe in the existence of the Holy Spirit. About two in five "born again" Christians believe that "it does not matter what religious faith you follow because all faiths teach similar lessons about life," and from half to three-quarters believe "there is no such thing as absolute truth."
I bring this up not to put down our Evangelical brothers and sisters, who on most issues are our closest allies and often are models of faithfulness. I bring it up only to encourage those who have been left tongue-tied by the sort of argument I've described. Out of charity, you should not be quick to quote these statistics in return but will, I hope, be able to listen with some serenity to someone put down the Catholic Church as inferior to Evangelicalism.
A Sign
Finally, you must see that realism about the Catholic Church implies a surprising proof of her claims. My Evangelical friends think that comparing lax Catholics to lively Evangelicals will make me an Evangelical. Their horror stories may be disturbing to me personally, but not to my faith. They do not make me doubt the claims of the Catholic Church. Fallen men in groups rarely keep a high standard and almost never do so over any length of time.
As a barely Christianized teenager, listening to classmates in my social studies class sneer at Christianity because the Allies and the Germans both sang hymns as they killed each other, I thought that such a thing was only what one would expect. That Christians in 1915 thought that God was on their side did not seem to me to have much to do with the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God who rose from the dead almost nineteen hundred years before.
Laxity seems to me almost inevitable in something as big and as old and as embedded in the culture as the Catholic Church. But I do not suggest that Catholics console themselves with a realistic view of the Catholic Church as a human institution, because in the body of Christ sociological inevitability does not have the last word.
I began to love the Catholic Church in part because she kept reviving when she seemed to be dying and men of the world were writing her obituary. Time after time, when sociologists predicted her death, she exploded into new life. These revivals have always seemed to me a sign of her unique divine life. We are, I think, at the beginning of such a revival even now.
What To Do
But what to do, when a friend tells you Catholic horror stories? It is trying, being treated as a dolt or a fool. I have found the best way to respond is simply to say, gently, "I'm not stupid, you know." This will usually send your friend into retreat — though not always, I've found. While he tries to apologize you can begin to tell him about the one Church whose status is not affected by her members' sins and failings.
And then you can admit that most Catholics are not perfect Catholics and explain that in the Catholic Church you have found all the graces by which God will help you pursue God. You can say that you love and respect your Evangelical brothers and sisters, but only in the Catholic Church are these graces to be found in their full range and power — which is why all the horror stories in the world will not discourage you.
David Mills is the author of Knowing the Real Jesus (Servant/Charis [2001]) and a senior editor of Touchstone: A Magazine of Mere Christianity.
©2002 by Catholic Answers, Inc.
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Okay, I'll calm down. Don't want to pop a blood vessel. ;-)
But I still don't see the point. That some Catholics do nutty things or have nutty ideas or do evil things or have evil ideas is no more surprising to me than that some Protestants do similarly.
"I told poly that I tend to believe him when he tells me it is not official church teaching that Mary is worshipped."
Gee, thanks. Beat us some more, why don't you. ;-)
C'mon, Wrigley, you tend to believe it? Could you be a little less decisive about giving Catholics the benefit of the doubt that we do not teach idolatry? Go read the Catechism of the Catholic Church! You can find it on-line. The Catechism offers a reasonably-concise 700 page treatment of what it is that Catholics officially believe. And worship of Mary, according to this official statement of Catholic belief, is verboten.
I tend to believe that you are sincere and don't quite realize the attitude of bias which comes across in your tending to believe that we are not idolators.
But next time I will be more gentle when I tend to believe that you are a brother in Christ deserving of the benefit of the doubt, even when you apparently accidentally push Catholic hot-buttons.
sitetest
Their usage of the language was wrong, not their intent. See my post to DrStevej. How can you know what every Catholic is forcefully taught, that all healing comes only from God, but that we may ask for intercession from other saints, both those living on earth and those living in heaven, and still persist in characterizing those poor women as practicing Mary worship.
It might seem a natural conclusion to you.
To me it is a bigoted unwarranted and uncharitable conclusion.
No Catholic worships Mary, even the simple little old ladies.
Every Catholic knows worship is owed to God alone. Every one!
So to us its simple bigotry for you to assert otherwise when we know damn well its simply untrue and we've explained why to you till we're blue in the face!
Of course, by "you" I don't mean you personally, Wrigley. But please understand our exasperation when otherwise well meaning Christians tell us we have this terrible problem of Catholics worshipping Mary when such is simply a straw man, an untruth, a lie propagated by professional anti-Catholics and accepted uncritically by otherwise well meaning Christians.
Can you not see how that veneration could lead to worship?
Are you also saying you know what the intentions were? I knew these guys personally. I think I would have a better grasp of what they thought than you would.
Horrors! Praying to Mary! Do you understand what that means? It simply means asking her intercession according to the communion of saints. IT IS NOT WORSHIP!!! And those guys know that!!!
I don't think I am unreasonable when I come to that conclusion.
Actually, you are not. You've been so programmed to think that
"praying to Mary" = Worshipping Mary as God,
not
"praying to Mary" = asking her intercession according to the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints, a doctrine found in the earliest Christian creeds,
that you are not being unreasonable at all.
But you are still wrong, and it is institutionalized anti-Catholic bigotry that programs your thinking to draw these fatally flawed conclusions!
Catholics do not worship Mary.
Protestants use different meanings for "worship" and "prayer" and "veneration" that, when those meanings are projected onto common Catholic dialogue and prayer practices, make it seem Catholics are involved in idolatry and worshipping saints.
They are not!!!
Furthermore, professional anti-Catholics know damn well that they are continuing to propagate these misunderstanding, BUT THEY DO IT ANYWAYS because it serves their agenda.
BTW, This of course is simple bigotry, willfully and of set purpose intended to confuse otherwise honest Christians regarding true Catholic practices and beliefs.
My first point is that when you say tend to believe that this is the official teaching of the Catholic Church, you are casting in doubt that we do not officially teach idolatry.
Since it is clear to anyone who can read, and has taken the time to inform themselves of the official teaching of the Church in this regard, that, indeed, we do not officially teach idolatry, your tending to believe sounds like an insult.
If you have any doubt whatsoever that it is the official teaching of the Church that we will not be idolators, fall silent for a while, check out the Catechism, and once you're convinced that idolatry is not our official teaching, then come back and ask the questions that you have.
Or at least pretend that you are convinced.
Now, to your question. Do I think veneration of Mary, or of any saint, can lead to worship?
Any good thing can be perverted. Even very worthy things can be perverted. However, I just don't know any Catholics who confuse the veneration due Mary with the worship due God alone. No matter how fervent our prayers to Mary, no matter how badly we use the language, we just don't equate her with God, and we don't offer her the adoration due God alone.
So, can veneration lead to worship? No. People may worship inappropriately, but it is not veneration that leads to worship.
But, for me, the real question is, can the doctrine "faith alone", and the doctrine of "once saved, always saved", and the various doctrines of predestination and utter depravity lead some Protestants to lead a life of Pharisaism?
To me, that's an interesting question.
sitetest
Assuming you have a good relationship with your mother, if I wanted to get your attention or wanted a favor from you, would I stand a better chance if I asked your mother to intercede?
THAT'S how most Catholics view Mary. You don't believe in the intercession of saints; Catholics do. I pray to my sainted mother, who I know is in God's presence, to put in a good word for me, every night.
I know she does.
I'll try to be brief. My parents converted first, and I tried to stop them by throwing up to them all the anti-catholic garbage I had heard in evangelical circles. My mother gave me some books to read. I know for sure that one of them was Fundamentalism vs. Catholicism. She also gave me Scott Hahn's conversion story on cassette. First I read books then I talked to my parents Parish Priest. We don't live in the same town so mostly we talked on the phone. He is a wonderful Priest. He was patient with me even when I was tedious. His love for the faith was evident as he explained it to me. Finally I began attending Mass at the nearest Catholic Church which is about 30 miles from my home. Little by little God began revealing His truths to me.
About a year after I first started investigating the faith, I was ready to convert. I began RCIA classes. They were taught by the Parish Priest and I can't begin to say enough good things about him. At first I was put off because he was so young. I expected Spencer Tracy (lol!) It wasn't until some time later that I found out what wisdom he possessed. See, I was divorced and remarried. At that time I didn't know I'd have to have my marriage annulled and Father David didn't tell me right away. Noooo! First he let me get over half way through with RCIA classes, and he gave me more books to read-- which I devoured. He waited until he could see that I was like the man in the parable; the one who found the pearl of great price and was ready to sell everything he had to obtain it. It was belief in the Real Presence that did it. I couldn't wait to be in full communion with the Church and receive our Lord in the sacrament. Only when I had reached that point did Father David give me the paperwork for the annulment. If you've never seen this paperwork you can't imagine the soul-searching you have to do to finish it. The questions are very personal and there is a lot of work involved. Father David helped me with the paperwork and it was only after I received the annulment that Father told me that my husband and I needed to have our marriage "blessed" before I entered the Church. Oh, he was slick alright! If someone had told me right at first what all was involved in becoming Catholic I might not have done it. But by the time I found out what needed to be done, I would have done almost anything!
Father David moved on and isn't in my Diocese any longer. I wish I knew where he was so I could thank him.
Yes, but it only happens in anti-Catholic horror stories and imaginings, not in real life! Catholics know the difference between Creator and created.
Is that not possible?
Anything is possible. Its just not probable. I can honestly tell you that not one single Catholic I have ever met or known, and that numbers in many thousands, has ever jumped from veneration of Mary to worship of Mary. This is a straw man.
Is that not an explanation to what I have heard?
No. What you heard was the unguarded clumsy prayers of faithful Catholics who are so immersed in the faith that they need not make these english language distinctions in their prayers simply so that you don't draw conclusions that Catholics are idolatrous. Only a man of bad faith would draw such conclusions when the teachings of our faith so blatantly oppose such a conclusion.
Even though it is not church teaching, that it could happen?
As I said, after Original Sin, anything, despite the best efforts of Catholicism, could happen. Does it happen? No, not that I have ever seen in my vast experience with Catholics from all walks of life. Except in anti-Catholic playbooks. Or the imaginings of those trying to disprove Christ's Church.
Don't take my bluntness as being mean. But you are blind if you can't see that.
I can assure you, I did not imagine this at all. We were sitting at lunch when one of the guys said his aunt was sick. They then prayed to Mary, not mention of Jesus. I asked them afterwards if ther were praying for Mary to heal her, or were they asking Mary to interceed to Christ. I was told the prayer was TO MARY SO SHE COULD HEAL. I did not mishear, I did not fantasize it.
A.
Suppose, we later asked the person and they said, I meant "B" is that idolatry?
Suppose...suppose...suppose...
"Don't take my bluntness as being mean. But you are blind if you can't see that."
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!
I tend to believe that you are not striking out at me in bitterness and nastiness. * chuckle *
But seriously, Wrigley, it may not be that I'm blind but rather that I see another set of things that you don't.
Good things don't lead to bad things. Period. Misuse of good things is a bad thing, of itself.
Of itself, sex doesn't lead to abortion. But misuse of sex (a very good thing, indeed, if I may add), through contraception, through pre-marital and extra-marital sex, through selfishness, can lead to abortion.
Veneration of the saints, especially the Theotokos, is a very, very good thing. Of itself, it cannot lead to worship of creatures.
But misuse of veneration, by desire for power, superstition, selfishness, foolishness, and other very serious psychological and spiritual deficiencies, can lead to worship of creatures.
Reading the Bible, of itself, is a very good thing. Of itself, it can cause no bad thing.
However, misuse of the Bible, through private interpretation, can lead to all manner of spiritual ills.
I notice you completely ignored my discussion of your telling us that you tend to believe us that our official teaching is not to endorse idolatry.
I tend to believe that that is just an unfortunate oversight on your part.
sitetest
How do you explain 1 Timothy 2:5 with the above belief?
1 Timothy 2 Pray for All Men Pray for Everyone
1 Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men,
2for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence.
3For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior,
4who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
5For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus,
6who gave Himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time,
7for which I was appointed a preacher and an apostle--I am speaking the truth in Christ[1] and not lying--a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.
Notice we are told to pray for all men, but our only mediator is Christ Jesus. Not Mary, not Paul, not any other Saint. Jesus Christ alone.
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