Meanwhile, Larry D explores the reasons ex-Catholics give for leaving the Church, in a thoughtful post which considers all of our duties as lay Catholics to work harder against this phenomenon.
And from our own comment boxes in the rather lengthy comment thread below this post, you can read such gems as:
Part of what I love about the Church is how it has remained true to tradition in some things, but part of what I loathe about the Church is its utter inflexibility in others...
I have been Catholic for almost 20 years. I know how I feel at Mass on a personal level, and that is why I go. So I may be a "catholic, but"...but I daresay, there are a lot of us who would like to see some things grow and change within the church...
Jesus was a revolutionary and bucked the traditions of his day...
If everything was to remain the same, we would be in the same clothes, with the same morality of Jesus' time. We no longer have slaves, women can cut their hair and speak their minds. Yes, the Bible uses Wheat as a metaphor, but many metaphors are used that we don't take so literally...
In all my life as a Catholic, I have never been taught a catechism that even comes close to what you guys are preaching here. My children are following in a Catholic School, and I know that they have only very minimally discussed the Pope. I was never told I had to bow down to the Church's will no matter what, and I was never taught, nor are my children, that there is one way, or the highway (to Hell) as some of you suggest. I have been told by a priest that reconcilliation was not a necessary sacrament. I have also heard a priest say to not worry ourselves too much with the goings on in Rome. I have to say as well, that I cannot recall a homily ever discussing taking everything literally. I know the Catholic community in which I participate, and I don't know anyone who takes everything as seriously and as literally as some people on this blog...
One can't be a good Catholic, a devout Catholic, a Catholic in full communion with the Church unless one what believes what the Church teaches. This is true. One can only be a dissenting Catholic, a "cafeteria" Catholic, a "Catholic, but."...
I think that ricegirl's point... is that many "catholics" are just that...catholics with air quotes. I like being that kind of Catholic, because frankly, if I had been told at RCIA that it was all or nothing. I would've looked somewhere else. I don't recall any homily regarding following Rome. I know that some parishes do things more seriously than others. I would say my parish is middle of the road. So there is a LOT of inconsistency in the Church. How is this "allowed" to happen in the one and only church? You can't deny that if we took a poll of Catholics, VERY FEW would say, "Yes, I take EVERY last bit of the catechism to heart, and if I deviate from it, I am in sin and not truly Catholic". You'd lose lots of the women (and men) right off the bat for using artificial birth control...There are probably more, but these were the ones that stood out.
Show of hands, anybody: when is the last time you heard a homily on what it means to be Catholic? On the papacy? On what the Catechism has to say about the Church? On the sacraments (including matter and form)? On moral law or the precepts of the Church? On contraception, abortion, or any other serious issue?
I don't mean to pick on our priests, here. They get approximately five to seven minutes a week to tackle 40 years of horrendous catechesis, creeping relativism, a culture which thinks that to be good one must be nice and to be bad one will be judgmental, and a laity comprised of anywhere from thirty to sixty percent functional heretics (in terms of their actual understanding and acceptance of Church teaching). Above and beyond all of this, our priests today must deal with the inconvenient reality that from earliest infancy American Catholics are taught to worship one false god: the god of self. The only criteria for truth is, "Do I like this? Does it fulfill me personally?" and it is the standard by which all other truth is judged.
Thus, you can have people beside you in the pews at Mass who really don't believe a word of the Nicene Creed, for instance (and who are going to go ballistic when one of those words becomes "consubstantial" next year), and who are actually charming pagans instead of Christians because they think of Jesus as a not-divine but rather nice social justice sort of person-and yet these same people will insist that they are Catholics, really, because their only criteria for what the word "Catholic" means is their own highly personal definition.
And our priests, as I said, get five to seven minutes a week in which to address any of this. Which is not nearly enough time-but wouldn't it be nice if this time were actually used for this purpose?
I mean, during my life as a Catholic I've heard countless homilies on our Christian duty to love each other, as in be nice and kind and caring and forgiving to each other. I've also heard countless homilies on how important it is to have a close, intimate, personal relationship with Jesus. In terms of putting the focus on Christ's call to love God and love our neighbor, then, these homilies haven't been all bad.
But like many adult Catholics, I can probably count on one decade of the rosary the number of times in the last ten or fifteen years I've heard homilies about serious moral issues, Catholic teaching on the Church, the papacy, and so forth, or our duty as Catholics to assent to Church teachings. Actually, let me take that back-one pastor of mine probably filled a whole decade by himself each year I was privileged to attend his Masses; but that's one pastor out of a great many. The "Get to know Jesus and be nice to everybody!" homily has been the standard fare.
There's a lot that needs to be done, if the Church in America is going to reach out to those Catholics who are only Catholics by their own lax definition of the word. The laity have an important role to play, too. But if our priests would lead the way by using that five-to-seven minute Sunday homily to address key aspects of Church teaching, pressing issues of morality and virtue, and other topics of similar importance, I think it would help. As the one commenter I quoted above said, "I don't recall any homily regarding following Rome." What would it mean to her and to many others, I wonder, if we all had heard many such homilies?
Origin: http://witchcraftforall.blogspot.com
