Thursday, August 14, 2008
Almost Catholic
Another religion-themed post.
Rarely will I abandon a book halfway through. Twenty or thirty pages might send it back to the library, & that doesn't happen often. I read decent private eye novels, most by established authors, & choose nonfiction with some care. I impulsively grabbed Almost Catholic: An Appreciation of the History, Practice, and Mystery of Ancient Faith by Jon M. Sweeney off the library's 14 day shelves.
Had a bad reaction at the start. Sweeney was raised fundamentalist (with an Irish name), didn't have the sense to ask the Catholic kids he knew about their church. Of course, he was overwhelmed by rural Filipino Catholicism. That's exotic stuff even for American Catholics. The Phillipines were colonized & converted by the Spanish Empire, with Spanish Empire methods. He was mesmerized. Nothing about it resembled bare wall American Calvinism. It must have been hallucinatory to the impressionable young man.
Sweeney is now a communicant at Episcopalian church. Hasn't even converted to that denomination.
With the possible exception of High Church Anglicans with Papal envy, there's no such creature as an Almost Catholic. The best way for non-Catholics to learn about Roman Catholicism is to ask Catholics why they're Catholics. You'll get a lot of different answers. Ask strict Catholics. Ask "cafeteria" Catholics." Most interestingly, ask "lapsed" Catholics why they persist in identifying themselves as Catholics. You get a sense of some deeper connection. Two of my four Catholic-raised girlfriends were in the latter category. Less common is the vocal ex-Catholic like my dad, who renounced & denounced the Church. Yet, I discerned an amusingly Catholic tone in his occasional rants, some string his Jesuit high school teachers plucked & set forever vibrating.
If you want to read about Roman Catholicism, start with the Wikipedia entries & other abundant online resources. Read Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton & The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. Right wing protestants who love to quote G.K. Chesterton & hear former Lutheran pastor - now insufferable neocon priest Richard John Neuhaus explain what the Pope is really saying can't deal with how the Church transformed the lives of sophisticated converts Merton & Day. Read Garry Wills' Why I Am A Catholic, by a man who seems to reject about 80% of the Church's beliefs & practices & yet remains Catholic, whether "in good standing" or not I don't know.
The idea of being almost Catholic was a matter of curiosity for me. My parents had all their babies baptised Catholic with no intention of raising us in the Church. The best I'm able to figure out, I was Catholic, given a "bye," until I reached the confirmation age of voluntary consent. Which explains why around that time a great-aunt, a nun, sent me a book titled Why Become a Catholic? I had never heard of her, but she had heard of me through the family Catholic grapevine. I still have it. It's an old Baltimore Catechism book with a special introduction. I didn't want to become a Catholic or a Methodist. I can be almost Methodist. There's no almost with Catholicism. They have a sacramental process as certain as protestant Evangelicals insistiing one be "born again."
Roman Catholicism is part of my family & cultural heritage. If I had the cheek to write a book called Almost Catholic, it would be very different from Sweeney's. It wouldn't begin with not listening to Catholic kids but rather with listening to their confused explanations of Catholic doctrines, my reaction of, "That's ridiculous, " & later discovering they weren't doctrinal & were ridiculous. Many Catholic doctrines are unbelievable or unconvincing to me, but they aren't absurd. The world is absurd. A recognition of that absurdity is in part why there's such a rich history of Catholic reasoning, Catholic art, Catholic literature, & Catholic mysticism continuing to this day.
About 100 pages into Sweeney's book I became completely frustrated with what he was taking from Catholicism & presenting to the reader. Who was he writing for? What he was doing felt more like plundering than appreciation; he wasn't connecting with the mother church that Catholicism is for protestants who feel the connection. Almost a virgin. Almost pregnant. Almost poetry. There's no almost about it. If Sweeney keeps on this spiritual path he'll become an almost protestant, but he still won't be almost Catholic.
BTW, Jon didn't have to travel all the way to the Philippines for strange rituals & Catholic folk superstitions. He could have gone to a Notre Dame football game.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Rarely will I abandon a book halfway through. Twenty or thirty pages might send it back to the library, & that doesn't happen often. I read decent private eye novels, most by established authors, & choose nonfiction with some care. I impulsively grabbed Almost Catholic: An Appreciation of the History, Practice, and Mystery of Ancient Faith by Jon M. Sweeney off the library's 14 day shelves.
Rosaries, rituals, crucifixes and canonized saints: Sweeney, an Episcopalian, enthusiastically embraces these trappings of the Catholic faith, even as many Protestants find them unbiblical and some Catholics have abandoned them. In his latest book, Sweeney talks about his chosen state of being almost Catholic, explaining how Catholicism's practices and outlook help connect him to the divine and expand his worldview. Raised as an evangelical Protestant, Sweeney tells how he grew up believing Catholics were going to hell unless they found our brand of true salvation. Later, as a church planter in the Philippines, his thinking started to shift when he stepped inside a Catholic church for the first time. Overwhelmed by the sensory experience, he came to love Catholicism as an approach to faith that lands in the heart and the body as well as in the head. He has stopped short of converting, however, saying that those who remain outside the institution can still access Catholic life.A "church planter" is an evangelical term for missionary.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Had a bad reaction at the start. Sweeney was raised fundamentalist (with an Irish name), didn't have the sense to ask the Catholic kids he knew about their church. Of course, he was overwhelmed by rural Filipino Catholicism. That's exotic stuff even for American Catholics. The Phillipines were colonized & converted by the Spanish Empire, with Spanish Empire methods. He was mesmerized. Nothing about it resembled bare wall American Calvinism. It must have been hallucinatory to the impressionable young man.
Sweeney is now a communicant at Episcopalian church. Hasn't even converted to that denomination.
With the possible exception of High Church Anglicans with Papal envy, there's no such creature as an Almost Catholic. The best way for non-Catholics to learn about Roman Catholicism is to ask Catholics why they're Catholics. You'll get a lot of different answers. Ask strict Catholics. Ask "cafeteria" Catholics." Most interestingly, ask "lapsed" Catholics why they persist in identifying themselves as Catholics. You get a sense of some deeper connection. Two of my four Catholic-raised girlfriends were in the latter category. Less common is the vocal ex-Catholic like my dad, who renounced & denounced the Church. Yet, I discerned an amusingly Catholic tone in his occasional rants, some string his Jesuit high school teachers plucked & set forever vibrating.
If you want to read about Roman Catholicism, start with the Wikipedia entries & other abundant online resources. Read Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton & The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. Right wing protestants who love to quote G.K. Chesterton & hear former Lutheran pastor - now insufferable neocon priest Richard John Neuhaus explain what the Pope is really saying can't deal with how the Church transformed the lives of sophisticated converts Merton & Day. Read Garry Wills' Why I Am A Catholic, by a man who seems to reject about 80% of the Church's beliefs & practices & yet remains Catholic, whether "in good standing" or not I don't know.
The idea of being almost Catholic was a matter of curiosity for me. My parents had all their babies baptised Catholic with no intention of raising us in the Church. The best I'm able to figure out, I was Catholic, given a "bye," until I reached the confirmation age of voluntary consent. Which explains why around that time a great-aunt, a nun, sent me a book titled Why Become a Catholic? I had never heard of her, but she had heard of me through the family Catholic grapevine. I still have it. It's an old Baltimore Catechism book with a special introduction. I didn't want to become a Catholic or a Methodist. I can be almost Methodist. There's no almost with Catholicism. They have a sacramental process as certain as protestant Evangelicals insistiing one be "born again."
Roman Catholicism is part of my family & cultural heritage. If I had the cheek to write a book called Almost Catholic, it would be very different from Sweeney's. It wouldn't begin with not listening to Catholic kids but rather with listening to their confused explanations of Catholic doctrines, my reaction of, "That's ridiculous, " & later discovering they weren't doctrinal & were ridiculous. Many Catholic doctrines are unbelievable or unconvincing to me, but they aren't absurd. The world is absurd. A recognition of that absurdity is in part why there's such a rich history of Catholic reasoning, Catholic art, Catholic literature, & Catholic mysticism continuing to this day.
About 100 pages into Sweeney's book I became completely frustrated with what he was taking from Catholicism & presenting to the reader. Who was he writing for? What he was doing felt more like plundering than appreciation; he wasn't connecting with the mother church that Catholicism is for protestants who feel the connection. Almost a virgin. Almost pregnant. Almost poetry. There's no almost about it. If Sweeney keeps on this spiritual path he'll become an almost protestant, but he still won't be almost Catholic.
BTW, Jon didn't have to travel all the way to the Philippines for strange rituals & Catholic folk superstitions. He could have gone to a Notre Dame football game.
Labels: religion, what I'm reading
