Monday, August 03, 2009
That there's a higher percentage of serious sinners in the city doesn't mean there's a higher percentage of saints in the suburbs. I'd wager the opposite. Saints become saints by going where saints are most desperately needed. Cities have more of everything, except spacious lawns & deer.
***
Reading "Why I Am a Catholic" by Garry Wills. Out of chapter sequence, as a counterpoint to "The Family: Power, Politics and Fundamentalism's Shadow Elite," Jeff Sharlet's scary expose of the C Street bunch.
Wills' book isn't about why I should be a Catholic, or why you should be Catholic, or even why no-longer-Catholic should be Catholic. He explains, through personal experience & detailed history, why the practicing Catholics I know remain practicing Catholics. These Catholics may not even know much of the history in Wills' book, but they are in the Church he describes, have always been part of it. That Church is a broad & deep river, more broad & deep than the recent Popes (or most Popes), Bishops, & the current lockstep Papist apologists would have us believe. One might say that popes float on this river. The Roman Catholic Church as it existed just prior to Pope John XXIII & 2nd Vatican Council was not an ancient Church, & Wills explains why. The ancient Church is the church of the people, a church that has never been narrowly channeled or steered into full submission to the worldly central authority of the institutional church, especially Vatican authority. The Catholic church of the people, of the believers - which is living & creedal - always the same yet different (as Buddhists say) - survives its popes - who are wrong enough. often enough, for Catholics to suspect they could be wrong about lots of stuff, like birth control, to name only one prohibition most Catholics ignore.
"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
***
Reading "Why I Am a Catholic" by Garry Wills. Out of chapter sequence, as a counterpoint to "The Family: Power, Politics and Fundamentalism's Shadow Elite," Jeff Sharlet's scary expose of the C Street bunch.
Wills' book isn't about why I should be a Catholic, or why you should be Catholic, or even why no-longer-Catholic should be Catholic. He explains, through personal experience & detailed history, why the practicing Catholics I know remain practicing Catholics. These Catholics may not even know much of the history in Wills' book, but they are in the Church he describes, have always been part of it. That Church is a broad & deep river, more broad & deep than the recent Popes (or most Popes), Bishops, & the current lockstep Papist apologists would have us believe. One might say that popes float on this river. The Roman Catholic Church as it existed just prior to Pope John XXIII & 2nd Vatican Council was not an ancient Church, & Wills explains why. The ancient Church is the church of the people, a church that has never been narrowly channeled or steered into full submission to the worldly central authority of the institutional church, especially Vatican authority. The Catholic church of the people, of the believers - which is living & creedal - always the same yet different (as Buddhists say) - survives its popes - who are wrong enough. often enough, for Catholics to suspect they could be wrong about lots of stuff, like birth control, to name only one prohibition most Catholics ignore.
Labels: religion, what I'm reading
