Who You Callin' "Christian?"

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The more I read the comments made in response to posts like this one, the more I wonder how Catholics can consider themselves to be “Christians?” It becomes obvious that the most “Catholic” among them just don’t get it.

But when the Supreme Pontiff of their church is prancing around a huge castle, encrusted in gold and laden-down with jewels, I guess this is not surprising.

It is no wonder that they regard “proof-texting” with fear and loathing.

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Rants: The Current Rage

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The rant below is one of my comments in a thread at Vox Nova concerning the recent controversy over mandated birth control in health insurance coverage provided to employees at Catholic institutions, such as hospitals and universities. I first quote an excerpt from another readers' previous comment, and then launch into my own screed:

@ Henry Karlson –

“This is also something constantly forgotten when bringing up religious liberty: it is not just our religious beliefs that are in the nation.”

The fact that you even need to point this out, and the fact that the whole discussion of the issue is entirely pointless without this fact in mind, is precisely indicative of the type of Catholic exclusionary thinking of which I have been complaining with regard to the question of the closed communion.

If it is not possible to be a good Catholic in a secular and pluralistic society, then perhaps this is not the best society for Catholics to inhabit? I say this seriously. This nation was originally founded by Protestants. And the Calvinists (and other Protestants), against whom I continually hear some Catholics railing, founded it in order to be able to live according to their own beliefs.

Maybe the Church should just get out of the hospital business? I’m sure that for-profit corporations will buy them out. Maybe Catholics should not be running colleges and universities if they necessarily need to be employing non-Catholic staff who will want to live according to their own religious beliefs (or lack thereof?) Or maybe they need to shrink to whatever size a fully-Catholic staff will be able to support?

Nobody is asking Catholics to use birth control (although apparently they do so anyway.) Nobody is asking Catholics to have abortions. The idea that it’s fine and dandy to use medieval Scholastic verbal gymnastics such as “material cooperation with evil” to try to control – in very fundamental ways – the lives of non-Catholics, is just wrong. In this country, it’s wrong. And I’m not sure in what country it might be right. Can you think of one?
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Readings: A Cause for Disputation

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Sometime later today I will have finished reading the sci-fi novel Deus Irae, a collaboration between Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny. Without going too deep into the plot, the story takes place after a nuclear holocaust and involves the goings-on of characters which are among a small remainder of Christians, and characters who worship the Deus Irae -- the God of Wrath -- who has wrought the rubble-strewn world in which these characters survive.


Just now, I was arrested by the following dialogue between a character named Schuld, who is (perhaps) a follower of the Deus Irae, and a character named Pete Sands, a Christian. Here, Schuld addresses Sands:

xxx“… Aquinas cleaned up the Greeks for you, so Plato is okay. Hell, you even baptized Aristotle’s bones, for that matter, once you found a use for his thoughts. Take away the Greek logicians and the Jewish mystics and you wouldn’t have much left.”
xxx“We count the Passion and the Resurrection for something,” Peter said.
xxx“Okay. I left out the Oriental mystery religions. And for that matter, the Crusades, the holy wars, the Inquisition.”
xxx“You’ve made your point,” Pete said. “I am weary of these things and have trouble enough with the way my own mind works. You want to argue, join a debating team.”

I have chosen to write on this excerpt in part because I loved the Plato/Aristotle/Aquinas observation--particularly the phrase “baptized Aristotle’s bones”. How apt! But I chose it more because I am not of Pete’s party; I want to argue about such things. And I do so often. As a man brought up with exposure to the Protestant traditions of both Luther and Calvin (but who is no longer a member of any congregation), I like to argue with Catholics about what I think should be meant by the word “Christian.”

In the past couple of days I have been arguing here and here with other readers -- almost all Catholic or ex-Catholic -- at the outstanding Catholic blog, Vox Nova. In the second of articles linked above, the argument is about the proper Christian attitude towards war. As a Conscientious Objector, who calls the killing of innocent non-combatants under American bombs on foreign soil, “murder,” I get roughed up pretty badly in the comment thread following that one. Have a look at it.

The first link is to a post about a friend of Kyle Cupp, a member of the Vox Nova stable of writers. Kyle’s friend no longer considers himself to be a Christian. I made the first comment on the article, based on a quoted sentence from Kyle’s text:

1. “Catholicism makes more sense than the alternatives to me, and so here I am.”


You seem to be saying, Kyle, that Catholicism appeals to you *aesthetically* more than do its alternatives. That is similar to the reason I usually give to professed atheists when they question the basis of my belief in the supernatural — that I *choose* to believe in a sentient universe, because the alternative universes all bore me.


If the Catholicism that fires your imagination were not exclusive in the ways that it is; inhospitable to visitors, as it is, I would perhaps be drawn to it for those reasons as well. But, as it is, I can only feel it most often as a condescending and antagonistic critic of that which existence has given me thus far. This makes me sad — another aesthetic reaction.

I call Catholicism “inhospitable to visitors” because non-Catholics are excluded from the communion service in Catholic churches. I argue in the thread that if I am excluded from taking communion with a Catholic congregation, I am on that basis excluded from the Christian religion, so far as the Catholic Church is concerned. I fear that if I am loved at all by Catholicism, then--like Willy Loman--I am loved, but not well-loved. It is my opinion that the sharing of communion is the very basis of Christian worship, which is founded on the shared belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ and on obedience to his instruction that His followers share the bread and wine in communal remembrance of the body and blood that He gave in order that we might live. It is my further opinion that true Christians will welcome guests in their churches and encourage them to share communion with them. If a congregation will not do that, then I don’t think that group is “Christian” at all. It seems that a Catholic is a Catholic: full stop. If you will not share communion with me and want to call yourself a “Christian,” very well then, I get the message -- fuck you, too.  (And this goes double for any Protestant sects with closed communion!)

That said, I will continue to argue the case for a universal communion so long as I can get anybody to listen. And when the day comes that all Christians--all disciples of Christ--are united in their worship, perhaps I will again become involved in organized religion.

But you’d better hurry up, you stiff-necked assholes. I’m not getting any younger!
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Reflections: Weblog Commentary

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I have been meaning to launch this blog post for some days now, but I’ve kept putting it off because I couldn’t decide how to frame it. Rather than continue not to get the words online that I wanted to share, therefore, I’m just going to go ahead and post them unframed and let them stand (or fall) for themselves.
This material consists of a comment made by Ron King, a valued sometime visitor to this blog, followed by several comments made by me, elsewhere. I asked Ron’s permission to share this comment because it will be made available to my Facebook friends, as well as to readers of this blog. Ron made the comment in response to this post. I will edit Ron’s comment only to the extent that his very first sentence has been moved to the end of the comment. I do this in order that it may segué into the rest of the material, all of which consists of comments I made on a couple of different strings, to a couple of different people, following posts on one of my favorite blogs, Vox Nova. These I will simply clean up to stand alone, if any such polishing is necessary. I will offer them without comment, while inviting comment on them here. Without further ado, Ron King:

The problem for introverts is the early emotional conditioning of fear and rage due to the pain of being aware of not being validated by the primary caretakers and then the educational system. Consequently, the introvert is constantly under the intrusion of forces trying to make her/him into something she/he is not. This will cause a further retreat into self along with an ever increasing suffering.

Once the introvert has an awareness that being created in this way has a distinct spiritual purpose of exploring the dynamics of human suffering and the loss of love as the cause of suffering, then introverts can begin healing the false identity that has formed in reaction to a world that does not know how to love.

Loneliness begins to fade when the introvert begins to educate others about what it means to be an introvert. They can begin to teach extroverts what it means to be more sensitive. Every introvert I have known in my life has a passionate desire to be free to express their truth. The freedom is to be found internally and not externally. It is to be found face to face with extroverts, regardless of what they may say or do.

xxxxx[and now the sentence I've moved]

Jesus is an introvert.

Vox Nova: excerpt 1

Another commenter said of Jesus,

“…if he were conversant in Greek philosophy to any extent why did he not lay things out ever in a similar style.”

I replied,

Jesus perhaps did just that, when speaking to learned Pharisees; or, perhaps, to learned Romans. It is unfortunate that in the Gospels we are usually only given the punch-lines of his dialogues with his intellectual opposition. But, in most of what we are given, he is preaching to peasants and fishermen and shopkeepers, etc. There is nothing to be gained by speaking over the heads of one’s audience.

Any time I am arguing with a Catholic and I quote a Bible verse in support of my central thesis, and that Catholic then visibly pales, frantically starts making the sign of the cross and backs away from me screaming “Sola scriptura! Sola scriptura!” I am reminded that this once had some validity. Pre-Gutenberg, people didn’t own Bibles. Most people weren’t literate. What they knew about the Bible had to be spoon-fed to them by clerics. The priests don’t want to relinquish that power, so they preach still today against the “proof-text,” as though the text shouldn’t be a source of proof. I have to either spit on the floor, or chuckle. Hopefully, I usually choose the latter course of action. Luther, to his credit, not only translated the Bible into German, but preached that people had a duty to read it, and to interpret its meaning (with a little help from above), each according to his special spiritual need at any given time. This is not to use the Book as an oracle, but rather to use it as a learning tool; as a workbook for the student of the spiritual connection between heaven and earth.

To sum up: Jesus knew what he was doing.


Vox Nova: excerpt 2

I don’t know what “go to heaven” means, because I can’t conceive of heaven as a place. I can only understand heaven as a state of being. The upshot of that would be that only saints would “go to heaven.” One would need to be in a state of being compatible with heaven, i.e. “heavenly.” And by “saint” I don’t mean what the Church routinely means. What the Church means, in most cases, is something like “Employee of Decade” or “Distinguished Professor” or “Father of the Year.” So, what happens to the rest of us, I don’t know. That sad alternative may be what’s happening to us now. Being Christ-like does not mean being a really big fan of Jesus. It doesn’t mean liking Jesus, it means imitating Him.

Vox Nova: excerpt 3

I’m not so interested in the theories such as that Jesus went to India during “the lost years,” or that Jesus was the iniate of a Greek mystery cult, etc. I think it enough to speculate that Jesus was very probably literate; that he grew up in a Hellenistic milieu; and that he may very well have had some acquaintance with, and instruction in, both Greek (Platonic) and Roman (Stoic) ideas and used some of those, tailored to the levels of sophistication of his audiences, in his teaching.

I also think it very telling that Jesus was apparently not a Jewish nationalist. Reading the New Testament, one would get the idea that Jesus and his followers were wandering about in tranquil, almost sleepy countryside. In fact, of course, the area was crawling with insurgents and a constant thorn in the side of Rome. Jesus seems to have been totally aloof from all of this, which makes him somewhat less than ultra-Jewish in his thinking.

Moreover, if he had been nothing more than an unusually witty freelancing Jewish rabbi, I doubt that we would be talking about him today.

Finally, Socrates had Plato, and Jesus had Saul of Tarsus: the rest is history.

Vox Nova: excerpt 4

The difference, of course, is that Socrates and Jesus had visionary interpreters of real genius, both of whom offered a set of ideas too grand to ever be exhausted by subsequent speculation, or completely co-opted by "the world," and which, therefore, endlessly spark the imaginations of intelligent and creative persons who come in contact with them.


This is to take nothing away from the mediation of Socrates or Jesus. In both cases, their teachings were worthy of such interpreters. I assume that this was a necessary condition for the production of those interpretative bodies of thought.


I see the institutions--the Church, the Academy--to be like globs of semen; millions of sperm sent forth to produce one fertilized egg; millions of the "faithful" assembled to produce one true saint. And only the saint transcends.

Vox Nova: excerpt 5

The very last thing that a saint would want to be, I should think, is innovative or original. A saint is simple. There is nothing novel in the truth. The saint is proof that the truth can be received from its source and that life can be lived in accordance to it–not merely read about and acquired by rote for recitation on command. Man would get redemptive brownie points for the latter only if Kafka is G-d and the path to “heaven” really does lead one through the corridors and the various official stages and offices of some vast bureaucracy, beginning in the kindergarten of the parochial school and ending before the throne of judgment.
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Your comments are welcome.
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Reflections: A Different Right-to-Life Issue

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A couple of days ago, I came across a post on the Catholic blog, Vox Nova, that interested me. The issue was whether the last strains of the smallpox virus, kept alive today only in laboratories, should be destroyed in order to protect against it somehow being “returned to the wild” to again become the deadly scourge that it once was; or whether even this deadly pathogen must be preserved as a part of God’s creation? I think that the author’s gist is contained in the following except from that post, but here is the link, if you would prefer to see it in context and make your own call on it:

[I]f the world is God’s, then our decisions must show deference to God’s own plan. We are stewards, and presumably (like all stewards) have a great deal of autonomy and authority, but in the end we are constrained by the plan of the actual Master of creation.

And what does this tell us about smallpox? I am not sure, but despite the very compelling arguments of those who argue for the destruction of smallpox, some part of me hesitates to willingly destroy any part of God’s creation.

After reading the post and the comments it gave rise to, I posted the following comment of my own, using artificial birth control as an analogy:

If it is God’s plan that every act of human sexuality potentially result in a pregnancy, making artificial birth control a violation of “natural law,” then how is it not also a violation of natural law to prevent the smallpox—or any other—virus from doing what God designed it to do–which is to invade a host and multiply in the environment for which it was designed? In fact, is not all of medicine a human effort to thwart the designs upon our mortality made by natural law? What gives man the right to cherry-pick those natural processes which will be allowed to perform the teleological functions for which they were designed by the Creator? If one answers this question by saying that God also designed man with the intellect to develop vaccines and other means of fighting disease, one can counter by saying that the same God-given intellect should therefore be licitly used to keep human populations from growing too large for the resources available to them. That is stewardship.

Anticipating a possible response to my first comment, I attempted to head it off at the pass by posting this:

To suggest that the answer to the question I posed above is “abstinence,” is to suggest that we should abandon immunization programs and go back to relying on quarantining the ill to prevent the spread of epidemics. Clearly, the most effective methods which human ingenuity can contrive are the methods which should be employed to resolve any problem of stewardship facing the human race.

Whether one gives credence to the concept of “natural law,” or not; and whether one believes that we are living in “God’s creation,” or not; the question is still an interesting on, the answer to which I don’t find to be patent.

After more than 24 hours of waiting without result for some intellectually confident Catholic blogger to respond to my comments, I decided to bring my reflections home to Rodak Riffs. It has often been my experience that Catholics, when they have no response to some contra-doctrinal idea encountered in the world-at-large, simply ignore it. In this they show themselves to be closet disciples of Wittgenstein (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.") and, ergo, crypto-Positivists.

Be that as it may, however, I find the issue of the deliberate annihilation of a living species—pro or con—to be an interesting one; so I pose it here.
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Religion: Hard Sayings

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I went to the local public library yesterday—kind of a busman’s holiday, considering that I work in the university library—basically just to get my ass out of the house. The library is near the bike path that runs along the Hocking River. So I parked at the library, took a walk along the Hocking, and then went into the library prior to heading for home.

Because it was sitting alone on a “featured books” shelf, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South by Ralph C. Wood caught my eye. As I have always considered Flannery O’Connor to be among the most interesting and important of 20th century American writers of fiction, I went home with the book in my hand.

I’m now going to share a few lines from Wood’s Introduction, because they demonstrate, I think, just why O’Connor is such a kick-ass writer and one whom every student of literature—and every avowed Christian—needs to read. Here is Wood:

No one understood both the promise and the failure of the modern church better than Flannery O’Connor. In a letter written in July 1955…O’Connor specified both qualities: “I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.”

In another letter, written in the same year, O’Connor wrote: “[I]f you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”

A few lines further down in his introduction, Wood sets the above in a larger context:

It was a religious, a cultural abyss, a moral nothingness that O’Connor sniffed as surely as Nietzsche did when, a century earlier, he declared that he could detect the odor of God’s rotting body in his nostrils. Like Nietzsche, O’Connor located the evil not in some remote ethereal realm, not in her circumambient culture alone, but also in the “one holy catholic and apostolic church.” She confessed that the church’s feeble and often noxious witness causes Christians as much grief as does the world’s mad plunge over the cliffs of self-destruction. …Unlike Nietzsche, O’Connor agreed with [Romano] Guardini that the church contains the one Solution even as it constitutes a terrible part of the problem. …Hence the frequent likening of the church to Noah’s ark: only the storm without exceeds the stench within. Yet insofar as Christ remains its animating center, the church provides everlasting life amidst the all-encompassing death.

That’s what I like about Flannery O’Connor—she will have absolutely no truck with cheap grace. She doesn’t bullshit. She lasers in on the needle in the haystack. And a glimpse into this moral integrity—and this rare ability—is the gift with which she has blessed the world in her magnificent body of work.

If you haven’t already read her, go do it.

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Quote du Jour: Robbing Paul to Hype Peter

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On this rock? Really?:

The most significant pope to exploit the new possibilities [after Constantine] was Damasus (366-84). After a highly discreditable election, in which his partisans slaughtered more than a hundred supporters of a rival candidate, and some very shaky years following that while he established his authority, Damasus sought to highlight the traditions and glory of his see. He was the first pope to use the distant language favored by the imperial bureaucracy in his correspondence. He took a keen interest in the process of making Rome and its suburbs into a Christian pilgrimage city, financing a series of handsomely sculpted inscriptions at the various holy sites in indifferent but lovingly and personally composed Latin verse, some of which survive. [...]

One aim of this programme was to place a new emphasis on the role of Peter rather than the joint role of Peter and Paul in the Roman past. Moreover, it was in Damasus' time that Peter came to be regarded not merely as the founder of the Christian Church in Rome, but also as its first bishop. Ironically, it was actually a North African bishop, point-scoring against his local Donatist opponents by stressing the North African Catholics' links to Rome, who is the first person known to have asserted on the basis of Matthew 16:17-19 that 'Peter was superior to the other apostles and alone received the keys of the kingdom, which were distributed by him to the rest'; yet significantly it was in the time of Damasus that this thought occurred to the North African, sometime around 370. All this promotion of Peter was not merely for the pope's greater glory; it was a conscious effort to to show that Christianity had a past as glorious as anything that the old gods could offer. The faith adopted by Constantine and his successors was no longer an upstart, but could be a religion fit for gentlemen. ~ Christianity: the First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch

The divine plan: Political assassination, sectarian conspiracy, public relations, concession stands, franchising, conventioneering, pyramid climbing, favorite son-ism, historical revisionism...

...this is what Jesus had in mind all along?

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Update: In the interest of being "fair and balanced," here is the more orthodox spin on it.
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Reflections: The Terrorists Have Already Won

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“He is our priest, our parish priest, and whatever he’s done, we should support him and give him the opportunity to redeem himself,” one middle-aged woman said, declining to give her name.

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Rants: Mary sí, Calvin no!

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At last look, an informal poll of the interests of readers at Vox Nova – Catholic Perspectives on Culture, Society and Politics, based on a tally of comments registered on concurrently active topics, renders these scores:

Transubstantiation: 13
Demonology: 20
Torture: 5
Gay Marriage: 106

The attitude of the Vox Nova readership towards demons is relatively laissez-faire (20); and more so for torturers (5). What, exactly, takes place with the Eucharist (it seems to be substantially a series of accidents) is mildly interesting (13). But a sizable percentage of them are damned-good-and-sure (106) that they don’t want those queers marrying and fucking up what has been, until now, a pristine-perfect institution. After all, what does the word “marriage” even mean, if it doesn’t mean compulsory breeding?

But what becomes apparent in an analysis the discussions cited above is that these folks generally don’t know what they mean. For example, the term “transubstantiation” dates from the 11th century and is still under dispute. The problem seems to be that Catholics are so good at scholastic finagling that they just can’t agree on the proper definition of any term: Bread? Wine? Body? Blood? Torture? Marriage? WTF?

That said, while it is quite clear that many of them are not too sure just exactly what they mean when they hold forth, many of them do know what they like. Or don’t like. (Mary sí, Calvin no!) Okay, then—whatever. Y’know?
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UPDATE: For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that when I first wrote this piece I had apparently misread the total number of comments on Demonology as "2" when it had actually been--at that point--"20". Thus, uranists and demons have been firmly established as the Number One and (distant) Number Two category of critters preoccupying the minds of the interactive portion of the Vox Nova readership.
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WWWtW-Watch #23: Catholic Charities?

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The Legion of the Damned over at What's Wrong With the World is predictably having a field day with the death of liberal Catholic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. One of the W4 minions (I think they call him "Frankie") felt it necessary to give additional exposure to a hatchet job by a self-righteous outfit which cynically calls itself Human Life International. As the piece in question amounts to a verbal desecration of Sen. Kennedy's corpse, I will not reiterate Frankie's incredibly poor taste by providing a link to it. As it the purpose of my WWWtW-Watch feature to expose these soi disant "Christians" for the loveless crypto-fascists that they truly are, however, I will provide this link to the relevant comments section. Hold your nose and check it out.

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Reflections: I Got a Million of 'Em!

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In the post, Apostolic activity comes out of an abundance of contemplation (8/7/09) at Disputations, Tom explores the crucial role played by contemplation in the apostolic life of a good Dominican.

In the comment section, Disputations regular, Brandon, shares the following:

As one who is attempting to determine (discern) what role the apostolic pillar should play in my life, let me just say that I feel very much like the guy in the balloon stuck in the tree from reading this post. I suppose that makes you a good Dominican.

Tom follows with a comment that reveals to the uninitiated the punch line of the joke to which Brandon has alluded:

For those wondering, the guy in the balloon stuck in the tree asks a passerby where he is, the passerby says, "You're in a tree," and the guy says, "What you've said is true, and of no use to me at all. You must be a Dominican."

That’s funny, I thought…I’ve heard that joke before. Maybe it was told around a campfire at Camp Michi-Lu-Ca, deep in the nighttime forest of darkest Michigan back in the day?

But in the version I remember, it goes something like this:

There’s this guy dangling up in a tree. The guy’s been carried up into the clouds by this bag of hot air, see? But finally the fuel’s all gone, and the fire goes out, and the guy’s bag just collapses. Down he comes. Now he’s snagged up in this tree. Can’t go back up. Doesn’t know how to get down. But, actually, he don’t know where the hell he is, get it?
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Now along comes this guy’s got both feet on the ground. So, the guy in the tree goes, “Yo, buddy! Can you tell me where I’m at?” The guy on the ground sizes up the situation for a minute. Then he says, “If you have to ask, you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” But the dude dangling from the collapsed balloon goes, “C’mon, pal. Be a guy!” So the pedestrian fellow says, “Okay, then—you’re up a tree.”
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Now the fallen aerialist looks around and he goes, “Hmm. It would seem that what you say is true, but I can’t use it. It sounds kinda protestanty to me!”
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The man on the ground smiles up at the treed balloonist. “Well, then, enjoy the view,” he says. And he goes on his way.
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Readings: Consequentialism...

...lifts its lovely head again.


Consequentialism refers to those moral theories which hold that the consequences of a particular action form the basis for any valid moral judgment about that action. Thus, from a consequentialist standpoint, a morally right action is one that produces a good outcome, or consequence.

This is certainly a topic on which reasonable persons can differ. Unfortunately, it is children who suffer most, while stiff-necked adults quarrel.

Readings: Taking No Prisoners

from Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier:

One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the “educated” are completely orthodox. The immediately striking thing about the English Roman Catholics…is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they are Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting from it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man. …

A working-class Catholic…does not spend his time in brooding on the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and he is not particularly conscious of being different from his non-Catholic neighbors. …In the Roman Catholic homes of Lancashire you see the crucifix on the wall and the Daily Worker on the table. It is only the “educated” man, especially the literary man, who knows how to be a bigot. And, mutatis mutandis, it is the same with Communism. The creed is never found in its pure form in a genuine proletarian.

It may be said, however, that even if the theoretical book-trained Socialist is not a working man himself, at least he is actuated by a love of the working class. He is endeavoring to shed his bourgeois status and fight on the side of the proletariat – that, obviously, must be his motive.

But is it? Sometimes I look at a [middle-class] Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation – and wonder what the devil his motive really is. …The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy…

Nobody spared!

Religion: Thanks For Sharing

I realize that I haven’t posted anything new for going on a week now. This is in great part because my cyber-energies were being drained off by an on-going discussion following the Wednesday, October 10th post at Disputations, entitled “Neither Pretense Nor Trump” which is now at 230+ comments and counting. It has been pretty much Protestant me against the Catholic field. But that’s par for the course. I’m not whining. That’s why I read that blog.

The original post, in which Tom, the Lord and Master at Disputations, discusses the urge of some Catholics and non-Catholics toward Christian unification and intercommunication, and the problems inherent therein, contains this statement of a Msgr. Wells:

“To pretend a unity that does not exist may feel good at the moment; but it allows us to avoid the painful truth that we are still far from the oneness in faith and action intended by the Lord.”

This was followed immediately by Tom’s statement:

“True enough, but if I may, I don't think Catholics and non-Catholics who desire intercommunion are pretending a unity that does not exist. At the very least, they surely don't think they are.”

I have argued before for an open communion as a necessary condition to allow for even the hope of a future Christian unity, and I took this opportunity to argue for it once again. Those interested in the topic might want to read through the comments following Tom’s post, as they are interesting from a number of different angles. I will not try to recapitulate all the points here. But I do want to mention an argument that occurred to me rather late in the discussion, which was that the episode in the Gospel of John concerning “Doubting Thomas” was a good analogy for a Protestant wanting to receive the Catholic communion.

The decisive argument against a Protestant receiving the Catholic communion, as forcefully articulated by Zippy, and others, is that the Protestant would be done great harm by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ, while not believing in the Real Presence. I argued that Thomas was allowed to touch the resurrected body of Christ, while not believing it to be the Real Body of Christ, and Thomas was in no way harmed; in fact his faith was confirmed and he received an immeasurably great gift:

John 20:24 But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, wasn’t with them when Jesus came. 20:25 The other disciples therefore said to him, “We have seen the Lord!”

But he said to them, “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

20:26 After eight days again his disciples were inside, and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, the doors being locked, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace be to you.” 20:27 Then he said to Thomas, “Reach here your finger, and see my hands. Reach here your hand, and put it into my side. Don’t be unbelieving, but believing.”

20:28 Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”

20:29 Jesus said to him, “Because you have seen me,* you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed.”

Here is but one of my comments in this long, long thread:

Zippy--
No, you're missing my point. The analogy obviously assumes that the Eucharist IS the Real Presence, as it was in the case of Thomas. The point is that Jesus did not send Thomas away because of his unbelief. Rather, Jesus allowed Thomas contact with His body, and thereby Thomas came to believe that it was Real.
We recall that first Thomas refused to believe the reports that Jesus has risen. Next Jesus appears in a room *with a locked door*. In other words, as in the Eucharist, the REAL body is present; but it is present *supernaturally*. The analogy is really very close.
Unbelievers should not be denied contact with the Eucharist because of their unbelief, but rather should be allowed the opportunity to come to belief *through their contact with it*. This, even though it would be better if they just believed without having it proved to them.
It is, in fact, difficult to see what the point of the inclusion of this episode in the Gospel is, if not to make this point and teach this lesson.
Rodak | Homepage | 10.14.07 - 7:15 pm | #

I was not able to convince a single Catholic that my analogy was any good, although I did receive some moral support from a loving soul named Anna, for which I was grateful. I have extensive notes for a post on the subject of the banality of atheism, that I will get to this weekend. Meanwhile, I would welcome any comments that would continue the conversation here.