For the third Sunday in a row, a dissenting Catholic (female) opinion columnist weighs forth in a Boston newspaper on the Catholic Church is so backward and needs to get with it.
Beverly Beckham—who it is very interesting to note was a columnist for the Boston Herald until recently when she retired her column; so why wasn’t the column printed there?—gives us the now standard line that she is a real Catholic, one who was born into a Catholic family and did all those Catholic things that Catholics do growing up. Sorry. Beverly, but none of that makes you Catholic. What makes a person Catholic is faith, specifically adhering to the faith that is handed down.
Beckham relates that she loved the faith as a child, then left it for 17 years, and came back. The way she describes it, she didn’t come back because she was wrong to reject the Church’s teaches, but because she thought the Church had changed to become acceptable to her.
I forgave the church its trespasses because of him. I opened my eyes and saw that there were no longer just altar boys serving Mass. There were altar girls as well. I saw lay people reading. I saw Eucharistic ministers. I saw a community where there once had been a kingdom.
I turned a deaf ear to Rome’s dictates about premarital sex, divorce, artificial insemination, and contraception. Yes, the church was against these things, but when I returned, it was to a parish where there was no finger-pointing.
If I could pull out one paragraph from all the hand-wringing and angst and anger of all the dissenting Catholics out there, this would be the one. Right here you have the essence of the problem of the Church in the US. The practice of the faith of most Catholics is to ignore the messy stuff that Rome says, which is easy because their parish priests rarely talk about it anyway, and to celebrate all those new things that entertain them. Mass has become a show and now we can all play roles in it. What you don’t see is any real sense of our need for God or of his authority in our lives.
Technorati Tags: Catholic, dissent, doctrine, heterodoxy, homosexuality, media-bias
I forgave the church its trespasses because of him.
How extraordinarily gracious of you!
Time and time again,we hear from the critics that the Church is obsessed about sex. The reality is quite different:
“I turned a deaf ear to Rome’s dictates about premarital sex, divorce, artificial insemination, and contraception.”
No, Liam, she’s not a clone of McNamara, but she’s not really a Catholic, either. Years ago, whilst proclaiming herself a Catholic, she wrote lovingly about the upcoming nuptials of her daughter—on a beach in Maine. I spoke to her briefly on the phone about it, and she quite coldly opined that it didn’t really matter what the Church said about matrimony, her own opinion was the most important.
That’s not Catholicism.
When we go to Mass each week, we say the Creed. In it, we profess belief (faith) in the Father, in the Son, in the Holy Spirit and in the Church.
Yes, she wrote the piece to which you refer— but frankly, her anti-Catholic pieces far outnumber this kind.
I frankly felt sorry for her as I read this latest column, as her ignorance was exposed for all to see.
Re: “specifically adhering to the faith that is handed down” – I think you hit on something here, but here’s the flip side:
Much of this _is_ what they were handed down – by lay activists, leaders and ‘commissions’, by bad (willfully or not) catechists, by priests weak in faith and often ignorant of the tradition, and by Bishops who refused to exercise authority. They are reinforced in these beliefs by spending time with people who are self-involved, “liberals” first and ancillarily Catholic, and by adhering to those who say they ‘have no sin’ and who themselves love the regard of the world.
Many of these people are aching for the truths of the faith: the point (ends/atlai) of it all. The hardest part (for me) is not to get irritated when expressing the faith against objections which miss the point entirely. The easy part is, when you can get them to really listen to the ‘hard stuff’ (even just a good line) and reflect on it, they eat it up. It’s shooting fish in a barrel, really, because the deposit of faith is, not to put too fine a spin on it, true. It touches people to the heart.
This is fresh in my mind at the moment because I just went to yesterday’s Archdiocese Peace and Justice Conference thing, and I saw how it all plays out, first hand. It’s not that these people are bad or stupid – it’s that they have missed the point and are being lead, guided, and formed by just those such as I reference above.
“I am as Catholic as the moon is round.”
Well technically the moon is not round being that round means that every part of the surface or the circumference is equidistant from the center.
This is just another example of the following logical fallacy.
God loves everyone, thus God loves homosexuality.
They of course won’t apply this same logic to murder, rape, adultery, theft, etc. God loves each person, but not their sins.
Some brilliant philosopher once said something like this: “The purpose of religion is to change people—not to be changed by people.”
The trouble with so many modern Americans is that they have been brainwashed to look on religion as something that can be altered, trimmed, hemmed, and decorated to suit each person’s tastes. The type peple the media hires and promotes has had a lot to do with the popularity of this attitude.
However, a religion which resembles the image in a fun house mirror or changes as frequently and drastically as Plastic Man is really no religion at all.
The Catholic Church is in a struggle to remain the home of “True Religion”—a struggle many mainstream Protestant churches have already lost.
Liam: I have to agree with Fr. Jim.
The impetus for Beverly’s first column was that _her_ granddaughter had Downs Syndrome. If it weren’t for that, there’s no telling how she would come down on the subject.
Jesus called it exactly in Matthew 5:43-48, especially “For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.” We could extend that without stretching to be <if you love your family, do not the pagans do the same?>
The fact that her belief aligns in this limited instance with Church teaching about the dignity of the human person doesn’t make her potentially right: it proves where she’s gone wrong, basing all things through her (corrupt, sinful, as is all of our) judgement. She seems to judge the new law, rather than live by it.
I opened my eyes and saw that there were no longer just altar boys serving Mass. There were altar girls as well. I saw lay people reading. I saw Eucharistic ministers. I saw a community where there once had been a kingdom.
Please, God, get me back to the Kingdom so I can assume my position as a humble surf digging in the dirt.
Like it’s antecedant, Sodom, may this new “community” burn.
Vivo Chrsito Rei!
Liam—the reason for the law is to prevent kidnapping?
Maybe a reason back in the old days, but not the reason marriage is celebrated in a church today.
We believe that matrimony is a sacramental moment. It should take place in a church, a place that is set aside for worship.
It is normative for Catholics to be married in a church, and not because women used to be coerced. Maybe your selective reading of church history could use some examination, Liam.
To reiterate—no, Beckham’s not McNamara, but she’s not a practicing Catholic woman either. She has and continues to dispute almost all of what we believe, since she explicitly rejects belief in the Church. No amount of sugar-coating can make her into something she’s not. Sorry if you disagree.
And thank you for at least giving me the benefit of the doubt vis-a-vis pastoral praxis. Yes, I did explain the reasoning behind the law, and no, she was not about to be convinced. As I said in the previous post, she was cold and angry at being challenged. Religious submission of mind and will to authentic teachings of the church is foreign to her.
“The Roman Catholic Church, my church, deems homosexuality a sin.”
This, of course, is false. See the Cathechism of the Catholic Church, paras 2357, 2358 and 2359.
Liam,
What is your source for this comment?
“(that is, that it was designed to protect women from kidnapping and coercion of vows in private”
I have never heard this, and it isn’t mentioned in the Catachism.
Liam,
Not to be a stickler, but I wanted the source, just because it sounds suspiciously like the kind of “scholarship” that explained that the reason Catholics eat fish on Friday was due to powerful families that ran the fishing industry in Italy wanting to capitalize.
I would suspect that the reasons for Church weddings go back significantly farther than medieval Europe. Even beyond Christianity. I am not an expert, but I would look at the how Jewish nuptials were celebrated, say, 2000 years ago. Even more specifically, I would be interested in the requirement of “freedom” in establishing a covenant as part of this requirement.
So, while this implies concern for publicly acknowledging the freedom with which one enters into the marriage covenant, I think your portrayal is the most cynical, least Catholic explanation possible.