One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church

My experiences with the Catholic Church have not been that extensive, but in the past few years, I have had the great opportunity to be friends with a few devout Catholics and thus the chance to actually ask some questions instead of relying on mostly negative stereotypes that had previously formed my conception of Catholicism.

Long sentence.

Like many Protestants (I'm not sure I fit that label in its truest sense, but I'm not Catholic, right?), I had grown up thinking of Catholicism as a hyper traditionalist, dogmatic, and legalistic institution. They prayed blindly to dead saints. They worshiped the Virgin Mary. They had extra apocryphal books that they considered Scripture. They held services in Latin, for seemingly no apparent reason, since the Bible was written in Hebrew and Aramaic. At one point in history, they sold indulgences and forced the real Christians to break off in a Reformation, for 95 reasons. They were monolithic in their stance against divorce, abortion, and fun.

I asked my first Catholic friend to explain the reasoning behind a lot of their ideas, and she partially answered my queries. She clarified that she doesn't pray to the canonized saints, but rather prays that they would intercede for her, the way we might ask a priest or parent or righteous person to pray for us. She cited James 5:16 as a biblical basis, where it states that "the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."

It seemed to me like the whole practice of praying to St. Christopher as a patron saint for travel is a large extrapolation from the associated Scriptural text. We talked about some more of the larger practices in the Catholic Church -- that the papacy comes from Scriptures like Matthew 16:17-20, among others -- and it seemed to me that Catholics would have to make a lot of leaps of faith from specific isolated verses of Scripture to the way they insisted was the right way to practice and apply them. Can you really go from "on this rock, I will build my Church" to having a pope seated in the Vatican who occasionally is infallible in Magisterium? Catholicism was more legitimate than I had thought, but only if you were willing to make big stretches in faith.

Also, any time I attended a Catholic service, I automatically think of that final montage in The Godfather where Michael Corleone has everyone whacked during the ceremony for his godson. Can't help it.

I went on a month-long road trip with another friend who had converted from Protestant to Catholic during his freshman year of college. He is one of the smartest guys I know. He was patient and answered a lot of my questions. Don't a lot of people in the Catholic Church just blindly follow a lot of tradition and dogma? Yes, that's true, and it's a problem, but it's also a problem for every denomination out there. Isn't it a huge stretch to derive the whole institution of the papacy from isolated Scriptures here and there? The Protestant denominations also have practices that are stretches of faith: the idea that tithing is a modern obligation, for example. And so on.

The most intriguing and challenging aspect of his Catholic faith was the validation (or not) of church history. We could argue doctrinal points all day, and we did. But a lot of his reason for belief was that he saw that the Catholic Church had preserved the things of God from Christ's first coming to the present day. That in the same way that Israel had preserved the Torah and been witness to the nations of God's law, love, and character, so the Catholic Church has been God's instrument over the last 2000 years. That the Catholic priests and scribes had been the ones to maintain and consolidate the canon of Scripture and that they had been the ones to make important decisions for Christendom in councils and diets. And if God had used the Catholic Church as His true body for the last 2000 years, then that was pretty compelling reason to join Team Catholicism.

I don't share my friend's view of history, but it was more legitimate than the blind loyalty to the Catholic Church that I had previously imagined.

Whenever a person believes anything, he or she makes a decision, at some point, to believe, no matter what the evidence or lack thereof dictates. Philosophically, every set of beliefs comes from an immovable "first principle," where you basically say, "I'm going to accept this as true." Wikipedia's example is that for the syllogism "All men are mortal; Socrates was a man. Socrates was mortal," the first principle was "All men are mortal." You accept this statement as truth, and the rest follows from logic.

It makes sense to me that faith would also follow a first principle. Okay, we Protestants really like to believe that our faith is based on undeniable evidence and reason. But everyone has a different point at which they choose to believe something is the truth. For most people, you ask why they believe in God, and they say, the Bible says so, and you say, why do you accept the Bible is true? And they say, because it is, and you've reached the end of their paradigm. That the Bible is true is a first principle for them. For others, you would need to go further to find the first principle -- they have to put their trust in the fact that biblical archeology is true, or they would have to do further research to see whether the archeology was done legitimately, or they would have to do even further research to see whether the reports auditing the archeology were verifiable -- you get the idea. Everyone has a point where they say, "Screw it. I believe this much is true, and everything follows from this."

For the Protestant thinker, this identifying of first principles and taking small leaps of faith is a never-ending process. Every issue and every practice, I have to wrestle with why I believe it and how I should practice it and whether Scripture or doctrine really says what I think it says and whether it makes sense with the world around me, a recurrent process largely chronicled in this blog. And here is the main distinction I see with the Catholic faith. When they take it on faith that the Catholic Church is true, then they have made one astoundingly large conceptual leap of faith -- but everything else Catholic follows from that because they can then trust the Church's authority. Where I might have to question whether the Trinity is a real, necessary part of my belief, where I might have to question everything, the Catholic believer can trust the authority of the Church that he has chosen to subscribe to. The Protestant believer has to make many small leaps of faith and decisions to believe in whatever constitutes his day-to-day faith. The Catholic believer has to make one huge leap of faith.

For me, right now, that intellectual leap is too large, so I don't think I'm in any danger of becoming Catholic. I still don't agree with the history or a lot of their practices that seem to stray too far from their biblical bases. But here are two things I do like about the Catholic Church at large.

The first is their reverence in worship. I like the way they seem to take God seriously. I like the feel of Catholic services: it's hard to sit through all those prayers and liturgy and look at all the imagery around the churches and not ponder, with some sense of wonder, the God who is so much bigger than you. Sometimes Protestant services and gatherings have the atmosphere of having been thrown together at the last minute, like a barnyard shindig. I pray a lot in my boxers right after I get off the can, and I know I'm not supposed to be legalistic or self-righteous, but I feel like I do owe the King of the Universe and Lord of my life more reverence than I give Him most days.

The second is their strong emphasis on the importance of family.

I guess in the end, I'm happy where I am, and I'm happy I'm not a Catholic. But they're less ridiculous than I had thought they were originally.