He points out that the Catholic Church is pretty open about her problems, and whenever she has tried to hush up and cover up she hasn't been particularly good at it. About right. One of the things that impressed me in my own journey to the Catholic Church is that the dirty laundry was out there for everyone to see. There was no big cover up about the Borgia popes. There was no secret history about the shameful history of the papacy in the seventh and eighth centuries. There was no massive whitewash of the sins of Catholics. The history was all there.
Two things impressed me about this: first of all, the slanted history, the half truths, the lies and the 'secret history' was all produced not by Catholics, but by anti-Catholic forces. It was the Protestant propagandists who produced all the dark, dirty, nasty stuff about Catholics. Of course they built on some terrible events, exaggerated, told the story one sided and twisted things (usually from a sincerely wounded perspective) and made stuff up. The Catholics didn't for the most part. They behaved like the kid with caught with his hand in the cookie jar. "Yup. Fair cop. You got me. Not good. Sorry. Try not to do it again." In the face of this wrong doing it was the Protestants who were all uppity and self righteous about it all. The Catholics were just ashamed.
The second thing that impressed me was that the spotted history of the Catholic Church was actually just what you would expect of a two thousand year history of a religious organization. The history of the Catholic Church read (if you like) like the Old Testament. It was one long soap opera of human sin, repentance, divine punishment, shameful pride, lust, ambition, vanity and folly all mixed up with miracles, divine intervention, saints, holy men and women, and through it all God's amazing providence winning through.
So when I read the history of the Catholic Church the very sinfulness and awfulness of some Catholics' behavior rather confirmed the whole thing as being authentic. What would have been very suspicious indeed is if every Pope was a Leo the Great, every priest a Cure d'Ars, every bishop a Robert Bellarmine, every Catholic a St Francis or a Therese of Lisieux. Now that would definitely have been smelling of rat.
So when I therefore read about 'secret Catholic conspiracies to cover up the truth' (Let's say about 'Pope Joan' or some such) it's laughable, because the Catholic Church just doesn't do that. It's not because Catholics may not wish to do that, but because the Catholic Church isn't the all powerful, megalomaniacal organization that its critics make out. When you read the history of the Catholic Church you get the impression, therefore, that this is real history.
You got saints. You got sinners. You got triumph. You got defeat. You got ups. You got downs. You got crimes. You got heroic sanctity.
It's just what you would expect. It's down to earth. It's simple.
My older brother was asked by a Prot relative why he became a Catholic. Thinking that the response would be, "Well, I like stained glass windows and priests in vestments." His bald reply was, "Because it's true."
That's the sort of apologetics that makes the other side apoplectic. And it suits me.
10 comments:
suits me too! ;-)
Ah, Squelly beat me to the punch! LOL!
GK Chesterton had the same came to the same conclusion as your older brother. It is simple.
Great thoughts!
'Because it's true' is also a useful answer when your average UK Catholic is asked 'Why are you Catholic when you have to put up with poorly celebrated liturgy and awful modern church architecture?'...
I agree, it is real. It always amazes me how the Church renews itself from within, especially when things get rough.
One of the nice things about being an RC is that you are immediately credited with a gazillion years of Purgatory time, simply for having to deal with our clergy ( the good Father L. excluded of course)
I wish I could be less jaded and cynical about the Ole'_____,(er, excuse me, I meant dear Holy Mother Church). Unfortunately, we have no choice. IT'S HER OR NOTHING.
Fortunately, as Natasa points out, She is periodically renewed and restored, and this tends to give me a glimmer of hope.
There are only two groups of people in the world:
1. Priests
2. Their critics.
Reminds me of what Amy Wellborne once said in her column "My Husband the Priest" published in Commonweal when writing about her ex-priest husband: "If you insist on using political labels to identify Catholics, here’s the way it works: the “liberals” aren’t interested in us because we make fun of them. The “conservatives” like us until they find out our histories, because there’s no worse epithet-not “pagan,” not “Protestant,” not even “heretic”-in a conservative Catholic’s vocabulary than “ex-priest,” a word which comes with a “p” conveniently built in so it can be virtually spit out of contemptuous lips." (Commonweal, January 2003)
Amen to your bro's answer.
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