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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 7, 2003
A reason why
As I said last week it is too early to explain all my reasons for becoming what they call a Roman Catholic and which I shall henceforth call more simply a Catholic. One discovers in heart and head and deed and life reasons one had never guessed from the moment the decision is made. But after looking at the wall-to-wall diatribes against me on the letters page of this newspaper on Thursday I have decided to add something. I don't want anyone to think I am joining the Catholics only from disgust with the doctrinal ramblings of my brother Anglicans. While this was naturally a precipitating factor it was only a reason to leave them not a reason to go anywhere. I could have joined any of innumerable evangelical churches or split-off traditionalist Anglican cells or become a western member of the Eastern Church. I have great respect for all these people and would be honoured to hang with them too in the name of Jesus. But I had reasons to go straight to Rome. This was where I almost went when I ceased to be an atheist and first became a Christian after a religious experience almost thirty years ago. It now seems I set out for Rome then but made it only as far as Canterbury. We all know because the media have rubbed our noses in it the recent sex scandals involving priests in the USA. The reporting is as usual intensely selective. There are scandals like this happening in so many institutions around us including our public schools. But the Catholic Church is singled out for attention. It is no conspiracy: prejudice against Catholics is as widespread today as it ever was; people want to hear bad things about this church especially; and want to believe the worst about its celibate priests. My e-mail inbox sags under the e-weight of anti-Catholic e-spittle -- people making remarks quite casually which if the word "Catholic" were replaced with the word "Muslim" or "Jew" might qualify for public prosecution. For many "liberal" people today including many liberal Catholics the traditional and faithful Catholics are a special tribe beneath human dignity. This does not extenuate all those priests who did evil things and hurt Christ in hurting his children. Human nature is darkly sinful and in the proximity of Grace are found the greatest temptations. This after all has been what the Catholic Church has taught through 20 centuries. It is a church which can hardly be surprised by the presence of evil both without and within its ranks. Yet it is a mark of the true Church that when she fails she is singled out for special treatment. In that sense even if they do it from the bad motive of anti-Catholic prejudice people are right to hold the Catholic Church to higher standards. And we must take their spittle in good grace. There is no space here in this secular newspaper to enter into the great doctrinal issues that divide Christians from Christians and Christians from others. And as I said my reasons for crossing the Tiber were larger than first appeared. I have room for only one point of the many I have considered and so will choose the most obvious. The Catholic Church though seemingly small in the places where its parts are surrounded is in fact a massive thing not only in space but time. Spatially she holds at least the nominal allegiance of many more than a billion people. There are more Catholics in the world today for instance than all the various kinds of Muslims combined. And almost three-fifths of Christians are Catholic. There are Catholics in every country and substantial numbers in most countries. It is the one Christian communion that is not ethnic but rather "universal" (that is what the word "catholic" means). This was brought home to me in Casa Nova -- the Franciscan hospice in the Old City of Jerusalem where I stayed for a month several years ago. In its refectory each morning over breakfast I was able to hear the voices of people speaking every imaginable human tongue who had arrived as pilgrims to Jerusalem from the ends of the earth. In other words every other church is narrow by comparison to the Catholic one; and each must answer to a particular community delimited in some ethnic or doctrinal way. Not only in the present but through past time. For the girth of the Catholic Church is something that is expressed in time. One sees this in every encyclical of a Pope -- the allusions and precise references not only and primarily to Scripture but to a cumulative wisdom of 2 000 years through which its finest minds have tested Catholic truth against the finest minds of the heretics. We may like or dislike Catholic doctrines -- today chiefly because they do or don't serve our concupiscent pleasures. But they exist unquestionably as an edifice more durable than ourselves and would do even if there were no God. But there is God; and one must reason. A God who if he sent himself in Christ has left no doubt that He takes our part in the economy of our salvation. Now I ask myself: how did God allow this Catholic Church to become what it has been over all this time and all these continents with such extraordinary continuity if it were not the very rock of St. Peter? What kind of God would allow the human race to be tricked and cheated not only on this scale but in His name? For I look upon the countenance of that Church and it seems to me to express and to have expressed the love of Christ through many ages. The Church is the bride of Christ as all confessing Christians have held. The love of Christ will be in her countenance. We each see what we see and in human freedom cannot be forced to see other than what we see. And through my eyes looking upon this Catholic Church through all its ages in its spirit and in its flesh I see that expression of love. Doctrines are many but they only point to the source of this Love as the bride to Christ. I believe that I have seen what was previously obscured to me and that is why while I was not born a Catholic I hope to die a Catholic. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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