NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 11, 2004
Being Catholic
At the end of last summer in successive Sunday columns for Aug. 31st and Sept. 7th I wrote on why I had decided to give up on the Anglicans and become a Catholic. Such questions are settled between oneself and God and today are considered to belong to the realm of the private. But if one writes for readers they are also public questions -- a reader should know where a writer is coming from; and to whom or to what he owes his allegiance. Besides to judge from mail people seem genuinely curious about my religious beliefs; including those who write How can a person who seems reasonably intelligent and rational in other respects fall for all that superstitious claptrap? (Actual reader quote.) To those who think I make sense on worldly affairs when writing on weekdays but none when I turn to religion on Sundays I can't resist making the obvious suggestion. Perhaps my political views are as batty as my religious ones. You should keep an open mind. To others including what I sense are many lost Catholics -- Christians who feel abandoned by their country and by their church -- I wanted to add something. When explaining my reasons for converting last summer I said I don't even know all of them, yet; one begins to discover reasons one never suspected, in the moment the decision is made. Months pass and perhaps I know more. For the record I was received into the Catholic Church on Dec. 31st after a great deal of thought prayer and soul-searching necessarily including that which is required to make a general confession after half a century of sin and error. Incidentally the Sacrament of Penance a.k.a. "Confession" is -- I did not used to believe but now do -- the mark of seriousness in both church and people. For if we are not trying to put ourselves right with God with whom are we trying to put ourselves right? Going through life without confessing is like going through life without bathing. And doing a "pretend" confession is like doing a pretend shower it still leaves you stinking. Men were born with a natural propensity to smell. Christ comes to wash us through the absolution of his priests. Someone has a problem with that? Quite a few people I should guess. I join a Catholic Church that is almost certainly not enjoying one of its brilliant moments at least in this country. I knew this before I joined but having taken my place at the communion rail (or rather at the "virtual communion rail" since the real thing seems to have been removed from most Catholic churches) -- the fact of general apostasy fills me with more anguish. According to the standard estimate 43 per cent of Canadians are Catholics and another 40 per cent Protestants in one branch or another plus the members of the eastern churches. That would make us in theory a very Christian country. Given that Catholicism alone has deep roots in French Quebec it would not be unfair even if it might be inaccurate to say that Catholicism is Canada's national religion. At least the Catholic Church claims far more adherents than any other and claims them among Canadians in every town and district and at all ranks of society. But for the most part they do not go to church; those who do do not go to confession; and whether they go or not there is little doubt that the great majority have strayed a long way from the main thrust of twenty centuries of Church teaching together with their priests. So that "Catholic" has become more of an ethnic description than a statement of religious faith. The situation is conveyed in the ancient Tenebrae: "How doth the city lie desolate that was full of people; how is she become as a widow that was mistress among nations. Among her lovers there is none to comfort her: all her friends have despised her they are become her enemies. All her gates are broken down: her priests sigh her virgins grieve and she is oppressed with bitterness." I can find no better description of the contemporary Catholic Church as it appears to the convert. One is conducted -- not everywhere but almost everywhere -- into a Mass which has been translated into an English that is crass puerile awkward semi-literate -- which wantonly mistranslates the Latin template and tries to dodge the most crucial doctrinal issues. A Mass stripped of its music its mystery and its majesty before an altar stripped of its tabernacle. One is led into the ruin of a once glorious cathedral. Yet that is where I have knowingly gone for Christ -- and to find Mother Mary weeping. It is the Church as it must be today on a continent where we have performed forty million abortions. One runs to the Church and away from the "zeitgeist" -- that strange German word which means "the spirit of the age" and which is perhaps the most acute modern translation of what older Christians called "the prince of this world". And one runs to it hopefully and joyfully. For even in its ruin that Mass offers our only possible means of salvation. It is rejected today as it has been rejected through centuries I think less from conscious malice than from wilful ignorance of what it is and is about. For what it offers is nothing that can be conveyed by simple formula in any human language. I already considered myself to be a Christian but became explicitly a Catholic Christian in the moment I began to understand the Mass. Not as something to be explained but as something to be done; not as something for us to change but as something to be changed by. In meditating upon it one begins to realize what is meant by such a phrase as the "Real Presence" in the enactment of the Sacrifice. Not a re-enactment of it but the act itself. That is something which is not a factional position but rather something that is true. It remains true whatever is done to it. It remains recoverable it cannot be lost. It can never be destroyed as rites and buildings and even people can be destroyed. It will always remain there to call us back; and we will always be called. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top