For example, if one were to set a Lenten goal and were not be able to make it despite intentions to the contrary, the Church is wise enough to realize that in many things, the intentions are as important, if not more important, than the actual action. And that is why I can write this exhausted post and still feel I’m keeping my Lenten promise.
Any Catholic space is a feast for the eyes. There’s so much to look at that it’s almost overwhelming: stained glass, statues, icons, frescoes, murals, carvings — a traditional (i.e., old, European) Catholic church is filled with visual stimuli.
Even the simplest wooden church is filled with details that drawn individuals to get a closer look. And entering a great cathedral like Notre Dame of Strassbourg is an overwhelming visual experience.
Yet it’s not just what individuals see now that sets apart Catholicism; there’s a history of visions throughout the Church: corporal visions, imaginative visions, intellectual visions, visions of saints, visions of demons, and probably, at least once, visions of visions. They’ve happened all over the world, and they continue occurring today, so there’s something in Catholicism that either encourages this or encourages believers by causing this. It’s either wish fulfillment or genuine experience — or a mixture of both.
Now I’m not going to suggest that this impresses me. I don’t know whether these seers actually had an experience or whether it was all suggestion and will. That’s not something I can decide. However, I find it striking how very important vision is in the Catholic faith, especially compared to other faiths. Seeing is not believing, but it helps, and Catholicism realizes that and makes use of it.
One of the reasons there are so many Protestant denominations is that they don’t recognize a common authority beyond Scripture. The problem with that is simple: whose interpretation is correct? When we look at the varied beliefs of Christians and the doctrines that are contentious (infant baptism, baptismal regeneration, the nature of justification, salvation, divorce and remarriage), it’s sometimes difficult to wonder how they can all claim to be within the same religion.
When Luther broke with the Catholic Church, he expected most believers to follow him and that would have been that. No one was supposed to break from him, and in fact, he anticipated mass conversions of Jews to his purified Christianity.
What he got instead was not a reformed church but reformed churches.
What’s more, he set a precedent: when one claims that the Bible alone is one’s authority, then one necessarily and inescapably adds one’s interpretation into the mix. Sola scriptura might more accurately be “by scripture and interpretation alone” (try as I may, I can’t figure out what that would be in Latin). Without an authority to determine which interpretation is appropriate and which is not, we’re lost. To suggest, as some do, that the Bible somehow interprets itself doesn’t solve the problem at all, for any and all reading requires interpretation. To read is to interpret, and to read one part of a text in order to interpret another part doesn’t magically lift us out of the interpretation quagmire.
The Catholic Church, though, claims to have that authority. Other groups do as well, to be sure, but not many other groups can trace their history back as far as the Church. Not many other groups can claim to have made the decisions about which books and epistles to include in the canonization process and which to exclude. Not many other groups can claim an unbroken line of successive authority back to 32 AD.
Father Robert Barron is what one might call a rising star in Catholic apologetics and philosophy. A professor of Systematic Theology at The University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois, Barron runs the Word On Fire website, which includes an enormous number of resources. What’s striking about Barron is how he manages to balance theology, philosophy, literature, and culture in each and every lecture, sermon, or talk he gives. He is one of those rare intellectuals who doesn’t sound like an intellectual.
Here’s a prime example: his discussion of “All Along the Watchtower.”
He also discusses everything from The Matrix to Christopher Hitchens — in a word, everything.
Kotlet schabowy z ziemniakami. She loves the pork — though we sell it to her as chicken — but she has to give the potatoes a bit of thought.
Still, she’s a Polish girl, through and through. Her favorite meal, the thing she would eat daily, the dish that gets her squealing with delight when she learns it’s on the day’s dinner menu: barszcz.
My first, indirect exposure to Catholicism was in a friend’s living room in Knoxville, Tennessee sometime in the early 1990s. Several of us were staying over with this friends family, and as we sat talking that evening, she put on Enigma’s debut album, MCMXC a.D. It was the first time I’d really heard plainsong, though it was layered under so much sampling and shallow lyrics that I really didn’t know the power of what I was hearing. But I was curious: I wanted to hear pure chant, without all the drum machines and pan flute melodies.
It seemed such a simple idea: a single melody, often limited to a handful of individual tones, sung by dozens of voices. No harmonies; no differentiation whatsoever. Polyphonic choral music– the famous SATB — seemed overly complicated in comparison.
The Girl likes to refer to herself as an artist. Just a few days ago, she was proclaiming that she’s an artist but that it’s a secret.
This morning, as I was planning some lessons, she came into the study from downstairs, picture in hand.
“Here Tata. I’m an artist.”
I glanced at the picture, saying the obligatory, “I know honey,” then stopped what I was doing to take a closer look.
“Did you help her with this?” I called out to K downstairs.
“No,” came the reply.
“Not even a little bit?”
I think I can be forgiven my initial skepticism.
The church I grew up in was founded in 1934. My best friend growing up attended a church that was twenty years older. My next door neighbor attended a church with a denomination that was founded in 1609. A good friend from high school traces her denomination’s roots to 1521. Yet the Catholic Church, by its reckoning, is older than all of these combined and doubled.
Of course many Protestants — particularly many here in the south — hold that Catholicism was a perversion of the original church, and thus the founding of the Church cannot be traced by to the first century. Yet even if we take the official start of the Catholic Church as late as 313, with Constantine’s Edict of Milan, it still has 1,200+ years’ experience over the first major Protestant division. (I’m leaving aside the Great Schism of 1054, which led to the division of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. By and large, though, the theologies of the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church have a great deal in common.)
That’s a lot of time for doctrinal evolution.
What’s most amazing is that during that time, the core Catholic theology has never come into question. The papacy might have descended into immoral chaos, the bureaucracy of the church might have condoned, encouraged, and even committed awful acts, and corruption might have been rampant, but the doctrines remained steady. What we find in the early Church Fathers is eerily similar to the theology we see in the Catholic Church — a fact that has led to several notable Protestant-to-Catholic conversions during the last few decades.
What does it take for an institution to last so many centuries?
“Catholic” means “universal,” and that is an apt description.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker, a local priest with a reputation that extends well beyond the region, explains it better than I could:
We had confirmation at Our Lady of the Rosary parish on Tuesday. What I love about the Catholic Church is her universality. In the congregation were Vietnamese, Palestinians, Nigerians, Poles, Philippinos, Mexicans, El Salvadoreans, French, German and more…why there were even a few converts there too.
We were all united in one church, one faith, one baptism. The bishop was there and our priesthood was united with his and with the gift of Our Lord to the Apostles.
In addition to the ethnic mix there was the socio-economic mix–executives from Michelin and BMW mixing with Mexican immigrants and everyone in between. (Source)
Another measure of the universality of the faith is the number of languages used to celebrate Mass at a given church. The church we attend has Mass in English, Spanish, and, once a month, Polish. Other, larger cities certainly have even more variety.