Why I remain Catholic

Catholic New Times, June 1, 2003 by Francois Brassard

Why do I remain a Catholic? It's important for the prophets of change in the Catholic Church to answer this question. Why? First, because conservative/fundamentalist Roman Catholics, a small but very powerful minority in the Church, have chosen to discredit, silence and excommunicate the prophets of change by accusing, judging and convicting them of heresy, of not being full and loyal Catholics, of being "cafeteria Catholics." The Pharisees and Sadducees used the same tactics with Jesus of Nazareth.

There is a second reason, a far more important reason why this question needs to be answered. And that is because the answer allows us to glimpse with the eyes of the heart, the heart of the Jesus experience. And it is the continuing reflection of the Christian community on that Spirit filled experience that grounds our faith and action.

The question is very popular these days. Catholic syndicated columnists have written on the topic in Catholic newspapers. Thomas H. Groome, a professor at Boston University, has just written a book entitled What Makes Us Catholic: Eight Gifts For Life. In it he analyses eight distinct Catholic qualities: the Catholic imagination, sacramentality, community, appreciation for human potential and fallibility, reverence for scripture and tradition, concern for justice and the unfortunate care for all and a faith-based spirituality that permeates every day. Good analysis, one that I can easily embrace.

Apostles' creed does not inspire

Garry Wills just did a follow-up book to his best selling Papal Sin--Structures of Deceit, entitled Why I Am A Catholic. After a further critical analysis of past papal hypocrisy, Wills answers the question by giving a personal and reasoned explanation of the Apostles' Creed. By the way, Sister Joan Chittister also gives a beautiful commentary on the Apostles' Creed in her book In Search of Belief. Though I greatly admire and respect the opinion of these authors on this matter, I do not share it. The Apostles' Creed does not encourage me in my faith. For me to recite it with assent requires extraordinary feats of theological gymnastics. It's even worse with the Nicene Creed. These creeds were fine in their day. They reflected well the understanding of the faith within the socio-cultural and historical context of their day. However, modern developmental theology has freed us from the notion that the understanding of our Christian faith is fixed and changeless.

It was Galileo who once insisted sotto voce while under papal arrest, "it moves" (the earth around the sun and not vice-versa as decreed by the pope). More than 400 years later John Paul II exonerated Galileo and repudiated the three-tiered cosmology upon which many tenets of our faith were based, e.g. creation of the world in six days, Jesus' descent to the dead after his own death and his ascent into heaven after his resurrection. In fact, now the Church teaches that every generation of Christians must come to a more profound understanding of the faith based on the discoveries of the day. And that is precisely what ninny theologians have been doing both before and after Vatican II.

Nature, scripture and tradition

All human attempts to understand God and God's intention with respect to the creation project are based first on a study of nature. This is based on the reasonable belief that whatever is created leaves telltale signs that profile the creator. The incredible scientific discoveries of the recent past, whether they be in astrophysics or microbiology, whether they be in archeology, zoology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, all of these and more have given us a mind-boggling vision of God's creation that is light years different from the people of 1st century Jerusalem or Rome.

For the believer there are two other possible ways of penetrating the mystery of God and God's relationship to creation. The first is Scripture, sacred writings revealing God through God inspired humans. The second is tradition, which incorporates the collective wisdom of the past, also God inspired, but communicated to us through diverse media, e.g. oral myths, theological ponderings, fictional literature, paintings, sculptures, music, movies, TV, radio. Because these two sources of God knowledge come to us through humans with their, as yet, limited means of communication, we need highly trained detectives of communication, experts in the human sciences, to unravel the overlays of time, culture, language, philosophy in order to expose the universal truth contained in the deposit.

Now, in point of fact, in the recent past there has been a vast production of sound scholarly work in the field of Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures that, among other things, reveal an understanding of God and God's intention with respect to creation and, particularly, to humanity that follows an evolutionary pattern parallel to post-modern discoveries in cosmology and human developmental psychology. For example, there are solid New Testament studies that show how the first pre-Gospel Christian communities (30-65 CE) believed that the risen Jesus was the perfect embodiment of God's Spirit and that his followers of the Way, imbued with the same Spirit, could renew the face of the earth (universe). Unfortunately, subsequent Christian communities, including gospel communities (later versions of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John) added layers of understanding to the original Jesus experience that reflected the old patriarchal, theistic concepts of God. It has taken over 1,900 years to uncover the real Jesus, both who he was and what he did, as the culmination not only of God's self-revelation as Loving Power, but also of God's ultimate plan to completely divinize all of creation through Spirit-filled evolutionary forces.