As a convert to the Catholic faith, I naturally want to see others embrace it, as well. But when I talk with folks who want to be Catholic I often find myself repeating Jesus’ counsel to “count the cost.” Why?
BY Mark Shea
March 11-17, 2007 Issue |
Posted 3/6/07 at 9:00 AM
As a convert
to the Catholic faith, I naturally want to see others embrace it, as well. But
when I talk with folks who want to be Catholic I often find myself repeating
Jesus’ counsel to “count the cost.” Why?
One thing that concerns me about
converts, especially from Protestantism, is that some seem to still be
basically Protestant. Some become Catholic, not because they have concluded
that the Church is the trustworthy sacrament of redemption given to the world
by Christ and guided by the Holy Spirit, but because they are fed up with
Protestantism and are leaving it and joining the Catholics — in protest.
Such folk are soon disconcerted that the people at Our Lady of Perpetual
Ordinariness are not this haven of saints and scholars, but a bunch of regular
people.
Some don’t know their faith at all.
Some hold political opinions that are very different from the convert’s. Some
don’t much take the Church’s teaching seriously. Some get their spiritual
insights from Oprah, or are devout but superstitious, or have a Protestant
brother-in-law who has taught them to say “Praise the Lord!” a lot.
It’s all so average
to the convert who was bargaining on a safe haven from all that. And when some
pope or bishop does something not to their liking, such converts not
infrequently embrace some form of the “two churches/two magisteriums” theory of
a pre- vs. post-Vatican II Church and (either slowly or quickly) start to hive
off into some extreme form of what they call “traditionalism” but which is, in
fact, yet another kind of Protestantism, albeit one with ultra-Catholic
aesthetics.
What we need to remember is that the
Catholic Church is and always has been the vessel of salvation for the world.
That means that most of the people you meet are going to be ordinary
— like you and me.
They are going to have the ordinary
tastes, prejudices, mediocrities, failures and virtues of their time and place.
There are, to be sure, great heroes and extraordinary people in the Catholic
communion. But to expect that as the norm and then be outraged and disappointed
when it is not is, I think, great folly and, in the end, great pride. Remember
the hellish “wisdom” of C.S. Lewis’ Uncle Screwtape, who would keep far from our
minds the thought, “If I, being what I am, can consider myself in some sense a
Christian, then why can’t these people next to me in the pew”?
So, though I have been appalled by
some of the sins that have been revealed in the ranks of the Church in the past
few years, I’ve never been shocked. What did I expect? They’re just sinners
like I am, and I know what I’m capable of.
“Well then,” it may be asked, “if
the average Catholic is so average, why bother joining the Church?” To quote
Walker Percy, “What else is there?” After all, it is not the Church that is
mediocre, but only we, her members.
The Church is, curiously, something
that exists before she has any members, because she is founded not by us, but
by Christ. The Church is the spotless bride of Christ, made so by the Holy
Spirit in the washing with water and the Word. We, her members, are generally
nebbishes and schleps.
But she is glorious and beautiful,
terrible as an army with banners. And in her all the fullness of the faith
subsists. In that faith, by the grace of God, I hope one day to be made perfect
in love of God and neighbor.
But it is not my job to immanentize
the eschaton. I can be more than merely content living in this strange, divine
sea of a Church, whose members are, like me, stunningly ordinary, but whose
soul, the Holy Spirit, is slowly bringing us along “until we all attain to the
unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood,
to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no
longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every
wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes”
(Ephesians 4).
Mark Shea is the senior content editor
for Catholic Exchange.
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