Proselytism Revisited

A Random Post-Script

Just troll through “X”, America Magazine or the National Catholic Reporter or more disconcerting activity from the Holy Father and the Princes closest to him and one will hear the mantras that came out of the Left Wing party at the Second Vatican Council that helped produce Gaudium et Spes and Nostrae Aetate. One can hear Rahner’s ghost insisting on all the “anonymous Christians” in the world that might be turned away if we pressed for conversion to the Catholic Church. A Right Wing reading of those documents might bring up condemnations against modernism by Pope St. Pius X or from Taylor Marshall’s Infiltration that are almost Feenyite about extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.

However, I’ve thought a lot about Bubbly Pope John’s hope to let the beauty of the Church attract non-Catholics with more light and less heat. I’d like to think of myself as just a plain ol Catholic that believes what I heard at my confirmation in 2013, that the teachings of Holy Mother Church were divinely revealed by God. I’m sure plenty of Catholic Buts (“Oh, I’m Catholic but . . .”) would take issue with the content of my OCIA classes heavily laden with Scholastic theology, Ott and much derision tossed at Jesuits.

But, I do believe there’s something to accompaniment; coming along side people and seeing what a Catholic is before hearing the dogmas that offend non-Catholic sensibilities. I do believe it is a greater piece of wisdom to make friends and let them ask questions rather than attacking the heretics with a copy of Summa Contra Gentiles like a Gibbs smack on the back of the head. Let me underscore: I am no fan of the nouvelle theologie and when I encounter it, my hairs bristle at the damage it has done to Catholicism before and after the Council.

And yet, I enjoy the Mass of Paul VI, with its dialogical approach; if I had looked into Catholicism by way of the Mass of Pius V, I would have become an Anglican. It was the beauty of the Liturgy, the amount of Scripture I heard, the incense and some recognizable hymns from Puritan Isaac Watts that hooked me. There was a wee amount of Latin, like a layer in the seven-layer cake, but not the whole cake, that helped me long for the tradition without being traditionalist.

So, as a former Presbyterian, I still frown on street preachers threatening the Sinners in the Hands of Jonathan Edward’s Angry god. I enjoyed +Barron’s “Catholicism” series precisely because he believed what I believe that the transcendent beauty of the 2000 year-old tradition has something to say, particularly to those wayward Catholics who grew up in the 1970s and the shyte that got passed off for religion by priests who no longer believed what I confessed at my confirmation.

Barron has made his enemies come out of the dark; they wanted to sweep the Church’s tradition behind 1962 as if singing “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” for the Introit ever helped anyone become or remain Catholic. I'‘m sure he has thought more than once, now that he is not completely embroiled with Word on Fire and has to do the hard work in the USCCB, “They didn’t tell me it was this bad.” Staring at pure evil face to face with clerics who wish you’d die sooner than later does something to you especially when you thought these prelates just leaned a little to the left theologically, I mean, do they really believe what Rahner and Kung wrote?

"You are the salt of the earth; if salt loses its taste, what is there left to give taste to it? There is no more to be done with it, but throw it out of doors for men to tread it under foot. You are the light of the world; a city cannot be hidden if it is built on a mountain-top. A lamp is not lighted to be put away under a bushel measure; it is put on the lamp-stand, to give light to all the people of the house; and your light must shine so brightly before men that they can see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5.13-16, Knox).