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Contents © 2001
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

JANUARY 2001 CONFESSIONS

FEET ON THE GROUND

I recently heard a story which initially struck me as odd, and then as utterly ordinary. A girl who had been two years behind me at college -- by all appearances, none too bright or mature, her demeanor tinged with empty, modern surliness -- had converted. But her conversion did not lead her to enter the ordinary Roman Catholic Church. Rather, she leapfrogged it, landing squarely amid the ranks of the Society of St. Pius X, and moving to one of the Society's strongholds: St. Mary's, Kansas.

Without addressing this or that claim of the Society, it seems safe to say that they are more than a little suspicious of the second Vatican Council, and that they are zealous adherents to tradition, especially with regard to the Mass. Where this young lady had been liberal and indulgent, they were conservative and restrained -- explicit codes of modest dress, chapel veils, the Tridentine rite. They represented the polar opposite of her old life, and so when it came time to reject her old life, they must have seemed an attractive option. The ordinary Church, on the other hand -- with all of its upheavals and divisions, along with the awkward attempts of many of its members to "change with the times" -- may have seemed too confusing an imbroglio to approach.

I am not attracted to the Society, but I sympathize with the girl. The Catholic Church in America is something of a mess. Over Thanksgiving, I read a column by a priest who was delighted to find that people didn't use the phrase "The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass" any longer. He saw it as a sign that we are growing more sensitive toward our Protestant brethren, who are uncomfortable with the term, since it seems to imply a further sacrifice beyond Christ's. This is nonsense -- people don't use the phrase because they don't believe in the Eucharist. The priest seemed to me to be guilty of a general fault in Vatican II as it was instituted in this country -- thinking much too much of people.

When I was being instructed in my faith as a teenager -- from a series of workbooks as opposed to any sort of Catechism -- I was taught that sin is a breaking of the love relationship between God and myself. This is true. It is also almost useless as a deterrent for a self-absorbed adolescent, whose notion of love is immature, and who has an insufficient grasp of the statement's meaning. I was never informed of anything like mortal sin, the necessity of confession, or even the real possibility of Hell. (We Catholics, after all, should be motivated by love, not fear!) Combine that with a lack of explicit teaching on various serious sins (masturbation, fornication, drunkenness, drug abuse, neglect of Sunday obligation, etc., etc. -- we don't want to be legalistic!) and you have a recipe for disaster. I had a decent formation at home -- many of my peers were not so fortunate.

My teachers assumed a foundation where there was none -- they thought too much of me -- and talked about love without linking it to obedience, heaven without hell, redemption without sin. That last was the real kicker -- were it not for sin, there would have been no need of Christ or His redemptive work.

I recovered somewhat, thanks to graces and Catholic home life. But my heart goes out to those who lacked such an atmosphere -- especially outsiders who try to enter the fold. Because I don't like the Church to assume too much, I did not used to have a great deal of sympathy for intellectual converts who felt humiliated by their experiences at R.C.I.A. classes. So what if you know more than your fellow neophytes? So what if you have a deeper understanding of God than the teachers running the program? Welcome to the Catholic Church, shallow enough so that a mouse won't drown, deep enough for an elephant to swim. Pride is the last barrier to submitting yourself to God and His Church -- swallow hard and come on in.

But then I heard things that made me think that the humiliation involved being more Catholic than the Catholics instructing you -- a bigger pill to swallow. One rather eye-popping example: someone (in this diocese) being told by their instructor that contraception is a matter of personal conscience.

For charity's sake, let us suppose that this was before the new Catechism defined contraceptive acts as "intrinsically evil." Let us suppose that the statement was made when distinctions were being tossed about by theologians over the nature of the authority inherent in this or that kind of proclamation from Rome. (The particular question being, "Just how binding is the teaching of an encyclical like Humanæ Vitæ?") Even so, you don't teach the indissolubility of marriage by referencing the Pauline privilege, or even annulment. You go with the ordinary magisterium. (In the case of Humanæ Vitæ, the disputed issue is obedience to the Pope. Surely this should be taught as a general virtue, and not as something that can be got around if you know the right distinctions?) Going to the hard case assumes an understanding of the issue in general -- again, thinking too much of people.

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