Posted on 05/21/2008 1:41:40 PM PDT by NYer
You know the drill: The Church is a prison that shackles the hearts and minds of people who yearn for the freedom to think and act as they please.
It is a stifling cell in which the best and the brightest are not allowed to be free due to the brutal restraints of dogma.
The reality is that most anti-Catholics are terrified of the intellectual freedom of the faith and much prefer some small ideology, cramped superstition or cozy little circle of slogans and simplicities that can be easily memorized and repeated.
I was reminded of this recently when the headlines noted that ex-Catholic Tom Cruise was building a bunker to prepare himself against intergalactic alien attack.
Now, I don’t know if Cruise is really building said bunker, but I do know that to leave the Catholic faith for Scientology is to exchange a vast estate full of woods and rivers ripe for exploration and quiet meditation for a cement cell decorated with cartoons.
I well recall a conversation with a friend who described an acquaintance of his, deep in the meshes of Scientology. The man had explained how the Scientology clinicians had hooked him up to a polygraph and asked him a bunch of incredibly personal questions, the answers to which were carefully recorded and filed away for later use. He saw nothing amiss with this.
When my friend asked him what benefits he had received from Scientology, he responded ‘Ah! I can’t tell you. You have to reach the $5,000 level!’
This strange urge to be harder on ourselves than the faith permits us to be is a curious feature of our fallenness.
I remember a friend who stayed with an aging group of Welsh Non-Conformists back in the ‘80s. They were the last survivors of a religious enthusiasm that swept through Wales in the early 20th century. Each year, their dwindling numbers got smaller, but they held the True Faith, and continued to meet and encourage each other in rigorism and joylessness.
At one particularly unforgettable gathering, one of the old duffers in the group stood up to give his testimony (one they had all heard many times). He said, ‘When I was a young man, I used to celebrate Christmas and enjoy a pint down at the pub. But when I found the Lord, I stopped doing all that.’
And all the saints said, ‘Amen.’
It isn’t just spiritual smallness people can choose, by the way.
Matthew Parris is a British columnist who recently distinguished himself with his preference for intellectual smallness by responding to the amazing healing of a French nun by dogmatically declaring that nobody could ‘honestly entertain the possibility that from beyond the grave the late Pope John Paul II interceded with God to cause a woman to be cured of Parkinson’s disease.’
You may ask how ‘ given the fact that the nun was, in fact, healed ‘ Parris knows this. Here is his free-thinking and open-minded response:
’But how can you be sure?’ Oh boy, am I sure. Oh, great quivering mountains of pious mumbo-jumbo, am I sure. Oh fathomless oceans of sanctified babble, am I sure. Words cannot express my confidence in the answer to the question whether God cured a nun because she wrote a pope’s name down. He didn’t.’
Meanwhile, the close-minded and fearful Church is continuing its investigation, just in case Mr. Parris might have missed something in his utter certitude.
To be Catholic is to be free ‘ frighteningly free, in fact.
Parris is manifestly terrified of a universe big enough to include a God who works miracles. Many people have what Evelyn Waugh called ‘little systems of order’ that depend, like a house of cards, on the wind of the Holy Spirit not blowing them apart.
It is a scary thing to realize that there is no Catholic position on many of the shibboleths and tribal loyalties that define our lives on a day-to-day basis.
The faith has no particular ideology concerning economics, ghosts, diet regimens, psychic healing, politics, TV shows, music or smoking. But to the tribes that care about such things, your opinion or lack thereof marks you as Us or Them.
The faith is the only place in the world that insists you can remain part of Us while holding almost whatever view you like about democracy or evolution.
Most people don’t want to be that free and prefer the cozy confines of an ideological cell.
Interesting discussion.
LOL! I haven’t thought about that in a long time; I was on the set crew for a performance in high school.
I sometimes wish we had more precise rules in the Catholic Church. It would eliminate some of the decision-making that can be so tiresome. But we don’t.
Ping!
That reminds me, has anyone else seen that a Brideshead Revisited movie is coming out?
Just had the most horrible argument with a family member about this. He decried the evil Church for shackling minds. He sees a Church very different from the one I do.
I didn’t handle it well, yelling back, and eventually, condemnation. It is just so frustrating to watch. Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa.
Funny,I just read something about this in a Chesterton book last night.
He was making the argument that so many people deride Church for dogmatic religion when in fact the Dogma saves people from unrestrained "religion," which can lead people to all sorts of destructive ends.
...as those of us in Lower Manhattan are daily reminded of.
Yes! With Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain. I hope they don’t ruin it. Remember the BBC (?) version from about 25 years ago? They were very true to the novel, but the last few episodes started to stray away from Waugh’s theme of the search personal redemption and become overly fascinated with the affair of Charles and Julia. Also, Lord Bridey’s character was a bit shallow and stereotyped, due to director not actor. Overall though it was quite excellent. Hard for me to imagine they won’t make this new film a squalid mess about sex and religious repression, and neglect the deeper themes, but if they can do it properly, it would be magnificently powerful.
http://www.kewego.com/video/iLyROoafYzSc.html
Movie trailer....hard to tell from these bits and pieces (”passion, control, desire...”), I hope Evelyn isn’t turning over in his grave. Looks like one of these arty films that will be worth seeing for the fabulous costumes and English scenery, but not much more.
I've seen that also. I'm an adult convert and my initial impression of the Church was how big and deep it is. Every Church/Religion has walls beyond which one is no longer in it. I see Catholicism as placing the walls as far out as possible allowing greatest freedom within.
Protestant Churches, IMHO, seem to take a piece of the Church and make it their whole. An obvious example is monastics and contemplative Christianity - a great loss in the Reformation.
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