This came in an email this morning from Ryan Burge that is relevant to the discussion of original sin and baptism.
“There’s a running joke in American religious life that goes something like this: ask ten Catholics what the Church teaches on a given issue, and you’ll get eleven different answers. It’s meant to be affectionate, a nod to the big-tent nature of a tradition that has managed to hold together nearly a billion people across wildly different cultures, languages, and political contexts. But like most jokes, it contains more than a little truth.
The Catholic Church is one of the most doctrinally specific institutions in the world. The Magisterium — the Pope, Cardinals, and Bishops — has issued detailed guidance on everything from the mechanics of salvation to the appropriate use of birth control to how often a faithful Catholic should receive the sacrament of Reconciliation. These aren’t suggestions. They are, in the Church’s own framing, the authoritative teachings of an institution that believes itself to be guided by the Holy Spirit…….
And yet, anyone who has spent time around American Catholics knows that the distance between official Church teaching and the lived experience of the average Catholic in the pew can be considerable. This isn’t a new observation — sociologists of religion have been documenting it fordecades. But it raises a genuinely interesting empirical question: just how Catholic, in the doctrinal sense of the word, is the average American Catholic?”
There is also a story within the story that asks if converts are more hard- core than cradle Catholics.
He provides interesting data, charts and graphs, as usual
https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/the-conformity-gap-what-american
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ReplyDeleteApologies that this is tangential to your main theme about conformity to doctrine. I realize that the experience of converts is of very little interest to those here. I wrote the above for a different discussion group, so I am happy to delete here if too far off-topic.
DeleteWell, not a convert, nut married to one, and daughter of one. So not off topic for me.
Delete"nut" should be but.
DeleteAnother attempt to link to the sub- article about converts so that it will open.
Deletehttps://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/p/are-catholic-converts-more-hard-core
“ I realize that the experience of converts is of very little interest to those here”
Well, maybe not to everyone, but it definitely is to me. It’s a subject that has long fascinated me because my years long struggles to stay in the church often made me wonder why anyone would. actually Choose to be Catholic, if not for marriage purposes.. I have read books by those who can’t free themselves from Catholicism (like me) and those who explain why they left, like the author of “A question of Conscience” and articles by converts. Years ago I read a book called “Once a. CatholicI “ about the strong hold and lasting influence of Catholicism even on those who come to reject it. https://www.amazon.com/dp/039542111X?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback#detailBullets_feature_div.
“ A Question of Conscience”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0340037490?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
by an English theolgian who left Catholicism. I read articles by converts, trying to understand their experience. Unfortunately (in my opinion) too many of those convert stories are by evangelicals who kept their somewhat fundamentalist world views but loved the smells, bells, costumes, and drama of Catholic liturgy
I have been very interested in your reports from RCIA. And how the Church Ladies operate at your parish. And your pastor. Why would anybody want to become Catholic at your parish with your RCIA program?
Second link is blocked. Appatently, once you've had your freebie, you're done. Thanks for trying. Carry on with the original theme!
DeleteInteresting. I get an email from him several times/ week. I’ve not been blocked from opening the sub- articles and I’ve never been asked to subscribe to read them.
DeleteFor me, the 2nd link isn't completely blocked. It let me read about five paragraphs, showed me one interesting graph (of cradle Catholics vs. convert Catholics) and then told me I needed to be a paid subscriber to see the rest. Apparently it thinks I'm an unpaid subscriber; it addressed me, not by my usual name, but by a nickname I've used for different commenting situations over the years. I don't remember freebie-subscribing to Burge's Substack in the past (although I might have), so maybe Substack recognizes me from some other Substack author's site.
DeleteYeah, I just got to the graph but not the explanation of what it meant.
DeleteWe just had the gospel about the sower and the seed yesterday. I'm thinking some of the converts may be like the seeds that sprung up, but the ground was shallow, and they withered away. Maybe not, time will tell.
Btw, to digress: maybe "sower" is a traditional term for these Gospel passages the last couple of weeks, but I don't think anyone around here uses them in real life, and for someone who is listening rather than reading along, it may not be immediately intelligible - almost certainly would not be intelligible for any children in the congregation. Why can't they say, 'A farmer planted some seeds' rather than, 'A sower sowed some seeds'?
DeleteWhen I think of a farmer sowing seed, I think of a guy driving a John Deere pulling some heavy equipment planting seed in nice neat rows. The word "sower" brings a mental picture of someone walking and taking handfuls of seed from a canvas sack, and flinging the seed with abandon. It lands where it lands.
DeleteOk, I guess there is an implied scattering technique in "sow". It does sharpen the mental image, if one happens to know that. I think last Sunday's parable still works if you imagine the crops growing in neat rows, and the weeds growing wilky-nilly among them.
DeleteLast week's parable also seems to distinguish between the sower (who apparently was the landowner) and the harvesters, who seem to be the owner's slaves. Jesus makes that distinction between planters and harvesters in one or two other places, so that may be part of what is at work here.
Interesting observations. So many of the parables and episodes in the Bible are aimed at nomadic-agrarian people living, often struggling, in a desert climate using technology that is as much as 3,000 years old.
DeleteContext gets very puzzling to people as time goes without instruction. Does that instruction happen in CCD? Not in my experience. We had to fill in a lot for The Boy.
It strikes me that what's missing from our understanding of Baptism is the dual symbol of water. It washes and cleans, yes. But water is also the source of life, essential for plants and animals, precious in an arid climate. Baptism nourishes us so we can grow.
I do think converts give more thought to doctrine than some cradle Catholics do. Usually there is one thing in particular that bugs them. With both my husband and my mom I think it was the Catholic relationship with Mary and the saints that they had to work through. Even though all the denominations which recite the Apostles' Creed have the line about the Communion of the Saints.
ReplyDeleteKinda not too surprising, all in all.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the bishops, at least during my adult lifetime, are hard-core on politics. They don't really say, "Thou shalt not vote for Democrats". Or "Thou shalt not vote for candidates who want to excessively curtail immigration." And I think that is as it should be. The bishops apply Catholic teachings to contemporary situations (like birth control or immigration). And then the Catholic voters figure out how to translate that into votes for candidates.
The bishops say that abortion is paramount ( even though Francis warned against that). So they say “ don’t vote for anyone who is pro- choice. Which is pretty much saying “ Don’t.vote for Democrats”
DeleteThey don't actually say dont vote for anyone who is pro choice, at least not here. They say that it is wrong to vote for someone because they are pro choice. I have no problem voting for someone in spite of them being pro choice if I think they are the best candidate.
DeleteThe Republican party has used "pro life" as a sort of human shield for the ton of objectionable things they are doing now. Our former governor, Pete Ricketts, who was appointed by the present governor to fill a Senate seat vacancy, used his own family money, when he was governor, to bring back the death penalty by a ballot initiative after the state legislature voted to repeal it over his veto. This is supposedly a pro life Catholic guy. He actually has to run for that Senate seat in November, and I'm not going to have any qualms about voting for his opponent. Or for the Democratic governor candidate. Turn the rascals out.
Jim I think that's as it should be too, that they're not hard core on politics.
DeleteOur archbishop did issue a strongly worded letter, also signed by the other two bishops in Nebraska last year. It was about just treatment of immigrants, not about voting.
My mistake, Ricketts actually did run in 2024 to hold his Senate seat. But he is up for election again this year.
DeleteKatherine, I am glad to learn about this further evidence that bishops are speaking out about immigrants. As a national conference, I don't think they have been particularly vocal (I could be wrong, but I'm not thinking of anything), although they have a department that specializes in that topic, and I am sure it has been pumping out statements and other materials. But many individual bishops, and perhaps state conferences such as yours, are speaking up, clearly and courageously.
DeleteI really think the topic of abortion has changed politically in the last decade, for a couple of reasons. The first was the Dobbs decision, which led to a couple of election cycles in which state-level abortion law shook out; that era now seems to be over. The outcome in quite a few states (including mine) has been unsatisfactory to the church, but the political way forward is not crystal clear in those states.
The second is that the Trump administration has put the very foundations of democracy at risk. It is becoming more urgent to secure those than it is to fight about abortion. I'm not speaking for the church on this point; this is my personal observation. I'm not certain the institutional church in the US apprehends the risk. The same may be true of other churches and denominations in the US.