What is Catholic?

Alix, as we talked about today, I think these are really difficult and thought-provoking questions. For me, reflecting on the inquiries you pose elicited a lot of thought but few answers. Like you, I struggle with the idea that I’ve chosen to remain (at least to the extent that I attend Church a handful of times per year) within a religious system which is shaped at least in part by beliefs with which I don’t agree and operating principles to which I don’t necessarily adhere in my own life. And so I recognize that the ritual of going to church – which I enjoy for similar reasons to the ones you express – perhaps carries far different meaning for me than for any other individual with whom I am sitting in the pews. While I do derive what I perceive to be real value from my experiences on those Sundays, I would characterize that value as, in Eben’s words, “the subduing of hectic consciousness”. Sometimes I leave musing over something that resonated with me, sometimes I leave thinking I fundamentally disagree with something that was said. Maybe the fact that my feelings after any given Mass have no actual impact on my behavior – I continue to go back regardless – means I’m struggling with cognitive dissonance and that I’m splitting to deal with it.

But even if that’s true, maybe (hopefully) there’s value in the very fact that we recognize this potential split in ourselves; that we have identified the discord inherent in the organizations to which we ostensibly belong. We are self-aware in the sense that we know we derive a particular kind of value (meditative, comfort of habit) from attending church, but that we don’t adhere to all of these organizations’ shaping ideals. Maybe that’s a reflection of an adherence instead to our personal beliefs of right and wrong, our individual notions of morality. Admittedly these personal ethical belief systems are perhaps influenced by or somewhat inextricable from the teachings of our respective religious upbringings, I don’t really know. However, even if our views on morality aren’t entirely independent of such shaping forces, maybe there’s value in the fact that we have self-defined benchmarks by which we measure what it means to be a ‘good person’.

We don’t blindly or automatically internalize the ideals espoused by a given religion and call them our own, or worse, define ourselves as “good Christians/Catholics” and use that self-identity to justify behavior we’d otherwise consider morally wrong. Like we talked about, we have had encounters with people who have the capacity to ignore and/or justify their moral transgressions by leaning on their self-definition as ‘good Catholics’ (going to Church regularly, getting ashes on Ash Wednesday, giving something up for Lent) and conflating that with being ‘good people’. I guess this is the paradigm I had in mind in response to your query on how one ‘uses religion’ to create a personal belief system and whether that equates to complacency. You obviously don’t use religion in this manner. You also don’t tell others that you do or do not believe in something simply “because you are Catholic” while knowing internally that you disagree with many other ideals the Church espouses. So in that sense I don’t think you’re complacent in perpetuating the shaping principles of Catholicism.

The bigger question, that I don’t know the answer to, is whether you and I are, by definition, complacent anyway, for choosing to ‘use’ religion the way we do, for deriving personal value from that use, and ultimately for choosing to remain within our respective religious organizations as a result.

-- CourtneyDoak - 17 Apr 2012