crazyfingers

<a href="http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/022/oped/People_of_the_church_must_take_it_back+.shtml" target="_blank">People of the church must take it back</a>
By James Carroll, 1/22/2002

Henrietta

The Catholics I have known have the good sense to ignore just about everything the pope says. The church will have to do something about the priest shortage if it wants to survive.

livius drusus

I know quite a few of that kind of Catholic myself, and they mystify me. Cafeteria Catholicism is even weirder to me than the usual run-of-the-mill cafeteria xianity because you really can't separate Catholicism and papal rule. The two are inextricably linked.

Here's an example. Last week, a gay friend of mine went to mass. The audience was predominantly gay and the priest had enjoyed a threeway with a couple of my friend's buddies two nights before. My friend described the sermon (at length, I'm sad to say) which apparently covered such topics as the fairies making people happy by sprinkling fairy dust on them, and a guy the priest knew who always had vials clinking in his pockets.

It sounds like the best mass I've ever heard of, but how it can be called Catholic without completely ignoring entire chunks of the fundamental doctrine, I just don't know. I asked my friend why he didn't just find a nice UU church somewhere and fuhgeddaboudit. He just can't let go of "being Catholic" even though he violates a quadrillion tenets a day.

It's Catholicism as an ethnicity rather than a religion.

crazyfingers

Sort of like a secular Jew. Jewish for the cultural part but not the god part.

Ernest Sparks

Well-established religions are complexes of dogmatic propositions, cultural adherences and rich interpersonal connections. It is nigh well impossible to separate these components, much as some dogmatists try. Catholics are becoming more and more insistent that catholicism is there's by right, rather than fiat of the church bigwigs. Anglicans (including Episcopalians) have been so for some time. They demand sacraments and other ordinances by right, even when out of regular attendance and not agreeing with any dogmatic assertions of the church. Many don't even believe in God and Christ as taught by their church. I suspect the same thing is true among Catholics.

Writer Gore Vidal once explained why he preferred to live in an out-and-out Catholic culture, rather than in hypocritically-puritanical U.S. He said that many heavily Catholic countries are at least part pagan as well as Catholic, and the hierarchy can't do anything about it. Often they have been forced to adopt aspects of the surrounding pagan culture. In a holy day celebration in Central America, one is apt to see a Catholic religious procession where both the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the traditional local Snake God are hoisted and carried about with equal honor.

[ January 22, 2002: Message edited by: Ernest Sparks ]</p>

livius drusus

That's exactly what I was thinking. It just seems to make much more sense with Judaism because its own doctrine establishes transmission through the female line and a kind of exclusivity that conversion-happy Catholicism can never claim.

crazyfingers

I'm just glad that so many catholics do ignore the pope.

I often wonder whether having the catholic church not survive in the US would be a good thing or a bad thing. Would many catholics just get swept up into something even worse? Or is it best that they just live this odd contradiction of ignoring the pops and doing what makes sense.

It doesn't seem likelly that too many catholics would quit believing in god if the church fell apart.

Henrietta

What I've seen is a strong conviction to be catholic or nothing. But I admit my sample population is quite small.

Throbert McGee

Word up! I sometimes privately think of myself as a Catholic atheist, though of course I never use the term aloud because it's such a pain-in-the-ass trying to explain why I don't see the two terms as necessarily contradictory.

Actually, it's even more complicated in my case because I'm gay, and we all know how the RCC stands on that. So clueless straight Catholics occasionally assume I'm gay out of rebellion against the Church, while self-described gay atheists think I left Catholicism because the Pope is mean to homosexuals. In fact, neither is the case; I'll go to the Mass if a relative gets married or something, but apart from that I'm 100% uninterested in all that God jive. (They could make fellatio a sacrament, and I still wouldn't go back.) I'm a metaphysical naturalist first and foremost, and I just happen to groove on masculinity.

But for some reason I can't quite articulate, I do continue to perceive myself as vaguely Catholic.

Orpheous99

Which gets me, because without the "god part" there are no Jews. Their religion is what defines them and their culture. It's like calling yourself a virgin after having sex.