To be perfectly honest, dear reader, I begin this post in the hope of allowing myself the luxury, at some point herein, to trash the liturgical tastes of my co-religionists at great length, because verily I say unto you that I have suffered through too many banal liturgies with too much banal music and I am about ready to puke.
I often praise the Lord (though I also wonder why it should be so) that merely by his presence, and without saying a word, a servant of God should frequently prevent people from speaking against Him.
Let your speech be always in grace seasoned with salt: that you may know how you ought to answer every man.
Through gyroscopic precession the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son into your life is tracked. When you start to back slide it causes our specially made gyroscope and accelerometer in our inertial guidance system. The inertial guidance system measures directly how inert you are to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When it detects back sliding the negative acceleration is detected and you are immediately warned.
Has God, then, in giving himself for us, made himself ours? Yes, replies St. Bernard. 'He is born who belonged to himself.' He who appertained to himself chose to be born for us and to become ours; love triumphs over God.
This God, over whom none besides can rule, yielded himself captive to love. Love has gained the victory over him and, from being his own, has reduced him into our possession.
St. Alphonsus Liguori
The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ
--the Eternal Word, from being his own, has made himself ours
Michael,
I was fascinated by the questions you asked and the (remarkable) consistency of the answers. (That's what you get for moderating comments -- everyone speaks up thoroughly instead of building on what has gone before. It's illuminating.) Since I am nothing like a theologian, I was not particularly competent to give answers. But as a consultant and a business coach, questions are my business. And the answers you get always depend on the questions you ask. Your questions were, legitimately, about the Catholic Church's view on particular things. That's the right approach because, as you've noticed, if you ask individual Catholics what their particular opinion is, you'll get a wide and unhelpful range of answers. But there's a way that answers to those questions, good as they may be, might not really address the particular issue at hand.
There is a difference between Catholic and Evangelical mindset. (I'm going to speak in wide generalities for the sake of making a point. Please graciously impute more nuance than I'm articulating.
N.B. - A bit about my background: Raised Catholic, spent 15 years with late husband and family as Presbyterian, began considering return to Catholic Church around 2001, then did so about a year after his death (Easter, 2004). Long-time participant in interdenominational intentional Christian community, so I'm coming from a background of respect and familiarity with key commonalities and differences among denominations.])
In my view, most orthodox Christians share a temptation toward legalism, stemming from the human desire to avoid uncertainty and construct as much solid footing for ourselves as possible. If we learn something from God, we tend to want to extrapolate it to (1) others, and (2) situations that appear similar.
This plays out differently in Evangelicals and Catholics. For Protestants, doctrine and practice issues are determined at the level of congregation, presbytery, synod, reformed-branch-of-original-denomination and the like, often adapting (healthily or not) to cultural or situation-specific understandings. Therefore, it's not unexpected that we might find, for example, formal acceptance of finely-tuned analyses of the precise mechanisms of grace, salvation and predestination; establishment of unswerving primacy of one scriptural principle (i.e. wifely submission in marriage) to others (charity to the poor, say); or pastoral practices, beyond those found in scripture, that would foster a sense of community (such as prohibitions against drinking or dancing).
This desire for certainty seems to work itself out different in Catholics. It doesn't happen as much at the institutional level. Despite sometime appearances, the Catholic Church does not make "policy pronouncements" about issues unless it has been necessary at some point in history to do so, either because of a pressing leading of the Holy Spirit or in order to counter an error that is widespread and dangerous enough that it needs to be addressed. So we find the Church being very specific about, for instance, the truth that Jesus was fully God and fully man from the very beginning, or the fact that it is solely by God's grace and not our merit that we are saved. (See CCC para. 2009.) But it is not specific about the exact method by which that grace is made available to us because there isn't a clear understanding that's been given to the Church as a whole by the Holy Spirit. Respected and honored Catholic theologians have often expressed disagreeing ideas on important topics, and frequently either is held as acceptable for a Catholic to believe.
But, we have this desire for solid ground. So individual Catholics, in my experience, might experience more of a temptation to individualized scrupulosity. They may hairsplit about the things the Church has, in fact, already said. They may ask their parish priest exactly how high their temperature must be in order for them to be too sick to go to Mass. They may be critical of couples who choose to limit their family size, even if done so within the guidelines acceptable to the Church. They may lose sight of the fact that all prayer, devotion to saints, even frequent participation in the sacraments are only vehicles God uses to increase our union with him rather than ends in themselves.
Well, Michael, that is turning into quite a treatise from someone who is spectacularly unqualified to so do. But there is a point to this.
A number of the questions you asked really have the answer, "It depends." For instance, you brought up the situation of a woman whose husband discourages her conversion to the Catholic Church. I have a friend who is as Catholic as you can possibly be without being fully received into the church, but out of charity toward her (solidly Christian) husband who would have a strong antipathy toward her converting and leaving the church life that they have shared as a family, she is waiting and asking God to work in the situation. In my opinion, my friend is firmly in the middle of God's will for her life. However, another situation might call for another action. There are objective things that are right and wrong and will never change. But there are sometimes pastoral-application issues in which wisdom and counsel can be brought to bear. It's one reason that the ordained priesthood, the confessional, and the tradition of spiritual directors can be enrichments to Catholic life.
So, although there are non-negotiables that we need to accept as Catholics, there are many questions on which there are numerous acceptable answers. One of the questions facing a prospective Catholic is: "Can I accept the fact that there will be people in full communion with this Church who decidedly disagree with me on this?". When I was returning to the Church there were a number of issues I decided to wait and consider from inside the house rather than do it while I was lurking in the front garden, so to speak. The real presence of Jesus in the sacraments - yes, I was right there. The competence of God to preserve the Church as a whole from serious error - yes, I was there. An exact understanding of how I could draw near to Jesus by drawing near to Mary - well, that was going to take some time. But it wasn't necessary, and I was able to trust that there was a non-heretical understanding that I would enter into sooner or later. But I had to humbly accept that perhaps some of these people who I thought might be a little "off the deep end" might be further along in an understanding of the truth than I was.
If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him. In perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. ... He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.”
When we question whether someone is a person, it is because we want to kill him. We do this with our enemies in wartime, or with anyone we would like to enslave or exploit. Before we can feel comfortable treating others this way, we have to expel them from the human community.
The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.
On a sabbath Jesus went to dine
at the home of one of the leading Pharisees,
and the people there were observing him carefully.
He told a parable to those who had been invited,
noticing how they were choosing the places of honor at the table.
“When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet,
do not recline at table in the place of honor.
A more distinguished guest than you may have been invited by him,
and the host who invited both of you may approach you and say,
‘Give your place to this man,’
and then you would proceed with embarrassment
to take the lowest place.
Rather, when you are invited,
go and take the lowest place
so that when the host comes to you he may say,
‘My friend, move up to a higher position.’
Then you will enjoy the esteem of your companions at the table.
For every one who exalts himself will be humbled,
but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”
Then he said to the host who invited him,
“When you hold a lunch or a dinner,
do not invite your friends or your brothers
or your relatives or your wealthy neighbors,
in case they may invite you back and you have repayment.
Rather, when you hold a banquet,
invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind;
blessed indeed will you be because of their inability to repay you.
For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”
