Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Sean & Me

I recall that very early in the blogging game I had a very high opinion of my level of book savvy. This was to some extent natural because I was more bookish and well-read than anyone I knew - in the "real", i.e. non-virtual, world - and it's natural to compare oneself to others after all. So I wrote and posted a little quiz about "how to tell if you're a bibliophile". What interests me now is how two people who were tremendously better read than me received it. One wrote a blistering post calling me a middlebrow and worse. The other (Thomas of ER) responded with a nice post of which books he had. In other words, one called me an idiot while the other didn't lord his superiority over me. Who was more Christlike?

I'm just thinking aloud here, so I could be all wet, but perhaps this is not unlike the Catholic ignorance of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and yes maybe even [swallows hard] John Kerry. They are often excoriated for their bad public examples, though I'm not sure they should all be in the same camp. But there's a chance a lot of that ignorance is due to, well, ignorance. They probably compare themselves to the people they know and they seem comparatively well-catechized.

But, as I type this, it seems there's a difference in that there is no "Book Authority" from whom we ought take our cues. I don't have to give up my personal title as Mr. Book Authority to Mz. Know-it-all. But with the Faith, it's different. We are given the great gift of sight via our shepherds. To knowingly reject that sight (as Kerry, Hannity & O'Reilly do) is to what? To lack faith? Lack apologetic/catechetical knowledge? Lack humility? Ahh, but there's the rub. There's no way to separate in ourselves where pride begins and ignorance ends let alone in another person. But the pride factor is huge, as Amy Welborn notes:

The larger point is that, as I've noted before, "We are all good Catholics now," good Catholics whose status as Good Catholics we wear as a badge and hold as a ticket no matter what we happen to believe. Which stands in opposition to the traditional stance of a Christian through a couple of thousand years, which has been the acknowledgment that we are all Bad Catholics in some sense, but uttered in the deep hope and trust that God is merciful and that filled with new life in Christ, we are redeemed, not by our own power or by our own wisdom, standing in judgment of what we think should be true, but by the love of God, the medicine in which we sinners stand in deep need.

I very much doubt that Tom of Disputations, when he wrote what follows, was thinking of the Hannity & company - since they have the whiff of being way too spiritually full of themselves - but it bears repeating in this context, concerning "cultural Catholics":

They will be there because there is where they go on Easter. They will be variously smiled at, cursed at, and tolerated, but generally dismissed as "Christmas and Easter Catholics" who do little more than clog the parking lot and mess up poll results (remember, 70% of Catholics don't believe in the Real Presence).

Here, though, I'm not talking about the C&E Catholics too spiritually full of themselves to go to Mass on lesser feasts. I'm talking about those people, maybe not even baptized, who are too spiritually empty to go to Mass, except when it will be crowded enough that no one will notice their emptiness.

And maybe this will be the year when a word or a gesture reveals to them that the Man they were looking for is here, in this church, on this altar, with these people. Maybe the prayer that makes it so will be yours.

I try often, without success, to pinpoint the time during the '90s when I became convinced the Catholic Church offered not just good suggestions but was the Authority. I suspect it was around the time I became deeply convinced about the truth of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If the Church was right about the great gifts of the sacraments, it seemed she was right about everything since so few churches were right about sacraments. But I can't pinpoint it.