Excuse me?
Many people seem to have this idea of the Catholic Church as some sort of gestalt mind, a Borg-like single brain with all members thinking in lock-step.
The Church does have a body of doctrine, but that doctrine was compiled over centuries. Doctors of the Church debated for years on this issue and that, applying all the forces of human reason and of observation to try and tease out the truth.
Yeah, that would be the Catholic Church, all right -- 10 pounds of reason in a five-pound bag.
And to think I have to work at being funny.
1 comment:
I was raised Catholic, and that certainly was my impression of the church. There are certain points of doctrine that are not up for discussion, because the pope makes it so; on others, the church is less prescriptive.
I'll give you an example: I had never heard of creationism until I had left school. A four-billion-year-old earth, the big bang, and evolution were all discussed without ever referring to supernatural forces. In fact, the only place where a god was inevitably brought up was in religion class (how quaint!).
I think that the church has changed in recent years. They're competing with a fundamentalist surge, and that has brought similarly fundamentalist Catholics to the fore -- most notably, the new pope.
I would hope that the church this guy describes will come back some day. With the current pope installed, I'm not hopeful. But there's no reason the Catholic church can't become a valid, useful part of society again some day.
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