Supposing that you want to believe in a religion, this blog post explains why you should become Catholic.
0. Contents
1. Clarification of the search
First, I’ll clarify what you should not be looking for from a religion. You should not be looking for a guide on moral beliefs, or on related beliefs about your freedom and responsibility, or on whether God exists. These issues are matters of knowledge. Since they are capable of precise definition, philosophy can determine, and has determined, the answers to them with certainty. You may simply read the answers off of a philosophy manual, or even from this blog.
Religions should be sought after for questions regarding the possibility and character of an afterlife, as well as the question of why we live in this world rather than in one of the other imaginable worlds. These questions, although they are commonly asked, are of unclear meaning, and we cannot know the answer to them. We may, nevertheless, believe an answer that we are told, and it is safer and more respectable to pick a traditional answer than to make one up. This is why they have been called “articles of faith”.
Religions should also be sought after for the choice of which religious practices to perform, or of which marvelous events to accept as proper miracles. These are questions which are philosophically indifferent, and although some philosophers have claimed to prove the answer of “none” for both of them, they have done so fallaciously. Once again, it makes sense here to pick a tradition and go with it.
If you are determined to accept no answers to these questions, then you are not looking for a religion. Catholicism is only propounded to seekers.
Given this scope of inquiry, I will explain why Catholicism is the right choice of tradition. This blog post will be organized along the traditional “four marks of the Church”, which have been defined in councils and exhaustively discussed by theologians. I have nevertheless thought that it would be convenient to set up my own presentation of them, which is what this blog post is.
2. Unity
The first thing you are looking for from a religious tradition is that it actually have a single definite answer to your questions. The whole reason you are looking for a tradition, after all, is that you decided not to make the answers up for yourself. If you are not quite sure what a tradition teaches, you cannot be sure that you even belong to it, rather than unknowingly diverging from it on some point.
This is where most other traditions fall short. In every other tradition, different teachers teach different doctrines. You are not sure who is right, but more to the point, you are not sure which one actually represents the tradition. ¶ Some of them have a fundamental text – the Bible, say – which supposedly settles disputes. But it doesn’t, of course. It is not actually possible for a written text to have a definite meaning. Each one will read it as he wills. (This blog post is written, but I am alive, and can answer questions from readers.)
Catholicism has a definite content, at least to some extent. To be sure, it has its share of disputes and controversies among theologians. But some things are beyond dispute. They have been defined by councils and popes, and if you diverge from the definitions about such matters, you will be warned and then excommunicated. There is a clear authority of the Catholic Church, which is the Pope. Rarely, there have been multiple claimants to the papacy, making the authority less clear, but these issues are usually overstated, and did not last long, and at any rate, the claimant popes in question did not teach different things on any point of doctrine.
3. Holiness
The second thing you want from a religious tradition is that the answers it gives you be the right answers. Of course, you can’t know that you’re getting the right answers, and this is the whole reason you looked for a tradition to believe in in the first place. Nevertheless, traditions generally cannot avoid speaking on points of science and philosophy which are, technically speaking, matters of knowledge. You would like these things to be fully correct when you hear them – if the tradition is wrong about those, it may well be wrong about the others. God is truthful, so that no one who speaks for God can say falsehoods while doing so.
Catholicism passes this with flying colors. I cannot, of course, explain every teaching of Catholicism regarding science and philosophy and show that it is right, because it would take too long and some people would not be convinced anyway. I can answer questions if asked about specific teachings, however. If you respect me as a person, you may allow that I might be right on this one.
Besides that, however, it is a central teaching of the Catholic religion, defined in the First Vatican Council, that “even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.”
So, you are assured of finding no mistakes. If you seem to find a mistaken teaching about science or philosophy in some official Catholic source, you may rest assured that, in all likelihood, the teacher was merely speaking obscurely or confusedly, and his true meaning did not contradict your rational knowledge after all. You may simply go with what reason tells you, and assume that you still belong to Catholicism. This will work every time.
Supposing, God forbid, that it doesn’t work, and that you get excommunicated for teaching a demonstrable rational truth, this will mean that Catholicism is false. I obviously think this hasn’t happened, and won’t happen. If Catholicism were false, the search for a religious tradition would be made much more difficult, perhaps impossible.
4. Catholicity and Apostolicity
Although most traditions, by far, have no clear unity in the sense explained in §2, some non-Catholic traditions nevertheless do seem to have it. The Mormon Church, for instance, has a central authority, and they can similarly excommunicate you from it for teaching the wrong thing. (Officially, it is called “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”.) It may be that, somehow, you are not sure of finding any rational mistakes in its doctrines either, so that it isn’t falsified for you on that count. What does clearly rule it out are the other two marks of the Catholic Church, traditionally called catholicity and apostolicity.
In more prosaic terms, these words mean “globality” – geographical universality, the quality of being present worldwide – and antiquity, respectively. The Catholic Church is present all over the world, more or less, and it has existed from since the first century, already claiming continuity with the even older Jewish tradition. The Mormon Church, by comparison, is much more confined to Utah, and certainly does not predate 1830.
Geographical universality, or catholicity (from Ancient Greek καθολικός, “universal”), is important because it means that, from all the groups that are actually teaching anything definite, you are joining the largest group around. The case is similar with the Church’s apostolic antiquity, but across time. We all want to be part of something popular, and if possible, of something that connects us with earlier ages as well. Indeed, sometimes we even think that the true religion should be popular, since it seems dreadfully pessimistic to suppose that the true divine revelation would be stifled or provincial. More practically, supposing that we are wrong at the end of it all, it is less shameful to make a mistake that many other people made. As Augustine said:
Suppose that we have found different persons holding different opinions, and through their difference of opinions seeking to draw persons each one to himself: but that, in the mean while, there are certain pre-eminent from being much spoken of, and from having possession of nearly all peoples. Whether these hold the truth, is a great question: but ought we not to make full trial of them first, in order that, so long as we err, being as we are men, we may seem to err with the human race itself? (De utilitate credendi, §15)
No other religion, from the ones with definite content, will allow you, supposing that you err, to err with the whole human species. Or, at least, with one-sixth of it, by current numbers.
The antiquity of the Catholic Church also means that it most likely was not made up just to dupe you. Joseph Smith benefited greatly from founding the Mormon Church, and his descendants still do so. The Catholic Church only hands down its tradition by rote, because it was handed down to it by a previous generation, and so on throughout the ages of ages. Its priesthood, being celibate, leaves no descendants. Everyone in it is evidently in earnest, for better or worse.
Indeed, in order to believe Catholicism, you do not even have to believe directly in the Catholic Church. Suppose that, taking the Bible as a historical document, you choose the miraculous interpretation of its stories, and believe, as many do, in the divinity of Jesus. Suppose further that you believe that the divine Jesus founded the Catholic Church, which is historically continuous even today with the movement that Jesus founded; and that Jesus promised that the Church would be infallible. This would mean, then, that you have faith in the teachings of the Church only because of your belief in some old miracles and doctrines from ancient history. You don’t have to suppose, from the outset, that the bishops are particularly trustworthy about divine matters, or that the Bible is divinely inspired. No one else is making it this easy for you.
So, supposing that you want to believe in a religion, you should really become Catholic; nothing else makes anywhere near as much sense.
No comments:
Post a Comment