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The idea for this video came from my own experience in protestant churches before I became Catholic as well as from interactions I’ve had since becoming Catholic, especially on my YouTube channel in which I encounter a lot of the same remarks and arguments from protestants about Catholics over and over, and instead of responding to them each time, I thought it would be more useful to be able to direct them to a video that catalogues them and responds to them. So that gave me the idea to make a video called “Stupid things that Protestants say to Catholics”, but I thought, to be fair, I should try to put the shoe on the other foot first and consider what kinds of things we Catholics say to Protestants that could be described in the same way.
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Some spontaneous thoughts as the popular struggle over the narrative starts to take shape in the aftermath of the death of Pope BXVI.
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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com It’s often claimed that the Church is full of fake and hypocritical Christians. A common refrain from non-Christians is that they like Jesus, but not his followers. There’s even a popular quote that I believe is misattributed to Gandhi which goes something like, “I like your Christ, but not your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” And even if Ghandi never said that, the popularity of this quote suggests that it resonates with a lot of people. And as a somebody that is part of the Church, believes in the Christian creed, and adopts the identity of a follower of Jesus, I can concede that there is a lot of truth to that sentiment – the Church does have that problem. But so does every walk of life. Nobody lives up to the moral standard that they profess, or at least internalize, and the reason we know this is because everyone has experienced guilt and shame. And I’m not talking about the kind of shame that comes from somebody else expressing disapproval of your moral conduct. That more often just produces the effect of anger and resentment, as opposed to shame. I’m talking about the kind of shame that appears as a result of the conviction of our own conscience – because we’ve done something that falls beneath the expectations and moral standards we set for ourselves – and we’ve all experienced this. We all have memories, that when they rehearse themselves in our minds, we sort of recoil from them in shame and embarrassment because it is our OWN conscience that disapproves of our behaviour. We all have things we wish we could take back.
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I recently read this tongue-in-cheek essay by C.S. Lewis and thought it would be a great reflection for your Christmas viewing. With his unrivaled wit and charity, Lewis assaults the strange habit of modern X-mas traditions in which we buy cards and gifts for people we don't like or want to buy for, exhaust our appetites through gluttony, and weary our stamina with "the rush", which he concludes, nobody would be willing to do to celebrate a religious feast in honor of a God they don't believe in - for that would be lunacy.
Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com -
When I was a newly minted Christian and a young adult, what seemed most obvious to me about my prayer life was the preference for an organic, improvised style of personal prayer at the expense of something formal and scripted. This meant a conversational style rather than reciting prayers from memory. I took this sentiment so seriously that I would adapt prayers that I knew I should be praying, like the Our Father, into a language that was more idiosyncratic to the way I speak. What was ironic about this is that in doing so, I was conceding a recognition that there are prayers that I ought to be saying because we are taught to, from Jesus himself, as well as Church tradition, but then I somehow missed the part where either scripture or Tradition tell us that unscripted and unrehearsed prayer should be prioritized at the expense of scripted and rehearsed prayers. Because it doesn’t teach that – which makes me wonder why I was so heavily influenced by this sentiment – and I’m willing to bet that many of you watching this video are as well. I also found that the longer I did this, the more I was running out of creative ways to make my prayers spontaneous and authentic. I inevitably found myself saying the same things every day to the point where I had created my own scripted and rehearsed regimen of prayer and if anything, the pressure to be creative and spontaneous became a discouragement to pray at all.
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Why is it that corporations today are so enthusiastic about punctuating the work they do with moral instruction when it really has nothing to do with who they are or what the purpose of their corporate enterprise is? For example, a major telecommunications company in Canada has assigned themselves to be the champion of mental health by encouraging conversation and destigmatization in their advertising content. But honestly, if I want to grow in my understanding of mental health and the afflictions of real people, I’m not going to turn to my cell phone carrier for advice – because, why would I? Coca-Cola, who needs no introduction, elaborates on the work they do in their mission and vision – where it’s all about love, sustainability, and our shared future. This from a company that has been accused of being the worst plastics polluter in the world by Ethical Consumer. If they were honest about their mission, it would be about selling as much poisonous and nutritionally vacuous soft drinks as they can with little regard of the health implications or the environment. So given the disparity, between what corporations actually do vs how they describe themselves and their incessant habit of lecturing everyone about their moral “values” which they seem to think we should adopt – doesn’t it make you wonder why they do this, why they spend obscene amounts of advertising dollars to perch themselves on a high horse and pontificate to the rest of us? Up until very recent times, we had our best people contemplating the big moral questions for the sake of educating the rest of us on how to live well. They would study these questions, read what others have contributed, and offer their own thoughts. And while they didn’t always agree or get things right, their motives were simple. They wanted to understand our ethical needs and gain insights to share with the rest of us. They weren’t simultaneously blending it with the objective of selling cars or something like that.
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My parents’ and grandparents’ generations did something unprecedented in the history of the Church. When their ancestors attempted to transmit the traditional culture of the faith to them, and which had been handed down with great care and diligence from their ancestors, my parents generations said, no thanks, we’re going to do it our way. We’re going to invent our own Catholic culture based on the contemporary fashions of the popular culture which we are so enamored with. And if that’s a legitimate process of cultural succession - to reject your ancestors’ culture in favour of perpetually reinventing the culture to whatever might fit your personal preferences in a given moment of time, then the thing that the Catholics from my parents’ generation need to realize is that their cultural and liturgical sensibilities are just as susceptible to that process as was their parents’ generation. In other words, what goes around comes around. But what I found in those early days of my faith when we were pushing the envelope was that we weren’t going to be given that same liberty as they themselves had seized upon. If you want young people to participate in the life of the Church today, and apparently this is a lamentation that has appeared in much of the listening sessions of the synod on synodality – that there are no young people attending mass – then baby boomers need to suppress their own cultural preferences in deference to those of successive generations like millennials in the same way that they expected their ancestors to embrace their cultural revolution. If there’s an unwillingness to do that, then maybe we need to admit that that isn’t a legitimate way for culture to progress from one generation to the next. Maybe it’s a bad idea to treat your parents’ and grandparents’ culture with contempt in the hopes that you can seize the reigns and make it all about your own generation. This cultural incoherence is the reason there is a lack of young people in the Church today. They are being told they can’t have a Catholic culture that reflects their own pop culture sensibilities, like their parents’ generation were allowed to do, but also, they aren’t allowed to embrace a tradition that is truly traditional. Instead, they have to inherit the anti-traditional tradition of the 1960s and treat it with the reverence and enthusiasm that the people of that time were unwilling to treat previous traditions with.
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In times of crisis, it’s easy to sympathize with those who are willing to consider extreme solutions to account for the extreme situation that they find themselves in. And if you’re a Catholic today and you’re paying attention, you can probably admit that the situation is extreme.
Which is why I don’t sympathize with Catholics and especially prelates who are carrying on as if it’s just business as usual. The sheep of the flock are suffering and confused, they are disenchanted, and they need a voice of reassurance. And in the absence of such authoritative voices, there are those with easy answers that are more than happy to lead people astray.
If I had started my channel 10 years ago, I think it would have been rare to see comments that say things like, “The Vatican 2 Church is false and you are a false prophet for supporting it.” Or simply, “Sedevacantism is true.”
I mean, those voices would have existed, but you’d have to search for them, whereas now, those voices have conspicuously multiplied so that on almost every video I publish, I will see a comment like that pop up.
And so, to reiterate, I sympathize with people who are struggling to make sense of things. Things are not as neat and tidy as they once were for Catholics and especially those who try to defend the Catholic position through apologetics.
Now we have any number of scandals to contend with from which there has been a lot of lip service from the highest authorities, but their actions are at best complacent and at worst, and there’s a lot of at worst, perpetuating, nurturing, and even encouraging the same corruption that created the scandals.
And among those same sectors of the Church, we find scandalous and incoherent teachings if not explicitly heretical. Which makes those of us who are trying to reconcile our beliefs with the historic tradition and the infallibility of the Church – anxiety inducing.
More recently, there was a debate published online that discussed sedevacantism that has amplified that anxiety for many people. And because there have been responses from competent apologists and thinkers like Trent Horn and Michael Lofton, I’m not going to repeat what they said, but I would encourage you to check out their efforts with the same open-mindedness that you brought to that initial debate.
And if you can’t do that, then ask yourself if you’re just looking for satisfaction and justification for your anger and indignation. It might be that you just want to give yourself excuses not to be meek and humble of heart as the reading from Ephesians at last Sunday’s Latin Mass implores us to do for the sake of unity in the Church.
But the thing about indignation is that it is dependant upon anger and for anger to be sustained, it will compete with reason. Righteous anger and indignation are good when needed as a response to something like war or a grave injustice, but if they are sustained for too long, you will forfeit reason. Beware of that. So come, let us reason together.
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I’ve been Catholic long enough now to have seen people come and go and whenever I’ve gotten some indication that someone I know is struggling or drifting away, I’ve often invited them to talk about it and to challenge them on what’s going on. And whenever I’ve done so with men, especially with those who have one foot out the door, they always describe their complaints as being intellectual in nature. They’ll start to deconstruct the existence of God, or the credibility of the Bible, or Church history, or whatever. And whenever I’ve heard these objections, I’ve never found them to be particularly compelling or novel and for my part, I’m usually able to find a solution that I find satisfying. And what I often find happens in these conversations is that they will end with a response that goes something like, “Ya, I guess.” or “I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” And the thing that I would like to say in conclusion to these kinds of exchanges is, “What would convince you? Because you’ve framed this as an intellectual and a rational problem that needs a rational solution and it isn’t addressed and resolved on those grounds, then there’s no longer an obligation to remain in the Church.” Because here’s the thing. There are compelling rational arguments and responses that are far superior to the objections that any of us mere mortals might raise. There will always be someone smarter out there who can respond to those objections and who have responded to those objections.
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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Some highlights from the video: "More and more, such pragmatic thinkers are discovering that religion and certain religious practices… just work – even if we don’t understand how. Study after study concludes that religious people are generally more happy and at peace than their non-practicing pears. Which is why psychologists like Dr. Jordan Peterson are eager to embrace the idea that even if you don’t know if God exists, it’s a good idea to act like he does – because – it works. It works for all the kinds of afflictions someone like him is responsible for helping relieve. " "Unresolved conflict and forgiveness are related to important relationships in your life. I’m not talking about the guy who cut you off in traffic or the person who was rude to you at the coffee shop, because those things are easy to forget about and move on. I’m talking about important relationships because when people who you share some intimate aspect of your life with hurt you, it can be extremely hard not to resent them and almost impossible to forget them. And this presents you with a choice. Every time you think of that person, you can indulge your anger and resentment and even thoughts of revenge – or you can choose to forgive them. If you choose the former – think about what that entails and to help illustrate this, I’m going to amplify the principle with an example that probably a lot of people can relate to. Imagine a parent who has done something that has seriously hurt you – like, I don’t know, splitting up your family by getting divorced – not uncommon right, but also extremely hurtful for everyone involved. Now imagine one parent is more to blame, like they had an affair or something. Well, you’re going to be confronted with your own emotional anger over what they did, and that’s to be expected. We should be angered by that kind of wrong behaviour. But if you nurture that anger, as a habit, so that it doesn’t recede, if you regularly feed it so that it grows in intensity and becomes something like hatred for that person, then think about what that does to you. Because that person, is going to feature significantly in your life up until that point. You will have memories of all the most important events in your life that include that person. Think about holidays, family events, formative moments in your life, graduations, weddings, the birth of your children. In order to hate that person, you will simultaneously be training yourself to hate important aspects of your own life – IOW you will be training yourself to hate, yourself by hating important parts of yourself."
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There is a lot of fanfare when someone converts into the Catholic Church, at least among Catholics, and that’s true whether you’re a pop culture celebrity, like Shia LaBeouf or not. I was in my early 20s when I became Catholic and because it was such an unusual thing for someone with my demographic qualities to do, there was never a shortage of people who wanted to talk to me or hear my story – that is as long as I didn’t say things that indicated I wasn’t the exact same kind of Catholic they were. And, honestly, that’s a good thing. We should want to hear converts’ stories and learn from their experiences, but there are also risks that come with all of that fanfare, both for the fans and for those who are treated like celebrities for their conversion, again, whether they actually are celebrities or not. This is why, from within that excitement and celebration, we need to embrace the goods that come from conversion and converts as well as be mindful of the ways that all of that celebration and fanfare can cause harm especially when we put them in positions of leadership or influence because of that celebrity factor.
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I once had someone initiate a conversation with me by saying, “you know what’s wrong with your religion? It doesn’t incorporate any physical exercises into it like yoga.” And I suspect that this criticism is something that many people, including Christians, would find persuasive and why they might be attracted to something like Yoga or why they might want to embrace a kind of syncretism between yoga and Christianity. Jesus told us to seek first the Kingdom of God and live righteously and all the other things that you might want will be added to that priority. CS Lewis put it this way. He said “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” If you seek after God and the virtues he can instill in you by fidelity to his commandments and the infusion of His grace, then all the other goods will be more accessible to you. But if you chase after those things apart from God, they will slip through your fingers and you won’t even know why. So why isn’t physical exercise a requirement in the practice of Christianity or something that is emphasized within the teachings of Jesus or scripture?
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My thoughts on Pope Francis' visit to my hometown and the effects of his actions here.
- Se mer
