The Sheepcat

A Divine Appointment

I love it when things like this happen.

On Thursday I completely forgot about choir practice, to the point where, as I was walking to Holy Family for the 5:30 Mass, I was looking forward to a free evening and wondering if I might borrow a DVD from the library on the way home. Then I suddenly remembered I had to be at St Vincent's at 7:00. Of course, my choir binder was at home. I toyed briefly with the idea of showing up without it, then decided I'd better not.

So a little before 6:00, instead of taking the King streetcar west from Holy Family as usual at that hour, home I headed. Just as I was a block away, I bumped into a neighbour, someone I've been praying for for years. He asked where I was coming from. I explained I'd just been to Mass and was about to go to choir practice at another church. He hadn't known I was Catholic. He himself is a long-lapsed Catholic and had never been terribly keen on religion in the first place. In the country where he grew up, it was "a cultural thing." He's "spiritual but not religious."

For me, though, he could see, practising the Christian faith is not a grim duty but rather something to get excited about.

And so we talked on the street corner for 20 minutes, in wind that felt like 12 below (for you readers south of the border, that'd be about 10 Fahrenheit), about whether Christianity is true--whether anything can be True--about our being made in the image and likeness of God, about historical smears against the Catholic Church. Yes, it makes sense for Catholics to say that other religions are objectively mistaken, even if they have elements of the truth. No, Pius XII did not help the Nazis persecute Jews--he actually sheltered Jews, a sign of which is that the chief rabbi of Rome took Pius's Christian name of Eugenio when he was baptized after the war. And so on.

Such seemingly random encounters are what my evangelical friends call divine appointments. Through no foresight on my part, I happened to be in the right place at the right time to share a bit of the good news of Christ and his Church.

I don't flatter myself that this is going to turn my neighbour around overnight. I just plant the seed and wait for the Holy Spirit to lead someone--maybe me, maybe someone else--to do the watering in due time. Choir practice was all the richer that evening, though, because God in his providence had let it slip from my mind in the afternoon.

Proof of the Truth of Christianity

Phillips Brooks, a nineteenth-century Episcopal bishop in Massachusetts, who wrote, "O Little Town of Bethlehem," was once asked what he considered the greatest proof of the truth of Christianity. He replied, "An aunt of mine who lives in New Hampshire."

Thumpin' Thought-Experiments, Batman!

Jimmy Akin uses the analogy of Batman/Bruce Wayne to look at whether Muslims and Christians pray to the same God.

And Ed Peters explains the footnotes to the 1917 code of canon law by way of a nod to Ed Wood's cult classic Plan Nine from Outer Space – reckoned by some as the worst film ever made. (This marks the beginning of a new "Church Discipline" category on my blog. I don't expect to use it all that much, but considering the number of times I've had to explain to friends that Church doctrine is handed down from the apostles and is protected by infallibility whereas Church discipline is subject to amendment, it's probably not a bad thing to file matters of canon law separately from doctrine.)

Anyway, who thought orthodox Christians were stodgy?

Woody Allen and Billy Graham

Link: YouTube - Woody Allen Interviews Billy Graham??!!!.
As Mark Shea says, a bit of an artefact of an era when the culture wars weren't quite so polarized.

Toto, I've a Feeling We're Not in St Peter's Anymore

"The highly perverted King James version"? Whaa? "Yup," I realized, "that's what it says all right." The page went on to catalogue a number of errors (alleged errors, I should say, as I haven't checked the claims) in various editions of the KJV. Now as a professional proofreader I admit I was disconcerted to find even the inconsequential misprint "that there are quarrels amoung you" (1 Cor 1:11) in an NRSV published by Thomas Nelson, but this was the first time I'd seen the KJV characterized in such terms.

I was browsing a site called Mario Derksen's Catholic Insight, which I'd come across while looking for the Canadian magazine Catholic Insight. As a new convert, I'm still getting acquainted with the huge number of Catholic resources out there on the Web, so I decided to take a look at the section on Protestantism. I've had a few exchanges lately with Protestant friends who are suspicious of Catholicism, to say the least. One of them--with the very best of intentions, I'm sure--had lent me her copy of Jimmy Swaggart's dreadful Catholicism & Christianity, so I was curious what this unfamiliar site had to say by way of response to Protestant criticisms of Catholicism.

Well! I went to what was promised as a good Catholic Bible concordance, only to find that it was not actually a concordance in any sense I was familiar with, and the link to do a word search on the Douay-Rheims Bible didn't work. Undeterred for the moment, I skimmed the section on private interpretation and saw in the defense of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception some early written documentation of what I'd been taught about the teaching's antiquity (far, that is, from being a novelty when Pope declared it infallibly in 1854). Okay, good enough. But what were the denunciations of homosexuality and astrology doing in the section Some Points of Contention with Prots.? After all, while there are plenty of liberal Protestants in certain denominations, among the people I know personally who dissent from these teachings, I can think of a few dozen Catholics and precisely one Baptist. And even more ironically, these sections consisted of scripture alone, without commentary illustrating the continuity of Sacred Tradition on these points. Something was amiss.

So when I came across the passage about the KJV in the article refuting the allegation that Catholics scrapped the Second Commandment in order to be able to get away with praying in front of statues, and then the following passage, I wondered: who are these people?

even sacred stricture states that we need a physical human guide in order to understands. The author's numerous strictural screw ups in this article alone show that he (himself) is in great need of a physical human guide and a more accurate Bible. private interpretation does not work.

I looked further, and along with a suggestion that the Jews (except for those who have converted to Catholicism) are no longer God's chosen people (compare CCC 218-220 and Rom 11:29), there was this about "so-called reformers"--acknowledging no distinction at all between those who wilfully break away from the Church and those who grow up in a worshipping community already separated from it.

Inevitably they lose their way; some of these perish, in the sense that they lose their faith entirely; others as members of innumerable sects, subsist meagerly on the imperfect. defective diet of a little truth and much error. All of these are on the path to hell.

So all Protestants are on their way to hell, it was saying? That's not what the Catechism teaches about the salvation of people who are in imperfect communion with the Catholic Church. I was especially glad at this point to have paid a social visit on Sunday to my old Baptist church, where I was reminded once again of the deep devotion to Christ among my friends there.

Back on the Catholic Insight home page I scrolled down to a link to an explanation of, ahem, why Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, claiming to be Pope, is not even Catholic. I think that was when I finally clued in (okay, so sometimes I'm slow) that the harsh tone of this supposedly Catholic apologetics site was explained by their being sedevacantists, dissenters on the right. And now I'm all but certain that I actually visited this site last spring when I was wondering whether Catholicism was really what it claimed to be, and I recall thinking that most Catholic sites I'd come across seemed to be more magnanimous toward Protestantism than were Protestant sites toward Catholicism. This one looked distinctly less charitable in its attitudes, even though some of its arguments seemed sound enough. I'm pretty sure I didn't recognize at the time that this Catholic Insight wasn't actually Catholic. So I shudder to think what a typical Protestant, really not knowing who's who and what's what within Catholicism, would think upon coming across it. After all, they call themselves Catholic.

Earlier in the week, a Catholic friend and I were remarking on how Catholicism really is small-c catholic. It's big, there's room for a lot of different approaches, and most importantly there's a kind of stability that comes from how the Church rests under God's protection. I can't say I've seen much of that patience and quiet confidence when I've come across dissenting groups either on the left or on the right. Now that I've been in full communion with the Church for five months, I've come to believe the problems really do run deep, and yet, I try to remind myself, this too shall pass.