The Sheepcat

Mea Maxisisima Culpa, I Guess

I got a surprise just now while looking at my site meter. Seems someone came by after searching for "mea culpas"--would you believe my category is currently ranked fourth out of 16,895 hits?! That's some most grievous fault! Kind of makes me glad I can now resort privately to the Sacrament of Penance. (If you check the date on the first post, it's before I became Catholic.)

goHa bve that OCR!

From a Brethren web site critiquing a declaration by Evangelicals and Catholics Together, a group for ecumenical dialogue, comes this choice specimen of muddled optical character recognition (OCR).

The statement refers to the "three solas" of the Protestant Reformation: "sola gratia = only by grace," "sola fide = only by faith" (elsewhere rendered on this site as "sola ride"), and "sola scriptura = only by scripture."

The signers of Evangelicals and Catholics Together say'We affirm together that we are justified by grace through faith because of Christ." To the charge that this statement is deceptive because it suggests that we have reached complete agreement on the central dispute of the Reformation, one must simply point out that anyone with the slightest familiarity with the history of theological controversy would immediately note the absence of the threefold "only's" (the "three solas"). The sofas are conspicuous by their absence, and it is not by accident that they are absent. Evangelicals and Catholics Together does not disguise but repeatedly highlights the fact that there are important questions of continuing differences and disagreements between evangelicals and Catholics.

I guess nobody reads these things once they're posted.

Update: Miaow! Well, that last sentence was pretty catty, wasn't it? (Yes, I know my persona is a cat, but there's no excuse for indulging one's fallen nature, now is there?)
Anyway, I woke up this morning realizing I'd gotten really rather self-righteous lately. Oh, most of it was polite enough to slip under the radar of a casual observer, I imagine, but my heart has not been in the right place. I withdraw the remark. Mea culpa.