Ask A Catholic

xpost -- Hero.

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

You just answered your own questions! Seriously – we revel in masochism. The veneration (not worship) of the crucifix is a reminder of what Our Lord endured for our sakes.

repurposing of the crucifix is actually like in my top five favorite things about christianity

xpost -- Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

yeah she was all "i washed them off". lady it ain't your right to do that.

I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such,

Maybe I was privileged in this regard, but as a Catholic school attendee for 12 years I never got the guilt. Maybe it was a post Vatican II phenomenon? My mom, however, got nothing but guilt.

Why do/did Christians hate Jews for killing Christ when He* had to die for our sins so that we can go to Heaven?

(*still a believer, so all pronouns capitalized...)

Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

Because Fr. Frank forces us to say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys for masturbating in the bathroom.

I know that's not meant as a non-sequitur, and yet.

the whole ecce homo bit and he died for your sins is the main thing i took from going to church between the age of 3 or 4 and 15 or 16. crucifix probably the least inexplicable thing about the whole shennanigans.

catholics no longer believe that jews killed christ. apart from weird ones like mel gibo who go against the contemporary teaching of the church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#Suspected_to_have_had_male_lovers_during_pontificate

Lenny Bruce said Catholics would wear electric chairs around their necks if Jesus had been a 20th-century martyr.

xxxxp (*as if the switch from third- to first-person ("us") didn't already tip you off...)

Doesn't Mel Gibson follow an anti-pope?

i'm lapsed, but still feel like a catholic. I never got the political drubbing about abortion etc at my catholic school (which wasn't associated with a diocese and had very few people from the church involved in it). as a result I don't have that kind of grudge against the church. but knowing that is there makes me resist going back to it (even though I live in a really liberal area where I'm sure 75% of the catholics at the churches near me probably are not in line with traditional church thinking on this topic).

if i was going to let something temporal about the church bother me it would more be the endemic child fucking and covering-up there of than the backwards views on abortion that would piss me off.

but it's just the whole kit and kaboodle that i'm put off by so i needn't worry.

Christianity in general makes me so angry, Catholicism only even more so, I try not to be baited too often. But I also have a weird history of being a very serious-minded kid in a super Evangelical community with no outside influences to level me out, so it's not really the usual thing.

as a catholic school person for 12 i never got the guilt. again, prolly cuz i was thrown out of CCD in 8th grade for farting.

well here's what has always confused me about the crucifixion narrative. on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc. so re the second interpretation it makes sense that you'd wear a crucifix (maybe. it was still a very common event to be crucified so it doesn't seem like a great grower as a symbol of a new religion -- tho i imagine without any historical background in this area that probably the icon emerged long enough after the Roman empire that this didn't appear to be so bizarre). has the first account (despite being canonized primarily in Mark) mostly been ignored in the main Catholic narrative or what?

Also I tried to find things to carry with me, maybe just from the "spiritual practice" side of what I was taught, but I feel more and more certain as time passes that there's absolutely nothing salvageable there.

"forgiveness" a pretty good one i thought but w/ever

(i have the kinda-luxury of having been brought up Nothing so everything looks way better to me than it does to people who were brought up Something)

Mordy, one of the motives behind adopting the crucifix WAS its commonness and lowliness. It was the death of thieves and murders and rapists, the lowest thing that Our Lord could be subjected to. This is common across all Christianity, I think -- not specific to Catholics, although the rest of us don't portray the human form on the cross in our iconography.

xxxp I think it's the being rose again after three days that turns the crucifixion into a victory:

on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc

these all go together and are not contradictory:

he forgives the people killing him -his followers, the crowd who choose barabas etc.- because he is the ever forgiving christ-god who dies for us in order to wash away our original sin even though we've gone against him and aren't worthy of such a sacrific.

he is in crisis because, although divine, he is human and wrestles with his predicament and torture until reaching acceptance and understanding of it.

xxp yeah iirc (and maybe i do not rc) the crucifix was in use as a symbol from the religion's earliest beginnings as a roman cult. it is a really neat defiant thing, i think! and what laurel says about connecting the holiness of the godhead to the lowliness of the lowest is also def true.

yeah and also don't underestimate the attraction of sheer maudlin morbidity

oh man I got onto other stuff and now there's a lot of questions

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

well, it's not just Catholics - that's all Christians. Crosses everywhere. It's a paradox, kind of your classic Jesus paradox: Jesus came to save you. You love him for that, right? Assuming you accept that you were damned & were likely going to Hell, this Dude came to take your place, because He loved you exactly as you were, warts and all. You on your worst day, He still loves that person enough to die in his place. Presumably you love Him back for that, but He has to die to accomplish the work of grace. So the cross on which He dies in transformed into an instrument of triumph; the instrument of His demise becomes the sign by which those redeemed by Him recognize one another and gain comfort and fellowship.

this is not a specifically Catholic teaching but it's the cross as I understand it.

NB I do not still actually believe much of this but I'm willing to offer defences as long as people don't talk like "oh ua believes all this stuff," I don't, I'm just intimate with it

The English theologian John Bale attributed to Pope Sixtus "the authorisation to practice sodomy during periods of warm weather."

i'm hazy on this but i think the cross took a while to really take off as The Symbol of the church. the fish was the 'sign' among believers for a good long time

xp Didn't you know? Anal keeps you cool.

I actually see more people with fish pendants and fish symbols on cars than crosses and crucifixes.

evangelicals love all the 'early church' stuff

btw sodomy /= anal

i mean, i'd rather sit on a pillar in the syrian desert than live in a dallas exurb myself

xp

I was raised Anglican, mostly High Church style, was even an acolyte, let active belief fall away from me gradually and have been a fairly content agnostic since I was twenty or so. I've always wondered if my joke that being raised Anglican means you get all of the ceremonies of Catholicism but none of the Catholic guilt is true and from the sound of it it is (thus your opening words), I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such, and might explain why I found it so easy to let go. Is it something that is ingrained from the start in any/all Catholic religious instruction?

Catholic guilt is tradition. It does make intuitive sense to my indwelling Catholic: the Holy Family suffered as they did for me, but how grateful am I really, in my daily life? Not very. I'm more interested in myself. That's my nature, and I don't do much to overcome it or transcend it. But the saints show me that I could, if I really cared. Hence, guilt!

Lots of straights don't understand that though. Fortunately in Catholic school I learned what constituted sodomy since it was all non-procreative sex anyway.

xxxp can include anal sex

I actually see more people with fish pendants and fish symbols on cars than crosses and crucifixes.

that may be, but in hoc signi vincis iirc

Alfred, if you were Philip K. Dick & saw those fish symbols, you would be transported back to the first century, and a pink light would tell you about your son's birth defects

goole right, wiki sez, but the cross was still around early:

During the first two centuries of Christianity, the cross may have been rare in Christian iconography, as it depicts a purposely painful and gruesome method of public execution. The Ichthys, or fish symbol, was used by early Christians. The Chi-Rho monogram, which was adopted by Constantine I in the 4th century as his banner (see labarum), was another Early Christian symbol of wide use.

However, the cross symbol was already associated with Christians in the 2nd century, as is indicated in the anti-Christian arguments cited in the Octavius of Minucius Felix, chapters IX and XXIX, written at the end of that century or the beginning of the next,[2] and by the fact that by the early 3rd century the cross had become so closely associated with Christ that Clement of Alexandria, who died between 211 and 216, could without fear of ambiguity use the phrase τὸ κυριακὸν σημεῖον (the Lord's sign) to mean the cross

If my sister's experiences in the mid nineties are any indication, Catholic schools are feebler institutions than they were in the fifties and sixties.

no more nuns to run them

oh that's for sure. it's the one thing that i kind of mourn about the slow death of the catholic hierarchy.

Why do/did Christians hate Jews for killing Christ when He* had to die for our sins so that we can go to Heaven?

The Sanhedrin, "an assembly of twenty-three judges appointed in every city in the Biblical Land of Israel" as Wikipedia handily puts it, handed Christ over to Pilate to be crucified. The race stuff in all this is way too dense for me to really parse without making an utter ass of myself, but, speaking from a how-it-seems-to-me position rather than a doctrinal position here, it seems like Christians (including Catholics over the ages) think of Christ as a Jew-who-passes. He's not really a Jew, because the Jews persecuted Him. Yes I know this is profoundly fucked up, but I do think that's how anti-semitic Xians think of the matter.

"lay teachers"

Who'd'a thunk it? That Catholicism would be the Hot Topic of the Day on ILE? Next thing you know it will be declared DaVinci Code Day on I Love Books.

Can you explain the Immaculate Conception a bit more? Like, how is that possible? How is it connected to St Anne being a saint?

It's possible because of grace. Pius IX institutes the doctrine in 1854: "In the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin." From newadvent.org, further explanation:

The term conception does not mean the active or generative conception by her parents. Her body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation. The question does not concern the immaculateness of the generative activity of her parents. Neither does it concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body. Mary was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin at the first moment of her animation, and sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul.

Not only did the Sanhedrin hand him over, but Pilate also gave the crowd a chance to save one of the convicted, and they chose to have Barabbus, a "bandit", freed instead.

VERY INTERESTINGLY, wiki has just told me that "bandit" is one translation, but that "insurrectionary" or "revolutionary" is another one. So perhaps the interpretation is that the Jews who voted for Barabbus betrayed Christ by picking the WRONG revolutionary/the wrong version of their future??

On one hand, I respect it. On the other hand, hey what now?

That sucks. Most of the Catholics I know are either priests or seminarians or lay people with Bachelors in Theology. They are all, of the ones I know well, lovely, caring, sacrificial, forgiving people. I think seriosly studying the tenets of Christ and the Church sifts the grain from the chaff (for the most part)

Last I heard there were about 1 billion Catholics in the world. That number has certainly been inflated to include anyone raised Catholic or otherwise claimable by the church, but it suggests to me that anecdotal evidence about the nature of Catholic individuals is likely to run the full gamut from truly unrecognized saints to the worst people ion earth.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

A lot of this is my story too. I was an altar boy, I went to CYO, I went on Catholic youth retreats, I went to an all-boys' Catholic high school for two years. I never had any bad experiences through any of it; I guess I just wasn't any of my local priests' type, because at least two of them were defrocked or quit the church later. One moved to Las Vegas and got murdered one morning by a guy he'd molested years earlier. Anyway, I stopped going to church when I moved out of my mom's house at 18 — I'd long since drifted away from any kind of Christian belief and into reading about other stuff (Zen, Taoism, the usual shit). These days my "beliefs," such as they are, are a kind of personal amalgam of Zen, Taoism, Stoicism, and Norse/Asatru values — blood, honor, manliness, but without all the stuff about the gods.

My mom is still very much Catholic; she does the readings at her church just about every week, and does a lot of charity work — drives meals to the elderly, does people's taxes for free, maybe some other stuff too. She acknowledges all the shitty things the Church and her alma mater, Penn State, have done, but it neither invalidates her engineering degree nor impacts her faith.

similar for my dad, who was born and raised Catholic. He joined the Knights of Columbus after he retired and all the kids left the house. I don't ask too much about it but as far as I know that's mainly been a social thing for him.

I know he has some old-school thoughts about women that aren't as severe as other people, and he's been called out by my sister, so I've never felt like piling on to what's probably an in-grained lost cause. But he was never a Jesus-first parent - which I really appreciate looking back.

perhaps Heez hasn't finished Home Alone. Marley and his son forgive each other at the end.

well, my Methodist-turned-Catholic mom took me to see Home Alone when it was originally out in theaters, and I'll cherish that time and parenting decision forever.

Bob marleys in home alone?!? Ok I’ll finish it.

I grew up Lutheran in the south. It was extremely chill. Church camps all that stuff. Not much guilt or anything like that. My mother and father are still Christian but they do not go to the same church nor do they vote for the same party. My mom prefers the activist, community oriented side of the church while my dad prefers the traditional side. The south is mostly are up of baptist and evangelicals who believe in the gospel of prosperity and rarely do community outreach.

I now live near DC in a neighborhood filled with federalist society lawyers who rarely engage with their non-Catholic neighbors. I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who are some of the best ppl I know, but seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

Anyway Catholicism has come to represent this very corrupted version of religion that you either walk lockstep with or fight against. And yes, I understand my small neighborhood doesn’t represent the entirety of Catholicism, so I’m mainly just asking questions, be it from a very skewed place

The thing about having 1.35billion adherents, is you're going to be able to find whatever you're looking for within that communion, good and bad.

― H.P

sure. 1.35 billion adherents is a lot. i don't need to play diogenes looking for a Good Catholic. they're all over the place.

one pope, though. one college of cardinals. all men, all celibate, or pretending to be. one Young archbishop of Portland, denouncing "gender ideology", issuing edicts forbidding teachers in Catholic schools from referring to trans kids by their _names_, from gendering them correctly.

one man. how many children? how many fucking kids is this one man abusing, and nobody says anything, nobody _does_ anything, it's _fine_ because he does it in the name of _Christ_, he does it in the name of the Roman Catholic Church?

-

I can't... I can't talk about what it was like for me, growing up Catholic. How it affected me. I try, but I can't. It hurts too much. Sorry. Y'all... I think y'all talking, I really would _like_ for y'all to know. But I can't tell you. Maybe someday. The most I can do is jump off Heez here:

I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who ... seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

My Catholic roots are Midwestern. Brahmin-y, but Midwestern. My parents, my mom's parents... I don't think of them as "strictly religious" either. I went to Catholic school, Catholic college, church every Sunday, but I don't think of my upbringing as "strictly religious" in the "women with exposed ankles are immodest" sense. Have I been extremely damaged by the Church and my parents? Absolutely.

I can't say more than that right now. I wish I could. I don't believe in... I don't believe in the culture of _silence_ I was raised in. I really want to speak up. I just can't right now. I'm sorry.

this is an excerpt from an auto-generated transcript of the most recent episode of the “know yr enemy” podcast, in which sam adler-bell and matt sitman, who is himself an adult catholic convert, discuss JD vance. I found sitman’s discussion unexpectedly moving!

“Well, you know, Sam, since you mentioned Vance's conversion to Catholicism, it's interesting that, you know, I mentioned that Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016. It wasn't until 2019 that he became Catholic. And, you know, he actually wrote a very, I found, interesting essay for The Lamp.

Some listeners, I don't think we mentioned The Lamp before. It's a subtitle, A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, The Fine Arts, etc. It's edited by Matthew Walther.

And they actually publish a lot of interesting pieces, to be honest. They've turned it into a much more interesting magazine than I thought it might be when it started. He actually wrote an essay for The Lamp in April 2020, titled How I Joined the Resistance on Mama and becoming Catholic.

And I did want to say that, you know, a lot of this essay of his really resonated with me, in fact, especially how alien Catholicism felt culturally to him. You know, his mama was a sort of Protestant of some kind, but didn't have much use for organized religion. Then he went through these different, you know, again, when his biological father became pentecostal, you mentioned Sam Vance taking that up.
“.

He also went through a kind of new atheist phase, at the peak of Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins, you know. And there's much that could be said about kind of the journey, you know, the first seeds of kind of doubt about the new atheism, so on and so forth. But here's the key part for Know Your Enemy listeners.

And again, why Vance is such an incredible subject for us to take up, is the key moment in his kind of conversion to Catholicism in particular, but just kind of like a key moment for his life period, was when he heard Peter Thiel give a lecture at Yale Law School, which is a huge moment for him in multiple senses, because that's when he became interested in Peter Thiel, who he thought was kind of like talking sense in a way that a lot of other elites in the tech and finance worlds weren't. And Vance will say this lecture changed his life. He will use that kind of language.

But part of how it changed his life was, this is where through Thiel, Vance became familiar with René Girard. And so Girard was, I think it's fair “to say, the key intellectual influence in Vance becoming Catholic. He does mention one thing in particular, which I did kind of like.

He says, Girard points out that Romulus and Remus are, like Christ's divine children and like Moses, placed in a river basket to save them from a jealous king. There was a time when I bristled at such comparisons, worried that any seeming lack of originality on the part of scripture meant that it couldn't be true. This is a common rhetorical device of the New Atheist.

Point to some creation story, like the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as evidence that the sacred authors have plagiarized their story from earlier civilizations. But Girard rejects this inference and leans into the similarities between biblical stories and those from other civilizations. To Girard, the Christian story contains, however, a crucial difference, right?

A difference that reveals something, quote, hidden since the foundation of the world. And then he goes into describing the scapegoat, right? And the way that Girard kind of acknowledges all these similarities and then points to that one crucial Christian difference, the reversal, right?

The innocent scapegoat, the forgiving scapegoat even. So he “does have this, we'll link to it in the show notes, this fairly interesting essay on his conversion to Catholicism. But it connects to Hillbilly Elegy.

He points this out specifically. He says, the left's intellectuals, and I'm still quoting from this Lamp Magazine essay on his conversion. The left's intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine, the difficulty in finding jobs, and lack of funding for certain types of resources.

While I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which most of our destructive behaviors persisted, even flourished in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion devoid of any expectation that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And so he ends up kind of saying that as he was reflected on competing views of the world, the wisdom and shortcomings of each, he liked the moral vision of Catholicism, what it held together, like the moral demands with a “certain level of forgiveness or grace or that kind of thing. And I just want to say, I mentioned that specifically because I think it does connect to what we're just describing, right? The moral disorder, the fear of being consumed by your impulses or desires.

And I just, those kind of moral demands and moral kind of framework of Catholicism as being what persuaded him, it was so interesting to me because it is a compliment to everything we've been discussing in Hillbilly Elegy. And also so foreign to my conversion to Catholicism.

Is that right? Well, I wanted you to say, because you guys have this shared, you know, sort of comparable early religious experience in relation to faith and God, and then also conversion.

So, well, for me, I was drawn to Catholicism for essentially one reason. And that is, I believe, what the Catholic Church teaches about the Eucharist is true, meaning Jesus is in some sense literally present in the bread and wine of communion. And even the first time I met my priest to talk about becoming Catholic, like I went through all these reasons, kind of like Vance does, all the intellectual reasons

“And I said, but actually, Father, I really believe Jesus is present in the Eucharist, and that's what the Catholic Church teaches, and that's why I want to be Catholic. I long for that. And he said, well, this is why I only had to meet with him four times, kind of had this express conversion.

He said, you want to be fed by Jesus in a way you're not being fed now. Why would I delay that longer than I have to?

I love that.

You know, and so almost effectively, I do feel a lot of Vance's essay was interesting to me. Certain experiences like the kind of otherness of Catholicism resonated, but it left me quite cold because there's like a passionate reason I became Catholic, like that animates me. And even when I talk about it now, you know, it's like, this is the thing.

So I just have to say, yeah, his conversion, I don't want to downplay it. It's not like it felt inauthentic to me. It was just much more related to like morality and kind of the system that provides an account for, as he put it, kind of like, among the “competing visions of the world, this is the one he found most persuasive.

Well, we've talked about this before, that the systematicity of Catholicism is often something that attracts right-wing Catholic converts.

And he does mention that too.

Has that satisfying kind of...

Comprehensiveness.

Yeah, yeah.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

Yeah, exactly.

thats really interesting stuff ty for posting

i think the critical shared element between the two journeys there as described is that each seems to have been searching for the right spiritual structure for themselves out of what already exists

the convenience of that always awakened the cynic in me as far as ever getting any further on a person spiritual journey, or perhaps breaking early from rural irish catholic faith left me extremely wary of hopping on the next preformed solution- nb there were not very many alternative prefirmed solutions even had i wanted one ofc

i think its striking that someone could start into catholicism by believing in the Eucharist. ive always imagined the vast majority of practicing/cultural catholics would struggle to say they had that belief. i wonder what his journey was to that- it hardly occurred to him independently one morning.

Never thought of centering cynicism of religion/s around their historicity. Assuming Sitman converted from a form of protestantism... the denial of the real presence can be a hang-up/tipping point for conversion. Agreed though, with no Christian experience otherwise, it would be a striking way to convert.

Most Catholics in my acquaintance only speak in tongues when I offer them Negronis.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 April 2024 00:48 (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also, love this ^^

sitman was very careful in that podcast (which is mostly a discussion of vance’s politics and his book, and is really good) to be as generous as possible re: his conversion, but it was clear he took a dim view of vance’s converting for “moral” reasons, probably because he saw it as a convenient technocratic approach to faith rather than a strictly religious one. as someone who is quite removed from his catholicism these days, I found that to be very striking and refreshing in a strange way

but yeah from a personal theology pov there must be some sort of longer backstory to his understanding of the eucharist

Totally, much more sympathetic towards Sitman. Converting to a religion for religious reasons? Classic. Converting for a reason that hasn’t been reduced to a religious reason (moral, traditional, cultural, emotional, etc.)….. I won’t go as far as to call it dud, but how firm is your foundation? Here I am cynical in the mould of darra; what happens when the next best moral/traditional/etc. system comes along? What happens when your moral/traditional-system changes? Seems like marrying the girl next door because she makes a mean carrot-cake and wears that dress you really like rather than for…. More uhhhhh, comprehensive reasons

No problem with dating based on carrot-cake and dress preferences though. In that regard, I am big on those criteria

I love this thread.

Hold on, JD Vance is a Catholic? Do Trump's evangelical supporters know about this?

They don’t give a fuck cos they align on the biggest issues (abortion is bad and women should be barefoot and pregnant).

Oh I'm sure some of them do.

Imagine the genesis of your religious conversion is a speech by Peter Thiel.

Saul on the road to Palo Alto.

Seems weird.

i think its striking that someone could start into catholicism by believing in the Eucharist. ive always imagined the vast majority of practicing/cultural catholics would struggle to say they had that belief.

Yeah. Also: what keeps the faithful believing in Catholicism? I've long thought it's largely -- I'm generalizing -- a belief in ritual.

https://i.postimg.cc/d0cGPZBr/20240814-124902.jpg

xp absolutely agree, the power is inshrined early or is bought into at later stage through circumstance such as described in kevs excerpt

my parents took me here when I was young.

https://www.ourladyofmartyrsshrine.org/

I remember it being like Shinto Catholicism - nature

Catholicism would have been more interesting to me if the religious ed people had actually talked about all teh weird stuff like names of demons etc.. there is a rich history there

en/in shrined xp

the appropriation of René Girard by creeps like Vance and Thiel is annoying af ... this piece is good on his scapegoat theory and its relationship to social media

https://criticallegalthinking.com/2023/09/04/mimetic-desire-the-scapegoat-notes-on-the-thought-of-rene-girard/

somewhat relevant to this thread because of Girard's personal Catholicism and his idiosyncratic approach to biblical texts

loved casey affleck in that

stories like this would have entertained me more than the usual homilies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_the_Great

Anthony found next the satyr, "a manikin with hooked snout, horned forehead, and extremities like goats's feet."

This creature was peaceful and offered him fruits, and when Anthony asked who he was, the satyr replied,
"I'm a mortal being and one of those inhabitants of the desert whom the Gentiles, deluded by various forms of error,
worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs, and Incubi. I am sent to represent my tribe.
We pray you in our behalf to entreat the favor of your Lord and ours, who, we have learnt, came once to save the world, and 'whose sound has gone forth into all the earth.'" Upon hearing this, Anthony was overjoyed and rejoiced over the glory of Christ. He condemned the city of Alexandria for worshipping monsters instead of God while beasts like the satyr spoke about Christ.[29]

Writing up that "Vatican Miracle Examiners" anime yesterday had me thinking about Roman Catholic religious doctrine. The anime had some pretty, uh, unorthodox interpretations of Catholic morality and canon law, but there was some stuff that the people who catechized me would totally be on board with. I've seen some people freak out about Ouija boards or whatever but growing up what I learned was more along the lines of "Oh, whatever, it's not like you're not summoning actual demons or anything."

I say that, but of course I'm not an expert on Roman Catholic religious doctrine. Yeah, I was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, but I'm not a practicing Catholic or anything. I think of being a Catholic kind of like I think about being a man - I was born and people said "OK, this is what you are, here's what you need to do," and I tried pretty hard, and it just didn't work out for me.

The Catholic Church, though, the sense I get from them is that they got this attitude of "We love you, please call collect" towards me. Like how the Pope is still like saying to the Orthodox Church "Look, we want to heal this so-called Great Schism. Just accept Papal authority and say you believe all the same stuff that we believe and none of the stuff we don't believe, and we can get past this awful misunderstanding."

I know the Catholic Church can sometimes excommunicate people as heretics or whatever, but I feel like it's not something they do a lot? It's like "papal infallibility", the Pope _can_ speak "ex cathedra", from the Chair of St. Peter, but he usually doesn't. Personally I suspect it's because they don't want one of their successors to treat them the way Pope Formosus' successor treated him, but I don't know that for sure.

To the best of my understanding, I'm confirmed as a Roman Catholic, but I'm in a state of "mortal sin" - that I'm not eligible to receive the eucharist until I reconcile myself with the Church. And I guess any priest can do that - like I could go to a priest and confess my sins and he could say "In the name of Christ I forgive you, your penance is to say three Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, and don't do it again." I once read a story of a longtime Boston gangster who repented and was given the same ecclesiastical penance. I mean he still had to account for his crimes in a court of law. It didn't mean he didn't have to serve out the rest of his sentence. It kinda reminds me of when I hear therapists talking about their job. A lot of therapists say yeah, our patients are really ashamed of a lot of the stuff in their past and they don't want to tell us, and they have no idea the shit we've heard. They're really ashamed of something and don't want to tell us and it's just not the big deal they think it is, and things would go a lot better for them if they would just tell us. I mean if a therapist, who's very much human, feels that way, I can't imagine God would be any less forgiving.

Nah the sticking point is "don't do it again". This is all kind of new to me, so I'm not sure what the "it" in this case would be. I know if someone's a cisgender homosexual and comes to the Church, in that case the official doctrine is "don't do gay stuff", which is kind of a broad remit. For the record I also think it's morally reprehensible, to say God only loves you if you don't do gay stuff. I'm not actually planning on reconciling with the Mother Church. Mostly I just want to know what reconciliation looks like from their perspective.

I'm pretty sure I'm in a state of mortal sin, technically speaking, but I'm not entirely sure what my mortal sins _are_. I'm not sure the Church knows entirely what my mortal sins are. I mean that's the thing about Catholicism, it's a very complicated religion and it's not one that has a lot of loopholes. For instance, when I was young, I learned about the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which forbids contraception as a violation of the "ethic of life", and there are a lot of Catholics who are very serious about that, and most of the Catholics I grew up around weren't. They'd point out yeah OK the Pope said that but he didn't say it _ex cathedra_, he didn't say "Simon Says no condoms" or "sudo no condoms" or whatever.

And maybe that's the standard. Maybe me taking E is kind of like Catholics using condoms, yeah the Pope _says_ you shouldn't do it and there are a lot of people who will say it puts you in a state of mortal sin, but ALMIGHTY GOD doesn't say that. Probably if I found the right parish and the archbishop didn't crack down on them, like the superconservative archbishop around here does, I could do that, right?

Except wearing condoms is, we'll say for the sake of argument, a private act. I may not take E in public, but I go out in public every day and call myself Kate and use she/her pronouns and tell people I'm a woman. Is that, in and of itself, a mortal sin? In order to be reconciled with the Mother Church, would I have to tell people I was a man? I mean I guess it's not that much worse than telling gay people they have to stop doing gay stuff, but damn, it would affect every single minute of my life.

But, I guess, it's not fundamentally any different from the Catholic Church's desire to reconcile with the Orthodox Church. I just don't know why they expect anybody to take them seriously!