Ask A Catholic

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??

Meanwhile, leave it to the Onion for timing (unless this is what prompted the threads):

http://www.theonion.com/articles/pope-to-ease-up-on-jesus-talk,19727/

xp it's cos of paddy's day tomorrow

Yeah, it was Mary who was a virgin at the time of Jesus' conceptions. Anne and Joachim definitely porked.

the wiki summary sort of implies the doctrine of the IC was a little bit political:

From early on in the history of the Catholic Church, in numerous places in the writings of the Church Fathers, the belief is implicitly stated.[citation needed] In various places the feast of the Immaculate Conception had been celebrated for centuries on 8 December when, on 28 February 1476, Pope Sixtus IV[6] extended it to the entire Latin Church. He did not define the doctrine as a dogma, thus leaving Roman Catholics free to believe in it or not without being accused of heresy; this freedom was reiterated by the Council of Trent. However, the feast was a strong indication of the Church's traditional belief in the Immaculate Conception.[7][8] On 6 December 1708 Pope Clement XI decreed that the feast of the Immaculate Conception be a Holy Day of Obligation.[9] throughout the entire Catholic Church.

The Immaculate Conception was solemnly defined as a dogma by Pope Pius IX in his constitution Ineffabilis Deus on 8 December 1854.[10] The Catholic Church teaches that the dogma is supported by Scripture (e.g., Mary's being greeted by the Angel Gabriel as "full of grace") as well as either directly or indirectly by the writings of Church Fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons and Ambrose of Milan.[11][12] Catholic theology maintains that since Jesus became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, it was fitting that she be completely free of sin for expressing her fiat.[13] In 1904 Pope Saint Pius X also addressed the issue in his Marian encyclical Ad Diem Illum on the Immaculate Conception.[14]

check them dates!

"expressing her fiat"

oh well if ambrose had her checked out first then i guess i believe

any takers on the alternate view of virgin as a mistranslation from the hebrew? i always found that interesting.

oh and i am like a catholic once removed or something - raised atheist but oh man never to be mentioned around my irish catholic grandmother. who was awesome btw, so i figure catholicism is aok. also radical nuns are the coolest shit ever. ok then.

I find it interesting too. It's was supposedly maiden or something and not virgin, right?

maiden is a virgin?

by definition I think it just means unmarried

The whole virgin vs maiden vs maid thing is v confusing. Really it used to just be a young unmarried woman. I think for a very long time there wasn't necessarily a connotation that she was also sexually pure!

p sure 'maiden' suggests virgin but that the mistranslation suggested only 'young woman' or somesuch

"Several distressed correspondents have queried the mistranslation of 'young woman' into 'virgin' in the biblical prophecy, and have demanded a reply from me. Hurting religious sensibilities is a perilous business these days so I had better oblige. Actually, it is a pleasure, for scientists can't often get satisfyingly dusty in the library indulging in a real academic foot-note. The point is in fact well known to biblical scholars, and not disputed by them. The Hebrew word in Isaiah is (almah), which undisputedly means 'young woman', with no implication of virginity. If 'virgin' had been intended (bethulah) could have been used instead (the ambiguous English word 'maiden' illustrates how easy it can be to slide between the two meanings). The 'mutation' occurred when the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint rendered almah into ... (parthenos), which really does usually mean virgin. Matthew (not, of course, the Apostle and contemporary of Jesus, but the gospel-maker writing long afterwards), quoted Isaiah in what seems to be a derivative of the Septuagint version (all but two of the fifteen Greek words are identical) when he said Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 'Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel' (Authorised English translation). It is widely accepted among Christian scholars that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a late interpolation, put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophecy should be seen to be fulfilled. Modern versions such as the New English Bible correctly give 'young woman' in Isaiah. They equally correctly leave 'virgin' in Matthew, since there they are translating from the Greek."

Yeah - it was young woman - my b.

i forgive u

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??

Use this site or this one to cross-reference any claims made on wikipedia regarding this sort of thing imo. Wikipedia tends to slant a bit on any given day. Number of different translations of Mark 15:7.

btw in case the Holy Father is reading this thread I apologize for reading the Bible

again btw in re: virgin vs. maiden the Church very conveniently regards tradition as one of the ways that God speaks to us. So if an early translator happened to say παρθένος for עלמה that was God's hand telling us more about the story

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!