3 Reasons Pro-Choice and Pro-LGBT Folks Won't Leave the Catholic Church

[patrice]

38. Oh? I lived it with thousands of others. 45 years of my life. Catholic schools, except

Last edited Wed Mar 6, 2013, 06:02 PM - Edit history (1)

college and graduate school. I have also taught in a Catholic high school, have numbered religious folk, men and women, amongst my personal friends. My father was even influenced by a labor populist preaching priest in SE Kansas back in the late '40s to become a labor advocate on big big construction projects.

The kinds of Catholics that you appear to be so eager to judge and to dislike are out there, but as in all things, oversimplification is a mistake and that's kind of a puzzling mistake when the basis of a critique of others is about the value of the individual living actively choosing for themselves how to live honestly in the face of fascism of ANY kind wherever they encounter it IN THEIR lives. Are their truths more important or is that power struggle more important? Individual persons MUST decide how/what/why/when.

Transubstantiation is not the same thing as "memorialism", because Transubstantiation is an ongoing effort directed toward complete self identification with the message and teachings of a liberal mid-eastern wandering teacher, especially in his example, which we see in his life, of how freedom makes peace and universal love possible, and, because of which example, whose very being evoked fear and hate in his church-state.

Though many fall way way way short of that identification, that does not obviate the fundamental purpose of the church. And to a Vatican II Catholic that is the WHOLE church, not just the part of it that calls itself Catholic - and - yes, for almost a couple of decades there, non-Catholics were welcome at Communion. We were also taught that ANY Christian baptism is baptism and it is forever. Converts to Catholicism weren't even required to be re-baptised. Are you aware of the radical liberal theologians in the Catholic tradition who have not been excommunicated? We were also told that all persons of good conscience can "go to heaven", because the important thing is to live the meaning of the NT, no matter how you learned it in the circumstances of your own life, nor whether, hence, you call it the same thing that a Christian calls it or not.

Yes, many/most Catholics and other Christians fall short of identifying the Good News by means of their actions, but just like anything else that is worth the effort, you don't give up, because the effort itself is good for goodness' own sake, so failure does not obviate the fundamental purpose, growing into that Christ-identity IN the world.

Memorialism is not like this; it's an accessory or a cognitive accoutrement to relationships, because the memorializer does not become whoever is memorialized. Memorialism is carried out, off and on, in parts and pieces of the memorialized. Transubstantiation is to become more completely, in all ways at all times the living embodiment of the teachings of Jesus, constantly in the same way that bread and wine become bone and muscle fiber, viscera, and blood. It's not symbolic it's a concrete lineage within the family of man.

I was NEVER taught that the church is the clergy and bishops etc. N.E.V.E.R. We were told the word church itself is based on a word that means community. The church is the people. Yes, Vatican II eventually caused something schism-like in the RC church, but many Catholics have not forgotten V II's true teachings, nor have we changed our minds about what anyone can see in the life of a man named Yeshua, the architecture of which one can even see in the work of the Jesus Seminar, btw. It is pretty sad though that some from both perspectives in the RC church have turned these issues into a struggle almost exclusively over liturgy.

There are videos on YouTube of Robert Kennedy, Jr. interviewing at least one religious historian who reviews all of what I have said here.