Monday, July 28, 2003
I BELIEVE IN THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH!
Teacher and Mother
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Caught in Peter's Net
"We are all caught in Peter's net, for Jesus has cast it for us." (Peguy)
And even some who are known as "dissenters" often can still speak eloquently about the always renewed youthfulness of the Church.....like these words of Hans Kung (who also played an important role in Vatican II; but sadly his voice seemed, over time, to become more strident and negative--yet here giving testimony to Christ's presence in His Church even today and into tomorrow):
"Why has this Christianity always endured despite all the non-Christian
elements in its history? Because this religion has continually inserted
itself into new cultural landscapes, like a great river which originates
somewhere in a modest way and imbeds itself in an ever new way in the
landscape through which it slowly flows... It is a river which has had
some ruinous falls... But must not one also see the river of goodness,
mercy, willingness to help, and solidarity that from the source, the
Gospel, onward has run through history?.... What sort of power is this
that is at work everywhere? Is it all just chance? All just fate?..."
The Church lives!
And so, the more the dissenters dissent, the more I hope to believe -- remembering the words of St Paul that "love believes all things"! The more the critics criticize, the more will I hope to love her! She is my mother, my hearth, my home! She has given me Christ and with Him all good things. And I love her with all my heart and soul! Perhaps a poet can say it better than I am able. In a wonderful article in The Atlantic Monthly the poet/social activist (and friend of Dorothy Day), Ned O'Gorman, sums up my own feelings:
"I think of the Church, my family, and me in the bark of the
world, growing with it, disappearing now and then into it, living with
it, dying with it, resurrecting with it in the riddle of my life. I
write of the Church from the place it has taken me, as judge, as the
beginning of my poems, as the form of my dreams, and the splendid,
four-dimensional bulk of my salvation."
"Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There's dance and song and good red wine.
At least I've always found it so:
Benedicamus Domino!
(Hillaire Belloc)
"O long sought-after desire of the eyes, joy of the heart, the truth after many shadows, the fullness after many foretastes, the home after many storms -- come to her, poor wanderers, for she it is, and she alone, who can unfold the meaning of your being and the secret of your destiny." (John Henry Newman)
And here is the poem Chesterton wrote the day he joined the Catholic Church:
The Convert
After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.
The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree;
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.
