Salter

🥲🙏🥀

Very, very cool! Most priests don’t when they praise the sacrament as this wonderful things that just helps everyone, which drives me up the wall. Thank you.

This part of my thread, which unfortunately got hidden when I posted on the “one having authority” verse, is probably the heart of it:

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Congratulations!

As a person who has had mostly bad experiences in the sacrament, I’ve got to ask: Do you talk about scrupulosity and the people for whom the Sacrament of Reconciliation is more harmful than helpful?

Yeah. Receiving communion in both Protestant and Catholic churches is a great first step for this, regardless of whether it’s allowed, though some would disagree.

You will say to let all that roll off my back and hold true to the good in my heart.

Obviously, my Christian life is holding fast to what is good from all traditions. But this diocese is dreadful, what few confessors there are, with the priest shortage, are cruel and threaten hell, homilies have turned sharper and more judgmental, the ecumenism with which I grew up has been crushed.

How?

I went to a Jesuit school, and most of the male professors seem to be ex-Jesuits who left the priesthood to get married.

Reminded of this because the school magazine came in the mail today, and yup, Fr. A who got married, Fr. B who got married, and, oh, here’s Fr. C, has he gotten married yet?

Words to remember, cont’d.

Oh do I wish it were like this near me.

I’ve got to rewatch this. I saw it some years ago (I’m a Ross Macdonald fan and wish the Harper movies were better than they are, because Newman could fit Lew Archer) and found the pace very slow. But maybe I wasn’t in the right mood?

𝐎𝐦𝐚𝐫 𝐊𝐡𝐚𝐲𝐲𝐚𝐦, 𝐢𝐧 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐫𝐭

Ah, beneath the white-jade Stars that shine,
A Figure with the Prophet’s whiskered sign
Returns my gaze from in the guileful Glass.
Wha—? Sure I’ll have another glass of wine!

And then there are the Beatitudes, which need no amateur commentating from me.

He, wise psychologist, knows that we can’t stop or even reduce sinning until we understand that we won’t be punished for sinning. As long as the threat of punishment is there, we will rebel like Milton’s Satan. Only in the face of judgementless, salvific love can we lay down our arms.

He refuses absolutely to condemn. He tells the woman caught in adultery to sin no more, yes, but only after he has assured her of the genuine unconditionality of mercy, the lack of judgment, the lack of any condemnation whatsoever.

I find his emphasis on unconditional mercy to be the corrector of my religious education, which (in the Church, not in my happily Mass-skipping family) centered on rules and threats of punishment.

I find him to speak, as the verse says, with authority. This is hard to explain. He does not sound pompous, arrogant, or controlling, yet he has an innate authority. He makes you want to sit up and listen.

I find his post-Resurrection appearances as convincing and consistent as his pre-Resurrection ones; he is still the same character. I find his character consistent throughout all four gospels, too, as if the writers were so compelled by this rabbi that they had to sit down and write their memories.

I find his tweaks both of his own disciples, his punctures of their (usually Peter’s) pomposity, and of the Pharisees to be refreshing and funny. I find his grief at Lazarus’s tomb emblematic of all human grief, of shaking our fists at heaven and asking why.

Oh, so many things. I can’t get over how human he is, by which I mean well-rounded human, able to understand everyone. I find his fear of death, his prayer for the Father to let this cup pass, some of the truest words any religious figure has said.

I will also add that (as someone told me the other day) God surely allows people of varying temperaments to end up where they are supposed to be at different stages of their lives, denomination-wise as with anything else.

I know that’s how you feel, and often I think it is a healthier temperament than mine.

Yeah. But I should just stop thinking about him other than to pray for him. A guy like that doesn’t deserve my caring about his smug assholeness. I’m sorry for his congregation, though, and hope they find a better priest somewhere else.

Yes, we’ve talked about this. It’s the “if.” If you can live with it as a feature, yes, you are set for success in Catholicism. If not, you try living with the cognitive dissonance for a while and eventually end up nailing 95 theses to a Wittenberg door.

BC for me. I do sometimes wonder what some of my old priest acquaintances/profs would make of my disagreements with the RCC and desire to leave.

A Jesuit education is a mighty force. Whether for good or ill, that’s a different question.

Sometimes, at my most jesuitical, I think this is what “infallibility” means (the ability to explain away the most blatant contradictions). “Yes, in some sense we can say that statement X is true, but also in some sense we can say that statement not-X is true, because in certain circumstances…”

Apropos of not much, but when I was in my super-Catholic phase, the first crack in my opposition to women’s ordination was when I met female Episcopal priests and seminarians. Then I attended services with female priests, and the anti-ordination arguments stopped making any sense whatsoever.

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