I have spoken of the faith of the young man who has passed through the sociological habits of infancy and the subjective idealism of adolescence to find the reality of the living God. He gives himself with enthusiasm and generosity to the Jesus who speaks to him the words of eternal Life and promises him–in return for a total renunciation–a hundredfold in this world. Happy are they who have had such an experience, which will leave a mark upon all their later life. And yet this enthusiasm will not last indefinitely. The honeymoon was necessary; but it is no more the fullness of love than the happiness of the young married couple. Just as the difficulties of married life purify and deepen love, so the disillusionment which life brings with it purifies and deepens faith. In a young man’s enthusiasm there is till a good deal of idealism, and what he calls faith in God is often only confidence in his own superabundant vital powers. The young, overflowing with energy and hungry for the infinite, are easily generous and readily exclaim, Laetus obtuli universa! It will be more difficult for them to give, day after day, what they have offered all at once . . . and in words. And then there are the failures and disappointments which multiply, those which come from outside and those which result from our inward wretchedness. Nearly all converts have to go through a crisis after about a year of fervour; prayer becomes difficult, attempts to lead a stricter and more generous life become less and less successful; the great discoveries with which faith dazzled their eyes are all over; they slip into lukewarmness. Faith and certitude remain intact, but illusions vanish. The spade comes up against rock. There is great danger of giving up the struggle and settling down to a sceptical and disillusioned sort of existence. The problem is not that of maintaining a juvenile fault, but of passing beyond it, recognizing the “impurity” in an enthusiasm which was animated rather by one’s own vitality than by the breath of the Holy Spirit.

I think that the last sentence lays a finger on charismaticism within Christianity.  Although it is a valid faith expression (which is at home and completed in the one, Catholic Church), if it is taken to be more than that–the norm for everyone–it becomes animatited by its own vitality rather than by the Holy Spirit..  And that’s why when the vitality of a particular charismatic group winds down, the group splits up to seek that vitality in another–in search of the eternal honeymoon.  Hence, Fr. Dwight Longenecker recently noted:

The much praised Charismatic movement is one of the most fissiparous of them all. The splits, divides, quarrels and schisms within Charismatic Christianity alone is enough to frustrate any attempt to understand, much less categorize and catalogue.

There’s a reason why the charismatics don’t find what they are looking for in older, established communions. These communions have grown beyond the phase of being animated by their own vitality and have settled down into a deeper, more mature faith life. I call charismatics to seek beyond the charismatic definition of vitality. Investigate what animated the faith of the saints.  Investigate what the Catholic Church says about the charismatic movement.  Pope John Paul II not only recognized the charismatic movement as a valid movement within the Catholic Church, but blessed it.  You see, the Catholic Church is the home of different expressions or personalities of faith.  All these are at home and completed in the one, true faith.

I became a Catholic at that point because the whole debate forced me to ask the question, “When Christians disagree about important matters how do we decide and where do we turn for the final answer?”

In other words, I began to look again at authority in the Church, and I began to examine seriously the claims to authority that the Catholic Church makes. To do this I had to discover what the Catholic Church really teaches about her own authority, and I had to get past my prejudices, misunderstandings and anti-Catholic bias.

I came to realize that for the Church to be both dogmatic and relevant to the age in which it lives it needs an infallible final authority. As Cardinal Newman said, Without an infallible final authority Christians will either sacrifice true doctrine for the sake of outward unity, or they will sacrifice the form of outward unity for the sake of what they perceive as true doctrine. They will fall either into the error of sectarianism or the error of indifferentism.

I accept that many Christians may be indifferent to this problem. All that really matters to them is how much they love Jesus. While this sentiment is laudable and the simplicity of this faith is admirable, it does beg the question, “But where is Jesus and how do I know I am loving Him and not just the fabrication of my own religious imagination or the subjective opinions of my own tradition? How do I know that I am loving Jesus and not just pursuing (and perhaps manufacturing) my own religious experiences.”

Read the whole thing (and comments) here.

Catholics, because of the nature of their faith, and how much humility, and one’s quiet connection to Christ as part of the community of faith, is so important–they just don’t talk about all the good things they do. Whereas with Protestants–generally, with evangelicals–there’s this testimony time; and so we tend to think because of that that Protestants just do a lot more than Catholics. Well, that’s because the nature of the communities are such that one stresses the virtue of public testimony and the other one doesn’t, and so you’re less likely to see more witness, or experience directly the evidence of the good works, other than some people quietly doing it.

Here’s a link to the audio.

But while these Protestants withhold membership from the one, true fold because they find her deficient in living things out, they are merely under the illusion that they are doing better. Remember, they’ve separated themselves out to form a group who’s going to do it better. They have this small band of pious people simply because they left all the sinners behind; and because they drive sinners from their ranks and repel others from even joining in the first place. There is a core–a big core–of pious people within the Catholic Church, but they retain and remain with their sinners instead of leaving them.

The Catholic family, then, is not a museum exhibit of saints, but a human family in which saints, publicans and sinners all feed from the same table. . . Goodness is a qualification for heaven but not for the Church: badness is an additional reason for becoming a Catholic. . . . I am proud to belong to a Church which retains, as no other Church retains, the affectionate loyalty of many who make little or no attempt to practice what the Church preaches. The Catholic religion is based on certain obective facts, of which the Resurrection is the most important. Facts such as these are unaffected by your conduct or by mine, and it is therefore illogical to deny those facts merely because our conduct is not consistent with our belief. The Catholic is more objective than the Protestant, for Protestants often cease to believe merely because they cease to behave, whereas many a Catholic who has cut himself off by his own actions from the sacraments continues to hear Mass every Sunday. As a boy I believed that Protestants were more moral and more truthful than Catholics. I now know that the widespread belief in the moral superiority of Protestants is due to the failure of the Protestant Churches to retain their hold on the disreputable. The reputation of the Church suffers, perhaps, from the fact than an American gangster or a Neopolitan brigand will attend Mass, whereas a criminal with a Protestant background never gives scandal to Protestants by attending Protestant services. It is this Catholicity of the Church which offends the non-Catholic, just as it was the catholicity of Christ which disedified the more exclusive Jews. Protestant Churches are clubs for good people, but the Catholic Church continues to welcome the publicans and sinners with whom Christ mixed so freely. . . . In the course of nineteen centuries the Church has discovered that sinners sometimes sin, and it is therefore not so scandalized as her critics by the frailties of her children. Like her Master, she comes to call not the righteous by sinners to repentance, and like her Master she continues to give scandal by her uncompromising hostility to fashionable sins and by her infinite charity to unfashionable sinners.
—Arnold Lunn, Within That City

Something else which feeds the illusion of living it out better is the zeal and vigor of new beginnings. Remember: the separate, pure communion is separate and pure because the pure separated themselves, but once these pure people fill their church with their children’s children’s children, they will not be so pure. It may take generations, but sin will find its way in. Meanwhile the division lives on. . . and yet another is needed. Ad infinitum. [3].Besides a fundamental misunderstanding as to the nature of the Church, these Protestants also labor under a misunderstanding or disregard of free will. God leaves us free to choose Hell. So, why can’t the Church leave us free to do the necessary work to save our souls? Like God, the Catholic Church knows that she can’t force interior conversion on people. If they don’t make that fundamental choice for God, she knows she can’t make it for them; but if they do, she provides them all the necessary helps: the sacraments, infallible teaching, spiritual direction, an apostolate or two, and massive amounts of spiritual literature from saints and other spiritual luminaries. If people aren’t availing themselves of these things, the Church can’t force them on them–just as God doesn’t force Himself on us. He calls. He woos. He’s there when we come home. But when we want to go eat slop with the pigs, well, He leaves us free to do so. [4].

1. They also don’t see that because they accept the reliability of the Catholic Church on so many points it is incumbent upon them to have reasons not to accept the reliability of the Catholic Church on this particular point.
2. Ironically, the preeminent true practice is to first be reconciled to truth. What if a Morman rejected the the evidence of the truth of Christianity, by declaring, “That’s all very well, but I can serve God better as a non-Christian.”?
3. Is this the model of the Church which Christ intended? Can it be reconciled with Scripture and Tradition?
4. “[Neither] God nor His Church forces any man’s conscience. To all He says by the mouth of his Prophet: ‘Behold I set before you, the way of life and the way of death’ (Jer. xxxi. 8 ) The Choice rests with yourselves.”—James Cardinal Gibbons, Faith of Our Fathers.
“Not even God, being loyal to His own rules, can change our minds or wills without our cooperation.”—Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. Saint Austin Review, July/August 2003

[sigh of fatigue] OK people. This borders on willful ignorance (a despicable…and sometimes damnable…habit) and it irritates the crap out of me.

1. Alls you have to do is scratch the Catholic Church–make the slightest effort to check your caricature of her with reality–and you’ll see that she is a veritable supernova of activity. Check out Zenit.org or First Things or Catholic News Agency or Catholic World News or American Papist or the USCCB or the Vatican Information Service or the National Catholic Bioethics Center (does your communion have a national bioethics center?) to get a glimpse of what the Catholic Church is doing. But I have a feeling that this isn’t good enough. (Caricatures die hard). A lot of the stuff found on these websites are representative of the things the Catholic Church says…but what is she doing? Oh…preaching the gospel is not enough? Well, first of all, don’t underrate that. I ended up an atheist because of my own sinful choices…but I was really, really, really, helped along the way by Protestant pastors who preached opinion…not truth. Second of all, the Catholic Church also feeds the poor, visits the sick and the imprisoned, and, in general, outstrips every other communion on the planet in performing both the corporeal as well as the spiritual works of mercy. But whose counting? Well, you are, apparently; so, check out the Catholic Campaign for Human Development or Catholic World Mission or Marriage Encounter or Aid to Eastern Europe or Catholic Charities or Project Rachel or the Knights of Columbus, just to scratch the first molecule of the tip of the iceberg of the larger ice shelf. In reality, it is so easy to find out just how much the Catholic Church really does in the world, that just yesterday I heard, in the 15 min. mark of the Vatican Insider podcast, host Joan Lewis declaring in response to U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Rooney’s, comments about how much the Holy See (just the guys in Rome) does for AIDS prevention in African, that “if the world could be fully aware of the…health education and welfare network on the planet of the Holy See, I think they would be totally speechless”. Notice that she is referring to just the stuff headed by the Vatican. This doesn’t count all the stuff headed by all the other bishops, priest, and laity. Oh…this isn’t good enough? The caricature lives on? Oh…the local church…what does the Catholic Church do on the local level? Well, she holds Mass daily during the week, twice on Saturday, and four times on Sunday (one of which is in Spanish), she offers the sacrament of confession at least once a week (but it’s not hard to find a parish with a priest who hears confessions everyday), she offers perpetual adoration of the Eucharist, and her members (along with clergy) have all sorts of apostolates and misc. groups one can join: the Blue Army, Familia, Opus Dei, and so on and so forth. Is the caricature dead yet? Probably not. I think what keeps this caricature alive is the evangilifundamentalicharismatical idea that it’s the role of clergy to hound people to be better Christians. Clergy is suppose to have an idea of where everyone is at spiritually and challenge them to come up to the next level. NEWS FLASH: This is what the sacrament of confession is all about. Couple that with spiritual direction and how much more challenged can you get? Not good enough. Oh…yeah…these things rely on the parishioner’s own volition and initiation. And here we get to the crux of the evangilifundamentalicharismatical caricature of the Catholic Church’s inactivity: It is the idea that Catholic clergy aren’t doing their job because they aren’t cornering people and making them love God whether they want to or not. Well, the problem with that idea of pastoring is that it’s not how God works. He calls. We respond. God doesn’t harangue us to holiness. He calls us to it. And he gives us a Church where the confessional is open, Mass is offered, the Eucharist is consumed, the truth is preached, spiritual direction is available, and opportunities for involvement abound. If you don’t grow, it’s nobody’s fault but your own. We’re all adults here. And that’s what I appreciate about the Catholic Church: She treats me like an adult. And what I resented about evangilifundamentalicharismatical culture was that I felt that I never left youth group.
2. After you go to the trouble of find out what the Catholic Church really does do, compare it with what your communion does. Note the incredibly vast discrepancy.
3. Take a nanosecond to reflect, professed lover of the historical church, on your idea and the nature of the Church. Let us say that the Catholic Church is terribly inactive. (Any institution that sticks it out for 2000 years is bound to have some lulls and periods of not-so-good-ness.) Is that a valid reason to not only remain separate from her, but perpetuate another (schismatic) communion beside her? If so, then the same goes for your communion when it falls on hard times. So every time a church hits a lull, reformation is made not from within, but by starting a new, separate, body….which means that in no time at all we have countless divisions. First, reconcile that with Scripture and Tradition. Second, tell me how the average Christian on the street is suppose to know which communion currently carries the torch…or if the communion he’s in still does…or why he’s wrong to think that the Spirit is leading him to start his own which does?
4. Realize that if you indolently dismiss all this as so much superfluous theology that you’ve opted out of reality for a caricature. And that’s dangerous.

Press release from Common Good:

Former Archbishop of the Charismatic Episcopal Church
Received into Full Communion with the Roman Catholic Church

(Richmond, VA) Randolph W. Sly, former Archbishop of the Charismatic Episcopal Church and one of the early founders of the CEC in 1992, was received into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church, along with his wife, Sandra, on November 12, 2006 at St. Benedict Catholic Church in Richmond, Virginia.

Sly indicated this decision came from an extended time of discernment for the two of them. “We were at a point last summer personally and ecclesiastically in the CEC where I felt a change was coming. Sandy and I had found ourselves moving deeper into catholic Christianity during our tenure in the CEC. More recently, the draw toward full communion in the Roman Catholic Church had grown greater and became a very strong call in the six months prior to our conversion. We are delighted to continue our service to Jesus Christ and His Church as Catholics.”

Fr. James Kauffmann, Pastor of St. Benedict Catholic Church issued the following statement: “It was my great joy to receive Randy and Sandy Sly into the full communion of the Roman Catholic Church at the Divine Liturgy at Saint Benedict Catholic Parish on November 12, 2006. What a glorious day it was! It was also a wonderful gift to, along with Deacon Keith Fournier, work with the Sly’s during their period of catechesis leading up to their reception. Their love for the Lord and the ancient yet ever fresh Catholic Faith is an inspiration. Their prior years of service to the Lord have only prepared them for what lies ahead as they respond to God’s continuing invitation to serve Him in the New Evangelization called for by the late Servant of God John Paul II. We welcome them home and eagerly anticipate all that lies ahead for them in the fullness of Catholic faith.”

Even prior to his involvement in the CEC Sly had been known for several years as a major voice of the “Convergence Movement” where the evangelical, charismatic, and liturgical/sacramental streams of the church were coming together as “one mighty river of God.” He has been in active pastoral ministry for over 30 years, first with the Wesleyan (Methodist) Church and then with the Charismatic Episcopal Church, where he last served as Archbishop of the Eastern Province and Supervising Archbishop of the Office of Communications.

Currently, Sly is President of Common Good, a way, a work, and a movement dedicated to the four pillars of the Church’s social teaching: life, family, freedom, and solidarity with the poor. A published author and communications specialist, he is also at work on several book projects as well as other commercial writing and media projects.

The Sly’s reside in the Northern Virginia community of Potomac Falls, where they are active members of Our Lady of Hope Parish. They have three grown children, all of whom are married and live nearby.

To schedule an interview with Randy Sly, comment below or send me an email.

One of the most powerful books I have read is Evelyn Waugh’s biography of St. Edmund Campion. It tells the story of a young man wooed away from the Catholic faith by worldly pursuits; and who, after returning to the true faith, sacrificed all he had gained, even his very life, in an effort to restore the true faith to his homeland, England. It’s a great read; I highly recommend it. (And it’s usually pretty easy to pick up cheap at a used bookstore.)

I think independent catholics would do well to consider the English Martyrs, of which St. Edmund Campion was but one (of over a hundred). Martrys in general are signs to the rest of us of what’s important; and they are signs of contradiction, because they give up what we generally regard as important in order to keep what we generally regard (at least in practice) as less important. They surrender their heads to the ax or the hangman’s noose rather than to error; and thus they demonstrate to us the truths that are worth more than our heads. And the truths that St. Edmund Campion and the English Martyrs died for are the very truths whose repudiation is necessary for the existence of independent catholicism: the unity of the Church and the primacy of Rome.

The Anglicans really were the first independent catholics. They were the first to assert the branch theory, the novel idea which purports that the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church of the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds is somehow not really one, as the Catholics and Orthodox hold, but divided into several mutually antagonistic bodies. And the Anglicans were the first to coin the term Roman Catholic, meant to imply that being part of the Church that is catholic and one has nothing to do with union with the Successor of St. Peter who presides in Rome.

Enter the English Martyrs. St. Edmund Campion and the rest of the English Martyrs died specifically for refusing to submit to these novel ideas upon which independent catholicism relies for its very existence. They declared that for one to be in saving obedience to Jesus Christ, one needed to be in His Church; and to be in His Church, one needed to be united to the Successor of St. Peter. And they backed up that declaration with the ultimate sacrifice, which independent catholics, when declaring what is, and what is not, really essential would do well to consider.

St. Edmund Campion, pray for us!

Read more about St. Edmund Campion here (by the late, great Fr. John Hardon, S.J.)

Read more about the English Martyrs at my martyrs “page” at del.icio.us