Long’s Loyalties

Last updated on: July 30, 2014 at 8:00 am by David Mills

Long’s Loyalties 2014-07-30T01:00:22-04:00 David Mills

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In My Church Loyalties, the Methodist philosopher and Marquette professor D. Stephen Long explains why he has not become a Catholic, though he has started the process twice. It is an honest and helpful essay, and a gracious one toward his Protestant brethren on the one side and his Catholic friends on the other, though also one that proves his wisdom in remaining a Methodist.

I think that Long, like many would-be converts, is attracted to aspects of the Catholic Church but not exactly to Catholicism. His mind is shaped very differently and were he to enter the Church now he would not be happy.

Two nice things from the essay: First, explaining one of his main reasons for remaining a Methodist:

On two occasions over the past decade I decided to become Catholic and initiated the process, largely out of frustration with Protestant sentimentality. On both occasions I had to wait because I had also been asked to lead a retreat, preach or preside at a Methodist church, teach a Sunday school class, lecture to a Methodist audience, or otherwise work in a congregation.

In Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, a less than admirable whiskey-loving priest becomes holy, and possibly a saint, simply because he had too much going on to leave Mexico after a revolution ousted the Catholic Church, even though he had begun to question most of the church’s teachings. I sometimes think I’m like a whiskey-loving Methodist preacher. I just never get around to leaving; I always have something to do for the Methodists, and I cannot figure out how to leave without betraying people I love.

And second, referring to an essay he wrote for the Christian Century in 2005 called “In Need of a Pope?”:

Two things prompted that 2005 essay. First, I was moved that so many Protestant leaders felt compelled to attend John Paul II’s funeral. The papacy no longer seemed to be a decisive point of contention if so many Protestants wanted to be present at the funeral mass. Second, I was moved by Benedict XVI’s smile when he was presented to the world as pope. It hit me that Protestant efforts to create authority through texts, laws, and regulations lacked this humanity. So I thought out loud, without thinking of all the ramifications, about how Protestants might come to find a way to affirm the bishop of Rome and other aspects of Catholicism that once were thought to be nonnegotiable dividing lines.

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