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You meet such interesting people when you blog

You meet such interesting people when you blog

Last updated on: July 17, 2015 at 12:43 am by Mark Shea

You meet such interesting people when you blog 2015-07-03T18:11:51-07:00 Mark Shea

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A reader writes:

Let me start off with the narcissism of small differences, where all truly Modern conversations begin:

I like you already.

I was a cradle Catholic–a lukewarm one, albeit with perfect-ish attendance. Plenty of seeds. Shallow roots. After that I went to college, where I dressed up as a drunken communist who was a bit queasy about everything that went on and was the only one a bit sea-sick about how we looked at everyone like pawns rather than people.
Seems like a good thing to reject.

One late night conversation devolved into some guy telling me how the Catechism actually gives the conditions which would allow the Vatican to bless an armed insurrection. Of course, I had to know, and I ended up buying one of those mass-market paperback copies with the awful blue cover. (It was one of the first books I honestly bought as an adult. I’d worked at a Borders and my college’s bookstore and had stolen more than a few books in my period of acting like an idiot).

🙂

I read that book cover to cover in the spring-summer of 2009. (as a sidenote, I left the book around at my parents’ house and its presence as a sort-of reminder was a factor in my parents returning to the church in about 2010).

The Lord moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

I didn’t return to the Church until late 2012, but those three years were a period of time in which I felt the literal tugging sensation to return, which I either lazily basked in or resisted, depending on circumstance.

I take a long time to translate thought into action too.

In the summer of 2012 I was cutting through a grocery store parking lot on foot when I found a Host on the ground. It was just there, I’m not sure why I noticed it. It was perhaps its perfect roundness, or something deep and baroque within me. I was walking to a bar where some friends and I were going to shoot pool. I picked up the Host, knowing that it should not be there, and put it in the breast pocket of my tavern jacket. It felt like I had a bar of plutonium in my pocket.

Beautiful image. And more powerful plutonium. 🙂

(I gave it to my Mom the next day, who called the priest who advised her to dissolve it in water and use it to feed a sunflower).

🙂

But I digress.

I arrived at the Church from the left. I get the impression that you did so a bit to the right of me, considering your feeling the need to comment on things like the Imaginative Conservative, etc just as I would feel the need to comment on Mother Jones or something like that.

Here’s my character arc, as the kids call it these days:

My goal has been to be a good Catholic. That’s all. I discover that in many ways, that makes me what the diseased Thing That Used to Conservatism calls a “liberal” and I call “sane”. But I still catch a ton of flak from the Left too (Andrew Sullivan calls me an “arch-conservative Catholic”, which I call “sane”.) 🙂

I’m still a touch more liberal than you on a thing or two, which can be chalked up to (to paraphrase Dorothy Day paraphrasing St Augustine) the container smelling like the liquid it once held.

I like that. Grace builds on nature and I think Catholic converts tend to bear the stamp of wherever they come from. Fine by me.

But that’s quite all right.

I want to tell you that you understand things in a way that verbalizes things I think and cannot quite verbalize yet. To put it another way, you have helped me clarify the way I think.

That’s why I write about the Faith, so I deeply appreciate hearing this. Thank you.

I’m thinking now particularly of your spot-on way you have talked about the left and the right misunderstanding the climate encyclical. (Misunderstanding it even before they’ve read it, which is, perhaps, admirable.)

It’s been a fascinating thing. I don’t think any encyclical has generated this much controversy since Humanae Vitae. And the thing is perfectly orthodox and profoundly creative. I love it and I love Francis.

I belong to Pax Christi, Rhode Island. It’s the local chapter of the official Catholic peace organization. We are trying to get a flyer out into every parish in the state about the papal statements against nuclear weapons in advance of the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Good luck with that.

I’ve hassled many parish secretaries (or office managers, depending) and their pastors about this, and one thing I’ve noticed is that its the pastors I perceive on the so-called left and the so-called right which give me the most loving welcome and are most interested in how to bring our religions call for peace to the people. It’s the lukewarm ones in the middle who are hanging up on me and grumbling about how if they accept a flyer from me they have to accept a flyer from anybody.

Yeah. I often think to myself that rank and file Catholics on both the left and right who are seriously engaged as disciples have much more in common with each other than they think.

I could ramble on for even longer, but I am coming to believe that left and right are flip sides of the same coin–the pragmatist, modernist, technocratic belief that, at best, religion is a tool to mobilize the masses and nothing more.

Yep. The manipulation of Catholics by power brokers who promise them a place that table of worldly power happens on both sides of the aisle. We have to build antibodies against the Culture Wars and learn to listen to the Magisterium, not to our tribal agitprop.

We need the undiluted teaching of the Church. It’s 200 proof, dammit. It’ll get the whole world cocked if we can just pull the cork out.

You get it.

I’ll get you a beer if you ever come through Providence!

Thanks! No plans at present, but if your parish ever wants me to come speak, I’d be happy to do it! Here’s the info:

PS–I like your aesthetics and belief in Catholic literature. Or maybe I’m just projecting that on you since you like Chesterton. I myself write occasional reviews for catholicfiction.net.

Good for you!

At least they convinced me to read some Waugh and Endo I hadn’t read yet.
Peace

Thanks for writing!

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