Forty Reasons I Am a Catholic by Peter Kreeft

Author:Peter Kreeft [Kreeft, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sophia Institute Press
Published: 2018-02-22T06:00:00+00:00

20

I am a Catholic . . .

Because of my friends and my family — my spiritual family

My friends and my family had a big role — largely invisible and unconscious, but partly conscious — in my journey home to Rome.

When I made the decision to abandon the spiffy new little lifeboat I was in and jump aboard Noah’s big old ark, full of weird, smelly animals, I had a vision in my imagination of a kind of battle of the books, or rather, of the authors. From the windows of the ark I saw familiar faces peering out and inviting me aboard, faces that I greatly admired.

I had once (before I became a Catholic) listed the twenty-five authors in the fields of religion, theology, spirituality, and religious philosophy whom I loved and admired the most; and only two Protestants and two Orthodox authors were among them: C. S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. Arrayed against them were twenty-one Roman Catholics: St. Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, Boethius, St. Anselm, St. Francis, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Nicholas of Cusa, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Catherine of Genoa, Pascal, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Blessed John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Venerable Fulton Sheen, Frank Sheed, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and Ronald Knox. All these were waving to me from the ark and asking me why I had not come aboard to be with them and share their wisdom from its source rather than ungratefully consuming it from outside. I had no answer. My body and my mind said: Jump!

Eleven of the twenty-one were canonized saints. Good company, that. “A man is known by the company he keeps.”

When you are in the ark, you are in a Really Big Family. Even when you feel alone, you’re not. Even when you have no idea what to do or what to say, your spiritual relatives will help you, invisibly and anonymously, like the angels, if you ask them.

When you don’t know how to pray, pray anyway, because your stupid words or lack of words, and your clumsy deeds or lack of deeds, will be made up for by your family, your friends in Heaven who see you struggling to pray and work and who are praying for you. You can draw on their spiritual “treasury” in Heaven just as you can draw on your biological family’s resources on earth. They will supply their fuller, wiser, holier, more powerful heads and hearts and hands for your empty, stupid, sinful, weak ones. Their intercession is central to one of the twelve articles of the Apostles’ Creed, the Communion of Saints, the one that Protestants have forgotten.

Why shouldn’t this be so? Why should our religion be private instead of familial and social and communal? God is not a libertarian. Why should He be an autonomous individualist? He’s not an American yuppie. Why should He be a Gnostic spiritualist? He’s not a Buddhist. Why should He be a Cartesian dualist? He’s not a Protestant.

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