Jeremiah's Lament: Episodes in Anti-Catholicism by Karl Keating

Author:Karl Keating [Keating, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rasselas House
Published: 2015-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

Hairballs

I was debating a former priest who headed a ministry that tried to lure Catholics into “real” Christianity. In the question period a young woman raised her hand. She looked angry and, turning to me, said, “My grandmother lives in Mexico. She is a pious Catholic. She goes to Mass every week and prays the rosary every day. Under her bed she keeps a glass jar with a hairball in it, and she worships the hairball. Why does your church promote such idolatry?”

I explained to her that worshiping hairballs is no part of Catholic practice, and she seemed to accept the plea of innocence. She seemed to recognize that we shouldn’t be blamed for something we would condemn, if we only knew about it. Then questions turned to real, not imagined, Catholic practices, ones that Fundamentalists find repellent. We might call these the “smells and bells” of Catholicism. These are activities that mark Catholics as Catholics, things we do that make us stand out.

On the whole, Fundamentalists dislike peculiarly Catholic customs because they think they’re non-scriptural, even anti-scriptural. This attitude can be overcome, but it takes patience. First, we must explain what we mean by a particular practice (many Fundamentalists don’t know, say, what the sign of the cross is—they don’t know the motions, and they don’t know the words). Then we must explain why we do these things (because they bring to mind our Lord’s redemptive work, for instance). Third, we must question Fundamentalists closely to see if they harbor some unusual misunderstanding of our practices. Many of them do.

We need to impress upon them that Catholicism is a sacramental religion. Sacraments are visible signs of God’s grace; they are actions that not only signify the transmittal of grace to us but really do transmit grace. They are a natural consequence of the Incarnation: God took on flesh (matter) to save us, and he left behind actions that use matter (such as water, oil, and wine) to continue to give us his saving grace. Unlike Catholicism, Fundamentalism is not a sacramental religion. It’s one thing, Fundamentalists say, for God to take flesh and to use material things during his sojourn on Earth. It’s something else for him to set up a Church that encourages the continued use of material things. God is too great, too “wholly other,” to use matter as a vehicle of grace.

Aside from the seven sacraments, Catholics have sacramentals, and in some ways sacramentals are more off-putting for Fundamentalists than are the seven sacraments themselves. After all, even Fundamentalists have the “ordinances” of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, even though they don’t think these “ordinances” do what our sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist do. But Fundamentalists have nothing like sacramentals, or so they think.

The revised Code of Canon Law explains that “sacramentals are sacred signs by which spiritual effects are signified and are obtained by the intercession of the Church” (can. 1166). They aren’t the ordinary means of grace established by Christ—that is, they aren’t sacraments as such—but they are related to sacraments.

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