One cannot, alas, explain away bad Catholics by appealing to the mere fact of good Catholics. Mother Teresa is wonderful, but she doesn’t answer the problem of President Kennedy.
Evelyn Waugh, to an interlocutor
who considered that his status as a mediocre human being reflected bad on the Church,
is said to have rejoined something to the effect of, “You can only imagine how
terrible I’d be if I weren’t Catholic.”
That is funny, though it hardly addresses the problem of Bad Catholics
in general either.
Still, another moment is due to Waugh’s response. It is after all the response that I am prone to give in my own case. If I fail, it is not in spite of my membership in the Church—it is certainly not due to my relationship with Jesus Christ, to the time I spend with him in prayer, and to the ways in which I attempt resemble him. On the contrary: to the extent that I fail, it’s because I am not conforming myself to Christ and the divine element within the Church.
That is only one data point, but
it is one which I know intimately—the workings of my own mind—and so it has
considerable salience. And it suggests
to me that the starting point, when I ask why there are so many bad Catholics, should
be to consider whether most of them are in fact doing what Jesus commanded.
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