Practicing Catholic
James Carroll
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0547336268
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A clear-eyed and personal examination of the Catholic faith, its leaders, and its complicated history by National Book Award–winner James Carroll
James Carroll turns to the notion of practice—both as a way to learn and a means of improvement—as a lens for this thoughtful and frank look at what it means to be Catholic. He acknowledges the slow and steady transformation of the Church from its darker, medieval roots to a more pluralist and inclusive institution, charting along the way stories of powerful Catholic leaders (Pope John XXIII, Thomas Merton, John F. Kennedy) and historical milestones like Vatican II. These individuals and events represent progress for Carroll, a former priest, and as he considers the new meaning of belief in a world that is increasingly as secular as it is fundamentalist, he shows why the world needs a Church that is committed to faith and renewal.
fleshly existence. And so on. As Ricoeur helps us understand, meaning itself is created; its Creation is the noble task of human intelligence. That does not mean that religious faith is mere projection, as if God were nothing but a figment of the human imagination. Indeed, the essence of faith is to see in the human capacity for such invention a sign of the luring that God does. Yes, God is a figment, but a figment that points to something real. The human intuition that evolved from a first
Mainstream historians agree that no such person existed. 4. Lukas, Common Ground, 399. 5. In 1974, polls showed that barely more than fifteen percent of American Catholics accepted the teaching of Humanae Vitae. That percentage continued to decline. Thomas C. Fox, Sexuality and Catholicism (New York: George Braziller, 1995), 300. 6. Garry Wills calls this a "structure of deceit" Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit (New York: Doubleday & Co., 2000). 7. "The Boston archdiocese has paid at least
"You (believer) and I (scientist) are both humanists in the broadest sense: human welfare is at the center of our thought. But the difference between humanism based on religion and humanism based on science radiates through ... the very meaning we assign ourselves as a species. They affect the way we separately authenticate our ethics, our patriotism, our social structure, and our personal dignity." The Creation, 167. On the contrary, I insist that the two humanisms are one: critical religion
now calls itself, is Mary Magdalen. I have been emphasizing the importance of understanding how the New Testament texts came to be composed. It is equally important to recall how those texts came to be selected as forming a sacred literature. The common assumption is that the Epistles of Paul, Peter, Jude, John, and James and the four Gospels, together with Acts and the Book of Revelation, were pretty much what the early-Christian community had by way of foundational writings. These texts,
Rome, as one council decree after another was openly debated and then published. In short order, our chapel Masses went from being stilted rites in Latin plainsong to rambunctious celebrations, complete with guitars and the music of Bob Dylan; our monastic isolation gave way to highly charged "encounters" with seminarians from Protestant, Jewish, and "ethical humanist" institutions; otherworldly detachment was replaced by fieldwork in inner-city parishes, which soon had us on civil rights picket