Stuff Catholics Like

While it’s true that your average student at a Catholic College wonders almost daily why thinking about God needs to be so dang hard when Jesus loves us anyway, most Catholics come to nourish a certain pride in accomplishment that we have some kick-butt theology coming from our ranks.

Savor this, if you will:
“But what was it that delighted me save to love and to be loved? Still I did not keep the moderate way of the love of mind to mind–the bright path of friendship. Instead, the mists of passion steamed up out of the puddly concupiscence of the flesh, and the hot imagination of puberty, and they so obscured and overcast my heart that I was unable to distinguish pure affection from unholy desire. Both boiled confusedly within me, and dragged my unstable youth down over the cliffs of unchaste desires and plunged me into a gulf of infamy.” (Augustine’s Confessions, trans. Outler, Book II.2)

Whew.  I’ll bet Augustine wrote those lines, put down the pen quill with satisfaction, and thought “Dang, I’m good.”  Or would have if he was not such a humble Catholic Christian.

Although there are certainly many skillful Protestant theologians–devoted to God through Scripture, prayerful people, and intellectually very sophisticated–theology is a field at which Catholics excel. There is a devotion to craft, best expressed in the scholastic understanding that faith and reason, properly understood, do not work against each other but with each other for our growth as Christians. Understanding is not essential to salvation, but could indeed help form our faith, conscience, and spur us to holiness. There is a healthy respect, even embrace, of rationality. This keeps the intelligentsia in university cultures perpetually perplexed. It’s rather fun.

The other reason Catholics have a secret yen for theology has to do with liturgy. You can’t live through a Catholic Mass without getting the equivalent of a super-soaker in theology. You know all the ink and worn blogger fingertips debating the extraordinary vs. ordinary form of the mass? This proves how theological Catholics are. Protestants would say, eh, so have a contemporary and traditional service, whatever. But liturgy isn’t about blocking or entertainment or even much about preference. Whatever “side” you’re on, it is about living out a particular understanding of who God is and who we are. So theology–through the Mass, whether you have studied it formally or not–sinks into your very bones as a Catholic.

As two friends of mine cheerfully debated in grad school (well, in a bar, two beers in, after class…hence the “cheer”):
Baptist friend: “…See, that’s the problem with you Catholics. You have the cold, distant Christ while we Baptists have the warmth of Jesus.”
Catholic friend: “Yeah, well, we Catholics have theology and you Baptists have choir practice.”