Top Five Things You Must Believe In Order To Be Catholic

Top Five Things You Must Believe In Order To Be Catholic
Qualifiers- You can't not believe these things and call yourself Catholic;
Sequence- unranked;

* Real Presence- This one's kind of a slam dunk. It's been on the books for millennia. The denial of this doctrine is a pretty recent development in the big scheme of things.

* Immaculate Conception of Our Lady- This one's better attested than its official definition might suggest. The tradition of these goes back to antiquity. It only became official dogma in 1854 but this was borderline consensus for all or most of the Church's history. Not bad for a "latecomer"...

* Magisterium- Again, history speaks so clearly to this that it scarcely needs defending except to people who refuse to read what the Church Father's believed and taught. Apart from that, vast swaths of the New Testament make no sense unless the Church has authority over her members.

* Papacy- This one should be obvious but here it is anyway. Still, I distinguish the value of the papacy quite apart from the Magisterium because the Magisterium by itself isn't exclusively Catholic. At least not anymore. The Eastern Orthodox, for example, won't hesitate to proclaim the legitimacy of obeying [insert bishop here]'s authority.

But the papacy as an office exists apart from that. One of the Church's central dogmas is that the Holy Father is the Vicar of Christ. You either believe that or you don't. And if you don't, you're not Catholic.

* Sacraments- This almost didn't make the list but I decided that even though the Protestants believe in the value of marriage, baptism, communion and other things, their understanding of those things is so flawed and incomplete that they arguably have missed the entire point.

To tie it back to the Real Presence, if it is not the Body and Blood we consume in the Eucharist, how then is John 6 to be interpreted? Our Lord appears to be speaking in quite literal terms there. But the "literalists" seem only too eager to allegorize this and many other passages from sacred Scripture.

I truly don't understand the value of a strictly commemorative observance of communion. I didn't understand it even when I was a Southern Baptist and I understand it even less now.

As I say, you can believe these things and NOT call yourself Catholic. That'd put you in the company of a lot of Anglicans, actually. More than you might think. But you can't NOT believe these things and call yourself Catholic.

And yes, yes, yes, there are several other doctrines I could've included. But I didn't. Because this is MY list. If those items being excluded bothers you that much, make your own list.

Oh, something else. I thought about posting something similar for evangelicals but their lack of unity about anything and everything makes that pretty tricky. You can find evangelicals who disagree on fundamentals as obvious as the divine inspiration of the Bible so attempting to unravel the "evangelical position" on any number of doctrines considered the amount of diversity of belief tolerated in the evangelical world is an exercise in impossibility. So I shall not bother.

The Catholicism of the Southern Baptist Convention

As My Catholic Year is still somewhat on pause because of goings on with my priest and responsibilities he's had to attend to, now's probably a good time to talk about some other things.

I was a fire-breathing Southern Baptist for a lot of years there. The SBC appealed to me specifically because I've always been a little too independent for my own good. The doctrines of justification by faith, Sola Scriptura and others appealed to me because I prided myself on my ability to parse words and divine the intent of Scripture on my own, unfettered by "meaningless tradition".

The fact that my prayer life rarely lined up with that which I professed is neither here nor there, of course.

In particular, I never had much use for the Catholic notion of apostolic succession. What value is that when the Bible says what it means and means what it says?

Yes, I've learned better since then. Not the point. The point is that I understand the value of apostolic succession now in ways I didn't before.

One thing that always stuck in my craw though came when I began researching the chaos and mayhem the SBC went through back in the 1980's. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the fundamentalists (and I use the word with reverence and affection even now) essentially depended upon their own skewed version of succession to ensure doctrinal fidelity.

Several higher-ups in the Convention arranged the election of a series of conservatives (by their standards) as President of the SBC over the opposition for a period of ten years so as to fumigate the Convention of liberalism. Taking a page from the great Ronald Reagan's playbook, somebody high up the conservative movement's leadership evidently decided "personnel is policy", and voted accordingly. Then they did it again. And again. And again. And the rest is history.

The thinking went that electing several conservative Convention Presidents in a row would ultimately lead to changes in personnel, policy and, ultimately, doctrine that EVERYTHING would ultimately be able to be tied back to that first conservative President (Adrian Rogers).

Still, explicitly or implicitly, the SBC is now governed by its own standard of succession. And like so much else with Protestantism, it's a malformed, incomplete, imperfect and completely dishonest version of what the Catholic Church has been doing for millennia. It isn't apostolic and it's not divinely appointed but it all can ultimately be tied back to one man.

The SBC's order of succession rests it's doctrinal fidelity (as they define it anyway) on fallen, sinful, imperfect man while the Church looks directly back at an unbroken chain leading directly to Our Lord Himself, ultimately.

You tell me which is more trustworthy.

Summer Break

Not much to say about My Catholic Year right now. But I've got other stuff on my mind.

You know what I don't get? There's a group of people out there who regularly get burned in effigy for taking a summer recess each year. It'd be accurate, I think, to say they're lazy, unproductive and utterly unremarkable. And this is not to mention their various and sundry sex scandals.

Yes, the United States Congress is a truly worthless bunch in most cases. And they're often criticized for it.

But there's another group of people who get nothing but sympathy and encouragement for taking a summer recess each year. It'd be accurate, I think, to say they're lazy, unproductive and utterly unremarkable. And this is not to mention their various and sundry sex scandals.

Yes, school teachers are a truly worthless bunch in most cases. But, in spite of the fact that most of them are even worse than Congressmen, they're almost never criticized for it.

They both regularly fail to perform to even the most minimal standards of their job, basic morality or even common decency. They both have amazing retirement packages way out of proportion to their personal ethics or professional success.

And yet, only Congress regularly gets lambasted by everybody. School teachers, in spite of having every bit as dismal a success rate with their job performance, are all but sainted by society even though they absolutely suck at their jobs and can't even teach children how to write so much as a corporate memo.

I mean, what's up with that?