Ask A Catholic

I left the Church years ago (tried to go back a few years ago in the midst of a personal crisis and almost made it but I believe in a woman's right to choose, that is final, the Church and I will never see eye to eye on this) but used to teach the Catechism. I know there are plenty of Religious Education/CCD survivors here, too, happy to answer questions, because once you're Catholic, you love Catholicism forever in some way or another: it doesn't wash off. What do you want to know about our super-occult image-rich original-colonialist tradition? Ask away!

Oh oh I have a question!

Can you explain the Immaculate Conception a bit more? Like, how is that possible? How is it connected to St Anne being a saint?

The Catholicism Thread

schism!

was to be expected, really

lapsed catholic here, have no interest in going back.

girlfriend's at this point pretty much firmly outside the church (this was a gradual process) because of lots of things but mostly that same issue. but yeah it's never really gonna leave her. she tried briefly to be a unitarian (like p.j. funnybunny, the bunny who did not want to be a bunny) but that didn't work.

itt Alfred, Lord Sotosyn is Henry VIII...

have no interest in any organized religion. fucking daycare provider took my son to ash wednesday and had ashes put on him....NOT HAPPY.

Catholicism is for lyfe in a way that other denominations aren't. I am not a "lapsed Evangelical", for instance.

aerosmith,

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

Dear AAC:

I was raised Anglican, mostly High Church style, was even an acolyte, let active belief fall away from me gradually and have been a fairly content agnostic since I was twenty or so. I've always wondered if my joke that being raised Anglican means you get all of the ceremonies of Catholicism but none of the Catholic guilt is true and from the sound of it it is (thus your opening words), I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such, and might explain why I found it so easy to let go. Is it something that is ingrained from the start in any/all Catholic religious instruction?

Yours,
The Guy Whose Dad is the Only Active Anglican In My Family Anymore

fuck that chris! "how about a separation, not so much between church and state but between my child's forehead and your ashy finger"

itt Alfred, Lord Sotosyn is Henry VIII...

I'd love to have been pope during this period.

apparently when my mom was little her dad would very occasionally bust out some wine for dinner and his line was always "tonight i thought we could be episcopalian"

I find the dis "cafeteria Catholic" hilarious, ie one can't pick & choose which dogma to embrace. Pretty much every Catholic does this, being human.

xpost -- Hero.

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

You just answered your own questions! Seriously – we revel in masochism. The veneration (not worship) of the crucifix is a reminder of what Our Lord endured for our sakes.

repurposing of the crucifix is actually like in my top five favorite things about christianity

xpost -- Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

yeah she was all "i washed them off". lady it ain't your right to do that.

I certainly don't remember any particular focus on the idea of guilt as intrinsic in my religious upbringing as such,

Maybe I was privileged in this regard, but as a Catholic school attendee for 12 years I never got the guilt. Maybe it was a post Vatican II phenomenon? My mom, however, got nothing but guilt.

Why do/did Christians hate Jews for killing Christ when He* had to die for our sins so that we can go to Heaven?

(*still a believer, so all pronouns capitalized...)

Then Alfred why don't you do what they do in Orthodox ceremonies and stand up straight through three hour services?

Because Fr. Frank forces us to say ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys for masturbating in the bathroom.

I know that's not meant as a non-sequitur, and yet.

the whole ecce homo bit and he died for your sins is the main thing i took from going to church between the age of 3 or 4 and 15 or 16. crucifix probably the least inexplicable thing about the whole shennanigans.

catholics no longer believe that jews killed christ. apart from weird ones like mel gibo who go against the contemporary teaching of the church.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sexually_active_popes#Suspected_to_have_had_male_lovers_during_pontificate

Lenny Bruce said Catholics would wear electric chairs around their necks if Jesus had been a 20th-century martyr.

xxxxp (*as if the switch from third- to first-person ("us") didn't already tip you off...)

Doesn't Mel Gibson follow an anti-pope?

i'm lapsed, but still feel like a catholic. I never got the political drubbing about abortion etc at my catholic school (which wasn't associated with a diocese and had very few people from the church involved in it). as a result I don't have that kind of grudge against the church. but knowing that is there makes me resist going back to it (even though I live in a really liberal area where I'm sure 75% of the catholics at the churches near me probably are not in line with traditional church thinking on this topic).

if i was going to let something temporal about the church bother me it would more be the endemic child fucking and covering-up there of than the backwards views on abortion that would piss me off.

but it's just the whole kit and kaboodle that i'm put off by so i needn't worry.

Christianity in general makes me so angry, Catholicism only even more so, I try not to be baited too often. But I also have a weird history of being a very serious-minded kid in a super Evangelical community with no outside influences to level me out, so it's not really the usual thing.

as a catholic school person for 12 i never got the guilt. again, prolly cuz i was thrown out of CCD in 8th grade for farting.

well here's what has always confused me about the crucifixion narrative. on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc. so re the second interpretation it makes sense that you'd wear a crucifix (maybe. it was still a very common event to be crucified so it doesn't seem like a great grower as a symbol of a new religion -- tho i imagine without any historical background in this area that probably the icon emerged long enough after the Roman empire that this didn't appear to be so bizarre). has the first account (despite being canonized primarily in Mark) mostly been ignored in the main Catholic narrative or what?

Also I tried to find things to carry with me, maybe just from the "spiritual practice" side of what I was taught, but I feel more and more certain as time passes that there's absolutely nothing salvageable there.

"forgiveness" a pretty good one i thought but w/ever

(i have the kinda-luxury of having been brought up Nothing so everything looks way better to me than it does to people who were brought up Something)

Mordy, one of the motives behind adopting the crucifix WAS its commonness and lowliness. It was the death of thieves and murders and rapists, the lowest thing that Our Lord could be subjected to. This is common across all Christianity, I think -- not specific to Catholics, although the rest of us don't portray the human form on the cross in our iconography.

xxxp I think it's the being rose again after three days that turns the crucifixion into a victory:

on one hand (and this obv varies by what gospel you're reading too) it's a negative account where Jesus either has to forgive the ppl killing him (they know not what they have done) or is in crisis (why have you forsaken me), etc. but in other accounts or maybe other hermeneutical traditions it is a very positive event and he died for humanity's sins, or his death was a gift to us (in its atonement), etc

these all go together and are not contradictory:

he forgives the people killing him -his followers, the crowd who choose barabas etc.- because he is the ever forgiving christ-god who dies for us in order to wash away our original sin even though we've gone against him and aren't worthy of such a sacrific.

he is in crisis because, although divine, he is human and wrestles with his predicament and torture until reaching acceptance and understanding of it.

xxp yeah iirc (and maybe i do not rc) the crucifix was in use as a symbol from the religion's earliest beginnings as a roman cult. it is a really neat defiant thing, i think! and what laurel says about connecting the holiness of the godhead to the lowliness of the lowest is also def true.

yeah and also don't underestimate the attraction of sheer maudlin morbidity

oh man I got onto other stuff and now there's a lot of questions

Something I've always wondered about: Why do Catholics revere the symbol of the crucifix when a) it was just the most common Roman instrument used for putting people to death, and b) it was the method used to kill Jesus.

well, it's not just Catholics - that's all Christians. Crosses everywhere. It's a paradox, kind of your classic Jesus paradox: Jesus came to save you. You love him for that, right? Assuming you accept that you were damned & were likely going to Hell, this Dude came to take your place, because He loved you exactly as you were, warts and all. You on your worst day, He still loves that person enough to die in his place. Presumably you love Him back for that, but He has to die to accomplish the work of grace. So the cross on which He dies in transformed into an instrument of triumph; the instrument of His demise becomes the sign by which those redeemed by Him recognize one another and gain comfort and fellowship.

this is not a specifically Catholic teaching but it's the cross as I understand it.

NB I do not still actually believe much of this but I'm willing to offer defences as long as people don't talk like "oh ua believes all this stuff," I don't, I'm just intimate with it

The English theologian John Bale attributed to Pope Sixtus "the authorisation to practice sodomy during periods of warm weather."

i'm hazy on this but i think the cross took a while to really take off as The Symbol of the church. the fish was the 'sign' among believers for a good long time

xp Didn't you know? Anal keeps you cool.

I actually see more people with fish pendants and fish symbols on cars than crosses and crucifixes.

evangelicals love all the 'early church' stuff

I am totally going from a small. Sample size and should have worded it as a question. I am genuinely curious whether there’s something inherent in Catholicism that makes forgiveness, or the lack thereof, a powerful tool.

xp Well I am also very suspicious of Anglican converts to Catholicism, they take it all way too seriously, they don't get that having so many rules means that you can safely ignore all of them.

i mean look what you really wanna watch out for are _british catholics_. british catholics are just fuckin' bad news all around.

English Catholics I think you mean.

xp But I guess they usually convert because they object to female/gay vicars or something.

Some of the loudest leftists I know are Catholics, all of whom have liberation theology sects in their blood.

I am totally going from a small. Sample size and should have worded it as a question. I am genuinely curious whether there’s something inherent in Catholicism that makes forgiveness, or the lack thereof, a powerful tool.

― Comfortably numbnuts (Heez)

oh sure, it's the biblical passage that they say is the scriptural basis for the papacy, from Matthew 16:

17 Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. 18 And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it. 19 I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20 Then he ordered his disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.

forgiveness, or the lack thereof, is an _integral_ part of catholic tradition, on an _ongoing basis_. out of the seven sacraments, the only ones that are _regular acts_ are communion and confession. it's part of why "catholic guilt" is such a thing, the expectation is that you are regularly going to confess your sins to a priest and do penance (i personally was never asked to do more than symbolic penance - a couple hail marys, a couple our fathers, not even close to a full rosary's worth, just a couple). it's kind of similar to the concept of "self-criticism" in marxist-leninism, except done in private rather than in public.

Some of the loudest leftists I know are Catholics, all of whom have liberation theology sects in their blood.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

the thing that gives me the most pause about this is that among white leftist catholics at least, the one they all seem to praise most is Dorothy Day. and in a lot of ways, in a lot of things, i think what she did was good. but it's the anti-abortion thing. to me, you know, i don't feel like that's someone i can be in _communion_, as they say, with. because what happens is time goes on and what gets lost is all the radical stuff she advocated for, and what _stays_ is the anti-abortion bit. an institution like the catholic church, particularly one founded by patriarchy, it wears down and erodes any opposition to it.

the same way, this is my understanding you have... francis of assisi. and this is a guy who was a radical opponent of the church, a radical reformer. martin luther wasn't the first. you had people, _often_ from the clergy, looking at what the church was doing and saying "hey, this, uh, this doesn't really seem to be in line with, like, what jesus actually taught, he wasn't all 'hey you want to live a good life start a rich, powerful, and oppressive institution in My name'"

and the church was like "ok two options. one, you quit talking about _political_ issues and stick to telling people to be good people, and you know, we'll encourage that. we're on the same page here, we want people to be good people too. but if you keep going around telling people about how what we're doing isn't in line with what jesus said, you know, we'll declare you heretic and kill you and all your followers. your choice, friendo." and he chose the first path, and that's why pope francis has the name he does, and catholics can all go like "lord make me an instrument of your peace" or whatever, and there are all these pictures of him being a friend to animals. and that's it, that's kinda all you get out of him, a name and some inoffensive pretty-sounding words.

i mean i guess being put to death as a heretic wouldn't exactly have done him any more good. like, what, he could be remembered the way the cathars are? yeah that doesn't seem like an improvement. idk. i guess i drank the kool-aid a little much as a kid when they kept telling me what saints the martyrs were.

i was at the funeral of an elderly rural catholic today, service was weird as they all seem to me now that im long enough outside of the cant and the concepts but the piece about the departed spelled out a life well lived and cherished and celebrated all the same regardless of noting his fondness for a pint

merchant seaman, mechanic, antiques dealer and father of ten. doubt he was a saint, dont doubt he was a catholic, doubt he was observant for what the purposes of this thread would seem to be

in other words typical enough of my experience of the irish roman catholic

little enough time was spent on the school-rules fanaticism which seems to dominate american commentator experience of catholicism. if i were to guess id say theres about ten of those people in the world and seven of them only started after reading dan brown.

is it possible ye read the rules and rarely observe the people at all, i ask

Eh there's a lot of American Catholics who identify culturally but don't practice any observance or church attendance except weddings and funerals, and they CERTAINLY don't have a personal religious practice or any interest in a moral code or spiritual pursuits. Unfortunately they still vote for Republicans and against abortion despite enjoying the benefits of birth control, family planning, mixed fibers, and doing whatever they want on the sabbath.

is it possible ye read the rules and rarely observe the people at all, i ask

― close encounters of the third knid (darraghmac)

the rules, and the powerful people who decide what the rules mean, they have more influence on my life than the people. it's just... it's the hardest thing for me, to talk about things on an _institutional_ level, and i do it poorly sometimes and it comes out as looking like i have something against the individual people. which i don't. i mean i don't have anything more against catholics than i do against, say, harry potter fans. the harry potter books, i haven't read them, but i'm sure they're fine books. they're important to a lot of people. it's just that, you know, supporting harry potter, it hurts people who don't deserve to be hurt, whether one _wants_ to hurt them or not. (and yes, i am drawing a direct equivalence between harry potter fandom and the roman catholic church. fuck it.)

feeling emotional and heartfelt at darragh’s post. last line a real killer.

hey my dad loathed religion all his life but still got a priest in at his deathbed. and i don’t think it was a pascal’s wager thing. not in the sense it’s commonly meant. and his mum was a lovely kind irish catholic married to a nasty disciplinarian by all accounts. both devout far as it goes. only one of them good.

community and communion probably meant something to them both but as darragh says, not sure the rules meant as much as all that.

❤️ fizzles

otm

hey my dad loathed religion all his life but still got a priest in at his deathbed. and i don’t think it was a pascal’s wager thing. not in the sense it’s commonly meant. and his mum was a lovely kind irish catholic married to a nasty disciplinarian by all accounts. both devout far as it goes. only one of them good.

community and communion probably meant something to them both but as darragh says, not sure the rules meant as much as all that.

― Fizzles

mmmm. i do feel differently about it.

my dad has a cross on his gravestone. i don't think it was catholic. he loathed religion all his life, and at the end, when he was alone, there was a lady who was there for him, to be his friend, and she converted him. that's what she _does_ with her life. and, i mean, i'm glad she was there for him. i'm glad she could get through to him when i couldn't. he buried himself in shame about abandoning us, about being a shitty dad, and poured it all out to her at the end. and it would have been nice. it would have been nice if he could have told me when he was alive. if i didn't have to get it secondhand. and for all that i'm grateful it seems... it feels _transactional_. to me, the cross, it corrupts, it debases, what i truly believe was this woman's genuine love, her genuine compassion.

that's the other thing about being a catholic, my grandfather's favorite movie was _a man for all seasons_, and it's a great film. it's one of those films where catholicism and leftism converge, i think, the film is a leftist film but it's a leftist take on catholic belief. and one of the things that i was taught about it, growing up - i didn't see it for a long time, but i was _taught_ about it - was that it wasn't enough to do the right thing, that there was a question of _why_, _why_ a person did something. that thomas more struggled with that. and no matter how good my dad's friend was, no matter how much it was _right_, the fact that on some level she was doing it to "win souls for christ"... i don't think that reflects badly on her. i think that reflects badly on _christ_. he has no _right_. no right to my dad's soul. that cross on my dad's grave marker is a lie. and a god, a church, a religion, that is willing to _accept_ that lie...

well, it's like Robert Wyatt sang on "Alliance" (_Old Rottenhat_, 1984):

It's hard to talk to enemies. We are enemies. What we had in common makes it even worse...

In truth, my values are as Catholic as anyone's. I believe in the power of forgiveness, truly believe in it. Not just for the sake others. For for my own sake, for my own _soul_. Forgiveness, for me, it's putting down a burden, letting go of that compulsion to distance, to wariness. The need for _vigilance_. I've had to be vigilant so often, about so many things. I have to be vigilant far too often now. I hate all of the things I have to see, I have to know.

Because I can't forgive. Not like, refuse, I believe, believe in my heart, that it's not possible. Not possible for me to forgive someone for something they don't believe was _wrong_. All I can do in that case is make excuses. All I can do is cape.

The thing about having 1.35billion adherents, is you're going to be able to find whatever you're looking for within that communion, good and bad.

I grew up in a fairly strict American Catholic setting. After my mom died, The Young Pope denied my dad's 2nd wife an annulment on her first marriage, so my dad stopped going to mass entirely.

On one hand, I respect it. On the other hand, hey what now?

That sucks. Most of the Catholics I know are either priests or seminarians or lay people with Bachelors in Theology. They are all, of the ones I know well, lovely, caring, sacrificial, forgiving people. I think seriosly studying the tenets of Christ and the Church sifts the grain from the chaff (for the most part)

Last I heard there were about 1 billion Catholics in the world. That number has certainly been inflated to include anyone raised Catholic or otherwise claimable by the church, but it suggests to me that anecdotal evidence about the nature of Catholic individuals is likely to run the full gamut from truly unrecognized saints to the worst people ion earth.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

Was raised Catholic growing up and was probably one of the model examples - taught Sunday school, Catholic summer camps, altar boy, etc. Maybe it was just the church groups we attended, but none of the more detestable aspects of the church were apparent or just leaned into through it all. I stopped attending as soon as I hit college because I think there were people involved that were more representative of Christianity as a whole that turned me off. That idea that "I can behave terribly but I'll be fine because I go to church and God always forgives" started becoming more noticeable in my later teen years when it seemed like the more reasonable option was to JUST BE NICE to people.

A lot of this is my story too. I was an altar boy, I went to CYO, I went on Catholic youth retreats, I went to an all-boys' Catholic high school for two years. I never had any bad experiences through any of it; I guess I just wasn't any of my local priests' type, because at least two of them were defrocked or quit the church later. One moved to Las Vegas and got murdered one morning by a guy he'd molested years earlier. Anyway, I stopped going to church when I moved out of my mom's house at 18 — I'd long since drifted away from any kind of Christian belief and into reading about other stuff (Zen, Taoism, the usual shit). These days my "beliefs," such as they are, are a kind of personal amalgam of Zen, Taoism, Stoicism, and Norse/Asatru values — blood, honor, manliness, but without all the stuff about the gods.

My mom is still very much Catholic; she does the readings at her church just about every week, and does a lot of charity work — drives meals to the elderly, does people's taxes for free, maybe some other stuff too. She acknowledges all the shitty things the Church and her alma mater, Penn State, have done, but it neither invalidates her engineering degree nor impacts her faith.

similar for my dad, who was born and raised Catholic. He joined the Knights of Columbus after he retired and all the kids left the house. I don't ask too much about it but as far as I know that's mainly been a social thing for him.

I know he has some old-school thoughts about women that aren't as severe as other people, and he's been called out by my sister, so I've never felt like piling on to what's probably an in-grained lost cause. But he was never a Jesus-first parent - which I really appreciate looking back.

perhaps Heez hasn't finished Home Alone. Marley and his son forgive each other at the end.

well, my Methodist-turned-Catholic mom took me to see Home Alone when it was originally out in theaters, and I'll cherish that time and parenting decision forever.

Bob marleys in home alone?!? Ok I’ll finish it.

I grew up Lutheran in the south. It was extremely chill. Church camps all that stuff. Not much guilt or anything like that. My mother and father are still Christian but they do not go to the same church nor do they vote for the same party. My mom prefers the activist, community oriented side of the church while my dad prefers the traditional side. The south is mostly are up of baptist and evangelicals who believe in the gospel of prosperity and rarely do community outreach.

I now live near DC in a neighborhood filled with federalist society lawyers who rarely engage with their non-Catholic neighbors. I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who are some of the best ppl I know, but seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

Anyway Catholicism has come to represent this very corrupted version of religion that you either walk lockstep with or fight against. And yes, I understand my small neighborhood doesn’t represent the entirety of Catholicism, so I’m mainly just asking questions, be it from a very skewed place

The thing about having 1.35billion adherents, is you're going to be able to find whatever you're looking for within that communion, good and bad.

― H.P

sure. 1.35 billion adherents is a lot. i don't need to play diogenes looking for a Good Catholic. they're all over the place.

one pope, though. one college of cardinals. all men, all celibate, or pretending to be. one Young archbishop of Portland, denouncing "gender ideology", issuing edicts forbidding teachers in Catholic schools from referring to trans kids by their _names_, from gendering them correctly.

one man. how many children? how many fucking kids is this one man abusing, and nobody says anything, nobody _does_ anything, it's _fine_ because he does it in the name of _Christ_, he does it in the name of the Roman Catholic Church?

-

I can't... I can't talk about what it was like for me, growing up Catholic. How it affected me. I try, but I can't. It hurts too much. Sorry. Y'all... I think y'all talking, I really would _like_ for y'all to know. But I can't tell you. Maybe someday. The most I can do is jump off Heez here:

I also know a lot more of the New England Catholics, well former Catholics, who ... seem extremely damaged by the church and their strictly religious parents.

My Catholic roots are Midwestern. Brahmin-y, but Midwestern. My parents, my mom's parents... I don't think of them as "strictly religious" either. I went to Catholic school, Catholic college, church every Sunday, but I don't think of my upbringing as "strictly religious" in the "women with exposed ankles are immodest" sense. Have I been extremely damaged by the Church and my parents? Absolutely.

I can't say more than that right now. I wish I could. I don't believe in... I don't believe in the culture of _silence_ I was raised in. I really want to speak up. I just can't right now. I'm sorry.

this is an excerpt from an auto-generated transcript of the most recent episode of the “know yr enemy” podcast, in which sam adler-bell and matt sitman, who is himself an adult catholic convert, discuss JD vance. I found sitman’s discussion unexpectedly moving!

“Well, you know, Sam, since you mentioned Vance's conversion to Catholicism, it's interesting that, you know, I mentioned that Hillbilly Elegy came out in 2016. It wasn't until 2019 that he became Catholic. And, you know, he actually wrote a very, I found, interesting essay for The Lamp.

Some listeners, I don't think we mentioned The Lamp before. It's a subtitle, A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, The Fine Arts, etc. It's edited by Matthew Walther.

And they actually publish a lot of interesting pieces, to be honest. They've turned it into a much more interesting magazine than I thought it might be when it started. He actually wrote an essay for The Lamp in April 2020, titled How I Joined the Resistance on Mama and becoming Catholic.

And I did want to say that, you know, a lot of this essay of his really resonated with me, in fact, especially how alien Catholicism felt culturally to him. You know, his mama was a sort of Protestant of some kind, but didn't have much use for organized religion. Then he went through these different, you know, again, when his biological father became pentecostal, you mentioned Sam Vance taking that up.
“.

He also went through a kind of new atheist phase, at the peak of Christopher Hitchens and Dawkins, you know. And there's much that could be said about kind of the journey, you know, the first seeds of kind of doubt about the new atheism, so on and so forth. But here's the key part for Know Your Enemy listeners.

And again, why Vance is such an incredible subject for us to take up, is the key moment in his kind of conversion to Catholicism in particular, but just kind of like a key moment for his life period, was when he heard Peter Thiel give a lecture at Yale Law School, which is a huge moment for him in multiple senses, because that's when he became interested in Peter Thiel, who he thought was kind of like talking sense in a way that a lot of other elites in the tech and finance worlds weren't. And Vance will say this lecture changed his life. He will use that kind of language.

But part of how it changed his life was, this is where through Thiel, Vance became familiar with René Girard. And so Girard was, I think it's fair “to say, the key intellectual influence in Vance becoming Catholic. He does mention one thing in particular, which I did kind of like.

He says, Girard points out that Romulus and Remus are, like Christ's divine children and like Moses, placed in a river basket to save them from a jealous king. There was a time when I bristled at such comparisons, worried that any seeming lack of originality on the part of scripture meant that it couldn't be true. This is a common rhetorical device of the New Atheist.

Point to some creation story, like the flood narrative in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as evidence that the sacred authors have plagiarized their story from earlier civilizations. But Girard rejects this inference and leans into the similarities between biblical stories and those from other civilizations. To Girard, the Christian story contains, however, a crucial difference, right?

A difference that reveals something, quote, hidden since the foundation of the world. And then he goes into describing the scapegoat, right? And the way that Girard kind of acknowledges all these similarities and then points to that one crucial Christian difference, the reversal, right?

The innocent scapegoat, the forgiving scapegoat even. So he “does have this, we'll link to it in the show notes, this fairly interesting essay on his conversion to Catholicism. But it connects to Hillbilly Elegy.

He points this out specifically. He says, the left's intellectuals, and I'm still quoting from this Lamp Magazine essay on his conversion. The left's intellectuals focused much more on the structural and external problems facing families like mine, the difficulty in finding jobs, and lack of funding for certain types of resources.

While I agreed that more resources were often necessary, there seemed to me a sense in which most of our destructive behaviors persisted, even flourished in times of material comfort. The economic left was often more compassionate, but theirs was a kind of compassion devoid of any expectation that reeked of giving up. A compassion that assumes a person is disadvantaged to the point of hopelessness is like sympathy for a zoo animal, and I had no use for it.

And so he ends up kind of saying that as he was reflected on competing views of the world, the wisdom and shortcomings of each, he liked the moral vision of Catholicism, what it held together, like the moral demands with a “certain level of forgiveness or grace or that kind of thing. And I just want to say, I mentioned that specifically because I think it does connect to what we're just describing, right? The moral disorder, the fear of being consumed by your impulses or desires.

And I just, those kind of moral demands and moral kind of framework of Catholicism as being what persuaded him, it was so interesting to me because it is a compliment to everything we've been discussing in Hillbilly Elegy. And also so foreign to my conversion to Catholicism.

Is that right? Well, I wanted you to say, because you guys have this shared, you know, sort of comparable early religious experience in relation to faith and God, and then also conversion.

So, well, for me, I was drawn to Catholicism for essentially one reason. And that is, I believe, what the Catholic Church teaches about the Eucharist is true, meaning Jesus is in some sense literally present in the bread and wine of communion. And even the first time I met my priest to talk about becoming Catholic, like I went through all these reasons, kind of like Vance does, all the intellectual reasons

“And I said, but actually, Father, I really believe Jesus is present in the Eucharist, and that's what the Catholic Church teaches, and that's why I want to be Catholic. I long for that. And he said, well, this is why I only had to meet with him four times, kind of had this express conversion.

He said, you want to be fed by Jesus in a way you're not being fed now. Why would I delay that longer than I have to?

I love that.

You know, and so almost effectively, I do feel a lot of Vance's essay was interesting to me. Certain experiences like the kind of otherness of Catholicism resonated, but it left me quite cold because there's like a passionate reason I became Catholic, like that animates me. And even when I talk about it now, you know, it's like, this is the thing.

So I just have to say, yeah, his conversion, I don't want to downplay it. It's not like it felt inauthentic to me. It was just much more related to like morality and kind of the system that provides an account for, as he put it, kind of like, among the “competing visions of the world, this is the one he found most persuasive.

Well, we've talked about this before, that the systematicity of Catholicism is often something that attracts right-wing Catholic converts.

And he does mention that too.

Has that satisfying kind of...

Comprehensiveness.

Yeah, yeah.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

Yeah, exactly.

thats really interesting stuff ty for posting

i think the critical shared element between the two journeys there as described is that each seems to have been searching for the right spiritual structure for themselves out of what already exists

the convenience of that always awakened the cynic in me as far as ever getting any further on a person spiritual journey, or perhaps breaking early from rural irish catholic faith left me extremely wary of hopping on the next preformed solution- nb there were not very many alternative prefirmed solutions even had i wanted one ofc

i think its striking that someone could start into catholicism by believing in the Eucharist. ive always imagined the vast majority of practicing/cultural catholics would struggle to say they had that belief. i wonder what his journey was to that- it hardly occurred to him independently one morning.

Never thought of centering cynicism of religion/s around their historicity. Assuming Sitman converted from a form of protestantism... the denial of the real presence can be a hang-up/tipping point for conversion. Agreed though, with no Christian experience otherwise, it would be a striking way to convert.

Most Catholics in my acquaintance only speak in tongues when I offer them Negronis.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 5 April 2024 00:48 (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Also, love this ^^

sitman was very careful in that podcast (which is mostly a discussion of vance’s politics and his book, and is really good) to be as generous as possible re: his conversion, but it was clear he took a dim view of vance’s converting for “moral” reasons, probably because he saw it as a convenient technocratic approach to faith rather than a strictly religious one. as someone who is quite removed from his catholicism these days, I found that to be very striking and refreshing in a strange way

but yeah from a personal theology pov there must be some sort of longer backstory to his understanding of the eucharist

Totally, much more sympathetic towards Sitman. Converting to a religion for religious reasons? Classic. Converting for a reason that hasn’t been reduced to a religious reason (moral, traditional, cultural, emotional, etc.)….. I won’t go as far as to call it dud, but how firm is your foundation? Here I am cynical in the mould of darra; what happens when the next best moral/traditional/etc. system comes along? What happens when your moral/traditional-system changes? Seems like marrying the girl next door because she makes a mean carrot-cake and wears that dress you really like rather than for…. More uhhhhh, comprehensive reasons

No problem with dating based on carrot-cake and dress preferences though. In that regard, I am big on those criteria

I love this thread.

Hold on, JD Vance is a Catholic? Do Trump's evangelical supporters know about this?

They don’t give a fuck cos they align on the biggest issues (abortion is bad and women should be barefoot and pregnant).

Oh I'm sure some of them do.

Imagine the genesis of your religious conversion is a speech by Peter Thiel.

Saul on the road to Palo Alto.

Seems weird.

i think its striking that someone could start into catholicism by believing in the Eucharist. ive always imagined the vast majority of practicing/cultural catholics would struggle to say they had that belief.

Yeah. Also: what keeps the faithful believing in Catholicism? I've long thought it's largely -- I'm generalizing -- a belief in ritual.

https://i.postimg.cc/d0cGPZBr/20240814-124902.jpg

xp absolutely agree, the power is inshrined early or is bought into at later stage through circumstance such as described in kevs excerpt

my parents took me here when I was young.

https://www.ourladyofmartyrsshrine.org/

I remember it being like Shinto Catholicism - nature

Catholicism would have been more interesting to me if the religious ed people had actually talked about all teh weird stuff like names of demons etc.. there is a rich history there

en/in shrined xp

the appropriation of René Girard by creeps like Vance and Thiel is annoying af ... this piece is good on his scapegoat theory and its relationship to social media

https://criticallegalthinking.com/2023/09/04/mimetic-desire-the-scapegoat-notes-on-the-thought-of-rene-girard/

somewhat relevant to this thread because of Girard's personal Catholicism and his idiosyncratic approach to biblical texts

loved casey affleck in that

stories like this would have entertained me more than the usual homilies

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_the_Great

Anthony found next the satyr, "a manikin with hooked snout, horned forehead, and extremities like goats's feet."

This creature was peaceful and offered him fruits, and when Anthony asked who he was, the satyr replied,
"I'm a mortal being and one of those inhabitants of the desert whom the Gentiles, deluded by various forms of error,
worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs, and Incubi. I am sent to represent my tribe.
We pray you in our behalf to entreat the favor of your Lord and ours, who, we have learnt, came once to save the world, and 'whose sound has gone forth into all the earth.'" Upon hearing this, Anthony was overjoyed and rejoiced over the glory of Christ. He condemned the city of Alexandria for worshipping monsters instead of God while beasts like the satyr spoke about Christ.[29]

Writing up that "Vatican Miracle Examiners" anime yesterday had me thinking about Roman Catholic religious doctrine. The anime had some pretty, uh, unorthodox interpretations of Catholic morality and canon law, but there was some stuff that the people who catechized me would totally be on board with. I've seen some people freak out about Ouija boards or whatever but growing up what I learned was more along the lines of "Oh, whatever, it's not like you're not summoning actual demons or anything."

I say that, but of course I'm not an expert on Roman Catholic religious doctrine. Yeah, I was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, but I'm not a practicing Catholic or anything. I think of being a Catholic kind of like I think about being a man - I was born and people said "OK, this is what you are, here's what you need to do," and I tried pretty hard, and it just didn't work out for me.

The Catholic Church, though, the sense I get from them is that they got this attitude of "We love you, please call collect" towards me. Like how the Pope is still like saying to the Orthodox Church "Look, we want to heal this so-called Great Schism. Just accept Papal authority and say you believe all the same stuff that we believe and none of the stuff we don't believe, and we can get past this awful misunderstanding."

I know the Catholic Church can sometimes excommunicate people as heretics or whatever, but I feel like it's not something they do a lot? It's like "papal infallibility", the Pope _can_ speak "ex cathedra", from the Chair of St. Peter, but he usually doesn't. Personally I suspect it's because they don't want one of their successors to treat them the way Pope Formosus' successor treated him, but I don't know that for sure.

To the best of my understanding, I'm confirmed as a Roman Catholic, but I'm in a state of "mortal sin" - that I'm not eligible to receive the eucharist until I reconcile myself with the Church. And I guess any priest can do that - like I could go to a priest and confess my sins and he could say "In the name of Christ I forgive you, your penance is to say three Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, and don't do it again." I once read a story of a longtime Boston gangster who repented and was given the same ecclesiastical penance. I mean he still had to account for his crimes in a court of law. It didn't mean he didn't have to serve out the rest of his sentence. It kinda reminds me of when I hear therapists talking about their job. A lot of therapists say yeah, our patients are really ashamed of a lot of the stuff in their past and they don't want to tell us, and they have no idea the shit we've heard. They're really ashamed of something and don't want to tell us and it's just not the big deal they think it is, and things would go a lot better for them if they would just tell us. I mean if a therapist, who's very much human, feels that way, I can't imagine God would be any less forgiving.

Nah the sticking point is "don't do it again". This is all kind of new to me, so I'm not sure what the "it" in this case would be. I know if someone's a cisgender homosexual and comes to the Church, in that case the official doctrine is "don't do gay stuff", which is kind of a broad remit. For the record I also think it's morally reprehensible, to say God only loves you if you don't do gay stuff. I'm not actually planning on reconciling with the Mother Church. Mostly I just want to know what reconciliation looks like from their perspective.

I'm pretty sure I'm in a state of mortal sin, technically speaking, but I'm not entirely sure what my mortal sins _are_. I'm not sure the Church knows entirely what my mortal sins are. I mean that's the thing about Catholicism, it's a very complicated religion and it's not one that has a lot of loopholes. For instance, when I was young, I learned about the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which forbids contraception as a violation of the "ethic of life", and there are a lot of Catholics who are very serious about that, and most of the Catholics I grew up around weren't. They'd point out yeah OK the Pope said that but he didn't say it _ex cathedra_, he didn't say "Simon Says no condoms" or "sudo no condoms" or whatever.

And maybe that's the standard. Maybe me taking E is kind of like Catholics using condoms, yeah the Pope _says_ you shouldn't do it and there are a lot of people who will say it puts you in a state of mortal sin, but ALMIGHTY GOD doesn't say that. Probably if I found the right parish and the archbishop didn't crack down on them, like the superconservative archbishop around here does, I could do that, right?

Except wearing condoms is, we'll say for the sake of argument, a private act. I may not take E in public, but I go out in public every day and call myself Kate and use she/her pronouns and tell people I'm a woman. Is that, in and of itself, a mortal sin? In order to be reconciled with the Mother Church, would I have to tell people I was a man? I mean I guess it's not that much worse than telling gay people they have to stop doing gay stuff, but damn, it would affect every single minute of my life.

But, I guess, it's not fundamentally any different from the Catholic Church's desire to reconcile with the Orthodox Church. I just don't know why they expect anybody to take them seriously!