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| Don't worry I'm not using a ball |
Like all week-end golfers I have played the occasional round of golf that brings you back to the course with delusions of grandeur only to be humbled before making the turn to complete the back nine.
I remember taking lessons and at the end of my final lesson my golf instructor said to me, stay off the course for two weeks, and then quit. If that wasn't enough he also advised me not to use my name and golf in the same sentence.
Then one day on the course I had an epiphany. My problem was that I was using a golf ball from tee to green. I stepped onto the next tee sans golf ball and hit a magnificent drive. I watched the imaginary ball turn from right to left and found myself twenty five yards from the green. I played my second shot and my imaginary ball with imaginary side spin came to rest two inches from the cup.
My problem all along had been those silly rules of the game that said I must use a golf ball. Every round is now a joy, and yes I know that you are going to say that I'm not really playing golf. I don't care, it's my happiness that matters, not some silly rule that states that a ball is part of the game. If I say it is golf it is golf.
Paul Elie, a senior fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times titled Give Up Your Pew for Lent.
"At 8 p.m. last night in Vatican City, Benedict XVI resigned the papacy. Now American Catholics should consider resigning too."
"The conventional wisdom has it that Benedict’s resignation sharply reduced the aura of the papal office, showed a tender realism about old age, and made clear that even ancient Catholic practices could be changed. That is all true, but the event’s significance is more visceral than that. It has caught the mood of the church, especially in North America."
"So if the pope can resign, we can, too. We should give up Catholicism en masse, if only for a time."
Pope Benedict XVI has decided that he can no longer carry out the duties of his office, but he is not leaving the Church. If Mr. Elie decided for whatever reason he could no longer carry out the duties of a senior fellow at Georgetown and tendered his resignation he would still belong to the Church.
"In traditional parlance, Benedict’s resignation leaves the Chair of St. Peter “vacant.” So I propose that American Catholics vacate the pews this weekend.
We should seize this opportunity to ask what is true in our faith, what it costs us in obfuscation and moral compromise, and what its telos, or end purpose, really is. And we should explore other religious traditions, which we understand poorly."
Rather than vacate the pews Catholics who are struggling with their faith might want to spend more time in the pews. Mr. Elie who teaches and lectures at a Jesuit university should take another look at The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
The Church does not ask us to compromise our morals. There are of course sinners in the Church, but Mr. Elie might be forgetting that human beings sin, whether they are Catholic, Jewish, Quaker, Moslem, or Protestant.
I would suggest that Mr. Elie read the book Goodbye, Good Men. When one speaks of moral compromise and obfuscation this book makes it very clear what moral compromise and obfuscation has cost the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church is still the Church Militant, not the Church Triumphant, and there are orthodox Catholics that do not understand this distinction, as well as those that are on the road to heresy. As far as the end purpose of the Church, it is to unite as many human beings as possible with God and Jesus Christ in eternity.
"A temporary resignation would be a fitting Lenten observance. It would help believers to purify and deepen our faith in the light of our neighbors’ — “to examine our own religious notions, to sound them for genuineness,” as the American writer Flannery O’Connor put it. It would let us begin to figure out what in Catholicism we can take and what we can and ought to leave."
Catholics who are struggling with their faith, who have doubts would be better off reading Mother Theresa. Mother Theresa labored on in spite of doubt, or what one could call the dark night of the soul. Mother Theresa may not be very popular at so called Catholic institutions because her stand on abortion is probably too uncomfortable for many of the seekers of spiritual enlightenment. After all it is all about me, and what makes me feel warm and fuzzy.
One can remove the crucifix from classrooms for fear of offending a non-Catholic, or they can remove them from the sight of Catholics who need to forget that there is more to life than the warm fuzzies. I'll give Georgetown the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they were removed from classrooms in the hope that Christ would not have to witness what goes on at Georgetown.
Catholicism is like playing golf with a golf ball. There are times when the game is easy, and there are times when the game is a struggle. Sometimes I am a good golfer, and sometimes I am a poor golfer. When you play golf and hit a bad shot you should always remember, you held the club and it was your swing when you played the shot. The one thing I know that will not help my game is a Unitarian golf instructor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/opinion/if-the-pope-can-quit-catholics-can-too.html?_r=1&
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