We love being Catholics.

Thursday, 4/16/15

I have been invited for lunch with some people who have left the Catholic Church, and, although I doubt that we will talk about our religious differences, I think that will be uppermost in our minds.

Rome, before Vatican II, removed Father Henre de Lubac from teaching and publishing. He had written a book saying the Apostles had not held that original sin kept unbaptized babies from heaven. A friend of his wrote asking him if his banishment had turned him against the Church.

Father de Lubac wrote back saying he could never turn against the Church. She was his mother. He lived to see Vatican II publish the following sentence he had written:


“The dignity of man rests above all in this, that he is called to communicate with God, and this invitation to converse with God is addressed to him at the first moment of his being.”

If I were asked about it tomorrow, I might come up with different reasons for my love of the Catholic Church, but right now it is these three reasons that  come to me.  

First, I love our dependence on the clear thinking of Thomas Aquinas who said that God is pure beauty, goodness and truth; so that we can see anything beautiful as Godlike, anything good as Godlike, and anything true as being at one with the mind of God.

Second, I love our ancestors who kept the Faith alive, and who were kept alive by our Faith. Among them I particularly admire America’s early Irish Catholic bishops, Carroll, Kenrick, Purcell and Gibbons.

Third, and above all, I love renewing the Last Supper at Mass seven mornings a week. Rather than seeing Jesus giving us his body so that we might enthrone it for adoration, I see him giving himself to us so that we might be physically as well as spiritually one with him in the Pleasing Gift, in the Eu-charis, at the sacrificial moment of the Mass.