My experiences are not abnormal in the RCC. When a priest or nun came into the parish, the first thing we asked was how many other places he or she had been. If they moved a lot they were under suspicion. We all knew the church moved their problems around.
i was not localized. i knew people from many parishes. My brother was invited to go to a priests cabin with the other alterboys. neighbors said they would not let their kid go. We knew why. there was a limited policing among the parishioners in a defensive way. you just did not go to the police or complain to higher levels. The fact that we knew no good would come of it and you would be labeled as a troublemaker for the church was part of the problem.
My problem is that if a church honestly believes in what it preaches it would not allow one incident to go unpunished. This is in direct opposition to teachings and should not be tolerated. The organization instantly becomes corrupt and loses its right to respect.
As I grew older ,I found that almost everyone I encountered had similar stories. I admit I am from an earlier generation than most dopers . Those that preceded me would not even discuss the subject like it was taboo.
[ul]
[li]Are these actually presented pervasively as Church teachings by Church representatives, or is your family’s experience unusual?[/li][li]If your family’s experience is commonplace, then do those teaching functionally become the beliefs of the institution in America despite the fact that it conflicts with official stands?[/li][li]Is there a significance to the fact that teaching such misperceptions is so tolerated by authorities, if it is?[/li][li]If these positions are not Church positions but are commonly taught as if they are, then how (or should) Church powerbrokers remedy the causes of the perception?[/li][/ul]
Well, as a (really rough) analogy, the theology of the church, in the forms of letters, recorded homilies, local synods (committee meetings), theological tracts, papal encyclicals, and recorded debates, corresponds somewhat to the Talmud. The declarations put forth in Councils would generally correlate to those few sections of Halakah within the Mishna that (as I understand it) one synod or another has declared true and closed for discussion. These council declarations are the things that the church has agreed upon as absolutely True. Some Council declarations have spilled over into the realm of Haggadah (simply because Christianity approaches spirituality a bit differently than does Judaism). So, for example, when those attending the Council of Nicaea in 325 put forth what became the Nicene Creed, that was established as fundamental to Christian belief.
At the far end of the scale, other writings of various theologians that get quoted a lot tend to be analogous to the Haggadah of the Gemara. (And remember I’m just trying to set up a loose analogy, here; they are not direct correspondences.) So people are liable to be taught the ruminations of theologians, simply because they have stature, even when the church has not defined it as doctrine.
An easy example is Limbo. As a recently departed poster was fond of pointing out, there are several passages in Scripture that indicate that those who have not been baptized are damned. An early proponent of that idea as a teaching was Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430 C.E.) who was one of the first “systematic” theologians. According to ol’ Augie, it was Baptism or Damnation. Unfortunately, we have a few problems with that, as Abraham, Moses, Elijah, and a few other folks would not normally be seen as damned (and I do not recall at the moment how Augustine dealt with that). So, some theologians proposed the idea that virtuous pagans (and babies who died unbaptized) could not get to see God, but they could not, under a just God, be damned to hell. So the theologians messed around with the idea that there was a “place” that was neither heaven nor hell, in which souls could hang out in perfect “natural” happiness, without the joy of the supernatural happiness of heaven.
The Church never bothered to address the issue as important or relevant to doctrine. So the idea sort of limped along with an occasional theologian suporting it or opposing it from time to time for almost 1500 years. About a thousand years along on its journey, an Italian poet decided to write a description of Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, (populating each place, appropriately, with the people he admired or hated). Since Purgatory was going to go away at the end of time, he could not place his infants and righteous pagans in Purgatory and the general theological thought at that time was that they could not hang around heaven, so he placed them all in his First Circle of Hell and made it a pleasant garden where the “good” pholodsphers and kings from among the pagans could hang out in a pleasant atmosphere for eternity.
When Milton borrowed a few themes from Dante, he gave the equivalent place the name “Limbo” from an old word meaning “border” since that place was outside, on the border of Heaven and hell.
Note that at this point, the church has still never addressed the issue in any official manner. However, we now have two great poets (along witrh any number of theologians) talking about it as a real theological place or condition. From there, any number of people, (either actual theologians or just folks who owned pen and paper) expounded on the ideas presented to that point and much of that speculation wound up in text books.
And still the church has never made it a matter of doctrine. In fact, Pope Benedict XVI just recently called a meeting of some of his former students (now professional theologians) to work over the concepts of Limbo with an idea to just tossing the whole thing out.
However, any person who grew up with a Catholic education prior to around 1970 was probably taught about Limbo, even though it is not and has never been doctrine. It has simply never risen to a level of awareness among the church leaders to the point where they thought it was worth pursuing.
Other issues are often treated the same way. The Extra Ecclesiam nullus salus phrase is, as noted, one of those. All sorts of popes and bishops and theologians had employed the phrase over many hundreds of years with a sort of implied understanding that on each occasion it was addressing a particular local issue. It did not become a matter of conflict untl Fr. Feeney stood up and publicly announced that only Catholics were going to heaven. Once the statement was out where everyone had to look at it, the various church authorities said “Wait a minute! We do not believe that!” ande so they spent a bit more effort clarifying how the phrase should be used
On the stricter side are the declarations of the Councils. When Nicaea declares that Jesus is truly Divine, that becomes an absolute statement that defines a Christian, (or, at least, Catholics since Catholics hold to the validity of the Council of Nicaea). When Trent declares that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, that becomes an identifying feature of Catholicism.
Regarding the naming of sins, one will not find very many actual sins defined in any Conciliar declarations. Councils tend to address beliefs rather than actions. So, when people go around looking for guidance regarding sins, they wind up relying on current theological texts. These, of course, are shaped by all the sorts of trends that affect any discourse of ideas. Pertinent to the antecednts to this thread was a school of thought called Jansenism that indulged itself with some of the “hatred of the flesh” ideas that recur throughout Christian history. Just as each of the preceeding systems that declared “flesh” to be vile or inherently sinful, the followers of Jansenism, (although not Jansen, himself, who had died by that time), wandered into the territory of heresy, declaring everything about the human body to be sinful, and the beliefs got condemned because the church does not teach that the body is inherently evil). However, the teachings of the Jansenists were squishy enough (and on a few points, resembled actual church teachings), that even after the movement was condemned, a lot of their ideas–including a whole list of sins of the flesh–hung around in text books for another couple of hundred years. When I was a kid, there were (silly) books trying to set out how many minutes a couple could kiss before it became a sin and how much longer they could kiss before it became a mortal sin. None of those ideas had ever been vetted, much less proclaimed, by a Council, they were just theological speculation that were sufficiently local in nature that they never came to the attention of the Vatican to be judged for consistency with doctrine.
So, finally coming around to your questions:
I doubt that my family received “different” teaching than other families–local to my neighborhood. On the local level, different diocese were more or less affected by different trends (and different teaching orders would also follow different trends). Knowing many seminarians, I discovered that a tiny number of seminaries were known as hotbeds of unpurged Jansenism (students in open dorms dressing and undressing in common while facing the wall and using paddles or paint stirrers to tuck in their shirts :rolleyes: ) while other seminaries were known as hotbeds of “liberalism” (trying out various aspects of the “new” liturgy, based on the approved experiments in Europe, before the Vatican had given its blessing for dissemination across the world). In each case, those were the outliers with most schools being somewhere on a continuum in the middle. Any given diocese and any parish within a diocese was liable to be teaching some slight variant of all the different possible interpretations and each interpretaion would be shaped by the seminary the pastor attended (or the years in which the pastor attended that seminary) or which orders of sisters or brothers were teaching at the school and a myriad of other factors. My teaching sisters in grade school were members of the Dominican order from the Adrian, MI motherhouse. When I got to high school and began comparing notes with kids who had been taught by the Felician sisters out of Livonia, MI, I began hearing odd (to me) versions of Catholicism that sounded a lot more like what gonzomax and Valteron have recalled. (To be fair, my school did have a sister of a certain age who sounded a lot more like what the Felicians appeared to be teaching.) But the Adrian Dominicans were not some radical group into whose grasp I happened to stumble: my mother attended high school from 1929 - 1934 in Indianapolis and was taught by (if memory serves) the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Her education was very similar to mine, rather than like that of the stuff taught by the Felicians. On the other hand, my sister after attending the same grade school as I did, went to high school taught by a different group of Dominican sisters from Oxford, MI and many of her high school teachers sounded much more like the Felicians. My pastor through most of my childhood, a secular priest, had a pretty narrow view of the world. However, as an altar server, I met weekend assistants who were Basilian, Benedictine, Dominican, and other secular priests who had widely divergent views from our pastor. (I am not rating any one as good or bad–I am only pointing out that the idea of some monolithic Catholicism in which every diocese, every parish or school, and every person was taught identical information is not correct.
This brings me back to my Talmud analogy. The RCC has a nearly 2,000 year history in which many popes, bishops, theologians, Councils, synods, and local diocese have made a lot of different statements generally top address particular situations and many of those statements get repeated by later people out of context.
There is a core teaching and a core set of values that all Catholics accept (or depart). They include such obvious statements as the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, etc. There are also a greaty many aspects of people’s lives and spirituality for which the church has established guidelines without writing down prescriptive rules that cannot be reinterpreted or modified under changing cultural conditions or increased understanding.
When I wander into a thread with a “correction,” I try to be careful to identify locally held beliefs from doctrine that originated from a Council. I also attempt to note when there are, indeed, divergent beliefs on particular areas. My purpose is generally to ensure that no statement of “fact” on the SDMB that is put forth as “Catholic” misleads non-Catholic readers.
One fun bugaboo is the old “Catholics worship trhe saints.” I do try to point out the theological distinctions between worship and veneration and between prayers of intercession and prayers of adoration. However, I have also pointed out that the practices of some Catholics regarding the saints are pretty much indistinguishable from the worship of a pantheon of gods. This is the sort of case where we can find Church statements marking the distinctions rather forcefully, but where we also tend to find Archbishop Firebreather a bit reluctant to hammer on the door of 98 year old Mrs. McGillicuddy, demanding that she correct her heretical behavior.
That was an excellent post Tomndebb, a tour-de-force if you will. I’m glad our faith has people like you to explain it 
I think it was Mark Twain .They asked if he was a member of am organized religion.
He said…No I am a Catholic.
However to say I am a member of one parish is incorrect. I went to a catholic catechism when I was young. My wife went to a different parish ten years later. she went to 2 other catholic schools. My son went to a catholic grade school. a different catholic high school. Another catholic college in another state. We are not simply sitting in an isolated parish surrounded with bricks. I have no idea where Valteron went. I suspect a different time and a different place. Our experiences are similar. There are about 220,000 parishes around the world. I do not claim they are all the same. i will say that within my background and many others I talked to about their experiences are quite similar to mine.
Will Rogers.
Organized political party.
Democrat.
(Just in the interest of the Straight Dope®.)
Senior moment
Tom, thanks for the post but I am still not quite sure I got it. Perhaps I have just had faulty impressions in the past.
You’ve analogized to the Jewish tradition but Judaism is notably sans creed. The closest we’ve got is the Sh’ma. Arguments between rabbis and divergent interpretations are the norm. I had always thought that Catholicism was, in contrast, much more top-down with authoritative statements of belief that are catholic to the Church. Your presentation, if I understand correctly, is of a Catholic Church with some that is doctrinal but much more variation of beliefs and practice than I ever appreciated.
So let me see if i understand how your post relates to the questions.
Are the impressions of Gonzo and Valteron of the widespread nature of certain concepts being taught as if they were doctrinal when they are in fact against Church doctrine accurate? It seems like are saying that they could be but that there may be wide variation.
It seems like you are saying that such widespread teachings do function as doctrine to the lay community, much akin to how the concept of limbo functions as part of doctrine despite the fat that it was more a product of the poets than of theologins. It is still vital to be clear what actually is doctrinal vs just traditional and/or not standard interpretations, if for no other reason than to not confuse the interested but as yet uneducated lurker.
That Church leadership usually tolerates such divergent interpretations and concepts until push comes to shove.
The Church deals with it when push does come to shove by having high level authorities make a doctrinal statement on the subject.
Gonzo and Valteron feel that the Church’s silence in the face of inaccurate teachings amounts to endorsement and/or cover-up. You would disagree.
Does that accurately cover your positions?
No, actually another display of your basic ignorance. Twain was raised Presbyterian, but displayed mostly contempt for organized religion throughout his adult life. Some term him an atheist, but I’ve seen nothing to confirm that. Twain was never Catholic.
I would modify this to change “against church doctrine” to “not church doctrine.” There are many pastoral declarations, (statements intended to help people muddle through their lives in particular situations) that, being particular to a specific time, place, and condition might be appropriate, but which the church might ultimately reject as a universal rule. The church (inherently conservative and always slow to act) also perrmits a certain amount of discussion before it makes any grand declarations. For example, had the Franciscans and Augustinians had their way between 1275 and 1585, the doctrine of Transubstantiation might have actually wound up being declared heresy. (It requires an Aristotelian approach to philosophy while the scholars in those two orders were definitely Platonists at the time.) Until the word was adopted at the Council of Trent, it would not have been accurate to claim that it was doctrine or that it went against doctrine, because doctrine on that topic had not been settled.
We have hundreds of years of different people (including Luther and Calvin!) using some form of the phrase “Outside the church, no salvation.” Nothing (aside from common sense) prevents the church from deciding to interpret that to mean only Catholics can escape hell. However, when we look at all the different people who have used the phrase in different ways over all that time, we do not get a clear statement that consistently says only Catholics can escape hell. (Some did use it that way, but it was not a consistent usage that was enshrined as doctrine by any Council.) So the phrase was not a contradiction of doctrine, only an unclear expression that had not been formally addressed.
I would say that that summarizes my view (until someone nitpicks some phrase and I have to revisit the topic).
I agree with this statement regarding endorsement of belief. (And I suspect that the inherent conservatism of the American church under constant if low-grade persecution, a condition that always pushes groups to their most conservative positions, has much to do with individual teachers presenting some of this information as Fact or Truth to American students when the actual church teachings were much more nuanced.)
I suspect that the issue of “cover-up” or endorsement of specific actions of particular individuals is, while related, a separate topic.
I’ve been thinking over this statement
I suspect that the RCC (and the Orthodox) are a lot closer to the approach of Judaism than an awful lot of people realize. That is a bit of an historical accident. The RCC does, indeed, have a very long tradition of trying to “nail down” its teachings. The arguments that are repeated in the Acts of the Apostles regarding the admission of Gentiles to the new Christian faith and whether the 613 mitzvot apply to Gentile converts is referred to as the First Council of jerusalem and is regarded as the first Council of the Church. On the other hand, the church has always accepted a great deal of back-and-forth reconsiderations of different theological points, very much in the Talmudic tradition. In its inherently conservative nature, no one is allowed to simply wander out and declare some new “truth” or declare that a generally agreed upon belief is suddenly overturned. But until an actual declaration is proclaimed by a council, there are always people who are reexamining earlier pronouncements in the light of new information. There were numerous declarations in the nineteenth century that could be read as condemnation of trade unions. They tended to be proclaimed at a time when the early labor movement was tied to the (European) anti-clerical movement and was seen as a challenge to the (God given) authority of the church and civil authority. As the nineteenth century wore on and into the twentieth, and as the potential abuses of human rights that occurred under unrestricted Capitalism began to become more visible, the church, while never recanting its earlier claims for recognizing that all authority derives from God, began to issue more statements regarding the value of the individual and the rights of workers to band together to seek just working conditions. Those declarations, usually in the form of papal encyclicals, were the result of many heated disputes carried out in (more or less) civil fashion in tracts flying back and forth across Europe. Today, it is still possible to find new papers “re-examining” the nature of the positions put forth in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, (the one addressing birth control).
And while the nature of the authority of the church is pretty much “top down” (despite some lip service to collegiality that is still being debated following Vatican II, over 40 years ago), the church leaders do not operate in a vacuum and most disputes have been argued thoroughly among theologians and bishops before they ever get to the upper stratospher of any of the Vatican Congregations.
That clarifies my understanding. Thank you again.
So all of this stuff that was taught to my father, my mother my siblings and me in Canada, as well as to a number of my American Catholic friends, over decades and decades, was heretical to (or at odds with if you prefer) REAL Catholic doctrine as represented in the documents you produce (which by the way, most Catholics probaby did not have access to or were unlikely to see in the pre-internet era).
They should not have taught us that Protestants cannot go to Heaven or that people who die with one unforgiven mortal sin go straight to Hell. And Limbo was nothing but an fanciful speculation by some clergy and a couple of umaginative authors.
Leads you to wonder a couple of things:
Were the Bishops or whoever not execrcising any control for dedcade after decade when heretical (or at least grossly incorrect) doctrines were being taught in their system of Catholic Schools?
How do we know “incorrect” doctrine of that kind is not being widely taught today? For example, Purgatory has really no grounding in scripture outside of a few obscure references about praying for the dead that might have different meanings. After praying most of my childhood for the souls in Purgatory, might I find it is no longer in operation?
Yep, you wasted hundreds of hours that could have been better spent playing Tetris or Donkey Kong or “Drop-the-Hankie” or whatever was popular at the time. That’s life.
I think religion is contemptuous. Not my fault.
The Bakers
Jimmy Swaggart
Haggard
Pat Robertson
A billion dollars paid in child molesting suits. Covering up for centuries. I did not start with contempt for religion . It was thrust on me. Take off your blinders. The errors of the churches are too fundamental to be ignored or forgiven. It goes straight to the reason they exist.
Your complaint would have been more valid at a time when illiteracy was more general. You, however, were apparently either insufficiently interested or too lazy to pursue such matters. None of this stuff is hidden away in secret files; it can be found in most libraries. When the church publishes new declarations or clarifications (that always recount the history of the discussion–where do you think I got my habit of posrting more information than anyone could desire?), it always is reprinted in the diocesan newspapers which, back in the days of your youth, were always available in racks at the back of the church. As I have noted, none of this stuff was ever a surprise to my (now 91 year old) Mom.
As to the greater question regarding whether the local bishops and priests and teachers should have done a better job of showing the nuances, exemptions, and intricacies of the actual church statements, I agree with you that they failed in their responsibilities in that regard. There are any number of reasons for that, of course, some exculpatory, some not: many of them grew up hearing the same stuff and did not take the time to learn the more nuanced versions; too often they took a paternalistic attitude that they could determine what the people in the pews or schooldesks “needed” to know; and they probably often got tired of watching their audiences’ eyes glaze over when the discussion got any further than the primary catechism questions and gave up and relied on the Cliff’s Notes®/catechism versions of the questions.
If you wish to be mad at them for “failing” you, go ahead. Getting mad at me for setting the record straight before a larger audience while never blaming you for being “wrong” seems to be a matter of shooting the messenger.
Well, you could take the time (if you were interested) to look up the various documents that address the issue of Purgatory and find out how firmly it is imbedded in doctrine. Since Purgatory is addressed in both the Councils of Florence and Trent, it is unlikely to be going away any time soon. (Since you do not believe in God, Christitianity, or Catholicism, I would guess that from your perspective, it was all a waste of time, anyway, so how would it be more of a waste of time if the future church changed their teaching on the topic?)
It’s amazing how this has absolutely nothing to do with Frank’s post or with Tom’s earlier correction of you.
Twas about Franks silly comment.Not so amazing when you think about it.
“Contemptuous” is not the right word. “Contemptible” is.
Looks as though your English teachers “failed you.”
You claimed it was a “senior moment” that you substituted Mark Twain for Will Rogers, religion for political party, and Catholic for Democrat. That’s not a senior moment, that’s either ignorance or making up shit as you go along.
Am I the only one who invariably reads the title of this thread as:
I noticed I still have some ASS left, Tomndeb?
As in, you missed a few spots when you chewed my ass off?
OK, maybe it’s just me.