Reviews for The Catholic faith

The average rating for The Catholic faith based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-08-12 00:00:00 Ashley Levine Contrary to what its title may imply, The Catholic Faith is neither some condensed version of the Catechism nor a comprehensive summation of Catholic beliefs and doctrine. It is, however, an excellent introduction to many of the Catholic Church’s most essential beliefs, and thus includes fifteen short, erudite essays on the divinity and humanity of Jesus, his passion and resurrection, the papacy, the sacraments, the Mass, Mary, and the Trinity, in addition to other central themes and topics. Notably, Father Roderick Strange, a former chaplain at Oxford University and the author of several books on now Saint John Henry Newman, seeks to explicate why the Church believes what it believes and, more than that, stresses the significance of various aspects of Church doctrine that many non-Catholics and even committed Catholics may find difficult to affirm. Take, for example, how Strange approaches Catholic attitudes toward Mary, the mother of God, historically a source of criticism in Protestant discourse. First, Strange stresses that Marian devotion is rooted in Catholics’ beliefs about Jesus as fully God and fully man: “Our care for her flows from our love for him.” If Jesus were not God, then Mary would not be the Mother of God, and thus she would play a very different role in the life of the Church than the central role she now plays. He also adds that, for Catholics, Mary is the model of perfect discipleship; “her words of acceptance” in response to Gabriel at the Annunciation “stand as the motto of the Christian faith. . . . The true disciple will always be like Mary,” he writes. Strange therefore contextualizes Marian devotion in its simplest terms before he explains more controversial claims about her, a move Catholics too often overlook in their defense of Marian doctrine. With this foundation in Marian devotion established, he proceeds to address what for many non-Christians is rather nonsensical, perhaps near-impossible to believe: that “Jesus was conceived without the intervention of a human father.” First, he observes that while parallel examples of divine participation in conception were ubiquitous in the ancient Mediterranean world—a refrain oft-repeated from historians who stress the unexceptional circumstances of Christ’s birth in the context of ancient Mediterranean myth—these stories “all presume some form of intercourse . . . [with] a male deity or element,” whereas Jesus was conceived without intercourse by the creative power of the Holy Spirit. He also notes that, historically, those who denied such a conception “usually did so because they denied as well that Jesus was divine”; Jesus’s divinity has always been linked with how Christians understood his conception. Nevertheless, Strange contends, “it is impossible to maintain that belief in Jesus’ [sic] divinity requires the virginal conception. Jesus would still be the divine Son of God if he had been conceived and born in the normal human manner.” If this is the case, then one may ask what the significance is of this belief about Mary and Christ’s conception? To this reasonable inquiry, Strange observes how Catholic doctrine about Christ’s conception and birth reflect the Christian emphasis on God’s intervention in history—that God sent his Son into God’s creation as a man. “We do not identify that belief as a conviction about Mary’s biological [my emphasis] condition,” he writes, “but we affirm that she conceived the child and remained a virgin, and locate the significance [my emphasis] of her virginity at a secondary level: her actual virginity earths for us the birth of Jesus as God’s intervention.” Even if non-Catholics may not find this interpretation persuasive, focused as they may be on the scientific impossibility of what Matthew and Luke claim to have happened to Mary, Strange refocuses the discussion for the Christian faithful who seek to understand Catholic doctrine on Mary, rather than blindly affirm what they were once told to believe without much in the way of explanation. I take pains to summarize Strange’s discussion of Christ’s conception and birth in relation to Marian devotion because it encapsulates his scrupulous approach toward a whole host of other doctrinal matters. He is attuned to criticisms of Catholic doctrine and to how poorly the Church has expressed the context from which its doctrine develops and the reasons for what it upholds. As a Catholic who attended Catholics schools my entire life before university, I was often confused and frustrated by what I learned about Mary, the Eucharist, other sacraments, and Scripture. I wanted to have faith, yet my teachers infrequently helped me understand the beliefs I was told to affirm, which simply left me irritated at the apparent irrationality and nonsensicality of many core Catholic doctrines. This short book is a corrective to the sort of Catholic education I received on this front. Moreover, even those who may read these essays and still harbor serious doubts about Catholicism will at least better understand the fundamental assumptions that have led the Church to believe what it believes. This may even help them better articulate their opposition to such beliefs, which is ultimately profitable to believers as well, as Catholics converse in dialectic with other Christians and non-Christians on these topics. Anyone interested in Christianity will therefore learn from this book. There are numerous other explications I could cite that helped me better understand my faith. To conclude, however, I want to call attention to one point of emphasis to which Strange repeatedly returns, which helps to explain so much confusion in discourse on Christian faith: that “our experience of the divine can only be authentic when it can be shown to be completely independent of the human.” Strange seeks to confront and correct this assumption, which he appropriately claims “is radically unchristian.” What Christians experience of the divine, he insists, is manifest in creation and therefore also in humanity, such that efforts to identify the explicitly divine aspect in Christianity where it is affirmed that the divine is present (in Scripture, in the Church, in the sacraments, etc.) will fail. For example, Christians “are told that the Bible is God’s word and expect to find a mark upon those documents explicable only by recourse to the divine. When their search fails, they decide that they have been misled.” Or, when they detect human fallibility and contradictions in Scripture, they similarly balk at the notion that the text can be the inspired word of God. Similarly, Christians hear that the Church is the people of God and thus seek to identify its distinctive association with the divine. When some discover that the Church as a community works and acts like other human communities and can be analyzed and understood as a typical human social phenomenon, they dismiss the Church’s special status as illusory. Or, when they learn of reprehensible behavior within the Church, they find it difficult to affirm the sanctity of its institutional structures. Finally, to cite one last example, Catholics learn that the sacraments are God’s acts of love, central to the practice of their faith, yet when some later learn the ubiquity of rituals in other spiritual traditions that similarly aim to cleanse, feed, anoint, and sanctify, they wonder whether the sacraments are any different and are, perhaps, mere superstitions. For Catholics, Strange explains, the divine reality of Christ and of the Church, of revelation, of the sacraments, etc. “is perceived and known in . . . the conditions of normal human experience.” And this principle is rooted in the person of Jesus of Nazareth: while “the human and the divine in themselves are utterly distinct from each other, the birth of the Word of God as man teaches [Catholics] about their union,” a union that is perfectly harmonious if nevertheless deeply mysterious. Therefore, he concludes, “we have to examine our human condition and try to discern the divine within it. . . . The divine is always distinct from the human . . . but it is perceived by a profound scrutiny of the human.” That Scripture, the Church and its hierarchy, and the sacraments all embody human characteristics or reflect human behaviors in other realms should thus come as no surprise, nor should it arouse inordinate skepticism in the Christian faithful. To claim that one’s experience of the divine is only authentic when perceived or experienced separate and apart from the human, or that experiences of the divine are only accessible via suprahuman means is, as Strange asserts, simply unchristian. This, perhaps, is the most central takeaway from an all-round excellent introduction to Roman Catholicism.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-07 00:00:00 Jean-Pierre Roch It's interesting to see how far the Church has come since 1994, when this book was written. Critics have a short memory, and don't seem to want to compare the Church today with how it was a decade ago. If they did they'd see that it is quite on the rise. Other than a glimpse into the mid 1990's this book isn't really useful now, however. I found my attention lagging throughout the final chapters. It was neat to see so many quotes from then-Cardinal Ratzinger and Cardinal Arinze, and to still be hearing their names today (naturally, in the case of Ratzinger).