Two Motives for my Catholicism

For a long time, I have realized that I have several different "motives" for my Catholicism, even though I should (perhaps) only have one. In this blog post, I'm only going to write about two, and concentrate mostly on the second. Here they are:

1) A belief that Catholicism is true. In all honesty, for me it has always been a choice between Catholicism and atheism (or agnosticism). I've never seriously contemplated the claims of any other religion. There are so many reasons for this; Catholicism's understanding of human nature, the lives of the saints, its reluctance to change its message, the apostolic succession, its spread through time and space, etc. So I'm moved to practice Catholicism because I consider it true and it's the source of my own and others' salvation.

2) Almost independently of this, a belief in the need for cultural Christianity. Society without religion seems loathsome to me. I can fully appreciate why an atheist like George Orwell would attend religious services and ask for a religious funeral. I'm baffled when people say they are religious but they detest organized religion, since organized religion itself appears to me as something highly desirable.

This applies to all religions, not just Christianity. But of course Christianity seems superior to me, in every way. Champions of other religions might say this is just a matter of familiarity, and I wouldn't be inclined to argue with them, although I don't think it's just that.

Without organized religion, in my view, society slides into pure utilitarianism (or worse). It loses ritual, ceremony, a sense of awe, continuity over generations, and so many other things.

You can of course have ceremony and ritual without religion, but somehow it never seems serious or whole-hearted. The essence of religion, from a social and cultural point of view, is that somebody believes in it.

All of this occurs to me most intensely, perhaps, when I'm reading about the Oxford Movement. The Oxford Movement could be seen in many ways. I like to see it as a group of young men who decided they were going to be very serious and intense about those very elements of religion that their immediate forebears found almost incidental. ("Purified" religion is like white bread; people only realize later that they've lost the most wholesome parts.)

Organized religion only seems to flourish when people are willing to be unreasonable about it, to risk the accusation of fanaticism or narrow-mindedness. When people are willing to be laughed at for its sake.

This is probably my favourite quotation from Cardinal Newman: "Here I will not shrink from uttering my firm conviction, that it would be a gain to this country, were it vastly more superstitious, more bigoted, more gloomy, more fierce in its religion, than at present it shows itself to be. Not, of course, that I think the tempers of mind herein implied desirable, which would be an evident absurdity; but I think them infinitely more desirable and more promising than a heathen obduracy, and a cold, self-sufficient, self-wise tranquility."