*Are you a Practicing Catholic?

What Does it Really Mean to be a Practicing Catholic?

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately, the term practicing Catholic is bit squishy and subject to abuse by all manner of Catholics (in name only) who seek to justify their various stances
The person who claims to be a practicing Catholic while not giving at least religious submission of intellect and will to the all Church's teaching, including that related to the ordination of women, artificial contraception, abortion, and homosexuality (to pick a few of the hot-button issues) is being disingenuous.  These moral teachings are part of the "standards of excellence" that are part of the Catholic practice.  Without at least religious submission of intellect and will to these and similar teachings, one can be many things, but one thing one cannot be is a practicing Catholic.

We likewise see it when the nuns involved in that hotbed of radical dissent and radical feminism known as the Leadership Conference of Women Religious--recently the subject of a doctrinal assessment by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith--when it insists that it is composed of faithful and practicing Catholics despite it and its members' public stances against the Church's teaching on such subjects such as the ordination of women, homosexuality, and a whole gamut of sexual matters.

The laity is similarly eager to use (or abuse) the term.  We have such abuses when Vice President Joe Biden or House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi--both politicians one would classify as pro abortion and pro-homosexual "marriage"--claim to be "practicing Catholics."

Outside politics we see the term practicing Catholic abused, for example, when the Ursuline-educated global promoter of contraception Melinda Gates claims to be a "practicing Catholic."


To enter into a practice, therefore, is to subject one's "attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partially define the practice."  We cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far.

With respect to a practice, our feelings are irrelevant.  Our personal druthers are likewise immaterial when it comes to a practice.  "In the realm of practices the authority of both goods and standards operates in such a way as to rule out all subjectivist and emotivist analyses of judgment," MacIntyre observes.

MacIntyre gives examples.  "If, on starting to listen to music, I do not accept my own incapacity to judge correctly, I will never learn to hear, let alone to appreciate, Bartok's last quartets.  If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fast ball and when not, I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch." 

Now there is always danger in applying a purely human or philosophical concept


By Andrew M. Greenwell, Esq

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online)
1/30/2013 Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)