Friday, March 04, 2005

Swimming the Tiber

I don't know who R. R. Reno is, but I plan to find out.
His essay in First Things tells of leaving (can we say escaping?) the Episcopal Church to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. He is a layman and writer, teaching theology at Creighton University.
A google search led to yet another blog, ROFTERS. (Sigh...one more to monitor. This could get tiring.) Here are a couple of snips. Yet another provocative and thoughtful read.

A few days after my reception into the Catholic Church, a colleague at Creighton who knows my attraction to dogmatic hyperbole took particular pleasure in observing, “My, my, you look ontologically different.” Kidding aside, he was certainly right on one level. I have changed. I once tried to forge a vocation of faithfulness as a loyal member of a liberal Protestant denomination. Now I am a member of the Catholic Church. I changed—I made a change. I do not think I changed my mind about theology or ecclesiology or the fate of Christianity in the modern world. I suppose that, in the end, I changed my mind about myself. All the major premises of my argument stayed the same, but the minor premises changed, and with them the conclusion.
[...]
The Catholic Church did not deliver me from apostasy and false teaching. I teach at a Jesuit University, so I am not naïve about just how insouciant about orthodoxy priests can be. Nor did Catholicism provide me with a neat, efficient, and trouble-free church. I do read newspapers. What my reception into the Catholic Church provided was deliverance from the temptation to navigate by the compass of a theory. The Catholic Church has countless failures, but of this I am certain: Catholic Christianity does not need to be underwritten by an idea.

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