Arturo’s take on the church
He says he doesn’t teach doctrine or want a following like ‘Catholic bloggers’ so on his own terms he’s a good read even if sometimes he’s wrong. One wag dubbed him the Etienne Gilson of Questionable Latin-American Religious Practices. My line as regular readers know is here at the Infallible Sportsmen’s Club and Pennsylvania Pierogi Festival I think I’m in the same non-modern spectrum as him and the SSPX (the self-conscious, self-righteous ‘100% Catholics’ he doesn’t like along with the conservative Novus Ordo culture warriors co-opted by the Protestant right and thus the mainstream Republican Party), north as in norteamericano of him (more self-consciously churchy) but south of them. Trad minus the ’tude.

The official church of course has its job: being 100% Catholic in its teachings and rules for practice. Arturo’s point: lay bloggers aren’t that official church and:

For the rest of us, Catholicism is what it always has been: the quaint religious obligations and signs that occasionally give us solace in a time of need. Having grown up in a Catholic world, this mentality does not separate religion from the values of the society in which it finds itself. Most Catholics do not have an “us vs. them” approach to the Faith, and it maddens the Catholic blogosphere and its allies that they do not. In the end, Catholicism is a religion of laws that try to bind a heterogenous mass of people together. At this point, those laws have a negative and not a positive effect: they do not so much tell you what to do in every circumstance, but often only let you know what you can and cannot think.

Labels: the Catholic faith