From Katolik Shinja
Iraq: they know they are lying
By Dr Thomas Fleming

Dalai Lama tells Christians and Muslims not to convert to Buddhism
Joshua Snyder wonders if he...

...is speaking not only out of genuine goodwill, which I'm sure he is, but also out of practical concern for the integrity of his own religion. I've known enough Western ex-Christian self-proclaimed Buddhist converts to know that they seldom add much to their new religion, in the way that the recently converted Christian Asians and Africans have added so many saints and faithful to the Catholic Church. [In fact, if you want to find Christian orthodoxy in the modern world, look to Africa and Asia!] Most of the Western converts to Buddhism I have encountered, in contrast, seek belief without dogma, religion without demands, spirituality without discipline, enlightenment without effort. In other words, they are seeking something that does not exist. The Dalai Lama should tell them to watch Oprah instead.

The late apostate priest Alan Watts was one of those offenders according to a biographer of Fr Seraphim (Rose) — search the blog for my views on the last — but even he had some respect for the integrity of traditional religions (or why I like Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism better than the Novus Ordo and other kinds of modern mainline Protestantism):

I have been trying almost all of my life to work for a true catholicity, a fellowship wherein Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Taoists, Jews and the rest could recognise their common ground...

Well and good as we hold that the truth in that common ground is contained in the Catholic faith. Watts denied the uniqueness of Judæo-Christian revelation; he was a relativist/indifferentist but interestingly not a syncretist:

and worship or meditate together without quarrelling, and yet without abandoning their interesting and colourful differences of method and style. I would not really want to see a Buddha-image on the high altar of St Peter’s or a crucifix in the Kaaba...

On natural religion (which we would say shares much with and is completed in the Catholic faith):

It has struck me that if one pay on attention to the meanings of the word [which of course one can’t do but anyway], most forms of temple-doings are essentially the same: chanting, bowing, candles, incense, gongs and bells — from the peyote ritual of the Oglala Sioux to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Paris, and from the Abbey of San Anselmo to the Daitoku Temple in Kyoto.

There is simply a consciousness clear as crystal and open to truth, reality or what is — which as St Thomas Aquinas would have said is what all men call God.

- From The Supreme Identity, a hard book and potentially dangerous, not something I’d recommend to everyone, including those new to the Catholic religion

The Lord loves the one who loves the Lord.

The faith teaches that one may be saved who in his conscience believes his religion to be right (contra Leonard Feeney).

The Anglosphere
Part of Catholic Europe or a toxic mutation of it? I like to think at heart it’s still the former but the best known things about it today are of the latter. (The parts that neocons like: Disraeli and Churchill for example.)

In any event, such national/ethnic pride must be balanced out by an awareness of universality, Catholicity, as Joshua points out. In a way so does Fr Paul Schneirla (he’s speaking for Eastern Orthodoxy) quoted by Benjamin Andersen.