Re: half-Catholic?

From: charles_almond_pearson (charles_almond_pearson@MSN.COM)
Date: Fri Aug 17 2001 - 21:43:26 EDT


Patrick,
 
I was delighted to see you use the term "cheap grace".  I take it you've maybe read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Cost of Dicipleship"?
 
Al Pearson
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Patrick Monaghan
To: PERCY-L@listserv.lsu.edu
Sent: Friday, August 17, 2001 12:19 PM
Subject: half-Catholic?


--On Wednesday, August 15, 2001 9:51 AM -0500 James L Piat <piat@JUNO.COM>
wrote:

All that preaching about the gas chambers, for
> example  --as a half Jew and half Catholic I, personally,  find it
> extremely (extremely) offensive.  Who the hell is he, as a Catholic, to
> be preaching about what led to the gas chambers.  Seems to me a bit of
> humility or even an apology might be more in order.  Especially the fact
> that the propriety of this preaching is never challenged.  That it never
> seems to occur to anyone that such talk might be offensive.

What the hell  (as you say) is a half-Catholic?  Does that mean you believe
in one and one-half of the Trinity?  Now I can see being a half-assed
Catholic or a lapsed one or an unbelieving one or an ex...but what claim to
authority is supposed to be gained by speaking as a half?

And a half Jew?  Well at least there is a biological claim that may be
halved, but isn't Elizabeth Taylor a Jew and wasn't Sammy Davis Jr.?  By the
old law the requirement was that your mother be Jewish...that would dispense
with halfness...then there was the Nazi's definition which was more
inclusive...and under the law of return both Dershowitz and Trotsky could
flee to Israel, but Edith Stein and Mortimer Adler couldn't.

Who hell is anybody to say anything?  Would one have to be an ex-Catholic,
former Jew, black who passed, man who transgendered, woman who after
hetrosexuality became a lesbian, then reemerged as a man and floated back and
forth to be able to express any insight or say anything?

Percy kindly and good naturedly pointed out some things that I think are
true.  They deserve to be dealt with at the level of discourse, not ad
hominem attacks.  Anti-Semitism?  How about charging him with being part of a
Communist-Jesuit-Masonic cabal on the Council for Foreign Relations that is
working for the Vatican?

We have just come through the bloodiest century and we need someone to talk
to us about the Armenians, the trenches, the gas, the gulags, the camps, the
bomb, Cambodia, Rwanda (rather than never again it's here we go again) and
that is what Percy tried to do.  

If we could save the world by torturing a baby, would we do It?  Well
Christopher Reeve and Mary Tyler Moore and probably a majority of the
academic elite probably would and the indifferent are even larger.  Who the
hell is some Russian writer anyway?  Academics and Hollywood stars are born
Qualitarians it seems.

Instead of self righteously apologizing or demanding apologies for the  past
in which most of us were not around, we would do better to address the
current horrors which our body politic is busy enacting.  Cheap grace
abounds.

We have perfected the way to handle our personal guilt by publically
professing noble political sentiments of a chicken in every pot, universal
health care, and an ecologically friendly electric car in every non-profit
community supported garage...these proposals need not work or be achieved
intelligently, we only need to be for them loudly and as a reward we can be
rich or comfortable without guilt.  I think we would do better visiting
Father Smith in the firetower and going to confession.  

Sin darkens the mind and weakens the will and when we lose a sense of it
through the Skinner box or ideology, then as Dr. More observed, we are really
in a fix.  Dr. Max Gottlieb (Got Love) means well for us and that means a
lot, but fornicating with a great conversationalist who has read all of Mazo
de la Roche, rather than with a stewardess, who took a fancy to us on a
flight to Houston, is still fornicating.  

The social consequences of personal guilt distort our actions and keep us
from effective and charitable response to one another.  Confession to cops,
shrinks, bartenders, ladies of the night, relieves us, is expensive, and
doesn't work, but Father Smith in the firetower can be the vehicle through
which absolution is received. This is not to say this is a limit on God's
forgiveness, but it is a place where the forgiveness is always available and
that can be a handy bit of knowledge, like knowing where 42nd Street or
Jackson Square is, it can help you get around.  Percy pointed this out
gently.



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