What Makes a Good Catholic?
One of the joys of my childhood in the mid-1970s was attending Saturday evening Mass with my grandparents. I recall the dim lighting of St. Paul’s church, the images of the Stations of the Cross posted on the walls of the nave, and the sound of the congregation’s collective voice during the responsorial psalm.
My favorite part, though, was hearing my grandmother proclaim the final “Thanks be to God.” She always announced it with genuine appreciation mixed with mischievous spunk. She made me believe that she felt deep gratitude, but I always sense a smidgeon joy that the service was finally over.
In her memory, I usually declare it the same way.
The conclusion of the Mass meant that we would climb into their Chevrolet and drive to the local mall where my grandparents would socialize with their friends over a meal while my sister and I played video games or hung out in the record store.
On the way there, my grandfather (who was active in his local Knights of Columbus council) would talk about some element of Catholicism. One week, the former K of C Grand Knight explained what a good Catholic is.
The Knights say that practical Catholic “accepts the teaching authority of the Catholic Church on matters of faith and morals, aspires to live in accord with the precepts of the Catholic Church, and is in good standing in the Catholic Church.”
That seems pretty straightforward. But today people debate endlessly on social media and in the Catholic media what constitutes a “good Catholic.”
Some people, especially on #CatholicTwitter, seemingly try to prove their good Catholicism by demonstrating how “traditional” they are. You may have seen their tweets tacitly (and sometimes overtly) rejecting the Second Vatican Council or calling the Pope a heretic.
These so-called “traditionalists” hope to correct perceived upheavals in society and the Church by returning to pre-Vatican II forms liturgy.
That’s not an overstatement.
One author asserted, “The horror we see in the Church today is the existential proof of this. For about fifty years, we have ‘experimented’ in weakening… these essential elements of religion.” He goes on, “Finally, when seen in this depth, it should not astonish us that moral depravity — even debauchery, the failure to preach the entire deposit of faith authentically, and the corruption of liturgical practice are all symptoms of one and the same profound disease: apostasy.”
There are two points of irony here. First, publishing that article on a website is the kind of media usage Vatican II envisioned for evangelizing. Second, rejecting the council called by a Pope and endorsed by the bishops is apostasy in itself.
Beyond that, it is absurd to believe that the church and the world are falling apart because Latin is not the language of the Mass and the priest faces the people instead of having his back turned.
While behaving as if they were more Catholic than the pope, they create a dilemma. In a truly catholic church, no one has the right to promote a private or sectarian set of traditions that “out-tradition” the tradition. The reactionary attempts to do so is tantamount to Docetism, the ancient heresy that affirms a disembodied Christ — in this case it is separating a doctrine from the living experience of the Church.
Being Catholic, like belonging to any group, is an identity marked out by boundaries, rewarded with benefits, and requiring responsibilities.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church has minimum requirements of being a practicing Catholic. Nevertheless, because it is a global church, Catholicism has a wide range of doing these things. Franciscan expressions of Catholicism look different than Carthusian spirituality. The contours of Amazonian Catholicism take different shape than they do in South Korea.
The apostolic journeys of Pope Francis to places as diverse as the Central African Republic, Bulgaria, and Panama highlight unique expressions of Catholicism around the world. The Vatican astronomer and even Pope Francis have even speculated what Catholicism might look like if we ever encounter extraterrestrial life.
It is useless to try to replicate medieval Italian Catholicism. And why would we try? We’re not medieval Italians — regardless of how much some people on social medial like to pretend they are.
On July 18, 2019 the Sisters of Mercy organized the Catholic Day of Action in Washington, D.C. Several sisters, priests, and lay people protested the detention of immigrants and prayed for their humane treatment. Some, like Sister Patricia Murphy and Sister Quincy Howard were arrested as they prayed in the U.S. Capitol.
Sister Norma Pimentel is the Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley. She helps care for hundreds of migrants and their families; many, if not most, of whom are Catholic.
So who is the good Catholic: the person yelling into the social media void arguing for the necessity of a Tridentine Mass or the person working to relieve the suffering of others? The person using a false Twitter name rage tweeting as they bash Pope Francis or a person locked in a cage, separated from their family, and longing for the Eucharist and a safer home?
Trying to out-Catholic others is a luxury many Catholics around the world without access to social media or a choice of parishes do not have. And ultimately, it is a fruitless endeavor.
It reminds me of the critique Jesus made against his antagonists in Matthew 23:23. “Hypocrites! for you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”
While they were busy with the smaller details of the tradition to prove they were literally holier-than-thou, they were neglecting what the details were intended to elicit. The rites and rituals are important not for their own sake but in order to create a context for the “weightier matters” to emerge.
Tradition isn’t intrinsically corrupt or fraudulent. In fact, it’s a blessing. Chesterton observed that tradition is downright democratic; it gives voice to those who have gone before. Tradition also recognizes that we will make mistakes, but it seeks to ensure that we will not make the same mistakes.
Loyalty to the tradition requires that we correct mistakes and add to tradition. The Creed recited at Mass came into being over the course of four councils separated by a total of 125 years. Enhancing tradition might be the most traditional practice good Catholics can do.
Catholic tradition exists to serve people, not the other way around. Jesus taught, “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
The living body of teachings, practices, and devotions empowers Catholics to follow Jesus. If that’s not what is happening with tradition, we are misusing it.
To paraphrase St. Paul in 1Corinthians 13,
“If I speak in the tongues of monastics and Scholastics, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have intellectual powers, and understand all theologies and all sacraments, and if I have all faith, so as to remove heresies, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I attend the most traditional liturgy so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
Holding onto what was the real or imagined tradition without recognizing the legitimacy of emerging tradition dishonors the entirety of the tradition. And dishonoring people made in God’s image — even on social media — in order to uphold all or part of what anyone considers to be tradition dishonors does not seem to me to make anyone a good Catholic.
How do you expect to be a good Catholic while arguing with everyone who doesn’t share your hope of returning to a mythical glory day of Catholicism?
Being an good Catholic has little to do with Latin chants, exquisite reredoses, and ornamental vestments. Instead, you are a good Catholic if you are participating in the living tradition of the Church by following the call of Jesus Christ.
Beyond that, we might be wise to re-envision the question altogether. The Gospel of Mark offers a profound story in the life of Christ.
As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.
Jesus himself would not engage in a debate over who was good — even if someone used that descriptor to flatter him.
Arguing over who is good, what is good, and how someone can prove their goodness leads us away from continual self-examination in the light of God’s goodness. In an echo of the Fall, we take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with disastrous results.
The drive to be good is a misguided attempt to attain a self-centered perfection that requires the self-worship (and sometimes self-loathing) of comparison. “I’m good. You’re not. My Catholic tribe is more Catholic than yours.”
It’s easy to see that this impulse ends up creating an idolatry that can never attain what it promises.
Catholics may wish to reconsider the desire of judging who is good or better-than altogether. Works of mercy reshape our actions to serve God in the “least of these,” and the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity reorient our gaze away from our own goodness and onto God who alone is good.
