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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Am I the only one who struggles with the pull to the Roman Catholic church, but then recoils in horror at something and says no way ever?  (It's not just the abuse crisis and the birth control stuff--although those are pretty much deal-breakers on their own)  Intellectually, I love RC books etc.--such a great intellectual tradition and I love the quality control where books get an imprimatur etc.--but then I go to a parish and people (nice people, more virtuous than I am)--they won't engage that tradition...like I'll bring up books by their greatest theologians like Karl Rahner or books by leading Catholic academics--and it's like I'm quoting some forbidden banned book or something.  I've heard that the Arlington diocese is the most conservative in the country...but this is where I live.  Is being a liberal Catholic even possible today--especially in northern Virginia?  I don't even like that word liberal applied to faith--but everything just feels so rigid on the ground.  [/quote]

I felt like this when I was younger, but ultimately I decided that I was chasing a bit of a mirage. Roman Catholicism has a great intellectual traditions, but so do the Protestant churches. Karl Rahner is a genius, but so is Karl Barth. I settled in Anglicanism for other reasons, but the more I explore its intellectual traditions, the more beauty and truth I find. What attracted me to Catholicism was the history, because a lot of Protestants don't engage with their history much, but neither do a lot of Catholics in the pews. The version of any Christian faith that is deeply grounded in theology and history is mostly a construct of the internet these days. That's not to say its bad, I get a lot of fulfillment out of that, but I also know that no church I attend will be a reading group for the luminaries of its intellectual tradition. That's fine.

If I were doing it again, I don't think the sex abuse scandals would move me much; every church has them. I would want to look at whether I thought what the Catholic Church teaches is true and consistent with Christ. I decided that I don't think it is, even though I find that there is a lot of truth there and I think there are things that Protestants can learn from Catholics. That's just what I decided though.[/quote]

This is really beautiful.

Though I will say I have often found churches with congregants who are deeply grounded in the theology of their specific tradition (one of my former pastors had a map of the "family tree" of all the Presbyterian denominations in the US in his office that he would break out to show the high schoolers during a summer class), but they tend to be very nerdy churches. It seems rare to find churches that are both deeply grounded AND outward/mission focused. The Catholic church seems to be able to have all these streams because it's so [b]big[/b].[/quote]

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