Those strange Catholics!
I loved this article - it’s so true!
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You are Weird; God is Odd
by Peter Mirus, special to CatholicCulture.org
July 13, 2005
There’s no hiding the fact that my family are a bunch of nutcases, and I’m certainly the nut with the biggest cracks. This is probably apparent to everybody. But aside from our garden variety eccentricities, there is a certain aspect to our weirdness that encourages us, but to others it may only compound our apparent strangeness: our Catholicism. I mean, it really doesn’t get any weirder than being a Catholic.
There’s a certain perception of Catholics which is excusable merely by having an outsider’s view. You don’t have to be raised on Jack Chick to tell that there is something a little bit odd about Catholicism, at least superficially. For example, it isn’t too hard to form the opinion that Catholics pray to statues. We all kneel in front of them with regularity, gazing and sometimes muttering. And if you take us at our word, we eat the flesh of Christ. This is more bizarre than curious.
And there’s more: Gregorian chant, incense, fasting, transubstantiation, spiritual intercession, sexual ethics, the notion that “death with dignity” can include a prolonged and apparently meaningless suffering, etc. And if you believe in the Pope, then in your heart you can’t really be in favor of democracy.
To say that God works in mysterious ways is another way of saying that God is inscrutable. And if you want to make a rhyme out of it, you can say that God is odd. Catholicism is odd too. And if you try to be godly and practice your faith fully, the world is going to regard you as odd.
The truth of the matter is that God is knowable (though His ways may seem odd) and the Catholic Faith is only superficially bizarre when in fact the epitome of truth, goodness and beauty. It is the world that is weird and distorted – a mere reflection of the truth, and a fractured one at that. We live in an upside-down world, but if you align your self contrary to the world, then the world sees you as out of place. Ironically, for centuries “progressive” thinkers have accused orthodox Catholics of burying their heads in the sand; it is in fact the opposite. It is much easier to bury your head in the sand if you are already standing on your head.
And yet the perception remains: we orthodox Catholics are anachronistic, bizarre, strange, odd creatures. In short, we are weird. If the world stops regarding us and our children as such, then either we’ve converted the world or it is time for a revaluation of our tactics.
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Amen! You can read the article in its entirety at: http://www.catholicculture.org/highlights/highlights.cfm?ID=67
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