What Exactly is a Roman Catholic? As one of those nasty and oft reviled nominalist, I think general nouns do not possess a universal (Platonic or Aristotelian) which defines a unified concept but directly refer to a constellation of vaguely resembling particular phenomena, not necessarily consistent with one another, in a Wittgensteinian family resemblance sort of way. But suppose we want to define what exactly makes someone a Roman Catholic. The answer isn’t as clear as it seems. One can resort to loaded theological vagaries “being in communion with the successor of Peter” or whatever. The problem with theological generalities is that of course, there is nothing distinctly *Roman Catholic* about it. Any Eastern Orthodox could claim that all bishops possess petrine succession, heck, even a high church Presbyterian can claim that all ordained pastors/priests possess the petrine succession or whatever. What we need therefore is a definition which precisely identifies a Roman Catholic qua Roman Catholic. To that end, I’ve come up with three hypothesis which does clearly define it, but which are problematic in their implications. (1) A Roman Catholic is someone which believes everything in a certain set of documents. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Tridentine Creed, or whatever set of documents of your own chosoing, etc.) This is what I would call the “confessional” approach. (2) A Roman Catholic is someone whose name appears on some parish roll, what I would call the “canonical” approach, to be simply in legal canonical fellowship with the Roman Church corporation constitutes being a Roman Catholic. (3) A Roman Catholic is someone who takes communion at a Roman parish. I would call this the “living communion” approach. All of them obviously are problematic in their own right. (1) would shrink the number of Roman Catholics to a very tiny minuscule who are even aware of those documents, never mind have subscribed to them. (2) would let in too many “nominal” Roman Catholics who behave exactly like the world but whose name have not been stricken out of the parish rolls simply because the Roman Church nowadays can’t be bothered to excommunicate anyone. (3) is even worse in that even prelates themselves have stated that they do not wish to use the withholding of communion to discipline even openly erring “Roman Catholics” who openly go against certain canons, etc. Furthermore, most Roman clerics as a rule give communion to anyone, to even Protestants and non-Roman Catholics. (There was an amusing story about Stanley Hauerwas who regularly took communion at a Roman parish even though he wasn’t a Roman Catholic. There was one time a priest refused to give it to him and he simply went to another queue to receive it!) To date, no self-identified Roman Catholic has ever given me a coherent answer to my question. To that end, I would simply say, when it comes down to the crunch, there is really no coherent meaning to being a Roman Catholics. Of course as analytic philosophy has always pointed out, the meaning of words often consist in the use and not in some unified and immediately grasped concept. Even though we lack a coherent meaning as to what constitutes a “Roman Catholic”, we still can talk about them, but with the understanding that we are referring to a complicated range of particular phenomenon frequently jostling against each other in tension. Among the set of entities referred to by the word, self-identification is the most important (although paradoxically contradicting the definition of certain documents whereby being a Roman Catholic is something bestowed upon by the Church and not adopted by one’s own sheer will or decision!), but also inclusive of the “parish roll” definition, taking communion, believing certain documents, etc, in various permutations and combinations. Maybe in the end being Roman Catholic really has no fixed visible identifiable marker, maybe it’s just something people just know in their hearts or in their spirit or something. I’m fine with that sort of move, but this Roman Catholics “in the heart” looks awfully like Protestantisms “invisible Church”.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 01:46:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015