(This is just a tangential reaction to your post. I certainly cannot rebut your point and I, too, don't wish to further elaborate on this issue. I just want to let it all out.
..:) It s a double ironic vision, if there ever was one.
People in society s fringes constantly paint a picture of the Catholic Church as a great persecutor while the Roman Catholic Church constantly complains it's being persecuted just as constantly by the increasingly inimical tenor of the times. It s hard for anyone to blame the former. No one can afford to dismiss their point as bull manure.
Non-Catholics, in particular, are automatically marginalized by their sheer lack of number in this country. It's easy to be smug as a Catholic here. It s so odd, thus, for a Church whose beginning most especially has been a beginning of unbearable, unbelievable bludgeoning, to be guilty of being an agent of persecution when you consider how it flowered into one of the world's major organized religions.
Just take one minute to imagine how Rome before Vatican City came to be, how it was bloodied so profusely by many a martyr s blood. To my mind, the Catholic Church should, more than any other entity, take extra care to avoid issuing anything that might lead to any soul being unjustly persecuted, or worse, executed. In this light, recent fire-and-brimstone pronouncements related to pesticide poisonings and jailbird-deaths-by-escape-attempt are indeed out of place.
I mention the word odd because in my readings about the early Church, I ve found not a few stories big and little that neither Hollywood-style violence (i.e., glossy, decorative) nor comic book scenes of seppuku-by-the-thousands can ever match.
Take a good look at this typical account as your aperitif du jour: The story of Perpetua and Felicity Perpetua, a 22-year-old noble lady of Carthage, was the mother of a baby son, while Felicity, a young slave at that time, was pregnant. During the persecution of Septimus Severus in 203, they were arrested along with three fellow catechumens: Saturninus, Secundulus and Revocatus. They were baptized in prison by Saturus, their catechist, who underwent voluntary imprisonment with them.
Perpetua surrendered the child to her pagan father, but remained firm in her faith despite his supplications. Felicity gave birth in prison to a child, whom a fellow Christian adopted. After confessing their faith before the judge, the martyrs were condemned to be thrown to the wild beasts.
They marched into the amphitheater signing psalms and giving one another the customary kiss of peace. The three men were torn to pieces by leopards and bears, while Perpetua and felicity were exposed to a bull. They stood up hand in hand before the savage animal that tossed them repeatedly, leaving horrible marks on their bodies.
They were finally brought into the middle of the amphitheater and slaughtered with the sword. Perpetua guided her throat to the shaking hand of the inexperienced gladiator who had failed to kill her the first stroke. Sidebar 1: Will anyone in Hollywood other than Mel Gibson make this story into a movie?
Will Nikos Kazantzakis and his types? Sidebar 2 (for Noel Vera): Maybe you want to distinguish between graphic violence that is meant to be a shocking realism (Passion of the Christ) and one that is meant to entertain (Spiderman); it s the latter that is certainly perverse, right? -- although I have to admit I enjoyed the two Spiderman movies.
Anyway, such, to my mind, is the enduring conflict that a good Christian follower should face: How can you insist on what the Church believes as fundamental truth without ending up having somebody burned at the stakes? Now, back to Church people ending up on the other side of the fence Isn t it also called persecution whenever Church people stand up for their beliefs and end up being maligned as closed-minded, hypocritical, and arrogant pricks? It amazes me where atheists, for instance, gather the wherewithal to dismiss sweepingly/with such blasé attitude all that precious wealth of wisdom accumulated throughout the ages by the Church.
Aren t these people plumbing the same bottomless well of hate, too? Verily, it s the hardest thing to dialog with minds that accuse you of closed-mindedness by displaying the same level of closed-mindedness! It s hard to dialog when the other side displays a complete disregard for certain facts and cares to look at only those points useful to their argument/agenda.
In a dialogue, I figure, there are only two respectable things: facts and logic. It s hard to deal with people who deny both when cornered into a debate cul-de-sac. Such misplaced pride and arrogance!
An arrogance that is nonpareil as it is based not on an informed standpoint but on plain ignorance - for how can anyone possibly be proud when he/she is ignorant? I wish it's so easy to just say let's just love one another as God has loved us. I guess it is best that these things are indeed left undiscussed for the sake of world peace!
!! at 11:17 AM (This is just a tangential reaction to your post.
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