The Sacramental Imagination: Why Emily Edmondson Remains Catholic

I suppose, then, that what I have been saying is that I remain Catholic not because of any contemporary benefit that I perceive or opportunity to work justice but because I have faith. Faith is a very uncomfortable claim to make by a mind that operates almost exclusively in discourse about testable and demonstrable data. Yet, why else remain Catholic than faith that the Church is the locus of encountering Christ sacramentally, as the apostles encountered Him incarnationally? Otherwise put, why else remain Catholic than faith that the Church is the primary places where we are fouled with the blood of redemption?

Writing a #whyremainCatholic around this time period in my life is poignant for me because I have had the dreary experience of recently hearing the tales of friends who either do not remain Catholic or do so only barely. Most cite some of the major objections you might expect to hear from those focused on the institutional aspects of the Church rather than the sacramental. There are, of course, those who gripe about gay marriage, women’s ordination, etc. Conflated with those gripes, however, is usually a desire to see genuine justice, but a desire that has shifted its gaze away from Christ.

I do not think that the desire to participate in some of the non-kerygmatic aspects of the Church’s ministry and mission are bad things, or things that distract from true worship. I would be mistaken to claim anything such as that. Forgetting, however, that what justice truly means is to be properly and humanly related to God through the faith is an all too easy act to do, even for those (such as myself) who try so hard to remain Catholic. Aidan Kavanagh, though describing the academy, succinctly summarizes this situation in his introduction to On Liturgical Theology:

They remain in academe and are worn down by it. Being worn down is often imperceptible in its slowness; it usually involves a transmutation of faith into one of more surrogates such as scholarship for its own sake, ideological distractions, or some form of involvement in activist causes of a political nature…One often encounters students who came to a seminary seeking less ordination than faith, only to discover counseling or social action as faith surrogates (Kavanagh, 12-13).

Hearing the stories of my friends who do not remain Catholic or do so only barely is why I began with the anecdote from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. I find that they often describe these types of surrogates as expressions of their faith. But as Hazel Motes morbidly reminds us: remaining in the Church means being fouled with the blood of redemption. The Church-Without-Christ will do for any other pursuit.