God Provides The Justification: Jean-François Garneau On #WhyRemainCatholic

The third set of things that made me drop my former ways and adopt a more confident approach to faith and the truths of faith was my finally coming to terms with a Cartesian streak in me that made me confuse certainty with clearness of vision. This incapacity to see that the creed is a symbol, not a textbook, and that what it revealed was a mystery not a conclusion, manifested itself in all sorts of ways and therefore needed to be worked through in all sorts of way. The discovery of the Oxford school of Thomism was of great help here, and I am really sad that I was at Oxford in their heyday and missed their great show, having never heard of their existence at the time.

These three sets of things started to produce their fruits in my soul in the late 1990s but I only noticed that a turning point had been reached during the Christmas eve Mass of 2009. I had taken my partner to Vézelay, to share the admiration I have for this jewel of Romanesque architecture. I don’t know what happened during that Mass, but it’s as if all my doubts gave way and, ever since, for all my disagreement with so much of the clergy of the Catholic church for their conservative ways of envisioning the relation of ethics to law, as well as for their obsession with minor points of sexual ethics, I have no longer doubted my faith or asked myself any of the questions that used to bother me so much before.

So in answer to your question: Why am I still a Catholic? I used to feel that I had to come up with an answer to that question. That question haunted me in fact, so much so that I thought I had to exorcise it with psychoanalysis. And whatever answers I cooked up always left me unsatisfied.

I now no longer ask myself this sort of question. I never ask myself whether God exists, whether the Resurrection really occurred, etc. And in the process of no longer asking myself that sort of question, I have found an answer to a slightly modified form of the question you are asking. For I no longer ask myself why I am ‘still’ a Catholic (as if it was up to me to provide a justification for being one). The justification for my faith is not in me. I have no answer to that sort of question. What I can answer, however, is the question of why I am a Catholic tout court (with no more ‘still”).

I am Catholic by the grace of God and as a light to Nations, i.e.: (i) I never chose to become a Catholic, this happened to me; (ii) this happening did not occur to answer my questions but to provide a witness to others; (iii) the witness demanded is not of an intellectual sort but of a compassionate sort.

I don’t think I’m at all particularly up to the job I’m called to do. In fact I know I very much suck at that job. But then I’m not the one who picked myself up for this task. The same goes for the entire body of the Church, which I realize is usually not much more fit to do the job. And yet that is the task for which we Catholics have been picked to do: To go preach a gospel of forgiveness to all, to signify this forgiveness by a washing in the death and resurrection of Christ which we call baptism, and to invite all nations to trust the truth of this forgiving love and to obey the command to love others as we have been loved (Matthew 28: 19-20).

There is no man-made justification for this sort of existence. This is what it means to be a creature: God provides the justification. All we can provide, in our own imperfect ways, is a witness to the justification we have received, a calling which condemns us at the same time that it forgives us, and which forgives us at the same time that it invites us to put our trust in the Lord and follow his example. It is called: The Gospel.