Catholic and Enjoying It!
Rules: Find some 800 year old church document tailored to the pastoral situation of an entirely different age and culture. Elevate it to Eternal Dogma. Pretend to want to know what Catholics think about it. Ignore things like, oh, 800 years of development of Church teaching, including rather more recent documents like Christifideles Laici.
The tedium of the Gotcha Game is, above all, the sheer childish disingenousness of the thing. Guys like Turretin have absolutely zero interest in actually engaging an idea. All they care about is scoring points with a peer group. No Catholic who knows the first thing about the Church’s teaching will be fooled by such silly tactics. But guys like Turretin don’t care. Catholics are barely human for them. The idea is not to engage in actual conversation, but merely to laugh with his buddies as they run down the street, counting how many noses of total strangers they pulled. It’s a remarkable dehumanized way of encountering people they claim to “love with the love of Jesus Christ”. That’s one of the great things about Calvinism. Since You’re Elect and They Aren’t, there’s no particular need to take the Love stuff all that seriously. If it chances that you were wrong to pull the nose of your victim, God will see to it that he is Irresistibly Graced to believe anyway. So you’re good!
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In