The Church is a Herd of Cats

A reader writes in mystification:

You’ve made this statement a couple of times:

“People ask if I believe in organized religion. I always answer, “No. I’m a Catholic.”

Could you flesh this out a little? I find it very interesting.

Not too much to flesh out really. It’s my tongue-in-cheek way of making the point that Chesterton made when he said that Catholics agree about everything and it’s only everything else they disagree about. Catholics have a few cosmic truths they share in common and then seem to enjoy arguing about everything else. We also have an almost preternatural gift (I suspect it comes into Catholic DNA from Judaism) for being obstreporous about even the smallest amount of institutional organizing. Anybody who labors under the impression that the Church is a mind-control cult need only sit in on some parish meeting or planning committee. It is a miracle of grace the Church gets anything accomplished at all and the various endless spectacles of bank scandals or the sheer institutional idiocy of the USCCB and Vatican making it hard for honest evangelists to have access to Church documents are just a couple of the many manifestations of the way the Church’s human ineptitude makes clear that we have these treasures in jars of clay.