The Crescat
… I don’t care much for labels. And I’m not just saying that because of the newest label given to me by some as Pope-Hating-Conservative Catholic. Yes, they can serve a purpose; identifying, understanding, and even unify sub-groups of things. However, in order to put ideas or persons into neat labeled groups means you must first divide them up. This dividing up into categories is contrary to the very word Catholic, which means “universal”.
Terry has a nice thought provoking post, as are most of his musing, on the matter of Catholic identity. Do we define ourselves by what we do, or in most cases, don’t do? I think it’s a shame that we’ve create all these subcategories within our faith to reflect back to ourselves our own ideologies. It’s a self centered way of defining what we believe.
Liberal Catholic, Conservative Catholic, Neo-Con Catholic, Trad Catholic, Rad-Trad Catholic, Liturgical Purist Catholic, Right Wing Catholic, Left Wing Catholic, CINO Catholic, Evangelical Catholic, Hypocritical Catholic, Narrow-Minded Catholic, Faithful Catholic, Dissident Catholic, Bat Shit Crazy Catholic…
You get the idea. How about we all just start with being fully Catholic and leave all the other labels to the Church Belligerent. I like what Simcha Fisher has to say on the subject of labels; “These labels are useful descriptors, up to a point, but none of these can describe a person in his entirety, and none should limit what we can expect out of ourselves.”
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