Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Right Way to be a Catholic

IT IS EASY TO get a name for broad-mindedness and good-fellowship by setting out to be a Catholic with a difference, half-agreeing with all the prejudices of your Protestant friends, making out that you are really paying rather a compliment to our holy religion by belonging to it; you who take it all so very calmly, so far removed from bigotry or fanaticism. But that is not the right way to be a Catholic. The right way to be a Catholic is to feel yourself all the time, a member of the Church Militant, a limb, living with the life of the whole, sharing its well-being and its discomforts, belonging to it, not talking as if it belonged to you. The right way to be a Catholic is to be associated with the essential activity of the Church, through prayer for the triumph of the truth and the conversion of sinners; as our Lord was when he kept his last appointment in Gethsemani, tempted, once more, by the prince of the powers of darkness.

- Ronald A. Knox

No comments: