Sunday, October 17, 2010

How the Media Sees the Catholic Chuch



vs. how we really are.

There's pomp and majesty in Rome, make no mistake, but even the Pope would tell you that the link given above was the kind of thing that the Church is really all about.

6 comments:

tim eisele said...

On the one hand, I agree that the media should give roughly equal attention to the many different things that the Church does.

On the other hand, the Church specifically stages these majestic spectacles of pomp and ceremony with the intention of getting as much attention from the media and general population as possible. When the media then concludes that what they see is, in fact, what the Church is all about, turning around and complaining about it strikes me as being, well, a bit rich.

And an idle question, which I don't know the answer to: what percentage of Church resources (both money and personnel) goes to general pomp, ceremony, and building decoration compared to all other Church activities?

(I would include Masses as "pomp and ceremony", incidentally)

K T Cat said...

First off, the Church is not the Department of Health and Human Services. Rachel's Hope isn't a competitor with the government, it's an expression of fallible humans attempting to emulate Christ's love for all. Helping people get to the point where they think and act in those terms is the purpose of the Church.

what percentage of Church resources (both money and personnel) goes to general pomp, ceremony, and building decoration compared to all other Church activities?

I don't have any hard data, but from personal experience, nearly nothing goes to these kinds of ceremonies. The Catholic Church has armies of volunteers that aren't recorded anywhere but in the hand-written sign-up sheets thumbtacked to the bulletin boards in the church entryway, so any analysis of budgets would be doomed to failure.

As for ordinary Mass being part of the pomp and ceremony, I think that one is better answered by Catholic bloggers more in tune with that than I. Dittos for the Canonization ceremony being aimed at the media. I don't believe that, but I can't express just why.

Secular Apostate said...

I used to see things exactly the same way Tim does. In my pre-Catholic, pre-Christian travels to Italy, I visited cathedrals and the Vatican and viewed them as art museums. I looked at the pomp and circumstance of the Vatican as just that.

But this is how I think about it now. If the Governor of Tennessee accepted an invitation for dinner at our house, we would respectfully get out the best china, crystal, and silverware. We would spruce the place up as much as possible. We might even paint the dining room, or buy a new rug.

And he's just a governor, one of fifty.

But we're not talking about a governor, we're talking about God.

Speaking as a person of faith, if there is gold left on the planet and I had the money to buy it, I would buy the purest gold for God's cup. If I were going to commission art to honor God, I would seek out the contemporary equivalent of Michelangelo, Botticelli, or Mozart. And still I would wish I could be even more respectful.

The Holy of Holies, the location of the Ark of the Covenant, in Solomon's Temple was overlaid with pure gold.

This "building decoration" was a holy act of worship, respectful of the very Creator and Source.

It's fine with me if folks choose not to believe in God, but I fail to see why people of faith would view their opinions on these matters to be of any consequence.

K T Cat said...

It's not that their opinions aren't of any consequence it's more that they don't see the full picture. From what I've seen, atheists and agnostics tend to see the Church from a utilitarian point of view - what concrete good is it doing - how many people did it feed and so on. That's not the real picture, just a part of it.

Secular Apostate said...

Sorry, Senor, but I disagree.

If their opinions were consequential, the consequences would be the repudiation of four thousand years of Judaeo-Christian theology and Sacred Tradition.

If one chooses to believe that the Bible is divinely inspired, then one is forced to admit that God cares how He is worshiped. Liturgical design parameters, for example, are laid out very carefully in Leviticus. Among Orthodox Jews, those ancient liturgical elements are very much alive today.

It's like the Church's position on abortion, or adultery. There are folks who think that the Pope should "relax" the dogma. But the Pope can't possibly do that. He doesn't have the authority. Because a Pope didn't invent the dogma in the first place. God did.

Once the opinions of non- or anti-Catholics begin to have consequences on the liturgical practices of the Roman Church, the Church is well on the way to becoming a branch of the Unitarians. One need only look to the Anglican Church to find a perfect example.

While orthodox Catholics and the Eastern Church may find dissenting opinions about such things interesting and thought-provoking, unless those opinions reveal something that has been overlooked for the last two thousand years of theological reflection, they must never be consequential.

tim eisele said...

Secular Apostate says: "If one chooses to believe that the Bible is divinely inspired,"

Yes. That rather is the question, isn't it?