One of the nice things about being Catholic is that we like to talk about religion and faith and belief and God and the afterlife - we argue quite a bit
I have to wonder... if I were present at such a discussion, and advanced my own opinions, what would the reaction be? I don't expect that I would be expelled from the venue, or even made deliberately to feel unwelcome, but I do suspect that, even with no hostile or negative effort of the part of my interlocutors, I would begin to feel a bit surrounded. Not as badly as I would be if I decided to declare myself an atheist in the midst of evangelical Christians, but definitely it would be an awkward situation.
My parents were raised as Protestants but converted to Catholicism; both are academics and much devoted to discourse (both have since ceased to be Catholics). I grew up in the midst of the great Catholic debate; I always stayed out of it - as I still do - because I can't bring myself to accept the ground rules of the debate.
Part of the problem here, I suspect, is that some of us have spent extended times in places where the Catholic Church is a very different institution than it is there, and its policies on issues like contraception take on an entirely different color. For myself, I acknowledge freely that my general distaste for that Church is largely not a consequence of doctrine at all: the Church is a rigidly hierarchical institution, a genre which I dislike on general principles; this general distaste is magnified by the fact that I was once pressed to submit myself to that particular hierarchy. |
