It hasn’t been a good several generations in regards to the implementation and understanding of the Catholic Doctrine in much of the Western World. Here, we clear up several “Catholic Confusions” that you might understand to be true.
Divorced People are Welcome
Divorced People are welcome in the Catholic Church. You can be divorced and receive all of the sacraments and are not ex-communicated. For decades, many Catholics that got divorced thought they were ousted from the Church. This idea just caught fire and we haven’t done a good enough job of clarifying it.
If you are divorced, and thinking of getting remarried, talk to your priest about the correct steps on how to proceed. The Catholic Church wants you to be the best person you can be, and honoring the sacrament of marriage is paramount to that. No one is going to kick you out.
The Catholic Church is the Largest Private Charitable Organization in the World
This is a pretty self-explanatory statement that attempts to put down the idea that the Catholic Church is flush with cash and should just give away all of its treasures and sell its properties and give to the poor. Nobody has given more to the poor or continues to do so to this day than the Catholic Church. The largest hospital network in the world is the Catholic Church.
Catholics Don’t Believe Only Catholics Go to Heaven
Catholics acknowledge that only God decides who is saved. We also don’t believe we can force our way to be saved. That is a heresy called Pelagianism and was settled in the 5th century, despite the fact that Protestants have been accusing Catholics of that for about 500 years now. If you want to read up on the Church’s view of salvation, check out the Lumen Gentium.
Suicide Is Probably Not an Express Ticket to Damnation
This was certainly the view of the Church up until there was a much better understanding of mental illness that leads to suicide. The underlying view of the Church has never changed- if you are free to decide to turn against God and kill yourself, that is a mortal sin. However, our understanding has developed to where we understand that mental illness makes the person “not free” in this regard. People that commit suicide that are determined to be suffering from mental illness can have a full Catholic funeral and are determined not to have died in mortal sin.
Catholic Teachings Are in the Bible
Yeah, this is patently not true, but shame on Catholics for being so poorly educated in their faith that they can’t defend such accusations. Here you can find exact scripture for all core Catholic beliefs and practices.
The Catholic Church is a Safe Place for Children
This is a very long topic that should be discussed more thoroughly, but there are few institutions today where children are safer than in the Catholic Church. Absolutely the child abuse scandal was a horrific stain on the Catholic Church. But it is important to first state a few facts:
- The Catholic Church followed the worldwide view that pedophilia was a curable condition at the time of the abuse crisis. Remember the excellent movie “Spotlight” about how the Boston Globe uncovered how the Church was dealing with the abuse scandal? Well, the Boston Globe at that time and even years after in other parts of the paper continued to publish articles by their experts talking about pedophilia as a curable condition where you remove and “rehabilitate” offenders. It was only years after that the medical community changed its view on the treatment of the disease.
- Priests had the same rate of pedophilia as teachers in public schools, within families, and within any other named grouping of people.
- Today, all staff at Catholic institutions have to follow extremely rigorous training and retraining. There are strict rules against being alone with children. Today, the instances of pedophilia associated with the Catholic Church are almost non-existence, which is certainly not the case with public schools and broken families.
The Catholic Church is Pro-Science
This idea that the Catholic Church is against science really came about after the Enlightenment with the publication of several books about the Church and Galileo. Here is the undisputed fact: The Catholic Church was prosecuting Galileo because how he was teaching was bad science. He simply hadn’t finished his research and was teaching something he couldn’t yet prove. The Catholic Church was far along in a belief in an helio-centric solar system. By all of the scientific standards of then and now, Galileo was wrong in the timing of his teaching.
The Catholic Church is responsible for the great scientific universities of the Western World. The Catholic Church invented the Scientific Method, A Catholic priest came up with the original premise of the Big Bang Theory, and the father of genetics was a Catholic Priest. The Catholic Church has been and always will be pro-science. Now, “scientism”, is a different matter, and a topic for another article.