I'm talking about walking in those doors, and feeling the weight of two millennia, and your bones knowing it feels right. Everything feels right.
Cool.
It was an indelible memory, Idolator. Please don't preach all over it.
You didn't have to post it. ofc when you publish you open your content up to scrutiny. Those are the rules. But I explain below what I was doing and why.
This thread was about Catholicism from the beginning. That's why I brought it back around.
That's basically what I said, viz. "since you bring Catholicism back into the conversation".
They think they're more Catholic than the Pope, and the Pope reminded them they're not. I really like this Pope.
SSPX know more about doctrine and dogma than probably 99% of Catholics, but they could be that and still stay in the Church, like the FSSP.
Important to note while the whole SSPX is included in the excommunication, the precipitating disobedience was just two men, two bishops, to whom the pope said, "Don't," but they did anyway. For all their knowledge of doctrine and dogma somehow they nullified something every other bishop knows—if the pope says jump, you say how high (in some licit instruction).
Also so far so good with Pope Leo for me as well. I didn't have any issue with Pope Francis of happy memory either though. He was ambiguous too, which really irritated some Catholics, and I think more than a few SSPXers as well. Leo being a native American is also historic which goes without saying. The first native Anglophone isn't from the UK or England but from the USA. That's got to sting on some level, for the British, no? I would think. It also goes without saying this is the first time in all history the pope speaks to Americans in an American dialect. We for the first time don't require a translator. We don't have to strain our ears like when Francis or JP2 would speak in their foreign, though fluent, English dialects. It's a terrific time to be alive for American Catholics I think.
=
How does 2000 years fit into 500? Sounds like you are packing into those doors what isn't there usually, your feelings. And
@Idolater is right (in a way), that such feelings of "home" should be reserved for
Christ, His death and resurrection depicted by the eucharist, and more importantly His return. We don't pray towards home like the Jews did from Babylon, but towards home like Jesus did in the Garden, looking upward.
His
presence in the Eucharist. As far as non-Catholic Christians go for sure there's no place on the Earth that's any more or less holy than any other, but we believe the Eucharist is the New Covenant Holy-of-Holies. Which is the whole reason I had to mansplain for TOL's super majority of non-Catholic and Evangelical Christians, what Anna was clumsily trying to express.
=
No he's not right. He didn't understand what I meant. And that's okay.
It isn't that. It's that you weren't clear. You're the one who said, "For [a] Catholic," rather than, "For anyone who appreciates history" or something secular like that.
Because when you say, "For [a] Catholic", you're implying (whether you think you are or not, here on TOL, surrounded by Evangelicals, who do not know or understand our faith, but who are instead, through no fault of their own, saturated in false Catholic myths and legends concocted by their Evangelical, anti-Catholic forebears, handed down to them and inherited by them; with part of this distorted opinion being that Catholics are somewhat like New Testament Jews in that we seem to honor Rome and the Vatican uniquely among all the places on the Earth, like how the New Testament Jews did honor the temple in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem itself that way); you're implying this is somehow central to deep Catholic identity when it is not.
Certainly nothing stops us Catholics from appreciating the history of Europe and Western Civilization, and understanding when in Rome that we're somewhere historically unique not only just for our culture and values but for the constitution of the Church, since it is where both Peter and Paul were when they were put to death. Certainly it's understandable as a Catholic to appreciate Rome as corroboration that Catholicism is right. And ofc also, as if as Americans when we visit Washington D.C., it is like this when Catholics visit the Vatican too, it is the seat of power of our supreme pastor, his home and headquarters (although it was in Avignon, France for a little while too).
My only issue was just to correct any unintentional and/or accidental implications you were making, particularly for the Evangelicals who are reading you as a Catholic. You're a Catholic witness for our faith and so I am going to step in to make sure any accidental implications get cleared up, and I might do that borderline recklessly, but it's not personal; it has to do with our faith; with its brand.
That's three of you now, mansplaining how I should or should not have described my visit to St. Peters. It's actually pretty comical.
I am mansplaining about the part that Derf literally picked up on. You're implying the mansplaining wasn't needed. You seemed to be hallowing the pope's place more than you honor the Eucharist in every Mass. Now you deny that you meant that ("and that's okay," as you put it), and I believe you, but that doesn't erase the ambiguity, so I'm mansplaining what I'm sure (because you're implying it) you actually meant, which was more about how the weight of history and of the certainty of your faith can be evoked in the visiting of Biblical places like the Vatican or Jerusalem.
That sensation is something as Catholics we should be calibrating against our experience of the Eucharist in each humdrum, plain old Mass that we attend 56 times each year. We are in the presence of the Holy-of-Holies, and we can enter into the Holy-of-Holies, in the New Covenant, in the Mass, each Mass. That is the hallowing experience we ought to have each Mass, it is just a calibration point whenever we're faced with transcendent consciousness, like you did in the Vatican, and like most everybody does from time to time in various settings and contexts.
It was just you making it seem like this was the universal experience for all Catholics, when it isn't necessarily the case.
=
I love this new trend. Big fan.
