As I wrote below, to find success in our culture is not to find one’s place in the group, but to transcend it. I was reading a recent Touchstone article (‘Unmarried, Still Children” by Joan Frawley Desmond) and the author quotes Jeffrey Arnett’s recent work Emerging Adulthood, where Arnett says that those in their late teens and twenties define adulthood as “accepting responsibility for the consequences of your actions,” and choosing “personal beliefs and values independently of parents or other influences.”
Even the old Lutheran Hiedelberg Catechism, while emphasizing strongly individual salvation and individual justification says,
Question 54. What believest thou concerning the “holy catholic church” of Christ?
Answer: That the Son of God from the beginning to the end of the world, gathers, defends, and preserves to himself by his Spirit and word, out of the whole human race, a church chosen to everlasting life, agreeing in true faith; and that I am and forever shall remain, a living member thereof.
I agree with this definition of the Church, but if I do, I cannot possibly equate it with the institutional churches that I see around me, even the one I belong to. I am convinced that Jesus gathers His Church, defends it, etc., but to equate this work of Christ with what most churches actually do is a ludicrous and possibly even blasphemous affront to God.
Does saying and thinking this make me an enemy of the institutional church? God forbid! But we have to realise at all times that what the Word of God declares is true: “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” But working out our salvation with one another in whatever bonds of mutual love whenever that is possible, is enough reason to support the institutions, always hoping that in our times they will serve the Lord and help us to follow Jesus, or at least that within them we may find such people as we can do these things with. That is my situation.
Romanós,
It sounds like we have very different experiences of the GOC, or perhaps different expectations and understandings from it… A lot of what you post about it puzzles me. I admit, I occasionally am perfectly befuddled about some thing the Archdiocese does (and has done), but it sounds like we are affected by it quite differently.