Please pray for me and my brother priests!

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Exclusive Inclusive Community

This great post was taken from The Curt Jester. He has a great site, and I recomend checking it out!

The problem addressed in this post is a common problem; it's all to easy to make Christ into a play thing who will do what we want Him to do, and entertain us until we put Him back into the toybox until we again feel the urge to take Him out and make Him dance. We must not make Christ more like us, but make ourselves more like Christ. We must love Him on His terms, and not our own.

Questions and comments are, as always, welcome.

God love you!
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Exclusive Inclusive Community

The Washington Post has an article on a church actually called "Inclusive Community" which contains Catholic priests who left to marry and other cultural Catholics who don't like the baggage of Christ's actual teachings. As is usually the case the word inclusive can easily be substituted for liberal. Their views are never inclusive enough to believe all that the magisterium of the Church teaches is true. To not deny any teachings of the faith would be inclusive, once you start snipping some of you become exclusive by the very act of excluding them.

She grew up Roman Catholic, but like millions of others, Rebecca Ortelli
came to disagree with church teachings on contraception, communion and priestly
celibacy, among other things.

Many Catholics drift away from the church or join other denominations. But Ortelli, 57, wanted to maintain both her Catholic identity and her worldview. And she didn't want to feel one was inconsistent with the other.So 20 years ago, she did what a small number of defiant Catholics are doing.

She joined a church with many lifelongCatholics of similar views, a church that borrows heavily from Catholic rituals even though it's not part of a Catholic diocese.

"I don't think I should have to give up my Catholicism. That's part of who I am. It makes me who I choose to be," said Ortelli, whose church, in Nutley, N.J., is called the Inclusive Community. "I like some of the rituals that we have. They're
important."

The cultural Catholic phenomenon is kind of like the Urban Cowboy one. People dressing up in Cowboy hats and boots who have never ridden a horse or lived on a ranch. That by performing some rituals or putting on a cowboy hat you can call yourself either a Catholic or a cowboy. In some ways this shows the power of rituals and how they shape us, but rituals ripped from their context and roots become pretty empty and devoid an any real meaning. This might explain why their services receive a whopping 15 members.

4 comments:

Katie Alender said...

We call this "having your cake and eating it too".

Adoro said...

The attitudes of these people really blow me away. They should at least have the integrity to realize that they are not Catholic.

And the "rituals"; anyone who uses this term in such a context betrays their ignorance in that EVERY LITTLE MOVE in the liturgy has deep meaning. It's not a performance put on to make everyone look holy.

Anonymous said...

Before the question of which rituals are authentic comes the question of which God is The Inclusive Community calling their attention to. In my admittedly brief observation, this community has not expressed any contempt for the God the Catholic Church has worshipped for 2000 years. Why criticize them? Only an anxious personalities needs to define the world strictly into enemies and friends.

WNV said...

Rochester, if one is a Catholic, one can not separate their faith in God from their faith in the Church, "...I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church..."

If one claims to be a Catholic, one should be a Catholic as the Church understands it. If one wants to be something else, one is free to do so. What is disingenuous, though, is claiming to be what you are not, or claiming to be something and destroying the integrity of that thing in order to please oneself.