The logic behind this sacramental vision of spirituality comes from the ancient North African Bishop Augustine of Hippo (354–430), who declares in the first lines of his autobiography, the Confessions, that human beings were created by God and are unavoidably restless until they rest in God. This “rest” is experienced most intensely in the practice of prayer, which the Catholic Catechism defines as “a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God.” The Catechism further explains that humanity’s prayerful thirst for God is really a response to God’s own thirst for fellowship with humankind: “Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.”4
The sacraments of the Catholic Church represent one very concrete expression of this sacramental consciousness. The seven sacraments – baptism, confirmation, penance, the Eucharist, the anointing of the sick, marriage, and holy orders (ordination to the priesthood) – are understood by Catholics to be ritual experiences that communicate God’s grace to human beings in uniquely effective ways. Baptism inaugurates the beginning of faith, and confirmation signals the maturation of that faith. Penance and the Eucharist are repetitive acts that sustain the life of faith and help people to grow spiritually. And the anointing of the sick prepares a person for what used to be called a “good death” – the ability to face the end of life without fear and with trust in God. The sacraments of marriage and holy orders are somewhat different, representing alternative life directions: either to marry and live “in the world” or to become a celibate (unmarried and sexually inactive) priest wholly dedicated to God and the service of others.
The Catholic tradition also includes a variety of sacramentals, other actions that convey forms of grace in addition to the sacraments proper. Making the sign of the cross, being sprinkled with holy water, and receiving ashes on one’s forehead at the beginning of Lent are all sacramentals. Catholics believe that the sacraments and sacramentals represent the most predictable and consistent means of receiving God’s grace, but Catholics also believe that God’s mercy can overflow these containers, making it possible for God’s grace to suddenly appear in someone’s life in unexpected ways when people are in special need or specially open to God’s presence in the world.
Communal consciousness
The Catholic tradition affirms the communal and interconnected character of human life. In particular, it stresses that the actions and attitudes of individuals affect those around them. Catherine of Siena (1347–80) put it this way: “There is no sin that does not touch others, whether secretly by refusing them what is due, or openly by giving birth to the vices.”5 Virtues work in much the same way. While a virtue is first of all an individual characteristic – a disposition that allows someone to act in a morally good manner – the living of a virtuous life has the potential to impact others positively both by modeling good behavior and by eliciting gratitude from those who are positively affected by those good actions. Growing out of this vision of human interconnectedness, Catholics recognize the need for community within the church. Being a Christian is being part of the people of God who together are making their way forward in faith. It is within the community of the church that vices are slowly unlearned and that virtues are encouraged and nurtured.
The Catholic tradition takes this communal perspective one step further and applies it to society as well as to individuals and the church. The assumption is that the accumulated moral choices of individuals in a society will slowly create a certain kind of moral ethos within that society that will, in turn, shape the morality of individuals. People who grow up in a materialistic culture are more likely to become materialistic themselves, and people who grow up in a sexually liberal society are more likely to become sexually promiscuous. By contrast, cultures that emphasize spiritual, as opposed to material, values and that stress sexual self‐control, as opposed to libertinism, are more likely to produce citizens who are nonmaterialistic and sexually chaste. Consequently, public rules of behavior – especially the legal codes of nations that touch on explicitly moral matters – are assumed to be serious and relevant concerns for the church. Historically, the Catholic Church has often opposed government actions that decriminalize or encourage behavior deemed immoral by the Catholic Church. In recent years, some Catholics have taken public stands against abortion and LGBTQ rights and other Catholics have been involved in antiwar protests and rallies for peace and justice. Whatever their particular cause, many of these participants are motivated by a spirituality that is deeply rooted in Catholicism’s assumption that human beings are morally interconnected.
Intellectual rigor
Perhaps more than any other Christian tradition, Catholicism affirms the importance of bringing faith and reason together. The Benedictine monk Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) coined the phrase “faith seeking understanding,” and those words have been a Catholic touchstone ever since. A hundred years later Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), one of the most influential theologian in all Catholic history, wrote that the goal of the Christian intellect is to use reason and intelligent reflection to turn mere belief into genuine knowledge. The foundational affirmation of the Catholic intellectual tradition is that Catholic faith properly understood and human learning at its best will never truly conflict, but will instead be mutually enlightening.
Faith has not always been properly understood and human learning has not always been at its best, so apparent conflicts arise frequently. History is full of examples, including the church’s unfortunate condemnation of Galileo in the year 1616 for his sun‐centered, rather than earth‐centered, view of the universe. But 1616 is a long time ago, and the notion that faith and reason, or science and religion, exist in a state of perpetual warfare is a fundamental misrepresentation of the Catholic tradition. Most Catholic intellectuals believe that, over time, further reflection and better information will lead to coherence between faith and learning. No one made this case more strongly than the British Catholic theologian John Henry Newman (see Voices of World Christianity 2.1).
Seasoned by a relatively high assessment of human intellect, the Catholic tradition has developed a style of theology that differs significantly from Orthodoxy. The Orthodox tradition, as explained in the previous chapter, has been apophatic in its theological orientation, often choosing to remain silent rather than to speak and take the risk of misrepresenting God or Christian truth. The Catholic tradition has taken almost the opposite approach. Though acknowledging that care must be exercised when using earthly images or ideas to describe God, the Catholic tradition says that using images and ideas is a necessary part of any robust articulation of Christian faith. Rather than remaining silent, Catholic theology is more likely to pile images and ideas on top of each other in its attempt to explore the depth of God’s being and relationship to the world.
The Catholic tradition insists, however, that these earthly images and ideas must be understood analogically when applied to God. An analogy describes one thing as being similar to something else, but always in a limited way. Thus, for example, Catholics say that God created the world in something like the way an artist creates a work of art, but of course there are differences. God does not have literal hands like an artist, and Catholics believe that God made the world ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), which is something no artist can do. Every other analogy has similar limitations, but these limitations are not necessarily defects; they allow room for intellectual advance. For example, the Catholic Church ultimately came to accept the theory of evolution by pointing out the limitations in the analogy of God as creator. To affirm that the world has an origin and purpose outside itself – that it was created rather than simply existing – does not necessarily imply that Catholics can claim any special knowledge about the details of how the world scientifically came to be. This kind of analogical thinking has allowed the Catholic tradition to develop and affirm many diverse insights regarding both God and the world.