Word: church
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...like Aquinas, who reconciled Augustine and Aristotle, just as my generation received it from the likes of John Courtney Murray, who defended democracy against doctrine. Aquinas and Murray figure prominently in books like Faithful Dissenters, by Robert McClory, which chronicle how such independent souls have not only questioned the church but helped save it from the kind of glaring errors - like its acceptance of slavery, a stance that Pope Leo XIII finally ended in 1888 - that underscore what a human and fallible institution the church...
...believe but to know WHY you believe. Benedict the scholar, as Jeff Israely and David van Biema noted in their TIME cover story this month, admires America's blending of faith and reason. And yet it's this very facet of our religion that is itching powder to a church that insists that only it can be trusted in the end to exercise reason on moral questions - don't try theology at home, the Vatican always seems to tell us - because it inevitably invites the laity to come to its own informed and conscientious conclusions about when human life begins...
None of which, however, means that U.S. Catholics don't want the Church. We do. Like everyone else, Catholics fall away from God on a regular basis and become pretty dismal human beings; and we benefit from the spiritual and moral guidance of priests and nuns, especially the example so many of them set as aids to the poor. We may not impart the church's ban on premarital sex to our children, but we're glad the church is there to help us teach our kids that sex should be shared in a context of love, respect and responsibility...
...also know the church's profound value as a receptacle of culture - and we cherish its quieter value as a place to ponder deeper questions than our inane media consider, and to mark life from baptism to burial. Perhaps most important, it's where and how Catholics receive the redemptive tonic of the Eucharist, a sacrament that so palpably but transcendentally expresses Christianity's faith that in the end, despite life's suffering, light always defeats darkness...
Still, the love most U.S. Catholics have for their church may never again be unconditional. It has to be earned, and simply wearing a collar or a habit won't do the trick anymore. Pope Benedict XVI took some positive steps toward earning it last week. But he needs to realize that his American flock, as good Catholics like Boccaccio did before us, follows a religion more than it follows a church...