Living With the Pain of Schism

Mark Shea has a interesting conversation going on about converts and their expectations and what, if any advice, experienced converts would want to give to someone considering swimming the Tiber.

I've been thinking on that very subject today. One of the reasons is an e-mail I just received from a Protestant pastor who, as he put it has " read all or most of the relevant books and have been informed by many of the usual suspects, e.g., Scott Hahn, Ralph Martin, Dave Armstrong, Karl Keating, Mark Shea, Marcus Grodi (and EWTN), Peter Kreeft. I've also pursued the Church Fathers, and the Catechism is an unfolding wonder. "

He writes "I have gone through many reactions to catholic teaching and have struggled to seeming exhaustion with trying to discern what the God-honoring response should be.

I could tell my correspondent that the struggle doesn't end when you enter. It varies from person to person, of course, but I am still striving to integrate my evangelical missionary heart, Quaker intuition, and Dominican head in a single discipleship centered on Christ.

After 19 years as a Catholic, I am still bumping my head against unexpected Catholic cultural assumptions that I find so stunning as to be unimaginable. Stuff that you won't find in any magisterial documents or in the catechism. Stuff that seems light-years away from or even in direct contradiction to formal Church teaching. The debate last month around St. Blog's about the title of our blog and just what did we mean by "intentional disciple" is a case in point.

Nineteen years as a Catholic, years of theological study and research, a million air miles, 75 dioceses, direct work with 30,000 Catholics including clergy and seminarians and I still didn't expect it. Because I just can't imagine an orthodox Christianity that isn't, first and foremost, about consciously following Christ. How could "intentional discipleship" possibly be controversial among serious Christians, among devout Christians? Much less "divisive", "elitist", "judgemental", "non-Catholic", and of course, "Protestant" as various commenters called it. The truly "Catholic" alternative is what? Unconscious, unintended discipleship? Zombie discipleship?

Schism does not just divide ecclesial bodies. Those of us who are "bi-cultural" Christians long to bring heart and the mind, Word and the Body, masculine and the feminine, the apostolic and the contemplative together. We don't just think about the impact of the Reformation, we feel it most intensely. We long to be able to rejoice in and to draw from all the riches of the faith at the same time, even those that have become, over the centuries of separation, associated with "the other side" and therefore, have become suspect.

As a veteran cradle Catholic priest, who was ordained in Rome in the little chapel of the chair of Peter, told me this morning: "Evangelicals have something critically important to give us. Their culture of open, public discipleship and their apostolic mindset." It isn't an accident that Cardinal Stafford used to visit Baptist churches in Memphis in mufti to understand how they formed their members.

And I think that struggle will continue whether or not my correspondent enters the Church. It is an honorable wound. In or outside of the Church, we are experiencing the real tragedy of schism. We carry in our hearts and spirits some of the brokenness of the Body of Christ. To the extent that we successfully integrate these different facets of the faith within ourselves, we become small hubs of reconciliation and balance within the larger Body of Christ.