If I was as articulate as others I would write an essay of my own on Why I Am Catholic. One such person has
an entire blog on the subject. Then there are those who rise above us all, like G.K., one of my all time favorites. With thanks to Lisa for posting this on FB, here are segments of his marvelous essay - read the entire article
here.
I've bolded my favorite part.
The difficulty of explaining "why I am a Catholic" is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. I could fill all my space with separate sentences each beginning with the words, "It is the only thing that. . . ." As, for instance, (1) it is the only thing that really prevents a sin from being a secret. (2) It is the only thing in which the superior cannot be superior in the sense of supercilious. (3) It is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age. (4) It is the only thing that talks as if it were the truth, as if it were a real messenger refusing to tamper with a real message. (5) It is the only type of Christianity that really contains every type of man, even the respectable man. (6) It is the only large attempt to change the world from the inside, working through wills and not laws; and so on...
...The other day a well-known writer, otherwise quite well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea. Indeed, those who complain that Catholicism cannot say anything new seldom think it necessary to say anything new about Catholicism. As a matter of fact, a real study of history will show it to be curiously contrary to the fact. Insofar as the ideas really are ideas, and insofar as any such ideas can be new, Catholics have continually suffered through supporting them when they were really new—when they were much too new to find any other support. The Catholic was not only first in the field but alone in the field; and there was as yet nobody to understand what he had found there...
...There are passages in Pope Leo’s Encyclical on Labor [Rerum Novarum, 1891] that are only now beginning to be used as hints for social movements much newer than socialism. And when Mr. [Hilaire] Belloc wrote about the servile state, he advanced an economic theory so original that hardly anybody has yet realized what it is. A few centuries hence, other people will probably repeat it and repeat it wrong. And then, if Catholics object, their protest will be easily explained by the well-known fact that Catholics never care for new ideas...
...Nevertheless, the man who made that remark about Catholics meant something, and ..it is only fair to him to understand it rather more clearly than he stated it. What he meant was that, in the modern world, the Catholic Church is in fact the enemy of many influential fashions, most of which still claim to be new, though many of them are beginning to be a little stale. In other words, insofar as he meant that the Church often attacks what the world at any given moment supports, he was perfectly right. The Church does often set herself against the fashion of this world that passes away, and she has experience enough to know how very rapidly it does pass away. But to understand exactly what is involved, it is necessary to take a rather larger view and consider the ultimate nature of the ideas in question—to consider, so to speak, the idea of the idea...
...Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making those old mistakes, from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves. The truth about the Catholic attitude toward heresy—or, as some would say, toward liberty—can best be expressed perhaps by the metaphor of a map. The Catholic Church carries a sort of map of the mind that looks like the map of a maze but is in fact a guide to the maze. It has been compiled from knowledge that, even considered as human knowledge, is quite without any human parallel...
...There is no other case of one continuous, intelligent institution that has been thinking about thinking for two thousand years. Its experience naturally covers nearly all experiences and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them...
...
On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes, not to mention any number of intellectual battlefields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or to a sheer precipice. By this means it does prevent men from wasting their time or losing their lives upon paths that have been found futile or disastrous again and again in the past but might otherwise entrap travelers again and again in the future. The Church does make itself responsible for warning its people against these, and upon these the real issue of the case depends. It does dogmatically defend humanity from its worst foes: those hoary and horrible and devouring monsters of the old mistakes......There is no other corporate mind in the world that is thus on the watch to prevent minds from going wrong. The policeman comes too late when he tries to prevent men from going wrong. The doctor comes too late, for he comes only to lock up a madman, not to advise a sane man on how not to go mad. And all other sects and schools are inadequate for the purpose. This is not because each of them may not contain a truth, but precisely because each of them does contain a truth and is content to contain a truth. None of the others really pretends to contain the truth. None of the others, that is, really pretends to be looking out in all directions at once...
...Thus, for instance, Catholicism, in a sense little understood, stands outside a quarrel like that of Darwinism at Dayton. It stands outside it because it stands all around it, as a house stands all around two incongruous pieces of furniture. It is no sectarian boast to say it is before and after and beyond all these things in all directions. It is impartial in a fight between the Fundamentalist and the theory of the origin of species because it goes back to an Origin before that origin, because it is more fundamental than Fundamentalism. It knows where the Bible came from. It also knows where most of the theories of evolution go to. It knows there were many other gospels besides the four Gospels and that the others were eliminated only by the authority of the Catholic Church. It knows there are many other evolutionary theories besides the Darwinian theory and that the latter is quite likely to be eliminated by later science. It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up, and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up...
...Every moment increases for us the moral necessity for such an immortal mind. We must have something that will hold the four corners of the world still while we make our social experiments or build our utopias. For instance, we must have a final agreement, if only on the truism of human brotherhood, that will resist some reaction of human brutality. Nothing is more likely just now than that the corruption of representative government will lead to the rich breaking loose altogether and trampling on all the traditions of equality with mere pagan pride...
