The Importance of Community: Why I Have Decided to Stay Roman Catholic

As many of you know, for the past 3 years I have been in discernment of whether to leave the Roman Catholic Church for the Anglican Communion.

As of this moment, I can say that I feel at peace about staying in the Catholic Church.

This doesn't mean, however, that I still don't have the same disagreements that I expressed in the past. It doesn't mean that those disagreements are not important to me anymore. What it does mean is that, at the present moment, I don't feel like these disagreements are enough for me to leave the Roman Catholic Church.

Why Not?
One of the main reasons why I decided to stay is the fact that the church is more than a simple institution I belong to. The Roman Catholic Church is more than just a club that I can easily drop membership to if it no longer fit my ideas.

The Church, above all of that, is a community. And I love this community.

Jesus call us to community, and this community requires a commitment that is nurtured through love and respect. When Jesus says that "my mother and my brother are those who hear the word of God and do it" (Luke 8:21) I believe He is putting a high level of commitment to His community.

When I grew up with my family, I didn't agree with all the rules of the house. I didn't agree with how everything was managed. I don't think there is anyone on this earth who can say that they did.

But I love my family, and it is that love that has kept me a member of the family to this day.

And so it is with my community of faith, the Roman Catholic Church. The fact that I don't agree with everything that is going on with it doesn't even begin to detract from the fact that I love this community. I love many of its traditions and wisdom, and I am willing to be under it out of love.

This love also encourages me to take a second look at its rules and regulations, and while I'm not saying that I will blindly follow them, I will respect them out of love and respect for the community.

When you live under the same roof with your family and/or community, you are bound to find house rules. These rules have helped the community in many ways. You may not agree with each and every single one of them, but once you decide to stay, and once you love this community, you respect its rules not from a simple sense of obligation, but by the freedom that this loves gives.

Individualism & Yelp Reviews of Churches
I believe that our desire to find a church that can satisfy our ideals and our niches is just a symptom of our emphasis on individualism. We church shop as if we are choosing our internet provider.

In an individualistic society, you are encouraged to fulfill your own dreams and ideals, and this can transfer over the way we do church.

Church, however, is not a place where we can have our needs met, a place where we worship alongside people who share our ideals.

Church is not a group of individuals, each looking for their often conflicting fulfillment of goals and ideals. If this is your idea of church then you will be sorely disappointed.

The Church is a community. In this community you come not to get something for your fulfillment, but you come to give yourself and your gifts, and to receive nourishment and support from the gifts of others. In this community, you come not so you can achieve your personal goals, but to love and serve.

In this community you come not just to nurture and build your individual body, but to nurture and build (or better said become) the body of Christ.

The Episcopal Church Welcomes...Me? 4 Questions to Episcopal/Anglicans Before I Convert!

Update: Thanks to all of those who offered me answers to these questions! As I wrote on this post, I have decided to stay in the Roman Catholic Church. Thank you for all your help in my discernment.

As part of my discernment process of whether to join the Anglican communion or not, I have done extensive research over its many issues, and more specifically, into the perceived issues of the Episcopal Church.

Some of the research has been encouraging, and some of it, to be honest, deeply troubling.

For this reason, I'd like to ask these 4 questions to people who belong to the Episcopal Church, or to members of ACNA, or any other Anglican body. I apologize in advance if any of these questions sound offensive. I'm just reacting to the wildly contradicting and varied opinions I hear about the Episcopal church, and it is difficult at this time to separate fact from fiction.

The 4 questions are...

1) Would I be mocked, dissuaded, or discouraged if I hold to my creedal orthodoxy?
I affirm the Nicene Creed. I believe that there is one Triune God, that Jesus died for my sins, that his death has atoning power, that He really rose bodily from the dead, and that He really will return again.

Would I be welcomed and encouraged in my beliefs? Would I find myself at home with these beliefs in the Episcopal church, or will my faith be mocked as fundamentalist and not in with the times?

2)Would I be welcomed with my Marian devotion and  my devotion to the saints?
If I am not  part of an Anglo-Catholic congregation, would I still be welcomed at the table?

3) Would I find a community that is committed to following Christ in a multi-religious society, instead of being encouraged to follow Christ with a multi-religious spirituality?
I am looking for a Christ-centric church. I heard stories of clergy in the Episcopal church reading from other religious texts and performing religious practices of other religions. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, it does seem a step too close to religious relativism.

Is this a normal occurrence? Can I expect to find a Christ-centric congregation or would I be discouraged in my single minded pursuit of Christ with ad-hominems like close-mindedness?

4) Finally, would I be welcomed if I consider social justice important but not the end point of Christian discipleship?
Is it OK if I believe that social justice is an important aspect of Christian discipleship, but not the most important aspect of it?


Again, I Apologize if these Questions Sound Offensive!
These questions are not intended to disrespect people's belief, or to make assumptions on the Episcopal church. If anything, it is to clarify what could become assumptions. These are questions that are being raised in my mind from the research I made on the the Episcopal church.

I'm simply  giving people who are in the Episcopal church an opportunity to clarify these issues.

Also, if you think that my beliefs and values expressed above are not a good fit with the Episcopal church, then please tell me so! This would help me greatly in my discernment process as I find a place to be and grow in Christ!

Thank you in advance!

Why I Still Pray to Mary (and Other Saints)

It is no secret for readers of this blog that I am currently going through a painful and disconcerting discernment process of whether to stay with the Roman Catholic Church or join the Anglican Church.

This does not mean, however, that I don't have any spiritual practices that are considered "Catholic". Quite the opposite: I still find a lot of nourishment from many Catholic practices, from Eucharistic Benediction to prayers to the Saints.

Why Pray to the Virgin Mary When You Can Go Straight To Jesus?

I get asked this question a lot from my protestant brothers and sisters. At face value, this question makes a lot of sense. Why bother to go through an indirect route when you can have direct access to the Master?

This question, however, ignores the fact that prayer is also a communal practice, not just an individual practice between you and God.

The same question can be asked to the protestant who asks his or her friends to pray for a specially difficult or troubling circumstance. We see this practice as something natural. Indeed, many of us encourage this practice.

Individual prayer is powerful, but there is something amazingly powerful when a community gathers around and are united in prayer.

Our faith is not born and nourished in a bubble but it was taught to us in community. This community has a direct and spiritual connection to that great cloud of witnesses that goes back to the Apostles.

I just happen to believe that Mary and all the Saints are active members of my community, and that they are participants of the new life in Christ, since God is a God of the living and not of the dead.

When I pray to Mary, or to any saint for that matter, I am declaring that I'm also part of this greater community whose faith I inherited, and in doing so, I am asking them for prayers on my behalf.

I Also Pray to Mary When I Need Counsel & Comfort

Don't get me wrong, I also pray to Jesus and receive from Him counsel and comfort.

There are moments, however, when I pray to God and I feel dry. There are moments where I feel God is distant in my prayers. There are moments when prayer is not passionate and pious, but dry and monotonous.

We all have experienced this desert. We all have gone through this dark night of the soul.

I recently went through a brief period of dryness in my prayer life with God. I prayed and felt no connection. At some point I felt helpless and alone. I even felt like God was rejecting me.

At one point I got the sense that I should pray to Mary, asking for her counsel and comfort.

I did, and I felt this powerful and moving connection with her. I told her all my struggles. I told her to please pray for me. Immediately, this sense of darkness left me. I felt comforted by her. I felt the assurances of her prayers.

I understand this might be scandalizing to some of you, but I see it no different than going to a close friend during troubling and dry periods of faith, and receiving counsel and comfort from them.

I Encourage you to Try It!

I am not asking you to worship Mary or the Saints, but just ask for their intercessions! This is an ancient practice that can be traced back to the Early Church Fathers, and it is one that nourished me and even gotten me through some dry periods in my spirituality.

Holy Mother of God, pray for us, now and at the hour of our death! Amen.

Anglicanism? Why I've been Thinking of Leaving Roman Catholicism.

Update: Since I've wrote this post, and after much prayer and consideration, I have decided to stay in the Roman Catholic Church. It has been a long and painful journey, but I am joyful to find a place I can call home. You can read here my reasons for staying in the church.

For the past 2 years I have embarked on a journey that has been both painful and exciting. I have been thinking, praying and exploring other expressions of my Catholic faith that are not exclusively "Roman" Catholic.

In this process, I have deepened in my Catholic faith, but my disenchantment with Roman Catholicism continues to grow.

I have been exploring other streams of Catholicism and the most attractive one at this point is Anglicanism.

But before we go into Anglicanism, let's talk about what I mean by Catholicism.

Some people use Catholicism and Roman Catholicism interchangeably, as if the Church of Rome had a monopoly on Catholicism. Sorry to burst your bubble, but this is not the case.

Catholic means "universal". To be a Catholic is to affirm the 4 Ecumenical Creeds. To be Catholic is to have a faith that has apostolicity and a direct connection with the succession lines of the Apostles. To be Catholic is to have the Eucharist as the center of our worship.

Under this category, there are many streams of Christianity that are Catholic.

In fact, many protestants traditions, especially the mainlines, still recite that part of the Nicene Creed that says "We believe in the holy, catholic and apostolic church", affirming their connection to this ancient apostolic tradition.

Before there was a Holy, Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church there was the Catholic church. Catholicism predates Roman Catholicism.

This may be hard to believe for those of you who see Roman Catholicism as the One True Church that Christ instituted, as I used to.

Why leave Roman Catholicism?
There are many things why I'm contemplating the move. One reason is that, theologically and ideologically, I'm not perfectly lined up with Roman Catholic doctrines and ideologies. I'm sure that if someone went all medieval on me and put me through an inquisition, I will fail the requirements to be considered a "true" Roman Catholic.

Another reason is what seems to me the arrogance from the Roman Catholic church to still call and consider itself the "One True Church of Christ", and seeing all churches as imperfect members of the Body of Christ.

They get to dictate who is in or out. They get to say to heaven "this is so" and expect heaven to simply follow suit (and yes, I know the keys of heaven, the tie and untie verses they base this on), with little consideration of how the God of Heaven thinks of the situation.

They get to declare protestants ordained orders, even Anglican Holy Orders, as "null and void" because they didn't follow the "form and matter". or simply said, they didn't follow the ordination rites with  the same words they do, ignoring the fact that the apostles themselves never ordained people to the ministry the way Roman Catholics do, and yet they dare to say that their Eucharist is not really the body of Christ, as if they really knew this.

Do they really think that God is up in heaven thinking, "oh...wait, you didn't say the right words exactly as the Romans Catholics do to ordain this Bishop, sorry no ordination grace to you buddy"?

Can the distribution of Grace be given by God so arbitrarily? We are ministers of His Grace, not the owners of it, with the authority to say who God gives it to or not.

They get to close communion to those who believe in Christ, and yet not in everything the institutional Roman Catholic church says we must, making belief in the institution more important than belief in Christ.

They deny women to the ordained ministry, even to the diaconate, despite the early church's practice of it, and the biblical mention of deaconesses, and they starting doing so by saying that women "are imperfect members of the body" and inherently more sinful than men.

They also say that since women were not present at the institution of the Eucharist, they cannot preside over it. Only men were there, therefore, only men can preside over the Eucharist.

First, there is scholarly debate about this, some saying that women could, and most likely were present at the Last Supper.

But even if they didn't, following this logic leads to dangerous places. First, only Jews could preside over the Eucharist, since only Jews were present at the institution of the first Eucharist.

Second, only men could partake of the Eucharist, if not, how could you justify the dividing of the command to "take and eat" from "do this in remembrance of me"? Jesus made no distinction between both of these commands. Where, therefore, do we get the authority to say that women can eat the Body of Christ, and so obey Christ's command to "take and eat" but not to preside over the Eucharist, so they cannot follow the other command to "do this in remembrance of me"?

If we really followed this logic then only Jews could preside over the Eucharist, and only men could partake of it, since only Jewish men were present at the institution of the Eucharist.

There are many reasons more, but these suffice.

Why Anglicanism?
Anglicanism is a stream of Catholicism that cherish both Catholic traditions and protestants traditions. From my understanding of it, they don't consider themselves "the one true Church" but simply a part of the Catholic Church.

They celebrate both Catholic and protestant saints. In fact, they celebrated Archbishop Romero years before the Roman Catholic Church decided he was a martyr after all.

They would not frown upon my love of protestant authors and music, as I find many Roman Catholics do when I tell them about it.

Did I ever tell you about the time I was leading a choir for the youth group in my local Roman Catholic parish, and was told not to sing "Christian" songs anymore, but only "Catholic" songs? We sang some Christian songs because those were the youth's favorites!

Anglicanism also leaves me room to breathe theologically, without the demand made on me that I agree perfectly with all their traditions in order to be in.

Anglicanism allows for the ordination of women as well.

Why haven't I made the move yet then?
This is not an easy decision, and not one that I should make hastily. Sometimes I worry about the future of Anglicanism, worrying how long they can stay together with all their differing views.

Also, sometimes I feel like I'm betraying my faith and my community. Just writing this post makes me feel like a traitor.

This is not the time for me to make this decision in my life, as I'm getting ready to get married. This is just not my decision anymore. It will be my future wife's decision and mine.

Also, Pope Francis is just amazing. I never been prouder of my Pope. This seems like the worst possible time to leave. Can I still follow the Pope and not be Roman Catholic? I think so, but I'm still uneasy about it.

And so I am, in what it seems to be a long state of limbo. My mind and spirit is urging me to make a decision, to find a place to land after all these wanderings. I yearn to make a decision. And yet I must wait.

I am not to make a decision like this without prayer, and without the Lord's approval. Please keep praying for me.