Am I still Catholic? (part 4: WWJD)

MY CREED, PART FOUR

9/23/21

IV: What is “catholic”?

(What does it mean to be “catholic” and am I still catholic?)

Lately I have been struggling with the question of what exactly it means to be catholic and am I even catholic anymore. I’ve had a few different people ask me that lately and it should be a simple answer but it’s not. This blog is my attempt to answer that question. Also, does being catholic mean the same thing today as it used to when the Church started. The world has changed and so have the leaders of the church.

The simple answer is that the word “catholic” means “universal”. However, all my life when I said I was catholic to people, I didn’t mean I was universal and they didn’t take it that way. Most likely they took it to mean that I follow the pope. Even today people hear “catholic” and they think “pope follower”. That’s not wrong but it’s not really right either. To say being catholic means you follow the pope is like saying that being American means you follow the president. Both the pope and the president are the visible leaders of their respective groups but those groups don’t just “follow” their leaders. To be catholic or American means to uphold and practice certain ideals. The leaders of the church and the country, theoretically, represent those ideals and are examples to the people that belong to the church or the country.

So, to be catholic means you uphold and practice certain beliefs and/or ideals. The complexity comes from explaining what those ideals are. To clarify this the catholic church put out two creeds of what we believe. The first one that came out was the Apostle’s Creed and it is much shorter. The second one that came out is the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed is much longer and lists a few more things that Catholics believe while also explaining some of the original beliefs in more detail. I wrote a two-part blog about each creed in 2020 and won’t go into it here again. The short story is that both creeds list the things that Catholics are supposed to believe and practice and have some things with which I disagree.

After analyzing and blogging about the creeds, I determined that I am still about 90% Catholic since there are only three items in the Nicene Creed that don’t make sense to me anymore and everything in the Apostle’s Creed makes sense. The items in question from the Nicene Creed were changed or added from the Apostle’s Creed to distinguish (separate) Catholics from other Christians. At the time of the Nicene Creed, there was dissention among the Christians and the catholic church felt the need to go into more detail about their beliefs. The full history of both creeds is another blog for another day. The summation is that they list things that Catholics should believe in and I still believe 90% of them.

A big problem with the list of beliefs in the creeds though is that there are no instructions on how to apply those beliefs to the real world. Another problem is that none of the beliefs are things you can take action on. The basic thing that makes a Christian is the word “Christ”. Christians are followers of Christ. Just as the followers of Charles Manson followed his instructions on how to interact and deal with people, Christians should follow Christ’s instructions on how to interact and deal with people. The beliefs of the creeds are kind of irrelevant if you don’t behave the way Christ would. The silly yet simple question of “what would Jesus do?” is actually all you need to be a Christian. In every situation in life you should always think about how Jesus would handle it.

Some people that have questioned what it means to be a Christian have also questioned whether Jesus was real and if the new testament is true. Whether Jesus was real or not is irrelevant to the question of what it means to be Christian. As explained above, a Christian is someone who tries to approach everything in life as Jesus would. How Jesus would approach every situation is described in the new testament. Whether the new testament is true or not is also irrelevant. You can take any character in any fiction or non-fiction story and become a follower of them. Then you apply that person’s philosophy to everything in your life. So, if Jesus was not real, I’m still a Christian and try to apply his philosophy to everything in my life.

Some criticism from non-believers is that they see proclaimed Christians not behaving in Christian ways and it turns them further away from Christianity. There are two problems with this. First, if you don’t consider yourself a Christian then you really can’t determine what is Christian behavior and what isn’t. Secondly, Catholics and Christians are not perfect in their attempts to imitate Christ because we are just humans with faults and flaws. Just like addicts in recovery that sometimes fall short, Catholics and Christians also fall short.

So, in conclusion, the answer is simple, actually. To be Christian means you ask what would Jesus do, in every situation in life, and try to apply his approach to every situation in your life. Forget about current and past “leaders” of the catholic church. Each have only been human and had their own flaws and corruption. What it means to be catholic is not dependent on who is the current pope. The philosophy of the catholic church is the same as it was when it started to now. Catholics try to imitate the life philosophy of Jesus Christ - whether he was real or not - in everything we do. Catholics are really just Christians that have a visible leader of their church in Rome. I still consider myself a catholic – despite my disgust with the current pope – and still try to live my life by the approach that Jesus would.

p.s. I may actually be a Moody-ian as I love and follow Ivan Moody too much in my life. (lol)