My theory: one nifty way to look at the divisions in the Catholic church is to see which Catholics would be happy to see the priest shortage solved by bringing missionary priests from the third world to the US; and which ones think the solution is to increase the ranks of pastoral and lay ministers and to allow married and women priests. To my mind, it primarily hinges on if you believe that Christ is physically present in the Eucharist - if he is, then that's what the priesthood is all about - confecting that sacrament - and the nationality of the priest doesn't make a difference. But if the Eucharist is our communal meal, where Christ is present in the congregation, and, as the gag-inducing songs tell us, we are all Eucharist - if that's your view of the church, then the priest is just the host of a dinner party, and if he talks funny, that'll get in the way...

You hit it, I think. The Real Prescence is so often the sticking point. And it's part of the bigger sticking point, the Incarnation. Almost all the heresies and schisms intersect at those locations. And you know why, and I know why...(I plan, by the way, to NOT be a controversialist within the Church, so you won't hear me making any denunciations of, well, you know what. But we are on the same wavelength...)

OK, John and Ethan, in light of John's wish to not be controversial, I guess I'm gonna be a wise-ass and ask just what is this business about "Real Presence", "Incarnation", and how various heresies and schisms intersect on those ideas.

(I'm not Catholic, Sunday School was a long time ago, and what "religion" I have comes largely from C.S. Lewis-- "Chronicles of Narnia", "The Screwtape Letters", "Mere Christianity", "The Problem of Pain", and his science-fiction trilogy. And much of that I read maybe 20 years ago.....)

(Short version) God made us because he wanted people to love. And we are so made that we need to love Him, in order to be our real selves, and to be happy. This is what you and I really want. BUT, love isn't love unless it is unforced, so he had to give us freedom also. And then, clever critters that we are, we instantly started thinking of other things we wanted. And also thinking that the "loving God" thing was much too tough. (It IS tough, in a way analogous to the way you grow up and stop playing with toys and often choose difficult painful goals, which bring more satisfaction in the long run.)

So, we all of us try to wriggle away from the tough choice. If you are a non-believer, no problem. But the believers want to wriggle away too. Which is harder. It would be a lot easier if God was distant and uncaring. But as it happens he actually took on the form and reality of a human being, Jesus, and came into our world and suffered and died out of love for us. That's the "Incarnation." If you believe that, you don't have much of an excuse for saying, "Gee, maybe some other day. Right now I'm real busy at work."

SO, people keep inventing new versions of the story, that minimize the impact of the Incarnation. Maybe Jesus was just a man, inspired by God. Or maybe he was God, but was not really a man---just a spirit using a human body as a robot. Maybe he was really only of the spiritual realm, and humans misunderstood what they saw. Maybe the story was only for the simple folk, but he had a cool secret message for us spiritually advanced people...

All these things are heresies, and almost all heresies are attempts to do the same thing--wriggle away from the Incarnation. And, Catholics also believe that the Church is the Body of Christ. We have faith in Christ AND his Church. So, the schisms are in a way also a means of avoiding the Incarnation, for He is incarnated in the Church.

And us crazy Catholics also believe that Jesus is really present in the Eucharist. That's called the Real Presence. I'm sure by now I don't need to spell out for you why that's also a sticking point, and something that people tend to try to minimize...

All this, by the way, is why Chesterton wrote that Orthodoxy is not something stodgy, or easy. It was and is a difficult scary tightrope balancing act, always threatened with falling in one direction or another.

Gnosticism is easy; fighting gravity is hard.

It is difficult - but the benefits come up in a host ways, seen and often unseen. When I was in the seminary, a friend of mine asked how I could possibly go my whole life without having sex again. He was astonished, amazed, mortified - how can you possibly do that? Never again, your whole life? He thought it was sooo repressive and confining...and after a while of him obsessing about how oppressed my life would be without sex, I realized - who's the one in slavery here?

I think most folks can accept that there are benefits to living on the (semi)straight and (semi)narrow - but so often, those benefits aren't the obvious ones. And it's the same thing with orthodoxy - the joy of orthodoxy is not that you get to stop thinking, become some mind-numbed automaton or brainless sheep or something. I'd say it's quite the opposite - I never had more curiousity, more questions, or challenged what I was learning more than when I was embracing Catholicism.

Oops - gotta run...more later (I'm sure you're all waiting with bated breath!)

Ach...completely lost the train of thought...and nobody really needs spiritual insights from an athiest anyway! The main point was that the whole seemingly-easy = hard, and seemingly-hard = easy thing - that's very true...and that even though I've chosen not to follow orthodox Catholicism anymore, because I simply do not believe that it's true, does not mean that I don't think it's not the best way to structure my life - in all its difficulties and in all its joys...

...and maybe someday I'll be back...I'll happily apply Franklin's logic to my current understanding of how the universe works...