Part 2: then I went to Christendom

Now, rewind almost 20 years to my college days (hard oof).

At Christendom College, I plunged into a faith community that took their religion very seriously and, for the first time, I joined, enjoyed, and continue to enjoy the special bond that exists amongst those who feel they have recognized together a secret and important fact. 

I quickly discovered that for most of my new friends, this special bond was nothing new. This was their normal experience of being Catholic in their families or parishes. 

More importantly though, it was also part of their definition of Catholicism. Whereas my old community would have called both us and themselves "Catholic", in this new view, some Catholics were not true Catholics, and slid away from the definition in the degree that they did not assent in their hearts to what we all knew we had to do, to be Catholic.

What is this thing we were doing? I think a definition my friends would agree on might be something like, "live out Catholic teaching in the ways that are uncomfortable but necessary when logic is brought to bear on the tenets of the Faith, in addition to the ways that are comfortable." I learned a new concept: something or someone is not just Catholic in a binary, but to a degree.

In its gradient form, "Catholic" (sc. something like "rational-and-Catholic", "intentionally-Catholic", "faithful") represents a ratio between assent to the teaching of the Magisterium and what rationalists would call inner alignment: grit, lack of akrasia, with respect to adhering to the conclusions of reason. I will call this gradient-Catholicism.

(Gradient-Catholicism exists on a gradient too. I'm not really addressing moderate amounts of this mindset. I'm referring for the most part to Catholicism with strong traditionalist tendencies.)

Gradient-Catholicism struck the same chord plucked by my mother long ago, the first time she looked at a nun in pants and whispered to me of betrayal. It was a precise, clear, sharp chord, like a taut violin string suspended in my soul, separating either side of it in an echo of the angelic Battle depicted in a painting prominently displayed in my home: the side of Light, and the side of Darkness. And indeed, that chord also defined the limen I felt I mustn't cross, whenever I considered the morality of an action. The goal, in a sense, was to sharpen this line ever more clearly.

It was with a feeling of enormous rightness that this aligned with another kind of precision and sharpness I was learning at the same time: Logic 101. This sensation cannot be emphasized enough.

Gradient-Catholicism provided the inner language whereby my religious identity and self-improvement could interface with this wonderful tool: the ability to make correctly reasoned distinctions, bidding the entire universe open up and deposit the jewels of reality and agency at our feet. 

Non-gradient-Catholicism was just that: Catholicism, but without this interface. It atrophied into irrelevance.

All us younglings graduated and gripped our firebrands -- one edge Reason, the other Faith -- as we toddled into the dark outside world.

Then what happened? Well, some "fell," you see. Some "lost the faith." Alas, they must have been led astray or grown weary, and are now languishing in darkness. Yes, I'm kidding. Many who say the same aren't.

Nearly all of my dearest friends are atheists. With those who fell away after Christendom, I enjoy our continued shared love of truth, rationality and the power of logic. It's no coincidence many of us are programmers. It is to these friends I am mainly speaking now. 

Meanwhile, I count myself lucky that my best friend, also an atheist, I have kept since sixth grade at St. Joan of Arc. I enjoy discussing spiritual things with Jamie too, and others of a more worldly stripe.

But there is an enormous difference in such talks with Jamie and her ilk, and with my post-Christendom, post-traditionalist atheists. The communication hurdle I face with the latter almost always makes less enjoyable, fruitful, and insight-rich the very conversations I would wish and expect were more so than normal.

The difficulty is that to their minds, and unlike the rest of the world, there is still no such thing as non-gradient Catholicism. It's not only erroneous, but nonexistent. Especially when compared to gradient-Catholicism, it is treated as essentially worthless in rational conversation.

Sure, I mean, they'd agree non-traditionalist Catholics are obviously out there. But they are definitionally on the "fringe." When seen from the inside, the reality is clear: if you embrace the teaching of the Catholic Church, you are taking the first step toward something that terminates in an unhealthy state of mind: a certain blocking-out of reality. 

One friend tells me that a Catholic "could not" write a book about sound rational practices, because being Catholic de facto means being slightly irrational (later amended to "probably would not"). A second habitually refers to Catholicism as a cult, and voices concern that someone thinking of leaving Catholicism might be in danger because "a life inside the church doesn't prepare you very well for a life outside." This sentiment is difficult to mesh with the St. Joan's Catholicism of my youth -- to say the least.

Telling from my own habits of mind, the argument for only-gradient-Catholicism-counts would go like this: the only kind of Catholicism is the kind to which you could apply tests of logic regarding tenets of the Faith and the resulting way of life. Because those other Catholics are failing obvious tests, much like writing code while ignoring big red errors in the unit tests, they are obviously not really using Catholicism as a load-bearing program in their lives. Sure, they have a file called Catholic.sh in their heads, but that's all it is: a bunch of text, dead code. When the reckoning comes, what do you suppose the odds are this code will run?

In principle, it's difficult to disagree. I become skeptical, however, for a few reasons, which will go in another post.