Catholicism- An Introduction Read online

  Teach®

  Yourself

  Catholicism – An Introduction

  Peter Stanford

  For UK order enquiries: please contact Bookpoint Ltd, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4SB.

  Telephone: +44 (0) 1235 827720. Fax: +44 (0) 1235 400454.

  Lines are open 09.00–17.00, Monday to Saturday, with a 24-hour message answering service. Details about our titles and how to order are available at www.teachyourself.com

  For USA order enquiries: please contact McGraw-Hill Customer Services, PO Box 545, Blacklick, OH 43004-0545, USA.

  Telephone: 1-800-722-4726. Fax: 1-614-755-5645.

  For Canada order enquiries: please contact McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, 300 Water St, Whitby, Ontario L1N 9B6, Canada.

  Telephone: 905 430 5000. Fax: 905 430 5020.

  Long renowned as the authoritative source for self-guided learning – with more than 50 million copies sold worldwide – the Teach Yourself series includes over 500 titles in the fields of languages, crafts, hobbies, business, computing and education.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: a catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: on file.

  First published in UK 2008 by Hodder Education, part of Hachette UK, 338 Euston Road, London, NW1 3BH.

  First published in US 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

  This edition published 2010.

  Previously published as Teach Yourself Catholicism

  The Teach Yourself name is a registered trade mark of Hodder Headline.

  Copyright © 2008, 2010 Peter Stanford

  In UK: All rights reserved. Apart from any permitted use under UK copyright law, no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information, storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or under licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Further details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited, of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

  In US: All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Typeset by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company.

  Printed in Great Britain for Hodder Education, an Hachette UK Company, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH, by CPI Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 8EX.

  The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher and the author have no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content will remain relevant, decent or appropriate.

  Hachette UK’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  Impression number

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Year

  2014 2013 2012 2011 2010

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Foreword

  Meet the author

  Only got a minute?

  Only got five minutes?

  Only got ten minutes?

  Part one: Catholicism – the basics

  1 What is Catholicism?

  The oldest institution in the Western world

  The scale of world Catholicism (taken from current Vatican statistics)

  An historical overview

  How are Catholics different from other Christians?

  The distinguishing features of Catholicism

  Attitudes to other faiths

  Conclusion

  2 Once a Catholic

  The changing Church

  Was Jesus Catholic?

  What do Catholics believe?

  The place of tradition and prayer

  The role of Mary

  Popular sites of Marian devotion

  How Catholicism operates

  Catholicism as a way of life

  The sacramental life

  Is there a Catholic morality?

  Conclusion

  Part two: The history of Catholicism

  3 The early Church

  The birth of the Catholic Church

  How the institution was created

  Catholicism as a state religion

  The growth of papal power

  Key thinkers in the first millennium of Catholicism

  4 From the Dark Ages to the Reformation

  The rise to European domination

  In conflict with ambitious princes

  Schism with the East

  Innocent III – The Vicar of Christ

  Avignon popes

  Impression of power

  The theses of Martin Luther

  Conclusion

  5 Counter-Reformation to Holocaust

  The Counter-Reformation

  Jansenism and Gallicanism

  The Enlightenment

  The French Revolution

  Retreat from a changing world

  Pius IX

  The rise of fascism

  Conclusion

  Part three: The Catholic Church today

  6 The modern Catholic Church

  The Second Vatican Council

  The key changes made

  Aftermath of the Council

  Confusion and conflict

  John Paul II

  Benedict XVI

  7 The hierarchy of Catholicism

  How popes used to be elected

  Who becomes a cardinal?

  Papal conclaves

  How popes are elected now

  Can popes abdicate?

  Papal infallibility

  The Vatican

  Conclusion

  8 The Church on the ground

  The episcopate

  The nature of priesthood

  Celibacy

  Married priests

  Eastern rite Catholic Churches

  Priestly titles

  Religious life

  The religious charism

  9 Women in the Church

  Women priests

  Objections to women priests

  Nuns

  Consecrated virgins

  Conclusion

  Part four: Teachings and traditions

  10 The sacramental and devotional life of Catholics

  The Mass

  The Eucharist

  Baptism

  Reconciliation

  First Holy Communion

  Confirmation

  Marriage

  Holy orders

  The sacrament of the anointing of the sick

  Other devotions

  The Rosary

  Benediction and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament

  The Angelus

  Stations of the Cross

  The Divine Office

  Fasting and abstinence

  Eucharistic fasting

  Conclusion

  11 The sacred and the secular

  Catholics and sex

  Contraception

  Abortion

  Assisted conception

  Homosexuality

  AIDS

  Sexual abuse

  Annulment

  Conclusion

  12 Dissent and dispute

  The Int
ernal Forum

  Dissent

  Excommunication

  Liberation theology

  The Devil

  Exorcism

  Conclusion

  13 Saints and martyrs

  Canonization and beatification

  Ten patron saints

  Modern martyrs

  Conclusion

  14 Where two worlds overlap

  Religion and science

  The ‘just war’

  Catholicism and the arts

  The Catholic writer

  Opus Dei

  Other modern movements

  Conclusion

  Conclusion: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church

  Glossary

  Taking it further

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  To Catholics of my generation (born 1961), the idea that you could teach yourself Catholicism is, at first glance, a difficult one. We were brought up to believe that if you had any questions about your faith, you should turn to a priest. The world – including the Catholic one – has moved on from those times, but I have still found myself, in writing this, turning to priests and theologians for advice and guidance on key questions of doctrine. I would like to thank in particular Fathers Shaun Middleton, John Hemer and Stephen McBrearty for all their hard work in guiding me during the researching and writing of this book

  All biblical quotations are from the New Jerusalem Bible, published by Darton, Longman and Todd. Quotations from The Catechism of the Catholic Church come from the Revised Edition published by Geoffrey Chapman.

  Peter Stanford

  Credits

  Front cover: © Oliver leedham/Alamy

  Back cover: © Jakub Semeniuk/iStockphoto.com, © Royalty-Free/Corbis, © agencyby/iStockphoto.com, © Andy Cook/iStockphoto.com, © Christopher Ewing/iStockphoto.com, © zebicho – Fotolia.com, © Geoffrey Holman/iStockphoto.com, © Photodisc/Getty Images, © James C. Pruitt/iStockphoto.com, © Mohamed Saber – Fotolia.com

  Foreword

  I thought long and hard when Peter asked me to write a few words as an introduction to this book. It was not that I was reticent about helping an old friend, or that I feared he might not be up to the task of explaining Catholicism. It’s just that I could think of so many people more qualified for the task than me.

  I have been a practising Catholic all my life. It remains an important part of who I am. But I certainly would never consider myself an expert.

  There is no doubt that this book is timely. Faith and religion, for good and not-so-good reasons, are very much back on the public agenda. This makes it more important than ever that discussions are based on the facts rather than fiction, which is, sadly, not always the case.

  It is giving the facts in a fair and balanced way that has been Peter’s goal with this book about Catholicism. He believes, as I do, that going back to the basics in this way will promote understanding and tolerance, and help, too, to highlight the fundamental and decent values that our great religions share.

  I hope you find the book as informative and interesting as I did.

  Cherie Booth QC

  Meet the author

  Welcome to Catholicism – An Introduction

  There are an estimated 1.2 billion Catholics around the world today. In theory, and in the rhetoric of the Church, all accept the magisterium (teaching authority) of its leader, the Pope, the successor to the Apostle Peter, and all accept the teachings of the Church, set out most clearly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a rule book reissued in the 1990s by Pope John Paul II.

  Yet the Catechism’s 700 pages and almost 3,000 entries, detailing what Catholics can and can’t do, think or believe, do not tell the story of Catholicism. Neither does a careful reading of 2,000 years of papal pronouncements. For the Church is not and never has been a monolith, filled with automatons who simply do as they are told. There are almost as many interpretations of what it is to be Catholic today as there are Catholics.

  Individual believers choose the areas of Church teaching where they place the greatest emphasis. This may be on its social teaching (for example, demanding a more equal playing field between rich and poor nations); on the form of the Catholic liturgy; or on Catholic approaches to such vexed subjects as abortion, in vitro fertilization and sexual morality. There are only two constants. One, each personal formulation of what precisely it means to be a Catholic will differ from the next, and, two, you will never find a Catholic who believes that each and every teaching of their Church is universally marvellous and absolutely spot on.

  I say that on the basis of having spent over a quarter of a century as a ‘professional’ Catholic, mixing in the course of my work with believers around the world, and more like half a century as a ‘private’ Catholic, trying and often failing to live out the Church’s teaching.

  I was brought up in that bastion of English Catholicism, Liverpool. After university, I had no particular idea of what I wanted to do – certainly no vocation – but pitched up as a journalist at first the Tablet, the international Catholic weekly, and then the Catholic Herald, a weekly broadsheet serving English, Welsh and Irish Catholics. For four years until 1992, I was editor of the latter, and since then I have covered Catholicism in newspapers, magazines, television and radio programmes and a series of books.

  The thing that continues to enthral me about the Church is that there are ties that hold Catholics to it, arguably over and above those that bind people brought up in other faiths to their particular denomination. You don’t, for instance, meet many lapsed Lutherans and Methodists, but with cradle Catholics, even when as adults they reject many of the Church’s beliefs and practices, there remains a residual and lifelong connection. Part of what it is to be Catholic – alongside the more obvious matter of a relationship with God – is navigating that relationship with the institution of the Church. That is what unites the 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide, and is the subject of this book.

  To Catholics of my generation (born 1961), the idea that you could teach yourself Catholicism is, at first glance, a difficult one. We were brought up to believe that, if you had any questions about your faith, you should turn to a priest. The world – including the Catholic one – has moved on from those times, but I have still found myself, in writing this, turning to priests and theologians for advice and guidance on key questions of doctrine. I would like to thank in particular Fathers Shaun Middleton, John Hemer and Stephen McBrearty for all their guidance in this project.

  All biblical quotations are from the New Jerusalem Bible, published by Darton, Longman and Todd. Quotations from The Catechism of the Catholic Church come from the Revised Edition published by Geoffrey Chapman.

  Peter Stanford, London, 2010

  1: Only got a minute?

  Catholicism is the largest church within Christianity, embracing an estimated 1.2 billion of the 2.1 billion Christians worldwide. It claims to represent the mainstream tradition handed down by Jesus Christ in the gospels of the New Testament to his Apostle Peter, the first Pope or leader of Christianity. Over the centuries, Eastern Orthodox and successive waves of Protestant Christians have broken with the Church of the Popes, based in Rome, but it remains larger than the rest of Christianity put together.

  Catholicism’s distinctive identity is based on several features. Principal among them is the teaching authority – or magisterium – of the papacy. Catholics regard the Pope as infallible on certain questions of faith and morals. He presides over a highly centralized, hierarchical Church, which, over 2,000 years, has spread to all corners of the globe. In their distinctive white robes, popes have long been familiar figures on the international stage.

  Catholic teaching stresses gospel values of justice, love and compassion. The Catholic Church is often to be found in modern society championing the cause of the poor, needy and marginalized. It has a strict code of sexual and personal morality. It rejects sex before and outside marriage and sees the primary purpose of sex as ‘the transmi
ssion of human life’. It forbids gay sexual relationships and campaigns specifically against abortion but more widely on a pro-life agenda that seeks decent housing, education, health care, wages and employment prospects for all. It opposes the death penalty, and has condemned all recent wars.

  5: Only got five minutes?

  It is not only the paramount role of the Pope that marks out Catholicism. Its stance on personal and public morality and its emphasis on the duty to attend the sacraments regularly also distinguishes it from other Christian churches.

  Personal and public morality

  Catholicism prides itself on standing apart from trends in broader society and defending ‘eternal truths’. It says of itself that it has never compromised teachings handed down by Jesus Christ to the Apostles, because it does not have the authority to override scripture. Therefore it cannot, for example, ordain women to its priesthood because Jesus did not choose women among his original 12 Apostles.

  The Catholic Church is often better known, in the popular mind, for its teachings on sex than for its social concern, but its achievement concerning the latter is extensive. Its social teachings seek to put into practice Jesus’s concern for justice and love of neighbour, especially the poor and marginalized. They attack such notions as class struggle and urge the narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. They reject the arms race and set out a universal human right to ‘bodily integrity and to the means which are suitable for the proper development of life’.

  Catholicism has always engaged fully with the world around it, rising to great temporal power in Europe and beyond from 800 until the eighteenth century. Then, with the Enlightenment, demands for individual liberty and the rise of scientific knowledge, it retreated into conservatism and isolation until, in the 1960s, the reforming Second Vatican Council renewed the Church’s mission to open a dialogue with the modern world.

  Today’s Catholicism is pro-life in all ways, not just opposing abortion – high on the Church’s agenda (though stopping well short of condoning the violent attacks of some Christian fundamentalists on abortion clinics) – but also standing up against policies that deny people decent housing, education, health care and employment.