"...if the Church isn't supernatural, why bother with it?"

A fascinating (though sometimes quite dense) meditation on the Church, interspersed with comments by the remarkable Frank Weathers of Why I'm Catholic blog:

...The Catholic mystic, apart from his individual vocation to real apprehension of Spirit, finds himself in relation to the Church, i.e. to humanity organised from the religious point of view, and it is, of course, in this relation and what comes of it, that his peculiar note consists. The Catholic or Universal Church is an organic unity of which the baptised individual is a member. It has its theoretical and practical conditions of membership; its dogmata of faith and morals. Like every organism its constitution is strictly hierarchical, its machinery of authority culminating in the law of Peter, irrevocable, infallible; infallibility being the sanction proper to a revealed system, such as the Church claims to be. The task of the Catholic mystic is so to adjust these social claims to his individual vocation, that not only neither be defrauded, but that each subserve the other.

Now the Church may be regarded from two points of view, that of faith, which is proper to the Catholic only, and that of observation, which is common to all men. Viewed in the latter way, in its purely phenomenal aspect, i.e. as an element of possible experience to every observer, Catholicism is seen to be nothing else than the world-society of souls.Yes, that is my bold highlight. Because that is the world that Truth came to save. The same paragraph continues,

Other societies of-souls there are in plenty amongst men, but in them the religious organisation has not reached its goal of universalism, it is still tribal or national, as the very names of these societies indicate. Their organisation may also be said to be opinionative, in contradistinction to that of the Church, whose organisation rests upon faith, in that whereas Catholics believe certain doctrines because they are members of the Catholic Church, the members of a sect or of a denomination belong to this or that body because they believe particular doctrines.

Faith, the foundation of everything that Christianity rests on. Faith in God, faith in Christ, faith in the Holy Spirit, all lead towards faith in the Church. Blessed John Henry Newman sees this, and all of the saints too. Frankly, I'm not interested in "opinionative organizations." There are plenty of those already. Besides, as Algar explains, those types of institutions have a problem to contend with.

In this case, the church does not make the doctrine, but the doctrine the church. The motive of their belief to the individuals composing the society is anterior to the existence of the society, let alone its authoritative teaching, for the society, in this case, comes into existence, not to teach anybody anything, but purely as the social expression of a certain pre-determined unanimity of opinion among the individuals who compose it. Whatever claims on the human conscience such a society may afterwards come to make, it will be forever logically impossible to exercise the Catholic quality of faith in regard to its teaching.

Like joining your alma mater's alumni association, or some fraternal order? I think I get the gist of what Algar is saying here. Further on, he hits on another reason that led me to the Church,

For—and in this is to be found at once its crux and its only possible justification—Catholicism claims to be a supernatural religion. The claim made on his soul by Revealed Religion! Ah! here is the rub; in this lies the 'open secret of Christianity.' Let us try to consider what this claim amounts to.

Because if the Church isn't supernatural, why bother with it? If it isn't supernatural, why bother with religion at all? Then Algar brings up the point that I hit upon when I met the Marine in charge of Justice and Peace. The "whole person" concept,

Revealed Religion, directly or indirectly, claims the whole man. It directly claims his intellect, his belief, and the flowering of his emotional being, his love. It indirectly claims his will. I say indirectly, for the service of the will unprompted by love has nothing to do with Revealed Religion, but belongs to ethics, which, as such, is a conception wholly alien to a system which counts among its saints Thais, the penitent light o' love, and Moses, the converted negro bandit. This is of course a tremendous claim, and one may well be surprised at the lightness, the lé gèreté with which so many, both of those who admit and of those who deny, appear to treat it. In return for this complete service, Revealed Religion claims to heal, once and for ever, the wound of man. Moreover, given the Church's definition of that wound, there can be no doubt but that Catholicism does heal it.

Two new saints to meet, a Desert Mother and a Desert Father. And if Algar lost you there, just think of the Sacraments and keep them in mind as you roll on to his next thought.

If the Catholic analysis of human nature (which is by no means only held by Catholics) be once admitted, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that the Catholic saint represents that nature perfectly restored. And to say as much as this is to say more than may at first sight appear. For it amounts to saying that the resources of the Catholic system are equal to meeting, to the full, all possible demands that can logically be made on it.

Because the Church keeps going and going, like the Energizer bunny, only better. MMXI years and counting. No big deal, you say? Well then, chew on this,

It will, no doubt, be said that the natural logic of things will account for this. But in human affairs, more particularly religious systems, is this natural logic so very apparent? Does not the arbitrary, the unexpected, constantly cut short the line of ideal development? Is not religious speculation, in particular, a byword for confusion of thought and tongue? We, at least, who come of Protestant heredity can hardly think otherwise. That there should then be just one system among warring theodicies both speculatively and practically complete is surely no slight thing, and must, one would think, arrest the inquirer's attention. I do not say that alone it can do more, but this, at least, it would seem it must do.

The arbitrary and the unexpected are the norm, at least in my short experience on the planet. Qohelth, my favorite friend from Ecclesiastes testifies to this too. And I have the heredity he refers to above and heartily concur with his thoughts here as well. Which is why the Church is concerned with all Christians, and everyone else too. She takes responsibility for the whole lot of us, just like the parent She is...