The Catholic Life is a daily living; a living from day to day, from hour to hour. A fair part of this daily life is taken up with the pure service of the life; the rest of it is taken up though it be with the secular, temporal or mundane functions, is lived in the light of the Faith and is applied religion, Every one knows what the Complete Catholic Life is. There are so many exponents of it in our own midst in every station of life that the thing is unmistakable.
It is therefore, right and proper that we devote some attention to the varieties of partial, fractional, or incomplete Catholicism prevalent in these and other parts. Those partial people do not go to work on (though of course, they accept in theory) the whole Catholic thesis and attend to the matter.
They pick and choose their favorite morsel and are content to live on it. It is not a bad morsel; but it is not the whole Catholic sustenance of the soul of man. To the morsel chosen the devotees pay an excessive and disproportionate attention. It is this disproportion not the morsel, that is not praiseworthy. In the full Catholic scheme are no end of parts; and these are well-proportioned and exquisitely interrelated.
Thus, prominent among our partial or fractional livers are the celebrated Candle Catholics. There is a pious practice in the Church of lighting a votive candle to God Almighty or the Saints, but there they are on the weekdays faithfully lighting their candle. They may (and, alas, even do) neglect to fast or abstain, but up goes their candle. There may be churches in their neighborhood, they may be members of a parish, but these churches see them not.
But at the proper shrines they are present to light their candles. They appear not to doubt whether their candle can cover so many omissions or whether a failure with the annual Easter precept is compensated for with the success of the weekly candle. To the good estate of the Holy Church their contribution is the candle. With it they stand or fall. The pious ones of them will light their candles, blow them out, light, blow and light again.
Some of these folk are in addition, Tuesday Catholics who call on St. Anthony, or Wednesday Catholics, who visit the shrine of St. Rita, or Thursday Catholics, whose week’s devotions are made and finished with a reverential attendance on St. Theresa the Little Flower. Nobody would be wanting to dissuade these folk from honoring these great saints as they do. The hitch in the business is when they forget the Sunday and remember Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday.
If they only asked these saints what they thought of this manner of Catholicism, the answer would be disappointing. Those heroic lovers of God’s Church would thank them for their kind visit, but feel in duty bound to remind them that the Sunday is an obligation under pain or mortal sin, but Tuesday or Wednesday visit is an option. Those who left out the Sunday could hardly be hot favorites with St. Anthony, St. Rita, and St. Theresa.
Near relations of the Candle Catholics are the Vow Catholics and the Pilgrimage Catholics. Both these groups live in a Catholic nomadic life. They do not behave as if they had settled abode, which in the mid of the Church means a parish or mission church to which they are bound. Their vows are paid in distant places and the matter of the vows relate, in most cases, to a good time on earth.
It is not a bad thing to ask for a good time on earth, but when the humble prayer for it is all that the votary’s Catholic Faith amounts to, the preoccupation does not appear honorable enough. The world is at its worst when the Vow Catholic makes vows not only for himself or herself, but, in an abundance of piety and an overflow of charity, for other people as well. There are no such vows, but they are made. And the helpless victims of other people’s vows see no way out of the difficulty.
A pilgrimage is an ancient and fruitful Catholic exercise of piety. But it is the Pilgrimage Catholics that Thomas a Kempis had in mind in his celebrated passage in the `Imitation’.
Many run to sundry places to visit the relics if the saints and are astonished to hear their wonderful works; and they behold the noble buildings of their churches, and kiss their sacred bones wrapt up in silk and gold.
Oftentimes, in seeing these things, men and moved with curiosity and the novelty of the sight, and but little fruit of amendment is reaped thereby: especially when persons lightly run hither and hither, without true contrition for their sins.
But, here, in the sacrament of the alter, thou art wholly present, my God, the man Christ Jesus, where also the fruit of eternal salvation is plentifully reaped, as often as Thou art worthily and devoutly received.
And to this we are not drawn by any levity curiosity or sensuality; but by a firm faith, a devout hope, and a sincere charity.
The Pilgrimage Catholics, who so forget the Sacrament of the Alter in their nearest church, indeed run hither and thither but in these days, not so lightly. Thanks to this machine age they can go with heavy luggage carrying comfort in many several bundles. Nominally pilgrims, they are really holiday people out on picnics. The saint provides them with a welcome opportunity and with camping-around; they provide themselves with the necessary implements of devotion, which comprise gramophones, wireless sets, packs of playing cards, bottles of spirit and rich fare. After some days of carousal, not unmixed with (let us admit to their credit) some casual attention to the saint, they go away justified. They have performed the important duty of visiting the booths and making purchases and acquiring souvenirs. They have also dispatched letters and cards in at the Pilgrimage Post Office and bearing its special postmark.
There are then the Conventual or Chapel Catholics. These good people live in the parish but in effect they depopulate it. They take no part in parish life nor do they anything like pull their weight as Catholics and members of the fundamental and canonical unit of the Church, the parish. They may hold pews in the parish church (and many even put up a keen fight to retain them) but they do not warm them.
The pew-holding is a grave matter of their prestige. Other people thank Heaven and use their pews, while the absentee pewry are frequenting the private chapels of convents, colleges and religious houses. Of the need of a public, corporate, parochial Sunday worship of God they do not have to foggiest notion. Of masses they Mass without sermon they choose the Mass without. Their time is so terribly precious that the sooner the Sunday observance is got over and done with the more profitably they can serve mankind and the world.
There are also in the Church the Seasonal Catholics: most common of them being the Christmas Catholics, and most staggering being the great Good Friday Catholics. The former are a jovial crew and the word ‘feast’ makes them prick up their ears, just as the word ‘fast’ (to them nearly an obsolete word) fills them with gloom and suffering. They make the Feast of the Lord’s Nativity go with a bang in the houses, and their heavy Catholic contribution goes to the support of shopkeepers, purveyors, victuallers, wine-merchants, tailors and other similar recipients. Good Friday Catholic, who has jettisoned fifty-two Sundays and several days of obligation, is stung by a conscience not yet altogether dead. With this last lingering, surviving loyalty he hopes to fly the wrath to come.
Let honourable mention also be made of the Critical Catholics, who of their love criticise the acts of the Church to prove to our opponents that the Church does not suppress free discussion but in the end they may be one with the enemy; of the Constitutional Catholics, who wish to have observed in the conference and meetings of ecclesiastical or parochial bodies the details of British Parliamentary procedure; of the Right Extreme or Responsible Catholics, so much eaten up with the zeal for God’s House. That they have better plans of Church administration than priest or bishop or even His Holiness the Pope has; the Presidential Catholics, who must hold office or sit on the platform or they have nil to do with the Catholic Societies or Groups of Action of the Catholics of the Church Dormant who feel that most thing are superfluous because God exists; of Sundry Catholics Pests and Nuisances who confirm their faith only by an occasional brawl with the priest.
There are the Marriage Catholics who are guests of the Church on the occasion of their wedding (very often to a non Catholic and in high dudgeon because all the honors have not been given them.) And to end there are the Funeral Catholics, who having lived a whole life out of the Church, beg, when dead to have their carcass deposited in Catholic ground with attendant clergy and all honor.
R.I.P.
