I got to meet with a Catholic Monk earlier today. It was a rather interesting meeting. I met this monk through one of my friends, who has been looking into Catholicism recently. We got together, along with my brother, with a few pre-set questions…that unfortunatley didn’t get to Father Curtis beforehand!
All the same, it was actually an enjoyable experience and I hope to meet with him some more. We spoke briefly on Justification, Scriptural Sufficiency (he personally hadn’t heard the distinction between “formal sufficiency” and “material sufficiency”), whether works were meritorious, who could be saved in other religions, and I also asked him what he thought of Trent anathematizing me.
His answers were fairly “stock” answers, but also (ironically, and somewhat contradictory to what I just wrote) different from a lot of Catholic internet apologists I could name. For instance, while he said he had not studied it recently, the Canons of Trent did indeed anathematize my position. And unlike Dave Armstrong he did not attempt to say that they were not directed at me (as I said that I agreed word-for-word with specific sections that said, “He who agrees with this, let him be anathema”). Of course, since Vatacan II is in play, he did not say that he considered me damned by that anathema.
Of all that he said, I probably disagreed mostly with the idea that non-Christians could still be saved. Father Curtis did insist that they were saved by Christ still; but it was through their ignorance. I asked him why, then, we should not just cease to evangelize them and let them believe in their own gods in ignorance rather than expose them to the risk of hearing and rejecting the Gospel and thus damning themselves? He argued that it would be better for them to hear and accept Christ, which is true I suppose; but it still doesn’t answer my first charge. Is it better to not hear and be saved, or to hear and be damned?
In any case, we didn’t have infinite time so we weren’t able to get in as deep as I would have liked. Still, we shall hopefully meet again in the future. I would definitely look forward to it. In the meantime, he gave me a couple of pamphlets: Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth and Handbook for Today’s Catholic. Since I’ve got my own Catholic Catechism, I’ll be able to use the second one more indepth (since it’s indexed to the Catechism). I’ll probably end up posting some stuff in this blog about it, although as you can tell just be looking at my categories index and the number of posts under each category, I’m much more interested in debating atheists. Still, for some reason, Catholics like to debate me too… :-)
Oh well; this is life! I think I’ll manage.
