One of the things I've enjoyed doing on here is elaborating on some of the teachings of the Catholic Church that I really had to do a lot of praying and reading about to accept. But today I got to thinking about those teachings that weren't so hard to swallow. And there are several! So in no particular order, here are a couple to get started:
- Weekly communion. We did it every Sunday in my old church, so this was no big deal.
- Infant baptism. While I was baptized as a youth (maybe 12 or so?), I knew lots of other denominations flip-flopped the ages for confirmation and baptism. I didn't read anything into it, but just figured different strokes for different folks.
- Praying to the saints. To clarify, when someone says they're praying to a saint, they're basically asking that saint to pray to God for them. Once it was explained to me that asking a saint to pray for you is like asking your friend to pray for you, I thought it sounded good. After all, I asked and was asked by people to pray for them all the time. Sometimes I forgot or slacked off - but the saints wouldn't, because what else would they have to do?
And it wasn't like it was necessary to pray to the saints - you could still go straight to Jesus if you wanted. In fact, you should still be praying directly to God in addition to that! It's like my mother said the other day when one of my brothers asked her to pray for him: "Of course I'll pray for you, but remember you have to pray, too!"
(Note that while I had no problem praying to the saints, Mary was a different story.)
- The papacy. After I got a handle on the whole Church authority thing (post about that to come soon!), I really didn't need the unbroken lineage of the apostles explained. Ditto with the papacy. Especially after I heard the whole Peter/petra/'rock' thing, which fascinated my linguistic self.
- I'm sure many other things that I can't think of, because they're shared by many if not all Christian denominations. (And because I'm starting to think about supper, and visions of dancing tacos are starting to interfere with my thought process!)
Are there any tenets of your Christian faith that you've never questioned? Or do you really struggle with any of the above?