Posts Tagged ‘for’
I’m Catholic. In America, it sometimes seems more trouble than it’s worth. Fortunately, for all the routine vilification the Church receives, as jokes at her expense are a touchstone of popular culture, it seems the critics can’t get their stories straight.
First and foremost, the Church is, apparently, a dinosaur that cannot change with the times. On abortion, gay rights and masturbation, the Church is a relic. True to form, the second most popular criticism is another
After a friend expressed interest in reading up on the Apocrypha — the books of the Catholic Bible deemed deuterocanonical and are not found in the Protestant editions — I found myself searching on Google for the terms “free bible apocrypha Catholic.” I didn’t find any free Bibles complete with both Maccabees and a few more chapters of Daniel, but I did find on both sides of the Apocrypha debate, quite a lot of hatred.
Due to my poor selection of search terms, a plethora of inflammatory Web sites popped up in my browser, Web sites not content to refer to the Church without using quotes.
The Roman Catholic ‘Church’ in effect accepts 12 of the apocryphal books as canonical (omitting I & II Esdras and the Prayer of Manassah from the above list.) Because of this the Roman Catholic ‘Church’ speaks of the Apocrypha as “deutero-canonical” books, and in turn labels as apocrypha what we may term “pseudoepigraphical” books.”
Almost everywhere, it seemed, the Church is belittled and mocked. The Church includes the Apocrypha in its Bible, and it cannot be a true Church, claims these garish Web sites. The Church must be discredited, they say, for putting words in God’s mouth, specifically:
While claiming to be the preserver of God’s word the Catholic Church has corrupted God’s word by adding books to the Bible that have no place in it.
To paraphrase, the second claim is that the Catholic Church is not afraid to contradict, interpret and change the Word of God as it suits her. To think, I was almost convinced that the Church is an unchanging relic way behind the times, only now to hear that she is actively working against the Word of God with all due haste, as a sort of Whore of Babylon.
Is the Church the symbol of stogy tradition, or does she flout tradition as the anti-Apocryphites believe?
Even this minor contradiction is enough to convince me all the more that the Roman Catholic Church has far more credibility than these most militant Protestant denominations who seek to discredit her. It isn’t much of an observation to note that the anti-Catholic attacks made here by Christians in the states aren’t very Christian in nature, given that they’re attacks and all.
Whatever the values advanced by the Bible, there will always be these few who nonetheless number all too many. Whatever the costs, they will always believe that it’s more worth their time to disparage the Catholics than to love these neighbors.
After a good 15 years in the public education system, I only knew how to do one thing well: classes. What I didn’t know boils down to merely everything else, including what it’s like to have a full-time job without a nametag.
I doubt a typical college student knows any real-life skills from college. College classes at most teach a clinical understanding about the outside world, and all the wider college experience has to offer involves ping-pong balls and plastic cups. Even though for our Beer Chugging regional champions, graduation is for quitters, but even the most adamant and decidedly average students choose to quit, eventually.
Graduating after five long years, our typical student spent the last four years cleaning up after that mess of a freshman year in the dorms. His expertise at grade substitution is unparalleled. The main office knows him by name.
He didn’t get here on much of a scholarship if anything at all. Because his fifth-generation Anglo-Irish heritage doesn’t lend itself well to scholarships, McAdequate is stuck with student loans, and merit-based scholarships are out of the question for this initiative-less loser.
Like most college students, he doesn’t have an internship and never applied. He doesn’t have a clue about how to succeed in life. He’s not prepared to do well, even if he has any confidence in the abilities he lacks.
He has no reason to prepare, he believes. His successes and failures in college will are not transferable units, are they? Do well in college, or poorly, and it doesn’t matter. His driving and criminal records will follow him, but McAdequate doesn’t have any outstanding warrants, and has only a few, scattered moving violations from back in his freshman year.
In everything else, he’s on his own.
On the other hand, his friend Perl already found a job, and she has barely a C+(+) average. She may be an information technologies major, but her success isn’t just because there will always be a future in computer maintenance. Perl succeeded because she took the initiative. She bothered finding an internship, and learning early on the skills in the job world.
She doesn’t need to pad her résumé with phenomenal personal greatnesses humbly veiled as weaknesses. She doesn’t need to exaggerate her job experience. That she has any job experience at all is a leg up on the McAverages who graduate in her field.
Maybe internships aren’t required because that’s the sort of initiative students need to find on their own. Even if McAverage did land that internship, it wouldn’t last. He’d go back to waiting tables. Perl will do something she likes, and will get paid a lot more.
Everyone’s a quitter, eventually — the only question is whether or not you have any initiative.
