Further Reflections

I lot of different ideas and thoughts were bantered around last night (see previous post), but two struck me more severely and I would like to mention them here.

As we were talking about my conversion, Fr. Eric said something quite interesting: "There are Catholics and non-Catholics, but there are no non-Protestants." I think this shows two things: first, that the validity of the Church is recognized in our language, and second, that there is something inherent in the unity of the Catholic Church that does not exist in the 'unity' of the Protestant ones.

Most, if not all, Protestants will argue that the unity of Christ's Church is only in a spiritual sense, that there is not supposed (or at least does not need) to be a visible body. Yet in even their daily language they make no attempt to present the Church as one invisible body. If one truly believed that the present state of unity was proper to the Church, the phrase non-Protestant would be just as meaningful as non-Christian or non-Catholic, yet before last night I had never heard it used.

The second thing is probably the more profound and more painful (in that it reflects the more visceral pain of man). As we were talking about the call to vocation and how people have responded to it he said "You can ruin your vocation." He did not mean just that if we refused to listen to God we could miss our vocation but we could, in a single action, ruin any real chance we had at our vocation, namely through getting someone pregnant.

Unless both parties are willing to give the child up for adoption, pregnancy essentially forces marriage were God may have desired a celibate life. Father even mentioned one person he had heard of who was very strongly interested in the possibility of the priesthood before he got someone (I'm assuming a girlfriend, but I don't know) pregnant and now they are married and he probably ruined his vocation.

This is, for me, probably the most powerful statement against sexual immorality. It is often too easy to fall into the "I'll do this and go to confession later" mindset, but with pregnancy there is no going back. The sin can be forgiven, but a new life has been brought into existence, a life that will never be gone. Sex creates a powerful effect, like dominoes, and has far reaching effects that we may never know. This act then not only destroys the proper application of sexuality, but can destroy the wondrous life God had planned for someone, forcing them to live through a vocation they were never called to.