You have probably often been asked “why are you a Catholic?” or perhaps even “why are you still a Catholic?” The question I would like to ask you is rather: “How do you know that you are a Catholic?”

The three essential dimensions of religion are beliefs, institutional membership and above all spiritual experience- Fr Peter Serracino Inglott

Certainly not because my name is in- scribed in some dusty register in the archives of St Paul’s parish church in Valletta. Nor would I take it as proof that I was not, or was no longer a Catholic if there were a marginal note recording my denial of it annexed to the record of my baptism when a baby.

Very famously the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce had claimed that he was entitled to call himself a Christian even though he was agnostic. More recently the unbelieving Jewish-Italian Senator Marcello Pera went even further.

He felt not just entitled but obliged to call himself a Christian. The ground offered for these claims is that the values and the culture to which they adhered were a heritage they had received from Christianity.

I believe that any person can decide to use any word with the meaning that person wants to assign to it, provided he is consistent about it. But I think that the self-definition by Croce and Pera is misleading.

I myself know that I have inherited much that is of great value to me from English culture both when I learnt to speak in English as a boy and when I studied at Oxford. But I think that if I called myself English on that ground I would only confuse people’s minds.

Since being or not being a Catholic is a matter of adherence or non-adherence to a religion, the three essential dimensions of a religion are involved i.e. beliefs, institutional membership and above all spiritual experience.

The question is much more complex than if it were either a matter of membership of a club or of acceptance of a cultural heritage.

You are saying that in addition to an individual’s relationship with an institution account must also be taken of beliefs and of inner personal experience. Can you explain that a little bit more?

Let us again take a concrete case. Since 2002 a group called Roman Catholic Women Priests (RCWP) have ordained approximately 75 women as deacons, priests and bishops in the US, Canada and Western Europe.

The RCWP acknowledges that these ordinations are ‘illicit’ in the sense that they are made in flagrant breach of Canon Law, but they maintain they are valid because the bishops carrying them out were ordained in direct apostolic succession.

The Holy See denies this validity on the grounds that only males can receive Holy Orders. But RCWP retorts that the Holy See’s declaration only begs the question.

Nevertheless, in 2007, the Holy See decreed that any attempts at ordaining women incurred automatic excommunication. This act, however, does not imply that the women ceased to be Roman Catholic as they claim, but only that they are being suspended from full participation in Holy Communion as a penalty for their indiscipline.

The RCWP rightly assert that being a Catholic does not mean being “a lifeless recipient of wholly pre-given dogmas and values” but that the relationship between individuals and the institution is always a matter of “negotiation”.

Like them, Peter Stanford, the editor of the excellent 2005 book Why I am still a Catholic, says “an individual’s relationship with the Magisterium is rarely straightforward”.

In an article expounding a similar point of view on what constitutes Catholic identity, in the Journal Ecumenica (2011), it is asserted that what it means to be a Catholic is not a seamless identity but something that is put on like gender. It comes about as the result of performances that are iterated (i.e. repeated with variations).

This account implies that the identity is dynamic and subject to change although not so much on an individual basis but through a community’s performances, ritual and other, being re-enacted somewhat differently over time.

In this perspective, institutional identity is itself capable of transformation through constructive, critical engagement of the community with the inherited, dominant culture.

It should be remembered that the Roman Catholic Church has in time come to proclaim as dogmas of faith beliefs that had been held by the masses of the faithful rather than consistently upheld by theologians or rigorously taught by the hierarchy, such as the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary.

In the present context it may be noted, for instance that a National Catholic Reporter survey in 2006 found that 63 per cent of respondents supported ordaining women to the priesthood, while as many as 81 per cent supported ordaining women to the diaconate – and this despite the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith having defined in 2008 that attempting Sacred Ordination on a woman to be nothing less than a “crime”. This case illustrates the difficulty of determining who is or is not a Catholic.

Have you yourself ever personally felt this difficulty?

It may sometimes have seemed to some that I expressed opinions differing from those of the hierarchy on such subjects as the moment of ensoulment or freezing embryos, but I am sure that I have never put myself outside the pale of Catholic belief.

For instance, on the question of women’s ordination, I agree with RCWP that “by ordaining women, we are re-imagining, re-structuring, re-shaping the priesthood and therefore the Church”.

I, therefore, also agree with the Holy See that simply ordaining women without deeper change of the very sacramental structure of the Church is unviable.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.