The Communion of Dear Hunting Unites Catholics , Protestants, Liberals and Conservatives

Father Neuhaus has not passed away a year yet but I still think about him a great bit and the influence he had on me. Neuhaus was a Lutheran that became Catholic. In my neck of the woods Lutherans are as about as rare as Jews or Eastern Orthodox. Basically the exposure is what you see on TV. So it was not till a few years after I became Catholic that I started looking at Lutheran Theology. Neuhaus was part of that window for me.Though he crossed the Tiber make no mistake his valued and celebrated his Lutheran heritage till the date of his death.

I think some non Southern Catholics have a very cartoon version of the Evangelicals we live around in the Jesus soaked South. The other day on a certain blog I was trying to explain the particular social contract that Catholics and in many cases Protestants that have varying degrees of differences among themselves all live under down here. Alas I don't think they get it.

Deer Hunting Season is upon us tonight in Louisiana. My parents are now Presbyterians. They had a nice event for hunters with Venison stew and the such to celebrate this "Holy Day". There were people of all faiths there including a few LSU Catholic boys that had come up to north Louisiana for the hunting. It appears deer hunting trumps the TULANE /LSU game.

But this night my thoughts ran back to a very nice article that Neuhaus had wrote. Go here to see it in it's entirety. I have always got a chuckle out of this part of it because well it is so true.

Then too, although in catechism class I heard about sola scriptura, we both knew we had a Magisterium, although I'm sure I never heard the term. When it came to settling a question in dispute, they had the pope—and we had the faculty of Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. It was perfectly natural to ask the question, “What's our position on this or that?” The “our” in the question self-evidently referred to the Missouri Synod, and the answer was commonly given by reference to an article in the synod's official publication, The Lutheran Witness, usually written, or so it seemed, by Dr. Theodore Graebner. Why the Spooners went to one church and we to another seemed obvious enough; they were Catholics and we were Lutherans. They were taught that they belonged to the “one true Church” and I was taught that I belonged to the Missouri Synod and all those who are in doctrinal agreement with the Missouri Synod, which community made up “the true visible Church on earth.” So, between their ecclesiological claim and ours, it seemed pretty much a toss-up. They were taught that, despite my not belonging to the one true Church, I could be saved by virtue of “invincible ignorance.” I was taught that, despite their not belonging to the true visible Church on earth, they could be saved by—in the delicious phrase of Francis Pieper, Missouri's chief dogmatician—”felicitous inconsistency.”

I doubt if ever for a moment the Spooner boys thought that maybe they should be Lutheran. I am sure that I as a boy thought—not very seriously, certainly not obsessively—but I thought about being a Catholic. It seemed that, of all the good things we had, they had more. Catholicism was more. Then too, I knew where all those good things we had came from. They came from the Church that had more. Much later I would hear the schism of the sixteenth century described as, in the fine phrase of Jaroslav Pelikan, a “tragic necessity.” I thought, then and now, that the tragedy was much more believable than the necessity. But in my boyhood, the division did not seem tragic. It was just the way things were. I do not recall anything that could aptly be described as anti-Catholicism. My father's deer hunting buddy was a Catholic priest, and deer hunting, for my Dad, was something very close to communicatio in sacris. In the Missouri Synod of those days, praying with Catholics—or anyone else with whom we were not in complete doctrinal agreement—was condemned as “unionism.” The rules didn't say anything about the deep communion of deer hunting.

Deer hunting as a unofficial shared Sacrament? Well I guess it is.