"You Must Immediately Be Some Sort of Legalistic, Harsh, Unwelcoming, Pharisee"

Fr. Longenecker so speaks for me in this post put up yesterday:

I honestly believe the historic Catholic faith and I wish to proclaim it in its glorious fullness, and this includes the church’s moral teachings. I not only want to proclaim it, I want to live it, fool and failure that I am.

However, what I resent is the present assumption that if you wish to live and proclaim the fullness of Catholic doctrine, dogma and discipline then you must immediately be some sort of legalistic, harsh, unwelcoming, Pharisee.

It is assumed that you don’t have a sense of humor or humanity, that you are intentionally harsh and that you probably pull the wings of flies for fun.

No doubt there are some who wish to follow the fullness of the historic Catholic faith who lapse into Pharisaism, sober seriousness, legalism and downright ugliness. We’ve all met them. No doubt there are some who stumble into strict negativity and tumble into sour self righteousness. In their zeal for clarity of teaching they lose charity.

There are conservatives like that and guess what? There are progressives like that too–but the other way around. They are just as ugly, self righteous, seriously smug and judgmental as the conservatives they despise, and they are just as blind to their self righteousness as the other side. In their zeal for charity they lose the clarity of the faith.

A plague on both their houses.

We needn’t go there. We mustn’t go there. There is another way.

Read the whole thing.  I did and and it's a personal roadmap of sorts for me... and probably, for others, something we who are passionate about our faith need to read and often.

Thanks Fr. Longenecker.