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Bridget's avatar

It is nice to hear about people finding common ground that even includes relatively recent saints. I am used to keeping half of my life of faith in the closet ("we don't talk about Bruno", or anyone else on the liturgical calendar) in polite conversation with other Christians whom I know socially, in order to emphasize commonality when our instincts are to latch onto differences, but maybe it's not necessary as often as I think it is.

If I could make an ecumenical pitch for anything, it would be "15 minutes a day of mental prayer" (but rephrased somehow, so that it's not necessary to explain what that even means.)

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Jason Link's avatar

“It can be a temptation to think that my preference has to be universal, for everyone. But of course, that’s not catholic.”

This is what I’ve been saying for years! I’ve found the American Church in particular is so focused on devotion, and so many people believe that if a particular devotion has helped them encounter Christ then by God everyone everywhere absolutely must pray that particular devotion and if they don’t then they aren’t really that Catholic anyway.

Someday I’ll write an essay on how all of the world’s problems can be boiled down to a confusion of the universal and the particular. On one hand, when you mistake the particular for the universal (as in the devotional example above) you get unnecessary rigor and legalism. On the other, if you mistake the universal for the particular, you get relativism. And those are really the most damaging issues for society today!

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