Went to noon Mass at St. Mary's Church in Rockville today, since I couldn't get up early enough for morning Mass at St. Bernadette's close to home. Their daily noon Mass is at the old chapel-like wooden building, which is famous as the church of The Great Gatsby author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who is buried in the small cemetery right next to it.
It's actually quite a fitting place to mention in my first post for this blog, since it sits at the intersection of my three identities: it is a quintessentially Catholic church, in the heart of a quintessential upper-middle class township within one of the wealthiest counties (Montgomery County, north and west of Washington DC) in the United States, yet it also happens to be the home of the only ethnic Chinese Catholic worshiping community in all of Maryland - the Our Lady of China Pastoral Mission. (I am not involved with this community, though, beyond attending a few Chinese Masses a few years ago.)
The priest today, who is from Poland, gave a pretty fitting homily, too: the Gospel was the one in which the Pharisees demanded a sign from Jesus to prove he was the Messiah, and he drew the parallel to today's world in which so many people, even Christians, close their hearts to God's grace by imposing strict boundaries on themselves and others, for what they consider to be beliefs and practices that are or are not acceptable to God.
But Pope Francis has exhorted us to be bridge-builders, not wall-builders.
Being a former evangelical Protestant, I have gradually come to a better understanding of just why God has allowed different types of Christianity - Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox - to exist over the centuries.
I myself believe the Holy Mass - as practiced by Catholics and Orthodox - to be the only specific worship rite instituted by Christ himself (when he was in the flesh), but I don't discount any authentic manifestations of the Holy Spirit that are indisputably present in more modern churches and denominations. After all, I'm from one of them myself.
And yet, this glaring division within Christianity should beg the question: can we Christians simply assume that those who don't acknowledge Christ can't be "saved", any more than I, as a Catholic, can assume that a Protestant doesn't know Christ as deeply as I do, because he has never received his true Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist?
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