The Catholic Faith Chapter Summary

Lawrence S. Cunningham's The Catholic Faith: An Introduction

Lawrence S. Cunningham's The Catholic Faith: An Introduction is a difficult book to muster up a response to. One is tempted to quip "there it no there there,"although more accurately I would say that there is little there that inspires much more than an indifferent shrug in response. Perhaps the blame lay in the purpose of the book, which is set out first to not be "an encyclopedia of Catholic trivia" (Cunningham, 8). I was disappointed to read this, since while an explanation of the meaning of the different titles and offices in the Catholic hierarchy, or an explanation of the various vestments and ceremonies may be "trivia" to some, at least it is information. Had I spent

It can be seen in his attempt to have us imagine a hypothetical parish to serve us in our exploration of what Catholicism is for those who actually practice it. Yet this hypothetical parish is so vague, so bled white of identity, of distinguishing characteristics, that next to nothing is left. After we have spent most of the book wondering just what this parish actually looks like, where is could be situated and what qualities, specifically the parishioners might possibly have, Cunningham finally gives away the game, in a footnote: "This emphasis on the parish must be seen in a non-exclusive manner. People may hear the word and celebrate the Eucharist in college chapels, small groups, mission churches, etc. The parish is my short-hand way of speaking to emphasize the liturgy" (140). The parish, like the word "spiritual," is a term that means whatever he wants it to mean at that moment. If whatever meager information he has given us about this imaginary parish threatens to contradict what he is now attempting to talk about, he simply tells us that the meaning of the word is now in accord with his current line of thought, not the prior one. Better to have had no hypothetical parish at all than to spend the entire book in anticipation of seeing some actual color, only to be disappointed when our groping after substance in this parish is never

But he only gets close before turning away and wading into shallower and calmer waters. For example, he returns to the issues of birth control and marriage mentioned in the first chapter. The ban on contraception, we are told is deduced from the Catholic reflection on love, marriage, and the finality of sexuality. When I read this, I really had my hopes up, because I thought I was going to actually see a deductive argument that reaches a conclusion based on a set of premises. No dice. Instead, we read that "the Church teaches that all sexual acts in marriage must be `open' to the possibility of procreation, otherwise, the act of marriage is somehow defective and imperfect." Why "must" marriage be open to procreation? Why is a marriage that is not open to this possibility called defective? Previously he claims that all Christians hold a traditional image of marriage as the ideal. Is he basing his argument on this audacious assumption? Who knows? Without this distinction, Cunningham says, "we cannot discriminate married sexuality, from say, homosexual sexuality which is, by nature, not procreative" (151). Is he saying that the reason married couples cannot have non-procreative sex is that if they did we would be unable to tell them apart from homosexuals? I don't doubt that there exists a systematic justification