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Catholicism
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Not the least difficulty in writing about Catholicism is the problem of isolating the subject. The history of the Catholic Church is so closely woven into Christian civilization that the one cannot be told fairly without the other, and to do justice by the Church would mean to retell the story of Christianity. Moreover not only Catholics claim the first millennium of Christian history as their own. The Orthodox and Protestants might therefore resent having all the centuries from Christ to Photius and Caerularius, or to Luther and Calvin, called Catholic instead of simply Christian.
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One of the seven sacraments in Catholicism is the sacrament of reconciliation. Each Mass opens with a prayer remembering God's mercy and forgiveness of sins. Protestants ... believe in a forgiving God.
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In addition to the changes in ministry, Catholicism is experiencing the impact of a new wave of immigration ushered in by the revised immigration laws starting in 1965. The church became more ethnically diverse than ever before. In 2000 Sunday Mass was celebrated in Los Angeles in forty-seven languages; in New York City thirty languages were needed to communicate with Sunday churchgoers. The largest ethnic group was the Spanish-speaking Latino population. Comprising people from many different nations, they numbered about 30 million in 2000, of whom approximately 75 percent were Catholic. It is estimated that by 2014 they will constitute 51 percent of the Catholic population in the United States.
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The growth of Catholicism the late nineteenth century... combined with other factors to place Catholics in a difficult position. While the Catholic Church had a decidedly Irish face in Georgia, others, such as Lebanese, Italian, Hungarian, and African American groups, also contributed to the church's growth. Church leaders recruited foreign priests to address the growing needs of the diocese. French Marists served in Atlanta and Brunswick, Jesuits ministered to Macon and Augusta, and German Benedictines came to Savannah. Protestants greeted this influx of foreign Catholics with alarm.
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The characteristics of liberal Catholicism are best exemplified in its chief exponents. The pioneer of the movement was the passionate French priest and prophet H F R de Lamennais (1782 - 1854), who developed a new apologetic for Catholicism. The Catholic religion, he maintained, is not evidenced chiefly by miracles and fulfilled prophecies but by its capacity to perpetuate those beliefs which mankind has found essential to an ordered social life: monotheism, the difference between good and evil, the immortality of the soul, and reward or punishment in a future life. Testifying to these beliefs is the sensus communis or general reason, the collective judgments derived from custom, tradition, and education. Hence society is the vehicle of revelation, a belief of great democratic potential. Lamennais's apologetics led to politics.
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Catholicism is not bound to any one school of theology, although there is something distinctively Catholic in the way the pluralism of theologies is integrated, systematized, and applied within the Catholic tradition. If the Catholic Church is not linked exclusively to a particular theology, much less is it linked to a particular philosophy: existentialist, process, phenomenological, even Thomistic. And yet there is a distinctively Catholic way of integrating the pluralism of philosophies underlying its various theological and doctrinal orientations. For want of a better term, that distinctively Catholic philosophical focus is Christian realism, as outlined, for example, by Bernard J. F. Lonergan (see his "The Origins of Christian Realism" in A Second Collection, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974, pp. 239-61).
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