A Third Category of Catholic?

I want to get your feedback on a topic that I've been ruminating over for some time, one that closely reflects my own experience as a "cradle" Catholic.

As someone who never left the Faith, I nonetheless found myself bathed in disillusionment the day that I discovered the 'Catholic Church' which I assumed I knew so much about, it turns out, had been a concoction of some well-meaning, but poorly formed dissenting theologian.

Speaking of equality, a confounded faith means equally
confounded Catholics.

Let's put it this way: some people, and perhaps, especially those from my post Roe v. Wade generation, grew up on some very bad catechesis, if you can even call it that.

So for those of us that fit into that category: we're all "cradles,"  none of us are "converts" or "reverts" but we were told things about the Church that were brazen and bold faced falsehoods. 

We're the Elmo-loves-you generation presented with a happy clappy version of  the "true," "tolerant" and "compassionate" 'Catholicism of the gospel," mainly because it was assumed that we couldn't handle concepts like sexual purity and distinctive gender roles within the family.

This is the Catholicism of Catholics for Choice, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, "women priests"and a host of others that are now so lacking in valid arguments for their cause that the only move they have left to play is the "I'm a victim!" card.

But what category do we, "I was told, and I believed that I was being a good Catholic" types fall into?

Well, what do you think?

I would say, for the sake of alliteration, another "c" word is in order.   How about "Confounded" Catholics?

That definitely applies to me: the sheer confusion, surprise and frustration associated from having all that I thought I knew about the Faith dispelled as wrong fits my experience. 

Because it's all dilly-dally all day long at the Vatican...

I was, for the majority of my life, a Confounded Cradle Catholic.  Judging by the prominent Faithful holding political office, and the sound bytes of Catholics against their own Church in recent history, I can tell I'm far from being the only one.

Pray for Confounded Catholics.  Many of us don't even realize our confoundedness.  How can we? We're  already stuck in our assumption that we're the correct ones.

The cure for this condition is simple: proponents and those knowledgeable in Church teaching need to continue in their apologetics ministries, in putting forth rational arguments and appeals to the facts.  They make a greater difference than they perhaps realize.

I changed because I was confronted with the naked tenets of my Faith, with the truth about abortion, contraception and homosexuality.  No one was intolerant or mean or vindictive - they were just more informed than I was.  And, if anything, I was the venomous one emotionally attached to some bizarre idea of free will and human relationships.

I owe everything to the simple, un-sentimentalist,  and truly compassionate attitude of certain authentically Catholic professors.  I'm thankful to have become acquainted them when I did because the rhetoric that becried the witness of those good faithful people as bigoted, archaic and fearful became just angry clamor that signified the nothingness or nihilism to which their perverse causes inevitably culminate.  And sadly, the most vociferous of these 'conscientious objectors' were other Catholics.

So pray for those who are lost and cause others to run astray as well.  They're not bad people, they're just unknowing; they have not been fully educated in the Faith they are dissenting from. They keenly feel the call radical charity, but they've haven't been shown how to properly execute it.

Just like the rest of us, they're trying to be 'good' Catholics. They acutely thirst for the redeeming waters of Christ, just like we all do.