Habitualism
©Lucio Mascarenhas
I was brought up in conflicting traditions. One one part, I was taught to rever Christianity, on the other, to contemn it. As I grew up, I probably found that it was easier to be a rebel than to conform, so that I became an atheist, a Marxist and anti-Clerical. I continued in this state for several years until I was exposed to non-Christians and their vitriolic anti-Christian propaganda in Junior College and at my first workplaces. This began the slow process of my return to the faith. The one-time atheist and anti-Clericalist eventually became a kattar (as we say in Bambaiyya) Christian and Clericalist!
One turning point was finding and reading Frs. Rumble & Carty's The Radio Replies. This work destroyed all my doubts and refuted all the allegations and charges made against the Catholic Faith. I am what I am today because of the Radio Replies.
However, it has always been extremely troublesome to deal with the "older Catholics". In time, the crisis of the repudiation of Catholicism by Vatican II, "John XXIII-II" and his "Aggiornomento" resulted in a break with them. They had blindly followed a crypto-Protestant out of the Church and into liberal Protestantism, onto the barren, sterile sands of Liberalism.
Therefore, when I read Peter Nazareth's short story, Eccentric Ferns, it struck a chord. The sad, pathetic condition of these "old Catholics" is highlighted in this story starkly — a veritable exposition of these people in all their naked ugliness!
I take no pleasure in their embarrassment — which, unfortunately enough for themselves, they are, by and large, blissfully unaware of! I wish that they would wake up and recognize the facts, and take steps to remedy the situation. However, all entreaties fall on deaf ears.
This is because they are secure in their own conceits. Like the Jews of our Lords time, they believe themselves indefectible — that they cannot lose the faith and cease to be Catholics. In the process, they have been gyped, like once before during the Arian crisis, and they do not even want to know about it!
I call their attitude "Habitualism". They are "Catholics" not by faith, but by Habit. They practice praying the Rosary and all the little things that denote the Catholic, not by an application of their mind, by believing, but purely by habit.
That is why so many of them fall so easily victim to the "Fundamentalist" or "Evangelical" Protestant sects. The "brainier" ones, when confronted with the deadness of their faith, and with the anti-Catholic lies of the "Fundamentalist" or "Evangelical" heretics, presume that the deadness is of Catholicism, not merely their own, and abandon Catholicism for the lying wonders of these sects.
The central character of the story, Horace Fernandes, was one such dupe, who went from a dead habitualist Catholicism to the heresies of Protestantism. So glibly does he spout the lying, anti-Catholic propaganda of the enemies of Catholicism! The denigration of the Holy Inquisition, of the pre-Pombaline, pre-Revolutionary Portuguese, of the missionaries who brought us the faith, brought us to Christianity. Spouts the ancient lies of the Iconoclasts, made their own by the Protestants. The hypocritical propaganda against the proliferation of churches. And so on and on.
If only our "pious" Goan folk would wake up, sit down and seriously study the Holy Faith! There is so much wonderful in the Catholic religion, that only study is needed to deliver. The Catholic Faith is not only the only true faith, but it also possesses the antidote to every single error, lie, misrepresentation, slander, libel and calumny made against it. Study and you will find the truth!
I therefore strongly recommend to my fellow-Goans that they take the trouble of acquiring the Radio Replies, which are still published by TAN Books, Rockford, Illinois, USA, and study the faith. They will be rewarded for their labours.
If we are to revive our first zeal, as when we were first evangelized by Goencho Saib and all his fellow-workers, if we would both revive our faith, and carry forward it to others, then we must do ourselves this favour!
©Lucio Mascarenhas