By Fr Jim Cogley
‘The faith experience of one generation will be the inheritance of the next. For the one after that it will be a convenience while for the next it will be an encumbrance. Convenience faith will tend to be rejected by the next generation because it is not sufficiently grounded in the human reality and is often exposed as being hypocritical.’ The faith experience for so many Catholics fits into this category. How can we identify it? What are its characteristics?
Convenience Faith tends to be ego based and doesn’t arise out of a genuine conversion or surrender of my life to God. The ’I’ remains at the centre of my life, so ‘I get Mass, I do my duty, I do things for God, I lead a good life, I earn my eternal reward.’
It sees the Christian life as one big attempt to be good enough and to merit salvation rather than one big act of thanksgiving for having been saved.
Any sense of righteousness is not the result of gift or grace but of hard effort.
It holds tightly to a rigid set of beliefs and rules which are unexamined and tends to resent anyone who questions them.
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