I have to admit I'm a little irked by some of the general chatter at St. Blog's over Stephen Colbert's Catholic Faith.

Every Catholic should embrace the whole of the deposit of the Faith, the whole of our Sacred Tradition--that is, everything passed on to us by the Lord through the Apostles.

But Catholic moral theory is quite insistent: culpability requires knowledge and intent.

On these grounds, I get rather annoyed when Catholics bash other Catholics for not standing up for the entirety of the Faith. Most Catholics don't have the proper knowledge and intent to be morally culpable for not confessing the Faith in its entirety, because quite simply, their own Church in America has not given them the formation to do so.

Can we really be so scandalized when most people don't possess the fullness of what our Church never successfully gave them? The Faith is not self-evident, and that is exactly why it is REVELATION, not deduction. The Faith is not easy to believe, and that is exactly why we have martyrs and apostates. Confessing the Faith requires formation and grace. The Formation required involves knowledge of what the Faith actually is, apologetical defense that makes the Faith reasonable and defensible (because we cannot expect that people will assent to something unreasonable), a positive presentation that makes the Faith attractive (because we cannot expect people to accept what is unatrractive), and the Christocentric, Eucharistic prayer life that is the cornerstone of it all. Without these things, I question whether any Catholic can morally culpable of not confessing the entirety of the faith.

I think we need to lighten up and be thrilled that Colbert is a practicing Catholic. If one of our brothers or sisters in the Church hasn't been given the resources to know, much less confess, the entirety of the Faith, then it is up to each one of us who have recieved it to continue to deepen the formation of our brothers and sisters in Christ so that they CAN confess the entire Faith. "To those to whom much have been given, much is expected"--and much griping probably isn't what's being expected. Much productive action is.

Bringing American Catholics to the fullness of their faith doesn't happen by condemnation or by magic, it happens when we actively give them the resources to do so--like, for example, parish groups, solid homilies, Relevant Radio, etc. And until someone is actively engaged in one of these apostolates, I don't want to hear that person dissing a single other Catholic for the fact that no one ever presented them with what the Church teaches in a convincing way. That quickly becomes destructive.