If one was raised Catholic (whether or not they are now Catholic) one is likely to have little familiarity with other interpretations.Wow, I don't think you could be more wrong. I went to Catholic school through a Jesuit HS, and we spend a lot of time on that. The (mandatory, five days a week) religion class for my junior/senior year in HS was comparative religions, junior year on all the other religions, senior year, on just the differences in Christianity, with the major sections taught with someone who really believed in their faith, be it high protestant, low protestant or Unitarianism. Though the Unitarian guy was pretty vague, I'm still not sure exactly what he believed, I don't think he knew either.
Hell, it wasn't until I got to college that I even heard the term Reformation, up to that point it was simply taught as The Great Schism. But we had to read Calvin (yeesh, what a prig), Knox, Zwingli (I kinda liked him), Waldo, Wycliffe and Simons, who I really liked. And we read the major American like Wesley, Whitefield, and Edwards with that wonderfully optimistic
god is love sermon:
Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God.* We also spent time on people like Aimee Semple McPherson, but only because I think the priest had some sort of fetish for her.
And, of course, being Jesuits, we went through
every single motherf-ing one of Luther's talking points in his
Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum (95 Theses)
in frickin Latin, so we could disprove him chapter and verse - or bullet point by bullet point, which is closer to the deal.
But of course the Catholics only run about 200 colleges and universities in the US, so they might not know much about education. I know that my Ignatian education stressed:
-- Rationality and the use of evidence, consistency, making valid argumentation, and systematic avoidance of omissions, the last two tend to be pretty common failings outside of the Jesuit system. They were so damn good at this that a solid 30% had given up the church faith for a more rational belief system before we were out of high school.
-- The existence of God
-- What the ultimate goals for humans should be
- The highest end/ends/tasks/duties/obligations of the polis (community), or society
-- The right means for pursuing the goals humans and the common good were striving to achive (i.e., ethics, or more basically, the end never justifies the means).
And in Jesuit tradition explicitly, but in Catholic tradition in general, knowing and/or understanding was pretty much worthless without the ability to articulate and defend those thoughts/values/ideas/notions. That, at a basic level, compelled us to study not only what was true and right (Catholic thinkers) but also the people who got it dead wrong, i.e. Protestants.
And, for the record, though I don't believe the basic Catholic teachings, I think that they veer much closer to some reality because quite frankly the Protestant take on sola scriptura and sola fide is total bull->-bleeped-<-.
* - Complete text at below, lets just say Edwards was not a very happy person - but it's a classic.
http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWFsZS5lZHUvY2dpLWJpbi9uZXdwaGlsby9nZXRvYmplY3QucGw/Yy4yMTo0Ny53amVv
