Father Neuhaus on Deer Hunting

Father Neuhaus wrote a wonderful article called How I Became the Catholic I Was. I is a good read and I love how he talks about his Lutheran boyhood and his best friends across the street - the Catholic Spooner boys.

There was a part that gave me a big chuckle because it such a part of my surroundings. Deer Hunting is a right of passage and big part of life for Southern boys . In fact now for men of my generation I am finding it more and more a big part of their little girls lives if their Fathers don't have boys .They take their daughters to the woods to take part in this sacred rite. The girls seem to enjoy it by the way.

Anyway a little part of a very nice essay

I doubt if ever for a moment the Spooner boys thought that maybe they should be Lutheran. I am sure that I as a boy thought-not very seriously, certainly not obsessively-but I thought about being a Catholic. It seemed that, of all the good things we had, they had more. Catholicism was more. Then too, I knew where all those good things we had came from. They came from the Church that had more. Much later I would hear the schism of the sixteenth century described as, in the fine phrase of Jaroslav Pelikan, a "tragic necessity." I thought, then and now, that the tragedy was much more believable than the necessity. But in my boyhood, the division did not seem tragic. It was just the way things were. I do not recall anything that could aptly be described as anti-Catholicism. My father’s deer hunting buddy was a Catholic priest, and deer hunting, for my Dad, was something very close to communicatio in sacris. In the Missouri Synod of those days, praying with Catholics-or anyone else with whom we were not in complete doctrinal agreement-was condemned as "unionism." The rules didn’t say anything about the deep communion of deer hunting.

Perhaps if Pope Benedict could go Deer Hunting with the head of the Greek or Russian Orthodox Church we could make some progress