#i promise you that there have historically been whole schools of catholicism slavishly devoted to not having any fun whatsoever | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

countingnothings · 1 year

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not to vagueblog or anything, but sometimes. sometimes! people on the internet should consider whether reading “Christian coded + austerity” as always and only Protestant is historically reasonable. like, yes, i am all for the engagement with the colours and flavours and vibrant sensuality of Catholicism and Orthodoxy and so on! but Catholicism is a vast bulk of a thing. it is large. it contains multitudes. many, many of those multitudes have explicitly followed rules about austerity. you can’t just read Catholicism as folk Catholicism or as lavish high church Catholicism - you ALSO have to think about monastic Catholicism and ascetic Catholicism outside the monastery. frankly, Protestant austerity pales in comparison. it’s just so irritating to me, personally, that people are wrong about this on the internet!

#did not know that this was a hill i would die on and yet here we are #begging everyone in this bar to PLEASE just THINK about medieval monastic disputes over the meaning of 'poverty'#in the context of the benedictine rule #instead of being like 'well nobody here is having any fun. must be protestants'#because while it is true that protestants rarely have fun (i say as an anglo-catholic)#i promise you that there have historically been whole schools of catholicism slavishly devoted to not having any fun whatsoever #and here i'm not talking about authorial intent - definitely some sff authors need to think about medieval monasticism as well #i'm talking about how we read coded texts #Religion #in fairness to everyone on the internet christian hegemony is a big enough problem #that if you can avoid thinking about the granularities of christian history i kind of don't blame you

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