A third, a physician in New York City, praised the Catholic
tradition for its emphasis on
human dignity and social justice, but
added: «I am troubled by the fact that I find greater acceptance of myself as a whole person in my professional community as a physician, than I do in the official hierarchy of the church of my family, my childhood, and my life.»
Traditions of every kind, hoarded and manifested in gesture and language, in schools, libraries, museums, bodies of law and religion, philosophy and science — everything that accumulates, arranges itself, recurs and
adds to itself, becoming the collective memory of the
human race — all this we may see as no more than an outer garment, an epiphenomenon precariously superimposed upon all the other edifices of Nature (the only truly organic ones, as it may appear): but it is precisely this optical illusion which we have to overcome if our realism is to reach to the heart of the matter.