Fr. Ratzinger's Prophecy

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 26 May 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI 

    I have often heard mention of an observation made by Joseph Ratzinger long before he became Pope Benedict XVI in which he anticipated a “smaller, purer church”.  I was reminded of the this remark last week as I was wrapping up my post on St. Julia of Corsica [here], and reflecting on the fact that we seem to need to suffer many smaller defeats on the way to enjoying Christ’s final victory over sin and death.  I was curious to find out exactly what the future Pope said, and when and where he said it.

     I found that the original statement came as the last of a series of addresses that Fr. Ratzinger, at that time a professor of Theology at the University of Tübingen, delivered over the radio in Germany in 1969 [I can no longer find the full text of Fr. Ratzinger's address online, but it is included in the book Faith and the Future, published by Ignatius Press].  His prophetic vision of a “smaller, purer Church” (someone else’s paraphrase, I think, because I don’t see that wording in the original text) was broadcast on Christmas day.  It makes interesting reading going on fifty years later.

     Fr. Ratzinger starts out saying that “The future of the Church can and will issue from those whose roots are deep and live from the pure fullness of their faith.”  Ah yes, a call to personal holiness: that sounds good. “It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment or from those who merely criticize others and assume that they themselves are infallible measuring rods . . .”  Hmmm, sounds like time for some self-examination.  “nor will it issue”, he says

from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men, that hurts them and compels them to sacrifice themselves. To put this more positively: The future of the Church, once again as always, will be reshaped by saints, by men, that is, whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.

So far, so good.  The future of the Church lies with those who are ready to make a deep commitment to self-sacrifice, who aren’t looking for easy answers.  But how does this lead to a smaller Church?  He goes on to explain:

We have no need of a Church that celebrates the cult of action in political prayers. It is utterly superfluous. Therefore, it will destroy itself. What will remain is the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church that believes in the God who has become man and promises us life beyond death. The kind of priest who is no more than a social worker can be replaced by the psychotherapist and other specialists; but the priest who is no specialist; who does not stand on the sidelines, watching the game, giving official advice, but in the name of God places himself at the disposal of men, who is beside them in their sorrows, in their joys, in their hope and in their fear, such a priest will certainly be needed in the future.

In other words, the corporal works of mercy may be an essential part of Christianity, but they can’t be the sole or primary focus of the Church (“I’ll show you the faith that underlies my works” James 2:18), since there are secular agencies and individuals who can perform them just as well.  Who needs the Church, if you can get the same somewhere else?  The thing that only the Church can provide is the encounter with Jesus Christ through his sacraments.  Everything else, Fr. Ratzinger says, will be burned away, but much like the man St. Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 3:15, who “will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire”, what remains will be pure metal:

From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge - a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so will she lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, she will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, she will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members . . . But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world.

     This fire-tempered, more faithful Church, Fr.  Ratzinger says, will stand as a refuge for those driven to “horror” by the spiritual poverty of a now Godless world.

     The future Pope wraps up with a peroration that is both grim and hopeful:

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

It isn't easy to follow Christ's Standard

      Fr. Ratzinger’s “prophecy” can be misunderstood.  Some commentators seem to believe that he is advocating a much smaller Church.  Not so.  He is looking at the “Signs of the Times” and extrapolating from them, tempering his predictions with the knowledge that Christ has promised that the Gates of Hell will not prevail against his Church (see Matthew 16:17).  The past half century has certainly developed just as Fr. Ratzinger suggested it would.  Church attendance has fallen as the weakly committed no longer feel the social pressure to attend Mass, the number of priests has plummeted, and most religious orders have shrunk dramatically.  At the same time, religious orders grounded in a traditional understanding of the doctrines and disciplines of the Church are growing, and we have seen an explosion of lay evangelization unlike anything the world has seen in a long time.

    It seems to me that Fr. Ratzinger’s vision of the near future of the Church, much like Paul VI’s admonitions in Humanae Vitae [here], has been more than confirmed by events since, and should serve as a serious warning of what is to come.  Christ’s final victory is guaranteed, but individuals and whole nations can be lost before its consummation.  We all still need to choose whether we’ll follow Christ’s Battle Standard, or Satan’s.

Blessed Margaret Pole, Martyred for the Church and the Family

Blessed Margaret Pole

Martyr of England. She was born Margaret Plantagenet, the niece of Edward IV and Richard III. She married Sir Reginald Pole about 1491 and bore five sons, including Reginald Cardinal Pole. Margaret was widowed, named countess of Salisbury, and appointed governess to Princess Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Queen Catherine of Aragon, Spain. She opposed Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn, and the king exiled her from court, although he called her “the holiest woman in England.” When her son, Cardinal Pole, denied Henry’s Act of Supremacy, the king imprisoned Margaret in the Tower of London for two years and then beheaded her on May 28. In 1538, her other two sons were executed. She was never given a legal trial. She was seventy when she was martyred. Margaret was beatified in 1886. (from Butler's Lives of the Saints)

     I called my recent piece on St. Julia of Corsica “A Saint For Our Time”; when I think about it, I have yet to find a Saint who isn’t for our times. But today’s Saint, Blessed Margaret Pole, who gave her life in defense of the sanctity of marriage, seems especially suited to the situation of our increasingly post-Christian culture. The niece of two kings, Blessed Margaret was martyred because she refused to applaud publicly the sacrifice of Holy Matrimony to a third king’s lust.

Henry VIII

     Blessed Margaret’s antagonist, Henry VIII, could serve as a sort of patron “anti-saint” for our times. He was a man possessed of great gifts: he was given a strong, handsome, athletic body, a quick mind that he applied to writing and musical composition as well as to governing, and was entrusted with the rule of a rich and powerful kingdom. Henry never mastered himself, however, and so his prodigious talents were put at the service, not of his people, but of his equally prodigious cravings for women, wealth, and power. In the end he tried to swallow even the Church. In his later years his grossly obese body became a living image of his insatiable appetites.

     People come and go, but human nature doesn’t change. King Henry is long gone, but his imitators are still with us. Like Henry, they are not satisfied with mere tolerance or tacit assent: they require full-throated public approval, and so the Margaret Poles must be silenced. Nobody is literally being led to the block, thankfully, and pray God it never comes to that. Nevertheless, as we have seen over and over again,  those who stand up for Church, family, and traditional moral norms today, even if they do so privately, can expect to have their character blackened and their livelihoods threatened.

     I have often heard Blessed Margaret’s younger and much better known contemporary, St. Thomas More, proposed as a Patron Saint for our times because of his martyrdom in defense of the Church and Marriage. Like him, Blessed Margaret's firm reliance on Christ's loving care gave her the strength to stand fast in face of mortal threats, and the serenity not to be swallowed up in bitterness against her persecutors.  We would do well to invoke Blessed Margaret Pole along with St. Thomas More, and to pray for her intercession against the ravenous spirit of Henry VIII that yet again threatens both Faith and Family.

Trinity Sunday

   Today is Trinity Sunday, on which we celebrate one of the most mysterious of Christian Mysteries.  I find it fairly easy to understand that there can only be one infinite being, one "Divine Substance"; I can also understand that love is something necessarily directed toward another, and so a God Who is Love would want to have other Persons to love.  I have a very hard time wrapping my finite mind around how they can both be true at the same time . . .  but how could it be otherwise?  Fortunately, even if the philosophical explanations elude us, we can know the Triune God through the experience of Faith.  Thanks be to God.
     Perhaps because the Trinity is such a deep concept, there aren't a lot of Trinitarian hymns (certainly not on YouTube, anyway), but here's an old favorite, in a beautiful video created by JMJ HF videos.  I have included information about the group, which relies on charitable donations, below the video.




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St. Julia of Corsica, A Saint for Our Time

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 23 May 2014. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com. 

Today is not a major feast day in the Church's liturgical calendar but, as always, there are saints whose feasts are celebrated.  One of the more interesting of today's saints is St. Julia of Corsica (also known as St. Julia of Carthage), a martyr who refused to be seduced by personal gain or cowed by the threat of torture and death.  My first post about St. Julia, published four years ago today on the blog Principium et Finis, remains one of the most visited pages on that site, a testimony to the timelessness (and the timeliness) of this saint.

St. Julia of Corsica

"St. Julia" by Gabriel Von Max

Julia was a noble maiden who lived in Carthage in the 5th century.  When that ancient city was captured and sacked by the Vandals, Julia was enslaved and sold to a Syrian merchant named Eusebius.  Despite the hardships and humiliations of her servile state she remained content, even cheerful, because of her piety and her deep love of Christ.  These same qualities greatly endeared her to her master.

   On one occasion, when Julia was on a journey with her master, he stopped at the island of Corsica where the locals were celebrating a pagan festival. Eusebius joined in the revelry; Julia, needless to say, stayed away. Her refusal to participate greatly annoyed the local governor, who, according to the account in Butler’s Lives of the Saints,

asked who this woman was who dared to insult the gods. Eusebius informed him that she was a Christian, and that all his authority over her was too weak to prevail with her to renounce her religion, but that he found her so diligent and faithful he could not part with her.

   Felix, however, was not one to take no for an answer.  First, he offered Eusebius four of his own female slaves in exchange for the one Julia; Eusebius emphatically refused to surrender her.  Next, after her master had fallen asleep, the governor approached Julia directly, offering to free her if only she would sacrifice to the pagan gods.  She answered that she was “as free as she desired to be as long as she was allowed to serve Jesus Christ.” This answer enraged Felix, who had her tortured and crucified.

    A few points stand out from the account of St. Julia’s life.  First and foremost, her devotion to Christ and her courage in the face of unspeakable suffering is an inspiration to us.  Maybe, the next time I’m tempted to “go along with the crowd” simply because I’m afraid of the disapproval or verbal abuse of others, I’ll take some strength from Julia’s fortitude in the face of much, much worse persecution.

Julia also shows us the power of example.  Clearly, her character and virtue made a large impression on her master Eusebius. While her diligence and fidelity alone were not enough to win him over to the faith, at least not right away, they did give him the courage to stand up to the governor Felix, and convince him not to give her up for, literally, any price.  None of the accounts I have seen, unfortunately, tell us anything about what eventually happened to Eusebius. One wonders whether the example of her heroic martyrdom was finally enough to make him a Christian. We do know that the witness of the martyrs was crucial to the conversion of very many people, for which reason Tertullian said: "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church."

A Saint for Our Time

Julia's story also tells us something about the nature of sin.  I am reminded yet again of Father Richard John Neuhaus’ aphorism:  “When orthodoxy becomes optional, sooner or later it will become proscribed”.  What he meant was that simply by doing the right thing one is seen as a rebuke to those who are not doing right.  Look at Julia: she wasn’t interfering with the pagan festival, she was simply staying away. The governor, however, couldn’t tolerate anyone who was not actively endorsing his activities.  How often we have seen this same attitude today. Granted, at least in the United States, nobody is literally being crucified, although the advocates of a “New Orthodoxy” will certainly try to destroy the reputation and livelihood of anyone who does not publicly cheer for their innovations.  

The Benham Brothers

A recent example (among many) is that of the Benham Brothers, whose planned home improvement program on the HGTV network was cancelled [see here] because the brothers, who are evangelical Christians, publicly oppose abortion and gay marriage.  It appears that the activists who intimidated HGTV also successfully pressured the bank with whom the Benhams have worked for years to sever ties – at least until the counter-reaction from Christians and others concerned with the erosion of personal freedom caused them to reconsider.  The bank now claims that the whole thing was simply a misunderstanding [here].

    But sin's not the end of the story, either.  We have seen throughout the history of the Church the truth of the aphorism, "The bigger they come, the harder they fall"; zealous persecutors from St. Paul himself to the Nazi death-camp guards who were awed by the martyrdom of St. Maximilian Kolbe have been converted, often by witnessing the faith and Christ-like serenity of their victims.  The ancient accounts don't tell us, but the governor Felix might well have been one of these. Whether or not he himself was moved in this way, we can be sure that many of the other pagan witnesses were.

    Finally, the example of St. Julia of Corsica has continued to inspire people through the centuries and is still with us to this day as a reminder that, although there there will always be defeats along the way, Christ wins in the end.  If we can put our faith in that, as Julia did, we can persevere. As St. Peter said: " Rejoice in so far as you share Christ's sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed" (1 Peter 13).

Pentecost Sunday: Christ's Message is For Everyone and Veni Sancte Spiritus

 Today is Pentecost, one of the great Feasts of the Church, in which we remember how Jesus sent the Holy Spirit upon his Disciples to guide them in their mission of Evangelization and in the governance of his Church.  In the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles we read that the Apostles, Mary and others were gathered in the Upper Room when there was a rush of mighty wind and tongues of flame.  Not only that, those gathered began speaking “in other tongues”.  The international crowd gathered in Jerusalem, on hearing them, was 

. . .  amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language?  Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphyia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." (Acts 2:5-11)

Referring to this event, St. Gregory of Agrigentum said:

           

Therefore if somebody should say to one of us, “You have received the Holy Spirit, why do you not speak in tongues?” his reply should be, “I do indeed speak in the tongues of all men, because I belong to the body of Christ, that is, the Church, and she speaks all languages. What else did the presence of the Holy Spirit indicate at Pentecost, except that God’s Church was to speak in the language of every people?”

The Church speaks to everyone because Christ is for everyone, and his language is universal.  Today we have ways of reaching people all over the globe that St. Gregory Agrigentum could not have imagined back in the 6th century, but it's the same Gospel, the same proclamation that the Apostles made 2,000 years ago.

Never Underestimate the Power of Prayer

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 21 December 2015. To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

The Anti-Prayer Warrior

The Dalai Lama, anti-prayer warrior

            Recently I have been pondering an old saying: "Never underestimate the power of prayer".  I had just been reading about the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader who has been (interestingly enough) urging people not to pray for France or for the victims of the recent Islamist terror attacks in Paris (a theme that has been echoed, much less gracefully, by some secular sources after the similarly motivated mass slaughter in San Bernadino, California).
     Bemused by the apparent incongruity of a renowned religious leader discouraging prayer, I tracked down this news article, which quotes the Dalai Lama as saying:

We cannot solve this problem only through prayers. I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place . . . We need a systematic approach to foster humanistic values, of oneness and harmony. If we start doing it now, there is hope that this century will be different from the previous one. It is in everybody’s interest. So let us work for peace within our families and society, and not expect help from God, Buddha or the governments.

            To be fair, the concept of an omnipotent Creator God who really hears our prayers appears to be foreign to the tradition in which the Dalai Lama was formed; we should not expect him to embrace a Christian concept of prayer. At the same time, St. Peter tells us to “to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” (1 Peter 3:15), and therefore it is proper to point out several false assumptions implicit in the Buddhist leader’s remarks, which are amplified in their cruder expression on the front page of the New York Daily News (picture below).

Ora et Labora

            First of all, the detractors of prayer seem to be suggesting that praying will somehow keep us from taking whatever concrete actions might be appropriate in a given situation, as if “Pray for Paris” means “Pray, and don’t do anything else.” Perhaps they’ve never heard the expression “Pray like everything depends on God, but work like everything depends on you” (or, as St. Benedict put it, Ora et Labora, "pray and work". In any case, nobody I know is proposing prayer as a substitute for action, so this is a (not very sophisticated) straw man argument. In the case of the people at the Daily News, it seems mostly an excuse to slam politicians they don’t like for not supporting gun control laws the newspaper promotes (one might point out that these policies were already in place in both France and California, and did nothing to hinder either attack).

            There also seems to be a misunderstanding, whether genuine or disingenuous, as to what such prayers are intended to do. Nobody is suggesting that God will restore the earthly lives of the innocent people murdered in Paris or San Bernadino in response to our prayers, or is expecting a deus ex machina whereby God simply steps in and solves our problems for us, as the Dalai Lama suggests. That is not to say that we discount the possibility of miraculous intervention (see below), but our prayers in response to human tragedies, for the most part, address things that are beyond the reach of any laws or “systematic approaches” we can enact in this world: prayers for the souls of the dead, and prayers that God bring healing and peace to the hearts of those among the living who are suffering from the tragedy (and in the case of suffering caused by evil-minded people, we pray for the conversion of the perpetrators hearts). Beyond that, we ask for the gift of God’s Grace, his divine assistance to give us the wisdom to know what we ourselves should do . . . and the strength and courage to do it. If the conclusion of that prayerful deliberation is that, for example, the application of armed force is advisable, we are happy to pray for the salvation in the next world of those on whom we are waging war in this one (we Christians are a Both/And People).

            Not that any of those things are likely to deter those pushing the “For God’s Sake, Don’t Pray!” theme, because their real (but generally unspoken) argument is that prayer is futile, that it can accomplish nothing, except maybe to give the people offering the prayers the excuse that they have done their part and can leave the real work to others. This assumption most of all we should not allow to go unchallenged; we should not underestimate the efficacy of personal witness to the power of prayer, particularly when we have seen for ourselves that prayer can have powerful, and, yes,  on occasion even miraculous results.  I had a powerful reminder of this truth with the last couple of days. 

The Power of Prayer

     Here's how it happened. When I first came across the Dalai Lama's anti-prayer pronouncement I was considering how I might respond.  As I was pondering I stepped out into the hallway and ran into a colleague who started talking to me about another staff member who was being treated for cancer. Our co-worker's situation reminded him of a close family member of his who had also been suffering from late stage cancer, and who had been given less than two weeks to live. He described how he, as he put it, prayed for his relative, and with her, and over her as she slept. His suffering kinswoman was still alive after two weeks; shortly after that she was cancer-free, and she is still alive and healthy today, more than a dozen years after the doctors told her she had barely enough time to get her will notarized and say good-bye. How interesting that this man, who had no idea what I had just been reading, and with whom I had never before discussed religion or prayer at all, should choose just that moment to share his personal testimony to the miraculous power of prayer.  I suppose it could have been merely a coincidence, but if so, what a coincidence!
            Another example from my personal experience is Benedicta McCarthy, a young woman with whom, and with whose family, I was acquainted some years ago. 

Benedicta McCarthy at St. Theresa Benedicta's canonization mass

Benedicta had swallowed an entire bottle of Tylenol when she was a toddler, overwhelming and destroying her tiny liver.  Her father, a Byzantine Rite Catholic priest, organized a prayer campaign for her as she lay in the hospital.  Amazingly, the doctors who had observed a hopelessly damaged liver in the morning found a perfectly sound and healthy organ that same evening.  The Vatican's Congregation for Saints ruled Benedicta's inexplicable (to non-believers) recovery as a miracle attributed to St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, for whose intercession Fr. McCarthy and his family and friends had been praying. This miracle was cited at the Saint's canonization in 1999.

     If we want an example more relevant to the threat of jihadists, we can look to the unlikely victories of Christian armies fortified by prayer over powerful Muslim aggressors at Lepanto in 1571 or Vienna in 1683. Let the Dalai Lama and the Daily News take note: Don Juan of Austria and Jan Sobieski did not stay home, secure in the expectation that God would smite the foe in their absence. Rather, they went forth to battle knowing that the Lord would answer their prayers only if they did their own part as well.

            Prayer works: we have seen it happen. Really, aren’t the people putting their faith in fantasies those who are relying on purely human “systematic approaches” and laws to do what such things have never done, that is, perfect human nature? So by all means, let’s pray. Let’s pray for Paris, pray for San Bernadino, say prayers for the healing of the people suffering from the ugly crimes committed there, and for the conversion of those who seek to commit such crimes. Finally, let us pray for all of us, and all humanity, that we may be willing to turn to our Lord and let our actions be informed by his grace and guided by his will.

What is a Hermeneutic of Suspicion, and Why Does It Matter?

An earlier version of this Worth Revisiting post was first published 15 October 2015 . To enjoy the work of other faithful Catholic bloggers see Worth Revisiting Wednesday, hosted by Elizabeth Reardon at theologyisaverb.com and Allison Gingras at reconciledtoyou.com.

What The Heck Is Hermeneutics?  

Back in my undergraduate days my college roommate took a class called "Hermeneutics". Not surprisingly, I couldn't help but ask, "What exactly is hermeneutics?" He explained that the word comes from the Greek verb ἑρμηνεύω (hermeneuo), "to interpret", and is related to the name of the god Hermes, bringer and interpreter of dreams. Hermeneutics, then, means interpretation, and when we speak of a hermeneutic we mean an interpretive framework through which we evaluate raw information. Even if we have never seen the term before, we all know the concept: if we say that someone "sees the world through rose colored glasses" we mean that they interpret reality through a hermeneutic of optimism, and a person who is always "under a dark cloud" employs a hermeneutic of pessimism. If we wish to use a more sophisticated example, we might say that someone resorts to a Marxist hermeneutic if they see everything through the lens of class struggle.

Hermes the Interpreter

    For most of us it seems a pretty esoteric word, and even if it's a part of our working vocabulary, it's probably not included in our everyday vocabulary.  Nonetheless, it's a handy term to have.  For instance, it gave Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) a very clear and precise way of summing up the the foundational error of both the "Spirit of Vatican II" progressives and the Lefebvrist ultra-traditionalists: both camps interpret the Second Vatican Council through a "hermeneutic of rupture", when the council should more properly be viewed through a "hermeneutic of continuity".  In other words, both groups operate with the assumption that Vatican II is a decisive break with the previous nineteen centuries of Catholic Tradition, the only difference being one group thinks that's a good thing, the other decidedly not.  Ratzinger was proposing that instead we should interpret the council with and through that Tradition.

The Hermeneutic of Suspicion

     A similar problem, one that can be found not only among die-hard progressives and rad trads, but also among many people who consider themselves "faithful Catholics, but . . ." (and in fact it's a temptation for all of us), is the "Hermeneutic of Suspicion". In other words, the default position that for any issue on which the Church takes a stance contrary to my preconceived ideas, political loyalties, the prevailing popular wisdom, or whatever else, She must convince me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my position is wrong and that her position is right.  This hermeneutic of suspicion is most conspicuously at play in the massive dissent from the traditional Catholic teaching on sexuality and family (which is not limited, by the way, to those who consider themselves "progressive").

    Am I saying that to be a good Catholic we need to stop thinking for ourselves, or "mindlessly" go along with the Church, as anti-Catholics are fond of telling us?  Not at all.   But nobody thinks and decides in a vacuum, we all need some basis for interpreting our world; "give me a place to stand", said Archimedes, "and I will move the world".  Being Catholic has always meant that we stand on the moral and metaphysical framework provided by Christ 's Church, and the Gospel as understood by that Church, not by the conventional wisdom or the prejudices of the cultural elite.

The Pillar and Foundation of Truth

    This demand that the Church must exhaustively prove to my satisfaction any teaching that does not correspond to my preferences before I believe seems to me to be the exact opposite of what has been normative throughout the history of the Church for those who consider themselves faithful Catholics.  St. Paul refers to “the church of the living God” as “the pillar and foundation of truth” (1 Tim. 3:15), and in another place he makes explicit where the believer is to stand in case of conflict between the Truth of God and the conventional wisdom:

           Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool so as to become wise.  For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God, for it is written: "He catches the wise in their own ruses," and again: "The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain."  (1 Cor. 3:18-20)

It was understood in the early Church, as well, where the authority to make final and binding decisions lay.  St. Augustine once said:

For already two councils on this question have been sent to the apostolic see; and replies have also come from there.  The cause is finished [causa finita est]; would that the error might be sometime finished also! (Sermon 131:10)

The expression causa finita est  comes from the practice of law; the modern expression that most closely corresponds is “case closed!”  To Augustine it seems a given that the replies from Rome have ended the discussion.

           More than a thousand years later St. Ignatius of Loyola is even more explicit in the Spiritual Exercises when he lists the rules “to have the true sentiment which we ought to have in the Church Militant”:  

Pope Paul III and St. Ignatius Loyola

To be right in everything, we ought always to hold that the white which I see, is black, if the Hierarchical Church so decides it, believing that between Christ our Lord, the Bridegroom, and the Church, His Bride, there is the same Spirit see which governs and directs us for the salvation of our souls. Because by the same Spirit and our Lord Who gave the ten Commandments, our holy Mother the Church is directed and governed.

                          

    St. Ignatius is not urging that Catholics leave their brain behind when they enter the Church: notice that he does not refer simply to white, but "the white which I see".  In other words, when it comes to fundamental categories (i.e., right and wrong), we need to trust the Church's judgment over our own, because she has been promised the guidance of the Holy Spirit, while we, as individuals, have not.

Every Man A Pope

    It really could not be any other way.  If we make ourselves the ultimate arbiters of truth instead of deferring to the Church, then the individual believer becomes, in effect, infallible, his or her own little Pope, the result of which could only be thousands upon thousands of little schisms; any sort of real communion becomes impossible.  In fact, that is exactly what we see among our separated brethren in the Protestant communities, whose separate denominations are now said to number in the thousands, a mere five hundred years after Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg.

    In the end, faith itself becomes an impossibility, if there is no Truth greater than my own personal "truth".  And if I’m the supreme judge, why do I need a church to teach me anything? For that matter, what use is religion at all, or a Divine Savior, if it’s up to me to determine whether there’s any sin from which to save me? Isn’t that the logical end-point of the Hermeneutic of Suspicion?  Just myself, closed in upon myself. That’s an awfully cold, lonely way to spend eternity; it brings to mind what St. Paul says: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24).  Paul, of course, knows the answer: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25).  Only Christ can save me from myself, I myself who “do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want” (Romans 7:19).  This same Christ has given His Church the power to bind and loose (Matthew 18:18); who am I, or any of us, to be its judge?