Pharisees
I recently read an article from yet another Catholic who thinks that it is possible to accept/promote abortion for those who want it and yet remain Catholic in fidelity to the Church’s doctrine, and I waded through the heated sometimes vitriolic discussion in the comboxes.
But what struck me was a theme that those who are uncompromising concerning abortion as well as contraception, just as the Church is uncompromising on those issues, are somehow Pharisees, and that Jesus condemned the Pharisees and taught compassion to the sinner.
Well, as far as what Jesus said and did, we have the record in the Gospels, and as I have stated it above, yes, he did call out the Pharisees, and yes he did forgive sinners. But perhaps we should examine that a little.
What did he condemn the Pharisees for? Mainly for their hypocrisy. Their outward lives were lived to the letter of the law, but their hearts were hard, cold and far from God. And they were also quite quick to correct the failures of others to follow the law.
In our modern day relativist shorthand we have come to think of the Pharisee as someone who is busy correcting others, and acting in a self-righteous manner, but because they have their own sin, we have given ourselves permission to disregard their admonitions because of their hypocrisy. This is the dilemma of the parent who did wild things in his/her youth and hesitates to correct a child because in his/her mind that right has been lost, and there is a fear of the charge of hypocrisy. And it is true that in the young there is a very fine-tuned homing device on hypocrisy, particularly when it comes to their primary law-givers, their parents.
But what is missing from the equation is a recognition of absolute truth, that it exists and can be known, whether or not it is immediately understood. Relativism, in practice, says that if the one teaching the “truth” is a hypocrite, then the “truth” may or may not be true. That manner of thinking is very evident in the discussions around issues like abortion, as those who don’t want to accept the teaching of the Catholic Church, yet are at least nominal Catholics, point to all manner of malfescence on the part of the Church heirarchy or other laity, as a reason to reject the teaching, and then they use the Pharisee argument and suggest that Jesus wouldn’t condemn their arguments but would have “compassion” for the woman who wants to end her child’s life, particularly in horrific circumstances such as rape and incest, thereby implying that Jesus would be just fine with abortion, and it is the Church in its patriarchal attitude that is actually persecuting women.
But they forgot something. Jesus said the following in Matthew Chapter 23;
Do what they tell you. Don’t do what they do, but do what they tell you. Jesus was pointing out that the Pharisees did have the authority to teach and to tell the people the right way to act, despite the fact that they themselves were hypocrites and did what they did for all the wrong reasons. Likewise today, for Catholics, the Magisterium does have the authority to teach, and to declare what is true in faith and morals. Jesus gave that to them, despite their human weakness and all out sin on occasion. That is a hard thing to accept. Moreover it is hard in any circumstance to accept truth from those who may not practice it, particularly if that truth will put us in a difficult place if we accept it.
But the other hard truth is this. If we reject the teaching if the Church in defiance, we are rejecting Christ. And if we don’t accept that the Magisterium has the authority in the first place we are Protestants, and need to face that fact.
But finally, if we know all this and yet we stay in the Church and try to undermine the authority and make the Church over in our own image, then we need to know that we are making ourselves the enemies of Christ, and following Judas Iscariot rather than Jesus.