North of the Shire

Last evening I heard a caller as I was flipping through my Sirius channels on the Catholic Channel on Father Dave Dwyer’s Busted Halo Show, who was discussing what a Catholic is, or who’s really Catholic.
The caller suggested that one person had said that if a person cannot adhere to this, this and this, right on down the line. Basically he was drawing a sort of legalistic picture. In contrast he was talking about a certain flexibility that people are not all on the same page at the same time.

Father Dave had a good answer. From the standpoint of persons and personalities, etc., it is true that each person comes to faith and the fulness of faith, or even the fulness of acceptance of all of the doctrines of the Catholic faith sometimes over a period of time and God works in the hearts of people by the Holy Spirit, and some people require more time. From a pastoral point of view he was exactly right, but from the point of view of what I think the caller was asking, Father Dave played it safe.

I may be wrong, but the seeming tone of the question was one of rejection of dogma, or the insistence upon dogmatic identifiers to separate those who are Catholic from those who are not. As someone who came to the Catholic faith later in life and was raised in an environment as non-Catholic Christian as it gets, I am particularly sensitive to these issues. For me, as well as many other converts to the Church, this issue of who is Catholic and what does it mean to be Catholic are central to our own identity precisely because we had to become what we were not in order to be Catholic, and that meant an essential change in what we believe. Of course it is important to lay out what it means dogmatically to be Catholic.

Father Dwyer is right in saying that everyone, because we are not perfect beings and have various levels of sin and hardness of heart, has an imperfect faith. We are all striving to learn and asking God for grace to help us conform to his will and at the very base of all this is that we know that the Catholic Church offers us the authentic way to ahieve our goal, both doctrinally and dogmatically, and practically and sacramentally. This is the fulness of the faith in every way.

The danger here is taking what our weaknesses are as human beings and deriving some kind of dogmatic filter based on those weaknesses. That is the application of relativism that the Holy Father has been warning us against throughout his pontificate. The truth is the truth. The dogmatic teaching of the Church on faith and morals is backed by the Holy Spirit and is the one area that the doctrine of Infallibility applies most specifically.

Therefore, if we are having difficulty accepting one or more dogmatic teachings of the Church, and usually the difficulty is in the area of sexual morality and the life issues, the doctrine is not wrong, we are. Perhaps it may take time for us to fully understand and accept what the Church is teaching, and perhaps the priest and others with whom we are in contact may not brow-beat us about it.

However, there are certain consequences to our behaviour, the behaviour that is a result of our way of thinking or level of belief. That is to say, that if we are living in a state of mortal sin, however that comes about in our lives and for whatever previous actions that we have done to get ourselves there, it is still incumbant upon the priests and ministers of the gospel to make it clear to all, not just us, that if we are in a state of mortal sin there are things we cannot do, such as receive communion.

Now that is seen by some as not being “inclusive” and that I think is where the question was coming from. Perhaps I am hyper-sensitive and am reading into the question, but it was the impression I got. Therefore, the person who is insisting on being hardline about dogma is not doing anything other than what St. Paul was doing in his letters to the Corinthian church, insisting that those who receive communion should not receive unworthily, for their own soul’s sake.