How Much Must I Believe?
Posted by AGroup in Faith on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 10:00 AM
Q: Do I have to believe “everything” to identify myself as Catholic?
A: I read the conversation that followed this question at Faith & Family Connect, and once again I was impressed by the honesty, wisdom, and compassion so evident in exchanges here at the Faith and Family online community. I had two thoughts that may be of use to those who are following this conversation.
The World around Us
First, isn’t it interesting that all of the specific doctrines brought up in the context of this question have to do with gender and sexuality? Homosexuality, contraception, women priests, abortion … These are the hot-button issues of our cultural moment.
Catholics engaged in today’s culture sooner or later discover that today’s culture doesn’t value or accept the Catholic view of sexuality. Five hundred years ago, Catholics engaged in the culture ran head on into different issues, things like: Is Jesus really present in the Eucharist? Did Jesus really start a visible Church? If Oprah had had a show in 1500, those would have been the hot-button issues for a Catholic guest.
And if we were to turn the clock back even further, say, 1500 years ago, the issues would have been different yet again. In those early centuries, for example, it was not uncommon for Christians to start riots over whether Jesus had two wills (a human will and a divine will) or just one.
My point is simply that many times, the difficulties we have with our faith are not really grounded in our faith. Rather, they stem from the Christian’s strange position as a dual citizen. We are residents of this fallen world, but we are on our way to an eternal city. This creates tension.
We want to feel completely at home here on earth, but we can’t, because we are meant for something greater. “We have no lasting city in this life …” (Hebrews 13:14). The Church, Jesus taught, is like a fishing net, partially subject to the ebb and flows of the ocean’s currents, but not fully. Therefore, we should not expect the demands of our faith to always be comfortable. We often have to swim upstream, which can be quite demanding (just ask the martyrs).
The Right Perspective
Second, as we face our difficulties and strive to mature in our faith, we should remind ourselves that doctrine is not divorced from life. Our Catholic faith consists of what God himself has revealed to us for the sake of our happiness and fulfillment, in time and eternity.
After original sin, human nature was wounded. Our ability to understand the meaning of the world and our lives was impaired. We became vulnerable to the deceptions of evil and the often subtle seductions of sin. We lost our way. The path of communion with God (the only path to lasting happiness) became full of obstacles.
God didn’t abandon us in that condition. He had a plan of salvation designed to guide us back to spiritual health and true happiness. This plan he revealed to us in Christ. And so, what Jesus taught us, and what he continues to teach us through his Church, guided by his Holy Spirit, is not just a list of abstract principles. It always has as its goal guiding us along the path of deeper and deeper communion with God.
The Church’s teachings on morality, then, are connected with a bigger picture: How to fulfill our vocation to live in communion with God. When we keep that in mind, we are better able to deal – patiently and humbly – with the difficulties and struggles we run into. We are better able to “fix our gaze on Jesus” (Hebrews 3:1), even while striving to understand better the wisdom of his ways.
Print Blog
Email a FriendPost a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
