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| Picture: Cardinal Christoph Schönborn (CNA) |
Yesterday I wrote about true friendship and
how sometimes true friends, turn out to be only “fair weather friends”. I related this also to our friendship with our Lord,
asking whether we are true friends of our Lord or just “fair weather friends”.
Are we Catholic because we were born Catholic; are we Catholic because it is
part of our culture; or are we Catholic because we have come to know and love
our Lord?
I came to be thinking about this because I have
for some time been trying to make sense of the constant attacks, by Catholics, on the Church and
the Church’s teaching. It frustrates me and causes me to despair
when I consider how many dissident Catholic newspapers, organisations, priests,
deacons, religious and laity there are, who constantly attack the Church and
the teaching of the Church. I can reconcile attacks on the Church and her
teaching by non-Catholics, but not attacks by Catholics. I want to understand,
if it is at all possible for me to do so, why a professed Catholic would so
openly and vehemently resist and attack the Church and her teaching. Why would
they seem so intent on destroying the Church and discrediting her teaching, usually under the guise of trying to
improve and build the Church?
I am not sure whether I will ever really
understand this, because there are probably a host of complex reasons for their
behaviour. Today, however, I read what Cardinal Schönborn had to say during an
interview with the Catholic News Agency on May 14, 2012. He said that “From the very beginning of his ministry, the
Pope has stressed that Christian faith, Christian life is not first of all a
series of doctrines, not first of all a series of rules, but a deepening
friendship with Jesus. He (the Pope) is convinced that without faith you cannot
understand Christian morals. Without faith, you cannot understand Christian
life. And therefore, I think the big challenge is really to deepen our faith.
Call it new evangelization, call it mission – I think it has very much to do
with conversion.”[i]
Could this be it? Is the Pope right? Is the
resistance towards and attacks on the Church and her teaching because some Catholics
haven’t yet developed a true friendship with our Lord, or because they have
lost that friendship? Are they seeing the Church and Church’s teaching as just
an oppressive institute, with a list of oppressive rules and regulations? Are
they, instead of understanding the Church and her teaching in a way that only a
true friend can understand another friend, viewing it from the ‘outside’ of the
friendship, where they simply don’t get it?
One has to admit that some of the Church's teaching, if taken out of the context of our relationship with our Lord, can,
if one really wants it to, take on quite absurd and even sinister tones:
traditional marriage can easily be seen as a selfish and bigoted rule to stop
homosexual people from being happy; not using contraception could be seen as an
ignorant approach to what is a clever human invention that helps all people to enjoy
sex responsibly without unwanted pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases; male
only clergy certainly seems archaic and oppressive in the context of the modern
world; the sacrament of Confession appears to keep people focussed on the
negative, encouraging feelings of guilt and inferiority instead of a positive
personal view of oneself; an anti-abortion stance means that poor people remain
poor because of having to feed unwanted children, not to mention all the other negative
consequences for women who are forced to have children they don’t want; the
concept of the Real Presence is just bizarre, a bit like a far fetched vampire
movie and actually pretty disgusting when one thinks about actually eating
another persons flesh and drinking his blood.
Yet, this same Church and the same teaching,
in the context of “a deepening friendship
with Jesus”, begins to make complete sense and in fact actually becomes
perfectly obvious, necessary and entirely natural for the Christian to accept
and live by. In the face of “a
deepening friendship with Jesus”, a Christian life without the Church and without
her teaching, is what begins to sound absurd and sinister.
The Cardinal may have hit the nail right on
the head. Possibly, what we need to do more of in the Church, as a viable and positive
response to all the dissident Catholics, is to pray that we will all really “deepen our faith”. Instead of engaging
in intellectual disputes to convince dissidents that our Church and her
teaching is right, let’s focus on helping others to develop a true friendship
with Jesus, because outside of that friendship, it makes no sense whatsoever
and will never make any sense. As Pope Benedict XVI says, “without faith you cannot understand Christian morals. Without faith,
you cannot understand Christian life.”
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