Is God Correcting the US Catholic Church?
Are we watching God’s will play out in the US Catholic Church? Is God changing His Church in America? Remember, nothing happens that God does not allow. This does not mean He approves but He does not stop.
Catholicism when you fully understand it is a partnership with God. It is not a moral code.
Many of us grew up under a rules-based faith. Even today, you can see faithful Catholics in various forums on and offline demanding that we must follow the rules. Jesus taught his followers to live the law and stated clearly that not one jot or tittle would be eliminated. The law, as one parishioner pointed out to me, is the only word of God written in stone — the Ten Commandments. So, we follow the law but it has two parts — the letter and the spirit.
Living the spirit versus the letter
Jesus called the disciples to live by the spirit of the law more than the letter. So, He healed on the Sabbath. He often encountered the suffering who begged to be consoled. Jesus cured them publicly even though the Pharisees considered this a violation of the third commandment. Some would say he did this as a form of taunt. His point was we are not to make obedience to the law a higher priority than treating others humanely and with love.
Now we are living in Post-New Testament times and we see the law still applies but Jesus gives us another standard to live in our faith.
The night before Jesus’ passion, he went out into the garden and prayed, begging that the crucifixion may pass him by. Ultimately, he obediently submitted to the Father’s will. He died after his torture and the death sentence of being nailed to the cross. Three days later, He resurrected from the dead and at that moment everything changed.
He gave us a model to follow and showed us the result.
What is that model? Prior to Jesus, the faithful lived by the law in their service to God. Now we are to be in union with God in our service to Him and our fellow human beings. This means that our existence changed. The law remains but now our personal and communal prayer becomes a central part of our living our faith. We now have a deeper understanding of the spirit of the law over the letter.
In our Catholic faith, many focus just on living the law. So, for example, some Catholic Bishops of the United States ruminate on who should or should not receive communion among the political class. Are they teaching you how to live in obedience to the Father and how to put that obedience in action? Or do they focus first on the law and the rules of the faith? Jesus calls us to be mindful of the rules and to live them but to do so in a prayerful union and partnership with God and his community.
Jesus’ death on the cross and subsequent resurrection changed our relationship with God so that we are now living with God in a more intimate way. When Jesus died on the cross, the curtain in the sanctuary tore into two pieces. Literally, God is no longer hidden from his people. We have a deeper call to believe and to have a deeper relationship with Christ and his Church. This means our focus should not be on following the law but on knowing Christ and asking him for the ability and the grace to do His will. The fruit of our prayer starts by receiving the grace and wisdom to follow the law but continues as we grow in doing the will of the Father.
Jesus' death and resurrection, therefore, changes everything in how we live our faith but often this is not what leaders teach if they focus us on rules.
Are the bishops teaching the right message?
I always cite a soon-to-be-retired bishop whom I feel embodies this problem. You will see him on Twitter for example proclaiming moralisms to the world. His Twitter-bio proclaims that he is pro-life, ironically there is no mention of Jesus in it. Does this mean it is more important to be pro-life than to love Jesus? The reality is the fruit of the latter is to be the former.
He once tweeted to his parishioners not to attend the Pride parade in his city because it is immoral. Of course, as the saying goes, when you put something on the World Wide Web, it goes to the whole wide world. He received tens of thousands of tweets from same whole wide world basically telling him to back off. He relented and wished everyone a good day.
The seat of his authority is literally the Cathedral — from the Latin Cathedra for chair which is on the altar. It sits in the church on the diocese’s property which is between the Planned Parenthood clinic on the other side of the main interstate through his city and the LGBTQ area of the city on the on the other side of his Church.
The abortion clinic is open six days a week, ironically, it is not open on Sundays. The LGBTQ section of the city is open during the regular hours of bars and similar establishments. The Cathedral is open for prayer one hour a day. This embodies exactly what I said.
What is his message whether he intends to make it or not? It is more important to obey the law of the Church than it is to pray. He, therefore, appears to put the curtain back up in the sanctuary. Jesus’ death and resurrection break the separation between God and his people. Focusing just on the rules restores it.
If this is what our US Church is teaching then God will act and sort out the wheat from the chaff of those who are uniting people to Him and those who are separating people from him by focusing on the law while remaining blind to the covenantal relationship.
The Church must lead all to pray first
I believe in the Catholic Church fully and I believe in her teachings. We cannot follow them properly without personal and communal prayer as part of our living our faith. In fact, this too is Catholic teaching. Living the rules without prayer is impossible and will lead to pride and eventually lead us off the track. Do you ever deal with intensely mean people who angrily proclaim the need to live by the rules of Christianity? They prove my point. The whole point of our faith is to be fruitful Catholics we must be good at prayer and live its by its ways.
If the leaders of US Catholicism do not teach prayer but promote strict fidelity to law first then maybe God’s hands are in the resistance and persecution they encounter.
So this means that, yes, we need to follow Church teaching but we cannot follow it well if we are not people of prayer. Jesus himself demonstrated this. When he prayed, he modeled to us that we cannot do God’s will unless we ask him to help us co-operate with it. We cannot just simply follow the rules. We need prayer to deepen our experience with God through Jesus Christ and to follow the law which is the wisdom of God. Otherwise, we live ersatz Catholicism.
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