Then I Must Obey, Then I Must Follow Him

Let's try another approach to the entry I had on Sunday. What we shall do is simply ask the question: Is becoming a Catholic an individual or a corporate decision? The obvious answer seems to me to be that a corporate group comes and individually each member decides on their own personal integrity to sign up or not. So a group who decided they wanted to be reunited to the Catholic Church whose orders were not accepted by the Catholic Church would have to submit individually to the Catholic Church's teaching. Each individual would have to be looked at on their own terms due to all sorts of possible personal issues that may need addressing. Each would then have to be received and confirmed. These are individual decisions. When they take place would be up to the individual who seeks to be united to the corporate body.

The Catholic Church is not Anglican for obvious reasons. It is much more hierarchical than some may be willing to see or find suitable to their taste. The point that is important for someone who is asking the question for themselves about becoming a Catholic is to recognise that becoming a Catholic is to accept the Church as she is in her authority. When one comes to accept that authority and sees the truth that lies within that authority, while feeling the pain and tension of separation and loss by not being united to her, the question must be asked how long is one called to live with that? Is there a point in which perhaps we ask ourselves whether or not we are living true to ourselves? One of the things I often try to remind my children of when I speak to them about Christian virtues is the very important issue of integrity. I tell them that integrity is basically doing the right thing when nobody is looking. It is living in the truth of who we are and being settled with the sacrifice integrity sometimes asks us to make. I tell them that only we can make the decision to do this.

Then, as I teach my children the lesson of integrity as I work to nurture that virtue within them I must always be ready to live it out before them as well. My children asked me over the last few months of this year when they saw me struggling with issues or overheard me speaking to their mother why I didn't just become a Catholic since we really were Catholics. From the mouths of babes!

The temptations to which we are exposed to is primarily to be autonomous and choose for ourselves what we like or dislike. I have heard this many times in the context of ecclesial life by comments from priests who say they are more a S. Peter man than S. Paul or who believe S. Paul got many things wrong when writing about relationships or whatever. What happens to a group when we advocate a party mentality? When this happens in the context of the Church it loses its identity as HIS Body and becomes 'my party'. The Holy Father speaks of conversion stating that,

Indeed, the essence of conversion lies precisely in the fact that I cease to pursue a party of my own that safeguards my interests and conforms to my taste but that I put myself in his hands and become his, a member of his Body, the Church.

What I was concerned about not doing was to live by a theory of a party system that only answered to my 'personal' expectations and taste. It was not about my choosing what suited me in the form that I was willing to accept it. I could not have the externals of Catholicism without the heart of its authority backing me up and supporting what I did and believed about a Catholic life. At one point the question was brought to me as to whether or not I could give a congregation in the C of E my complete heart for a five year period. I asked myself, could I do this without constantly looking over to the other side of the Tiber knowing that my heart was lacking something by not being in full communion? I could not answer this question in the affirmative so rather than take on something in the future where my heart would in part be somewhere else I knew it was time for me to make the final leg of the journey God started me on in my theological pursuits 18 years ago.

This brings me to something very important about the question of faith in my life and what that meant. The Holy Father reminded me that faith

is not the selection of a programme that is to my liking or the joining of a club of friends in which I feel understood but is a conversion that transforms me and my taste along with it, or at least makes my taste and my wishes take second place. Faith penetrates to an entirely different depth than can be attained by a choice that pledges me to a party. Its power to change is so far-reaching that Scripture designates it as a new birth (1 Pet. 1:3; 23).

So, a party was nothing more than a self-governing society that attempts to organise itself along the lines acceptable to all its members democratically determined by the mechanisms of minority and majority. There is a quotation on the lower left column of this blog that speaks to this sort of an issue. Do give it a read. What happened then with regards to a decision about what I was to do was to come to the conclusion that my faith was not a decision about a cause that I liked and was willing to sign up to and support. For to do so was to actually be a sole actor who simply was trying to arrange my own house to be comfortable and that would hopefully appeal to as many as possible. I came to see that I could not confuse the Church with a party programme. Faith requires from me something much more than this. I abandon my taste and I submit myself to Him. The answer was made clear and it was a decision only I could make, 'Then I must obey, then I must follow him, even when he leads me where I do not wish to go' (Jn. 21:18).

Over at rorate caeli there is a fantastic quotation from the Holy Father's Vespers homily on Ss. Peter and Paul about how to think like an adult as a Catholic. Fantastic.

In the last few decades, the expression ‘adult faith’ [fede adulta, 'grown up faith'] has become a widespread slogan. It is often used in relation to the attitudes of those who no longer pay attention to what the Church and her Pastors say — which is to say, those who choose on their own what to believe or not to believe in a sort of ‘do-it-yourself’ faith. Expressing oneself against the Magisterium of the Church is presented as a sort of ‘courage’, whereas in fact not much courage is needed because one can be certain of receiving public praise.

Instead, courage is needed to adhere to the Church’s faith, even if it contradicts the 'order' of today’s world. Paul calls this non-conformism an ‘adult faith’. For him, following the prevailing winds and currents of the time is childish.

For this reason, it is part of an adult faith to dedicate oneself to the inviolability of life from its beginning, thus radically opposing the principle of violence, in defense precisely of the most defenseless. It is part of an adult faith to recognize the lifelong marriage between one man and one woman in accordance with the Creator’s order, re-established again by Christ. An adult faith does not follow any current here and there. It stands against the winds of fashion.

Benedict XVI