Choosing Communion with the Truth
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - April 21, 2006
In a March column in The Boston Globe, provocatively entitled "Should Liberals Leave the Catholic Church?," Joan Vennochi candidly vented her frustration that Church teaching, particularly in areas related to human sexuality, was not shifting in a liberal direction.
"Liberals raised as Catholics," she wrote, "think we can be pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-gay adoption, and in favor of married and female priests and still call ourselves Catholics. … We believe our views are the enlightened ones and Rome's represent the Neanderthal; eventually we will get a pope who understands that." She admits, however, that the Church "isn't budging" and states that "every pronouncement from Pope Benedict XVI draws another line between official church doctrine and liberal ideology. When do liberals choose one side or the other?"
Her column set off a small explosion on the message board integrated with the on-line edition of the paper. In the matter of a few days, 2,087 comments were posted, many from those who, in response to Vennochi's interrogatives, answered that it was time for liberals like her to choose "liberal" over "Catholic" and leave the Church; several of them admitted to having already followed their own advice. Other echoed their frustration over the conflict between Church teaching and their own liberal beliefs, but urged Vennochi and others to remain in the Church to try to change the Church's teachings from within.
In this choice between "liberal" and "Catholic," neither Vennochi nor her on-line supporters seemed to recognize that they were proposing what Vennochi perhaps unintentionally but befittingly termed "liberal ideology" as the standard by which to judge the teachings of the Church founded by Christ — rather than the other way around. Their ultimate ground of truth, of right and wrong, of good and evil, was not faith in Church's capacity to pass on the teaching of her founder on faith and morals, but rather modern liberal dogma, or, perhaps more accurately, their own beliefs which coincide with it.
Pope Benedict has described this tendency to try to conform Church teaching to modern mores, rather than to purify and transform modern value systems by Church doctrine, as one of the great contemporary ecclesiological errors. But on April 5, during his continuing weekly catechesis on the Church in "Jesus' original plan" and how we must "commit ourselves to live in it at the beginning of a new Christian millennium," the pontiff described how this error has been present in the Church as a "trial" since the beginning. The experience of the early Church, guided by the Holy Spirit in truth and love, is a model for the Church today, he taught, in how to understand and deal with conflicts between the "truths of faith" and "lacerations of communion." What we learn from the early Church is not a naive, Rodney King-esque mode of conflict resolution — "Can't we all just get along?" — but a mature recognition that sometimes, sadly, communion cannot be maintained:
"Just as a communion of love has existed from the beginning and will exist until the end (cf. 1 John 1:1ff), so, sadly, from the beginning division has also erupted. We must not be surprised by the fact that it exists also today: 'They went out from us,' says the First Letter of John, 'but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out, that it might be plain that they all are not of us' (2:19)."
"Therefore, the danger always exists, in the vicissitudes of the world and also in the weaknesses of the Church, of losing the faith and thus, of also losing love and fraternity. Therefore, it is a specific duty of those who believe in the Church of love and want to live in her, to recognize this danger also and to accept that communion is not possible with those who do not abide in the doctrine of salvation (cf. 2 John 9-11)."
Jesus himself faced this "trial" when he preached about the reality of the Eucharist. St. John candidly described that many of Jesus' disciples responded by saying "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" and then "turned back and no longer went about with him" (Jn 6:59; 66). Jesus didn't and couldn't change the truth to accommodate their preferences. All he could do was propose it and hope that they would respond in faith.
With regard to parts of Church doctrine, some modern disciples like Vennochi echo, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" But the Church founded by Jesus cannot change the truth about abortion, marriage or holy orders any more than her founder could alter the truth about the Eucharist. Real communion can only occur through conversion to the truth in love, through mutual abiding "in the doctrine of salvation." Let us pray that those who find Church teaching difficult today respond differently than the disciples who walked away from Jesus and the apostles in the Capernaum synagogue.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
