- Feb 5, 2002
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“In the culture, if you stand for virtues and principles and morals, you are far right,” went a Facebook post I stumbled upon. “In the Church, if you are devout and follow ‘all’ of the teachings of the Church, you are rigid. Got that?”
Not untrue, though I’d want to qualify both claims. The second sentence is the one that interests me here. It may be meant for encouragement or for virtue-signaling. In either case, the question to be answered is what “follow the teachings” means. It has more possible meanings than we might think, and some of those deceive us into thinking we’re doing better than we are. A Catholic can follow without following.
Does it mean follow as in following a legal commitment? The kind of thing almost everyone does when they hit “agree” to the pages and pages-long legal statement about updating an app? You make a contractual agreement, which could in theory bind you in ways you don’t want to be bound. But you can’t claim to follow it all — or even understand it all — and for practical purposes, most of it’s irrelevant to your life.
It’s easy to hold all the teachings of the Church in that sense. And perfectly proper to do so. You can legitimately hold it in the same way you agree to the app’s legal document. The Church teaches a lot of things, some of it at a high level of complexity and sophistication, and the actual application to most of our lives can be very obscure. We say the Nicene Creed at Sunday Mass without knowing the mind-bending subtleties of Trinitarian theology.
Few of us have the gifts or the time to work it all out. We trust the Church knows what she’s doing even if we don’t. She’ll work out how it all applies to our life. So yes, it does mean this.
Continued below.
What does it mean to follow 'all' of the Church's teachings?
Not untrue, though I’d want to qualify both claims. The second sentence is the one that interests me here. It may be meant for encouragement or for virtue-signaling. In either case, the question to be answered is what “follow the teachings” means. It has more possible meanings than we might think, and some of those deceive us into thinking we’re doing better than we are. A Catholic can follow without following.
Does it mean follow as in following a legal commitment? The kind of thing almost everyone does when they hit “agree” to the pages and pages-long legal statement about updating an app? You make a contractual agreement, which could in theory bind you in ways you don’t want to be bound. But you can’t claim to follow it all — or even understand it all — and for practical purposes, most of it’s irrelevant to your life.
It’s easy to hold all the teachings of the Church in that sense. And perfectly proper to do so. You can legitimately hold it in the same way you agree to the app’s legal document. The Church teaches a lot of things, some of it at a high level of complexity and sophistication, and the actual application to most of our lives can be very obscure. We say the Nicene Creed at Sunday Mass without knowing the mind-bending subtleties of Trinitarian theology.
Few of us have the gifts or the time to work it all out. We trust the Church knows what she’s doing even if we don’t. She’ll work out how it all applies to our life. So yes, it does mean this.
Continued below.
What does it mean to follow 'all' of the Church's teachings?
