When you’re more right than the Church, it’s time for humility

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: 1 Sm 3:3b-10, 19
Second Reading: 1 Cor 6:13c-15a, 17-20
Gospel Reading: Jn 1:35-42

In this Sunday’s First Reading, God calls, and Samuel answers, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”

How wonderful, we think, to hear God telling us what to do! Like the Israelites after their liberation from Egypt, we long for the security of slavery, with precise instructions from God our Master.

But God refuses. He has made us sons, not slaves. He calls himself our Father, not our Baal (“master”).

Accordingly, we are tempted to seek instructions from clairvoyants, horoscopes, astrology, psychic readers, tarot cards, feng shui, etc. – all forbidden by the First Commandment.

Usually our conscience tells us how to do God’s will, for he has inscribed his law deep within it, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. However, what our conscience dictates depends on the principles of faith and reason already present in our mind. It uses these general principles (e.g., fornication is wrong) for particular conclusions (e.g., I must not fornicate with my partner).

If we are to make right moral judgments, our conscience must be educated: properly “enlightened” and “informed.” Otherwise, it can become “almost blinded through the habit of committing sin.”

Therefore, in order to give us complete and certain understanding of his law, God not only inscribes it in our hearts, but he also reminds us of it in his Ten Commandments, as St. Paul does in the Second Reading.

Moreover, he also gives us his Church to interpret it for us. We hear the beginning of his promise to do so in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading when Jesus said to Simon, “You are to be called Cephas,” which means “rock.”

As Matthew tells us, Jesus continued, “I will entrust to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”

For example, one of God’s commandments is to keep Sunday holy, and we must always obey it. However, it is the Church’s commandment to attend Mass.

We all feel sad and deprived at not being able to attend Mass, but we must recognize that what the Church has commanded, the Church can abrogate.

For example, many of us feel that we show disrespect for the Eucharist by receiving it in our hand instead of on our tongue, but on Feb. 12, 1970, the Church authorized that practice for Canada, and in August 2020 the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments endorsed the authority of bishops and their conferences to enact “provisional norms” which “must be obeyed” (e.g., suspension of the “reception of Holy Communion on the tongue or the public celebration of Holy Mass”).

Some of us feel that we co-operate with evil by using materials or knowledge derived from aborted fetuses, but on Dec. 17, 2020, Pope Francis approved a statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that “all vaccinations recognized as clinically safe and effective can be used in good conscience with the certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal co-operation with the abortion from which the cells used in production of the vaccines derive.”

As St. Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Church in Ephesus, “We ought to receive every one whom the Master of the house sends to be over his household as we would do him who sent him. It is manifest, therefore, that we should look upon the bishop even as we would upon the Lord himself.”

It is when we feel sure that we are right and the bishops wrong that, by humble submission, we need to testify to our belief “in the holy Catholic Church,” which we proclaim in the creeds.

After all, as G.K. Chesterton said, what we need is not really “a religion that is right where we are right;” what we need is “a religion that is right where we are wrong.”

Father Hawkswell is again teaching “The Catholic Faith in Plain English” free of charge. All the materials (video and print) are available online at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 18, “Baptism and Confirmation,” will be available Jan. 17.