Believe everything or get out

[Leela]

Jesus is King…he is also the head of the Church…which happens to be in “The Vatican.” The Church, by the authority Christ gave it, the Church…being the body of which Christ is the head, gives a moral teaching on contraception. The OP as do I, as do you, has free will to accept or reject Christ, His Church in “The Vatican”, and His moral teaching on contraception through his Church. It’s a simple path to choose: Accept or reject, the choice is always ours because God gave us free will.

If I understand you correctly, your view is that any Catholic who does not submit to every Catholic teaching is rejecting Jesus. In other words, “believe everything, or get out.”

 

[Wowbagger]

I don’t have much time today, so I’ll have to be brief.

Nothing about the faith HAS to conform to reason. Certainly nothing about the faith will contradict properly applied reason, but it can and does go beyond it in many instances.

This misses my point, which you’ll find here:

My problem is that there is a – to me – clear contradiction between faith and reason.

I leave the domino-like collapse of every other argument in your latest post as an exercise to the reader. However, as always, I appreciate your attempt to help me figure this problem out. I just can’t say its gone very well so far.

Leela:

If I understand you correctly, your view is that any Catholic who does not submit to every Catholic teaching is rejecting Jesus. In other words, “believe everything, or get out.”

One need not necessarily believe every universal moral and dogmatic teaching of the Church (although it is hoped that all the Faithful will come to believe), but one must submit to all of them. Subscription to the Catholic set of beliefs, including Magisterial infallibility, is what it means to be a Catholic rather than a Protestant. If you do not believe or at least submit, then it’s not a question of “getting out”; you have already left.

It’s sort of like if a geometric shape with four corners started demanding that the triangle club let him join. It’s just not happening, and there’s not a thing anybody in the Church can do about that.

Which brings me, lastly, to my good chap Bob:
Bob Crowley:

Maybe because I’m an ex-Protestant I tend to be a bit jaundiced about Church infallibility - Inquiisition, Galileo, massacres of those who resisted the faith in Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the way the church worked hand in hand with generations of South American dictators, the pedophilia cover up, the cruel educational methods used in many Catholic schools (I remember a TV personality, now in his 80’s, quite a nice chap, who with his mates stood outside his Catholic school at the age of 12 and shouted, “That’s it with God!” They’d had enough of the brutality. Mind you I know of an Anglican outfit that was much the same.), the fact most Western Catholics today have smaller families than previously which tells me most of them don’t have much time for the contraceptive pill ruling, the devious way Vatican I was called, the 4th Crusade and the sack of Constantinople, the way one of the Pope Pius’s (?) went around chipping off all the private parts of statues in part of the Vatican, the Pope’s coronation of Napoleon, the way Peter himself nearly caved into the Judaisers, the church’s opposition to “modernism” for a hundred years, the close relations between the Vatican and Franco the butcher, the butchering of the French Huegenots (although they reciprocated in equally brutal fashion at times), the endemic corruption in the church which brought about the Reformation in the first place, the Borgia Popes, the Anti-Popes, and so on.

Although many of the scandals you mention are distorted at best, you are free to hold whatever opinion you want on the vast majority of them and still call yourself a Catholic in good stead with The Big Guy. But when you reject a universal moral or dogmatic teaching, you are rejecting the teachings of Jesus Christ and the revelations of the Holy Spirit to the Church.

There are two such teachings on your list: this teaching on contraception, and the Church’s opposition to the Modernist heresy (which, incidentally, remains in effect - it did not end after a century, and Catholics are still required by the Holy Spirit [Who Is the origin of Magisterial authority] to believe it or at least submit to it).

I have to go now. I’m sorry I didn’t manage to say more to you, slywalker, except that I know where you’ve been! The book that really ended up keeping me going was not, in the end, the Summa. Strangely enough, it was the Silmarillion. The whole book, but especially the first two pages (where we witness the fall of Melkor/Lucifer), provide a powerful meditation on free will and our independent power to sin. Although I still don’t fully understand the teaching, I am no longer in a state of “crisis of faith” over it, largely thanks to that book.

I recommend it, and I will pray for you. Please do the same for me, if you can make the time.

Best,
-W.

 

[RosaryFan]

…Nevertheless, I have some issues with the Church policy on contraception. I am not for abortion but believe that this will not be reduced until contraception is promoted.

I know I’m entering this thread really late, but I cannot let the above comment go by without comment.

Contraception has been promoted, tirelessly and emphatically, since the 1960s! In fact, 9 out of every 10 people I know (“Devout” Catholics) are on some type of birth control or have been sterilized. How on earth can you claim that it is not promoted???, infinity???

And the abortion rate continues to rise and rise and rise and rise and rise and rise and rise and rise and rise and rise at horrifyingly alarming rates. We’re above 50 million babies now. It is staggering… no thanks to “birth control”.