hmm…
seems pretty simple when you put it that way… so why does the RCC seem to not encourage people to learn straight from the Bible? It really has a “just do as I say” attitude… Kind of like my dad when I was growing up… Makes it seem so terribly wrong to ask questions, when someone acts like this, it is like they are trying to hide something… (Maybe not literally, but YKWIM)
For one thing, you can’t just learn straight from the Bible. By the time you’re old enough to be seriously addressing the hard moral questions, the questions that interest you aren’t expressly set forth in the Bible. The Bible itself says it can’t be interpreted without someone explaining it, and it also says that Scripture is not something for personal interpretation. After all, it’s not like there’s an index that says “Iraq, invasion of, based on existence of weapons of mass destruction… p. 309.”
Paul taught Timothy to pass on
both Scripture
and Tradition, as he had been taught. Peter pointed out that we cannot interpret Scripture for ourselves, and specifically that some parts of Scripture are difficult to understand. Luke expressly pointed out that the Scriptures can’t be understood on their own without someone to explain them. And this is all
after Pentecost, so the standard non-Catholic line that “the Holy Spirit will guide me and I don’t need anything (or anyone) else” doesn’t hold water.
So, who can explain the Bible? That’s why Jesus left us the Church.
There’s nothing wrong with asking questions. If you feel the need to do so, ask away. What you will find is that the answers all go back to Scripture and Sacred Tradition as taught by the Apostles. It’s just that, as time goes on and circumstances change, the questions themselves change, too. Many of the moral questions faced in Apostolic times aren’t an issue today (when’s the last time someone asked you over to dinner and tried to serve you meat that had been sacrificed to idols?). Many of the moral questions faced these days weren’t an issue in Apostolic times (Can you adopt the embryos from a fertility clinic? If so, can you pay money for them?). But the Church is big enough that it has people assigned to study these things, and they can reason their way to an answer to difficult questions that I might not be able to resolve on my own – especially since they can take their time and debate it with other professionals.
But then, when you ask the same question a few years later, you’ll just be given the answer. If you need to know the reasoning behind it, ask away; the reasoning is out there. The particular priest answering your question might not know why the answer is what it is, but someone does, and you can find out.
Look at it this way: if I asked you whether it was okay to kill my neighbor for stealing my newspaper, you’d answer “no.” If I asked whether it was okay to sleep with his wife, you’d answer “no.” You might even get mad or worried about me for asking in the first place, because the answers are so obvious, and they’ve been definitively resolved for a long time. You certainly wouldn’t bother looking it up in the Bible (not that there’s anything wrong with looking it up, but you already know the answers).
The Church has been answering right-and-wrong questions for 2,000 years. Most of the questions you’re likely to ask have been asked already; and most of them have been definitively resolved. So, when you ask a question that seems new to you, you might get an off-the-cuff answer that makes you think the Church only cares in you doing what you’re told (“Question 283? Answer 976-Q”). But, if you delve into it deeper, you’ll find that there’s a reason for the answer you were given. Our morality “database,” if you’ll pardon the analogy, is bigger than the “database” of the pastor of Frank’s Sixth Church of Christ – so it might look to you like Pastor Frank sat down with the Bible and took the time to figure out the answer while the Catholic priest didn’t. But the truth is that the priest didn’t need to figure it out right then. That’s already been done, he studied it in seminary, and he passed on the information to you. Ideally he should’ve also told you
why the answer is what it is, but his failure to do so doesn’t mean we’re a Church of dictators; it just means he didn’t explain it fully.
