The mentality of "you can never go wrong with a priest"

[PetraG]

My parents grew up in a Catholic farm community well removed from the “big city”, and pretty much had the opinion that “Father knows best”.

We knew from our own pastor that there were some priests out there who said some head-scratching things. We also knew, though, that we should do our best to inform our consciences and not have an inordinate fear of a confessor who said something that wasn’t right. If we did our best and only believed what our physician of the soul told us until we had a way to know better, what we did in the meantime was on the priest who lead us wrong, not on us. Our pastor taught us to be sensible and to have a sensible amount of wariness of being mislead, but not to be paranoid about it. So yes, in a way, we were taught that it was OK to trust what a priest told us, just not in a blind way.