Home        Answers to Questions / Editorial Articles listing

Q: Would it be wrong to practice only what the Church teaches, even if the teaching goes against what your own heart tells you after much prayer and reflection?

A:            A Gentle Reader asked this in a broader context. The gist of the other questions which came in with the e-mail was basically, “Where do you draw the line?” meaning, when it comes to doctrine and practice, “how far can you go” and still be considered within bounds of Catholicism.

            Both the question and the context seem to paint a universe in which Catholicism is a sort of dark and closed box, maybe even a big one, but “everything else” in the universe is much bigger than that. So before getting to the particular question today, the following worth asserting: The one and only God, who is the Holy Trinity, and who made each soul with the hope they would enter his only Church (Catholicism), made all things, and he is good, one, true and beautiful. The truth is God wants all men to be Catholic, but he wants them to be so by persuasion and not by force, and has mercy on those who, through no fault of their own, have sincerely sought his will but failed to find it.

So there are the teachings and practices of the Church, and then there are things that are not. I do not, however, refer to some aspects of Church life which are human laws but for the Catholics, for example, that the minimum age of a sponsor at baptism is 16 years of age, or that we genuflect to the cross on Holy Saturday. These are conventions, and we must obey them out of obedience to the Church. But there are other aspects of Catholic practice whose content appeals to natural law (such as the prohibition to steal, contracept, covet or dishonor one’s parents) or to revealed law (such the Lord’s command to celebrate the Eucharist, saying, “do this in memory of me”).

There are no gradations to faith. If one has assented to Catholicism, he should have done so for ONLY this reason: Because God has revealed these things, and he can neither deceive nor be deceived. That is, we believe on the authority of God, as revealed to us in Jesus Christ, and passed on to us by the Apostles who worked many miraculous deeds as signs that they had been sent by God. In other words, we don’t believe “because my heart tells me this or that after some ambiguous experience which I hereby dub prayer and reflection.”

A person who believes this latter way may think that they believe 99% of what the Church teaches even if they leave out that other 1%. But the fact is, they have 0% of the faith, for they have no faith at all. They believe either what they want to or what they have been able to understand, they do not believe what God has revealed because of the authority of God who reveals.

Granted, there may be something, or many things, or – who knows? – maybe most things the Church teaches which may challenge you, which you might not understand, or which you might not like. But the assent of faith will help you understand, and know that God is good, and what he wants you to believe is good, so you have nothing to fear. Think of the great minds like St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, probably the most intelligent human beings who ever walked the earth, plus the whole slew of “doctors of the Church” (men and women), and all the saints. Any honest person could come to this conclusion about them: “Look now, if all these people, blessed with such intelligence, and who wrote and studied so voluminously and amply and deeply about every aspect of the faith, could produce all that and still be believers, then maybe I too might some day, like them, penetrate with my intellect those objects of my faith. So for the moment, even though I might not understand, or might not like, one teaching or another, I’ll accept it without rejecting it, and I’ll find those answers I have always been looking for.”

Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. Be patient and be humble, and eventually you’ll find the reasons, if you have not been able to now.

But know the reasons are there. Our God is not an irrational God, but rather amazingly true and intelligible. Yet as the sun is so bright it can blind our eyes, God’s truth is so bright it sometimes blinds our intellects. You need the right “tools” to look at God’s revelation, and the first one is faith; the second is study; and the third is a virtuous life which also bestows understanding. God wants you to know him, so don’t be afraid of the labor it takes to penetrate the mysteries of his divine Word.

All of this helps us answer your question. No, it would not be wrong for you to practice what the Church teaches, even if you don’t get it. Of course, you should always follow your conscience, but only if it is informed with the truth. The truth is that God is always true, and that the Holy Spirit (who is God), speaks through the Church on matters of faith and morals, for our salvation. So if God is always true, and he speaks about morals, and he speaks through the Church, then when I follow the Church’s authentic teachings, I will be doing what is good. So a well-formed conscience is never afraid to obey the Church; it is good to obey the Church for these reasons, and yes my conscience can understand that it is good to obey the Church.