Audio only:
As Catholics, it’s easy to point out how divided Protestantism is, with all of its different denominations. But what about all of the divisions within Catholicism between “conservative” and “liberal” Catholics, Traditionalists, Charismatics, or a thousand other possible splits? As it turns out, the objection that Catholics are just as divided as Protestants isn’t a new one… and nor is the problem of unity within the one Church. So here’s how St. John Henry Newman, Cardinal Ratzinger, and St. Paul responded to this argument.
Transcript:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So this is the second of two videos I’m doing on the theme of Christian Unity because today is Holy Thursday and on Holy Thursday at the Last Supper, Jesus prays for Christian unity in a prayer I don’t think we as Christians give enough thought or attention to on the whole. So that prayer, as I mentioned last week, is in John 17 in which Jesus prays, “I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one even as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be in us so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”
So Christian unity, as I pointed out last week, is important for evangelization. People are not going to want to convert to Christianity if all they see of Christianity is Christians fighting with one another. That’s something that is glaringly obvious. You can talk to plenty of non-Christians who can confirm it. You can talk to converts who are afraid of converting because of all the infighting, and yet we still ignore it because we don’t want to stop our fighting. Jesus goes on to say or pray, “The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me. They may become perfectly one so the world may know that thou hast sent me and has loved them even as thou hast loved me.”
Now, I pointed out last week that this is in my view, really a death knell for Protestant theology in this sense, that Jesus has called us to unity and elsewhere he calls us to truth. And this is not something that is like, “It’d be nice if you guys had this, but it’s not super important.” It’s like, “No, no, if we are not working for unity, we are not working in accordance with Jesus,” because he views this as essential and essential for the spread of the gospel as we just saw. And at the Last Supper with very few things that he gives us in the scheme of things, the thing he gives future generations is a prayer that we’ll be one. He also gives us something else at the Last Supper, the Eucharist, which is going to be really connected to that oneness, but we’ll get to that.
But he calls us to be one and he also calls us to be united in the truth. And the point I made last week, which I’m not going to rehash anymore, don’t worry, is that you need something like an infallible church. You need some kind of infallibility because if you leave it to people and say, “You guys need to all agree and you need to be united and you all need to have the right answer,” you can leave people alone for 2000 years and they’re never going to all agree. I just was listening to a fascinating podcast about AI alignment fears. This is going to get super nerdy for about 30 seconds. They put top critics and scholars and theorists who are really worried about AI, and I think they spent 18 hours with top critics and theorists who are much more sanguine, who are much less worried about the risks of AI. And they had them talk for 18 hours together and they barely budged their opinions.
They respected one another. They could accurately say what the other side thought and why, but they just did not agree. And so theology is like that, where we just have to talk it out and maybe we’ll agree on this eventually, it’s not going to happen. You’re never going to have a single Protestant denomination that all just agrees one with another. And you don’t have to be Protestant more than 30 seconds to see that. You don’t have to know much about the history of Protestantism to see that. But if you know anything about the history of Protestantism, you can see that it’s fracturing more and more and more and more. And that’s not because they’re just like bad people, it’s because they’re pursuing truth and have given up on unity because they can’t figure out how to have truth and unity.
But if you can trust the church, which Ephesians 4 and plenty of other places in the New Testament point you to, if you can trust that it is, as St. Paul says, “the pillar and foundation of truth,” then you can have unity and truth together in the church because you’re united in the truth. But if you don’t have infallibility, you don’t have anywhere to direct all of those energies towards unity or any answer to settle upon that everyone can agree is the truth. Now, having said all of that, I know I just rehashed the entire last episode, the objection that I anticipate and have gotten is that, “Well, that’s easy for you to say as a Catholic, but look around the Catholic Church. Catholics are massively divided on a lot of issues.”
And on this, I would say, “Correct. That’s right.” And that is a problem to a certain extent. This is also not a new problem. But does this problem invalidate everything I just said about unity in the truth in the Catholic Church? No, but to see why I want to step back and look at the history of this problem and the first place I’m going to go is actually in 1850 because John Henry Newman, now St. John Henry Newman, he was a well-known, very prominent Anglican, was called Anglo Catholic, like an Anglican trying to preserve the Catholic roots of Anglicanism, who in his early forties converted to Catholicism.
And so roughly equal spans of his life were spent as an Anglican and then as a Catholic. And he was a brilliant writer. And in 1850, I think six years after he became Catholic, he wrote a book called Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. So he’s just trying to say, “Look, I was an Anglican, I get it. I know some problems you’ve got with Catholicism,” and then speaking into those objections. And so in volume one of that, he says, “It’s well known in controversy, when Protestant apologists make arguments against the church, to say that the Catholic Church has not any real unity more than Protestantism for if Lutherans are divided in creed from Calvinists and both from Anglicans and the various denominations of dissenters…” Those are the groups kind of split off from Anglicanism. “Each has its own doctrine in its own interpretation. Yet Dominicans and Franciscans, Jesuits and Janissanists have had their quarrels too.”
And Newman says, we’d go even more than that to say, “At this very moment, the greatest alienation, rivalry, and difference of opinion exists among the members of the Catholic priesthood. So the church is but nominally one.” Meaning one in name only. “And her pretended unity resolves itself into nothing more specious than an awkward and imperfect uniformity.” So that is an interesting objection and Newman is going to point us in the direction of how to answer it, and he’s going to look particularly at two types of divisions, divisions over non-essential issues and dissent over essential issues. But before we get into his answer and before we kind of plot out a course with that, I want to turn the clock back even further because yeah, it’s true, there was a lot of infighting in the church in 1850, but you can go back even further than that to about 50, that is the year 50, and find massive infighting.
And so the first part of the answer we’re going to see is that the kind of unity Jesus is talking about coexists even in the midst of Christian infighting, that there is a kind of unity, a sacramental unity, a oneness in the true church that exists even as members of that church are fighting. And we get this from the pages of scripture, specifically we get this from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians chapter one, verse 10, Paul says, “I appeal to you brethren by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you agree and that there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.” That is what if you’re a Christian you should be praying for, striving for, pushing for. And if you’re settling for something less than that, you are settling for something less than what you’re called to by the gospel.
But then Paul describes the problems in Corinth. He says, “For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there’s quarreling among you, my brethren.” What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or, ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or, ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or, ‘I belong to Christ.’ And Paul responds to this and says, “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” So the whole idea of denominationalism and factions and all of this, of belonging to a different party that’s a rival to some other party, that’s not what we’re called to as Christians. If you are a part of a church that’s named after somebody that isn’t Jesus Christ, that should be a red flag.
Like everything he says about the party of Paul and Apollos could also be applied to the party of Calvin and Luther and all of that, that kind of denominationalism. But even if you are not in a group like that, you could be like, “Oh, I’m an non-denominational. We just follow Jesus. I’m just the party of Jesus.” Well, Paul called that out in 1 Corinthians 1 as well, that even if you claim to just be the party of Jesus, you’re still dividing Jesus. And so that kind of infighting exists in Protestant denominations, in the Catholic Church, and all the way back into the first century in this church in Corinth. And yet despite this or in the midst of this, St. Paul can say to these same Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 10, verse 17, that because there is one bread or literally because there’s one loaf, “We who are many are one body for we all partake of the one loaf.”
So the Eucharist… And it’s very clear from 1 Corinthians 10, he’s referring here to the Eucharist, which he talks about as a participation in the body and blood of Christ. The Eucharist makes us one even when we are getting on each other’s nerves, even when we’re fighting against each other. There is a kind of oneness that is not of human origin because think about it, Jesus in John 17 is praying for union, which should be a constant reminder that this is not something we can achieve simply on our own. Now, our efforts can help or hinder the cause of unity, but there’s a kind of unity that God can give that we cannot provide for ourselves and we’ll return to that point at the end. But in that sense, no matter how much Catholics may be at each other’s throats, one with another, we don’t want to overlook this true unity we have sacramentally in the Eucharist, that we don’t have with those who don’t have the Eucharist, the kind of unity St. Paul is talking about in 1 Corinthians 10:17 exists between Catholics.
If you’ve got two Catholics and both of them are receiving the Eucharist worthily, even if they’re furious with each other, whether that be a personal squabble, whether that be a theological dispute, whether that be a political problem, whatever it is, there is a unity between those two people that you don’t want to miss. And I think this is something that… Because look, we live in an age in which politics controls everything and it’s really tempting to view everything through left, right, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat. And the problem is you can fall into this pattern of thinking, “Oh, the non-Christian, the non-believer, the non-baptized person, the person who doesn’t have the Eucharist who agrees with me on politics is closer to me than the person who is Catholic, in a state of grace, but who disagrees with me on politics.”
And that I would suggest is a problem, that you’re losing sight of the things that create true unity. It’s not political alignment, it’s not voting for the same guy, it’s not even having the same kind of moral values in the political space. There’s something deeper that’s of divine origin, which is this sacramental and divinely given unity. So that’s the first point. I don’t want to overlook that, but now I want to go back to what Newman’s talking about because he’s going to talk about unity on essentials versus non-essentials and disagreements on essentials and non-essentials. As we turn back to Newman, I want to highlight early Reformation Latin mantra that was really… It kind of caught on with Catholics and Protestants like this, and this is a rough English translation. “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity”. So on essential doctrines, it’s important that we be united.
We can’t just agree to disagree about something like the Trinity or about something like, “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” Those are not okay things for Christians to just say, “You do your thing, I’ll do mine.” It’s important the church have one position on this and probably important even to expel members who don’t agree to that position, essential unity. But then the second thing is in non-essential issues, Christian liberty should be the norm, that on things you don’t have to agree upon, there should be plenty of space for safe disagreement. That can actually be a really good way of even moving the conversation forward on things where there maybe isn’t one Christian answer, which is going to be as we’re going to see a lot of life, including a lot of things in the realm of theology.
Third, in all of this stuff, whether you’re talking essentials or non-essentials, it needs to be governed by Christian charity. If you are not approaching this with love, you are an impediment to unity, even if you’re right about everything that you believe in, maybe even especially if you’re right about everything you believe in. Because if you’re right and a jerk, it makes it that much harder for the person to accept the truth. Now, my focus here is on this disunity in the Catholic Church, but as I said, this kind of formulation, “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, charity,” is something Catholics and Protestants tend to agree on largely.
The problem is within Protestantism there’s no way of even knowing what are essentials and what aren’t essentials. So this is another area where I think it’s a false equation to say Catholics are as disunified as Protestants. So Dr. Doug Beaumont, a friend of mine back in, I want to say like 2012 or something, wrote a piece called Theological Abstrucity, Protestantism’s Glaring failure. Now Doug Beaumont is a former Protestant who was studied under some of the best-known minds in Evangelical Protestantism, and one of the things he came away with is in Protestantism there’s a huge amount of infighting where it’s not just that Protestants don’t agree with one another, it’s that they don’t agree which of the following things should even be considered essential or non-essential doctrine.
So even if we all agree, “Hey, let’s be unified on the essentials, let’s agree to disagree on the non-essentials,” which category does abortion go in? A lot of Christians today would say, “It’s an essential doctrine.” Christianity today in the 1970s was pro-choice until the Catholic Church really pushed the Evangelical movement into a more pro-life direction. Is that something Christians can agree to disagree on? Is it essential or non-essential? Or take Baptism. Baptism is an extremely important doctrine if you’re a Lutheran. It’s a symbol that’s kind of important if you’re Baptist. I’m oversimplifying a little bit in both of those. But how important is it to get baptism right? Is this something we can agree to disagree on or is this something that to be an Orthodox Christian, you have to get this right? Take Communion. There’s massive disagreements over what the Lord’s Supper or the Eucharist means, what the theology is of that.
And this is, as St. Paul seems to point to, a linchpin of unity. So is this an essential doctrine we all have to agree on or should we allow the wide plurality of theologies that we see in Protestantism? Or take Dispensationalism. If you are someone who is a Dispensationalist, the idea of rightly dividing the word of God according to Dispensationalist tenets is a really essential way of understanding Scripture. But most everybody else would say, “This is a non-essential and not even true.” Or take evolution or take free will or take God’s attributes like, “Is divine simplicity real?” Or take the existence of hell. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, I’ve been going A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. I’m just choosing one from Doug. He has a list of 75 of these. Justification is iūstitia in Latin. He didn’t have an I, so we’ll go with justification.
Can you disagree with forensic justification and be a Christian in good standing or is this an essential doctrine? If it’s an essential doctrine that everyone has to agree on to be a good Christian, there may not be any good Christians before the 16th century. That’s a problem. If it’s not an essential doctrine, what does that mean for these kind of Reformation debates? And the point here being I’m not trying to solve these doctrines, I’m simply holding these up to say to even move forward with the idea that in essentials we need unity, and in non-essentials, liberty, you kind of need a church to be able to tell you which things are… We would use the phrase de fide, matters of faith. That just means these are essential doctrines. This is part of the faith and you need to believe in this, whereas other things are of a lower certainty or a lower importance and you’re given freedom to agree or disagree.
So the Catholic Church is actually uniquely positioned to live out this thing that both Catholics and Protestants want to live out, which is we want to be unified on essential doctrines and we want to give each other breathing room on things that aren’t essential because if I’m left to my own devices to figure out which things are which, you know what’s going to happen? My passion projects, the stuff I’ve been reading about, the stuff I’m just super interested in, that’s going to rise to the top of the list and my personal interpretation of the stuff I’m really passionate about suddenly becomes the essential doctrine everyone has to agree with. It’s no longer, “Do you agree with 2000 years of Christianity?” It’s just, “Do you agree with me?” And that’s a problem, right? And I would suggest that we see this all over the place, both in Protestantism and in Catholicism when we’re not being careful, that you can say, “If you want to be a good Christian, you have to agree with my reading on Genesis.”
“What creed, what counsel says this?” “None. But I’m really convinced I’m reading Genesis right and you’ve got to read it the same way I do.” And this causes in many cases tremendous spiritual damage because I’m forcing someone into a false unity by forcing them on a non-essential to agree with me and to be unified with me and treating myself as the infallible church in magisterium. So this is the roadmap. Catholics and Protestants, broadly speaking, agree with this roadmap, but I would suggest only Catholics actually have a realistic way of moving forward with it because we can distinguish which things are essentials and which things are non-essentials. Okay, so for the remainder of this video, I’m going to basically make three points. I already made the first of them, that Christian unity is divine and sacramental, but second, that turning towards the non-essentials, Christian unity permits disagreement on non-essentials and we’ll get into how we navigate that and why it’s okay that sometimes Catholics are divided on even important issues, that that’s not the kind of thing that Jesus or St. Paul or anywhere in scripture is trying to prohibit.
The third and final point is going to be that church discipline and disunity should be distinguished and that’ll make more sense when we get there and then I’ll end with kind of the call for charity. So that’s where we’re going. So first, “In non-essentials, liberty.” Now I realize I’m switching the order of the Latin phrase, but this is where I think it makes more sense to go because this is what John Henry Newman goes to first because if the question is, “Well, why are Catholics so divided?” His answer is basically, “Well, because we’re human beings, because Catholics and Protestants are cut from the same clay.” In his words he says, “When then in it is said that she, the church, makes her members one, this implies that by nature they’re not one and would not become one.” You don’t need Jesus to pray for unity if Christians are naturally just going to be united.
If everyone, given enough time, just gravitates towards the right answer, then you don’t need to pray for that. It’ll just happen. But that’s of course not how human nature works. Human nature works the exact way we’ve seen Protestantism work for 500 years. People become more and more divided. That’s normal and natural and Catholics are the same kind of creatures. As Newman says, “Viewed in themselves, the children of the church are not of a different nature from the Protestants around them. They’re of the very same nature.” We are as prone by disposition, by nature, by temperament to conflict and division as any Protestant, as any atheist, as anybody else. The only thing that checks that is grace and the role of the church. And so Newman says, “Left himself each Catholic likes and would maintain his own opinion and his private judgment just as much as a Protestant. What’s more than that, he has it and he maintains it just so far as the church does not by the authority of Revelation supersede it.”
Look, you’ve got your own favorite restaurant, your own favorite way of getting from home to work. You’ve got your own way of folding clothes, maybe not the same as your spouse. It maybe causes conflict in your home. That’s not me speaking personally, but I know there are a couples for that’s an issue. “He folds towels differently,” or whatever. You’ve got your own way of doing things, your own beliefs about the best way to do things, your own approaches to all sorts of things in life. And it’s actually one of the things that we tend to really like about life. And Jesus is not, in the name of Christian unity, trying to quash that and the Catholic Church is not trying to quash that. In large realms of life, that thing that you really like, you’re permitted to do that.
And Christian unity is not saying, “We all have to agree on the favorite restaurant.” It’s not saying, “We all have to do things the exact same way,” or, “We all have to the exact same kind of art or the same kind of music.” That is not what the church is trying to do. Now you’ll find people in the church who try to insist on a particular way of doing things and insist that it’s their way or the highway, but that’s them, right? That’s not the church, that’s not Jesus. That’s not the call to Christian unity. And so as Newman puts it, “The very moment that the church ceases to speak, at the very moment at which she, that is God who speaks by her, circumscribes her range of teaching, there private judgment of necessity starts up. There’s nothing to hinder it.”
In other words, there are all sorts of issues the church has not given a definitive official teaching on. That’s of course to be expected. There’s a limitless number of things you could potentially have an official teaching on. I mean every TV show that comes out, you’re going to find some Christian saying, “Should we as Christians watch this show? Should we indulge in this popular activity?” Even if you had a church that tried to limit all human freedom and give answers to every single question, you couldn’t possibly answer questions as quickly as they come up. And so the church has never been in the business of trying to do that.
And all of those areas where the church isn’t trying to give you that clear cut, “This is the official church teaching,” kind of answer, well, of necessity you have to make some judgments. Is this appropriate for you? The church doesn’t have an official teaching on whether you can have a second cinnamon roll. You have to make a judgment, but you need to make a judgment. And so that’s where private judgment comes in. Private judgment doesn’t just mean, “Do whatever you want.” Private judgment means use prudence, use human rationality, use wisdom, be guided by your spiritual life to make good decisions about things where there isn’t clear guidance from the church because no matter how active the church tries to be, there are going to be a lot of areas where you have to make a judgment.
I had a guy recently ask how much money he was allowed to spend in buying a house. That kind of legalism is something we can gravitate towards because it takes us away from the need to actually make good prudent decisions and to be generous with our money. If the church just says, “Give us this percent,” there’s a sense in which that’s extremely liberating, but that’s not the Gospel, that’s not Christianity. Jesus doesn’t give you that answer. The church is never going to give you that answer. That is something that’s left in this realm where you have to decide. Now it’s important and you can sin if you go to an extravagant degree. If you decide to build an opulent mansion for your own glory, you might be sinning against God. You might be held accountable for that. So it’s not like it’s an unimportant issue, but it’s not a matter of de fide, it’s not a matter of the faith that you’re allowed to spend X amount of money and no more.
Hopefully that’s clear. So you by your nature and me by my nature, we like to choose things for ourselves. And Newman says this is good to a certain extent. “The intellect of man is active and independent. He forms opinions about everything. He feels no deference for another’s opinion except in proportion as he thinks that the other is more likely than he to be right.” You will sometimes say, “You know what? I thought it was going to be this, but that person’s an expert and I trust him more so I’m going to defer to them.” But you have to actually think they’re more likely to be right than you are. “And he never absolutely sacrifices his own opinion except when he’s sure that that other knows for certain. If you’ve seen a movie and I haven’t, and you tell me this is a twist ending, okay, I believe you.
Maybe that’s a very unlikely, maybe it’s a very bizarre way for them to have moved on with that story. I never would’ve guessed. I would’ve given that a 1% chance at best, but you’ve seen it and I trust you because I haven’t seen it. Now I can give that kind of absolute certainty, but I need that kind of knowledge that you definitely know the answer for me to be able to do that. If it’s just, “I’m a film buff and so I really am betting this is what the movie’s going to be,” well, even if I give you a lot of leeway, I probably don’t give you absolute certainty unless you’ve actually seen it for yourself. So likewise, with matters of the faith, to be able to give that kind of absolute yes, I need to know for certain that for certain, and so Newman points out in some cases we have that. Man is certain that God knows. So as a Catholic, you know that God knows. “Therefore if he’s a Catholic, he sacrifices his opinion to the word of God speaking through his church.”
So if I believe Jesus really is God, Jesus really did establish the church, Jesus really did give the Holy Spirit to the church to guide the church into all truth as he said he would, then it follows that when the church makes a pronouncement, even if I was previously like a 1% likelihood of that being the right answer, I can now give it that absolute certainty. “But from the nature of the case,” Newman says, “there’s nothing to hinder his having his own opinion and expressing it whenever and so far as the church, the Oracle of Revelation, does not speak.” Now, I want to be clear in calling it the Oracle of Revelation, Newman does not mean to suggest the church is getting some new revelation from God. This is a matter of interpreting what God has given and applying it and explaining it in the modern world.
So it isn’t like, “Hey, we found a new book of the Bible.” That’s not what he’s talking about here, but talking about the ability of the church to speak as the pillar and foundation of truth, that wherever that’s not the case, wherever the church hasn’t spoken in that level, in that definitive of a way, then I’m free to still go about believing whatever it is I would’ve naturally believed in before. So he says that, but then a little later he says, “Further still, in all subjects and respects, whatever, whether in that range of opinion of action which the church has claimed to herself and where she’s superseded what is private and individual or on the other hand, in those larger regions of thought and of conduct as to which she has not spoken, though she might speak…” So whether we’re talking about areas of faith where the church has actually spoken or areas where the church hasn’t spoken but maybe could, “The natural tendency of the children of the church as men is to resist her authority.”
That’s a striking kind of thing to acknowledge and realize is right, that we look at the craziness among Catholics in 2023, where the church could come out and say, “Birth control is wrong,” like we did in 1968 and Catholics resist that authority and say, “Ah, we’re not going to listen to that.” Or the Pope could say something tomorrow and there’s a good chance a large number of Catholics would say, “Ah, we’re not going to listen to that.” And that’s not new. Maybe it’s worse today in some ways, but Newman’s point is that’s part of our nature as fallen men. We really like our own opinions and we are naturally resistant to authority. In his words, he says, “Each mind naturally is self-willed, self-dependent, self-satisfied, and except so far as grace has subdued it, its first impulse is to rebel.”
I know I’ve mentioned this before. I’m the father to two toddlers and a baby, and when you tell the toddlers to do something, their first impulse is usually to rebel. Sometimes they check it, not always, but that’s natural. That is the clay we’re formed from in a real way. This is the inner workings of both the great gift of reason you’ve been given and the corrupting influence of concupiscence together. And Newman says, “Now, this tendency through the influence of grace is not often exhibited in matters of faith, that usually by grace we’re able to not do this about issues of faith.” We don’t just rebel when the church says there’s three persons in the Trinity for it’d be incipient to heresy and be contrary of knowingly indulged to the first element of Catholic duty.
So in that area, we tend to be good, but he says, “In matters of conduct, of ritual, of discipline, of politics, of social life, in the 10,000 questions which the church has not formally answered, even though she may have intimated her judgment…” We’re going to look at one of those in a little bit here. “There’s a constant rising of the human mind against the authority of the church and of superiors in that in proportion is each individual is removed from perfection.” So the more sinful we are, the more we feel that draw to rebel. So Newman has charted out why is it we as Catholics fight back so much? Why is it we fight against one another so much? Why is it we even fight against our bishops and our pope?
Well, he’s going to say, “Partly it’s because you have this great gift, a mind that can think for itself, and partly because you have the corrupting influence of sin.” So he says, “For all these reasons, there ever has been and ever will be a vast exercise and a realized product, partly praiseworthy, partly barely lawful of private judgment within the Catholic Church.” Now remember, we are dealing here still with non-essential doctrines. Now, birth control earlier was a bad example because that’s an actual dissent, but the idea here is on issues where the bishops write a document, say, a lot of Catholics first impulse is to roll their eyes and either ignore it or make fun of it or push back against it. That is a spiritual problem, but that spiritual problem doesn’t rise to the level of a lack of Christian unity, and that is, again, partly from this praiseworthy thing about you that you can form your own judgments and partly from this barely lawful thing where you’re exercising it in a way that seems just intentionally defiant, that may show a lack of spiritual growth.
So hopefully that’s clear enough. Newman’s going to give an example that I think is helpful, if maybe provocative, and he gives the example of nationality, that you have within the church not just of these different religious orders or these different theological schools, but more glaringly, you have these different nations and national allegiances. And this is something we actually don’t think about as often or as deeply as we should, that when we’re talking about Christian unity, one of the most striking things is we’re talking about unity of people in different countries. I remember at World Youth Day, meeting people from Iraq at a time when our countries were at war with one another or my country was trying to build a government in their country and realizing there was this thing that united us that was bigger than the kind of national level politics and all of the messiness and awfulness that was associated with that.
I think I’ve given that example before, but that kind of thing is important to realize, that within the Catholic Church there are different countries, different nationalities, and Newman gives this as the most obvious instance of the kind of liberty or license that he’s talking about. And he says he doesn’t understand why it’s not mentioned more often because he says, “After all, what a vast assemblage of private attachments and feelings, judgments, tastes, and traditions goes to make up the idea of nationality,” that to say someone is English as opposed to French is both a statement about a political kind of affiliation of what’s your relationship to the government, but also just like a thousand questions of culture, language, and preferences and tastes and all of these things that even if the two countries aren’t at war with each other or something, just point to a deep level of differentiation.
And that’s two neighboring countries. I mean there’s like a channel in between but basically neighboring countries. “Yet,” he says, “there it exists in the church because the church has not been divinely instructed to forbid it, and it fights against the church and the church’s objects except where the church authoritatively repels it.” We’ll get back to that idea that the church hasn’t been divinely instructed to forbid nationality because I think that’s a really important point, that God doesn’t want you in the name of Christian unity to just have uniformity. It’s not you have to lose your entire culture, your entire heritage, your entire language, your entire way of approaching life. You keep those things and those things, properly understood, actually enrich things. And that might mean your perspective on something, even where it disagrees with your neighbors, might actually enrich us, might actually build up the body of Christ.
That’s one of the reasons why we don’t just have liberty among non-essentials because we can’t settle every fight practically. That’s true. We have liberty among non-essentials because in those areas where you’re not fighting against God, you might be making the body of Christ richer. I mean, French food is amazing. I’ll gloss over English food. So Newman says, “The church is a preacher of peace and nationality is the fruitful cause of quarrels, far more sinful and destructive than the paper wars and rivalry of customs or precedents, which alone can possibly exist between religious bodies.” In plain language, you can say, “Look, these Franciscans and Dominicans are debating the nature of the beatific vision and the church hasn’t settled that. Is love or knowledge going to be higher in the beatific vision?” Interesting questions, brilliant theologians on these two sides are engaged in a paper war going back and forth, and maybe it gets heated sometimes, but you know when it gets really heated? When countries attack and invade each other.
And so in the name of Christian Unity, Christ has not eliminated that possibility. So he probably didn’t mean to get rid of all the other possible paper wars where you’re writing maybe heated essays, blog posts, whatever it is, one against another. And sure enough, 1 Peter chapter two, verse 17 says, “Honor all men, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the emperor.” So right there amidst this call to unity is also a reaffirmation that nationality can exist, that you can have a healthy relationship with the state, with the political system even when the political system is Nero who’s going to kill Peter. As fascinating as that is, the “Honor of the emperor” is a really big clue that Christianity is not preaching in the name of Christian unity something like an anarchy or a one world kind of government that gets rid of all nationality.
Now there’s a preservation of all those things and instead there’s leaving those areas of Christian liberty open even knowing they can do some damage. The church may have to push back against the warmongering and nationalism, but not against the idea of nationality as such. Okay, I want to turn down from Newman to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI. He wrote a document called Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion, General Principles. And the question he’s presented with and is presenting to the bishops is under what circumstances should a bishop deny communion to a Catholic? Like where are they out of step with the church in such a way that they’re no longer in the communion with the church necessary to receive communion? Hopefully that’s clear, that there’s this relationship, as I said, between the body of Christ, the Eucharist, and the body of Christ, the church. And if you sever that relationship because you no longer believe what the church believes, you are not permitted to receive communion because you don’t have the oneness with the church that communion is all about.
And so you instead as 1 Corinthians 11 warns, risk eating and drinking damnation upon yourself. And so Ratzinger says, “Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia.” For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion. That’s contrary to the way I was kind of in my earlier years exposed to Catholic teaching. It was this idea that, “Well, one group of Catholics disagrees with the church on abortion, but the other group of Catholics disagrees on the death penalty and everybody’s a dissenter.” And so we’re all equally dissenters and so we’re all equally Catholic and we’re all equally able to receive communion. That is not actually what the church teaches.
There are issues like abortion and euthanasia that all Catholics have to agree. And if you don’t, you don’t believe the Catholic thing. And there are other issues like capital punishment and whether or not to wage war on a particular case where you can have a legitimate disagreement. And Ratzinger puts it like this. He says, “While the church exhorts civil authorities to seek peace not war and to exercise discretion and mercy in imposing punishment on criminals, it may still be permissible to take up arms to repel an aggressor or to have recourse to capital punishment.” And he says, “There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia,” that there may be a situation in which for a lot of reasons that it’s too complicated to get into here you could morally support a war.
We could say, “I’m glad the US went to war in World War II,” and no one says, “How could you believe that as a Catholic?” But if you say, “I think you should be able to kill an unborn child on purpose,” well, no, that actually is overstepping a moral line in a way that’s just flat out unacceptable, not we’re viewing the matter differently. Hopefully, that’s clear. You’re never going to get invaded by an army of unborn children and have to resort to self-defense to save your country. That’s not going to happen. There’s no unborn children committing crimes where the state has to decide whether the capital punishment is an appropriate penalty. That’s not going to happen. So on issues like abortion and euthanasia, we’re talking definitionally here about the taking of human life that is innocent intentionally, and that’s a different category than we’re talking about just war or talking about capital punishment.
Now, the capital punishment thing gets somewhat more murky with some of the things Pope Francis has said, including the changes to the catechism. But I want to point out here that even Benedict XVI in 2011 talked about how he wanted to call attention to society’s leaders on the need to make every effort to eliminate the death penalty. So Benedict, Ratzinger, was firmly against the death penalty. His point is not, “Maybe capital punishment is a good idea.” His point is, “The church’s stance against capital punishment isn’t at the same level as the stance against abortion or euthanasia.” So one reason for that is this, the nature of what the church has… Remember how I said the church isn’t an Oracle of Revelation in the sense of getting some new revelation? The nature of what the church has is what’s called the deposit of faith.
In verse three of the Letter of Jude… It’s Jude 1:3, but there’s only one chapter so it feels weird saying chapter one. It’s like saying, “The first Letter of Jude.” Well, there’s just one. So Jude 1:3 says… Well, it calls upon us to contend for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. So the whole idea there is there’s not some new revelation coming. We don’t have Mohammed or Joseph Smith coming down the line giving us some new books. We are contending for the faith delivered once for all to the saints. Now, we might have to apply that to our modern circumstances, and that’s one of the things the church exists to do, is to help us apply that. But in those applications, there may be some room to disagree not about what the teaching is, but about how the teaching is applied in a particular context, in a particular circumstance.
And so the more it’s dependent on the circumstances of 2024 or whatever year, the more room there is for an ordinary Catholic to say, “I view things differently.” And that’s okay. So what’s the problem when we have Catholics fighting with each other on non-essentials? There are two. We’re to have liberty and we’re to have charity. And so the two ways we fail this are, number one, by being uncharitable in how we’re approaching political questions, national questions, things on which the church does not have a single position. It could be liturgical questions, it could be any number of things that the church doesn’t have one way of doing it, but I think there should be one way. So what’s your posture in how you receive communion? Are you standing or kneeling? Do you receive on the hand or on the tongue? I have personal preferences on that question, and my temptation is going to be to impose those on you.
But that is not what the church has done in this situation. And so if the church has given some liberty, if this area is loosed, it’s not my job to bind what the church has loosed. Hopefully, that’s clear. These are areas in which I want to impede your liberty and I shouldn’t, and I want to approach it uncharitably and I shouldn’t. So those are the two ways we can kind of fall into this trap, not giving the other person the liberty they have and not approaching the matter with charity. That’s the first category of Catholic dissent, and I kind of imagine that’s not the one that most people are kind of threatened by or concerned about, which is Catholics disagreeing over essential doctrines, Catholics disagreeing about matters of the faith. So the second point is on essentials, we actually do need unity. So there was a Facebook objection that was one of the things that led me to write this, and I’m going to leave the person anonymous because he was going to get back with me and actually record something, but he didn’t. That’s all right.
His objection was Nancy Pelosi was denied communion by the Archbishop of San Francisco for her pro-abortion advocacy. So Pelosi went to a Catholic Church in DC who is more than happy to give her communion, and he’s a Protestant. Said, “This just goes to show that despite claims to the contrary, and despite what Catholic teachings are officially, in practice, Catholic Churches are no different from Protestant churches.” And he says, “Apologies to my Catholic friends. I respect you and your devotion to the Catholic Church. But when you try to argue against Protestantism because of the different denominations or because there’s no centralized teaching to appeal to, the same thing is true of Catholic Churches. While there is a central magisterial teaching in Catholicism, more liberal and progressive Catholic Churches clearly don’t respect it, and the Pope sure isn’t going to hold them accountable for not respecting the central teachings of the Catholic Church.”
Now, the first thing that you might notice there is that sounds a lot like the objection Newman was answered in 1850, but it is important to note here that we’re now not talking about disagreements over things that the church has given us liberty to disagree about. We’re talking about actual dissent, meaning disagreement from things that we need to be unified on. And again, Newman describes it as saying that it’s a well-known point in contrast that Catholic Church has on any real unity more than Protestantism. But he points out that this is a false objection. It’s a false objection for this sense. He says, “Well, who would not suppose that objection to mean that these divisions were such as to make it difficult or impossible to ascertain what it was that the Roman Communion taught? Who would not suppose it to mean that there was within the communion of Rome a difference of creed and of dogmatic teaching, whereas the state of the case is just the reverse?”
In other words, it’s just not true that this makes Catholicism just like Protestantism because even if you have an outspoken pro-choice Catholic skirting church discipline while it’s trying to be applied to her, that doesn’t mean anyone is going to look at the Catholic Church and say, “Is the Catholic Church pro-life for pro-choice? I just don’t know.” No very clearly, even if they ignore the teaching, everyone knows the Catholic Church’s position on abortion. So it’s just not true to say, “Oh, this is just like Protestantism.” In Protestantism, you have actual denominations that are pro-choice explicitly. That is quite unlike Catholicism where there is no pro-choice magisterium. So that is the first and biggest kind of response to this.
There’s a difference between saying, “There’s a clear teaching and some people are ignoring that teaching,” and saying, “There’s no clear teaching.” The difference being one is a lack of unity in magisterium, the other is a matter of dissent from a unified coherent teaching. There is a clear, coherent, unified teaching and some people just refuse to accept it. That might be Catholics who refuse to accept Catholic teachings, there might be Protestants who are in rebellion from the church outright, might be ex-Catholics who don’t come back to church, whatever that is, that doesn’t make the Catholic teaching any less coherent or one or visible or any of those things. And again, this has been the case since early on. I’m going to go back to 1 Corinthians. So back to about the year 50 or so. St. Paul says, “It is actually reported that there is immorality among you and of a kind that is not found even among Pagans for a man is living with his father’s wife and you are arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn, let him who has done this be removed from among you.”
So what’s the failure there going on in the church in Corinth? It’s not a failure to teach the truth about sexual immorality. It’s that they viewed themselves as very broad-minded and accepting as a member this person living in pretty flagrant sexual sin. So it’s a failure of church discipline. Now, arguably, you have the same failure today in many places in the church. I think not just arguably, probably undeniably, but this is a much trickier issue. It’s one thing to say, “Catholicism has a magisterium and a clear body of teaching in a way that Protestantism doesn’t.” This is an undeniable claim. It’s another thing to say, “Here is the absolute right way to approach church discipline.” Because here’s the issue. In 1 Corinthians 5, there’s a failure because there was an under application of church discipline. They needed to excommunicate someone who they hadn’t. But there’s a risk of going too far in the other direction.
This is not a cut and dry kind of issue. So in Matthew 13, Jesus gives the example like this. He says, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. While men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also.” So you might think it’s going to be like, “Okay, well, that’s easy enough. Just do what we did in 1 Corinthians 5, throw out all the weeds.” And sure enough, the servants of the householder come up and say, “Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?” And he says, “An enemy has done this.” And they say, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he says, “No, lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them.”
So there are particularly flagrant violations of Catholic morality and theology that need to be disciplined, but we can be pretty trigger-happy as ordinary Catholics behind computers and want to excommunicate everybody who’s wrong about anything. And we’re actually warned against doing that because we don’t want to throw out some of the wheat while we’re on our crusade against weeds. Instead, Jesus says, “Let both the weeds and the wheat grow together until the harvest. And at harvest time, I’ll tell the reapers, ‘Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.'” And there’s an important moral lesson there, which is that the weeds are doing damage to the wheat. That’s the point. They’re not just personally wrong, they’re actually harming others, and that’s a problem. But it’d be a worse problem if in our desire to correct that, we started harming the wheat by throwing them out.
And so you do have to be judicious in how you apply church discipline, which is to say church discipline is a murkier issue in its application. It starts to look much less like just an issue of essentials. It may be that there is an issue where we can just say, “Here’s a very clear standard and everyone who goes over it needs to be thrown out.” But so often in life, it’s talking to the individual, trying to explain where they’ve gone wrong, trying to pastorally counsel them. And a lot of stuff is happening behind the scenes and so on that I would say, both, one, it’s probably true there are real failures of church discipline, but two, that doesn’t put the Catholic Church in the same position as Protestantism. There were real failures in the church founded by Christ from the beginning and there will be continually in the areas of church discipline.
We just heard two of those. One, you’ve got the church in Corinth under-disciplining, and two, you’ve got the people in the parable who want to over-discipline. So I’d say here, there’s some good news about bad Catholics, and the good news about bad Catholics is that they exist. I don’t just mean, “Hey, it’s great there are people dissenting.” That’s not what I mean at all. I mean, you can have such a thing as a bad Catholic. To have a bad Catholic, first, you have to have a coherent Catholic teaching and then you have someone who’s rebelling against that teaching. In contrast, there’s no such thing as a bad Protestant. A Presbyterian doesn’t believe what a Baptist believes. So he’d be a bad Baptist, but he’s not a bad Protestant. A Baptist doesn’t believe what a Presbyterian believes. He would be a bad Presbyterian maybe, but he’s not a bad Protestant.
So there’s no position in which the Protestant church has ever spoken because there’s no such thing. And so there is no coherent set of teachings from which a Protestant could rebel. So you don’t have bad Protestants, you just have other Protestants. Someone who disagrees with all of the teachings of every Protestant denomination can still be Protestant and just form his own church. And so the fact that we have such a thing as bad Catholics, as weird as that is to say, is a sign that there is a unified reality to Catholicism that simply doesn’t exist in Protestantism. And so you can have an insubordinate child and there’s still a family. There’s still something from which they’re rebelling from. You can have an outlaw which points to the reality of the law. If you don’t have that, if you just have a lawlessness, you don’t really have outlaws because there’s no law for them to be outside of. Everyone is an outlaw or no one is.
In Protestantism, you’re in much more of that situation. It’s a theological Wild West. Now, some people behave very well in that. I don’t mean to suggest everyone’s out there forming their own church. Some Protestants have done a great job of trying to hold onto elements of tradition. Just as in the real life Wild West, some people tried to build up civilization and take what they’d carried with them from the east. Well, here the situation is the same, that it’s possible to have dissenters only because of the unity in the truth in the church that we find in Catholicism. Okay, so the last thing I want to say is that in all things, charity. So remember we have unity in the essentials, we have liberty in the non-essentials, but whether we’re dealing with an issue of someone dissenting on an essential teaching or just a squabble about a non-essential teaching…
Squabble may be not even a big enough word because sometimes it looks to be really big, really important issues the church has not settled. Whatever the case, we need to be guided by charity. The Catechism in paragraph 8:22 says, “Concern for achieving unity involves all of us, faithful and clergy alike. But we must realize that this holy objective, the reconciliation of all Christians in the unity of the one and only church of Christ, transcends human powers and gifts.” That is why we place all our hope in the prayer of Christ for the church, the one we just saw in John 17, in the love of the Father for us, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. In other words, as we’ve seen in the very beginning, Jesus prays for unity. And so this idea of having charity one for another is rooted in the recognition that it is not left simply to us. We need to rely on faith, hope, and charity because God is the one who will bring about unity and God is the one who will increase the unity that he’s already given to us.
There’s a kind of unity that already exists in the Catholic Church for one thing through the sacraments, for another through the oneness of the church, that there is one visible body that we’re a member of. So there’s a oneness that already exists, a unity that already exists. That unity can grow and one of the ways that can grow, as St. Peter says, is by us having unity of spirit. And so Peter says, 1 Peter 3, 8 to 9, “Finally, all of you have unity of spirit, sympathy, love of the brethren, a tender heart, and a humble mind.” I want to pause on that because one of the biggest threats to unity is our egoism about our own ideas. And the more we can admit when we’re wrong, the more we can be open to other people’s ideas and approaches, the more we can actually have something like unity.
And so he says, “Do not return evil for evil or reviling for reviling. But on the contrary, bless for to this you have been called that you may obtain a blessing.” So even if the person’s being a jerk have love, charity, compassion and gentleness for them, and that’s going to be really key to having something like the Christian Unity we’ve been called to. And so I want to close by going back to the Last Supper, the place we began, the very event we’re celebrating today. Jesus prays for unity, but he also prays for us to have the love for one another necessary for that unity to work. And he gives this to us as a command. He says, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this, all men will know that you’re my disciples if you have love for one another.”
When we tear each other apart, when we are uncharitable to one another, we do not reveal ourselves as Christian disciples. We seem to suggest the opposite. And so just as we need to be very serious about the truth and very serious about unity in a way that, again, requires something like the church, we also need to be very serious about charity because if we don’t have charity, then our quest for truth and unity is going to lead us headlong smashing into other people and it’s not going to reveal us as disciples of Christ. Have a blessed Triduum. I hope to see you next week, metaphorically speaking. I can’t actually see out this side. Hope to see you next week during Easter week. God bless you.