The typical heresy of our days is that of those who want to make the Church a “self-service” where everyone chooses the truths and rules as they please, taking some and leaving others. Considering the Church as a restaurant, the customer looks at the menu, selects his favourite dishes and, perhaps, even has them prepared.
This heresy itself is already bearded, because there have always been those who, theoretically accepting the integral universe of faith or morals, would skip this or that point. With one difference, however: in the past, those who did so recognised their error, confessed to being sinners and, with greater or lesser seriousness, made a resolution to make amends. Today, the case is different: some claim to be full Catholics, even though they do not believe in the Eucharistic presence, in hell, or openly disregard broad swathes of Christian morality.
I believe that underlying all this is a distorted image of God and of mankind. God is indeed the merciful Father who lights the sun for Greeks and Trojans and teaches to forgive seventy times seven. God’s heart only knows how to love, God’s lips only know how to kiss, God’s hands only know how to cradle and caress. But let us not make of Him a kindly, guilt-ridden old man who is always condescending and smiles indulgently at everything. He is a Father who evaluates and judges the behaviour of His children by peering into the depths of His heart.
And here again we have a blurred picture of the human person. The man of whom the Bible speaks does not correspond to the picture that contemporary secularist culture paints of him: a Prometheus burned with divine fire, who dictates his own laws, who opens the paths he really wants to follow, who builds his life solely on the basis of his own resources and whims. A human being without references, without points of support, is nothing more than a puppet that moves all over the place, but does not know where it is going.
Those who have this conception of God and of the human person only admit, of course, the doctrine of the Church or the Word of God insofar as it comes to approve or bless one’s own choices and options. There are no objective truths, no universal criteria. The windlass is preferred to the compass.
What is really intended is a domesticated Church that accepts as good and lawful whatever the sovereign secularism or the madness of customs has previously decreed as such.
In the age of abortion, of euthanasia, of all kinds of experiments with the human genome, of terrorism, of television trash, a Church is called for that blesses everything, that applauds everything, that passes over everything. A Church that ceases to be the critical conscience of humanity in the light of the divine message. And which admits the relativism of those who pretend to find the truth through their own particular desires and opinions. A subjective truth, closed in on itself, to the taste of the client.
Dogmatic and moral teaching is an inseparable part of the Church’s mission. And like it or dislike it, that is the way things are. The Gospel has never been easy to swallow completely, but the Church cannot renounce its duty. And a citizen can be Catholic or not Catholic, but he cannot deceive himself by fabricating a Christian life according to the “customer’s choice” or “the fashion of the house”.
Abílio Pina Ribeiro, cmf
(PHOTO: Kaleidico)
