Rousing Her Radiance: Day 5
Author: Andrew Comiskey
October 15, 2023
How
the Church Forms Conscience
‘However
much Christianity may have failed during its history (and it has failed again
and again appallingly), the standards of justice and love have nevertheless
emanated from the good news preserved in the Church, even against her will,
often in spite of her, and yet never without the quiet power of what has been
deposited in her.’- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
A
friend opined: ‘I like the Church ‘cause I know where I stand. This is this and
that is that. Sin is sin, time doesn’t change that. The Catholic Church keeps the
boundary lines when no one else does.’
That
took me aback. My friend isn’t a Catholic (and I only a recent one), but as I
considered her words, I could agree that the Catholic Church always represented
to me something stable. Let’s add stodgy and inaccessible to non-members, but also
Rock-like, immovable in her morality. Somehow through kids’ books, popular media,
and a handful of Catholic peers, I knew the Church upheld sex only in marriage and
couldn’t bless divorce and homosexuality. She forbade abortion. I knew that vulgarity
and immodesty and not reverencing this God was wrong. Championing the poor
pleased Him.
In a
parochial way, to this child, the Church helped form my conscience. Even as a turned-on
Protestant, more inclined to cultivating personal devotion to Jesus and
evangelizing others than studying moral theology, I looked to the Church as
authoritative in moral practice. Maybe I just trusted her ‘take’ on Scripture due
to centuries of seasoned deliberation, especially about sexual matters.
For
example, her ‘culture of life’ commitment from cradle to tomb won me over. Included
in that was the idea that sex had to answer beyond itself—it needed to both
dignify this other and be ‘open to life’, the expectancy of conceiving
children. Sex couldn’t just be an arm of my desire, loneliness, or insecurity.
It revealed ultimate things about love and creativity to which God entrusted me.
So
this Church, this bastion of sexual clarity (at least in doctrine), impacts us
all. Even if we disagree with her, we disagree with a giant. I want her to
remain a serious point of moral reckoning for people.
I
fear that Pope Francis is eroding the Rock. In his efforts to reform her into a
kindly inclusive mother who ‘doesn’t judge’, he risks removing her teeth. Wayward
kids don’t need a feeble grandmother who nods senselessly at whatever we want. We
need the Rock that doesn’t roll.
‘Thank
You Jesus for this Church. She is hard for us. We are soft, more defensive about
our needs rather than surrendered to Your will. Convict us when we conform the
Church to our own image rather than being transformed by hers. Where and when
we experience her as unbending, teach us to rest in the Rock’s shadow. Continue
to form our conscience.’
‘Father,
we thank You for Jesus who established the Church on a Rock against which hell will
not prevail (Matt 16:18). We pray for every Christian leader to build on Her
firm foundation of sexual clarity and integrity. Father, unmask the deceiver
and divider of Christians and unite us in one Spirit. As weak members of
Christ, we ask for truth to guide our pursuit of sexual wholeness, for grace to
sustain it, and for spiritual power to transform us. May we reflect the chaste
radiance of Jesus (2 Cor. 3:18) as we “shine like stars in the universe,
holding out the word of life” (Phil. 2:15-16) to a lost and hurting world.’
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