Conservative/Liberal or Faithful/Unfaithful

Jan 22

January 22, 2023

Jesus Christ: Yesterday, Today, and Forever ~

A month ago the Wall Street Journal published a story on priests becoming increasingly conservative over the past generation, while the laity have become increasingly liberal. I haven’t read it but I’m pretty sure part of its inspiration comes from the results of worldwide surveys conducted on behalf of Pope Francis’ Synod on the Synod (pastor’s column dated 12/19/21). As part of that process, parishes and diocese all around the world gave input into what focus they would like the Church to have, and changes they would like to see. This survey wasn’t taken from amongst devout Catholics who know and try to the live the faith, but from all Catholics, most of whom don’t know their faith and disagree with God on many points of it, especially morality. So the outcome of those surveys saw responses from a majority of Europeans and Americans that looked an awful lot like popular contemporary opinions, that is to say; opinions that oppose what is found in God’s Word (the Bible) or in what Christ has handed down to us over two millennium of saints and practice. What those surveys don’t show, is that of the ever decreasing number of men who are willing to be priests, the vast majority have gone in the opposite direction of popular culture’s ever more godless beliefs, and have embraced the timeless truths of the Bible and what has been handed down to us from the saints for over 2000 years. The Wall Street Journal would be right then in picking up on a big difference between the beliefs of priests ordained in the past 30 years, and the beliefs of your average Catholic who calls themselves that, yet may or may not attend Mass, or know what the Ten Commandments or seven sacraments are. The Wall Street Journal calls it a conservative/liberal divide, but more accurately it needs to be called a faithful/unfaithful divide.

When my parents were growing up in the 1930’s and 40’s, Catholics might describe their political views as conservative or liberal but not their faith. There weren’t conservative or liberal Catholics in faith, instead, there were good Catholics, bad Catholics, devout Catholics, pious Catholics, lapsed Catholics, and simply Catholics. What there were not, as it regarded the faith, were conservative or liberal Catholics. That all changed in the 1960’s and has been a pox upon our house ever since.

God wants us to embrace all of His Truth’s, the ones we like and ones we don’t like; the ones that are easy to live and we wished everyone else tried to live them too, and the ones that are hard to live and find us regularly failing at. You see, God isn’t conservative or liberal, rather God is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty; All Knowing, All Loving, and All Powerful; the one before whom all will be judged. God is Sovereign. Political categories don’t apply to God or His Truth.

Perhaps this will help. We don’t think of math as being conservative or liberal, just easy or complex, right or wrong. 1+1=2 isn’t conservative or liberal, its’ just true. A mathematician isn’t conservative or liberal because of his calculations, he’s just right or wrong. The same is true of Catholics: if we agree with what the Church has always taught in faith and morals, we aren’t conservative, we’re right; if we don’t agree with what the Church has always taught in faith and morals, we aren’t liberal, we’re wrong.

If you find yourself disagreeing with Church teaching, then in all honesty, you’re disagreeing with God, and that’s a very big problem for yourself and the others you influence. Ultimately accepting the Truths of God or rejecting them, is a matter of fidelity or infidelity, not political categories.

I’ve attached an abridged article by Dr. Jeff Mirus, writing for Catholic Culture dot Org. An article that gave rise to this pastor’s column. You can find his whole article at the website below.

May Almighty God Bless You,

Not conservative or liberal, but faithful or unfaithful
By Dr. Jeff Mirus | Dec 28, 2022

One of our recent Catholic World News headlines, about a week before Christmas, was: Young American Priests Steadily More Conservative. With our usual editor’s note, this headline leads to a December 18th story in the Wall Street Journal.

What this news story is really about is the difference between those clergy and laity who accept what Christ teaches through His Church and those who do not. You might refer to this divide as the difference between “orthodoxy and heresy”, but perhaps today the terms “faithful” and “unfaithful” better capture the spiritual dynamic at work.

Today, in the senses that matter most spiritually and religiously, the “liberals” are those who reject the constant teaching of the Catholic Church that comes from God through the Natural Law and Divine Revelation. Spiritually speaking, it is these teachings—this understanding of reality—that the “conservatives” ought to be trying to conserve and extend. But the words conservative and liberal carry a massive weight of political, social and even ideological baggage which often confuses the issues, and makes it far too easy to dismiss one side or the other without thinking things through—and perhaps I should add, without praying things through.

The most serious problem in society and in the Church today is that good and evil as taught by God (and as known most precisely through the official teachings of the Catholic Church) are being redefined by human beings in order to scratch their own itches. This is as true in the priesthood as in the presidency, in synodality as in the Senate, in local catechetics as in local caucuses. It does absolutely no good to point out the difference between conservatism and liberalism. The only thing that matters is the difference between truth and falsehood—or in Catholic terms, the difference between fidelity and infidelity. I mean the difference between following Christ on the principle that no servant is greater than his master and that His kingdom is not of this world, and aspiring instead to be accepted by the cool kids in the class—the class that dominates the world.

As a matter of habit, we ought to banish the terms “conservative” and “liberal” from our vocabulary when we are discussing right and wrong, true and false. I know what the story in the Wall Street Journal means (mostly) when it reports on a study that shows younger priests as increasingly “conservative” and the Catholic laity as increasingly “liberal” over the past generation. But the terminology allows everybody to think of the differences as legitimate options—a liturgical or pastoral confusion, perhaps, within the Church, but not a problem that lies at the very core of spiritual health. Instead, we need to jettison the unfortunate habit of thinking about our relationship with God in terms other than “fidelity” and “infidelity”.