The Church in Latin America, which in recent decades has emphasized social themes acceptable to secularists, has notoriously been losing people to Protestantism

Does Doctrine Matter?

By James Kalb

Man is a rational animal. That doesn’t mean he’s always reasonable, but it does mean that his actions are guided by what he believes about the world and how it hangs together. Reality comes first for him, or at least it should and often does. That is one reason love of God—of the Most Real Being—is the first of the two great commandments.

To love God is to be oriented toward the world as it really is. The good and the true go together, so an orientation toward truth is never at odds with the right orientation toward our neighbor. To act badly toward others is to ignore the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves, and to ignore reality is to follow impulse and embrace injustice.

So the Church as merciful mother can’t be separated from the Church as teacher and guardian of true belief. She needs always to be both, since separation from truth is separation from God and therefore from mercy and salvation. Still, the unity of mercy and truth isn’t always obvious to us. The Church sometimes tells us things that we don’t want to hear, just as Mom tells us to do our homework, eat our Brussels sprouts, be civil to our sister, and go to the dentist. The reason, of course, is that she recognizes reality, and wants us to live in accord with it even when we don’t want to. At times she may find it advisable to ease up here or there, but she’ll catch up later if she’s doing her job.

Of course, she may not always do so. The world’s not perfect, and Mom is not only Mom, she’s also the fallible woman who happened to give birth to us. Similarly, the Church is the Body of Christ and the Sacrament of Salvation, but she’s also the flawed human beings who compose and govern her and sometimes do what they shouldn’t.

We need to be governed, we’re not perfect ourselves, and our governors often see things we don’t, so we should honor and obey them in spite of their weaknesses. Obeying does not mean blind obedience, however, and it certainly does not mean silence in the face of real problems. It is legitimate for children to raise issues with their mother if the issues seem serious. Intelligent cooperation is impossible otherwise, and she sometimes needs second opinions like everyone else.

That is true for the sons and daughters of the Church no less than those of a human mother. And the current condition of the Church does seem to call for second opinions. To all appearances, the pastoral tendencies of recent decades have led to a broken-down sheepfold, a scattered flock, and packs of well-fed wolves. For a while an inclination to moderate some of those tendencies had been apparent, but quite recently there seems to have arisen a strong movement toward their radicalization.

With that in mind, it seems that those who believe that very recent tendencies are likely to make existing problems worse should say what they think. A layman without special authority must speak for himself, but it seems to me, and I believe many others, that one huge problem in recent decades has been a tendency to downplay doctrine, and therefore reality, in favor of subjective experience and interpersonal relations.

Truth can be upsetting, and sometimes it’s useful to smooth things over with people, but making nice can’t be our basic approach to anything serious. The tendency to make it so seems nonetheless to be growing stronger in the Church.

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