Onward Christian Soldiers: Obedience of Faith, Religious Assent Should Be Key Factors Driving Lay Apostolates

by Fr. Wade L. J. Menezes, C.P.M.

Catholics seem to know well that the Second Vatican Council had much to say about lay apostolates and the important role they play in leading the lay faithful to sanctify themselves, others, the Church, and the world. This is, after all, a component of the “universal call to holiness” so beautifully expounded upon in chapter 5 of the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium.

But two Church teachings also reiterated at Vatican II seem to have somehow gotten lost in the shuffle during the 40 years following the Council, doctrines which of themselves are essential to making lay apostolates successful and the road to sanctity a sure avenue to be traveled by those who seek a real, attainable destination of holiness.

What are these two teachings? The moral obligation to give “obedience of faith” and “religious assent,” respectively, to the Church’s extraordinary and ordinary magisterial teachings. Indeed, all members of the faithful—lay, religious, and cleric—are called to express this loyalty to the magisterium (the Church’s teaching authority). Why are these teachings important? Because the virtues of faith, obedience, and religion demand them.

As a Catholic priest, I often hear lay people lamenting the fact that, 40 years after the Second Vatican Council, the authentic interpretation and implementation of the Council’s teachings have yet to take place. In large part, I believe this is due to the fact that the Church’s doctrines concerning obedience of faith and religious assent have not been heeded (even by many priests!). Do the majority of the faithful even know these doctrines exists? Do priests preach about them from the pulpit? The levels of dissent and ignorance about many Church teachings would answer “no” to these questions. But there is hope to correct this dilemma.

As the Holy Spirit is the sure guide of the Church and the driving force behind every apostolate, it’s absurd to not be in union with the former yet want success from the latter. Here, then, we see that one’s willful religious assent and willful obedience of faith to the Church’s teachings are directly tied to the success of any apostolate. In short, God rewards faithfulness.

Last year proved to be quite a landmark year for Catholics, a year that I believe served as a wake-up call to Catholics everywhere, inviting them to live an even more solid and dedicated Catholic life. The happenings within the Church last year were too great and too important to ignore. As Catholics, we must rethink and internalize these events.

To begin with, the majority of 2005 hosted the “Year of the Eucharist,” which was decreed by Pope John Paul II before his death. This was a year set aside to rekindle our love and devotion for the Church’s most revered treasure: the source and summit of the entire Christian life.

Let’s not forget, too, that the Year of the Eucharist was proclaimed almost immediately following the promulgation of several important liturgical documents—including the rubrical General Instruction of the Roman Missal—in an effort to finally end the “mass confusion” fostered by decades of liturgical abuse.

In 2005, Catholics also witnessed a change in the papacy—many for the first time in their lives. But there’s more: We witnessed, too, the heroic death of Pope John Paul II, who showed us firsthand how to embrace human suffering and its salvific meaning—all the while making the culture of death tremble.

In November, a much-anticipated document on homosexuals in the priesthood was universally promulgated by the Vatican after nearly five years of exposed priestly sexual scandal. While less than five percent of all priests in the United States since 1950 have been part of such scandal, the fact remains that 80 percent of those scandals involved a same-sex (male) victim, a fact that cannot be ignored. Indeed, this document holds just as much significance for laypersons as it does for clerics and religious.

And toward the end of the year, on December 8th, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the Church commemorated the 40th anniversary of the closing of the Second Vatican Council. So much did Pope Benedict XVI deem it important to recognize the anniversary of the closing of the Council that on that day he granted a special plenary indulgence to the faithful who fulfilled the required conditions.

And so herein lies the clincher: Precisely because Catholics received so many landmark gifts in 2005, each one of us must now question our individual loyalty to the Bride of Christ, who is the giver of those gifts which come from her Bridegroom. And because the magisterium of the Church cannot err, the time has arrived for every Catholic beyond the age of reason to (unabashedly!) give obedience of faith and religious assent to her teachings so as to strengthen the Church in her God-given mission here on earth, a mission which every lay apostolate has a role to play.

While at seminary, I remember a history professor telling us men that it took nearly 100 years for the Church to implement the reforms of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). In this modern day and age, why should the authentic reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) take just as long? They shouldn’t. And having just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the closing of the Council, we should not have to work at it for another 60 years to finally get it right. Come now.

Indeed, it’s time for Catholics everywhere to embrace the Council fully so as to finally implement its mandates in the pure, unadulterated form envisioned by the Council Fathers. This was a task ardently executed by Pope John Paul II during his 26 years as pontiff, and it is one which continues to be carried out by Pope Benedict XVI. All clerics, religious, and lay faithful are duty bound to do the same.

But there’s also the issue of the defense of Church doctrine, whether defined by the magisterium through extraordinary or ordinary means. While extraordinary magisterial pronouncements require obedience of faith from the faithful, all ordinary pronouncements require religious assent from the faithful. But both are just that: required (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, 891–892). This is because religious assent, “though distinct from the assent of faith, is nonetheless an extension of it.”

I for one am tired of certain Catholics questioning whether or not papal encyclicals like Humane Vitae constitute “infallible” teaching. Pope Pius XII taught that although encyclicals are not the usual way for defining infallible pronouncements—these are usually pronounced “ex cathedra,” that is, “from the Chair (of Peter)”—they still reflect the ordinary magisterium of the Church, and so the faithful must still give religious assent to them and to the teachings they contain.

And then there’s the fact that a lot of Catholics today cannot seem to defend certain Church teachings, either because they don’t know the teaching to begin with, or if they do know the teaching, they choose not to embrace it.

Take, for example, the bioethical issue of surrogate motherhood. Can the average Catholic explain and defend why it is that the Church teaches that surrogate motherhood, regardless of its mode of execution, is immoral? (Principally, but not exhaustively, it is immoral because it invites a third party into the marriage covenant and so becomes a specie of adultery. If our Lord teaches in the Gospels that the sin of adultery can indeed be committed in thought, then it can surely be committed by way of a third party actually and physically entering the marriage—even if in more scientific rather than overtly sexual ways. Surrogate motherhood also makes the woman’s womb a product of commerce to be rented and used.)

But there are other defined doctrines that need to be defended today as well: the immorality of contraception, abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, slavery, same sex unions, and prostitution. The litany of the culture of death goes on.

Recently I gave a homily where I mentioned these and other sins are taught by the Church to be intrinsically evil. After the Mass I was approached by a woman with a bewildered look on her face. She said to me, “I have a concern: In your homily I did not hear you mention war or the death penalty.”

Interiorly I sighed. I then explained to her briefly and concisely that while the sins mentioned in my homily are taught by the Church to be always and everywhere intrinsically evil, war and the death penalty—while they can be definite evils—are not intrinsic evils. The Church does teach a just war doctrine and the Church also teaches that an offender of a heinous crime can be put to death by legitimate government authority. (However, such instances, in the words of Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae, should be “very rare, if not practically nonexistent.” This is because today we possess more modern means to ensure permanent incarceration so as to protect society.) Are such distinctions so difficult to grasp or teach from the pulpit?

In my missionary preaching I often remind my listeners that it seems as though everyone, both Catholics and non-Catholics, can tell you what the Church teaches, but very few can articulate why she teaches it. And because they can’t articulate the why, they’re ready to argue against the what—and this in the name of personal conscience.

But one’s personal conscience is not to be the final arbiter of one’s personal decision. Rather, one’s properly informed conscience is; otherwise, one runs the risk of operating his life with an erroneous conscience that is not properly informed. And who in their right mind would want to follow an erroneous conscience?

So, how does one properly inform his or her conscience? By looking to the divinely revealed teachings of Jesus Christ as safeguarded by His Bride, the Church. These are the same teachings discovered via Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the magisterium—what I like to refer to as the Church’s “three-legged stool.” And the Catechism of the Catholic Church, mind you, is a solid compendium of all three.

While giving a retreat once, I asked the group of attendees what shape the legs of a three-legged stool form. One man immediately answered, “A triangle.” Correct. When I next asked the group what would happen to the three-legged stool should any of those legs be taken away, a woman shouted back, “I would fall!” Correct again.

This woman’s answer was very telling, because whereas I asked about the stool’s fate, she answered about her own. Her answer holds an important truth for all of us: We don’t want to fall.

As Catholics striving to live fully our baptism in the midst of the modern world, we must never separate ourselves from Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, or the magisterium. If we do, we risk falling. This truth brings to mind a marquee sign I once saw outside a small protestant church in the South. It read: “Welcome to eternity. Would you care for smoking or non-smoking?”

As baptized Christians, we do right to think and care about our fate, our eternity. We also do right to remind ourselves of the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell. We must come to connect, then, the truths that we love and need Christ and His Church, and so we love and defend Christ and His Church. And we do so by giving obedience of faith and religious assent to her extraordinary and ordinary magisterial teachings, respectively.

When we receive the Sacrament of Confirmation, we believe that we become “soldiers of Christ.” We also believe that within the three-tiered hierarchy of the Communion of Saints, those of us still living here on earth are members of the Church Militant. For the success of any lay apostolate, these are truths worth meditating upon—and living—in defense of Holy Mother Church and her teachings.

Fr. Wade L. J. Menezes, C.P.M., is vocation director and student master for the Fathers of Mercy, an itinerant missionary preaching order based in Auburn, KY.

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