Catholics face many choices. A choice is real because you’re able to make it. Choices you can’t make aren’t real choices.
One example of a false choice — for nearly all Catholics — is whether to uphold the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage or not. Another false choice is between upholding, or not, the teaching to refuse communion for those who are divorced and remarried. Teaching, by nature, is the act of a teacher. And unless you’re the teacher, you can’t choose to uphold or relent on a teaching. Those responsible for teaching, in these cases, are bishops in union with the pope. For most Catholics, believing these choices are real is simply false.
So, Matthew Schmitz’s short editorial called “Catholics Face a Choice” itself faces some serious problems. In it, Schmitz incites Catholics (presumably all Catholics, not just those with a real choice) to choose to reject Pope Francis’s “campaign” on questions of irregular marriage situations by upholding the legitimate teaching of the Church.
Schmitz is right that those “who value Catholic truth” ought not be silent. Professing the truth of the faith is important; it’s part of living it. And he’s right to remind us that outright denial of the Church’s teaching shouldn’t be the only thing we react to with firmness and “indignation.”
Wrongly characterizing the nature of faith, however, is a surer affront to the truth of the Church than the relative silence of her members. Faithfulness, here, doesn’t require a particular choice vis-à-vis the content of doctrine; it requires perseverance in the truth of Christ already received. Saying otherwise is as untruthful as the sacramental abrogation that Schmitz — and I — would ardently oppose.
The correct response, and the only available choice for most Christians, is to abide by the Church’s teaching on marriage by living it and supporting it devoutly. I’ve also found — and many others have told me — that this real, livable approach provides the added benefit of an antidote against the sort of frivolousness that makes promoting hasty distinctions appealing in the first place.
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