[Apologetics] Fw: A good article

[Dianne Dawson]

Conscience and Chaos | Dr. James Hitchcock | IgnatiusInsight.com 

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The "Gospel of Judas" is rediscovered, which leads some people to announce 
triumphantly that the entire New Testament story has been turned on its head. 
The Bible the Church has given us is fundamentally in error, essentially a lie.

When the Holy See states that the idea of Limbo has never been official doctrine 
(which it has not been), a theologian exults that soon the doctrine of Original 
Sin will be abolished.

A newspaper reports that "an ordained Roman Catholic priest" has come to town, 
something that is noteworthy because the "priest" happens to be a woman.

Theologians in Australia denounce their cardinal to the Vatican as a heretic, 
because he points out that "conscience" is not the ultimate criterion of truth.

The lay trustees of a Catholic parish appoint their own pastor, who serves 
entirely at their pleasure. The pastor in turn offers his support to a parish of 
the "American Catholic Church," headed by a "bishop" who has never even been a 
Catholic priest, which has as one of its tenets the acceptance of homosexual 
activity.

When the closure of a New Orleans parish is announced, parishioners complain 
that they are being denied the sacraments and manifest their love for those 
sacraments by repeatedly interrupting the celebration of Mass with jeers and 
angry threats.

In each of these cases something fundamental to Catholicism is being denied, 
sometimes, perhaps, without the people involved even realizing it. The Church 
teaches that women cannot be ordained, so that the woman who claims to be a 
priest is in fact not. The idea that "conscience" is not the ultimate criterion 
of truth for Catholics is not the invention of an Australian cardinal; any 
competent historian would consider it self-evident. If people value the 
sacraments, raucously interrupting the celebration of Mass as a means of protest 
indicates that they have little appreciation of what the sacraments even are.

The case of the lay trustees is significant because what starts out as 
apparently a dispute over property, which is not a matter of faith, ends with 
overtures to a church that denies an important Catholic moral teaching and whose 
priestly orders are questionable.

Some Catholics say that all they want is a "pluralistic" Church, but it is no 
exaggeration to say that the above incidents (the list could be a lot longer) 
manifest nothing short of chaos. A woman is a priest and a man is a bishop 
because they say they are. A parish is Catholic even though it is not in 
communion with any Catholic bishop. A congregation expresses its love for the 
Mass by desecrating the Mass.



Source:
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2006/jhitchcock_conscience_apr06.asp


The key to all this is the claim about "conscience." Long ago that noble word 
was debased to mean, "I am the ultimate judge of right and wrong." At one time 
conscience was experienced as demanding, because it nagged people not to do 
things they wanted to do. Now it has been turned into a self-issued blank 
permission slip, so that in one sense the theologian is right -- it is necessary 
to abolish original sin, even though that would make Christianity meaningless.

Catholics often think that Protestants at the Reformation enshrined the 
principle of "private interpretation" of the Bible, but that is not really 
accurate. At first it may have seemed that way, but Protestants soon established 
firm criteria of doctrine and discipline, including the means of enforcing them. 
They believed in heresy and moral absolutes and acted upon that belief. Even 
those Protestant groups with the least degree of hierarchical authority, such as 
the Baptists, nonetheless insist on a high degree of uniformity among their 
congregations, something that can be enforced by congregations breaking union 
with one another.

The habit of appealing to the Bible over the head of the Church, so to speak, is 
untenable. Without the Church who is to say that the Gospel of Judas is not more 
authoritative than the Gospel of John?

We do live in a pluralistic society, which means that Catholics dissatisfied 
with their Church have an endless menu of other groups to choose from. As far as 
I can see, dissidents remain in the Church mainly because of a kind of stubborn 
sense of "ownership" -- "It’s my church, and no one is going to drive me out." 
But that is a denial of the fundamental nature of Catholicism as it has existed 
for almost two millennia.

People who advocate this kind of "pluralism" are not rising above petty 
theological quarrels to achieve a higher unity. Rather they are exacerbating 
disunity in a radical way, introducing, as it were, a wild card into the deck to 
be played any way people choose. It is a formula for endless rancor, like a 
dysfunctional family whose members gather regularly for Sunday dinner and always 
go away even more alienated than when they arrived.


      
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