I have often been amazed by how intelligent people can fail to understand and accept what I have found easy to accept and usually understand with regards to Catholic teaching. How can non-Catholics read John’s Gospel and not believe in the Real Presence in the Eucharist:
John 6:51–56
51I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
52The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
53So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you;
54he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
55For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
56He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.
To me it has always been clear as to what Jesus meant. Yet many fail to accept the Church’s teaching regarding the Real Presence.
I work with a man who is not Catholic but shares my difficulty in understanding how intelligent people can hold or fail to hold certain beliefs. He wonders at how an intelligent person can believe in certain doctrines of the Church such as papal infallibility. As a fan of William F. Buckley, Jr. he finds it incredible that Buckley can be so intelligent and yet also be Catholic.
What is it that causes intelligent people to look at the same thing, to read the same materials, and one will say, “Yes, I believe” and the other will look on in disbelief and say, “Are you kidding?” The answer is Faith.
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J., presents a nice explanation of the virtue of faith in his book The Catholic Catechism. (I recommend this book to all as a very fine supplement to the Catechism of the Catholic Church)
Hardon states:
We often apply the term faith to the body of truth to be found in the Creeds, the teachings of the Church and, above all, in the words of Sacred Scripture. The terminology is familiar, but we are referring to something else here; namely, our subjective counterpart to God’s objective communication of himself to us.
Faith thus understood is the first of the three theological virtues set by St. Paul side by side with hope and charity. They are called theological because they not only go to God, as all virtues do, but they also touch him. They are virtues because they are good habits, as distinct from vices, which are bad habits. They are infused virtues, other than habits we have to acquire by repeated practice, because they are directly infused into (Latin infusum, poured into) our souls.
Viewed from another angle, we may say that sanctifying grace vitalizes the human substance and thereupon affects all our faculties of activity. These elevated qualities of action are the infused virtues, from the Latin virtutes, meaning “powers,” which enable us to act far beyond our natural capacity.
Among these virtues, faith is essentially the power to know God as he has revealed himself. . . .
(Hardon, p. 33)
Faith is the power to know God as He has revealed Himself. I find this very enlightening. Our intellect, while helpful in understanding and applying what we know about God, is not as helpful in enabling us to know God as is the virtue of faith.
But, if the virtue of faith is infused into the soul at baptism why do those who are validly baptized, whether in the Catholic Church or into another Christian church, still not know God in the same way? Why this disagreement over matters of faith? Because faith must be nurtured through education in the faith and we must cooperate with the grace we have received.
I have been fortunate to have been raised in a Catholic family. In a way I am thankful I attended public schools and attended “catechism class” on Saturdays. Why am I thankful for this? Because I think I avoided many of the errors that were taught unintentionally in the parochial schools. Let me give you an example.
The only time I had nuns for teachers was in second grade for First Communion. (This was pre-Vatican II) I remember one Saturday morning the nuns stating “only Catholics can go to Heaven”. A short time later I was playing outside my house with some neighbor kids. Most of them were not Catholic. I repeated what I had been taught at catechism about only Catholics going to Heaven. My father overheard this statement and called me into the house. He told me that teaching was wrong and I shouldn’t be repeating it to my friends.
Now, my father had been told this same thing, that only Catholics can go to Heaven, when he had been in school in another state and from different nuns thirty years earlier. I have also been told by many others who went to parochial school that they were taught the same thing. This is not Church teaching now and it wasn’t Church teaching when these nuns taught it.
So what’s my point? Just this. Sometimes members of the Church teach things in error. Often it is unintentional, such as what the nuns taught in my example. Other times it may be intentional. In either event, it is our responsibility to search out the truth of Catholic teaching. Obviously this requires the use of our intellect. We need to read and question and discuss and sometimes debate. However, it will all be unfruitful if we don’t do this in light of the virtue of faith.
philneri, May 7, 2000
Edited May 8, 2024
© 2024 Greg Gillen
Scripture – Revised Standard Version Second Catholic Edition
Image Credit/Greg Gillen
