Catholic rules and disciplines are good—but don’t absolutize them

A Reflection for Wednesday of the Third Week of Lent

Find today’s readings here.

Every religion, nation, community, group and family has laws and rules. They help to define each one of them, give them a shape and an identity. They can create and protect spaces for human development and progress. Rules are (despite what rebellious teenagers believe) good and necessary. Without rules, those same teenagers wouldn’t have the freedom to be rebellious. The English author G. K. Chesterton wrote, “Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.”

If rules are good and necessary for human development, human beings seem to have a propensity for absolutizing them, especially those of our own tribe. When Catholics absolutize church rules and disciplines, which often happens by rigidly imposing moral teachings on others as a means of correction or evangelization, we risk misrepresenting them, and unintentionally hurting our own evangelizing efforts in the process.

When it comes to rules and disciplines, it might be helpful to adopt Jesus’ approach to the law: not abolition, but fulfillment. In our Catholic context, we might say that all the rules and disciplines exist, not for themselves, but for fulfillment. They exist to be lived always more in line with God’s will, not less. That is, they assume their proper place insofar as they draw us progressively closer to the mystery of God’s infinite mercy and love, which cannot be earned, negotiated, accomplished or won; only accepted.

During his 12-year pontificate, Pope Francis went to great lengths to reinforce this idea: “The Church is herself a missionary disciple; she needs to grow in her interpretation of the revealed word and in her understanding of truth.” In arguably his most consequential magisterial teaching, “Evangelii Gaudium,” Francis asserts that the church’s entire mission depends on what we prioritize in our proclamation: “When we adopt a pastoral goal and a missionary style which would actually reach everyone without exception or exclusion, the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary.” He goes on to say:

When preaching is faithful to the Gospel, the centrality of certain truths is evident and it becomes clear that Christian morality is not a form of stoicism, or self-denial, or merely a practical philosophy or a catalogue of sins and faults. Before all else, the Gospel invites us to respond to the God of love who saves us, to see God in others and to go forth from ourselves to seek the good of others. Under no circumstance can this invitation be obscured! All of the virtues are at the service of this response of love. If this invitation does not radiate forcefully and attractively, the edifice of the Church’s moral teaching risks becoming a house of cards, and this is our greatest risk. It would mean that it is not the Gospel which is being preached, but certain doctrinal or moral points based on specific ideological options. The message will run the risk of losing its freshness and will cease to have “the fragrance of the Gospel.” 

It’s worth noting that Francis garnered much criticism for teaching this. But in my opinion, the criticism stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of him and today’s Gospel’s notion of fulfillment. Stating that rules and disciplines do not exist for themselves does not automatically suggest a lack of belief in them, or worse, an ulterior motive to corrupt Catholicism. On the contrary, such reminders preserve and protect the good and necessary rules of our beloved church which exist to serve a higher purpose.

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