What’s a girl to do?

Jcecil, (who made it abundantly clear a few months ago what he thinks of me anyway) charges this weekend:

I believe that you often confuse these doctrines with things that are solemnly defined, or make a case that ordinary and universal magisterium is manifest where even the pope would not agree with you that manifest demonstration is present.

For the record, Mr. Cecil boasts 6 years of seminary training.

I count 10 years of intense homestudy, self directed and on my own, of the catechism and church teaching, having been short changed and cheated in that department from my Catholic High School and Catholic grade schools from 1968 to 1977. So all of the correct canonical lingo makes me run for my textbooks and references.

But frankly, I don’t think that my role as a lay woman, Catholic wife and mother, is to understand and apply these things. My vocation, my “rule of life” doesn’t require that I even have an interest in “ordinary” vs. “universal” magisterium, (as though these are two separate entities that battle each other for supremacy). All I really need as far as foundation for understanding and living my Catholic Faith is here and here.

And I think the late, great John Paul II thought so too when he said:

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I approved 25 June last and the publication of which I today order by virtue of my Apostolic Authority, is a statement of the Church’s faith and of catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church’s Magisterium. I declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion. May it serve the renewal to which the Holy Spirit ceaselessly calls the Church of God, the Body of Christ, on her pilgrimage to the undiminished light of the Kingdom!

I’ll be frank about something else. I think all this other talk about what magesterium is fallible, and which is infallible is just another way of looking for the loopholes. It makes a person bound by to “the law” (which I find incredibly ironic since liberal “progressive” sorts frequently speak with great disdain for any laws or rules, and yet they want all the behaviors that they favor to be written down, codified and pronounced ex cathedra!) That’s not something that interests me at all. I don’t want to be looking for how to slip through and barely live my Catholic faith. And I don’t need abortion, birth control and marriage between a man and a woman to be pronounced as infallible doctrines ex cathedra to know that what the church teaches right now on those topics is right and true. Instead, I want to live it my Catholic Faith, live it fully and live it now!!

That seems like a more intellectually and spiritually honest way to live anyway than to keep waiting for the next pope to arrive on the scene and change 2000 years of authentic Catholic church teaching around 180 degrees. Seems like a waste of the life given to you to keep hoping for that.

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