We go to Dave in Cincinnati, Ohio listening on Sacred Heart Radio. Dave, you
are on with Jimmy Akin. Thank you very much, hello Jimmy. Hi.
I beg your indulgence with a short background here but I don't want
to send the wrong impression with the question. I am a
life-long Evangelical, and I am seriously considering a conversion.
I've been listening to a lot of EWTN because I spend a lot of time in the car,
I listen to you repeatedly, I listen to a lot of Al Kresta, and the point A is, I
find a great deal of clarity in the answers, I go and I research them in
the Scripture. I'm getting more and more confident about the conversion, but
there are a number of issues that really are--they're difficult changes for me as
an Evangelical. Sure, I sympathize. Here comes the question: I'm really
surprised by the fact that that many of you, who are presenting the official
Catholic answers to our questions, are not priests. And my mind frequently says,
"Okay, if I rely on these answers and I then make a conversion, then I get myself
involved in the Church and I find from priests that I'm getting different
answers, I don't go through that experience." And so I guess the upshot to
my question is, why are there so many non-priests addressing these
questions? And what can I rely on here to know that you guys represent the
official Catholic positions on these answers? Since you're not-- Okay, well,
so ideally a priest would give you the correct official answer on
everything, and that's something that's been true ever since the Old Testament. I
mean, one of the things it says in the Old Testament is that the lips of the
priest should guard knowledge. And so they, priests even back then, had a
teaching function. But the very fact that the Old Testament points out that this
is what should happen means that it doesn't always happen, and so you don't
want to rely overly much on the fact that somebody is a priest. God willing,
they're going to give you great answers. Also, though, you don't have to be a
minister in order to give good answers. That's something we see also from both
Testaments in Scripture; it talks about how in the Old Testament, people would
urge others to know the Lord, even though they weren't priests. Similarly in the
New Testament, when you have someone who actually was functioning as a kind of
minister, Apollos, who initially preached accurately about Jesus, but knew the
baptism of John only, and so we had an incomplete knowledge of Jesus and his
message; Priscilla and Aquila, who were not ministers took him aside, and
Priscilla being a woman, especially, was not a priest, but it points out
that they took Apollos aside and gave him additional education in the message
of Jesus and helped him grow in his knowledge of the Christian message, and
so you don't have to be a priest in order to accurately teach the Christian
faith. In terms of why there are so many folks who are non-ministers who are
participating in the teaching of God's Word in Catholic circles these days, it's
for a couple reasons: the fundamental one is that the Church, a number of
decades ago, began specifically urging the laity to take on a greater role in
promoting the Christian faith, in promoting who was--in the language of the
time, was called the apostolate. So the Church has this apostolic work to be
done, and it urged laypeople to get involved in that because there aren't
and never have been enough priests to reach the world with the message of
Jesus. It takes the cooperation of all people to do that effectively, and so the
Church wanted laity to not just sit back and say, "You know, that's a job for
priests, so I'm going to leave it to them," they wanted everybody actively engaged.
Now of course that does mean understanding the teaching of the Church
and communicating it accurately. And precisely
because I'm not a priest, I know I don't have a clerical collar that people are
going to defer to me on the basis of, you know, so I have to be really sure I'm
right when I say stuff, and that means I take special pains to make sure that I'm
accurately representing the Church's teaching, I study constantly, I study the
Church's official documents constantly, I parse them very carefully. Sure, I'll make
mistakes sometimes, and I own up to that and I correct them when I find them. But,
precisely because I'm not a priest, I take special pains to make sure that
people can trust what I say, because otherwise I would just be subverting and
destroying the ministry I'm trying to engage in. I want to be effective for
Christ, and that means, you know, doing my homework and being right. But how do you
know I'm right? Well, the ultimate way to check is by checking up on me, looking
at the Church's official documents. Now you'll want to be careful,
because sometimes I'll be saying "This is the teaching of the Church," but also
you'll hear me say, like I did earlier today in the question about
predestination, said "There are different options here," and I said, "Some people have
proposed this as an idea." Well there, I'm not saying the Church teaches this; I'm
saying "This is one option." And so in addition to checking up on that,
in addition to checking up on what the Church's official documents say, you
can also go and look at reputable theologies, books of theology, that go
beyond just what the official teaching is into the different ideas that have
been proposed. Because there's a difference between "doctrine," which is
what the Church actually teaches, that's what the word "doctrine" means, is "teaching,"
and "theology," which is seeking to understand the teaching. And so I would
say, check me out. Look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that's probably
your first, best resource. Look at in the other documents at Vatican.va, the
different encyclicals and audiences of the popes,
the documents published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith.
Read reputable Catholic theologies by Orthodox Catholic theologians, like
Joseph Ratzinger or Avery Dulles or people like that. Those are the people
who are informing my thought, and that's what I'm trying to convey to people in
general when they ask questions.