I'm about two and a half years into the Catholic Church. I was a Protestant all my life,
and I remember they would send out surveys to "unchurched people," they call them,
and that went over and they built these big non-denominational mega-churches. And now they have
coffee shops and rock bands. Why would the Catholic Church ask laity who, in my opinion,
a lot of them don't even know the teachings of the church? Why would you even ask them
what they think about, like, the morality teachings of the church. It's irrelevant to me.
I hear you, and I'll offer a little bit of a challenge that. The reason you would
ask is because there's a model of that asking in this in Scripture and in the early church
that the asking the sort of coming together as a Christian community of believers of the baptized
to pray together and to discern the Lord's will or to discern the movement of the Holy
Spirit in the life of the Church is is fundamental to the identity
of the Christian life and always has been. And so the Second Vatican Council called for us
to return to doing that more often: coming together to sort of discern pastoral and,
- and, and sort of, you know - pastoral issues in the life of the church are practical issues in
the life of the church. And to pray together to do that. Where we get off track is where we
think that coming together to pray about what God wants from us is an open season to sort of
just say what we think God wants from us or the way we think, the things which we know are true,
which the Magisterium is interpreted to be true, need to be changed, modified or reversed.
I mean, so it is it is hugely important. And we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater
because the the bathwater or the baby are important. I kind of
got lost in the metaphor there, but we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater of
[Crosstalk] - The baby's important! The bathwater is about babies. Important, right? Exactly. [crosstalk end]
The notion of coming together as Christians to pray about what God wants as a parish,
to pray about what God wants for the parish, as a diocese to pray about what God
wants for the diocese, as a family especially to pray about what God wants for the family.
That's really important, and we're not doing nearly enough of that; in my own family, we're not
sitting down often enough to listen to the Lord together. And that is - should be - an ordinary part
of the Christian life. But it would be a mistake - The real mistake, where we start to throw out
both baby and bathwater, is where we think coming together to pray about what the Lord wants means
I also get to make judgments on what's true when the Magisterium has interpreted
already the deposit of faith and sacred scripture and tradition to tell me what's true. That's the
part where these things go off the rails. And so this call, even the of call Pope Francis
for this emphasis on synodality in the church: that's rooted in the Second Vatican Council.
And many of us - for you know, were praising it - we're praising this notion as it's rooted in
the Second Vatican Council. And now that we've seen the way that it's played out, we say, "okay,
clearly we have to learn how to do this. The church says that we need
to do this. So we need to learn how to come together and pray
without it turning into some sort of French Revolution or something like that."
You know, like we need to learn how to do this without it turning into
a rejection of all the things which are true. But we shouldn't forget that this
essential idea of coming together to ask the Lord what He wants for us
really is fundamental to our identity as a Christian community.
But if I may, and I don't want to step on Stephen's question, the way you say it asks the Lord what He wants for us.
It does seem to me that there's a prudential thing about
how much does the Lord actually speak through a population that has been so poorly categorized for
60 years? [Absolutely right.] You know, do you really want to ask - every - like a million people
who have already rejected what the church teaches. What is the Lord teaching here?
That's where it goes off the rails. Right. So first, yeah, the first thing is
come and know the Lord and then come and learn how to pray. And most of us probably aren't
learning well enough how to pray. And then once we have learned a little bit about how to pray,
let's come and pray together to hear... But yeah, absolutely.
To jJust start with, "okay, guy on the street who is baptized as a baby,
you tell me what the church should be and tell or tell me what you think the
Holy Spirit is telling you the church should be." You know, that's just,
you know, fooliright. I mean, that's just not not not not the same thing at all.
But you invite people into prayer, right? Even to invite people who are new to
Christ into prayer. As long as as long as it's not, you give the direction of the
prayer is a good thing to invite people who don't know much about how to pray,
to pray with your family or to pray with your prayers. That is a good thing.
Right. But that's how we learn in our sort of apprenticed in the way of discerning
the Holy Spirit instead of kind of just are presumed to have it "ab annuncio."