Hi, my name's Father Mike Schmitz. This is Ascension Presents.
So one of the things that people will ask me about a lot essentially is,
"Well, hasn’t the Church changed over time, like,
aren’t there some times when the Church teaches one thing, and then all of a sudden
it seems like they're teaching something else,
or sometimes the Church says, "Well this is a sin, but all of a sudden it's not a sin anymore?"
That's a great question. That's great wondering. I’m gonna try to answer that.
So here's the thing. The Church teaching is what you call doctrine right?
So doctrine is simply a fancy word that means "teaching."
Now, doctrine can be divided into a couple different things: there's dogmas,
and they don’t really change. We'll talk about that a little bit. And there's disciplines.
Both of them are Church teaching, both of them are doctrine,
but they're very different in the sense of, like, how did they develop, or how do they change.
What you can say is this:
There are capital "T" Traditions. They don't change.
There are lowercase "t" traditions, and those things can change.
When it comes to dogma, these are what we might call, like, the capital "T" Traditions of the Church.
They're like the things that, like, nope, that's pretty much established,
but dogma, or that kind of doctrine, can develop. Like, it can change over time
No, but it'll never, remember this, it will never contradict itself.
What I mean by that is, at one point we had someone ask the question, “So who is Jesus?”
Well, Jesus is the Lord. Okay great. Awesome. That's the doctrine.
But, wait, what does it mean that Jesus is the Lord?
Well, it means that he is the Son of God. Okay. Great. Awesome.
Wait, what does it mean that Jesus is the Son of God?
And we keep looking at Scriptures and keep praying about this, and the Church gets to definitively teach,
says, oh, actually what we believe about Jesus is that he's the second person of the Trinity
that he is fully God and fully human, so two natures, human and divine, in one divine person.
Like, okay, so we get more and more clarity, so that's the development of doctrine of dogma.
Now, we know, now here in the 21st century,
more about God than the apostles did before Pentecost, even at Pentecost.
Like, we actually have more theology 2,000 years later after Christianity started than they did at the beginning.
And does that mean they were wrong?
No. it just means there's the development of doctrine.
Now, none of those developments contradict the original teaching.
They’re simply a development of that original teaching.
There’s a guy named Cardinal Newman. I work at a Newman center, so I kinda like Cardinal Newman.
Cardinal Newman talked about this.
He was a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism when he was about 45 years old.
He was an amazing guy in Anglicanism, and he became an amazing guy in Catholicism.
He talked about this thing called the development of doctrine, and he said this,
he said that development has to be organic, that development can't contradict, can’t be a mutation.
He said it's like this:
There’s an acorn and then there's an oak tree. They look very different.
But, if you watch the development from that acorn into an oak tree, you recognize,
"Oh, but that wasn’t a mutation.
It's still consistent. It’s still the same thing. It's still organic.
Nothing in the oak tree contradicts the fact that it was once an acorn."
Similarly, when it comes to the development of doctrine,
is there's nothing in our Catechism of the Catholic Church that contradicts the Apostles’ Creed.
It's simply development. The Apostles’ Creed – acorn.
Then you have the entire Bible,
the magisterial teachings of the Church, that means the teachings of the Church, you know,
all the way to where we are now –
simply the development, organic development, inspired by the Holy Spirit, of doctrine.
Now, so doctrines, they can change.
What I mean by that is, they develop over time under the guidance of the Holy Spirit within the Church.
Dogma’s a truth we're discovering as we dive more deeply and deeply into it.
A discipline is simply a teaching of the Church that, typically,
is like what you call, not a capital "T" but a small "t," tradition, or a small "c" custom,
and it's a teaching of the Church that is binding on us,
that we have to live up to it, that we're called to live, you know, in a certain way,
but the Church can change that small "t" tradition. The Church can change that small "c" custom.
Here's an example.
For years, I mean for centuries, maybe even for longer than a couple centuries,
the Church taught that, discipline of the Church, was that
you do not eat meat, as Christians we don't eat meat, on Fridays.
Everyone has to abstain from meat on Fridays. Why?
It comes from the teaching, or the doctrine, that Friday is the day in which our Lord suffered and died.
That we’re called to unite our sufferings to Jesus’ suffering, so on this particular day,
you know, the custom of the Church, on this particular day,
we commemorate Christ's death and we unite our sufferings to his.
That we can unite our suffering to his, that he died on Friday, those things are doctrine and those things are not going to change ever.
And since we see Friday as a fast day that means we don't feast on that day. Just makes sense, right?
Part of that fasting means we're going to avoid things associated with feasting.
Something associated with feasting, typically in most cultures, in many cultures, is meat.
And so it makes sense if this is a fast day, not a feast day, we're not going to have meat on that day.
So here's the decree, the discipline of the Church: Don't eat meat on the day that the Lord died.
Don't eat meat on Fridays. Great.
So if I were to go against that, what I'm doing is, I'm going against the teaching of the Church.
Even if that teaching isn't a dogma, it still is the authoritative teaching of the Church.
Now, in the 1960s, the Church looked out at the world and said, OK, so our culture has changed.
What? How’s it changed?
Well, meat is no longer always associated with feasting.
In fact, there's a whole group of people that never eat meat,
so how is not eating meat on Friday anything special for them?
Also, you could probably go down to Mcdonald’s and pick up a hamburger for a dollar
cheaper than you get a salad.
And so it's not necessarily associated with feasting for most people.
And so Pope Paul VI, with others, right? He's the person in authority at the time, says,
"I’m going to change the discipline from 'not eating meat on Fridays' to
'choose some sort of suitable penance for yourself.'"
I know people who are like, “When I was a kid growing up, like,
if you ate meat on Fridays that was a sin, but now suddenly you can do whatever?" Like, "That's crazy!"
I can't believe that you're just changing the rules.”
But that's a discipline of a rule,
a change of a discipline of a rule that just kind of no longer applies to everybody and all cultures.
No, the doctrine still is the same.
Yes, penance is good. Unite your sufferings to Jesus. That's good. Keep doing that.
But now you have freedom to choose the way you offer your penance.
Whatever penance you enter into, enter into.
That discipline can change,
doesn't even have to develop. It can simply be decreed by the authority of the Church,
and they do that in order to reach people’s hearts.
That's the goal. The disciplines are meant to touch our hearts.
The disciplines are meant to enlighten our minds.
The disciplines are meant to transform our lives.
And if a discipline no longer applies to my life or my heart or my mind, then it can change,
and if it changes, that's not a bad thing. It simply means that the discipline changed.
The doctrine—even though it develops, remains the same—never contradicts itself.
From all of us here at Ascension Presents,
my name is Father Mike. God Bless.