{"id":106281,"date":"2018-10-20T00:31:25","date_gmt":"2018-10-20T07:31:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=106281"},"modified":"2018-10-19T10:35:47","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T17:35:47","slug":"prudential-judgment-and-minimum-daily-adult-catholicism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2018\/10\/prudential-judgment-and-minimum-daily-adult-catholicism.html","title":{"rendered":"Prudential Judgment and Minimum Daily Adult Catholicism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Here\u2019s the first in a little series I\u2019ve written for The Catholic Weekly about how to navigate the Church\u2019s moral teaching in a time when many have lost confidence in the Magisterium.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a taste<\/a>.\u00a0 Stay tuned.\u00a0 There are three more in the series:<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a little passage from\u00a0Lumen Gentium<\/em>\u00a0you don\u2019t hear much about these days:<\/p>\n

Bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, are to be respected by all as witnesses to divine and Catholic truth. In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff,\u00a0even when he is not speaking ex cathedra<\/strong>; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will.<\/em><\/p>\n

What this means in plain English, is that we are to try to obey the Church as best we can even when the pope is just giving his best, good faith, estimate on how to proceed in applying the Tradition.<\/p>\n

That is, by the way, how things are most of the time.\u00a0 Most of the time, the pope is not laying down dogma.\u00a0 Dogma is, in fact, very rarely what the pope has to say on a daily basis in addressing, say, what to do about migrants in the greatest refugee crisis since World War II.\u00a0 He\u2019s not giving us dogma when he says that invading Iraq is a terrible idea in 2003.\u00a0 Nor is he offering dogma when he says that we should abolish the death penalty.\u00a0 Nor, by the way, is he articulating dogma when he promulgates\u00a0Humanae Vitae<\/em>\u00a0(though he is articulating the ordinary magisterium).<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not a problem if you actually take the teaching of\u00a0Lumen Gentium<\/em>\u00a0seriously, because your default position will be, \u201cJust try to obey the pope whether or not he speaks\u00a0ex cathedra<\/em>\u00a0and you will be fine.\u201d<\/p>\n

But lots of Catholics these days not only don\u2019t listen to\u00a0Lumen Gentium<\/em>, but have no idea what it says.\u00a0 Instead, they have imbibed what I call a \u201cSimon Peter Says\u201d theory of obedience to the Church: the idea that you\u00a0only<\/em>\u00a0have to listen to the Holy Father or the Magisterium when they speak dogmatically and infallibly and that, the rest of the time, you can blow it off.\u00a0 This leads to a Minimum Daily Adult Requirement approach to the Faith that seeks, not to obey Jesus completely, but to see how much you can get away with avoiding him and what bits of the gospel you can cannibalize to accessorize your politics and\/or lifestyle.<\/p>\n

If you are on the Left, the way you blow it off is by appealing to \u201cprimacy of conscience\u201d.\u00a0 \u201cI don\u2019t have to listen to the Church\u2019s pelvic issue teaching because I believe primacy of conscience means I can sleep with my girlfriend because we truly love each other\u201d is the general template, though a host of different partners and genders can be mixed and matched to supply the argument against sex inside marriage to one person of the opposite sex.<\/p>\n

If you are on the Right, the preferred jargon for blowing off the Church is \u201cPrudential Judgment\u201d.\u00a0 \u201cI can ignore the Pope on virtually the whole of Catholic social teaching from just war to torture to gun violence to a living wage to capital punishment to the environment because that\u2019s all Prudential Judgment junk\u201d is the general form of that line of argument.\u00a0 Sometimes, this is beefed up with the classic line, \u201cWhere does the Church teach that the Pope is infallible in every prudential judgment he makes?\u201d<\/p>\n

What people who make this argument never do is ask where the Church teaches that\u00a0they<\/em>are infallible\u00a0ever<\/em>, particularly when they have a track record of being repeatedly and massively wrong and seldom demonstrating an ounce of prudence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s the first in a little series I\u2019ve written for The Catholic Weekly about how to navigate the Church\u2019s moral teaching in a time when many have lost confidence in the Magisterium. Here\u2019s a taste.\u00a0 Stay tuned.\u00a0 There are three more in the series: Here\u2019s a little passage from\u00a0Lumen Gentium\u00a0you don\u2019t hear much about these […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[836],"class_list":["post-106281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-catholic-weekly-stuff"],"yoast_head":"\nPrudential Judgment and Minimum Daily Adult Catholicism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here's the first in a little series I've written for The Catholic Weekly about how to navigate the Church's moral teaching in a time when many have lost\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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