There’s a habit that has crept into Catholic life. If you aren’t seeing it, you aren’t looking or paying attention. And once you see it, you won’t be able to unsee it.
Catholics treat the Church like a political party.
The pattern is obvious and it shows itself throughout Catholic life. Catholics come in with a political framework already in place, and then they start filtering, selecting, and prioritizing Church teaching based on what already fits their political framework.
We’ve been doing it with “Jesus” for decades. Whatever we find in the Bible that doesn’t accord with our errant preconception of Jesus, we overlook, toss away, ignore, or explain it away with a statement like “I’m sure he didn’t mean it that way.” But whatever fits what we think we know about Jesus, that’s what we focus on, and even magnify beyond even the parameters of the scripture itself.
Now we do it with the Catholic Faith. It’s the exact same paradigm of reconfiguration and distortion. Teachings that align with our instincts get emphasized, while teachings that challenge or indict us get tossed away. Teachings that don’t “make sense” to us or that we don’t agree with get downplayed, reinterpreted, or ignored
The “Left, Right…” Cadence
It’s not confined to one side. On the right, Catholicism often gets wrapped up in conservative instincts—order, authority, tradition, moral clarity. Those things aren’t intrinsically bad—in fact they’re very good. But they require a center of gravity. That center of gravity is supposed to be God, Divine Revelation, the teaching of the Church. But instead the center of gravity becomes the secular world, and the temporal order.
TruthBomb by Fulton Sheen 👇
The same thing happens on the left, just with different priorities. Now the lens becomes inclusion, autonomy, and social reform. Again, not intrinsically bad things, but they become agents of destruction when they lose the correct center of gravity.
Tired ‘Old’ Church?
So between the Left and the Right, the mechanics are identical. Catholicism becomes something to manage rather than something to submit to. The Holy Faith becomes second-place to every other philosophy and ideology. The Church becomes our aging grandmother whose ways (and mind) are old and worn, rather than our Holy mother who, while ancient, is ever new.
I often say that people think of God as a tired old man in a rocking chair, who left the family business of Earth/Man to his more casual, hip, laid back Son. False! And now we see the Church the same way—old, tired, worn, and believing “we know better”
What we need is a reversal of all of this. There is a Truth in every error, and a Good in every evil. Error is a Truth, disfigured. Evil is a Good flipped upside down. So instead of encouraging the faithful to stop what they’re doing I think the best approach is to redirect the paradigm toward Truth.
A True ‘Catholic’ Political Party
Catholicism actually should function more like a political party than it currently does—but not in the way we’ve been doing it.
Political parties demand loyalty. They shape identity. They don’t sit on the sidelines as one influence among many—they tell you how to interpret the world and how to act within it. People don’t filter their party through a higher authority. They align themselves to it. That’s how we should view Catholicism.
That instinct—misplaced as it often is in politics—is closer to how Catholics should approach the Faith.
“We must not fashion the truth according to our inclinations, but must conform our inclinations to the truth.”
— St. Francis de Sales
The Faith should always be our center of gravity. It should shape how we think, inform our personal philosophies and ideas, and guide how we live our lives, and the choices we make. Our political views and ideals should come from our Catholic convictions, not run alongside them, and certainly not override them.
The problem isn’t that Catholics are too committed. It’s that they’re committed in the wrong direction. We’ve let political identity take the lead, and then tried to fit Catholicism inside it.
My friends, Catholicism has no competition! It teaches what God teaches, and nothing can compete with God.
So be Catholic first. Everything else after. Because if politics can overrule our faith, then it’s politics that defines us. When we meet Jesus at judgement will he see a saint, or will be see a political pundit?
What do you want him to see?
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