Following the Successor to Peter

I never marked the day on the calendar. I’m not even sure what year it was, although I’m almost positive it was before I moved from Nebraska to Texas. I do know that I was, to paraphrase Ambrose Bierce, of the faith in the sense that the church I wasn’t going to regularly was Catholic. And, nevertheless, I was trying to write a defense of Catholicism in the wake of the predator-priest scandals. But it was on that day that I boxed myself into orthodoxy.

How could I believe? How could anyone believe, knowing that so many bishops had covered up ephebophilic priests’ activities? How could anyone believe today, in light of the way bishops assaulted seminarians? My answer, then and now (and despite what I recently wrote), is that if the Catholic faith is true, then I should expect to find flawed, failing mortals, even among priests and bishops. As an elderly Irish monsignor once reportedly said, “Faith, the Bark of Peter must be divine; else we boys would have kicked the bottom out long ago.”

In any event, on that unmarked and almost-forgotten day, I had finally worked through the theories of apostolic and Petrine succession to my satisfaction. They made sense to me from the historical and theological perspectives, and they were supported by Scripture. It was right then, though, that the full implication struck me: I can either accept the apostolic authority of the pope and bishops, including everything they teach on faith and morals whether I like it or not, or I can stop calling myself “Catholic.” There is no Door No. 3, no middle option that allows me to be Catholic “on my own terms.” To reject even one thing they teach because it doesn’t suit me is as good as to declare myself a Protestant.

Free will means that, at any point between now and death, we’re free to reject the faith in part or in whole. But freedom doesn’t only work one way. If I am truly capable of free thought, then I am free to agree with the Church as well as to disagree. If at any point I’m free to walk away from the Catholic faith, then I’m equally free to maintain that same faith until my dying day. Obedience is as much an exercise of free will as is disobedience; humility, however, is an act of self-discipline, while pride is an act of self-assertion.

Self-discipline was never my strong suit.

The point is not that my choice was a willing, irrevocable adoption of intellectual submissiveness, but rather that it was binary: I could call myself a Catholic (in the Latin-rite sense) only if I trusted that the Holy Spirit guides the Successors to St. Peter and the bishops in communion with them. For a man with trust issues, that’s a big step.

Some people think the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a trait of low-IQ people. In my experience, however, it’s more of a problem for above-average intellects. The smarter you are, the less likely you are to admit you’re wrong, and the more intellectual tools you have to explain away evidence or logic that contradicts your opinion. People with average or below-average IQs tend to stick to what they know and admit when a topic’s beyond them. It’s the above-average minds who don’t admit their incompetence, who behave as though their postgraduate degree in subject X confers on them authority on unrelated subject Y.

I know what intellectual pride is from the inside. I know what it’s like to want to be acknowledged as the smartest guy in the room. I freely admit I get impatient with people who overlook facts or truths I believe to be glaringly obvious, and that I have opinions on matters in which I’ve not had an adequate education. I’ve had to face the fact that, as intelligent as I am, my intelligence has limits, and that for a smart guy I can do and say some pretty dumb things.

Socrates may have been arrogant, but dang it, he was right: The beginning of wisdom is to realize just how little you really know.

If the Holy Spirit guides the Church leadership as promised by Christ (John 14:26, 16:13) and the Holy Spirit is reliable (Romans 3:3-4; 2 Timothy 2:13), then the Church leadership cannot err on matters of faith and morals. Contrarily, if the Church has erred, then either the Holy Spirit has abandoned the Church—God has reneged on His Son’s promise to be with us “to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20), and the gates of Hades have prevailed contrary to Christ’s promise to St. Peter (Matthew 16:18)—or the Holy Spirit is untrustworthy. It’s that simple and that irrefutable a dilemma.

If God can’t be trusted, then why be Christian, let alone Catholic?

In practice, we don’t assert infallibility for everything the Church has proposed in the past or proposes now; rather, we limit it to those teachings given the fullest exercise of the Church’s teaching authority. There is some room for growth and development, which by necessity means some change. However, we are also called to “adhere … with religious assent” to those teachings which the Church has merely proposed rather than dogmatically asserted (CCC 892, cf. Lumen Gentium 25). If we trust the Holy Spirit, we should also trust the Church.

Accepting the teaching authority of the pope and bishops, then, means not only rejecting the doctrinal authority of Dr. James R. White, John Piper, and Rick Warren. It also means recognizing that bishops trump theologians, apologists, priests, and other Catholic thinkers, including that brilliant if obscure scribbler Anthony S. Layne.

Call me “ultramontane,” if it makes you feel better about your dissent; the Gallican opinion lost almost 150 years ago at Vatican I. Ubi est Petrus, ibi Ecclesia est: Where Peter is, there the Church is. I follow the Successor to Peter and the bishops in communion with him because I have reason to believe they are protected from error by the Holy Spirit. I have no reason to believe such of anyone else, not even me.