The Tapestry of Clichés

After the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, Jesus reveals His divinity as He walks on water, and in the Eucharistic Discourse (Jn 6). Jesus says, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no life in you,” and most of the disciples, seeking a Bread King, abandon Him. Alone with His Apostles, Jesus inaugurates the first papal conclave (Mt 16).

He asks, “Who do men say that I am?” By God’s grace, Peter responds, witnessing to His divinity: “Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God.” Then Jesus crowns Peter as Pope: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I shall build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

We’re fortunate we didn’t have the Internet back then. Social media would light up with comments responding to texts leaked by the Apostles. Most of the comments would have been negative. Pope Peter wasn’t a towering intellectual or an accomplished Torah scholar. He was a mere fisherman who, in his first encounter with Jesus, pleaded, “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” His threefold denial during the Passion validated his admission.

After 2000 years, why should we place our faith in the teachings of Peter and his successors?

The thought of abandoning the turmoil of life in the Church is appealing to anyone who has placed a Bible on his lap and spent a couple of hours leisurely reading the Gospels and the Old Testament adventure stories. Add a podcast or two and ask, what more do we need? Why should I force myself out of bed on Sunday morning, clean up, and march myself and the kids to Mass to endure people coughing, babies crying, and the priest droning on about religion, most of which I already know? Thank goodness, they don’t talk politics. What do they know about the world?

Good point. Priests often live in their parish cocoons, oblivious to the secular pressures the faithful endure every day. As they witness the Gospel, they repeat religious clichés. Clichés, by definition, can get old. We often think of clichés as slogans our English teachers correct with bright red ink. But, in a sense, the entire faith can be described as a tapestry of clichés.

Here are a few examples: “Greater love than this no man has than to give up his life for his friends.” “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?” “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” (Clichés don’t need citations.)

The scriptural clichés become a tapestry of Tradition down through the ages. Saint Augustine repackages the teachings of Saint Paul. Saint Thomas Aquinas repackages much of Saint Augustine. Church councils are interconnected by references to Scripture and with footnotes linking their conclusions to previous solemn pronouncements. The mighty edifice of Church Tradition is astonishing. It reveals the great principle of noncontradiction at work: “A statement cannot be both true and false in the same sense, at the same time, and under the same conditions.”

The Holy Spirit guarantees the Church’s fidelity to the deposit of faith; the principle of noncontradiction explains why a genuine doctrinal reversal would constitute a contradiction. After the Second Vatican Council, dissent from authentic Church teaching exploded. Pope Paul VI’s teaching on human life in Humanae Vitae was mostly ignored. The widespread acceptance of contraception undermined the meaning and ends of matrimony, with consequences that metastasized throughout society. Today, the LGBTQ ideology has reached the highest levels of society and has seeped into the hierarchy of the Church.

Some suggest that contemporary cultural pressures require changes in traditional teaching. In 2023, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, S.J., the Archbishop of Luxembourg, said he believed the Church’s teaching concerning homosexual relationships was wrong and that its “sociological-scientific foundation” was no longer correct. He argued that this could warrant a fundamental revision of the teaching.

Very funny, if it weren’t so destructive. How can a teaching be called authentic doctrinal development when it requires reversing the Church’s consistent interpretation of Scripture and Tradition across centuries? Fleas of dissent, heresy, and schism always afflict the Mystical Body of Christ. But Sacred Tradition ensures they remain pesky fleas.

Who do we have to thank for this remarkable consistency? Peter—and, through Peter, the Holy Spirit who protects Christ’s Church from errors that would suggest that the gates of hell have triumphed over her. Human logic helps.

It is easy to criticize Peter and his successors for many failures over the years. And it’s common to equate the Church specifically to the hierarchy: popes, bishops, and priests. Where is the laity?

The Church isn’t bipolar. We often forget that priests and bishops come from families. At one time, every priest was a baby, then a young child who often fought with his brothers and sisters. He went through adolescence and into adulthood, suffering from the customary immaturities of youth. As we criticize the hierarchy, remember that families form churchmen.

As ordained ministers of the Gospel, for no merit of their own, they take simple bread and wine and repeat the words of consecration, and Christ becomes present on our altars. Through the laying on of hands, their ordination can be traced back through Peter and the Apostles. The triumph cannot be reduced to the beautiful tapestry of faith we find in the Bible and the Catechism. The Church’s victory will forever be the Presence of Jesus in history under the appearance of bread and wine in the celebration of the Mass.

Every Mass repackages the clichés of the faith, repeats them, presents them, and forms us with the Living Word of God. We encounter the Living God at every Mass and wherever two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus (cf. Mt 18:20). Jesus saves. So stop complaining, get out of bed, and go to Mass.