Doubt can be the emotional equivalent of a brief spring rain or a hurricane. People doubt whether to place two bucks on the Mariners (don’t) or whether the God in whom they have trusted all their life is a sham, fraud, and delusion. Doubt can be a healthy exercise in learning to put aside our tribal prejudices, or it can be a soul-shattering crisis that radically remakes or destroys us.
The difficult thing about counseling the doubtful is that doubt isn’t always bad and confidence isn’t always good.
For instance, one of the trendy notions afoot is the so-called theology of doubt, whereby a supposed new breed of Christian eschews the “rigid dogmas” of the past and treats the Christian tradition with an “open mind.” What this almost invariably means is that the new breed of Christian is trading in his parents’ set of unquestioned assumptions for a new set of unquestioned assumptions, usually based on whatever ideology or current pop-culture norms his peers accept.
Such folk think nearly anything they like about Jesus Christ. (Was he eaten by wild dogs, as John Dominic Crossan says? Did he exist at all? Who knows and who cares? The table is open for a freewheeling discussion!) But there is only one way to think about St. Paul (he was a misogynist), the Church’s hatred and fear of Science (everybody knows Catholics burned down the Library at Alexandria and killed Galileo), or the Bible (nothing but a collection of myths and legends).
Similarly, on the reactionary side of the aisle, a reflection of this misplaced doubt and certitude has been emerging. There we often hear that we just can’t trust the teaching of the bishops, since the Second Vatican Council allegedly perverted everything. So we must ignore the purportedly heterodox bishops except on one subject and one subject alone.
This mentality can be summarized as “Opposition to abortion and euthanasia taketh away the sins of the world.” It is the theory that one is completely free to ignore and even heap contempt on the Church’s clear teaching on virtually any subject just so long as one opposes abortion and euthanasia. So whether it be the clear and obvious desire of the Church to abolish the death penalty, the reiterated prohibition of the use of torture, the Church’s clear warning that “the concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church,” the teaching of the Church that health care is a right, or any other matter of public concern, the argument of many reactionaries is that none of these things need be heeded or even treated with respect, just so long as one is opposed to abortion and euthanasia.
In this topsy-turvy world, we are condemned to a universe of doubt about almost every Catholic moral teaching beyond “abortion is wrong.” But that’s not to say reactionary dissent lacks certitude any more than progressive dissent does. There is often utter certitude about the worthlessness of the Paul VI Mass, the disposability of Paul VI’s and John Paul II’s teachings, the sinfulness of church architecture or hymnody not to one’s taste, or the use of banners in the sanctuary. One can, in such circles, discover infallible proclamations that Harry Potter is evil, that true Catholic parents homeschool, that Mary is most assuredly appearing (or most assuredly not appearing) at Medjugorje, and that waterboarding is nothing more than a harmless splash of water.
In short, the problem is often not merely “faith versus doubt.” It’s that people are doubtful about what the Church says is trustworthy (like the Mass or the social and moral teaching of the Church) and are possessed of adamantine certitude about things that common sense or the Church’s Magisterium urge us to treat as ambiguous, cheerfully latitudinarian, dubiously quacky, or just plain wrong. In such cases reactionary dissenters, no less than progressive dissenters, often simply tune out the Magisterium and common sense and run to their favorite celebrity theologian, visionary, political messiah, or media talking hairdo to reinforce their certitude about the doubtful thing and their doubt about the solid and obvious thing.
Yet, for all their hostility to one another, the progressive and the reactionary do have one thing in common: the notion that an old-fashioned “pre–Vatican II” faith that is coterminous with rigid ideological certitude is being replaced with a “new” Catholic faith that is riddled with doubt. On both sides of the aisle, the basic story is this: In the pre–Vatican II Church, you knew exactly what was what, which was without nuance, paradox, or ambiguity. This simple world of Baltimore Catechism blacks and whites was swept away by the post–Vatican II Church of Ambiguity. Such folk often talk as though they eagerly await (or desperately dread) the day when some Third Vatican Council is called to finish the work of demolition and reconstruction begun by the Second Vatican Council. (Progressive dissenters and reactionary dissenters disagree only on whether that narrative is a happy story or a tragedy.)
In fact, that narrative is not true at all, because there are not two Churches, pre- and post-conciliar. There is simply the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. And what that Church has always offered us is faith, not certitude or doubt. For the Catholic faith has always been in a God who is a mystery, not a fog, ideology, political platform, diagram, formula, or equation.
How then do we approach the false doubts and false dogmatism of the sundry human factions that always contend within the bosom of the Church? The first thing to do is remember, “Twas ever thus.” Paul had to rebuke factionalists repeatedly. The early Church had party spirit in spades, rioting and battling it out in Ephesus, Constantinople, Rome, and any other place Christians got excited about anything from politics to soccer.
In short, the faith in its theological teaching (summed up in the creeds and dogmas of the Church) tells us a few certain and definite things about God and the human person, and then it leaves much of the rest of life for us to figure out as we can and order as we will with the help of our shepherds and with the tools provided by such things as law, science, philosophy, and the sense God gave a goose—all with the help of the Spirit, of course.
That means we may have strong views on Harry Potter, marijuana, health care, the Iraq war, weight loss, and even how those with same-sex attraction may order their lives in society. But the Church is not going to micromanage our views on those things—and it never has. That’s why you had great saints on both sides of the Avignon schism, the Civil War, the Galileo controversy (news flash: he was not executed), the question of the merits of St. Thomas Aquinas’s work, and every other serious controversy that has faced the world since the birth of the Church. And it’s why you have Catholics arguing about homeschooling, whether BP or big government is the villain in the Great Oil Spill of 2010, whether we should institute carbon credits, and whether government health-care legislation is a good idea.
In short, rarely will the Church hand down dogma. Virtually always, when it comes to moral acts, she hands down a few elementary moral truths such as “don’t murder” and “love your enemy,” and then she hands down finely crafted counsel steeped in the tradition of the Church so that we might apply such teaching to our circumstances. She simply does not live (and never has) by the motto “That which is not forbidden is compulsory.”
That’s the basic difference between ideology and the Catholic faith. The faith says, “We don’t know much, but we do know that these few things that God has revealed are true.” Ideology, in contrast, claims to be an all-explaining theory of everything. Ideology (which is to say, “heresy”) seeks to whittle ultimate reality (that is, God) down to size and make him manageable—in a word, an idol. That’s why it’s crucial to remember that God is more unlike than like any creature. St. Thomas Aquinas tells us:
Although it may be admitted that creatures are in some sort like God, it must nowise be admitted that God is like creatures; because, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. ix): “A mutual likeness may be found between things of the same order, but not between a cause and that which is caused.” For, we say that a statue is like a man, but not conversely; so also a creature can be spoken of as in some sort like God; but not that God is like a creature.5
The Catholic faith says that things are like God but denies that God is like things. Faith lets God be God and reveal himself on his terms—which are, paradoxically, our terms in the incarnation of God as man in Christ Jesus.
Because of this, the Church has never had a problem with doubt, provided it is honest doubt. Indeed, the Church has deep compassion for doubters, since the gospel, after all, was forged in a crucible of doubt. John the Baptist doubted both Jesus and himself, asking, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matthew 11:3). Note that Jesus did not rebuke the honest doubts clouding John’s thoughts as, awaiting execution, he sat in prison. As God bucked up an exhausted and despondent Elijah with his still small voice, so Jesus fed John’s flagging faith by reminding him of the solid facts:
Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is he who takes no offense at me. (Matthew 11:4–6)
More than this, he took the occasion not to diss John the Baptist as a weakling lacking true faith but to praise him to the crowds:
As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to behold? A reed shaken by the wind? Why then did you go out? To see a man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, those who wear soft raiment are in kings’ houses. Why then did you go out? To see a prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written,
‘Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way before thee.’
Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist.” (Matthew 11:7–11)
Nor was John the last doubter. As Jesus himself warned his disciples, including the famous doubting Thomas, on Holy Thursday, “You will all fall away” (Matthew 26:31). And that warning of terrifying thunderbolts and long rainy days of doubt has been the Christian experience ever since. Whether in the process of conversion, when we discover with Paul how hard it is “to kick against the goads” (Acts 26:14), or at some point in our Christian life, the overwhelming majority of us experience doubt sooner or later, and usually several times. It may be doubt about God’s existence or goodness. It may be doubt about Jesus Christ. It may be doubt about the Church, or the Bible, or some aspect of their teaching. It may be doubt about one’s self or something that has constituted a sure anchor for your soul. It may steal over the soul with the accumulation of thoughts and feelings you don’t know what to do with. It may be pounded into your heart with a nail by the shock of tragedy or betrayal. But however it comes, it must be faced with the help of Jesus Christ through his Body the Church.
Of which more next time.
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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