The Truth About What Matters

One

Is the Catholic Church nitpicky?

The Catholic Church has a bit of a bad reputation for being nitpicky when it comes to her teachings. Throughout her history, the Church has absolutely insisted on the importance of distinctions that don’t seem all that important to outsiders.

For example, in the fourth century, the people who said Christ was homoousios, that is, one in being with the Father, were considered good Catholics, but those who used the word homoiousios were regarded with suspicion. Or, during the reformation, the Church fought tooth and nail against the teaching that the Eucharist involved consubstantiation, she said it had to be transubstantiation. Today, a lot of people can’t see any major difference between NFP and contraception but the Church says that one is okay, and one absolutely isn’t.

Why is the Church so nitpicky? Didn’t Jesus give us a simple message of love of God and love of neighbor? Why do Catholics seem to want to muddle everything up with their super-complicated distinctions?

Two

Love and Precision

The Catholic Church is very precise about her teachings for a very simple reason: when you care about something, you try to get the truth of the matter precisely. You don’t settle for inaccuracies or broad and unhelpful generalizations. If you think something is important, then you think the truth about that something is very important. And the Catholic truth thinks that the truth about God and the truth about humanity is very, very important.

That’s because she takes Jesus’ message about loving God and loving neighbor seriously. Because the Church loves God, she wants to preach and defend the precise truth about God. Because the Church loves humanity, she wants to preach and defend the precise truth about our neighbor.

Again, because if there’s something you think is important, you’re going to care about getting the truth right about that something. And the Church does.

Three

Examples

Most everyone thinks their physical life is important. That’s why they would never complain about somebody being “nitpicky” if their life was on the line.

They wouldn’t go to a surgeon who said, “You know, I just think the message of health is a simple value. That’s all I care about, is health! I don’t get all nitpicky about what part of the person I cut into, or exactly what part I take out, or whether I use just exactly the right number of stitches or the exact dose of anesthetic.”

No way! We want our surgeons to be really precise, to know exactly what’s going on. We care a lot about accuracy when it comes to surgery because we love our lives and our comfort.

Same thing if you’re stuck in the room with a ticking bomb. If the guy comes to diffuse the bomb, and he says, “The thing is, I just like cutting wires. Doesn’t really matter which wire. Sometimes I cut the blue one, sometimes I cut the red one. I don’t want to be all uptight about which wire it is, that would take all the fun out of it.” That is not what you want to hear.

You don’t want a laid-back bomb diffuser who just takes a happy-go-lucky approach to his work. So why would you want a Church that takes a laid-back, non-rigorous, happy-go-lucky approach to salvation?

If you actually care about God, heaven, and you and your neighbor’s soul, you want a Church who takes the truth seriously, who can give you precise instructions about true and false, right and wrong.

If you don’t care about religious precision, it just means you don’t care about religious truth. And that means, you don’t care about God or the soul of your neighbor. Which is not exactly a good sign in a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Four

When you love somebody, you want to know about them.

So we’ve just seen that if something you care about, like your life, is on the line, then you want an expert who cares about exactitude, about precision. But it’s also true that we care about getting the exact truth about some person who means a lot to us.

Suppose someone at work, say your boss, is always forgetting your name, or worse, always calling you the wrong name. Suppose he doesn’t really know what you do at the office and knows nothing about your family life, or how long you’ve been with the company. That would indicate that your boss doesn’t really care about you – because he or she has no interest in learning anything about you. Because we want to learn about the people we care about. We want to know the truth about them.

So if you treat God the way a forgetful boss treats an employee he doesn’t care about, if you show no interest in learning the truth about who God is, what He’s done, what His inner life is like, that’s a pretty good indicator that you actually don’t love God at all.

And if you want to cultivate a love of God, since Jesus says that’s the most important thing there is, wouldn’t you want a Church that cares enough about God to develop the truth about Him with the greatest enthusiasm, and in the greatest detail of any religion or denomination on earth?

Five

Caring about the truth means caring about the details.

The 8th Commandment doesn’t just tell us not to lie, it tells us to care about the truth.

And you can’t really care about truth without caring about details. You can’t care about medicine, or bomb diffusion, or a person at your office unless you’re interested in the details. And the details do matter.

The Church fought for homo-ousios over homoi-ousios because it really matters whether Jesus is God or not. If He isn’t God, it’s blasphemous to adore Him. If He is God, it’s blasphemous not to. Also, the Church fought for transubstantiation over consubstantiation, because if the Eucharist is bread, we shouldn’t adore it – and if it’s Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, we should. Today the Church forbids contraception and allows Natural Family Planning because one means doing something to sterilize and wither the love between a man and a woman, and the other doesn’t.

You care about the truth of what you love, what you think is important. And if you love God and love neighbor, you’ll care about getting the truth about them right. 

And you’ll be grateful for the clarity that is uniquely offered by the Catholic Church.