As a child, I enjoyed playing with Silly Putty. When newspaper ink was petroleum-based, I liked using it to pull print or images off the pages. Now, in our current times, is it a stretch to say that some of our leading luminaries consider the immutable Teaching of the Church changeable like Silly Putty? The immutable Teaching of the Church, such as the dogmas and Ten Commandments, can be shaped into whatever we want them to be, these “lights” tell us. Times have changed. So too must the Teachings of the Church change to fit our epoch, some experts insist.
Yet this type of thinking is uncreative and lacks genuine love. Take a parent who gives warning to a young child not to touch a hot stove. If this parent were to say one day: “Today I am changing the rule—you can touch the scalding hot stove. Everyone is doing it. Therefore, it must be worthwhile.” In response, we would be upset and assert that the parent is unfit and derelict in duty. The screaming child with the burned hand is the consequence if we play out the scenario with the new rules.
Now it is true that some of the Teachings of the Church are mutable. In other words, they can change. For example, disciplines of the Church can change, such as not eating meat on Fridays (except for those during Lent). Today we are given the option of which sacrifice to do to honor our Lord’s passion and death each Friday. Another example is Church feast days. These can change. Immutable teaching, however, comes from God, is without error, and is given to us in divine love.
Our God is agape love which means that His divine love is unconditional and sacrificial. He desires the best for us, always. The unchangeable Teaching of the Church flows from this agape love for man. God created marriage between one man and one woman out of this agape love. The moral Teaching of the Church is rooted in this total love. Living in accord with the moral laws of God is life-giving. That is why God calls those with a vocation to marriage to the Sacrament of Matrimony and not just shacking up together. God, in His love for man, gave us the Teaching to be our guide in life and to make for human flourishing.
Yet, in the minds of some, the immutable Teaching of the Church can change because they reason that the word of God is primitive and out of fashion in our world today. Living a chaste life might seem out of touch with this age, but it actually produces the fruit of peace. Bucking the moral law might produce a temporary sense of wellbeing, but it is like the wellbeing a steer knows after it is fed and just before it is slaughtered. There are eternal consequences to bucking the moral law throughout one’s life.
But many in our era want the experience of bad moral choices that they deem good. Since they create their own reality—or so they have been told—some of these people make irreversible decisions. If only they had been told the Good News that God gave His Son Jesus Christ to die and rise for them.
God wants to give them life, forgiveness, and a real sense of purpose. This is where the baptized come in. As the Lord brings us to people, we must live the Faith and tell them the Good News.
So the next time you hear some “expert” say that Church Teaching is primitive or that the moral law of the Church should be changed to accommodate modern lifestyles, think of Silly Putty. It is the myths of our day, dictated by popular cultural values, attempting to re-shape immutable truth. But immutable truth is timeless. And the public revelation of the Faith cannot be re-fashioned into whatever we want it to be.
Truth is not fickle. Just like a good parent’s wise rules, the Teaching of the Church is meant to give us direction and peace. After all, this is what human beings search for and find in Christ.
Photo by Leonhard Niederwimmer on Unsplash
