Can You Outgrow the Catholic Church?

Why practicing the faith is not a "pro forma" thing

In recent weeks, a BBC interview with COVID czar and self-professed Catholic Anthony Fauci added to his notoriety by stating that no, he didn’t go to Mass anymore, and no, he didn’t practice the faith.

The reason:

A number of complicated reasons. . . . First of all, I think my own personal ethics in life are I think enough to keep me going on the right path. And I think that there are enough negative aspects about the organizational Church, that you are very well aware of. I’m not against it. I identify myself as a Catholic. I was raised, I was baptized, I was confirmed, I was married in the Church. My children were baptized in the Church. But as far as practicing it, it seems almost like a pro forma thing that I don’t really need to do.

O-kaaaay… Not that I believed that Fauci’s Catholic faith was ever worth more than Joe Biden’s or Nancy Pelosi’s, both of whom have become infamous as not just defenders but outright peddlers of institutionalized child sacrifice and mutilation, which—need I say it—are generally considered not-so-Catholic things.

Not that I thought the man who, as presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asserts, was the CIA’s bioweapons expert and conducted gain-of-function research on the very same virus that was in 2020 released from the Wuhan lab would be a paragon of piety.

Still, I thought Fauci’s statement was pretty outrageous. To come right out and say that your ethics (ha!) are so superior that you don’t need the guidelines of the Bible or your Church and to that practicing your faith is a “pro forma thing”—to me, that smacks of declaring yourself to be your own god, with your subjective definition of goodness as the only yardstick and “whatever feels good” as your only doctrine.

The key to Christianity is that we’re all tainted—broken, wounded sinners who are lost without God. In His infinite love and mercy, He sent His Son down to Earth to share the existence of the mud people for a while and to become the ultimate blood sacrifice so they could be lifted out of the dirt. This is what we believe.

To deny the need for salvation throws this entire concept under the bus... so what kind of Catholic are you, Fauci?

Apparently, one of the ordinary kind.

In a 2011 article, Bishop Robert Barron mentioned a survey showing “that many Catholics disagree with core doctrines of their church and yet still consider themselves ‘good Catholics.’ For instance, 40% of the respondents said that belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is not essential to being a faithful Catholic.”

A whopping 88% of the surveyed said “how a person lives is more important than whether he or she is a Catholic.”

Matthew Becklo states in his recent commentary in Catholic World Report on “Anthony Fauci and lukewarm Catholicism”:

[The] problem is that such Catholics, to borrow from Kierkegaard, fail to “become what they are.” They live in a state of what the existentialists called inauthenticity: play-acting as what they are not. This charade runs in both directions: they are Catholic, yet reduce religion to personal ethics and deny any need of the institutional Church; they become worldly, yet keep the Church at their disposal for academic degrees, special occasions, or times of crisis.

They are neither believers nor unbelievers, but passengers; neither wayward prodigal sons in a far country nor loyal elder brothers at home, but aimless middle brothers who come and go as they please. Churches are nice, they admit, but not that nice; they are not against attending them, they aver, but are too busy to do it themselves. They are, in fact, the true pro forma Catholics—too tepid to inhabit their own tradition but also too timid to leave it behind. They want to have their cake but still eat it.

This is exactly the lukewarm type of “Christian,” says Becklo, that Jesus warned He’d spit out of His mouth when the time comes.

We need to remember that the Catholic Church is our Mother and the bride of Jesus Christ. When the bridegroom returns, we don’t want to be found milling around in the twilight region of the eaten/uneaten cake.

And those who console themselves with the thought that it’s unlikely the Second Coming will happen in their lifetime, remember that the day we die is the day we’ll meet Him face to face, Second Coming or not. We’d better have more than some lukewarm excuses ready when that happens.