I was pleased the other evening to engage in a telephone conversation with one of my Professors who served on the Faculty of Canon Law at the University of Saint Paul in Ottawa, Canada. I was a student there during the 1985-86 academic year and completed my studies earning the Licentiate in Canon Laws (JCL).
Many years have passed since those privileged days in classes learning the Law from such eminent scholars and teachers.
And yet, the rather lengthy passage of time seems to dissolve almost immediately whenever I have the pleasure of conversing, even by phone, with these good and learned men who helped guide and form me in the knowledge and application of the Universal Law of the Church.
I am humbled by the fact that my former teacher is an avid follower of this blog. Lord knows how many times I have been both affirmed and challenged by his comments and responses to my posts!
It had been a while since we last visited, and he wanted me to know how much he had been impressed by a two-part article I had posted a while back entitled “New Wine Into Old Wineskins”, an article which inspired a plethora of reader responses and reactions.
I thanked him for the compliment, coming especially from one whose expertise in the knowledge of Church Law and history is universally recognized.
All of which got me to thinking about the place of “expertise” in any Divine or human enterprise these days.
It seems that nobody's listening to "experts" in any field anymore.
Rather, nowadays, everyone is an expert on everything. You can hardly touch upon a subject on which anyone and everyone doesn't believe that they have an expert opinion to offer. But if every one's an expert, then nobody is an expert. And no one listens to experts anymore, so nobody listens to anyone else. We don't have dialogue anymore. We have competing lectures.
Self-proclaimed expertise in all things permeates every facet of our culture, sadly, including morality and faith.
I’m amazed when I hear people tell me that they are "devout Catholics" but they think the Church is wrong about homosexuality or abortion or some other issue. All they offer are personal opinions, and uninformed opinions at that.
But such thinking is typical these days. Ask folks what research they've done to counter 2,000 years of thoughts and research by an institution created by Jesus Christ himself. Inevitably they talk about something they saw on the news or about knowing a guy who is gay or a woman who experienced this or that.
So, 2,000 years of wisdom is ignored because you know someone? No research? No studies? No theological consideration of why the Church might teach this or that? No, they saw a 60 Minutes broadcast, or an National Public Radio show, or read an article in the Times, the Wall Street Journal, even the National Enquirer!
In this age,when literally libraries of information are at our fingertips, it appears that humanity has never been so wllfully ignorant; as if the omnipresence of information has inoculated us against wisdom itself.
We live in an age which rejoices in the shunning of such wisdom.
Many posit that anything which came before is tainted by the mere fact that it came before their generation and should therefore be ignored. The thing is, nothing can be built in such an age because there is nothing to be built upon; there is no foundation.
A generation such as this can only do the only thing left to do - destroy. And that is what is happening.
So, Marriage being between a man and a woman is something that thousands of previous generations held to be the central fact of their lives but it's irrelevant today. Sure, the Church has taught for two millennia that killing the unborn is a sin but what about rape and incest or the health of the mother.
And we've seen all warnings against casual sex dismissed as prudery from an un-enlightened era as if God never called us to love one another, only to receive consent to gratify ourselves.
This is the real world in which we live today. The Church needs to understand that appeals to traditional doctrinal teaching, creedal formulae and authority no longer bind upon the intellectual and moral judgments of the day.
How the Church will overcome this anti-intellectualism and slow humanity’s descent in a new experience of the Dark Ages will be a challenge indeed.
May the Holy Spirit guide and inspire the Church to find the voice and the words to call mankind back to its senses!
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