Can i disagree with the catholic church

Try reading theology of the body. You are still on a journey, and I would encourage you to continue on that path. Intensify your prayer life, do some more research, and stay close to the Blessed Virgin Mary. My guess is that your own sense of integrity would prompt you to want to come to a basic acceptance of Church teaching before you decide to publicly enter its embrace. Just type in your question or send an email to AskAPriest rcspirituality.

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Complete this form to receive the weekly email and create a FREE account, which provides access to member only content. RC Spirituality is a service of Regnum Christi that creates life changing Catholic formation materials in many media formats. Bartunek Our Patron Saints Contact. Gospel Reflections Retreat Guides Videos. That being said, I do have some issues with a few of the moral teachings of the Church regarding homosexuality, abortion and contraception.

I will say, for the sake of being as clear as possible, that all my opinions on these matters come from years of studying the Bible and intense personal and spiritual reflection. Thank you again for your time. Answered by Fr. A biblical basis could be found for the three points you mention. Since the Second Vatican Council, "the Church is being rediscovered as community and the role of reception is regaining respect.

Reception is, then, no small gift of the believing community that it can give but withhold as well when the teaching or practice in question does not ring true to apostolic tradition.

Examples of non-reception, on matters great and small, abound in the history of the church. The canon of scriptural books was decided through reception by the community of believers. In a historically small matter, Pope John XXIII's encyclical restoring Latin as the language of theological education Veterum Sapientia was turned into a dead letter by its non-reception by the Catholic community.

As a historical matter of far greater influence and relevance, the non-reception by the churches of Pope Paul VI's restatement of the church's ban of birth control in Humanae Vitae is understood as rejection by the believing majority. When non-reception occurs, the teaching in question is erroneous, inadequately expressed or, so to speak, judged unbelievable by the majority of good, faithful Catholics.

This gift of reception is a long-accepted expression, then, of the sensus fidelium , the "sense of the faithful" with which the present document concerns itself.

Although often misunderstood, this sense of the faithful is also expressed in other behavior, as, for example, in the drop in the number of confessions after Vatican II. Some have claimed that this "neglect" of penance is part of what its critics call the chaos and confusion sown by that council.

This less frequent use of confession was not a rejection of the sacrament of penance, but rather a healthy rejection of the exaggerated sense of sin and guilt that had, for example, made eating meat on Friday as grave a sin as murder. The Christian community expresses the sensus fidelium by its operational judgment that trivialities, foibles and the imperfection of the human condition are not sins that need to be confessed regularly or at all.

This should be considered a healthy rebalancing of the scales of moral intuition and judgment. A rear-guard action is still being carried out by those leaders in the church who misread this sense of the faithful as a loss of devotion rather than the recovery of a truly Catholic perspective on the relative gravity of sins. In the present document, reception is acknowledged but is hemmed in with spears of qualification.

It may be easier to pass the initiation for third-degree membership in the Knights of Columbus than to be recognized as a Catholic who shares the gift of reception. These include active participation in the life of the church, especially through the liturgy; a "heartfelt" endorsement of the Gospel preached to them; and "openness to reason," which is described as "acceptance of the proper role of reason in relation to faith" that "purifies" it.

The real kicker is found in the fourth demand that believers must adhere to the magisterium, a qualification that, on its face, means that a genuine sense of the faith and of the faithful depends on accepting exactly what the magisterium says -- a pre-emption, it would seem, of the community's using the gift of reception except in accord with what the pope and bishops already teach or, as the document expresses it, "attentiveness to the magisterium of the Church, and a willingness to listen to the teaching of the pastors of the Church, as an act of freedom and deeply held conviction.

In a similar squeeze play, believers must practice a catalog of virtues, including humility and holiness, that would humble a monastery of Trappists before they can be graced with the sensus fidei. To claim the latter, believers must edify the church and avoid anything that would divide it. How about -- in view of the sex abuse scandal, money laundering by the Vatican bank, and embezzling archbishops -- the church's doing something to edify the ordinary, everyday Catholics who put up with a lot and ask for very little?

The document is at pains to distinguish what its authors seem to believe to be the temptations of those with a sense of the faith. The authors labor mightily to distinguish the sense of the faith from what they deride as popular religiosity or, God forbid, public opinion that they think believers frequently follow instead of the teachings of the church. As one distinguished traditionalist commentator, Jeff Mirus, sums up the thrust of this central portion of the document, "Thus what has been enunciated by the Magisterium is received by the Church as belonging to the deposit of faith.

The document is, as Boston College's Richard Gaillardetz observes , thin on developing ways to consult with the faithful on theological questions. If the judgment against women priests were so convincing, for example, why did Pope John Paul II forbid Catholics from even discussing it?

Such matters give witness to the simple question that threatens the shaky thinking: "what if the dissenters are right? The last and first defense, that the Holy Spirit reveals truth from the top has worn thin. Without allowing for error, and willingness to admit it, there will be no widespread solution to these profound disagreements.

Condescension to the "confused" who aren't confused at all has made it worse. The prevailing problem isn't that Catholics haven't correctly been taught what doctrine means; the more common problem is that they have been and found it wanting. Send your thoughts and reactions to Letters to the Editor. Learn more here. Join now. Blog NCR Today. Don't Agree With the Church? Join the Conversation Send your thoughts and reactions to Letters to the Editor.

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