What to do When you see the Church Criticized
“I want to be more involved in sharing my faith.”
“I want to serve the Church by speaking up for truth.”
This is a common impulse for Catholics today, especially on social media. While the truth of the Catholic faith is unchanging, there is a greater desire among Catholics to make that truth known, and, when necessary, to correct error. I would say this is one of the clearest fruits of the Second Vatican Council, yet that fruit needs to be cultivated. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for how Catholics should speak up when they see the Church criticized.
- ) Doing nothing is often the smart move
Wait, why is an article on telling people what to do leading off with do nothing? This is an unpopular truth, but it needs to be said: Far too often today, people speaking up in defense of the faith do more damage to the faith than if they said nothing at all. Cosplaying as St. Robert Bellarmine can be dangerous if you don’t have the skills and training St. Robert Bellarmine had.
An example from Sacred Scripture helps us see this. Shortly after the death of Christ, a new religious movement had sprung up within Judaism, claiming to be of God. This movement was causing a lot of consternation among the Jews in Jerusalem, requiring the involvement of the authorities. During their deliberation, their wisest scholar arose and said:
Men of Israel, think well what you mean to do with these men… And my advice is still the same; have nothing to do with these men, let them be. If this is man’s design or man’s undertaking, it will be overthrown; if it is God’s, you will have no power to overthrow it. You would not willingly be found fighting against God. (Acts 5:35, 38–39)
Sometimes God allows the actions of Catholics and of Church leadership to be criticized because change is required. While divine in origin, the Church is still made up of human members, fully capable of sin. They show this capability in history in abundance. When faced with this reality, sometimes it is best to just let something be.
2.) Remember that some debates look silly years later
If you learn one thing writing over a long period of time about Church affairs, it is how pointless controversies tend to be over time. Most people don’t have the foggiest idea of some of the central debates during the pontificate of St. John Paul II. Sometimes they even forget that the sainted pope, by his own admission, made a mistake on something. Its just taken as a given it happened, and everyone moved on. Many writers made it their hill to die on that the pope was always right on these matters. Nobody is aching to bring back Assisi gatherings, the restrictive Indult for the Latin Mass, or a host of other issues. None of this damaged the pope’s cause for sainthood, nor does anyone really feel compelled to defend why these decisions were a good today. To the extent they are spoken of at all, its recognized that he is a saint not because everything he did was right, but because he exemplified holiness and virtue to a heroic degree.
3.) The Church and Pope does not need you to “defend their honor”
The Catholic Church is an organization that is thousands of years old with a divine mandate to exist until the end of this age on earth, and for eternity in heaven. That Church is made up of roughly two dozen Churches in communion with each other, comprising roughly one billion souls across every nation and culture and ideology. She has, at her disposal, the brightest minds in history with the sharpest arguments to deploy against error. The Roman Pontiff is one of the most powerful men in the world, who can summon the brightest minds in the Church with but a single phone call or statement. He might not have all the answers. He might need your help in providing them. What he does not need is for you to leap to defend his honor against a keyboard warrior.
Often, this impulse leads to far more harm than good. Speak because you have something to offer that is edifying, not because someone needs a defense. If they need a defense from you, they will ask you.
4.) Never underestimate prayer
We live in a society where “I’ll pray for you” is reduced to a cliche. Prayer is generally distinguished from action. To the Catholic, this is lamentable. Prayer is action. If we shouldn’t just ignore the issue, the first thing we should do is pray over the issue.
What should we pray about? Pray that we are looking at it charitably. Are we looking at the criticism fairly? Or are we looking to just jump down someone’s throat and enter the fray guns blazing?
After all of this, you still want to speak? Before you do, repeat steps one through four. I don’t want to say you can’t speak, or that its wrong to speak. I just want to make sure that you are speaking out of a desire to serve, and that you will actually accomplish something by speaking. We’ll talk about what to actually do when speaking later, because really, sometimes “shut up for a second” has a lot of wisdom to it.
