Over the course of my life, I was always taught that Christianity wasn’t beholden to modern sentiments. To say that it did was the same as saying that we’d be willing to abandon the will of Christ in order to make his bride seem a bit more appealing to other men.
At no point should we compromise our beliefs in order to fit in with the modern world. We’re in the world, not of it, and it’s on that mindset that we understood why we never wavered or conformed. God does not change, and as such, our instructions don’t either. Given, our instructions have changed in the past, but it took the son of God to literally come to Earth as a human and change universal law through a very lengthy process that culminated in his sacrifice himself.
Today, the church seems to be shrugging that off in order to proclaim that now, it makes the room.
Case in point, earlier Monday I reported that American Bishops were getting together to discuss whether or not they should deny President Joe Biden communion over his pro-abortion stances and actions. Biden presents himself a devout Catholic, but like every Democrat, he’s only a devout Catholic when it suits him. He’s more than happy to throw taxpayer dollars at abortion clinics or the good PR it affords him with leftist voters.
In response, the Vatican itself warned the bishops not to deny Biden communion, saying that the eucharist was not a political weapon. The pope was cited as saying that communion was “not the reward of saints, but the bread of sinners,” which is wholly fine in the vast majority of circumstances. However, I can’t help but think that it’s the church that’s caving to political pressure, not the bishops using the church to create pressure in politics.
That seemed to be very obvious to me given the response to this situation from one of Biden’s catholic defenders.
“The proposal to exclude Biden and all election officials who support legal abortion from communion is an effort on the part of conservative bishops to shore up their base of regular Mass-goers who are the lifeblood of the church,” said Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. “But exclusionary ecclesial policies will only lead to greater defection from the pews, especially among Millennials and Generation Z.”
This is the same as saying that if the church comes down on Biden then it would be a statement on how the church views abortion in a very negative light, thus causing younger people to leave the church.
…and?
God doesn’t answer to Neonhair McWokeston and if they/them doesn’t want to be a part of the church because the church has a very hardline stance against abortion then so be it. The church is more concerned with answering to God than a Twitter mob. In my opinion, this is the church caving to politics, not politics caving to the church. To be sure, when it comes to deciding how a Catholic should act, modern sentiment shouldn’t play a part. At some point, that sentiment will pass, but God will still be there, unchanging, and looking not too pleased about the whole ordeal.
This doesn’t just apply to the Catholic church either. This applies to every church.
A church should be welcoming everyone it can through its doors. Unbelievers should be able to find seats and hear what Christ has to say. Gays and lesbians should be able to hear the gospel and realize that they do have a choice. If they don’t, they don’t, but at least they’ll be showing up and hearing the actual gospel.
God’s word isn’t going to make everyone happy, and not everyone is going to want to follow Christ based on personal opinion. In the end, they’ll either say to God “thy will be done,” or God will say to them “thy will be done.” But let either of these people let them hear the word first honestly. Giving the young a false idea of God or the church will only breed resentment down the line as they find out they were lied to in order to get them in the doors so the church would seem more popular.
The church needs to remember who it is, and more importantly who it answers to.
