Can You Be Catholic and Disagree with Doctrine?

Catholic Dissenters Should Call the Episcopalians

I found this article to be a good read. I agreed with all the points and it is a much needed response to the growing dissent of Roman Catholics from the dogmatic truths of our faith. Granted, I wish the article articulated this message in a less "preachy" or easy-to-perceive-as condescending manner. I don't think this was the author's intent at all, either way, and I can understand the author’s impatience with this growing disrespect and scandal within the Body of Christ by cafeteria Catholics who pick and choose what they will believe as if the Gospel is just some other ideology. We preach Christ the Savior not Christ a Savior.

St. Augustine in the fourth century said, “If you only believe what you like in the gospels, it is not the Gospel you believe in, but yourself.” The Catholic Church claims to bear the entirety and fullness of the truth about human existence—not scientific truths or the accurate answers to historical mysteries, but the truth about man, the truth about the human condition, it’s meaning and it’s purpose and the true eschatological end of all of mankind. Based on this vision of the human person, a certain and rich moral framework for life can be drawn forth. Hence, the Church teaches infallibly on matters of faith and morality. We believe in a Christ who proclaimed that His Spirit will come upon His Church and protect His Gospel until the end of time—not a Christ that said we will come to understand the truths He wished to teach at some time in the future. Catholics who dissent lock themselves in a position of contradiction by holding that Catholicism is the true faith while simultaneously believing that the Church has erred on matters of faith and has some sort of authority to “edit” the whole, entire Gospel truth she has received. If the credibility of the apostles, of the Holy Spirit’s protection of the Church is compromised, with it goes the credibility of Christ.

The truth is accepted whole and entire or not at all. Truth does not and cannot change. This is not a matter of unyielding compromise, but it is simple logic: the Church cannot be wrong on a matter of faith or morality in its teaching or else it contradicts its own doctrine that it cannot err in regard to such matters, and thus, the position of the cafeteria Catholic validates the idea that the the Church of Rome is the Whore of Babylon many Protestants make her out to be.