Seeking Understanding

By Fr. Jerry Pokorsky ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 08, 2026

Clichés are overused expressions whose original force has been dulled by repetition. For our purposes, the term also includes concise formulas, slogans, or repeated statements. With all due respect to English teachers, clichés are useful. Properly understood, they provoke thought and help us remember and act.

Nevertheless, we would do well to heed the warnings of wise English teachers. Such formulations have their limits and may distort our grasp of reality, inhibit thinking, and harm mutual understanding.

We grew up with advertising slogans. “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” “A little dab’ll do ya.” Politicians always use slogans: “All the way with LBJ.” “In your heart, you know he’s right.” Nowadays, MBA slogans are pervasive. The phrase “best practices” is often repeated as though it settles an argument. But formulas, whether managerial or religious, never eliminate the need for intelligent inquiry and judgment.

The Catholic faith depends upon concise formulas that communicate realities far deeper than the words themselves. For example, the doctrine of the “Real Presence” teaches that Jesus Christ is truly present—Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity—in the Eucharist under the appearances of bread and wine. Jesus provides more details in His Eucharistic Discourse after the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and at the Last Supper.

The disciples repeated the sayings of Jesus until the evangelists assembled them in the four Gospels: “Greater love than this hath no man than to give up his life for his friends.” “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me.” Some are consoling: “Woman, has no one condemned you? Neither do I condemn you.” And Jesus from the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Some of the Gospel sayings are deliberately unnerving and require further explanation: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” “If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away.” “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no life within you.”

Inquiry and understanding give Christian formulas depth and wisdom. Like Mary at the Annunciation, the Church receives revelation in faith and seeks understanding. When the Angel Gabriel appeared to her and said that she would bear a child, Mary accepted the brief revelation, but asked a question to help her understand: “How can this be, since I do not know man?”

The Apostles’ Creed consists of reliable brief catechetical formulations. I believe in God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Church, and everlasting life. The Church teaches many concise formulas of the faith, but encourages us to ask questions in faith to deepen our understanding. As Catholics, we receive the apostolic faith through the Church and seek an ever-deeper understanding of the words of Jesus.

Experience suggests many failures when we stop asking questions. Many children undergo Christian formation in preparation for Confirmation. But after receiving the sacrament, they may lose a healthy sense of inquisitiveness and do not set foot in a church for years to come. They may even grow to despise the Church, as comedian George Carlin did, because they never spent sufficient time enriching their faith through theological contemplation and understanding.

The clergy may have the same problem. The always-amusing newspaperman H.L. Mencken wrote nearly a century ago.

Any literate plow-hand, if the Holy Spirit inflames him, is held to be fit to preach.... But he has learned the clichés of his craft, and he has got him a long-tailed coat ... and is set up as a fountain of light and learning.

The Catholic seminary system is far more sophisticated, but without authentic faith and reason, priests may also reduce their training to merely repeating the clichés of the priestly craft.

Living by clichés without seeking understanding can have serious consequences in every sphere of life. The danger is not confined to religion. The Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt analyzed Adolf Eichmann after his capture for war crimes. In compelling testimony, she explained the “banality of evil” (the extensive quote completes our understanding):

Six psychiatrists certified him [Eichmann] as normal…. His attitude toward his family was described as not only normal, but most desirable. The minister who visited him in prison declared him a man of very positive ideas. And this was the man who sent millions to their deaths. The longer I listened to him, the more obvious it became Eichmann was not stupid. That is not the point. He was simply, genuinely, completely incapable of thinking from the standpoint of anyone else. He spoke exclusively in clichés…. He was surrounded, if by armor, by stock phrases that insulated him entirely from reality. This is what I mean by the banality of evil. Not that evil is ordinary or unimportant. Not that it is excusable. But that it can be committed on a massive scale with bureaucratic precision by someone who is not motivated by hatred, or ideology, or psychopathy. But by someone who simply stopped thinking and stopped asking what am I doing? And to whom?

It would be unnerving to realize that our patterns of thinking lack honest inquiry, allowing stock phrases to shield us from accurate moral perspectives. Youngsters often need the elderly for their years of wisdom. But the elderly may need the unprejudiced insights of the young to break ingrained patterns of moral error reinforced by clichés. We need God’s grace to dissipate the fog of intellectual sloth that prevents us from perceiving reality and applying the Ten Commandments.

Thoughtful Catholics unite doctrinal formulas with reason and, aided by the graces of the Eucharist, seek understanding—and mutual understanding—in both faith and life.