What it means to be “welcome” in the Catholic Church

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 15, 2024

In the last few days we have seen two instances of high-ranking Church leaders either refusing to speak clearly or deliberately speaking unclearly about the fundamental principles of Catholic faith and morals. Phil Lawler has already commented on the recent failure by Pope Francis to speak truth to transgender power. And our news team has reported the willful distortions of the Church’s position on homosexuality by Cardinal-designate Timothy Radcliffe. In both cases, a false understanding of the Catholic Church’s teaching on these issues has been encouraged through either silence or distortion.

Pope Francis has frequently spoken against gender ideology and gender change, so it is only natural to wonder why he sometimes seems incapable of loving sinners (and we are all sinners) in the only way that it is truly possible to love them, which is to intensely desire and foster their conversion. Fr. Radcliffe even more obviously misses the mark when he seeks to explain away African Catholic opposition to homosexuality by claiming it is the product of “pressure from Evangelicals, with American money; from Russian Orthodox, with Russian money; and from Muslims, with money from the rich Gulf countries.”

This is not only undoubtedly false, but it slanders the African faithful and the African bishops. In resorting to such ludicrous charges, Cardinal-designate Radcliffe reveals that it is he himself who is so lamentably culture-bound—to the decadent and increasingly pagan culture of the contemporary West.

Indeed, the Church in the West needs to learn once again that conversion is a process of improvement not only by addition but by subtraction. All are welcome who are willing to accept the truth that Christ teaches through His Church. Actually, we can go one step farther than that: All are welcome who, despite any doubts they may have, are willing not to contest what the Church teaches. In fact, the difference between those who are welcome and unwelcome in the Church is the difference between sinners who are willing to allow Christ and the Church to help them conquer their sins and sinners who intend instead to conquer Christ and the Church. The mind boggles at how much confusion there is today about such a simple distinction. This confusion does not come from God.

Distressingly simple

It never ceases to astonish me that the modern West has progressed so far in “enlightenment” that it cannot distinguish a person’s desire for affirmation from a person’s desire for conversion. I suppose I should not be astonished, since we live in a culture that is eager to insist that nothing outside our own minds is genuinely real. Whenever we disagree with someone, we claim that their assertion is merely “their truth”, not “my truth”. This has gone so far that it is a wonder that, when crossing the road, we in the West still believe it matters whether (a) we see traffic coming, and (b) we admit to ourselves and others that we see traffic coming.

This has always been a human problem, of course—I mean the rebellion against reality, and the desire to inhabit instead the realm of wayward imagination. After all, this desire lies at the root of all human sin. But the problem has certainly been exacerbated in a technological culture in which we spend so much of our time “participating” in fantasy worlds through our means of entertainment, and so little time experiencing what is actually real. What we seem so slow to grasp is that, in the end, imaginary worlds do not lead to joy but to insanity. In our time, we have forgotten the difference.

This forgetfulness is quite literally killing us, not only spiritually but even bodily. And you would think the Catholic Church would always and everywhere be in the forefront of the movement to reclaim what is Real. For we do not actually live in a world in which actions no longer have consequences; we have simply excelled at describing evil consequences as good results. The justification for sin, of course, depends always on the acceptance of lies, effectively fostered by the Father of Lies.

It is appropriate to have a degree of sympathy for those who are living in denial of reality—that is, those who for one reason or another, and not always by their own fault, are living a lie. But the Church can neither lie nor smile at lies without betraying her Divine head, who is the way, the truth and the life. Therefore, like Our Lord Himself, we need to begin once again to ask the critical question:

Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. [Jn 8:43-45]

This is not directed only at particular Church leaders, of course: We all need to do a better job on this very first of our practical priorities. If we seek to remain in the Church, we must welcome sinners as Christ and the Church have always welcomed sinners, which means we must welcome them in the joy of repenting to believe in the Gospel (Mk 1:15). I admit that this is socially embarrassing, and that embarrassment is a form of pain. But it is not a sin, and it really is a sin to let our embarrassment obscure the truth.

Instead, we must all, from the Pope on down, learn to talk with sinners, including ourselves, without lying—with either our tongues or our faces. We need to remember that it is impossible to accept the Gospel and be joined to Christ in His Church without repentance. Certainly we must strive at every moment to love the sinner. But if we really do love the sinner, we must also hate the sin.