Authority

What is the difference between liberal and conservative Catholics? I'm thinking it's about authority. How do we know truth and how do we judge what is good? On what authority can we rely?

Imagine the interior life as an ocean journey, navigating your ship from one island of solid ground to a new and better one as you go. Some people find a continent and settle for life. Some want to search the whole archipelago and then set sail for the next continent.

Or imagine jumping across a wide flooding stream from rock to solid rock, the prospect of falling in and being swept away always on your mind.

Or imagine climbing a steep rock face, finding sure handholds and toeholds, on your way to the vista at the top.

The metaphors are about solid ground, the sure places a person has to find to live or to move forward. I'm thinking that no matter how unreflective a person might be, or how unarticulated the fundamentals are, to be sane we have some trusted ground under foot. It's the sense of who we are, what it is all about.

The Catholic Church, in its current institutional format and culture, is like one continent, a big old solid piece of ground. It says you can count on its slow sifting of what humans know and its declarations of truth and goodness to guide your whole life. It claims divine guidance for itself in that process of assuring its members of the true and the good. You can rely on its authority. Conform your thoughts, obey, and you are safe.

If, instead of looking to the current Catholic teaching authority, you look to the 2000 year tradition of Christianity for footholds and toeholds,solid ground to stand on, you will have to make your own study, your own judgments, or join a Christian community to identify with, to depend on for guidance to solid ground.

But if your life's journey has taken you to other cultural continents, other islands big and small, you may have a different perspective on what is true and good, what is solid ground to identify yourself on. What authority do you rely on for your identity, for judging what is true and good?

You piece together an identity from all you have seen and heard, you keep questioning and listening to the serious voices around you, you act from your best judgment of the moment. The authority is within yourself within the human community. You could say the divine guidance comes through humanity as a whole in its slow and painful evolution toward some end, the truth and goodness of which we only hope for.

Is a person who calls him/herself a liberal Catholic a person who acknowledges a cultural formation within the Catholic tradition, and the deep wisdom in the tradition, but who, nevertheless, does not rely on the authority of the pope and bishops for a final judgment about what is true or good? Or maybe it's a relative matter: no one relies for final judgment on the pope and bishops, but "conservative" Catholics want to affirm that solid ground exists in institutional form somewhere in the world.

What do you think?