The Biggest Lie Catholics Have Been Sold

The biggest lie Catholics have been sold is that we have to choose a side.

Traditional or progressive.
Conservative or liberal.
Truth or love.
Justice or mercy.

But what if the reason so many Catholics feel frustrated, exhausted, and even spiritually homeless is because Jesus never fit into those categories in the first place?

In this episode, Bobby explores the central idea behind his forthcoming book from Ave Maria Press,  Guardians and Prophets: Living a Both/And Faith in an Either/Or World.

What is a prophet?
What is a guardian?
Why does the Church need both?
And why does Catholicism refuse to choose between truths that belong together?

We'll discuss:
✓ Why Catholic social media feels so divided
✓ The difference between renewal and reinvention
✓ Why the Deposit of Faith matters
✓ How the Holy Spirit continues to renew the Church
✓ The danger of tribalism inside Catholicism
✓ Why dialogue is not compromise
✓ How to hold truth and love at the same time
✓ Why the future of the Church depends on both guardians and prophets

If you've ever felt too traditional for some Catholics and too open for others, this episode is for you.

If you love the Lion of Judah crewneck and Christ Is King hat featured in this episode, be sure to check out our friends at Saintly Society. Their mission is simple: to evangelize the culture through what we wear. Every piece is designed to spark conversations about faith and help bring Christ into everyday life. Support a brand that's helping spread the Gospel one conversation at a time.

👇 COMMENT BELOW:
Do you naturally identify more as a Guardian or a Prophet?

#Catholic #CatholicChurch #CatholicPodcast #ChristianPodcast #Catholicism #JesusChrist #FaithAndReason #TruthAndLove #Evangelization #CatholicLife #Christianity #CatholicYouTube #CatholicContent #ChurchHistory #CatholicFaith #CatholicTeaching #SpiritualGrowth #GKChesterton #PeterKreeft #GuardiansAndProphets

https://linktr.ee/bobbyfred85

Purposelycatholic.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever felt like no matter what side you choose, somebody in the church is going to be disappointed with you? Maybe you're too traditional for some Catholics, or maybe you're a little too liberal for other Catholics, or maybe you're a little bit too concerned with pro-life issues for some people, or maybe you're a little too concerned about the immigrant and the poor for the other side of the church. Or maybe you looked around and thought, why does it feel like everybody is asking me to pick a side, even within our own church? You know, this isn't just political. This is also within our church walls and our church pews, but it's also within our own souls. I feel it personally, and I've had plenty of experience with wrestling with this in my own life. Because everywhere we look, we're being told the same exact thing. You need to pick a team, pick a side, be part of a tribe, find your group of people that think just like you. And then on the flip side, that means that you need to fight the other side because they are the problem. And if we're really honest, that could be appealing because it's a lot easier. It's a lot easier when you have somebody else to tell us what to think. It's a lot easier when you have somebody else to blame. It's a lot easier to look and point our fingers at other people instead of turning that finger on ourselves and trying to say, how could I be a better person? It's definitely a lot easier when we can reduce all these complicated problems and issues of our day and make it into a box that we can easily fit in. And it's a lot easier to point out villains and enemies that we can blame for the reason it is the way it is. And it's always easier when we know who to blame. And if we're honest, it actually makes us feel good for some reason. That is part of our brokenness. But easier doesn't mean true. And scapegoating other people and othering people only leads to dark, dark things. History is full of many of those stories. And when we do that, even within our own church, we are set up for failure. And one of the things that I discovered after becoming Catholic over 17 years ago is that Catholicism is frustrating precisely because it refuses to put these issues into these nice, neat categories. For example, Jesus is both fully God and fully man. She could have easily said, you know what, he's half man, half God, but the church refuses to compromise, not take a middle ground and split the difference. The church is always a both and, not an either-or. We see that with scripture and tradition. We also have that with faith and reason. It isn't an either-or proposition. Justice and mercy would seem like they're contradictory. They work together. We see that on the cross. And that's the same for truth and love. You can't give somebody the truth without love because they're not going to listen to it. And if you only give somebody love without the truth, well, you're not doing them any favors either. The church has continually insisted on holding two sides together at the same time when we are trying to pull them apart and make it easier. G.K. Chesterton once wrote, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious. That line really changed how I see the world because that's exactly what Catholicism does. It doesn't try to water things down. It doesn't compromise the truth to try to help and make other people feel better. And it doesn't split the difference to say, you know what, there's a gray area in the middle. On the contrary, it holds these two what seems to be opposing ideas together. And guess what? That's hard. That's where we have tension. And in this world, the word tension itself gets people frustrated because we just want to relieve the tension. Because we know our culture doesn't reward this kind of thinking, this both and thinking. Our culture instead rewards certainty. Our culture rewards outrage. It rewards disagreement. That's how these algorithms actually work. The more we argue and get angry, the more you want to attack somebody else online. And then that helps get views and that helps make them money. Right? These social media companies don't make money from nuance. They make money from division. And when we participate in it, we are helping the evil one. The more angry we become, the more certain we become. And we know that Jesus tells us that we are really quick to look at the speck in someone's eye and avoid the log that are in our eyes, because if we're honest, it's a lot easier to point fingers at other people than it is for us to point a finger at ourselves and to actually change. But what I found is the more certain that I become, the less curious I become. And the less curious we become, it's a lot easier to believe that everyone who disagrees with you, well, they're the problem. And eventually that mindset finds its way even within the walls of the church. Then all of a sudden, we have progressive Catholics, we have traditional Catholics, we have Catholics with any kind of prefix in front of it, Trump Catholics or Biden Catholics, instead of just Catholic, which just means according to the whole, the universal. We shouldn't have sections within Catholicism. People spending more time defending tribes than actually following what Jesus taught. And people who can perfectly explain what's wrong with everybody else, but they have a hard time trying to explain what's happening in their own soul, in their own heart. And that's exactly why I wrote this book. What originally was called Divine Tension, why the Catholic Church Doesn't Choose Sides, we decided with Ave Maria that the title should be Guardians and Prophets, Living the Both and Faith in an Eitheror World. Because I think the biggest problem facing the church today isn't liberalism. It isn't conservatism. It isn't even Vatican II. It isn't the Latin Mass. And it isn't any of those kinds of issues. It's not about contemporary music versus Gregorian chant. It isn't the politics. It isn't any of those things. The biggest problem that we've forgotten is to see each other as members of the same body, to be brothers and sisters. And you know what? That's hard. It's hard to even get along with our own brothers and sisters. And I see why we struggle with that. But we have forgotten that our battle is not against flesh and blood. And it's definitely not with those who are in our same churches. We have forgotten that Catholics sitting on the other side of the aisle, they're not our enemies. They may have different ideas, but they are never our enemies. People are never our enemies. We are in war with those principalities, those dark forces, and even ideas, but never people. We have forgotten before we are conservatives or liberals or left or right, we are brothers and sisters. And I know we brothers and sisters fight, and that's okay to have healthy fights, to have dialogue, and that's important. But we've forgotten that the church has always needed two wings to fly, always needed two kinds of people. I like to call them guardians on the one side and prophets on the other. We hear law and the prophets, but the category of these roles of what the roles of what the people do within the church, I think is best described as guardians and prophets, not one or the other. We need both. And sometimes we need to be both, even within our own person. And if we lose either one, we are losing something essential within the church. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at St. Lake Society. I want to thank them personally for sponsoring the show. But more importantly, because our missions align how to evangelize the culture. And I think some things that I've learned, just by wearing a great hat or sweatshirt, it's such a great opportunity to spark conversations about our Lord and our Savior without being weird. Our podcast is about normalizing Catholicism. You don't have to be a street preacher to talk about Jesus. But when we wear our faith, it gives us those opportunities when somebody especially asks us about it to have and start that conversation. So thanks again. Check them out, saintlysociety.com. So, what exactly is a prophet? Because I think most Catholics misunderstand that word. And when we hear prophet, we immediately think like John the Baptist or somebody's in the desert. They're predicting the future. Somebody's saying, hey, this thing's gonna happen, God told me so. Somebody talking about whatever's gonna be happening next. But in scripture, that's not primarily what prophets do. Prophets were truth tellers. They were the people who are willing to tell God's people the truth about what was going on in the present moment. They looked around and said, We've drifted. You know what? We became comfortable in this situation, or we have forgotten what our mission was. We have forgotten God, right? And we see what happens to those people all throughout scripture. Most of the prophets lost their lives, but they are calling us to gain what we have lost and what matters most, to repent and to come back. The prophet isn't primarily concerned with predicting what's happening tomorrow. The prophet is more concerned about helping people see that today. And every generation needs prophets. Every generation also needs guardians. Before I explain what a guardian is, let me tell you why it hit me so personally. When I first became Catholic, I was all guardian. I didn't have the language for that at the time, but that's exactly what I was. I loved the doctrine, I loved apologetics, I loved adoration, I loved talking about the deposit of faith. I loved learning and reading books, and I wanted to know everything possible about the faith. And I wanted to defend everything from everybody. And I wanted to protect it so it would always be there. And those are all very good things. But if I'm honest, there was a season where most of my faith was almost entirely about God and me. It was about my prayer life. It was about my holiness. It was only about my spiritual growth. It was only about my relationship with Jesus. And again, none of that is bad. We all need to have that relationship with God. But eventually, God started showing me something a lot deeper. He was inviting me into something a lot more in line with what the scriptures actually say. The gospel isn't just vertical, it's horizontal too. We are called to love God and love our neighbor both, not an either-or proposition, not one side or the other. Not like, oh, I can love God and then I'll love my neighbor. By loving our neighbor, we love God. They are so interconnected. Since we are all made in the image and likeness of God, when we love our neighbor, we literally love God. And those two aren't disconnected. I thought I was protecting the faith. What I didn't realize was that sometimes I was just protecting myself from what God was calling me to do. The Matthew 28, Great Commission to go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations. I was more focused on me becoming a disciple. And that's, like I said, there's nothing wrong with that. But that isn't where it ends. Because you can know all the right answers. You can still fail to love even the same person that's been sitting in your same pew for the last five years. So many of us don't even know the people in our pews or know their names. But we are called to more than coming to mass for just God and ourselves. We are there to worship God, but we are called to holy communion with God and with our neighbor. And you can win theological arguments, but completely miss the mission of the church. And you can preserve the faith perfectly, but forget the people that the faith is meant to save. That realization really had an impact on me and changed me. And I think that's one of the dangers that guardians face. Not because guardians are wrong, not because every strength has a shadow side, but because guardians preserve the faith. Guardians are those who are in charge of protecting the deposit of faith. And guardians make sure that the church doesn't drift with every single cultural trend that the world is embracing. Guardians remind us that our faith isn't ours to reinvent. The church calls it the deposit of faith for a reason. Think about that phrase. Deposit. That's the same word that we use when we're talking about putting things that are valuable into the bank. We make a deposit. If somebody handed you $10 million and said, protect it until I return, you wouldn't leave it in your front yard. You definitely would guard it. You would protect it. You would do all things to preserve it. And that's exactly what guardians do. And thank God they do it because we need those people too. Because without guardians, eventually everything can become negotiable. Without guardians, every generation starts to reinvent its own form of Christianity. And without guardians, we lose the treasure that we have been entrusted with. But guardians have temptations too. And sometimes we begin protecting things that aren't actually the faith. And sometimes we start protecting what our preferences are. We call those comfort zones, how we feel within our tribe, the way that we've always done things. And before we know it, we start protecting the tent instead of protecting the treasure. And that's where prophets come in. Prophets remind us that the church doesn't exist for herself, the church exists for the salvation of souls. And the church exists to evangelize, to go out, and to bring other people back. The church is an existence to help bring people to Jesus. And prophets remind us that that mission matters. And prophets are constantly asking those uncomfortable questions. Who are we missing? Where is that one? We know the 99, and it seems crazy to go look for the one, but the prophets are calling us to go grab that one. Who have we forgotten? Who's being left behind? Who isn't in the pews? I know many of us know our friends and our family who aren't there, but are we that concerned with them? Do we feel that pressure within ourselves to make them want to come back? Do we have that within us? You know, who are the people that maybe feel unwelcome? And where is the Holy Spirit in this whole thing? Inviting us to grow? You know, inviting us to notice something seems to be off. And none of these questions require changing doctrine or changing the mass. None of these questions require things that the guardians would be opposed to. Renewal is not the same thing as a revolution, right? The prophet isn't called to invent a new church. But I love the idea of G.K. Chesterton's idea of the white fence post, that he says that even when we want to conserve something and guard something like a white fence post, you still have to go back and paint it white if you want it to stay the way that it originally was. Prophet isn't called to invent a new church. The prophet is called to remind us who we are. The prophet says, remember your first love. Remember the gospel, remember the poor, remember those who are outside the church, remember to pray, remember holiness, remember Jesus. That's prophetic. One of the most beautiful images in all of Scripture is the transfiguration. I absolutely love the story. Jesus stands on Mount Tabor, and on one side of him is Moses, and on the other side, Elijah. The law and the prophets, or I say the guardian and the prophet. One is preserving what God has already given us, and the other one is calling God's people back when they have forgotten. The guardian and the prophet. And where is Jesus? Well, he's standing right in the middle. He's not choosing one side or the other. He's not rejecting this side and confirming the other. He is fulfilling both. And that's the image that helped launch the entire book. Because the more I looked around at the church, the more I realized that many of the divisions aren't really about doctrine, they're about emphasis. Some people naturally gravitate towards being guardians, and others gravitate naturally more to being prophets. And I understand that and I get that. And then we make the mistake of treating each other, though, like enemies. But what if God intentionally gave us both? What if the tension isn't the problem? What if the tension actually is the point? Peter Kraft once said that every heresy begins by taking one truth and making it the whole truth. And I think that's exactly what is happening in so many of our church conversations today. Guardians see something true, prophets see something true. The problem begins when either side starts acting like they possess the whole truth by themselves. And Catholicism refuses to collapse into one side or the other. The church is always, ever ancient and always, ever new, holding on to what is timeless while finding new ways to proclaim it. Not changing the gospel or doctrines or dogma, but by finding new ways to reach people with the same gospel. And that's where I think many Catholics miss the whole entire point. Renewal doesn't necessarily mean changing the Mass or the liturgy, and renewal might mean becoming radically hospitable. Renewal might mean learn how to listen. We are very good at talking, but very bad at listening to other people. But renewal might also mean walking across the parish hall or the parish pew and introducing yourself to somebody that you never met or somebody you maybe you don't understand or don't agree with. Renewal might mean caring about the person sitting three rows behind you that you've never introduced yourself or don't even know their name. There are a thousand ways to renew the church that doesn't require changing any doctrine, dogma, or the liturgy. There are a thousand ways to preserve the faith that don't require becoming isolated either. That's the both and. And I think this is where many Catholics can get stuck. We become so focused on fixing the other side that we stopped examining ourselves. The traditionalist blames the progressive, and the progressive blames the traditionalists. We have either their two clericalism or we have progressivism or liberalism. The left blames the right, the right blames the left, and we go in this circle over and over again. Everybody all of a sudden has a villain, and everybody has a scapegoat to blame. And we see how that worked in scripture. And that's not how renewal happens. That's not how we are going to move the church forward, because we can all agree that the church needs renewal. But we know through the Old Testament, the Pharisees did the same thing. They were constantly looking for somebody impure to blame. They were looking for somebody to point at, somebody to exclude, somebody to make it a reason why things weren't going the way that they're supposed to. And it definitely was never pointing the finger back at themselves. They were looking for somebody to blame all that was going wrong and never on themselves. G.K. Chesterton also has this line that I love. He was asked the question, what's wrong with the world? And he just said, me. And I think that takes great humility. But Christianity isn't built on blaming other people and scapegoating, it's built on conversion. And conversion, if we're honest, starts with me. Starts with you. Doesn't start with them or they. It starts with me. The question isn't who's ruining the church or who's to blame for the church? The bishops, it's the Vatican II, it's it's this or it's that. The question is, Lord, what are you asking of me? Am I being called to guard something? Am I called to challenge something? Am I being called to renew something? Am I being called to preserve something? Am I called to be more? And maybe it's both. You're definitely called for more because the Holy Spirit has the habit of making us very uncomfortable. We like to say is that if you never do anything uncomfortable, how can you expect the comforter to come in and help? And the Holy Spirit, he always pushes us beyond what we already know and our preferences. He makes us feel uncomfortable because that's where growth is at. We are called to go beyond our tribes, beyond those who are already in our churches, those who we already agree with, those who we like. We're called to even pray for our enemies, which is radical. And we are definitely called to go beyond our very own comfort zones. Dialogue doesn't mean that you surrender, doesn't mean that you compromise. And listening doesn't mean that you agree with the person that you're listening to. Conversation doesn't have to lead to compromise. You can listen deeply to somebody and listen to their point of view and still disagree, but don't do it by being a jerk, right? You can respect somebody without attacking their position or adopting their position. And you can love somebody without affirming everything that they believe. In fact, that's what mature Christianity looks like. That's what I learned, that there is a balance of truth and love. It is not compromising one for the other. We need to do both. This isn't truth without love or love without truth. It's both at the same time. And maybe that's the challenge facing the church today: not choosing sides, but becoming the kind of Catholics that are capable of holding both. Because if we're honest, the word tension and holding things together has got a bad word. But as I talk about in the book, is that there's this principle called time under tension. When you're in the gym, the longer that the muscle is under tension, the more demand it puts on it that it can grow. But the word tension has got such a bad rap. But that's what our faith is. We're called for this holy divine tension that we are to hold two things that seem contradictory or paradoxical in together at the same time. Because the future of the church isn't guardians defeating the prophets, and it isn't prophets that are finally going to defeat those old pesky guardians. The future belongs to Catholics who are mature enough to become both. Guardians who protect what matters, and prophets who are calling us back to what matters. Catholics who refuse to choose between truth and love, and Catholics who refuse to choose between preservation and mission. Catholics who refuse to choose between fidelity and renewal, because that's what the church has always been at her very best. Not an either or, but a both hand. And maybe that's exactly where Jesus is inviting the church into right now.