(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of The Bishop Strickland Show, Bishop Joseph Strickland discusses the consequences of changing Church teaching, comments on the nature of tolerance, and briefly remarks on a recent pastoral letter.
Strickland starts the show by exploring the problems that could result from changing Church teaching. Using an analogy used by show host Terry Barber, Strickland says that if one ignores or changes the rules of baseball, then one is no longer playing baseball.
“If you keep changing what is Christianity, the Catholic faith, the Church that Christ has left us, then it’s not the Church anymore,” he explains.
“The rules that we are guided by come from God,” he continues, adding that the “rules” that guide the Church are found in Sacred Scripture, the Catechism, Church teaching, the Sacred Tradition, and the magisterium throughout history. If one were to change the “rules,” Strickland contends, “you start to change the very nature of the Church.”
“It’s the Mystical Body of Christ,” Strickland declares. “I want to be faithful to Who He is because it’s about being disciples of Jesus Christ.”
Barber and Strickland connect the idea to tolerance based on a quote from Archbishop Ven. Fulton Sheen, with Strickland recalling something he said on last week’s show, namely that one can be so open-minded that his brain falls out.
Commenting on the idea of how tolerance machines function, His Excellency observes that the “tolerances” of machines such as space capsules have to be “unimaginably precise.” Applying the idea to the Church, Strickland says “If you just tolerate anything that isn’t the truth, the Church ceases to function as she is as the Body of Christ.”
Imagining, however, a charge of intolerance, Strickland notes that one must always respect other people and their intrinsic value. Yet, at the same time, if they tolerate a falsehood, their instrinsic value demands that the tolerated evil should be corrected. “If they’re on a path that is destructive, [to simply tolerate their error] isn’t real love, and that’s not what we’re called to from the Word of God.”
Later in the episode, His Excellency addresses why he wrote his pastoral letters, saying that he wrote them “because there’s so many novel questions out there.” Strickland adds that he wrote them to offer clarity on Church teaching, seeking to “revisit” it because it brings people “ultimate fulfillment with God in Heaven.”
Speaking to a recent pastoral letter on the error of universalism, or the belief that all will be saved, Strickland says that universalism denies the reality of Original Sin and that man has nothing to turn away from and be healed of to turn to God.
“You just have to look at the world to see that sin is destructive to the individual, to the community, to so many things in the world,” he explains. “The more we can turn away from sin and live the good news of the Gospel, the freer we are, the happier we are, the more peaceful we are.”
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