When Authority Fails

Years ago the bishop of my son’s diocese decreed that all parishes in the diocese constituted a gun-free zone. My son was a police officer and insisted it did not apply to him because officers are encouraged to carry whenever they are in public, whether in uniform or not. But the bishop was not having it and rejected my son’s argument. So for a time my son either went to a late Saturday or Sunday Mass in uniform (the law required officers to carry while in uniform – and the Bishop would neither pretend he could decree the law invalid nor forbid uniformed officers to attend Mass) or drove his family 45 minutes away to Mass in another ciocese. His family then became parishioners in that entirely different diocese for several years.

A bishop has no spiritual authority to order you not to be prepared to defend yourself and others. He does, however, have administrative authority to set the rules for those properties under his administrative control. That can create some unpleasant – and absurd – circumstances.

In America, the bishops, as a group, are deeply lacking in wisdom on those things that belong, generally, to the laity’s prudential judgment. Even worse, by using scholastic language to dress up their ill-conceived temporal decrees, they think they are brilliant – unaware that no matter how much lipstick you put on the proverbial pig, it is still a pig.

Religious leaders the world over, through the World Council of Churches, were co-opted as a propaganda tool for the Soviet Union in 1961, pushing the West to disarm unilaterally. Now, in defense of the Council, they were too naive to realize when the Soviets decided to use them as an Active Measure against the West. (Active Measures were a specific program to use particular gambits to demoralize or weaken the West.) These religious leaders were also too morally arrogant to realize they were intentionally being used as tools to undermine the very societies that best defended actual freedom and autonomy. They are not without blame. They prolonged the Cold War and gave cover to Soviet aggression. If they had had their way, we would have lost the Cold War and a lot more of the world would have been in chains. Religious leaders pretending to authority they don’t have, and wisdom they don’t even bother to try to have, has done great damage in the life of the world and of the Church.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is a well-meaning, but usually feckless organization when it tries to opine on matters of public policy that belong to the prudential judgment of the Laity. It has been the partner of the leftists in facilitating the mass invasion at our border these last three and a half years, along with all the human trafficking, spikes in crime, displacement of needy citizens, and drug smuggling that has entailed. They just smugly proclaim we must be open to all and ignore the chaos they help enable. They do NOT pressure other countries to reform their toxic systems. They do NOT offer to act as sponsors, taking financial and behavioral responsibility for immigrants. They do NOT acknowledge that the US has a method for legally processing immigrants. They do NOT recognize that we all have a hierarchy of responsibilities: the first duty is to your family, then to your friends, and then to others who approach you.

The Bishops’ formal position on illegal immigration is akin to saying that if a thug with MS-13 tattoos breaks into your house and sets up housekeeping in your daughter’s room you are obliged to let him stay. It really is that feckless and irresponsible.

You all know that I am adamant about respecting a bishop’s lawful authority. But I am also not unaware that one of the reasons their lawful authority has been so diluted is because so many of them have tried to exercise temporal authority they do not have – and have exercised their pretensions thoughtlessly and without serious attention to effective, rigorous analysis. The Covid debacle was the most recent shameful episode that did the Bishops no honor. I pray – and believe – it was a wakeup call at least to some. Their penchant for virtue signaling without commitment to rigorous analysis has done the Church and the faithful serious damage, while badly eroding respect for the authority they actually do have.

I write all this to acknowledge that you are likely to confront some tough situations as the current ugliness in the world plays out. Bishops who have serially misused, misunderstood, and fecklessly abused the concept of authority are not likely to suddenly combine the precise judgment of St. Thomas Aquinas with the humble work ethic and clear lines of thought of St. John Paul the Great. If a bishop decrees that you must forfeit any of your God-given rights under natural law in order to attend a Church of which he is administrative head, he is not speaking from any spiritual authority, but he is speaking from his legitimate administrative authority. You are NOT obliged to obey this authority generally, but you are if you enter into a property he has administrative authority over. You can – and should – protest this public abuse of authority. But you really only have three choices:

1. Submit and attend under his offensive terms.
2. Attend in another Diocese if you can.
3. Do not attend until the offensive rule is lifted.

Of course, many will wonder how that comports with our obligation to physically attend some Masses. We are obligated unless we are truly unable to attend. Though I am not the final word on such a matter, my take is that a bishop who needlessly requires me to offend my informed conscience in order to attend is the one preventing me from attending Mass. The sin is his – and spiritual communion is available to me.

I do not carry arms. But I have had a real instance where I lived that ethos. During Covid, I absolutely refused to attend any Mass setting that required a reservation. Either all are welcome or they are not. So there were Sundays in different places where I attended no Mass – and I did not take it to Confession, because I did NOT believe I had sinned. The bishop or priest had, delivering us timidly to the secular wolves through his own ignorance and arrogant fecklessness.

I am adamant about our responsibility to submit to legitimate authority, whether we agree with it or not. I am equally adamant that bishops and clerics must live their responsibility well, defending their flock from the wolves without bullying or abusing their sheep. I make the decisions as best I can with an informed conscience and rely on God to cover and correct my errors.

You probably will have situations where you have to make hard decisions that seem to defy authority. It would be well for all to spend some time studying what authority applies where, when it is legitimately exercised and when it is not. Then make your decision, taking full responsibility for the decision you make.

On the bright side, there are many honorable priests who will celebrate Mass privately without the temporal restrictions some bishops love to effect through their administrative authority in order curry favor with the world.

Inform your conscience well, give notice when an offense comes that you can’t abide, then live your conscience fully before God and man, taking full responsibility for what you do. Whether about defensive weapons or other restrictions, I suspect that every one of us is going to have to make these decisions in some cases going forward. It is not that God wants to trap us between a rock and a hard place, but that He wants all of us to think anew. We have gotten sloppy, cold, and sometimes cowardly. God is going to fix that by these trials.