It is common in today’s world to find Catholics who openly disagree with core Catholic teaching. We all know people who say that they are Catholic, but who don’t come to Mass on Sunday — they only come on Christmas and Easter, if they come at all.
We all have heard or read about politicians who say that they are ardent and practising Catholics, but who publicly support laws that go directly against some of the most basic tenets of morality as taught by the Catholic Church.
And if we are honest with ourselves, we even recognise in our own lives this same tendency.
We call ourselves practising Catholics, and yet we spend more time working on our favorite hobbies than on our prayer life. We spend more time becoming an expert in our profession than in our faith, and we tolerate in our own lives hidden habits of selfishness and sin while we criticise other people for their more visible faults.
If we think about it a little bit, we see very clearly that this contradiction between what we believe and how we live is not a good thing.
It is like the second son in this Sunday’s parable. He impressed his dad with fancy words and a good show of healthy obedience, but underneath the surface he was still living for his own self-centered gratification, not for the greater good of his mission in the Father’s kingdom.
When we fall into that contradiction, it is no wonder that we don’t grow in our experience of Christ’s love and grace, and it is no wonder that we don’t grow in wisdom, interior peace, and the deep Christian joy that we thirst for. Faith, if it’s real, makes a real impact on our lives. When it doesn’t, our spiritual growth is stunted.
