QUOTATION: God is the Source of Authority

The gravest danger to American democracy is not from the outside; it is from the inside – the hearts of citizens in whom the light of faith has gone out. Keep God as the origin of authority and you keep the ethical character of authority; reject Him and the authority becomes power subject to no law except its own.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Whence Come Wars

QUOTATION: Today's Skepticism

The general rule is that nothing must be accepted on any ancient or admitted authority, but everything must be accepted on any new or nameless authority, or accepted even more eagerly on no authority at all.

-- G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Clerical Authority

We can’t not exercise the service of authority: leave everything be, not intervene, not speak the truth which can hurt but which clarifies and helps us to get back up. We then leave people in confusion for fear of hurting them or speaking a truth that is not at all popular and which goes against the ambient culture. This applies to bishops, priests and pastors. It is a greater charity to communicate a truth that alienates a person from us for a time, a time during which he can come to realize that we acted in his favour.

--Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Actualité et avenir du Concile oecuménique Vatican II

QUOTATION: God is the Source of Authority

There are many who believe that human beings, and in particular the government, have the right to violate divine laws whenever it seems expedient to do so. This kind of thinking caused innocent people to be interned in concentration camps, robbed of all their possessions, exiled, or murdered outright. Those who issued and carried out such orders, or merely approved of them, all forgot one thing: whenever a conflict arises between human and divine law, we must obey God rather than men. Those who govern this land chose to place themselves above the laws of God. They fail to realize that in doing so, they were undermining the foundations of their own authority.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Pastoral Letter, May 1945, cited in Memoirs, 1974

QUOTATION: The Church and Her Authority

When we speak of the Church—allow me this parenthesis—let us think of what she truly is. Let us not have an attenuated conception of her; let us not picture to ourselves a mere spiritual administration. Let us remember that she is herself a mystery, that she is the Mystical Body of Christ, a living person, at once divine and human, whose head is Christ and all of whose members the Holy Ghost joins together, the great Contemplative who aspires to beget all men unto eternal life, and all of whose movements—so far as the Church herself is concerned (whatever the human frailty of individuals may be)—proceed from divine wisdom and the most pure gifts of grace. We shall not then bargain over the terms of our allegiance, we shall not follow her like peevish children who have to be dragged along; we shall understand that her doctrinal authority is not limited to defining solemnly what one cannot deny without being a heretic, but extends, on the contrary, according to all the degrees and all the nuances that what one calls the ordinary magisterium of the Church admits of in the tone of its voice and the authority of its affirmations, to all that concerns the integrity of faith in souls.

--Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, 1958

QUOTATION: Ecumenical Councils

In Ecumenical Councils there are many lively debates and a profound search for the truth through reasoning, theological argument and council interventions; however once a subject has been debated, it is up to the Council Fathers – that is, the Bishops and especially the Pope who is the Chief of the Bishops – to decide, to reach a conclusion, to determine the mind of the Council. Once their determination has been made, everyone should acquiesce in it and accept it, not because of the arguments that were advanced in favor of the final determination, or the research that preceded it, but rather because of the authority of the Holy Spirit. Invisibly presiding at Ecumenical Councils, the Holy Spirit it is who really judges and determines by means of the mouths of His servants who have been established by Him as the Pastors of Christendom. All the reasoning, theological argument and council interventions are made, as it were, in front of the Church; while the actual decisions and determinations of the Council Fathers are made in the sanctuary, where the Holy Spirit does speak through the mouths of the visible heads of the local churches, just as Jesus Christ promised.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: The Church's Authority

It may be said that the Church has forfeited its early privileges, by allowing itself to remain in a state of sin and disorder which Christ never intended: for instance, "that from time to time there have been great corruptions in it, especially under the ascendancy of the Papal power: that there have been very many scandalous appointments to its highest dignities, that infidels have been bishops, that men have administered baptism or ordination, not believing that grace was imparted in those sacred ordinances, and that, in particular in our own country, heretics and open sinners, whom Christ would have put out of the Church, are suffered, by a sin on the part of the Church, to remain within it unrebuked, uncondemned." This is what is sometimes said; and I confess, had we not Scripture to consult, it would be a very specious argument against the Church's present power, now at the distance of eighteen hundred years from the Apostles. It would certainly seem as if, the conditions not having been fully observed on which that power was granted, it was forfeited. But here the case of the Jewish Church affords us the consoling certainty, that God does not so visit, even though He might, and that His gifts and calling "are without repentance." [Rom. xi. 29.] Christ's Church cannot be in a worse condition than that of Israel when He visited it in the flesh; yet He expressly assures us that in His day "the Scribes and Pharisees," wicked men as they were, "sat in Moses' seat," and were to be obeyed in what they taught; and we find, in accordance with this information, that Caiaphas, "because he was the high priest," had the gift of prophecy—had it, though he did not know he had it, nay, in spite of his being one of the foremost in accomplishing our Lord's crucifixion. Surely, then, we may infer, that, however fallen the Church now is from what it once was, however unconscious of its power, it still has the gift, as of old time, to convey and withdraw the Christian privileges, "to bind and to loose," to consecrate, to bless, to teach the Truth in all necessary things, to rule, and to prevail.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "The Church Visible and Invisible", Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 3

QUOTATION: Church Authority

Take away the authority of the Church, and neither Divine Revelation nor natural reason itself is of any use, for each of them may be interpreted by every individual according to his own caprice ... Do they not see that from this accursed liberty of conscience has arisen the immense variety of heretical and atheistic sects? ... I repeat: if you take away obedience to the Church, there is no error which will not be embraced.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Respect for Authority

If it be true that the world has lost its respect for authority, it is because it lost it first in the home.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Church Authority vs. Private Judgement

When you have contrived to persuade him that, for Catholics, the authority of the Church in matters of faith is not a self-evident axiom, but a truth arrived at by a process of argument, the Protestant controversialist has his retort ready. "You admit, then, after all," he says, "that a man has to use his own private judgment in order to arrive at religious truth? Why, then, what is the use of authority in religion at all? I had always supposed that there was a straight issue between us, you supporting authority and I private judgment; I had always supposed that you criticised me for my presumption in searching for God by the light of my imperfect human reason; it proves, now, that you are no less guilty of such presumption than myself! Surely your reproaches are inconsistent, and your distinctions unnecessary. If you use your private judgment to establish certain cardinal points of theology, the existence of God, the authority of Christ, and so on, why may not I use my private judgment to establish not only these, but all other points of theology--questions such as the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, or the Real Presence in the Eucharist? You can hardly blame me for using the very privileges which you have just claimed so eagerly for yourself."

I could not have imagined, if I had not heard it with my own ears, the accent of surprise with which Protestants suddenly light upon this startling discovery, that the belief we Catholics have in authority is based upon an act of private judgment. How on earth could they ever suppose we taught otherwise? I say nothing here of the grace of faith, which is the hidden work of God in our souls. But how could the conscious process by which we arrive at any form of the truth begin without an act of private judgment? I may, indeed, overcome by a kind of emotional crisis, surrender myself unreflectively to an influence imaginatively experienced; but that is not Catholicism, it is Protestantism; it is "conversion" in its crudest form. If I employ my reason at all; if I employ my reason only so far as to say "The Church says this, and the Church is infallible, therefore this must be true," even so I am using private judgment; it is my own reason which draws its conclusions from the syllogism. Reject private judgment? Of course Catholics have never rejected private judgment; they only profess to delimit the spheres in which private judgment and authority have their respective parts to play.

Is it really so difficult to see that a revealed religion demands, from its very nature, a place for private judgment and a place for authority? A place for private judgment, in determining that the revelation itself comes from God, in discovering the Medium through which that revelation comes to us, and the rule of faith by which we are enabled to determine what is, and what is not, revealed. A place for authority to step in, when these preliminary investigations are over, and say "Now, be careful, for you are out of your depth here. How many Persons subsist in the Unity of the Divine Nature, what value and what power underlies the mystery of sacramental worship, how Divine Grace acts upon the human will--these and a hundred other questions are questions which your human reason cannot investigate for itself, and upon which it can pronounce no sentence, since it moves in the natural not in the supernatural order. At this point, then, you must begin to believe by hearsay; from this point onwards you must ask, not to be convinced, but to be taught." Is it really so illogical in us, to fix the point at which our private judgment is no longer of any service? Are we really more inconsistent than the bather who steps out cautiously through the shallow water and then, when it is breast-high, spreads out his hands to swim?

--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927

QUOTATION: Authority

The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with “I think I heard somewhere, or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said such-and-such”, and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact.

-- G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Authority

Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority.

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

QUOTATION: God and the State

This kind of liberty, if considered in relation to the State, clearly implies that there is no reason why the State should offer any homage to God, or should desire any public recognition of Him; that no one form of worship is to be preferred to another, but that all stand on an equal footing, no account being taken of the religion of the people, even if they profess the Catholic faith. But, to justify this, it must needs be taken as true that the State has no duties toward God, or that such duties, if they exist, can be abandoned with impunity, both of which assertions are manifestly false. For it cannot be doubted but that, by the will of God, men are united in civil society; whether its component parts be considered; or its form, which implies authority; or the object of its existence; or the abundance of the vast services which it renders to man. God it is who has made man for society, and has placed him in the company of others like himself, so that what was wanting to his nature, and beyond his attainment if left to his own resources, he might obtain by association with others. Wherefore, civil society must acknowledge God as its Founder and Parent, and must obey and reverence His power and authority. Justice therefore forbids, and reason itself forbids, the State to be godless; or to adopt a line of action which would end in godlessness -- namely, to treat the various religions (as they call them) alike, and to bestow upon them promiscuously equal rights and privileges.

--Pope Leo XIII, Libertas Praestantissimum, 1888

QUOTATION: Conditional Faith Produces Conditional Catholics

Maybe people are led to think, the Church will change its position on this or that or the other thing. The "maybes" of conditionality produce conditional Catholics, and conditional Catholics are deprived of the joy of unqualified discipleship.

--Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, 'To Propose The Truth'