SIT ANATHEMA! SIT! GOOD DOG.

If you are not good at something it is best to admit it and move on to more constructive things. The same advice would do well for the Church.

We are not good at marketing ourselves.

We aren’t.

We are not good at wording things. Well, that is not exactly true. We are very, very good at wording things as long as you agree with the definition of the words that the Magisterium uses and understand the concepts behind certain phrases that are used in Church circles. Those who write most of the official things for the Church could never get a job in a local newspaper. Half of every paper would be apologies and corrections for the previous edition. Not that what they say was incorrect, but the way in which something is said is open to misinterpretation by those not using language in quite the same way.

One perfectly good word (that I happen to like) that does not work so well anymore is dogma. To the kennel with it! Perhaps the reason it does not seem to go down the collective gullet so well is because we have not explained it properly. If someone said they did not believe in a particular dogma they might be told, “But you have to or you cannot be Catholic!” “Who says?” might be the response to which the very well intentioned, budding apologist might say, “Because Rome said so!”

Is it any wonder people mislabel dogma as “man made laws, rules, and ideas?” But dogma is not a bunch of guys sitting around deciding what everybody needs to believe. It is the collective knowledge that we have of God. It is formal stating of revelation (God revealing Himself and His mission to us.) It is the result of the careful study of Scripture and Tradition. (Tradition being another word that is wildly misunderstood. See how we get into trouble?)

For example, our central dogma is the dogma of the Trinity. Thus did God reveal himself to us. To not believe in the Trinity is to put one’s self outside of not only the Catholic Church but Christianity in general.

Problem number 2: Say you do not believe in a particular dogma. It is said that you are anathema. You are kicked out of the club. The natural reaction might be, “Says who?” To which our earnest budding apologist might respond, “The pope!” Well, that is not exactly true (while at the same time sorta true.)

Look at it this way: One of my favorite professors in the seminary said, “You can only change the rules of the game so much until you find you are playing another game.” So you want to play basketball. But you want to play it with a ball with pointy ends, so that means you can’t dribble, and you decide that to make a point you have to run the ball into an end zone. You can call it basketball all you want but the expert in basketball will say, “You have changed the essence of the game so much that you are playing a different game.”

Dogma is our basic knowledge of God. To reject that revelation of Him is to change the rules to such a degree that you are playing a different game. Rome does not decide this, the pope does not decide this, this is the treasure that the Church has been given of which an individual has chosen not to partake. The big bad Church did not kick them out. They left even if they did not realize it. Dogma helps them (us) realize it. As Russell Shorto said of it, “Dogma wasn’t a dirty word – it was ground. Dogma was conceived not as an external shackle but as the living source that made knowledge of truth possible in the first place.”

Fixing our language. This is where you come in. The Church cannot change her language at society’s whim or one document would not be able to speak to another document without being thoroughly confusing. But we who love her as God’s instrument for His mission on earth must come to understand her language and interpret it for others.