Conviction or Compulsion, Fr Joseph Welch responds

Fr Alvan Ibeh, who has a regular column in the Diocesan paper and website, titled Voice of Hope, asked readers in his latest feature, “Are you following Jesus out of conviction or out of compulsion?”. Fr Joseph Welch, parish priest at St Pancras in Ipswich, responds.

Fr Alvan concludes his most recent Voice of Hope column on the diocesan website (August 31) by asking readers, ‘What do you think? Are you following Jesus out of conviction or out of compulsion?’ But perhaps it is not a matter of either conviction or compulsion. Maybe we Catholics follow Our Lord through conviction and compulsion.

At the moment of creation, God gave to the human race the gift of free will, not – as many might think – so that we could choose between good and evil but so that we could choose the best good available at any one time. Which is the best good, the best way to serve God, amongst all the choices before me at this particular moment in time? Our Lord’s ‘if’ in the passage quoted (Mt 16:24) is less about whether we choose to follow Him and more about what the conditions of becoming a disciple actually involve. What Our Lord is saying, according to St John Chrysostom’s commentary on this verse, is ‘you will not be able to be saved unless you suffer and die, and renounce your life always.’ Pope St Gregory the Great adds, in his commentary, ‘For unless a man departs from himself, he does not draw near to Him who is above him.’ Our Lord is not issuing an invitation, or putting the conditional tense, but highlighting the consequences of becoming a disciple.

Choosing to become a disciple will indeed, we hope, involve a delight in our service of the Lord. In an ideal world, all Catholics would hasten to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day, filled, as this sense of delight implies, with piety. Piety (or godliness or holiness, as it is sometimes called) is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (Is 11:2). It is the gift by which the individual is so gladdened in his service of, and love for, God that he undertakes that service in a spirit of supernatural joy. This was the case with all the saints. But being filled with piety does not remove from us the obligation to give to God what we owe Him.

Justice is one of the four cardinal virtues by which we give to others what we owe them. We owe our neighbour common respect and courtesy, and, in the context of Christian virtue, charity. ‘Religion’ is also a virtue. It is a subset of justice and is the virtue by which we give to God what we owe God. All creatures owe to their creator praise and homage, worship and adoration, acts fulfilled by insensate and inanimate creatures through their being what they were created to be, and doing what they were created to do. Rational creatures (angels and people) adore God through acts of the will, as Fr Alvan points out. Yet God still imposed upon Moses and the People of Israel the Commandment to ‘Keep holy the sabbath day,’ a commandment which the Catholic Church has always taught is fulfilled by going to Mass and abstaining from servile labour. Certainly, to fulfil this obligation with joy in our hearts rather than through a sense of dutiful drudgery is a greater gift to God on our part than otherwise. But this does not take away from the fact that fulfilling a duty, even without joy in our hearts, is still an act of worship and a far greater thing to do than refusing to fulfil an obligation.

So, perhaps it is not either/or. Perhaps we are called by God both to delight in our acts of worship, as did the saints through the gift of piety, and at the same time to fulfil an obligation placed upon us by God Himself, and taught us, consistently, by the Church He founded. I do not know whether God ever promised heaven to anyone simply because he or she delights in God. He most certainly did promise heaven to those who fulfil their God-given duties.

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