Smashing Idols

The deadly danger of being more Catholic than the Church

There was a time, long ago now, when I never went into a church without a chapel veil on my head and never left the house without wearing a skirt or a dress.

I was in my early 30s then and, in the abstract, had good reasons for what I did. The Cliffs Notes version of those reasons is that I saw the chapel veil as a symbol of humility, reverence, and tradition. I saw the skirts and dresses as symbols of femininity, grace, and beauty. I saw both could be outward signs of inner realities, signaling to the world the importance of reverence and femininity. And I saw both also could be a sort of sacramental, helping me become more of what they signified—more humble, reverent, feminine, graceful, and beautiful.

For years, I wore that chapel veil and those skirts. They were, in a sense, my personal protest against a society which denies the sovereignty of God, the divinity of Christ, the reality of the Eucharist, and the difference between men and women.

But no longer. The veil came off in 2008. I still wear skirts and dresses, especially in the summer. But in the colder months, unless I’m dressing up, you’ll rarely see me wearing anything but jeans. Why?

 Simply put—because that chapel veil and those skirts made me a self-righteous ass.

Okay, that’s a little too simply put. It’s more accurate to say that wearing a chapel veil and never wearing jeans helped reinforce some of my besetting sins. They didn’t make me a self-righteous ass. But the devil did use them to encourage my natural inclination to be one.

Let me explain.

I am a type AAA choleric, which means I have strong and quick reactions to almost everything. I form hard opinions fast. I am, by nature, judgy. Super judgy. And I am passionate in my judgement. I also crave justice and struggle to extend mercy to others. I struggle even more to extend mercy to myself. Compassion, empathy, gentleness—these do not come naturally to me. Scrupulosity and rash judgement do. Which are habits of heart and mind that can make you a good op-ed writer, but not a good friend, wife, mother, or human being.

Early in my walk with Christ, I identified these tendencies and tried to overcome them. Thanks to the graces of the sacraments, I made progress. But then I went all in on the chapel veil and skirts. Day by day, that progress was undone.

When I donned the chapel veil, I didn’t grow in humility; I grew in pride. I believed I was doing this Catholic woman thing right, and everyone who did it differently did it wrong. I also became more vain. Instead of thinking about Jesus during Mass, I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about myself. What did people think of me wearing a chapel veil? Did they notice? Was I convicting them to wear one, too?

Forgoing pants produced similar results. I judged other women and their fashion choices everywhere I went. I thought myself wiser, better, and more feminine than others, based solely on what I wore. I thought myself more Catholic than others, based solely on what I wore. And it wasn’t good.

I’m not writing this to discourage you from wearing chapel veils and skirts. Wearing chapel veils and skirts might be the best decision possible for you. It might be helping you grow closer to Jesus and deepening the love in your womanly heart in all the ways I hoped it would for me.

But maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s making you self-righteous, too. Or maybe some other devotion, habit, or non-doctrinal belief you’ve adopted is doing that. Maybe something good that helps others grow closer to Jesus has become an idol for you? Maybe you’ve fallen into the same trap the devil set for me and have become more Catholic than the Church.

A Means to an End

There is an obvious danger in being less Catholic than the Church. Not believing the fullness of the Faith, compromising with the culture on the essentials of Christian life, and picking and choosing which of the Church’s teachings we follow is deadly. While doubt and questioning are a normal part of growing closer to Jesus, the willful rejection of God’s revealed truth is not. It kills the life of grace in us.

That being said, there is also real spiritual danger in being more Catholic than the Church, in equating personal preferences, optional disciplines, or our own beliefs with the moral law, and then judging ourselves and everyone else accordingly.

Satan may be a bore, but he is no fool. He knows our strengths and weaknesses inside and out, and if he can’t get us to fall into one trap, he will lay another. If there is no getting us to be less Catholic than the Church, he’ll try to get us to be more Catholic than the Church. Satan doesn’t care how he gets us to disregard the Church’s authority, as long as he gets us there.

Sixteen years ago, Satan realized that tempting me to be less Catholic than the Church was a losing battle. I know the Church’s teachings. I understand the Church’s teachings. I love the Church’s teachings. The intellectual coherency of the Faith brings me joy. And while I may struggle to live out some of those teachings, I know that’s my fault, not the teachings’ fault. It’s Original Sin doing its work in me.

So, because of that, the devil tried the opposite tact. He took things that are perfectly good in themselves and tempted me to believe that they weren’t just good, but necessary, essential, the very best for everyone. He also tempted me to focus on those things to the exclusion of far more important things—things like helping people know who Christ is and how He loves us. I gave into those temptations. Then, slowly, they did their damage in me.

After deciding I knew better than the Church’s Magisterium on skirts and chapel veils, I began focusing more on what else other Catholics—including priests and bishops—were doing wrong. As I did that, my anger at others—especially priests and bishops—grew. I freely shared my thoughts about other Catholics’ problems with more conviction than I shared the Kerygma, and when I did talk or write about the fundamentals of the Faith, I became harder and harsher in how I presented them.

Only God knows what damage I did during those years.

Only God knows what more damage I could have done, had I stayed on that path, judging others by standards which were my own, not the Church’s, and focusing more on the failings of broken human beings than on the saving love of Christ.

And only God knows how much damage so many Catholics are doing when we insist that to be a good Catholic woman you have to wear skirts or dresses. Or marry young. Or go to a certain form of the Mass. Or be a stay-at-home mom. Or have a certain number of children. Or parent in a certain way. Or use social media in a certain way. Or shop in a certain way. Or do anything in a certain way that isn’t required by the Church.

And there are lots of things that aren’t required by the Church.

Law and Freedom

God knows us. He knows us inside and out.  And He knows exactly what each of us needs to do to become the saint He made us to be.

Much of what we need to do is the same as what every other person needs to do. Receiving the sacraments and following the moral law, as spelled out in the Catechism, are non-negotiable.

But no person is the same and no journey to God is the same, which is why, once we move beyond the realm of sacraments and law, God gives us a lot more freedom to choose—to choose how we dress, where we work, what spiritual disciplines we adopt and what prayers we pray, the age at which we marry, how many children we have, the way we educate those children, the way we educate ourselves, and a thousand things more. God trusts us with these decisions. He expects us to exercise faith and reason in deciding what is best for us and our families. Thoughtful reflection and prayerful discernment, which integrates Church teaching with our own circumstances, is how we do that.

And we should do that. Each of us must work out our salvation with fear and trembling, making the best choices we can as we pursue holiness in a broken world. As we make those choices, though, we need to be on guard against confusing what can be good for some with what is necessary for all, as well as putting more faith in the words of a celebrity priest or celebrity pundit than in the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Doing that is a dangerous denial of the freedom God has given us. It is forgetting how God works differently with every individual. It’s also setting us in opposition to other faithful Catholics and the Magisterium, stirring up pride in our hearts and dividing us from the very Body we claim to love.

Now, all that being said, I do not think the most widespread problem in the Church today is people being more Catholic than the Church. Not by a longshot. Far more souls are intentionally led away from the fullness of truth by those who are “less Catholic” than by those who are “more Catholic.”

But, while more people may drift left of the Church’s heart, I suspect the devil rejoices a bit more when he convinces someone to drift right of the Church’s heart. Partly, because once he has done that, we start doing his work for him, pushing and pulling our fellow Catholics away from the Church as we waste our energy judging, confusing, guilting, and shaming one another, instead of proclaiming the saving truths of the faith we profess. Also, because that drift can be more subtle, making it harder for us to see. And what we can’t see in ourselves, we can’t correct in ourselves. We fool ourselves into believing we’re holier than everyone else and become hardened in our self-righteousness…like the devil himself.

Truth and Love

So, how do we avoid this trap? How do we exercise freedom, without making idols of our choices and preferences?

Equally important, how do we engage in discussions about womanhood, family, devotions, and culture—discussions which are important to have—without also impinging upon the freedom God has given others?

I don’t know. Catholics have been trying to figure this one out for almost 2,000 years, vacillating between Pelagianism and Donatism, Modernism and Jansenism. This isn’t a new problem. It’s as old as the Church herself.

But I do know it starts with knowing the Faith. Not Richard’s Rohr’s version of the faith or Rorate Coeli’s version of the Faith, but the actual Faith. What the Church teaches. And fortunately, that’s all written down. You don’t need to trust me or someone else on Instagram. You can go to the Catechism. You can go to papal encyclicals. You can read the actual documents from the Church whose authority you have made the decision to trust. The Church has taken the guess work out of it for you. That helps.

What also helps is thinking about our own failings and spiritual life more than thinking about anyone else’s. It’s easy to get caught up in blaming what’s wrong with the Church on the pope, the bishops, celebrity priests, or that heretical mom on Instagram. But we can’t do a darned thing about what’s “wrong” with everybody else. We can pray for others. And we should. But the best thing we can do for the Church is beg God for the grace to recognize and root out the planks in our own eyes. Because we can do a darned thing about those.

One way to do that is examen our conscience nightly, asking ourselves how well we have loved Christ and others that day. Have we failed in charity? Have we failed in generosity? Have we failed in kindness and compassion? Have we judged rashly, spoken unfairly, bore wrongs poorly, withheld forgiveness, refused to extend mercy, or nursed envy? Have we paid attention to Jesus and found time for Him?

Once we’ve answered those questions, we need to look at why we failed? What is leading us to choose sin instead of Christ? What wound needs to be healed? What fear needs to be overcome? What near occasion needs to be avoided? What idols need to be smashed?

Finally, we need to cultivate the virtues of gentleness and humility. When explaining the fundamentals of the faith and defined Church teaching, we need to remember we’re speaking to broken, struggling, hurting people in a broken, struggling, hurting world. It’s not enough to just speak the truth. We have to speak it in a way that helps people hear truth and respond to it. This includes acknowledging their hurt, acknowledging their confusion, and acknowledging that the life of faith is, indeed, challenging. It also means not being unnecessarily provocative. What wins followers and likes is not necessarily the same as what wins souls.

And when it comes to talking about things that aren’t defined, things that we think are good, helpful, or important, but aren’t doctrine, it can help to do two things.

First, it can help to qualify. It can help to say things like, “What’s been helpful for me…”, “What I’ve experienced…”, “Our family has been blessed by…”, “It’s not a question of doctrine,”, “It’s not a salvation issue,”, “Different people will have different experiences,” and dozens of other statements like that, which check our inclination to pride and don’t force the person to whom we’re speaking to play defense.

Second, it can help to say, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know the right answer.” I don’t know what you should do.” “I don’t know why this has to be so hard.” Because often, we don’t know. Learning to temper our opinions with some acknowledgment of the mystery of God’s ways and refraining from judging what is not ours to judge will, in the long run, do more for our souls and others’, than all the bombastic pontificating on Twitter.

Truth is simple. But life is complicated. And the world is a mess. I get the temptation to take hard stands on questions of liturgy, culture, family, and more. When everything is chaos, how can we not want to stand on the firmest ground available? How can we not want to hold fast to the most traditiony tradition we can find?

But people are dying spiritually all around us because they don’t know Jesus. They don’t know how much they are loved. They don’t know how great His mercy is. They don’t even know what love and mercy are. They are drowning in pain and ignorance. We can’t lose sight of that. We can’t get caught up in the weeds, giving all our energy to fights that won’t save the drowning…and just might damn us.

What I’m Reading (When I Manage to Stay Awake)

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. This month has been insane. Between sick babies, sick babysitters, and sick me, I have barely managed to keep my house afloat, let alone read a book. But I did manage to get through a few online essays. Here are a couple of the best.

Searching for Plato with my 7-Year-Old Daughter is a beautiful reflection on the power of both the classics and a father’s time to shape a child’s mind. It’s written by one of my favorite essayists, Thomas Chatterton Williams.

As Afghanistan Sinks into Destitution, Some Sell Children to Survive is as grim of a read as the title sounds. It’s an important piece, though, and worth your time (and prayers).

Ted Lasso. Okay, it’s not a book. I’m not reading it. And it’s super vulgar. So, if salty sailor talk and a a very 2021 understanding of human sexuality isn’t something you want to deal with, stay away. But, this streaming Apple+ show is not only the funniest show I’ve seen in a long time, but also offers some surprisingly insightful thoughts on virtue, fatherhood, and power. Plus, the episodes are only 30 minutes or so long, which means we can almost always get one in between the two hour saga that is bedtime here and me needing to collapse into my own bed.

What My Family is Reading

Toby is currently obsessed with Blueberries for Sal, the 1948 children’s classic (and Caldecott Honor Medal winner), and makes us read it to him nightly before bed. It’s not strictly a fall book … but they do talk a lot about canning and getting fat for the winter, so somehow it seems seasonally appropriate.

Little Blue Truck’s Halloween. Just being honest. It’s not my favorite of the Little Blue Truck books, but Toby likes it just the same, so we read it again and again … and again…and again…and again.

What I’m Cooking

Bacon and Brussels Sprouts Frittata. I shared this Smitten Kitchen recipe on Instagram, but in case you missed it, I’ll share it here again. It was a favorite of every one in the family this month, and I will definitely be making it again.

Truffle Ravioli with Pancetta, Sage, and White Wine Cream Sauce

Okay, that sounds 1,000 times fancier than it actually was. But with as insane as the past month has been, I’ve been dressing up all the seasonal Aldi ravioli to feed my family on the cheap and quick. This was one of my favorite dressing up experiments.

Serves: 4

Prep Time: 5

Cook Time: 15

Ingredients:

• 2 Packges Aldi Truffle Ravioli (or mushroom ravioli)

• 1 onion, minced

• 4 ounce Pancetta, diced

• 1/3 cup chicken broth

• 1/2 cup white wine

• 3 Tablespoons butter

• 1 teaspoon Herbs de Provence

• 2 Tablespoons chopped fresh sage

• 1/2 cup Parmesan, shredded

• 1/2 cup heavy cream

• Extra Virgin Olive Oil

• Salt and Pepper to taste

Instructions

1. Fill a medium sized pot halfway with water, salt generously and bring to a boil; add ravioli and cook 5-7 minutes or until tender; drain; return to the pot; drizzle lightly with olive oil to prevent sticking; cover to keep warm;

2. Meanwhile, heat 2 Tablespoons of oil in a large. deep sided skillet; add onion, with a pinch of salt and pepper, and cook until golden (5 minutes); add pancetta and cook until it begins to crisp (5 minutes more); remove from pan and cover to keep warm;

3. Into the same hot pan, add chicken broth and wine to deglaze the pan; scrape up any browned bits from the bottom with a spatula; cook for about one minute;

4. Add the cream, sage, Herbs de Provence, and Parmesan to the sauce; cook until heated through (about 2 minutes;

5. Add pancetta and onions back into the sauce; check for seasonings, adding salt and pepper if necessary; add ravioli to pan and toss to coat;

6. Serve immediately.

Newsy Bits

In case you missed my Instagram announcement, I am authoring a new series of children’s books with Scott Hahn. I’ll be taking some of his best-selling books for adults and turning them into books for kids, ages 3-7. The goal is to make the story of salvation history and truths of the Faith accessible to children through fun, engaging, (and well-rhyming) story-telling. I’ve signed a six book contract and the first of these books, on Mama Mary, will be availably by Easter. I’ll keep you updated when pre-orders become available.

Last August, Father Dave Pivonka’s Wild Goose Ministries, filmed an 8-part special with me on my newest book, Letters to Myself from the End of the World. That is due to be released online later this month, and will stream for free on their website, so keep an eye on Instagram for updates.

Beautycounter has launched 12 of its limited edition Holiday sets and is offering free shipping to everyone through the end of the month. First time customers also get 20 percent off their first purchase with the code CLEANFORALL20. My favorite set so far is the gorgeous Countertime Deluxe Mini Set, which is the smaller version of their skincare line that changed my skin. If you are ready to make the switch to clean beauty or need help picking out the perfect gifts for yourself and others, I would love to help you. Just email me at estimpson@sbcglobal.net.