Several months ago, I had an argument online with a faithful Catholic. The issue was that he had lunch and then went to mass. His devotion was not planned. The priest distributed communion fifty-five minutes after the man finished his lunch and the man decided he could not receive. The Church requires an hour.

I explained that God was not that exact and that he could have received communion.

He responded by citing canon law and that I was wrong that he could not have possibly received communion for another five minutes and, therefore, he the more faithful of the two of us was the better Catholic. I do not know if this kind of thinking goes on in Europe, but it is rampant in the United States. This is an example of what is killing our Catholic witness.

This intensely law based concept of Catholicism makes it hard for us to do what ultimately is our vocation: love one another. You cannot be legalistic and loving at the same time.

Strangely enough this issue raised its ugly head another time. I was with a group of Brazilian Catholics attending a Catholic Festival in Framingham Massachusetts. The priest who was going to celebrate mass is internationally known and my experience is that he did not celebrate a mass in less than an hour and a half. As we were preparing to find a place to sit for mass, a friend offered us all a cookie apiece. We took some and were eating the cookies before mass maybe ninety minutes before we were to receive communion. An older woman approached us and chided us for not observing our fast. (Again this was despite the fact that in both cases the faithful knew that I am a priest.) The Brazilians told me that they had never seen such a thing as the behavior of that woman. Again, she reduced the whole concept of our faith, and likewise incorrectly, to a legalistic form of living the faith.

Saint Augustine said that in all things we must have charity, a teaching that I work hard to follow. That means we must be charitable to ourselves and to each other as well. Neither case reflects an understanding of that level of charity. We are not being charitable to ourselves if we refuse to receive communion for the sake of five minutes. Nor it is charitable to openly reprimand others without knowing all the facts and without understanding whether it is your place to do the reprimand.

I am sure I am going to receive letters chiding me on both points, so be it. Yet, when our faith is reduced to just following rules, then we miss the point of the faith in the first place. This was Jesus’ issue with the Pharisees. They were good at following rules but not so good at treating others as God had called them and us to do. Rule following is easy, living the faith as Christ called us to do is hard. Yet, one is a dead faith of rules, and the other is a living faith of passion. If we are going to live our faith we need to build our passion upon the rules, but not make it our passion to follow rules.

One witnesses to no one and the other brings the radical nature in the gospel to life.

from Being Catholic Agents for Change by Fr. Robert J Carr. Link is not affiliated with the New Song Community or the Archdiocese of Boston