A Crisis of Authority

To day we live in a spiritual wasteland. We must ask ourselves how we got into this lamentable state?. This did not happen in a few years but has occurred gradually over many centuries. It has taken on a more rapid tempo in recent years because of a more public rejection by governments of divine reality, divine supremacy, divine authority.

What does authority mean?
The term derives from the word author, which means the originator, the origin.
The primary origin, the primary author, of everything is God, the Creator of everything.
The Creator expects His creatures to live and act in accordance with His directions for us, with His Will for us.

Man’s life can be reduced to two primary considerations –responsibilities and rights, including the right to exercise authority.
The responsibilities are primary and the rights are secondary and are bestowed in order to facilitate the carrying out of the responsibilities.

From the beginning of the Church, after it was given freedom by the Emperor Constantine, the Church was universally recognized as the supreme authority in matters spiritual, an authority conferred on it by Christ when He said “ All authority is given to Me in heaven and on earth : as the Father has sent Me I also send you : go therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and behold I will be with you all days even until the end of the world” : “And I will send the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, who will bring all things to your minds whatever I have commanded you”: “He that heareth you, heareth Me”.

This was not just some guru, some philosopher, some mere man, who made these statements : it was God the Creator Himself - whether millions believe it or not. With these words, Christ declares the duties, the responsibilities, of the Church and at the same time, declares the right of the Church to the teaching and ruling authority necessary for it to carry out these duties, these responsibilities.

The right to exercise authority constitutes a permission to do something and is attached, not to a person, but to a position, to an office held by a person. This authority, this right to rule and/or to teach, is bestowed to enable the holder of the office to carry out the responsibilities of the office.

The authority in civil life is to govern, to exercise some measure of direction, some measure of control, over citizens : it is exercised at various levels.

In religious life, authority is given to rule the Church at various levels and to teach, again at various levels, with certainty, the Truths of Revelation as revealed by Christ to His Church.

Papal authority derives in an unbroken succession from the first Pope, the apostle Peter : this authority resides in the office of the Papacy and not primarily in the person of the Pope.
The authority of the Catholic bishop likewise come from a direct, unbroken succession from the Twelve Apostles and resides in the office of bishop and not in his person.
The authority of the Catholic priest is imparted to each one at the time of his ordination and is an extension of the authority given to the bishop who ordains him and under whom he serves : again the authority resides in the office of the priest and not in his person : this authority to function as a priest - the priestly faculties - can be withdrawn from a priest by his bishop for due cause even though he still does, and always will, remain a priest - a laicized priest : there is no such thing as an ex-priest : he carries the indelible mark of his ordination all his life, in the same way that a validly-married person carries the indelible mark of matrimony until one spouse dies.

Authority is given by God to many other types of recipient and is exercised in many ways.

Authority over children is given by God directly to parents who can delegate some of this authority to teachers and civil authorities.With this parental authority goes the parental obligation to ensure that the child is brought up in accordance with God’s Will. The parents are answerable to God for the manner in which they fulfil this role.

Civil authority is given by God to governments at various levels: it is given to mayors, state governors, to presidents and kings. Christ said to Pilate – “You would not have this authority unless it was given to you from above”. Such civil authority does not derive from the citizens who elect persons to these positions : the citizens merely select the persons to whom God gives the authority to rule. Here also the authority goes with the position rather than with the person : when the person leaves office, he no longer has the authority. The authority carries with it the obligation to carry out his responsibilities in accordance with God’s Will and for the greater good of those over whom he exercises authority. Like parents, government office-holders at the various levels, are answerable to God for the manner in which they fulfil the responsibilities of their office : when a government office-holder acts in deliberate opposition to God’s Law, his authority becomes forfeit and it is the duty - in the case of an elected position - of the voters to vote him out of office or - in the case of an appointed position - of the entity that appointed him, to remove him from office : such removal must, of course, be by peaceful means.

Since the beginning of Christendom, the spiritual authority of the Church has been challenged from time to time by various individuals or groups, clerical and lay, but never on a broad scale or in a serious manner until the 11^th century.
The first serious challenge came with the Great East-West Schism in 1054 when the Patriarchate of Constantinople separated itself from the Church in Rome. This was essentially a pure challenge of authority, a rejection by the East of the administrative supremacy of Rome. There was no essential disagreement in matters of dogma or morality.

The next most serious challenge came with the Protestant Revolution in the early 1500s. As this evolved over a hundred or more years, it developed into a broad rejection of the teaching and legislative authority of the Church of Rome under the Papacy.
The Protestants declared that the Catholic Church had no authority to teach or legislate in matters of faith and morals, that such authority resided in the Scriptures and in the Scriptures only : they declared that the Church presided over by the Pope was not the custodian and interpreter of Christian Revelation, but that each individual was to reach his own conclusions based on his/her reading of the Scriptures and that the Holy Spirit would show him the truth directly.

This was undoubtedly a prescription for disaster. The Protestants were setting out on the journey of life as a ship sets forth on a voyage without a compass or chart.
Gradually over the ensuing centuries, dissidents, while they remained faithful to their readings of the Scriptures, though their belief structure included spiritual errors, retained a sufficiency of spiritual truth to enable them to retain and maintain in their personal lives and public institutions an adequate respect for the Christian Moral Law.

The third great challenge to Church authority came with the so-called Enlightenment which ushered in the French Revolution with its savage onslaught on all Church authority and institutions.
From this catastrophe came the false slogan triad of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ which has contributed greatly to the false concepts that have come to govern civil, religious and social life in our times.
Since the Enlightment, Protestants gradually began to lose their faith and respect for the Bible, and with this loss of faith came a disregard for the morality based upon it : they came to find reasons for justifying evil actions: they accepted the Benthamite concept that the end justifies the means: they came to reject the concept of absolute truth, preferring to accept the false concepts of personal autonomy and relativism under which each person can decide for himself what is right and what is wrong or under which right and wrong can be decided by discussion and democratic majority vote : this latter misconception can explain how the democratic majority vote of a Supreme Court and of a Parliamentary Congress favouring and promoting the merciless killing of millions of innocent and helpless prebirth or intrabirth infants, can be accepted by a seeming majority of the citizens of this country : what would have caused tremendous outrage and opposition by the public a few decades ago is now accepted blandly and even promoted.

The citizens now accord to their governments the spiritual authority they have denied to the Church and to the Bible. For this denial, mankind has paid and will pay ever more dearly.