Experts Discover what Catholics have known for Centuries

Experts Discover what Catholics have known for Centuries

There are three ways of knowing anything, reason, belief and experience. Believing what others say accounts for probably eighty percent of our total knowledge. We have been trained as children to look for and to trust the experts, the teacher, the counselor, the news, the textbook writers and various celebrities who are experts at drawing attention to themselves. The assumption being that the experts are more knowledgeable than ordinary people and we also assume they have a desire to reveal the truth about their subject matter so that it will benefit mankind. Saint Paul warned about the so-called ‘wisdom’ of the experts in his first letter to the Corinthians. 

“Consider your own calling, brothers and sisters.Not many of you were wise by human standards,not many were powerful,not many were of noble birth.Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise,and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world,those who count for nothing,to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God” 1 Cor 1:26-31. 

Saint Paul had a very clear understanding of the human person. He knew that every so-called expert is also a fallen human being who, whether they realize it or not, is subject to the effects of Original Sin including the bias of a faulty worldview. Because we each have a fallen human nature we are lacking moral integrity, immortality, infused knowledge and impassibility. We also are born in exile from God and without divine life or sanctifying grace. We lack the light of supernatural faith, the guide of supernatural hope and the desire for the good of the other through supernatural love. 

It would be foolish to put one’s trust into the authority of such a damaged individual regardless of how much natural intellect they have been given or how much they have studied their particular subject matter. While we love science in its pure form as a tool to discovering God's creative genius, at the very least we should remain wary and skeptical of our contemporary experts just as Saint Paul was of his. 

If you’re Catholic the primary authority and source of truth is Jesus. Secondly, we rely on the authority that Jesus passed on to his apostles when he said, “Whoever listens to you, listens to me” (Lk 10:16) and “I will give you the keys of the Kingdom, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven…” (Mt 16:19). Today we have the unbroken chain of apostolic succession in the teachings of the Magisterium (Teaching Office) which are congruent with Scripture and Tradition which makes up the Deposit of Faith. Even though the moral credibility of the bishops may be damaged, the perennial teachings of the Church remain. We are not called to be blind sheep but wide eyed, wise and thoughtful as we give our assent of faith to the whole system of checks and balances inherent in our Catholic Faith. We can be ‘thinking Catholics’ harmonizing the balance between faith and reason as if they were two wings that we use to ascend to the truth.

The magisterium of the Catholic Church has never insisted on the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as a matter of doctrinal obligation. Many popes have publicly venerated the Shroud including Pope Francis. For these kind of things the Church relies on the Sensus Fidei or 'the sense of the faithful'.  Recently Pope Francis said, 'When you want to know 'what' Holy Mother Church believes, go to the magisterium, because it is in charge of teaching it to you, but when you want to know 'how' the Church believes, go to the faithful people."

If we were merely people of the world without Magisterial guidance, Divine Revelation or the Deposit of Faith, we would probably consider worldly, fallen experts to be worthy of our trust since they have ‘evolved further than we have’ at least in their particular area of expertise. We would have a pelagian view of the human person which states that humans are able to achieve material or spiritual greatness on their own without grace, without God, without the Church and without Revelation. Modern day pelagianism depends on the chief pillar of scientism: human experts telling the foolish and the unwise how to think. Experts have become the new ‘Teaching Office’ whose declarations they have bound on earth have also been bound in the minds of the masses until they are inevitably, remarkably without shame, proven false. 

This modern day neo-pelagian heresy has been exposed recently when news broke that the experts have now confirmed that the Shroud of Turin is in fact 2000 years old and originated in the area of Jerusalem. It only took 36 years for the experts to acknowledge that the 1988 carbon dating done on a swatch of the Shroud which supposedly showed that the Shroud was a medieval forgery was actually wrong. For those whose faith in the Shroud never waivered, we delight in the words of Saint Paul,  “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise,and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong.”

The problem is there is no shame on the part of the experts because there is no mechanism built into the worldy, secular ‘magisterium of the the wise’.  to say, “Oops, sorry we were wrong’. Instead of humble recognition that scientists got it  wrong, there is a weird pretension that what they have said has always been true. The thing is, in the minds and hearts of those who trust in the world, the truth is subject to constant revision as it is ever evolving and conveniently fluid.

Whether the Shroud of Turin is really the burial cloth of Jesus does not make or break our faith. For those who have accepted it as authentic regardless of the errant opinion of experts and scientists, there was never any doubt. Catholics have long accepted, even before modern science, that it is an amazing, photographic relic that defies science. All the buzz and hype about the recent discoveries is just background noise just like in 1988.

It doesn’t matter what experts of the world say because their scope and vision will always fall short of the miraculous and the supernatural. Of course faith and science are congruent (when everyone is honest and sets aside their religious bias). As Pope John Paul II said when it comes to the relationship between faith and reason, 'The truth cannot contradict the truth'. While for some the scientific findings may excite a renewed interest in the Shroud, when it comes to our God-given faith in the redemptive death of Christ they have no authority. In the words of Saint Paul, their credibility as an authority in the area of religion has been ‘reduced to nothing’ and for that we ought to be thankful.