True Obedience In The Church

Aquinas says that man makes a perfect offering of himself not by giving up external goods, not even by giving up family ties and marriage, but only by giving up his own will. (p4)

Clearly, the obedience of one man to another mere man is not, and can never be, unconditional or, to use the more common language, "blind."

it is not obedience that comes first, but truth and charity; … In the order of being, there is first the truth, and the love of this truth; and then, obedience is the only appropriate response to truth, the only appropriate response of the will to truth that is to be loved for its own sake.

For obedience to be able to be given, there are two fundamental conditions that must always be present, either explicitly or implicitly. First, there is trust. Trust is based on a belief that the superior loves us with Christian charity and wills our good, or at the very least does not seek our injury or destruction… Second, there is what might be called rightful subordination.

God alone, … deserves absolute and unconditional obedience, because He is worthy of all our trust; He has no superior, but is Himself the source and model and righteousness of all superiors, and He never wills anything other than our good.

Obedience, then, is not given in a vacuum.

Christian obedience is never a form of unthinking servility. We have brains for a reason. Christian obedience is an act of love. It's a free gift of the self, and when obedience to authority becomes mechanical and excessive, or worse, if it serves a bad end, it crushes the spirit.

obedience is beautiful because it is always obedience to GOD, whether immediately or mediately.

If one has a serious and well-founded doubt about whether the human command is compatible with the divine or natural law, one should not obey it. To say otherwise would be to say that in a case where we fear we might be committing a mortal sin, or even a venial sin, we should go ahead and do it lest we offend our superior.

Aquinas distinguishes between three kinds of obedience: one that is "sufficient" for salvation, where one obeys what one must; another that is "perfect," whereby a religious vows himself to obey every lawful command given to him, no matter how onerous or displeasing; and finally, "indiscreet obedience," which "obeys even in matters unlawful."

Leo XIII echoes his master when he says in his encyclical Diuturnum Illud: There is no reason why those who so behave themselves should be accused of refusing obedience; for, if the will of rulers is opposed to the will and the laws of God, they themselves exceed the bounds of their own power and pervert justice; nor can their authority then be valid, which, when there is no justice, is null.

it will always be unreasonable to choose the merely individual good to the detriment of the common good. If the two come into conflict, the only reasonable thing to do is to choose the common good.

the common good does not automatically take care of itself; it requires someone to care for it, act explicitly on its behalf, and coordinate individuals for its pursuit and its defense. … [authority] is born to serve and promote the shared good of many.

The Church's common good is the divine life of Jesus Christ, her sovereign Head — the superabundant grace of His divinized soul, shared with His members through the illumination of the intellect by revelation and the inflaming of the heart by the supernatural charity of His Heart — and the divinization of souls by the sacramental life and prayer (chiefly the solemn, formal, public worship we call the sacred liturgy)

In the realm of the liturgy in particular, we must see the traditional rites of the Church as not merely human works but works conjointly of God and men — of the Church moved by the Holy Spirit.