To endure personal suffering we need a change of mind and heart, to think the way the Church thinks. St. Paul refers to it as putting on the "mind of Christ".
Flannery O’Connor in her conversion to Catholicism spoke of the glorious freedom she experienced in being delivered from the “tyranny of her intellect.” Fides ut intelligam! That has become my experience. It is the paradox of true intellectual freedom by submission to “the church’s teaching.” It is a glorious freedom, not only in the mind’s love for God, but in the vocation of the priest in theological and spiritual formation of disciples of Jesus.
This theological conversion thus is not first of all a conversion to the peculiar Catholic beliefs that my inquirers challenge me about: What about Mary? What about purgatory? What about contraception? Rather it is a conversion to the faithfulness of Christ’s gift to the Church of an authentic authority to bind and to loose. At its deepest it is a question of pneumatology even more than ecclesiology—how does the Spirit of Truth actually function in the Church? Whatever complexities and seeming incongruities may be discerned, the Magisterium is (at minimum) a reasonable and practicable answer to the question of Truth that is trustworthy; at best, it is what the Church proclaims it to be: the provision by Christ of the gift of unerring guidance to his people.
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