The Catholic Church and Christ are Awful.
That’s right… I said it: The Catholic Church and Christ Are Just Awful
And, depending on the century you’re standing in, such remarks are either a devastating insult or the highest possible compliment. Unfortunately for modern critics, the word awful has a longer memory than they do. And thus begins our examination of the necessity of the Church’s Magisterium, Tradition and memory…
Before it was demoted to meaning “terrible customer service” or “that movie everyone pretends they liked,” awful meant full of awe—that unsettling mixture of fear, reverence, and wonder experienced when a finite creature encounters something overwhelmingly greater than itself. Thunderstorms were awful. Kings were awful. God was awful.¹
Today, of course, we prefer our gods approachable, relatable, very huggable and ideally in lockstep with what we already believe. Awe has been rebranded as trauma, and authority as abuse. So when the Church insists on teaching fixed truths with a straight face, the only word left in our diminished vocabulary is one: awful.
Once again, yes. Exactly.
I. The Word Awful and the Death of Transcendence
Etymologically, awful comes from awe + -ful. Awe itself descends from Old English ege and Old Norse agi, meaning fear, dread, terror, reverence—often all at once.² Awe assumed hierarchy. It assumed danger. It assumed the universe was not a suggestion box.
In Middle English and Early Modern English, awful retained this meaning. One spoke comfortably of the “awful majesty of God,” the “awful judgment,” or the “awful presence of the Almighty.” These were not rhetorical flourishes; they were metaphysical statements. God was not “nice.” God was real.
The semantic shift occurred gradually, but not mysteriously. As Western man grew increasingly uncomfortable with divine authority—especially authority that could not be voted out—the emotional content of awe became embarrassing. Fear was pathologized. Reverence was democratized. Judgment was canceled. By the 19th century, awful had been linguistically neutered. By the 20th, it simply meant “very bad.”³
Language followed theology downhill.
II. Why Modern Man Hates Awe (and Calls It Toxic)
Awe is deeply offensive to the modern psyche because it implies three intolerable truths:
You are not the highest authority.
You are accountable to something outside yourself.
Reality does not care about your preferences.
A Church that claims divine authority is therefore not merely incorrect; it is rude. A Church that says, “This is true regardless of your feelings,” commits the unforgivable sin of certainty.
Hence the contemporary fantasy that Christianity would finally flourish if only the Church would abandon dogma, soften moral claims, decentralize authority, and let every age reinvent the faith in its own image. This proposal has been tested extensively.
It does not work.
Christianity without awe becomes therapy. Christianity without authority becomes autobiography. Christianity without memory becomes a motivational podcast with candles.
III. Christ: Not a Brand Ambassador
The central problem for modern Christianity is that Christ Himself was awful.
He did not workshop His messaging. He forgave sins by authority, demanded repentance, warned of judgment, spoke casually about hell, and described Himself as the exclusive path to salvation. When He calmed storms, the disciples did not applaud; they panicked. Scripture records their reaction succinctly: “They were filled with great fear.”⁴ In short, they were full of awe.
This was not a misunderstanding. It was the response to holiness.
Christ did not inspire awe accidentally. He inspired it because He revealed the structure of reality: moral, hierarchical, ordered, and final. He did not negotiate truth. He proclaimed it.
Any Church claiming continuity with such a Christ is doomed to be awful—unless it lies or distorts.
IV. Why We Need a Magisterium
Consider the sentence:
“I didn’t say you stole the money.”
Seven words. No metaphors. No theology degree required. And yet this sentence is a semantic minefield.
Depending on emphasis alone, it can mean at least seven distinct—and contradictory—things:
I didn’t say you stole the money
→ Someone else accused you. I’m innocent.I didn’t say you stole the money
→ I implied it heavily, but technically, I didn’t say it.I didn’t say you stole the money
→ I wrote it, texted it, nodded knowingly, or told everyone except you.I didn’t say you stole the money
→ Someone stole it. Just not you.I didn’t say you stole the money
→ You “borrowed” it in a morally creative way.I didn’t say you stole the money
→ You took some money. Let’s not be dramatic.I didn’t say you stole the money
→ You stole something else entirely, which is a separate conversation.
Same sentence. Same words. Same order. Radically different meanings. Hat tip: Patrick Madrid
Now imagine insisting that this sentence, written down, separated from its speaker, tone, and context, could be interpreted correctly and authoritatively by anyone, at any time, without reference to an authoritative interpreter.
That is not a thought experiment. That is Protestantism.
Scripture Is Harder Than This Sentence
Sacred Scripture is not seven words long. It spans centuries, languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek), literary genres, cultural assumptions, rhetorical conventions, and theological controversies. It contains poetry, law, prophecy, apocalypse, irony, hyperbole, narrative compression, and polemic.
And yet modern Christianity frequently insists that every individual reader is equally competent to determine its meaning, guided only by sincerity and the private assistance of the Holy Spirit—who, inconveniently, appears to inspire mutually exclusive conclusions.
This is how one Bible produces:
baptismal regeneration and baptism-as-symbol,
the Real Presence and “just bread,”
salvation that can be lost and salvation that cannot,
faith formed by charity and faith alone,
apostolic authority and total ecclesial anarchy.
Apparently, the Holy Spirit has developed a routine fondness for contradiction.
Language Changes. Meaning Drifts. Authority Is Required.
Here is the crucial point modern readers prefer not to confront:
Words do not remain stable over time.
We already admitted this in Section I when we watched awful collapse from “awe-inspiring” into “terrible.” No conspiracy was required. Cultural instincts shifted. Emotional reactions changed. The word followed.
Why, then, do we pretend Scripture is immune to the same phenomenon?
If a single English sentence can fracture into seven meanings within the same room, in the same year, among native speakers—what do you think happens to ancient texts over two millennia?
Idioms die. Emphases invert. Moral assumptions evaporate. Terms acquire new connotations or lose old ones entirely. To deny this is not piety; it is linguistic illiteracy.
This is why Christ did not leave behind a book. He left behind the Catholic Church.
Christ Left an Interpreter
Before there was a New Testament, there was authority.
Christ taught orally. He commissioned apostles. He gave them the authority to bind and loose, to teach in His name, and to be heard as though He Himself were speaking. Scripture emerged from this authority; it did not create it.
This matters because interpretation always follows authority, never the other way around.
A Magisterium exists because meaning requires continuity. Someone must be able to say, in the year 2026, “This means what it meant in 325, 451, 1215, and 1545—no more and no less.” Without that tether, Christianity becomes a semantic improvisation.
The Catholic Church claims—not modestly, but coherently—that she can trace her interpretive authority through the centuries, publicly, document by document, council by council, bishop by bishop, without doctrinal contradiction.
That claim is either false or devastating. Reason suggests the latter.
Interpretation Without Memory Is Guesswork
Absent a Magisterium, interpretation becomes a psychological exercise. What does this passage mean to me? What does it resonate with? How does it feel in my context?
Return to our sentence:
“I didn’t say you stole the money.”
If no authoritative speaker can clarify meaning, interpretation collapses into preference. Everyone hears what they want. Everyone is sincere. Everyone disagrees.
This is why Christianity without a Magisterium does not converge over time; it fragments. Every generation “rediscovers” the gospel and somehow discovers something the previous nineteen centuries missed.
The Catholic Church, irritatingly, refuses to allow that.
She insists that meaning is not reinvented but received. That doctrine develops organically but cannot reverse itself. That interpretation must be accountable to what came before.
As John Henry Newman observed, true development preserves identity the way growth preserves a living body. A child becomes an adult; he does not become a different species.
The Magisterium Chooses Meaning Over Chaos
The Magisterium exists because Christ’s words matter, and words require guardians.
It is institutional memory that prevents doctrine from drifting the way vocabulary does. It is the reason Catholic Christianity can still say, with confidence, “This is what we have always meant” in a world that treats permanence as a vice.
To modern ears, this sounds authoritarian.
To rational ears, it sounds necessary.
Because without a living, continuous, historically grounded authority, Christianity becomes a seven-word sentence shouted into the void, endlessly reinterpreted, never resolved, and thereby emptied of meaning altogether.
The Magisterium does not limit understanding.
It makes understanding possible.
I’ll say it again: The Catholic Church and Christ are awful.
She inspires fear before comfort, reverence before familiarity, obedience before self-expression. She does not update Truth for relevance. She insists on memory in an age of amnesia.
And that is precisely why she will endure—if even as a Remnant.
Because only something vast, immovable, and terrifyingly real—can shatter illusions, humble pride, and save a world drunk on itself.
And that is why Christ and His Church are, in the fullest and most offensive sense of the word,
awful.
Endnotes
Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “awful,” historical definitions and semantic development.
Etymology Online, s.v. “awe”; see also Old Norse agi.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, on moral language degradation.
Mark 4:41; Luke 5:8; Matthew 28:4.
Matthew 16:18–19; Matthew 18:18; Luke 10:16.
First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, on revelation and doctrinal continuity.
Catechism of the Catholic Church §§84–87 (deposit of faith and Magisterium).
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 10; II–II, q. 1, a. 9.
John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, on moral fragmentation and loss of authority.
