It’s time for Catholics to stop dining à la carte and accept the full menu

John Mac Ghlionn• June 20, 2025

There’s a difference between doubt and defiance. One builds faith. The other destroys it.

We live in an age where religious obedience is mistaken for oppression, and moral clarity for arrogance. Among Catholics, this confusion has spawned something quietly devastating: cafeteria Catholicism, the bespoke, pick-and-choose approach to doctrine that sanctifies dissent by calling it discernment.

It treats religion like a Netflix menu. Scroll past what makes you uncomfortable, and binge on what feels good.

The phrase “cafeteria Catholic” was once an insult. Now it’s a badge of honour. The Church says life is sacred from conception to natural death? Take the appetiser, skip the main course. Marriage is sacramental and indissoluble? Hard, pass. The Eucharist is literally Christ’s body and blood? Maybe “symbolic” plays better at dinner parties.

This isn’t faith. It’s consumer preference. Personal comfort masquerading as conscience, dressed up in compassion-speak to avoid calling it what it is: spiritual vandalism.

Let’s be clear—this isn’t about sinners. The Church has always been filled with sinners. Thank God for that. The issue isn’t failure. It’s refusal. A culture that refuses the hard teachings while demanding the Catholic brand name. A culture that treats two-thousand-year-old doctrine like a Spotify playlist — skip the tracks you don’t like, repeat the ones that validate you, ignore the artist entirely.

Defenders invoke “complexity”. They talk about “wrestling with doctrine” and the “messiness” of modern belief. Fine. Life is messy. Faith is harder. But there’s a canyon between grappling with a teaching and discarding it because it’s inconvenient. One is the path of saints. The other is apostasy with better marketing.

In my opinion, the “wrestling” metaphor has become a convenient excuse. Real wrestling implies eventual resolution, not permanent rebellion. The cafeteria model doesn’t just fall. It calls the floor the destination. It transforms the Church into a mirror instead of a window to divine truth. And that’s the real danger. Once the Church becomes a mirror, people don’t seek to be transformed; they seek to be affirmed. They’re not wrestling with God, like Jacob did — they’re editing Him. Wrestling with doctrine was once a painful but holy struggle to understand and submit. Now it’s a performance — faith-as-flexibility, where the goal isn’t sanctity but self-congratulatory sophistication.

You’ll hear complaints about “rigidity” and “alienation, ” and that the Church must “evolve.” But doctrine isn’t the obstacle — it’s the foundation. Without it, Catholicism becomes secular humanism with better architecture — a faith that asks for nothing, offends no one, and means even less.

I think we must speak plainly here. A religion that demands nothing will be believed by no one. A Church that constantly apologises for its own teachings becomes indistinguishable from the culture it’s meant to transform. The “hard edges” of Catholicism — life’s sanctity, marriage’s permanence, sin’s reality — aren’t there to make life difficult. They exist because truth isn’t democratic. And that’s precisely what makes Catholicism worth believing.

We’ve forgotten that orthodoxy enables compassion, not the reverse. True charity doesn’t lie to keep you comfortable. It tells you the truth and walks beside you while you learn to live it.

Cafeteria Catholicism sells faith without form. Community without creed. It treats moral truth like a buffet and then wonders why the Church is starving. Not because the faith is too demanding, but because we’ve convinced ourselves that any demand equals oppression.

The cafeteria model offers something worse than heresy — it offers irrelevance. At least heretics took doctrine seriously enough to reject it explicitly. Cafeteria Catholics simply ignore what they dislike and pretend the rest doesn’t exist.

In my opinion, this approach fundamentally misunderstands what religion is supposed to do. Religion isn’t therapy. It’s not meant to affirm your existing preferences or validate your lifestyle choices. Religion is supposed to challenge, transform, and occasionally make you deeply uncomfortable with who you are versus who you’re called to become.

This sanitised version of Catholicism can’t offend because it can’t convert. It can’t redeem because it won’t confront. It affirms, flatters, soothes, then evaporates. The result isn’t renewal. It’s dissolution.

When treating religion like a personal shopping experience, you end up with neither religion nor satisfaction. You get spiritual junk food, immediately gratifying but ultimately empty.

A Church that bends to every cultural breeze will snap. And when that happens, people won’t abandon faith because the world is too dark. They’ll abandon it because the light went out inside the sanctuary.

The cafeteria must be closed. Not because we’re cruel, but because we’re starving. When everything is optional, nothing is meaningful. When doctrine becomes suggestion, faith becomes fiction. You can’t have Catholicism without the Catholic part. The clue is in the name. So here’s the choice: take the whole meal or find another restaurant. But stop pretending you can live on spiritual appetisers forever.

(© Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk)