"The Catholic Church teaches that."

I heard this phrase again tonight, only it struck me a different way. We shouldn’t look at the Catholic Church as something outside us, that we come into contact with every so often. Instead, if we are members, the ones actually making up the Church, then when we say, “the Catholic Church teaches …”, we should be thinking also, "and that’s what I believe". Because if we don’t agree or even oppose the teachings of the Church, then we aren’t fulfilling our role as members of the Mystical Body of Christ. This is more than symbolic. In our baptism, we really enter into the Church, and therefore are joined to it. By working against Catholic teaching, we are then, in a way, working against our very selves. It’s not so much to say we should blindly follow these teachings, but instead recognize them as truth and learn more. It’s as if the stomach growls, we instinctively know that our body is hungry. But we can learn further that it’s because we haven’t eaten, and we may learn exactly how the stomach makes the growling noise. Listening to our body, and being good to it, and living in truth with it, will make our body healthy. The same goes for the Church.