This is often a subtle criticism of those who appear to pick and choose from the cafeteria food booth what they want, leaving behind the distasteful or uninviting parts of the menu.

The term gives the impression of a person not serious about their faith, one who selects what is easy to digest and avoids the harder elements.

Yet I would argue that we all are cafeteria Catholics.

In its 2,000-year history, global reach and 'big tent'; we all are picking and choosing from the vast menu of Catholic theology, thought and practice.

Our choices are reflected in the parish we attend, the books we read, the causes we support, the votes we cast, the political parties we join and the popes we prefer.

All Catholics make choices.

• Do we read Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain or Scott Hahn's Rome Sweet Rome?
• Do we support migrants at the border or march in Right to Life rallies?
• Are we members of a Catholic Worker house or the Knights of Columbus?
• Is Black Lives Matter an atheist leftist formation as some bishops assert, or a legitimate protest as other bishops see it?
• ​​Are we aligned with Tyler, Texas, Bishop Joseph Strickland or San Diego Cardinal Robert McElroy? Benedictine Sr Joan Chittister or the late Poor Clares Mother Mary Angelica, founder of EWTN?
• Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone?

A beauty and strength of the Catholic Church is our big tent.

At some non-Catholic churches I have attended, it is obvious political perspectives are very much aligned.

I have been to Catholic parishes where it is just as obvious theological and political views represent the centre, left or right.

The main issue is not whether we are cafeteria Catholics but whether we are still feasting at the banquet.

Psalm 23 reminds us our cup is overflowing.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his friends, "I have many more things to say to you."

That Gospel also reminds us "of his fullness we have received, grace upon grace."

The writer of Ephesians prays that we all have the "strength" to comprehend the love of Christ and be "filled with the fullness of God."

Spanish poet and mystic John of the Cross wrote in his poem "The Spiritual Canticle" that if you gather together all that the saints and holy people have learned of God over the centuries, the "greater part" remains to be unfolded.

A question we must ask then, no matter our current theological, social and political perspectives: Is that all God has to say to us, or is there more?

Are there "many more things," is there "grace upon grace" and are we filled yet with God's fullness?

Jesus told Nicodemus that the Holy Spirit is like the wind — we hear the sound of it, but we do not know where it has been, or where it is going.

To say we know it all and we hold all truth is to undermine the freedom and liberating energy of the Holy Spirit.

Our "truths," as we know them, are partial and in constant need of expansion and change.

If someone says they fully understand what God has revealed, I suggest such a view is unbiblical and against Catholic teaching.

The late Swiss priest, author and theologian Hans Küng wrote in The Church Maintained in Truth that just as grace overcame sin, the Gospel truth shines more brightly as it corrects our errors.

Küng suggested we are "corrected" to the extent we are open to the Holy Spirit. Küng wrote, "God's Spirit is under no law other than that of his own freedom; no justice other than that of his own grace; under no power other than that of his own fidelity. … The Church does indeed try continually to take over the Spirit, but it cannot 'possess' him, cannot control, restrain, direct or master him."

Vatican II is a prime example of our collective choosing. Continue reading

For decades the Catholic right referred to the positions of Popes St John Paul II and Benedict XVI; now the Catholic left points to Pope Francis' pronouncements on everything from climate change to LGBTQ inclusion.

The strategy has been ramping up of late as October's Synod on Synodality, a meeting of the world's bishops on the church's future, approaches.

Critiques about how the synod is being used to push radical change in developed nations are rebuffed as dissent over the Holy Father's synodal process, with virtually no attention paid to how such changes would affect marginalised Catholic communities in the Global South.

But the jockeying ahead of the synod is only part of a broader claim by the left, long accused of picking and choosing among church teachings according to their taste, that the Catholic right are the real cafeteria Catholics.

Call out one of the left's favourite cardinals for his public statements on LGBTQ issues?

You're implicitly defying Francis, who appointed the prelate, and the pope's social justice agenda! Defend the church's ban on contraception by pointing out its harmful health effects on women?

Ugh, can't you see Francis wants to end the church's obsession with pelvic issues?

Most egregiously, these folks tend to invoke Francis when it is convenient and ignore him even when he has strongly and clearly laid out his views contradicting their agenda.

We've seen this political and theological whiplash time and again with Francis' views on abortion, which he calls akin to a white glove Nazi crime or hiring a hitman.

Some on the left genuinely wrestle with the fullness of what the Holy Father is teaching, but the majority refuse to subject themselves to his authority on this issue.

The same is true of the Holy Father's views on gender.

Francis has characteristically made pastoral care of people with gender dysphoria a priority, and he is rightly concerned about their health and well-being.

He has not sacrificed the truth in doing so.

He has called gender ideology "evil" and a contemporary example of colonization.

In his apostolic exhortations Laudato Si' and Amoris Laetitia, he compares it to the error of imagining ourselves as masters of the divinely created and ordered ecological world.

But is anyone taking Pope Francis' teaching on these matters seriously?

Many of those on the Catholic right, who are basically waiting for this papacy to be over, take little he says to heart.

And despite their insistence that their political opponents be bound by his teaching, those on the Catholic left are themselves likely taking a pass on this particular line of thought.

This hasn't stopped a wide range of ideologically diverse bishops from accepting it.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago — not exactly two peas in a pod — wrote a joint essay in America magazine insisting that Catholic hospitals must be permitted to affirm Francis' views when it comes to caring for persons with gender dysphoria.

"Does objecting to performing gender transition procedures — but welcoming patients who identify as transgender — constitute discrimination?"

The two cardinals spoke with one voice: "Of course not."

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine, led by Bishop Daniel Flores, pastor of the border city of Brownsville, Texas, recently issued a doctrinal note on "The Moral Limits of Technological Manipulation of the Human Body," in which he defended the fixed male-female binary of the human body.

This relatively brief document invokes Francis' teaching throughout and cites him six times.

Flores is an outspoken advocate of the church's teaching on immigration and is respected across the ideological spectrum.

His doctrinal note would almost certainly not have been published if it didn't have the approval of Rome.

It's difficult to dismiss it as a mere product of a right-wing US bishop — any more than a similar document issued by the Nordic bishops days later.

In it they "declare dissent" from an ideological movement that "puts forward a view of human nature that abstracts from the embodied integrity of personhood, as if physical gender were accidental."

Can the Catholic left honour their stated commitment to the authority of the Holy Father by declaring a similar kind of dissent from the orthodoxy of their political circles?

No one is talking about something other than genuine care for people awash in the evil of gender ideology, especially children.

Getting on the side of a child in this context doesn't mean affirming gender dysphoria but rather loving them through what's called "watchful waiting."

There's more than theology in this approach.

Most kids (around 80%) grow out of childhood-onset gender dysphoria by adulthood.

A non-medical approach is clearly the way to go as we find the best ways to work for the good of our children.

But Catholics who honour the teaching of Pope Francis would go a long way to stopping the whiplash effect by taking all his teachings seriously.

It would reduce the atmosphere of cynicism and mutual distrust as we head into the synod. And that will be good for everyone.

• Charles Camosy, though a native of very rural Wisconsin, has spent more than the last decade as a professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, "Resisting Throwaway Culture." He is the father of four children, three of whom were adopted from the Philippines.
• First published in RNS. Republished with permission.