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Vaccines and the Common Good

November 3, 2021Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Church AuthorityCommon Good, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Churc, CST, Vaccinestwowingstogod@gmail.com

The past 150 years has seen the greatest flurry of social change in the history of mankind. From the end of all monarchies to the full acceptance of democracy and the rise of Marxist regimes, the world is very different than it was a century and half ago. Not surprisingly, the Church has struggled to keep up with the massive changes, especially in her articulation and application of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Her principles are often misunderstood and misapplied, furthering the plunge into chaos that seems to be the inevitable conclusion. This is especially true when it comes to one of the “Four Pillars of Catholic Social Though”, the Principle of the Common Good.

It is admitted at the outset that the notion of the Common Good remains elusive because it can be rather complicated, compounded by the fact that the Church has largely abandoned the Scholastic language that lends itself to explaining the nature of various things. Nevertheless, this has not stopped many Churchmen from using the term in a sloppy manner because of its innate power. For once a man enters a society, he has an obligation to contribute to the Common Good. This means it can be used as a coercive term and leads some people astray when it is not used properly. It is with this in mind that I intend to shine some light on the Common Good.

Defining the Common Good

To begin, the Church provides two definitions of the Common Good, both of which are given in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church in paragraph 164:

“…the common good indicates ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily’. The common good does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity. Belonging to everyone and to each person, it is and remains ‘common’, because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness, with regard also to the future. Just as the moral actions of an individual are accomplished in doing what is good, so too the actions of a society attain their full stature when they bring about the common good. The common good, in fact, can be understood as the social and community dimension of the moral good.”

Notice first that the definitions are difficult to reconcile. The first speaks of the utility of the Common Good and makes it seem as it is a collection of parts (“the sum total”). The second speaks of the Common Good not being a sum but an indivisible whole. We need not do the theological gymnastics necessary to reconcile the two to understand the Common Good, just look to Tradition to find a good working definition.

Once we do that, we find that the second definition is the most useful. For it speaks of the Common Good as both being common and a good. This bears further explanation. First a good is something that man desires in order to fulfill his nature. Second, there are two types of goods private and common. Private goods are those of one person alone. A common good on the other hand is one in which the good diffuses itself to many people, and in its diffusion, it is equally shared among members and is not diminished in any way when it is shared.

An illustration might help. Food is a necessary good for each man. I can speak of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But the minute I speak of our peanut butter and jelly sandwich, there is a problem. We cannot both have the whole sandwich. The minute I share that sandwich, there is a diminishment of the sandwich such that me taking a piece of it diminishes the amount you can have. There is only so much to go around. Properly speaking we might call the sandwich a public good because I shared it, but this does not make it a common good. Public goods are really just private goods that are shared.

This distinction is important as well for another reason. In a certain sense, by me eating my half of the sandwich, I have done harm to my neighbor by depriving him of it. What makes a common good a common good is that by doing the good, I am also willing the good of my neighbor for his own sake. By contributing to the common good, even though I benefit, I still am also benefiting my neighbor equally. This is why the image of the Common Good as being the good that flows over each member of society equally is helpful. I might have to forgo certain private goods for the benefit of the Common Good. But in doing so, I too share equally in the good. A police officer forgoes the private good of personal safety for the sake of a just ordering of society. The good of justice flows back over the police officer as well and thus he shares equally in it with every other member of his society.

The Common Good is “better” than a private good, or even a collection of private goods, because it is diffused to each member of that society. This extension of the good makes it a more noble good than merely a private good, no matter how many we are speaking. A good is higher based upon its diffusion so that St. Thomas calls the common good “divine” and says that God Himself is the ultimate Common Good. It also shows the primacy of the spiritual over the material. The material always diminishes in its diffusion while the spiritual does not.

Abusing the Common Good

Once we grasp this definition, we see the danger of only adhering to the first definition in the Compendium (which is the only one the Catechism has in #1906). It makes it appear as if the Common Good simply exists for the private good of individuals and not for the sake of the whole. This is characteristic of our time in which the good of the individual is seen to trump the good of all and how they are often seen to conflict. When we speak of the good of all we really mean all and not just some.

This misunderstanding is especially problematic in the recent CDF statement regarding vaccination: “the morality of vaccination depends not only on the duty to protect one’s own health, but also on the duty to pursue the common good.”

The former, namely that one has an obligation to protect one’s health is undoubtedly true. But health can only be and can only ever be a private good. Public health is not part of the Common Good, but a private good, even though it may extend to many people. It can never be shared equally among the members of society. It also, because it depends upon material conditions, is diminished when shared.

The danger of linking it to the Common Good is that it appears to take on an obligatory nature, despite the fact “that vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.” You cannot have it both ways and by connecting it to the Common Good you have muddied the waters (at best). The fact of the matter is that justice, which is intrinsic to the Common Good, is not maintained when vaccination is forced, even if it is through the soft coercion of ambiguity and the flurry of non-authoritative Magisterial prodding. Decisions regarding one’s health falls under prudential judgment and can never be imposed without doing great harm to the Common Good.

Living Purgatory Now

October 30, 2021Apologetics, End Times, Last Things, Sin, SufferingHeaven, Last Things, Penance, Purgatory, St. Catherine of Genoatwowingstogod@gmail.com

The contested doctrines are almost always some of the hardest to live by. This is not because they are difficult, but because they are contested. When a doctrine falls into the contested realm and Catholics are forced to defend it, there is an almost innate tendency to treat the doctrine as an intellectual problem and not as a saving truth. One example of this comes to mind and is particularly apropos for the season—Purgatory. Since Luther’s revolt, Catholics have spent so much time on their heels defending its existence, that they haven’t always lived as if it does. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that we have not spent enough time meditating upon death. Memento mori the desert fathers and early Christians were fond of saying, not just as a mere platitude, but because death is a fact of life. Meditating on our own death is of course fruitful, but when it comes to living as if Purgatory exists it may be best to focus on those we know who have died. All too often we are quick to canonize the dead and thus ignore the reality that if they were saved then they needed purgatorial purification to get there.

Praying in Faith, Hope and Love

To speculate on the destiny of loved ones who have died is not being “judgmental”. But it is presumptuous not to. In the majority of cases, we will have known the person well enough to know (at best) that they weren’t yet perfected. It is uncomfortable to think this way, but it is necessary because Purgatory then becomes the realistic basis for our hope that they were saved.

And it is hope that can animate our prayers for them. CS Lewis in A Grief Observed said he never really, really believed in Purgatory until his wife died. Then he prayed with fervent hope that she would be purified so as to come quickly into the presence of God. His belief in Purgatory took flesh because he realized his beloved still needed his help through prayers and penances.

Meditating on the sufferings of the souls in Purgatory and being able to put faces on those otherwise general mass of suffering souls makes Purgatory a real doctrine. Our prayer comes alive and with it, our faith in the doctrine itself. Praying in faith, strengthens our faith. Praying for suffering people increases our charity. Knowing that they are approaching perfection increases our hope. Those faces don’t need to be someone we know. They can also be aimed at people in specific circumstances: “I pray for the soul that has entered Purgatory most recently”, “I pray for the soul who most loved Our Lord in the Eucharist”, “I pray for the soul who is most abandoned”, etc. We might not know them personally now, but we will have gained a friend in eternity.

Undergoing Purgatorial Purification?

I mentioned above that we can be sure that our loved ones undergo purgatorial purification. That is because, short of the Virgin Mary, everyone, even canonized saints underwent purgatorial purification. Many of them underwent them in this life rather than in the next. And herein lies the other way in which we might come to true faith in the doctrine of Purgatory: ask to undergo those sufferings now.

This begins by once again meditating upon the sufferings of Purgatory. The pains of Purgatory are very similar to those of hell. Although the person is completely in love with God, they experience a pain of loss in the knowledge that their sins and their momentary delight was traded for time with the Beloved. Likewise they experience a pain of sense in that they are “saved through fire” (1Cor 3:11). Cut off from uniting their suffering to the merits of Christ, they must suffer “alone” to heal the stains of their forgiven sins. Now the face we put on it must be our own. We must imagine how great the suffering is.

After doing this, we trade that suffering for suffering now. The suffering now is different in that the pain of loss is felt less severely because it is in a certain sense natural. Likewise the pain of sense is less because our sufferings can be united to those of Christ. The obstacle of course is that we lack the courage to make this bargain. It feels really scary to give God carte-blanche over our sufferings. But we must remember that God is not a masochist but a Father Who disciplines in the wise and gentle way. Our sufferings now, especially those dealt by Providence, are the most wise and gentle sufferings, hand-chosen by God in order to purify us. Jesus told St. Faustina that He rather there not be Purgatory because He will send enough suffering, that united to His, will purify us, without the need for Purgatory.

But there is another aspect of this that we all too often forget. The holy souls in Purgatory are suffering greatly, but they are also filled with joy. This is important for us to remember because the reason we are hesitant to give this to God is because we are focused only on the suffering part. But the suffering is just a means to the end of closer union with God. Suffering is the gravity that thrusts us into the Heart of God. It takes away all of the impediments to drawing closer to Him provided we will to suffer the things He sends through His Providence. St. Catherine of Genoa speaks of how the pains in Purgatory is occasioned by love delayed. By allowing our purification to happen now, that love will be less delayed.

Becoming Men with Chests

October 27, 2021Anthropology, VirtueAbolition of Man, Aquinas, CS Lewis, Emotions, Feelings, Heart, Passions, Summa Theologiaetwowingstogod@gmail.com

CS Lewis once described modernity as being inhabited by “men without chests.” His pithy characterization highlights the fact that men no longer are educated to have a healthy emotional life. Lewis describes how in reviewing an elementary textbook, he came across a description of a waterfall as “sublime”. The authors insist that the speaker is “not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.” Lewis is concerned that such language, even in what appears to be a mere throwaway remark, betray a certain universal prejudice towards sentiments as nothing more than private feelings that have no objective basis in reality. Devoid of any real meaning attached to emotions, modern man suffers from a shrinking of his heart.

Lewis gives a sketch of man as having three parts: head, belly, and chest. By head he is referring to our spiritual faculties and by belly our bodily sensations. For most of us, that would be a sufficient description. But in order to be more than mere parts, they must be an integrated whole—they must be connected in the middle by the chest. To ignore the chest is literally disintegrating, you might even say dehumanizing. “It is by this middle element that man is man; for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite a mere animal.” It is the heart that makes humanity unique and it is through its proper integration that we become fully human.

The heart is the “place” where man’s hybrid nature meets and where man is most properly himself. But most of us have learned to be suspicious of our own hearts—and rightly so. But we cannot remain masters of suspicion without doing great harm to ourselves. We must confront this suspicion head on if we are to be authentically happy. After all happiness is not just a feeling, but a happiness that isn’t felt isn’t true happiness either.

Lewis thought part of the problem was in education. Although he doesn’t go into details about a proper pedagogy, it most certainly would begin by defining what we mean are talking about when we speak of the Heart. For modern man, the heart is really the place where our feelings reside. But this is far vaguer and narrower than the classical and Biblical notion of the heart. There are different kinds of feelings that we experience and these feelings are on different levels according to the unique powers of the human soul. There are the mere vegetative feelings like hunger and thirst. There are the animal feelings like contentment and anger. Finally, there are the spiritual feelings like peace and joy. When we speak of a heart that is fully alive, then we are speaking about a heart that has the capacity for the animal feelings (under the control of reason and will) and the spiritual feelings.

Men without Chests

At the end of his first chapter in The Abolition of Man, Lewis sums up the modern dilemma as follows: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” His point is that without a healthy emotional life, we will never be able to be virtuous—it is like asking a castrated horse to reproduce. Notice what he is saying—neither the Stoic nor the Sentimentalist can be truly virtuous. To see why this is we need to reflect briefly upon the nature of virtue and its relationship with the emotions.

Temperance and fortitude and all their sub-virtues are ordered to the proper use of our emotions, or to use a more Thomistic term, the concupiscible and irascible passions. Notice the italics are use. Our emotions are not something that are to be killed or to be allowed to run free, but something that, when properly put to use, enable us to enjoy the good.

An example will help. All too often we hear “Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.” This is not the virtue of courage. The truly courageous person does not feel fear, but daring. Daring, when moderated by courage, gives him a motor by which he can energetically fight against the evil he must not avoid. Without it, he will succumb to fear or only fight back only weakly.

Virtue conditions the passions to act in accord with reason. When the courageous man is faced with evil, he does not need to deliberate or wait to stir up daring, it is automatically conditioned to arise in the face of some threat. In fact it may arise before he is even conscious of a threat and act as an alarm for the person.

Passions not only make the act easier then, but also make it better. St. Thomas says that when the passions are involved in a morally good act then it makes the act more meritorious. This is because the entire person—head, heart and hands—is involved in the act as opposed to simply white knuckling it. White knuckling is still good but doing so fervently is better. The less interior resistance we have to doing the good, the better the action is. So, despite popular misconceptions, there are moral reasons why we should be emotionally healthy as well.

Feeding Our Nature

Returning to Lewis’ point, education in the emotions is important because it is the thing that makes virtue easier. But this education must be aimed not so much on the feeling, but on the object that invokes the feeling. This cannot be emphasized enough. As long as the student is focused on the waterfall and not on the pleasure of the feeling of awe or wonder that can only be described as “sublime” he is focused on the good before him. The minute he turns to the pleasure as his focus, the pleasure is gone and the object is deemed boring. But if he remains focused on the object, he can learn to contemplate it to find out why it evokes such a response and if the response is, in fact, the appropriate one. This is one of the reasons why we must always protect and promote children’s capacity to wonder.

It is by taking in reality that they begin to grow in self-knowledge as well. Combined with education from parents especially, the child learns that there are right and wrong emotions. The right and wrongness depends upon the object that causes it. A young girl touching a cobra because she is charmed by it, needs to be shouted at so that she associates fear with it instead. All too often parents attempt to diffuse children’s emotions rather than guide them. This only causes moral problems later on down the road as Lewis points out “By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”

Following the Science of Roe v Wade

October 20, 2021Abortion, American Founding, Bioethics, Catholic Social Teaching, Church and StateAbortion on Demand, Aristotle, Roe v Wade, SCOTUS, St. Thomas Aquinastwowingstogod@gmail.com

In a previous post, it was mentioned that emerging tyrants greatly rely upon sophistry in order to manipulate people into giving away their freedom. That particular post was focused on pointing out the manner in which “experts” use science to serve their own tyrannical aspirations. It is tempting to think that this is the first time that science has been abused on such a massive scale in our country, but we would be wrong. Before there was Covid, there was Roe v. Wade.

We have all heard the arguments for abortion from the Pro-Choice peanut gallery. Some are better than others, but all of them have been refuted. That is why it is surprising that the Supreme Court so readily caved in allowing abortion on demand. Surprising, that is, until you realize that it was the Supreme Court itself (or at least 7 of the justices) that decided they would pull the “follow the science” card and tyrannically impose their will, condemning 60 million (and counting) children to death.

The Summary of the Argument

Somehow the Justices were able to find a right to privacy implicitly within the Constitution, but no “prenatal protection” of personhood to the fetus. They decided to arbitrarily draw a line between postnatal persons and prenatal. Without first defining personhood, there is no way other than arbitrarily to decide whether the location and level of development of the child has any bearing on their rights. They simply declared that “we need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins” despite the fact that “(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.” It would seem that no decision could be made until that question was answered.

It is instructive then to see how they arrived at such radical skepticism regarding the personhood of the unborn. Justice Blackmum took his readers on a historical review of the examination of personhood through philosophy, theology and empirical science. His analysis goes on for 18 pages but can be summarized (like most of modern philosophy) by examining the parts with Aristotle and St. Thomas. Blackmum began with Aristotle and his theory of delayed hominization. This theory essentially says that the conceptus went through three changes before finally becoming a person with a rational soul around day 40 (or 80 for females). St. Thomas Aquinas picked up on this theory and expounded upon it by saying that the body that was first formed was vegetative in nature and later underwent a substantial change with a new body in which it was animated by an animal soul. Then another substantial change occurred, and the now-human body was infused with an intellectual soul.

Note that both supported the idea that once a human body was present, the rational soul was also present. They simply did not have the embryological knowledge of the 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Centuries which concluded that human life began at conception because a human body was present at Conception. Science discovered three things:

the conceptus is biologically distinct from either parent. Sperm and Egg (2 things) come together and make a single biological entity that is:
a unified self-integrating human organism with its own DNA such that
nothing is added to the organism from the outside such that the only thing necessary for growth and development is the same thing we all need—water, food, oxygen and a healthy interaction with its natural environment

The Science of the Court

The Court was well aware of these “well-known facts of fetal development” but instead chose to treat them as a “theory” of an otherwise open question. The question was still open because of the science of Galen (200 AD) and “new embryological data that purport to indicate that conception is a ‘process’ over time.” In other words, the “substantial problems for the precise definition of when life begins” are based upon the work of a third century biologist and the “science” of 5 law review articles and 2 “scientists” (see footnote 62).

Even the “process” argument is specious. The term is extremely vague and makes it seem like we can never be sure. But in truth when sperm and egg meet, a zygote is formed that is neither sperm nor egg. It is a new thing. Does this happen instantaneously or through some process? Yes to both. The moment of conception is when during the process of the sperm penetrating the egg a new thing is formed. There is most certainly a single instant when this happens (or else it would never actually happen) even if we cannot say precisely when that instant is. Even if you accept that it is a process, then that is not an argument for abortion on demand; only for abortion during the “process”.

As an aside, this would still be wrong as it would constitute a contraceptive act, although the moral gravity would be lessened. The point in mentioning it though is that it is really just a smokescreen for sneaking in abortion on demand. Exceptions only apply to the exceptions and can never be the basis for the rule.

The point is that the Court completely glossed over the established science and instead feigned a skeptical view in order to impose abortion upon America. But there can be no skeptical view—to allow abortion is to take the position that the child is not a person. There can be no neutrality on this question and the fact that they are “following the science” should alert us to the fact that they desire to set up a tyranny in which the unborn are only persons if someone says so.

Truth and Reality

October 6, 2021Creation, Defending the Faith, DevilsLanguage, Lying, planned parenthood, Political Correctness, SCOTUS, Sophistrytwowingstogod@gmail.com

The devil is a one-trick pony. Everything he does to mankind is simply an echo of his original temptation to Eve, “you shall be like God.” Throughout history he has dragged many souls into hell by coming up with creative ways in which he could coax men into usurping the role of God. I say creative not in the sense that the devil can create anything. He can only twist and distort what God creates by breathing lies into creation. Only God truly creates while the devil fabricates, a fact that I want to spend some time focusing on.

God creates by simply speaking something into being. He creates through His Word (c.f. Col 1:16). Reality came into being not through some evolutionary process, but through God’s “let there be…”. Mind you I am not saying that things don’t come into existence naturally, only that the different kinds of things (what we might call the different natures) and reality as a whole were spoken into being during the first six days of Creation. It should not be a surprise that this foundational truth, the same truth we profess in the Creed that “through Him all things were made” is under attack. And because it ultimately has its cause in the diabolical, it is so subtle that we might not even realize what is going on.

Lies and Reality

Human words are meant to describe reality, even if they inevitably short-change it. The words themselves are said to be true only to the extent that the ideas they convey conform to reality. To say “oranges are orange” conveys the truth about the color of oranges, but it does not fully describe what an orange is. On the other hand, to say that “oranges are blue” is a falsehood because it does not describe the reality that is an orange in any intelligible way.

Now, admittedly the orange example isn’t real (as far as I know). But it is illustrative of a larger, one might say, diabolical problem. There are two possibilities at play here. A person may be ignorant of the color of oranges or he may want oranges to be other than they are. The first man is a fool and the second is a liar. The folly of the fool can be remedied with the truth. The liar is another story.

All lies are attempts to use words to change reality simply by declaring it so. It is a poor man’s “let there be…”. I say poor man, but it is really diabolical having its roots Satan who is the “Father of lies”. He is always trying to upend Creation and make it appear to be something that it is not. It is an attempt to “be like God” and make reality whatever you want it to be. It is, to quote the diabolical Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood vs Casey, the freedom “to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life” (Planned Parenthood vs Casey, 1991).

The Father of Lies in Our Times

I said at the open that the devil was always seeking to institutionalize his plan and develops unique strategies for particular ages. He has been particularly successful in our age because we have failed to recognize the mechanism by which he is shaping the spirit of the world. For most of us, Political Correctness is a minor annoyance that we do our best to avoid. But for the devil it is the tool by which he blinds men to reality.

Notice how the term itself, Political Correctness, creates the aura of an alternate reality. It creates a realm where words are correct, but not true. It does this by politicizing, that is, making public, that which is personal and private. It is made political because it must have the “power” to make other people conform to the alternate reality.

There are many other examples, but the renaming of “Mother” to “Birthing Person” comes to mind because it is relatively new. We laugh at the absurdity, but we fail to see the danger because we have grown so accustomed to it. It is simply an attempt, albeit by employing the law of gradualism, to divorce motherhood from femininity and femininity from biological sex. It is a (not-so) subtle attempt to overthrow reality by lying. We intuitively grasp this, but instead of fighting back we laugh at the absurdity. It is no longer funny.

Have you ever won an argument with a liar? Of course not. When someone is lying you do not use arguments to refute them. You simply insist on the truth. Yet many of us repeatedly resort to arguments to counter Political Correctness. They are too adept at changing meanings of words to give any room for logic. Can you deny that a mother is a “birthing person”? Instead we must insist on the truth through precision and clarity. Simply refuse to adopt any of the Politically Correct language. We must have the courage not to play the game and simply tell the truth regardless of the consequences. Words not only convey reality, but they form our ideas about it. Only the truth can set us free to roam throughout reality. If we do not stop the abuse of language that abuses reality, then we risk the eternal abuse of many souls. People end up in hell for bad ideas too, especially because it changes what they become through their actions.

Preparation for Holy Communion

August 25, 2021Eucharist, Mary, SacramentsHoly Communion, Marian Consecration, Marian Devotion, Mass, St. John the Evangelist, St. Louis de Montforttwowingstogod@gmail.com

As mentioned in a previous post, the Church has long understood Sacramental Grace as operating in two dimensions. On the objective plane we say that the Sacraments contain grace ex opere operato. What this means is that grace is made available by the Sacrament regardless of either the faith of the recipient or the minister. It is created “from the work performed.” This does not mean however that the recipient of the Sacrament is a recipient of grace or even all the grace that is available. That is because there is also a subjective plane by which the grace received is proportional to the disposition of the receiver. In no other Sacrament is this distinction more important than in the Eucharist, not only because It contains grace, but because it contains the Author of Grace Himself. Therefore, there is an abundance of grace available to the receiver provided that he is properly disposed to receive it.

Obviously then, preparation to receive Holy Communion ought to be the primary focus for those who desire closer communion with Christ and through Him the Holy Trinity. But for most of us, our preparation is sorely lacking either through ignorance, neglect, or distraction. Thankfully St. Louis de Montfort has left the Church a surefire way to prepare to receive Holy Communion that is sure to increase the graces we receive.

Our Lady of the Eucharist

To grasp the simplicity of his method we must first remove any abstractions we might have related to Our Blessed Mother. What is meant by this is that we all too often forget that she was a real person who lived out her Christian life in the Early Church. When Our Lord left her in St. John’s care, He wasn’t just taking care of her physical well-being. Nor was He abandoning her to someone else’s care. Instead, He was leaving her in the care of one of the men whom He had empowered to make Him present to her. In other words, Jesus left Mary with St. John so that she could receive Him in the Eucharist daily.

Once we realize that Our Lady received the Eucharist regularly, we can begin to let our imagination take to flight as to what her disposition was like when she received Him. Her heart was found worthy for her womb to house the Son of God would have daily received Him into that same Immaculate Heart with a renewed and deeper love than at the Incarnation. Her fiat would have echoed in her Amen. Separated from His physical presence, she would have run to the Communion rail to taste that presence once again. She would have offered herself yet again as the Sorrowful Mother at the foot of the Cross and renewed her commitment to be Mother of all the Elect just prior to receiving. She would have overflowed with adoration and thanksgiving after her reception. She would have longed to receive Him again when she wasn’t at Mass. The love with which she received Him grew so much that upon receiving her Viaticum she was taken body and soul to Heaven. She was and is always Our Lady of the Eucharist.

St. Louis de Montfort, Our Lady, and Holy Communion

Knowing that Our Lady’s disposition was perfect for receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist may inspire us to imitate her example, but that is not the reason why this reflection is necessary. When Our Lord is received by one of her children, she flies to that child in order to adore His Eucharist presence. As she draws closer to Jesus within the bosom of the believer, Jesus only draws closer to the believer. Her act of adoration brings more glory to God than all earthly acts of adoration and He pours His pleasure of being in her presence out on this child of His Mother.

All of this may go on without our awareness or we might, following the advice of St. Louis de Montfort, actively and consciously participate in it. The Saint says in The Secret of Mary that the best way to prepare for Holy Communion is to “implore that good Mother to lend you her heart, that you may receive her Son there with the same dispositions as her own.” We pledge that if she will give us her heart, then we will place Jesus in it. For those fortunate souls that who are consecrated to Jesus through Mary, the two of them during Holy Communion will lodge within our soul. Our Lady will share with Our Lord all our needs and will glorify Him more than in our asking. As St. Louis de Montfort puts it, “Let us allow the King and Queen to speak together. Let us not disturb their divine colloquies by our restless thoughts and unsettled desires. Let us entrust to them the care of our future and the choice of means.”

Avoiding Therapeutic Tyranny

August 7, 2021Bioethics, ConscienceCoronavirus, Covid19, Dignity of the Human Person, Vaccinestwowingstogod@gmail.com

Because of the atrocities that were carried out under the Third Reich, there was a global awareness of the dignity of the human person especially when it comes to performing medical experiments. Experimentation today is mostly benign because of the fact that the war crime tribunal of Nuremberg articulated 10 standards by which researchers must conform when performing medical experiments on human subjects. These standards have now been adopted throughout the world and form the basis of our clinical trials system. The first of these standards was that “[T]he voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.” The Principle of Free and Informed Consent as it has come to be known has been included in nearly every code of medical ethics throughout the world. It is meant to protect human beings from a medical totalitarianism by which people are treated as guinea pigs. Tyrants always try to control the population and, thanks to medical technology, the temptation to chemically control them is greater than it was even 75 years ago.

The Principle of Free and Informed Consent

Although this principle has been articulated in secular code only recently, the Magisterium of the Church has taught this principle throughout the history of the Church. Her teaching has been summarized succinctly in the Charter for Health Care Workers that was promulgated in 1994 by the Pontifical Council for Pastoral Assistance to Health Care Workers

“To intervene medically, the health care worker should have the express or tacit consent of the patient. In fact, he ‘does not have a separate and independent right in relation to the patient. In general, he can act only if the patient explicitly or implicitly authorizes him.’…Besides the medical relationship there is a human one: dialogic, non-objective. The patient …‘should be called upon to share in the improvement of his health and in becoming cured. He should be given the opportunity of personally choosing, and not be made to submit to the decisions and choices of others.’ So that the choice may be made with full awareness and freedom, the patient should be given a precise idea of his illness and the therapeutic possibilities, with the risks, the problems and the consequences that they entail. This means that the patient should be asked for an informed consent.”
Charter for Health Care Workers, 72

While the principle of free and informed consent is fairly straightforward, in practice it can be difficult to secure fully informed consent. The response to a given medical treatment varies greatly from individual to individual. This means that it is often impossible to explain to someone all of the possible complications involved in a given treatment modality. Some complications may be extremely remote and a listing of all possible complications may only serve to frighten them away from participation. At other times, not all of the related hazards are known.

Free consent is somewhat easier to achieve in practice because it is essentially consists in a negative. Any sort of coercion ought to be completely rejected. Because the goal of the research study is therapeutic in nature, this therapeutic benefit should be sufficient “payment” for their participation. They must remain free to determine whether the personal benefits outweigh the burdens. Likewise, there must be no “outside” coercion from either public or private institutions that threaten the person in some way.

For this reason, the principle of free and informed consent should really be interpreted as requiring “reasonably” free and “adequately” informed consent as governed by the a “Medical Golden Rule.” The US Bishops in their Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services stated the principle in this way: “Free and informed consent requires that the person or the person’s surrogate receive all reasonable information about the essential nature of the proposed treatment and its benefits; its risks, side-effects, consequences and cost; and any reasonable and morally legitimate alternatives, including no treatment at all” (27).

Why the Principle Matters Today

What makes this principle particularly important is that we are in the midst of the largest medical experiment in human history. No matter where you stand on the Covid vaccine—its safety or its effectiveness—you should be appalled at the gross violation of this principle.

First of all, the vaccines are advertised as “safe and effective”. They may yet prove to be so, but at this point to make such a claim is really unsubstantiated. Before such a claim can be made, there must be thorough risk-benefit analysis done. Other than the J&J vaccine, this has not occurred. They also have not been forthcoming with the data. Why, for example, when we are concerned about getting people vaccinated, would the CDC not report hospitalization and death data comparing the vaccinated and unvaccinated? It gives the appearance of hiding something. In fact, even if they aren’t hiding anything, it does gives credence to those who are concerned about a conspiracy.

What about the rates of adverse events? To say they are rare lacks a precision that they can readily quantify. This is vitally important when different subpopulations have greatly different risks from Covid. When, for example a 20-year-old already has a rare chance of suffering death or long term effects from the virus itself, why should they take a vaccine that also has rare side effects? How can someone compare them without anything more than the vague designation of rare? To appeal to public health is a two-edged sword as there is also a drain on public health should the person suffer one of said rare side effects. Public health is far more than just the elimination of communicable diseases and people are far more than incubators.

The point is that all of this and more makes it practically impossible to give informed consent. But more disconcerting is the growing attacks on free consent. The amount of coercion has reached a fever pitch. Federal agencies, universities both private and public and private companies have all instituted mandatory vaccination. Public officials have offered to pay people to be vaccinated and even have offered a lottery system that rewards one lucky winner a million dollars. All of these forms are coercion are morally reprehensible and should be of grave concern to us all. Mandatory vaccines today, mandatory sterilizations for the “public good” tomorrow. Once the principle of free and informed consent is no longer recognized, there is nothing to keep it from becoming a therapeutic tyranny.

The Covid vaccine might prove to be a good thing (that is why we are performing an experiment), but public health is not an element of the common good. It is essentially a private good because not everyone shares in it equally. Elements of the common good, as the name suggests, are shared equally among all the members of society. Freedom of conscience (properly understood). on the other hand, is part of the common good. To coerce vaccination, whether it is “safe and effective” or not is ultimately harmful to the common good and therefore must be opposed by even those who are personally in favor of vaccination.

The Eucharistic Marriage

July 31, 2021Eucharist, Grace, marriage, SacramentsCommunion, Marital Embrace, St. Paul, Wedding, Wedding Supper of the Lambtwowingstogod@gmail.com

Although the idea is no longer in vogue, the notion of the “marital debt” remains an important Biblical principle within Christian Marriage. Within his teaching on Marriage in 1Cor 7, St. Paul exhorts married couples to never forget this principle that follows from the vows that seal the Covenant of Marriage. Because the spouses pledge to give themselves personally, and therefor bodily to their spouse, they give their spouse rights over their body. This is especially true when it comes to the marital embrace. It is important not because spouses necessarily have to engage in the marital embrace anytime one of them feels like it, but because it is a sign that reveals something very important about the relationship between the Divine Bridegroom and His Bride.

The preferred image of Sacred Scripture for the relationship between God and mankind is that of Bridegroom and Bride. The Bible has numerous examples, most prominently that of the end of time when Christ will take His Bride into His home (Rev 19:7). The actual wedding took place when a Virgin said Yes and became a mother, offering her body so that He could take human nature to Himself. The Incarnation is the one flesh union of God and Man—what God has brought together, no man can ever draw asunder. It is consummated when Bridegroom gives up His Body for His spouse with a love that is stronger than death.

If we were to stop there, we would be leaving things on a rather generic term. Christ did not intend to consummate His marriage to mankind in general, but each man specifically; not just the Church, but each of her members. And this is where the Marital understanding of the Incarnation meets the Eucharist.

At each and every Mass, Christ states His desire to enter into a one-flesh Communion which each of the believers present. “This is My Body, given up for you” is meant to be taken quite literally as Christ giving Himself bodily to each of us. We must likewise specify our consent to enter into this communion with our Amen. To receive the Eucharist is to literally enter into a one-flesh Communion with Him, a Divine/Human marital embrace if you will. This is one of the reasons why God, when He designed marriage, and the marital embrace specifically, attached such great desire and pleasure to it. It was meant to point to the desire and joy that we experience in the heavenly consummation first and foremost. But it is also meant to be a sign of the desire and joy of the earthly consummation in the Eucharist.

The Marriage Debt and the Eucharist

All that being said, what does this have to do with the marriage debt? Through the true one-flesh union that is effected in the Eucharist, the individual believer gains the rights over Christ’s Body. These “rights” mean that they can offer Him to the Father as if the offering was their own and that there is a moral unity so that His acts become ours. The Marriage Debt ultimately allows us to fulfill the debt that each of us has to God of offering a worthy sacrifice. The Natural Law demands that we offer sacrifice to God. But no sacrifice that man offers on his own could ever fulfill this obligation. So Christ now makes such a sacrifice possible and in such a way that it is man that offers it. This is no mere substitution but an offering in spirit and truth of the made possible only through the one flesh union that occurs in the Eucharist.

The comparison then that St. Paul makes in Ephesians 5 is not just about marriage but about the Eucharist as well. It also eliminates any understanding of the Eucharist as a mere symbol. A symbol could not bring about a true Communion—only Christ truly present in the Eucharist will do.

With the one flesh union between Christ and the individual believer that occurs in the Eucharist, each person is able to give glory to God and achieve the salvation of their soul. The one-flesh union is not just a union of bodies, but a union of Persons so that the fourfold intention of Christ in the Eucharist, becomes the fourfold intention of His Bride.

Furthering the Communion

This makes the short time in which this physical union takes place, namely the time right after receiving Communion, an important time. It is the time where we further solidify our communion with Christ. We join Christ in His fourfold intention and make His acts ours. First, the Eucharist is offered as an act of adoration. Adoration is the acknowledgement of our utter dependence upon God as our Creator Who alone is worthy of supreme honor and dominion. Because it is Christ, true God and true Man, Who offers it the Eucharist is the most pleasing act of adoration to God. Likewise, the Eucharist is offered as an act of Thanksgiving for all the benefits that God has bestowed upon us. Each Eucharist can be offered for specific benefits. Third, the Eucharist is a sin offering by which are sins are forgiven. Finally, it is offered as an act of impetration asking for the necessary graces for salvation. These same graces were won by Christ and are distributed through the Eucharist.

It is in and through the Eucharist that Christ fulfills the marital debt by offering His Body to His Bride for her use. The Holy Eucharist is a nuptial Sacrament that is the greatest expression of married love.

The Tyranny of Sophistry

July 21, 2021Abortion, Culture, Marxism, ScienceCoronavirus, Covid19, Follow the Science, Mask Mandate, Pro-Choice, Sophistry, Tyrannytwowingstogod@gmail.com

In his book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper comments that the battle against sophistry is a perennial problem. Satan’s primordial sophistry escaped the gates of Eden and has plagued mankind ever since. Progress, especially when it is not matched by moral progress, only causes sophistry to grow. Sophistication, Pieper says, usually entails greater degrees of sophistry. What the sophist seeks to do is to shut down all pursuit of the truth by playing with words, usually by inventing catch-phrases that slide off a forked tongue and convey some half-truth that is cleverly dressed up as the whole truth. It is most certainly an abuse of language; for the proper use of language is to convey ideas and tell the truth. But sophistry uses language in order to manipulate people.

The Sophistry of Today

The problem of sophistry in our own age is particularly acute. You might say that we are living under the tyranny of sophistry in which any objection to a sophist shibboleth is met by stupefied hostility. “Pro-choice”: how could you not be in favor of a woman’s right to choose? “Black lives matter”: so, you think Black lives don’t matter? The objection is not with the half-truth, but with the half-falsehood that is dressed up by the slogan. In other words, the objection is with the sophistry that manipulates language to hide what is really going on.

In general, we should all be pro-choice, but in particular it totally depends on what the object of choice is. If you are choosing to kill an innocent baby, then no, in fact we should not “Pro-choice”. Of course, Black lives matter. But what the honest person objects to is dressing up the Marxist aims of the further destruction of Black lives and society as a whole in this truth. It is sophistry plain and simple. And anyone who insists otherwise is a language tyrant.

Following the Science

There is a new slogan that is being peddled by the tyrant—“follow the science”. Science is a great weapon in the hand of the sophisticated tyrant because it can be made to say anything you want it to say. It is presented as somehow being about objective truth gathered by running controlled experiments in an unbiased setting. The method may be reliable, but the scientist himself is a fallen human being. He is prone to biases, lapses in attention, ignorance, faulty design and even outright lying. It does not help that his so-called peers who review his work also suffer from the same inherent problems. It is also not immune to the “Cancel Culture” with many scientists handcuffed by a cultural confirmation bias. All of this leads to what scientist Stuart Ritchie in his book Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth calls a “replication crisis” in modern science. Experiments are run all the time. But the true test is when an experiment is replicated. Almost none of the so-called “science” has been replicated and very often is exposed as flawed when honest scientists attempt to do so. Like Ritchie we should not be anti-science but instead to use it in a manner that discovers the truth without succumbing to the sophist’s tactic of inventing it.

As I said, science is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the sophisticated tyrant because it can be used to say whatever they want it to say. Herein lies the half-falsehood found within “following the science”. Science itself can never lead to certainty. To assert otherwise is to turn science into a religion that must be governed by faith. “Follow the science” is a credal statement.

Why is it that science can never lead to certainty? In short, science, because it deals in material being, always deals with contingencies and therefore only leads to contingent truth. The truth of what is being asserted always depends on certain conditions also being true. The point is that when “Science” is presented as certain, without any discussion upon the conditions in which the thing also depends, it is a manipulation.

Take, for example, the contention that “masks work”. This is most certainly not an absolute. What are the conditions under which they work? To mandate mask wearing without any reference to the conditions under which they work, is not about safety but control. If you want to keep people safe, then you will school them in the art of wearing the mask. If you want to control them then any mask will do. Likewise, the push for vaccination. What are the conditions under which the vaccines “work”? What are the conditions under which they don’t, or might even be harmful? Are we to believe that a vaccine was developed at warp speed that covers every contingency? To say they are “safe and effective” without observing a multitude of contingencies is not science but scientism. To even mention those contingencies is sacrosanct and will likely get you censored.

Science can say whatever I want it to say simply by playing with those contingencies. I simply design my experiment so that it leads to a positive result. Then I get peers to agree with the way it was run—never mind that these peers also have a vested interest in toeing the party line. If it leads to a negative result anyway, I simply put it in the file cabinet. Whenever you hear some scientific “fact” presented in some absolute manner, always seek the contingencies. Who or what does this apply to? When doesn’t it apply? When someone tells you that it applies across the board, they are presenting something that has some degree of uncertainty as certain. We may be willing to accept that degree of uncertainty and treat the proposition as true, but it is not anti-science to demand further uncertainty be removed. But either way, certainty will never be achieved.

In classical Greece, the sophists threatened to take over society until the likes of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle stepped in. They were unafraid to call sophistry what it was. But that was not enough for them. They also rescued the victims of sophistry by teaching them how to reason. Perhaps in our own sophisticated age, we could do the same.

Discernment of Spirits and Mindfulness

July 17, 2021Anthropology, Ignatian Spirituality, PaganismCatholic Mindfulness, Discernment of Spirits, Mindfulness, St. Ignatius of Loyolatwowingstogod@gmail.com

In a previous essay, I offered an anthropological criticism of what most aptly be described as Catholic Mindfulness as described by Dr. Gregory Bottaro in his book of the same name. The heart of the problem, as I described it, lies in the fact that mental health will never be restored by turning off our natural mechanism by which we come to know reality. The error is in our judgment and so we must learn to judge rightly rather than judging at all. It is akin to stopping overeating by not eating at all rather than training ourselves through the virtue of temperance to eat correctly. I ended that essay by saying that we were much better off not looking any further East than Rome for help in governing our thoughts. Now I would like to offer the Catholic alternative to Mindfulness.

This “alternative” is not a baptized version of the Buddhist practice, but instead an approach that is deeply rooted within Ignatian spirituality. St. Ignatius of Loyola calls this practice Discernment of Spirits. It is predicated upon the idea that not every thought that each of us has is his own. We are caught in a cosmic struggle between Good and evil spirits. Our minds are the battleground upon which this conflict is played out. The Good Spirit, appealing to our freedom, inspires us to love the Good and move towards its source, God Himself. The Evil Spirit meanwhile moves us by using confusion, discouragement and darkness away from God and towards “low and earthly things.” So St. Paul invites us to “hold every thought captive to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) to judge whether the thoughts we have are our own or if they are coming from the Good or Evil Spirit. And St. Ignatius offers us a practice to make this admonition possible.

To Be Aware, to Judge, and to Act

According to St. Ignatius, when a thought or movement in our soul arises, we need to discern its source. We do that first by making ourselves aware of the thought. In this way, Discernment of Spirits is similar to Mindfulness. We should cultivate the habit of examining the movements in our souls. But this is where the similarities end. Rather than “paying attention to the present moment without judgment or criticism,” as Dr. Bottaro suggests, we should judge where the thoughts are coming from. St. Ignatius gives us rules by which we can judge their source, that is, he gives us rules by which we can train ourselves to judge correctly.

St. Ignatius says that if the thoughts inspire in us an increase in faith and hope, inflame the heart with love for God, increase our commitment to the will of God and to true humility or align our hearts with the Truth, then these thoughts should be acted upon. St. Ignatius calls these consolations and it is the means by which God forms us and strengthens us. When those thoughts arise we should act in accord with them.

On the other hand any thoughts or movements in our souls that draw us away from those things or, as St. Ignatius puts it, those things that stir in us “darkness of soul, disturbance in it, movement to things low and earthly, the unquiet of different agitations and temptations, moving to want of confidence, without hope, without love, when one finds oneself all lazy, tepid, sad, and as if separated from his Creator and Lord” should be acted against.

Notice that this rule does not say we should ignore or push the thoughts away, but, when faced with desolation we should judge them rightly and act against them. In fact, according to St. Ignatius, to respond weakly, or not at all, will actually make matters worse. Like most bullies, the evil spirits flee when they are confronted with strength (see Rule 12). The best time to resist evil thoughts and temptations is in the beginning before they gain any traction in our hearts.

It was mentioned above that consolation was the means by which God formed us. In order to be more accurate we should say that God also forms us by permitting desolation. It is when “I am weak, that I am strong” so that by exposing us to desolation, God is able to deepen our faith, hope and charity. In other words, desolation is only permitted when it is for our spiritual good. So important is this principle that St. Ignatius says that consolation is often given to us in order to strengthen us during times of desolation (Rule 10). The point though is that in order to benefit from it in the way that God intends, we must actively oppose it. For this, St. Ignatius gives us three specific rules (Rules 5-7).

Rules for Times of Desolation

St. Ignatius says that when we are in desolation, we should never make a change to a spiritual resolution we made while in consolation (Rule 5). Because we are drawn towards “low and earthly things” we will be tempted to think our previous resolutions to be too hard or a little “over the top” and want to walk them back.

Resisting that temptation to change, we should instead insist on changing ourselves (Rule 6). Rather than merely standing against the temptation, we are advised to fight back “by insisting more on prayer, meditation, on much examination, and by giving ourselves more scope in some suitable way of doing penance.” There is no better way to resist being drawn away from God than to run back towards Him and rejecting “low things” through penance and mortification.

It becomes plain to see that what Dr. Bottaro and his mindfulness friends offer is not liberation from our thoughts (as if they were only ours) but a means by which to get further ensnared by them. We should follow St. Ignatius rules for the Discernment of Spirits and enjoy the freedom that only Christ can give.

The Blueprint for the Reign of the Immaculate Heart

July 14, 2021Anthropology, Atheism, Marxism, Sexual Ethics, Theology, Theology of the BodyCommunism, Errors of Communism, John Paul II, Karl Marx, TOBtwowingstogod@gmail.com

Yesterday, July 13^th, marked the 104^th anniversary since Our Lady visited three children in Fatima Portugal and donned the prophet’s mantle warning of the dire consequences that mankind was to face for the next century. Her prophecy that “Russia will spread her errors throughout the whole world” remains the most relevant today. For Our Lady was not merely warning against Communism per se but was warning about the errors upon which Communism rested. Our Lady of Fatima was telling us that the next great battle the Church would face would be against Marxism.

Our Lady anointed as her “helpmate” the second great prophet of the 20^th Century, John Paul II to assist her. He had given his papacy, like his entire life and priesthood, to Our Lady. He even adopted as his episcopal motto, Totus Tuus (“all yours”), to show his total consecration to Mary. So, when on May 13, 1981, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, just prior to giving his Wednesday Theology of the Body lecture and the announcement of the founding of the Pontifical Institute for Marriage and Family, the Pope was shot he saw it as confirmation of his prophetic mission. He said that “one hand pulled the trigger while the other guided the bullet” away from his major arteries and organs. Our Lady had directly intervened so that John Paul II could carry out his sacred mission of stopping the spread of the “errors” of Russia. He eventually dealt a decisive blow when he played an instrumental role in the destruction of the Eastern Bloc.

It is tempting to think that Communism died when the Berlin Wall fell, but nearly 2 billion people still labor under Communist regimes. As one of them, China, continues to exercise its hegemonic aspirations, and the errors of Russian continue to spread far and wide, it becomes increasingly important to both understand and counter these errors.

Marxism as Identity Theft

In his Encyclical Divini Redemptoris, Pope Pius XI spoke of Marxism as a “Satanic Scourge”. The reason for this is that it strikes at God by attempting to obliterate His image in man. It overwrites human nature as co-Creator with God (proletariat vs bourgeois) and as men and women in marriage (exaggerated equality between the sexes). The Marxist revolution shifts away from the family, an image of the Trinity, as the fundamental unit of society towards the individual. The individual is merely a cog for the collective without any inherent dignity. It employs the Sexual Revolution as the means for bringing this about—divorce, abortion, contraception, sexual promiscuity even homosexuality (since nothing un-natural)—all permitted and promoted in the name of liberation from the family and human nature.

Likewise, complementarity is replaced with inherent conflict. A perpetual conflict between victim and victimizing classes is set up and Marxism delivers Messianic prophecies of peace that removes even the need for government. Everyone will be equal except, of course, for those who would be more equal than others. To reject the inherent hierarchy in creation leads to anarchy.

This is where John Paul II enters the scene. As he told his friend Henri de Lubac, he saw it as his mission to put an end of the pulverization of the human person that had its roots in Marxist thought: “The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person…To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies, we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of ‘recapitulation’ of the inviolable mystery of the person.”

The means by which he would accomplish this “recapitulation” is his Theology of the Body. He would flip the materialistic atheist’s vision of man as nothing but a collection of atoms at the service of the collective on its head. He would say that the material exists to make the immaterial present. Man was not just a body, but the body revealed man. John Paul II would offer his Theology of the Body as the foundation for solving the identity crisis brought about by Marxism.

A man or woman’s identity can only be received by knowing where he or she came from. Are they simply an accident of biology, or worse, an accident of a creation in lab? Or, were they willed from the beginning as a directly willed act of love, the crown of creation and very good? Karl Marx says they are the former while John Paul II affirms the latter.

Theology of the Body as Antidote

Theology of the Body restores the Christian vision of man’s origin through the three moments of Original Solitude, Original Unity and Original Nakedness. Man was made to be different from and superior to the animals. He does not come from the animals but instead is superior to them from the beginning and capable of being in relationship with God. This Original Solitude is not all because the man Adam was also made to be in a self-giving relationship with the woman Eve in Original Unity. Through the Original Nakedness in which they are “naked without shame” the two visibly see their vocation to love.

But knowing the beginning is not enough for our identity. We must also know our history. This history is not marked by conflict between victim and victimizer but Fall and Redemption by Christ who became a victim so that we didn’t have to. Christ came to take away all of the coping mechanisms that modern Marxian psychology offers and gives to us true freedom that Marxism can never give.

Finally, to know our identity, we must know our destination. Marxism controls and manipulates people through a fear of death. It always try to take away man’s vision of where he is going. The last 16 months have made this abundantly clear. But Christ came to take away the fear of death and to clear our vision to our supreme calling, to be caught up in the life of the Trinity with the Communion of Saints. There is no absorption into the “Collective” but a blossoming of personality such that we become who we were made to be. John Paul II’s Eschatological Man provides the vision and spurs our desire to journey there.

It is not a coincidence that Our Lady promised that once the errors of Russia were defeated, the reign of the Immaculate Heart would be achieved. The love with which Mary loves, a love that is marked by purity, will invade the hearts of mankind–and Theology of the Body supplies the blueprint for that vision.

On Politicians and Receiving Communion

May 26, 2021Abortion, American Founding, Bioethics, Catholic Social Teaching, Church, Church and State, Church Authority, EucharistAmericanism, Arian Heresy, Arianism, Art of the Possible, Catholic Church in America, Catholic Politicians, Heresy, NARAL, Senator Tim Kaine, Separation of Church and Statetwowingstogod@gmail.com

Last week, Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia wrote an Opinion piece in the National Catholic Reporter weighing in on the debate over Catholic politicians who openly support abortion and the reception of Holy Communion. The Senator clearly articulates the challenges faced by politicians who attempt to adhere to the Catholic faith when Christendom has eroded. Although he does not frame it using the same terms, he speaks of applying the principle of the Art of the Possible when fighting against the Culture of Death. Despite the good beginning, ultimately Senator Kaine’s opinion reveals him not to be Catholic, but an Americanist.

Americanism was first condemned as a heresy in the Church by Pope Leo XIII in a letter to the American Bishops in 1899. The Pope condemned the infection of Catholicism by the American “spirit of independence which passed too easily from the political to the religious sphere.” It attempts to replace the Holy Spirit with the Spirit of `76 and to focus only on areas of agreement with other Americans.

Revealing the Americanist Heresy

Only an Americanist would say that “bishops demanding that Catholics in public life not only live according to church doctrine but additionally shape the law, even to include the threat of criminal prosecution and punishment, to enshrine church doctrine on sexuality as mandatory for all Americans is contrary to our basic liberty.” And only an Americanist would ask, “Why would government require that Catholic sexuality doctrine, or Sharia law, or Orthodox Jewish rules about Sabbath observance, be followed by all?”

A Catholic would never need to ask that question because the answer is simple: Catholicism is true and the others are false. At the very least we can say that “Catholic sexuality doctrine” is binding upon all because it is based on the natural law. He has committed the fallacy of equivocation. As a Catholic he should know and believe that the only protection of our “basic liberty” comes through following the truth, both as revealed in nature and directly by God.

The law most certainly should be shaped according to the truth and not according to the whims of the masses. His job is not “representing a pluralistic society” but of representing God (Romans 13:1) from whom his authority comes. The Americanist always believes there is a separation in Church and State, but the Catholic knows that just as separation of body and soul leads to death, so too a “wall of separation” between Church and State leads to death of a society (and its members).

Americanism Leads to Arianism

Furthermore, the Senator attempts to put up a wall of separation between the man Jesus and the Word adding Arianism to his list of heresies. He says that “a decision by U.S. bishops to elevate issues of human sexuality, however important, above all others seems contrary to the Gospel. No reading of the life of Jesus would suggest these issues as his primary, or even secondary, concern. His towering message is about love of neighbor as oneself with a special focus on the poor, sick, hungry, marginalized.”

First of all, there is a reading “of the life of Jesus” that suggests these issues are of significant concern. That reading would include three mentions of human sexuality in the Sermon on the Mount regarding purity (5:8), lust (5:27) and divorce (5:31-32). Likewise in Chapter 19 of Matthew he speaks of marriage being restored to how is was in the beginning. Given how deeply sexuality concerns human beings, we would be surprised to find the Word becoming Flesh and ignoring those things as the Senator suggests.

Senator Kaine also makes the Arian mistake of not grasping that the Word of God as revealed throughout Scripture is the same Word of God Who took flesh. This is why we must look upon the Scriptures as a whole and not just focus on the “life of Jesus”.

The Senator also treats abortion as an “issue of human sexuality.” Certainly, the child being conceived has something to do with human sexuality, but the fact that they are legally killed is a matter of social justice. His rhetorical bait and switch allows him to speak of Jesus’ “towering message about love of neighbor…with a special focus on the poor…marginalized” and then support legislation that takes the most vulnerable, the most marginalized in the womb and sentences them to death.

Americanism and the Reception of Communion

Animated by the Americanist spirit, we should not be surprised to find the Senator taking exception to the practice withholding Communion from Catholic politicians who obstinately remain in support of grave sins such as abortion and gay marriage. The “wall of separation” between Church and State likewise divides the Americanist’s heart from his political action. It is impossible, according to the Senator, that a bishop or a priest should judge the heart of politician by his action.

A moment’s reflection upon this position shows its absurdity. Saying you are “personally opposed” to something while simultaneously supporting it by voting for and enacting legislation that leads to its spread is a lie. Personal opposition always manifests itself through public opposition. For a politician like Senator Kaine to have a 100% NARAL rating and to claim personal opposition is impossible.

The point is that someone may be in favor of abortion, but not let anyone else know. That is, in a certain sense, a “private” sin and nearly impossible for a bishop or a priest to judge. Therefore, you would not expect them to withhold Communion from that person. However once someone’s view has become public, that is, once they have made their will known, their sin likewise becomes public. Now, there is no longer a question of judging the interior disposition, but the exterior revelation of the interior disposition. In that case, the bishop or priest has an obligation to withhold Communion for the good of the person’s soul (more on this in a moment). Likewise, the bishop or priest would be contributing to the scandal attached to the public sin by not publicly correcting it. Notice that this would apply not just to politicians but to anyone and any public sin.

It might be contended that the politician might be in a state of ignorance regarding the seriousness of their sin. This of course allows for a private discussion in which the bishop or priest lets the person know that they are in an objective state of grave sin so as to remove any ignorance that might be present. This would give the person the opportunity to repent publicly without the appearance of having been chastised.

The Eucharist should be withheld for the person’s own good because to receive unworthily, that is, in a state of mortal sin, is to draw condemnation upon oneself (1 Cor 11:29). That is, they sin further by desecrating the Eucharist and do further harm to themselves. It is analogous to cutting a drug addict off from access to more drugs so they do no further harm to themselves. This is not being “judgmental” but instead is a pastoral act of love.

Before closing, it is worth responding to the concluding statement by Senator Kaine because it is a popular “go to” for people in his situation. “The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.” Medicine is not for the dead, but for those who are sick and weak. Those in a state of mortal sin are spiritually dead and incapable of eating—it is St Thomas who says a dead man cannot consume food; he first needs to be spiritually resurrected from the dead through Confession. Instead, the nourishment is for those who are in a state of grace but battling the weakness of concupiscence. The Church has always taught that the Eucharist is a Sacrament of the living and cannot be given to those who are spiritually dead without first going to Confession. Senator Kaine seems to be omitting this important detail from his argument.

Guest Post: On Trinitarian Symbolism in the Family

May 9, 2021Family, Guest Post, TrinityContraception, Divorce, Gender Theory, Holy Spirit, Image of God, Mystery of the Trinitytwowingstogod@gmail.com

By Connor Szurgot

When speaking of the Blessed Trinity, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, “the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the mystery of God in himself.” (CCC 234) Beyond even that epic and truly awe-some reality is the reality that, since every cause is in some way in its effect, all of created reality is in some way Trinitarian. One of the clearest examples of this Trinitarian symbolism in created reality is the family. As such, the devil seeks to attack the Blessed Trinity through His image: the family.

A Community of Persons, United by Love

Through the mystery of the Trinity is not able to be fully comprehended by man, certain facts about the mystery can be understood. Some of those facts are: 1) There is one Divine nature, 2) there are three distinct Divine Persons in the Godhead, 3) each of these Divine Persons is co-equal, co-eternal, and fully God, 4) each of the Divine Persons is only differentiated from the others by their relations to the other Persons. These relations are as follows: 1) the Father, the first Person of the Trinity, eternally begets the Son, the second Person of the Trinity and 2) the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Trinity, eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. Without delving too deep into this mystery, it is important to understand that all three Persons are united in love. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father and this eternal perfect love between the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit.

With that understanding established, it is not hard to see how the family images this. A man and women love each other so much as to give themselves to each other in the life-long bond of matrimony and the fruit of their married love is a child. What unites them in the child on a material level are their shared genes. (Indeed, the father and the mother are in a way now more completely united since the child is the product of both of them.) Yet, beyond the material level, the are united in mutual love, one for another. Also, each member is distinct in their role within the family. They are a community of persons, united in love, that images the community of Persons, united in eternal love.

The First Attack: Gender Theory

Progressive gender theory advances the idea that men and women are the same. This positions leads to two conclusions: 1) to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ has no actual meaning and 2) that one can switch between being a man or a woman at will because what you are is defined only by what you think you are. In addition to the obvious absurdity of this claim, a problem with this is shown by a passage from Genesis, “So God made man in his own image, made him in the image of God. Man and woman both, he created them.” (Gen. 1:27) Notice two things: 1) that God clearly created two distinct sexes and 2) that He created them in the image of God. Clearly, the complementarity of man and woman are supposed to reveal, in a subtle way, something about the Trinity.

The complementary of man and woman is supposed to model the relationship of the Father and the Son. The Father (the man) eternally loves and gives Himself to the Son (the woman) Who receives Him and gives Himself back in return. The man is the giver in the relationship while the woman receives him and gives herself back in return. The natural inclinations in man and woman show this to be true and to attempt to defy this is not only to make oneself miserable, but to destroy this image of the Trinity in man.

The Second Attack: Divorce

Divorce is the first of these three attacks that has found its way into mainstream acceptance among Protestant Christian circles. This is strange since Christ is very clear that, “[husband and wife] are not two, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” (Matt. 19:6) This practice attacks the Trinity by destroying the Love that binds the Father and the Son together, the Holy Spirit. When a man and woman give themselves to each other in marriage, something new is created even before they step away from the altar. The objective reality of their marriage comes into being and exists in a way that is separate, but dependent on the two people in the marriage. This dependency is not upon the will of the two people joined, but upon their lives. Their marriage will objectively exist until death do they part.

When a couple divorces, they tear apart and divide what God has created to be the symbol of His Unity in the Trinity: the family. The painful effects of such a rupture are often far reaching. It can be particularly damaging to the children of their marriage, who have lost what was supposed to be their image of complete and unconditional love—their image of God on earth.

The Third Attack: Contraception

The second attack of the three that has broken through the walls of the broader Christian kingdom and proceeded to pillage and destroy the interior of that kingdom is contraception. At the beginning of Creation, God gave all animals the blessing of the ability to produce another being like itself. Only in man, however, can we call this blessing procreation instead of reproduction. Only man has been given the privilege of assisting God in the creation of new souls. It is a privilege so important and sacred that it has always been entrusted to two people and marked with a degree of pleasure befitting the goodness of such an act. Moreover, it is a power which makes man truly God-like in the love which motivates it. To will to bring into existence a creature that you will care for and sacrifice for and who has done nothing for you, is indeed incapable of doing anything for you at the beginning, is an act imaging the love that drove God in the act of creation.

The act of contraception, however, opposes the image of the Trinity by removing from a man and woman the natural end of their love and the damage caused by this removal is proportional to the good it damages. While a single contraceptive act, even between a man and wife, is gravely sinful as it opposes the end set forth by the natural law, the effects of a contraceptive mindset are even more terrifying. Through the adoption of a contraceptive mindset, our culture has separated marital love and the creation of children into two separate camps. The fruits of such a separation are bountiful in our culture: pre- and extra-martial relations, masturbation, pornography, abortion, fatherless children, the acceptance of homosexuality and numerous other sexual disorders. It paves the way for marital love, which is supposed to express perfect self-giving to another, to corrupt into selfishness and mutual use. The Trinity shows that love is fruitful by its very nature. The love between the Father and the Son spirates out from them and is another Person. To act contrary to the natural end of love is to act contrary to love itself.

The family is the building block of society and God has will that it be the building block of the supernatural society of the Church as well. He has also made it the natural image for His very Nature, the greatest mystery of the Catholic faith. We must defend this great gift from God which has been entrusted to us by living and proclaiming the truth.

The Social Cost of Greed

May 5, 2021Catholic Social Teaching, Culture of Life, Economics, Freedom, Human Dignity, Marxism, Politics, WorkGreed, Gregory the Great, Oligarchy, Original Sin, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Paul, St. Thomastwowingstogod@gmail.com

It is axiomatic that those who can’t control themselves will always be controlled by someone else. This axiom is on display in our own day as we continue to see democracy be overthrown by oligarchy. A virtuous populace can thrive under a democratic system. Any system of self-government requires a people who are capable of governing their own desires. Once that power is lost individually and vice takes over, mobs are sure to follow. The problem with mobs however is that they really can never organize and so an oligarch must step in to incite and organize the mob. Thus, democracy moves from mob rule to oligarchy very quickly. Our own day bears witness to these principles in action as democracy dies and oligarchy takes over. If we are to arrest this development, then we must examine its causes. Every social ill has as its root cause personal vice and there is one vice that seems to be baked into our society—avarice. We should not be surprised at this fact given that St. Paul matter-of-factly proclaims that “love of money is the root of all evil” (c.f. 1 Timothy 6:10) and the Christian Tradition since Gregory the Great has considered it as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Despite tradition’s testimony to the contrary, our own culture insists there is no sin in avarice. That is because it is baked into the American Experiment. Founded on a class-less basis, class became something that was earned and prosperity was the first form of virtue signaling. As Tocqueville said public fortune became synonymous with greed. To condemn greed is to suffer the label of Socialist. For those who are willing to wear that label proudly, they always do so while hiding their 10,000 square-foot houses behind hedges and gates. These modern-day hypocrites make the Pharisees seem tame.

What is Avarice?

What then is greed and why does it cause such social evil? St. Thomas says that, “avarice is taken generally for an inordinate love of having anything whatsoever, and in another way particularly for love of having possessions all of which are comprehended under the name of money because their value is measured by money…avarice signifies a certain defect in regard to the dispensing of wealth and a certain excess in regard to its acquisition and retention because of an excessive love of money” (De Malo, XIII). Mere desire for possessions and money is not evil, but instead an inordinate love of them is. This inordinate love occurs when the desire to possess a thing or thing goes beyond need (this includes the “need” for saving and reasonable luxury). Rather than getting caught up as to where the line between reasonable and inordinate is, we should instead look to the interior of what it is that actually motivates us in our greed.

What makes greed particularly deadly is the fact that it kills our recognition of our creaturely status. All of us crave security. Rightly ordered, we know that this security is limited and so we must trust and hope in God and His promises. This is why the Dollar Bill has the motto In God We Trust on it. But given enough material prosperity, and more importantly, enough money, we begin to think our security is founded upon the ability to monetarily weather any storm. This craving for security leads to an insatiable desire for money because money gives us the appearance of having control. Greed then become all about control and grasping at a God-likeness that is rooted in Original Sin.

Personal greed also spills over to other people because it is opposed to both generosity and justice. It really is more blessed to give than to receive (c.f. Acts 20:35) because it keeps us from falling into the greed trap. The virtue of generosity conditions us to draw pleasure from giving rather than getting. One can hardly imagine God allowing a person to outdo Him in generosity so that they give away too much.

Likewise with justice. The tight-fistedness of greed always keeps us from ensuring that our neighbor receives what is due to him. For the avaricious man, relationships are fundamentally competitive rather than complimentary. Each slice of the pie that you receive is one less that I can have. In this way avarice also becomes deadly for other people. Accustomed to measuring everything in terms of costs, there is an emphasis on having over being. Utilitarianism, rooted in greed is, as Pope St. John Paul II, at the heart of the Culture of Death—”“This culture [the Culture of Death] is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency…only goal . . . the pursuit of one’s own material well-being” (Evangelium Vitae, 12).

Extending Control

It is also deadly to others in a less obvious way. Buoyed by unbridled Capitalism and fed by insatiable greed, the avaricious man, accustomed to thinking he has absolute control over his life, now sets his sights on other people. Having many zeroes in their bank accounts, they now decide they will play the hero for others. But this playing of hero is just that, mere play, even if they label it as philanthropic. This philanthropy however is always motivated by a desire to control other people. It is literally a Messiah-complex thinking that they can save the world on their own terms. America seems to breed these “philanthropists” throughout the ages, be it Carnegie and Rockefeller or Gates and Bezos.

Greed creates the oligarchs and greed is what makes the mob malleable to their manipulation. Convinced that the only way to be free from the grasp of the oligarchs is by having their own resources, they remain under their thumbs. Greed generates “class” warfare and Socialism becomes the weapon to pit the greedy plebs against each other. In truth however the only way to be free is the same way it has always been—become men and women of virtue. The virtuous always remain free because they are immune to such manipulation. Armed with generosity and justice, they are not only counter-cultural, but culture changers.

Cancelling Anger

April 21, 2021Culture, Freedom, VirtueAnger, Cancel Culture, Justice, Repentance, Seven Deadly Sins, St. John Chrysostom, Wrathtwowingstogod@gmail.com

Virtuous men are rarely, if ever, prone to propaganda. That is because they can ascertain when to “fight the good fight”. Vicious men, on the other hand, are extremely prone to it. They have no idea which are the good fights and so they must be told. But simply telling them is not enough. Lacking any real control over their anger, they need someone else to stir it up for them by turning events that fit the narratives catastrophes. Having no way to turn it off, they are absolutely unforgiving and must find offense around every corner. Discerning ears will recognize this scenario for what it is—our modern society and its incessant need to cancel other people.

In truth then, at the heart of cancel culture, is the inability to discern the difference between wrath and anger. These terms, even if they are often used synonymously, are not truly referring to the same thing. Anger is, first and foremost, a passion or an emotion built into human nature to deal with the presence of evil. More specifically, it is the emotion that provides an interior motor to fight against a specific evil that acts as an obstacle to achieving some good thing. When a man discerns some good thing is being blocked, he wills to be angry in order energize him to fight the good fight.

Fighting the Good Fight

The virtuous man knows the good fight when he sees it because he has the virtue of justice. He is habitually desiring that each person receives what is due to him. When some obstacle is placed in the way of that being achieved, he grows angry in order to move him to fight to restore justice. This is why St. John Chrysostom thought that: “He who does not get angry, when there is just cause for being so, commits sin. In effect, irrational patience sows vices, maintains negligence, and encourages not only bad men to do wrong, but good men as well.”

Not only does the virtuous man grow angry when he should, he also directs his anger at the source of the injustice and does not just “vent”. Likewise, he also filters it through the virtues of clemency and meekness to avoid becoming excessively angry and aim it at the injustice first and then the cause of it. He truly knows how to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” because he is just.

Our Lord, Who referred to Himself as “meek and humble of heart” is the example par excellence. When He cleaned the Temple, it was because His Father was not being rendered what was due to Him. So, fueled by anger, the Just Man removed the obstacle. With meekness He whipped the tables but with clemency avoided whipping the money changers.

The reason why anger is such a strong emotion is because it must often supply enough fuel for us to fight for justice for other people. When that fuel turns inward and ignites a fire in us because of how we perceive we are being treated then it is truly wrath. This is why wrath has been considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins—it turns what should be an outward-facing passion into a selfish one. The wrathful man sees red, not because of an offense against justice, but because he has been slighted in some way. To use modern parlance, he has been offended by the words or actions of another person. Because anger must always be justified, he must also search for a reason why his own personal offense is really unjust. In essence wrath turns anger off of justice onto my feelings and directs it not towards rectifying an injustice, but mercilessly punishing the offender.

A simple example might help us discern the difference. A man is getting on to a crowded bus and he steps on your foot. You feel anger arise, but look at him and realize he had tripped over someone else’s foot a few feet ahead of you and it was merely an accident. In that case the just response is clemency because it was an accident. Now suppose that same man enters the bus looks you in the eye, smiles and stomps on your foot. Now the anger is justified, but the meek man would temper his response such that it did not include punching him in the face. But the anger would be directed towards the action and not just the fact that it was done to you. The way to know the difference is by imagining after stepping on your foot he goes and steps on an old lady’s foot. If you are just as angry (or more) about that as you are about your own foot being stepped on, then you know the anger is justified.

This scenario also highlights an important point that is often a source of confusion regarding anger. The Christian in imitation of Our Lord, when He is the sole victim of the injustice, will often suffer it in silence and not be angry. But when there are other victims, including those who might be scandalized by you not confronting the evil, then zealous anger will confront the wrong directly. The “others” include the offender because he needs to know that he has done evil in order to repent—and will need to be justly punished as part of that repentance.

Back to the Cancel Culture

Every passion, when not properly wedded to virtue, needs increased stimuli in order to get an equivalent response. Related to the question at hand, wrath needs to be constantly fed, especially when it is being used to keep the vicious fighting. It no longer becomes about justice, but about keeping them angry. There is no need to discern whether something is actually unjust or not, because the anger will make it “feel” that way. There is no need to make the distinction between victim and perpetrator because the object of that anger will tell which is which. There can be no forgiveness until the perpetrator is “cancelled” and is no longer exists, either literally or figuratively.

Thankfully, history has many examples of cancel cultures that always end with the cancellers eating their own. When there is no one left to be angry at, when there is no one left to cancel, wrath demands that you execute the executioner. For those who are trapped in this vicious circle the only option is for the virtuous to step up and restore justice. Fear, masquerading as prudence, is never the solution. Neither is the ersatz anger that we call “outrage.” Nor is any attempt at cancelling the cancellers. Only true zealous anger for justice can repair our decadent culture.

The Worst Sin

April 14, 2021Church, Church Authority, Eucharist, Magisterium, SacramentsAdoration, Aquinas, Communion, Communion on the Tongue, Penance, Reparation, Sacrilege, St. John Vianneytwowingstogod@gmail.com

What is the worst sin that afflicts the world today? Our immediate inclination might be to respond, Abortion. And we would not be wrong in identifying the sheer magnitude, done with impunity and under the legal protecting of the State, of the deliberate murder of the most innocent members of society. We most certainly cannot turn a blind eye nor remain silent in the face of such a grave evil. The murder of the innocent cries out to Heaven for vengeance prompting us to clothe ourselves in “sackcloth and ashes”—doing public penance for so public a sin—but, as evil as it is, it is not the worst sin.

Admittedly, all sin is evil because it is an offense against God first and foremost. Sins such as murder, abortion, adultery, and theft are direct offenses against love of neighbor. Other sins such as sacrilege, idolatry, blasphemy, apostasy, heresy, final impenitence, and the like are offenses directly against the love of God. The latter set always represent, objectively speaking, graver offenses for that reason. So as evil as abortion is, it is not the greatest evil. Instead, the greatest evil in the modern world, both in magnitude and frequency, is sacrilege against the Eucharist.

Sacrilege

Sacrilege is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, “irreverence for sacred things.” A thing is sacred because it is been set aside for Divine worship. “Now just as a thing acquires an aspect of good through being deputed to a good end, so does a thing assume a divine character through being deputed to the divine worship, and thus a certain reverence is due to it, which reverence is referred to God…and is an injury to God” (ST II-II q.99, art.1). The worst acts of sacrilege St. Thomas says are committed against “the sacraments whereby man is sanctified: chief of which is the sacrament of the Eucharist, for it contains Christ Himself. Wherefore the sacrilege that is committed against this sacrament is the gravest of all” (ibid, art.3).

Considering the magnitude alone should give us great pause in both the manner and intention by which we approach the Eucharist. But in our time, it is the frequency by which this sin is committed that makes it the worst sin.

First of all, at least objectively speaking, Protestant services by which “Communion” is “blessed” and given represents an act of sacrilege against the Eucharist. This does not, to be clear, consider the subjective guilt of those who participate which may be relatively light. Still, simulation of a Sacrament, even when done by professing Christians who have no intent of offending God, still can be an act of sacrilege. I bring it up, not as an attack on Ecumenism, but for Catholics to be conscious of this fact when they are considering participating in such services, even if they choose not to actually partake of the communion wafers and grape juice. Regardless, it is still objectively an act of sacrilege and calls for those who do love Jesus in the Eucharist to do penance and acts of reparation. Perhaps the Ecumenical Movement would gain more steam if Catholics did not commit what St. John Paul II referred to as Eucharistic “duplicity” (c.f. Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 38) by ignoring the fact that Communion will never be achieved while these sacrileges are glossed over.

Then there are the sins of those who are professed members of the Catholic Church. By far these are most grave and frequent because “he who handed me over is guilty of the greater sin” (John 19:11). For a Catholic to commit any sacrilege of the Eucharist is akin to betraying the Son of Man with a kiss. The Eucharist is Christ’s gift of Himself to His friends. To betray a friend, especially when that friend is Christ Himself, is a diabolical deed. These sacrileges tend to happen in one of three ways.

Sacrilege in the Church

First, there are those who “eateth and drinketh unworthily” (1 Cor 11:28) by receiving when in a state of mortal sin. These sinners, according to St. John Vianney, crucify Jesus in their hearts:

He submits Him to a death more ignominious and humiliating than that of the Cross. On the Cross, indeed, Jesus Christ died voluntarily and for our redemption; but here it is no longer so: He dies in spite of Himself, and His death, far from being to our advantage, as it was the first time, turns to our woe by bringing upon us all kinds of chastisements both in this world and the next. The death of Jesus Christ on Calvary was violent and painful, but at least all nature seemed to bear witness to His pain. The least sensible of creatures appeared to be affected by it, and thus wishful to share the Savior’s sufferings. Here there is nothing of this: Jesus is insulted, outraged by a vile nothingness, and all keeps silence; everything appears insensible to His humiliations. May not this God of goodness justly complain, as on the tree of the Cross, that He is forsaken? My God, how can a Christian have the heart to go to the holy table with sin in his soul, there to put Jesus Christ to death?
Sermon on Unworthy Communion, Book IV, Sermons of St. John Vianney

When members of the Hierarchy either promote such sacrilege by encouraging those who are living in an objective state of sin to receive the Sacrament or by those who look the other way when a public sinner presents themselves for Communion, then they become complicit in the guilt. At least Judas kept his betrayal to himself and did not try to corrupt other members of the Apostolic College or the rest of Our Lord’s disciples.

Likewise, sacrilege can also occur when a sacred thing is treated as profane. This is, to use St. Paul’s terminology, a failure to properly “discern the Body of the Lord.” Faith is vitally important to receiving Our Lord in the Eucharist because it is our part in the exchange that occurs in Communion. Our Lord gives Himself completely while we give Him our faith that the Eucharist is. It is only by first believing that the Victim for our sins is truly and really present that we can identify with Him as Victim and join Him in offering ourselves to the Holy Trinity. This exchange cannot happen unless we first receive in Faith.

This profanation of the Eucharist can occur in the manner in which Our Lord is handled. I will not belabor the point that was made previously about how the unnecessary use of Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion, Communion in the Hand, and all of the sanitary abuses related to the pandemic have only served to increase the number of offenses against Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Still, I would like to point out that when there is mass sacrilege going on, we must have the zeal to receive Our Lord in the most reverent way possible. This means making acts of faith, hope and charity and self-offering (Suscipe) before receiving Our Lord on the tongue. It also means approaching Him after making a sincere act of contrition and an act of thanksgiving afterwards.

It also calls for acts of reparation and penance to repair the harm done to the Church by abusers of the Blessed Sacrament. This starts by committing to watching for one hour with Our Lord in Adoration in reparation specifically for sins against the Eucharist. But it continues by joining Bishop Schneider’s Crusade of Reparation to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus. He has a prayer (at the bottom of this link) that should be said at the end of every Mass and each of the acts contained within the prayer offers a concrete way in which we might offer Reparation.

In many ways, the sin of sacrilege against the Eucharist and abortion are simply parallels in the same failure of love of God and love of neighbor. Just as we fail to love the God Who hid Himself in the Eucharist we also fail to love our neighbor hidden in the womb of his mother. Out of sight, out of mind as the expression goes. But until we treat Our Lord in the manner worthy of us great gift, we likewise will not see an end to the mass killing of the hidden children in the womb.

The Second Sin

April 10, 2021Moralilty, VirtueCharity, envy, Kindness, Seven Deadly Sins, St. Martin de Porrestwowingstogod@gmail.com

It was, St. Paul said, through one man’s sin of pride that death entered the world (c.f. Romans 5:12). It was through another man’s envy that death was realized. Cain killed Abel out of envy. This pattern, pride followed by envy, is the same path followed by Lucifer. First pride in defining how he would be like God, then through envy he attacks mankind (c.f. Wisdom 2:23-24). It is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and is perhaps the deadliest of these vices because of the way in which it addicts us to misery.

Envy is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas (who cites St. John Chrysostom), is “sadness at another’s good” (De Malo, q.10 art.1). And herein lies the reason for its deadliness. Properly speaking, sadness is oriented towards evil and should only be experienced in its presence. For the envious, it is good that causes it. This is because the man with the vice of envy experiences someone else’s good as a threat to himself. More specifically the good of the other person is thought to detract from his own excellence. And since he experiences sorrow, sorrow that can only be mitigated by removing the evil cause, they will for the person’s excellence to no longer below to him. They don’t really care if they receive the excellence, they only want the other person not to have it. Victor Hugo, in his poem, Envy and Avarice, captures the envious heart. When God offers envy anything he wants with the only condition that his neighbor will get double, he says “I would be blinded of one eye!”.

The Evil Eye

What Hugo is subtly pointing out is how envy has its punishment built in. The misery the envious experience never really lets up as long as envy lives in their heart. Their sadness never subsides while the vice is still present. In this way some have called it the “just vice.”

The blindness that comes from only one eye is also particularly descriptive because, although envy is in the will, it stems from the inability to see correctly. The envious see everything in terms of competition. Their self-worth is predicated upon being better than someone else. Their self-love is only possible when they hate their neighbor since envy renders them unable to “will the good of the other.”

As a culture addicted to self-esteem, we are particularly vulnerable to envy. This is why when someone does or achieves something good, there are always people who go searching out, usually through old social media posts, evidence that the person is deeply flawed. Apologizing to the envy mob only has the effect of inflaming them further. There can be no forgiveness for wrongs, real or perceived, when it is the good that the person has done that is experienced as the evil. Cancel culture is not just about controlling thoughts, but also, and maybe primarily, about indulging envy.

The Second Greatest Commandment, according to Our Lord, is to “love your neighbor, as yourself” (Mark 12:31), but the envious find this command impossible because they do not grasp what the love of self means. This connection between love and self and love of neighbor often causes us to confuse envy with jealousy. Although they are often used synonymously, jealousy means that you love something that you possess, but fear that that it might be taken away. Envy has no such desire to possess, only to see the other not have it. Jealousy regards sadness at the prospect of losing something good that you already have while envy is sadness in reaction to someone else’s good.

The envious also are rendered incapable of fulfilling the First Commandment as well. The hatred of neighbor necessarily spills over to God who is “the Giver of all good gifts” (James 1:23-24). He ultimately bears the blame for unequally distributed His gifts and excellencies among His creatures. Envy makes us like the younger brother in the story of the Prodigal Son.

Like all vices, envy is baked into our fallen nature and can only be removed by intentionally acting against it. This, of course requires that we are able to identify it in our pattern of thoughts. Envy is tricky because it hides in the dark. Unlike the other vices, no one wants to admit to being so petty. As Rebecca Konyndyk puts it in her book Glittering Vices, envy shuns open warfare mostly because of the feeling of inferiority—to declare one’s envy is to admit one’s inferiority. And so, it normally is exercised through sins of the tongue such as detraction, slander and calumny. We use all of these to keep others from holding the person in such high esteem. It also manifests itself through belittling and “roasting” the other person.

De-programming Envy

Just as Sloth is the vice by which we fail to love God, envy is the vice though which we fail to love our neighbor. So, one of the opposing virtues is charity. Properly understood, charity is loving another person for God’s sake. By loving the excellence of the other because it ultimately comes from God, we develop the habit of rejoicing in the good of others.

In practice it consists in the virtue of kindness which is a fruit of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Gal 5:22). Kindness flows from a burning desire to do good for one’s neighbor in a specific and concrete way. As an example, St. Martin de Porres who often was the subject of severe ridicule because of his mixed-race complexion, would run after someone when they made fun of him in order to do some kindness for them.

St. Thomas also mentions that because envy regards two objects—namely the sadness and the prosperity of a good person, it has two contrary virtues. First there is pity by which one grieves, both affectively and effectively, the misfortune of a good person. Likewise, zealous anger is the opposing virtue by which one is saddened at the prosperity of the wicked.

The Battle Over the Origin of Species

April 7, 2021Anthropology, Creation, Creed, Evolution, Science, ScriptureCreation of Man, Darwin, Deism, Genesis, Literal Meaning of Scripture, Pius X, Pontifical Biblical Commission, Theistic Evolutiontwowingstogod@gmail.com

Writing in his journal in 1873, Charles Darwin said “I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire and he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force and vigor of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect; real good seems only to follow the slow and silent side attacks.” Using his slow and silent theory of Evolution as his side attack, Darwin decided that he would reimagine the Book of Genesis. The original Origin of Species speaks of the supernatural beginnings of all of creation and it was to be replaced by a completely naturalistic explanation for the origin of all that is. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution started a revolution, first by consigning the first three chapters of Genesis to “myth” and then systematically deconstructing each of the tenets of the Creed. The Church was certainly caught flat-footed when the attack began and the Faithful made compromises with Darwinists that can be labeled as “theistic evolution.” But this compromise does not just remake the beginnings but removes the supernatural from nearly every element of the Faith. It is high time then that we reconstruct a theology of Creation which starts with a proper understanding of the opening chapters of Genesis.

Before diving into the specifics, we must first admit that the use of figurative language has as its goal to make the truth clearer. Those who attempt to reconcile the two Origin of Species accounts often speak as if Genesis is using figurative language to convey the truth that God created all things, but that it is not intended to explain how He did so. Nevertheless, the account does in fact reveal how He made things. Genesis speaks very clearly that the animals are made from the clay(Gn 1:24), Adam from the slime of the Earth (Gn 2:7) and Eve from the rib of Adam (Gn 2:23).

The Figurative Catch-22

It is often contended that the author of Genesis is merely using figurative language thus opening the door to an evolutionary explanation. The problem with this interpretation is that there is no need to use figurative language; ordinary language will do. Darwin did it and didn’t need the Holy Spirit’s help. If Theistic Evolution is true, then the figurative language makes this less clear, not more, and violates the sole purpose of using figurative language to begin with. No one would read “Let the earth bring forth the living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth, according to their kinds” (Gn 1:23), and think this is simply a metaphor for one living species becoming another. It is quite clear, even if we admit that it is figurative language, that the author is saying that the living animals all came directly from inanimate matter. Likewise with man who God “breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.” If man’s body came from animate being, then “breathing the breath of life” into the man so that he “became a living soul” may be figurative language, but the figure does not actually point to reality.

This also invites the more fundamental question as to why God needs to use figurative language to begin with. Certainly, there are truths that are beyond human understanding and thus only a metaphor or the like will do. But when speaking of God’s actions in Creation, the Omnipotent God, can do things in such a way as to make them explainable. In other words, why would God need a metaphor to describe how He created—couldn’t He just create in a way that enables Him to also describe it in relatively simple terms? Why do we default to thinking that “the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth” isn’t actually how God actually did it? The only reason why we wouldn’t read that literally is because we a priori remove any supernatural action on God’s part and assume that it is a metaphor for some natural explanation. Again, why would God then use a metaphor when there is a natural explanation that could be explained using clear language? The ancient peoples knew of different theories of evolution, so it would have been intelligible to even them. “Slime” or “dust” (depending on your translation) is not a metaphor for ape, even for the most inarticulate person you could imagine.

That it should be read with a supernatural interpretation is clear from the fact that things are created by God’s Word—“through Him all things were made.” How can we reconcile God’s “let there be” and evolutionary construction of the universe by natural processes? The only way is through a Deistic conception of God by which He speaks not directly into creation (i.e. supernatural creation and miracles) but through some Divine blueprint by which the universe reaches its completion without any direct intervention on His part.

The Mind of the Church

It was mentioned above that the Church was caught somewhat flat-footed in its response to Evolution. That was not the case initially. A local synod was held in Cologne, Germany in 1860 to specifically address Evolution. They sought to respond to the release of Origin of Species in Germany and nip any attempt to say humans were subject to evolution in the bud. Although it was a document of a local Church it did receive the unreserved acceptance of Rome because it contained the ordinary Catholic teaching. Likewise, Vatican I declared that all things were created directly “according to their whole substance” by God. Pope St. Pius X also commissioned the Pontifical Biblical Commission (PBC), giving them Magisterial Power to declare the truths about Genesis. In his 1907 Motu Proprio, Praestantia Scripturae, he declared that “all are bound by duty of conscience to submit to the decisions of the Biblical Pontifical Commission, both those which have thus far been published and those which will hereafter be proclaimed.”

Related to the specific question at hand, the PBC issued the document “Concerning the Historical Character of the First Three Chapters of Genesis” in 1909. The question that was posed was “[N]otwithstanding the historical character and form of Genesis, the special connection of the first three chapters with one another and with the following chapters, the manifold testimonies of the Scriptures both of the Old and of the New Testaments, the almost unanimous opinion of the holy Fathers and the traditional view which the people of Israel also has handed on and the Church has always held, may it be taught that: the aforesaid three chapters of Genesis contain not accounts of actual events, accounts, that is, which correspond to objective reality and historical truth, but, either fables derived from the mythologies and cosmogonies of ancient peoples and accommodated by the sacred writer to monotheistic doctrine after the expurgation of any polytheistic error; or allegories and symbols without any foundation in objective reality proposed under the form of history to inculcate religious and philosophical truths; or finally legends in part historical and in part fictitious freely composed with a view to instruction and edification?” to which they answered, “In the negative to both parts.”

Genesis, according to the mind of the Church then, contains actual events “which correspond to objective reality and historical truth” and is not “allegories and symbols without any foundation in objective reality proposed under the form of history to inculcate religious and philosophical truths.” Genesis is true history from “the beginning”.

If the modern Church that has been steamrolled by the slow and steady onslaught of Darwinian Evolution it is because these teachings have been mostly forgotten. If we are to reverse the tide, then we must reassert our confidence in the truth and meaning of God’s Word. We have abandoned it for dubious science and the fallout has been great. Only by reasserting the Traditional understanding of the Church can we restore a belief in the supernatural action of God.

The Gateway Vice

March 13, 2021Anthropology, Eucharist, Fasting, VirtueBread of Life, Capital Sins, Concupiscence, Fasting, Gluttony, Original Sin, Seven Deadly Sinstwowingstogod@gmail.com

As Eve twisted the apple from its stem, little did she grasp that she was also twisting the desires of her progeny for all time. By mingling good and evil, their desires would no longer be the North Star that God intended them to be. For He had willed that man, in pursuing those things that were truly good for him, would be rewarded with pleasure. Reason commanded the will towards the good and pleasure was its reward. Adam seized the reward instead by choosing that which was “pleasing to the eye and good for food,” Adam truly upset the apple cart. In choosing pleasure over reason, reason no longer ruled but instead wrestled with pleasure. In seemingly becoming “like unto the gods” he became like unto a beast.

God did not leave mankind unaware of its fundamental brokenness but instead left an orientation towards those things that are truly good for them intact. It became difficult, but not impossible. Generation after generation knew this and sought to root out vice and find fulfillment in virtue. But few of those generations have embraced this brokenness with such gusto as our own. Virtue is something to be signaled, not actually owned, and vice is to be rationalized away as, at worst, a “bad habit” akin to cracking your knuckles or clicking your tongue before you speak. If virtue is to be more than signaled, then we must restore a proper understanding of vice.

Following in the footsteps of the desert monks, St. Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas, Tradition has left us with Seven Deadly Vices. St. Thomas called them Capital Vices because these seven vices are usually the source or head of all of the sins we commit (see ST II-II, q.153, art.4). The reason why this is important is that these vices remain hidden to us as subconscious motivations for the sins we do commit. They cause us to steal pleasure where none should be found. Only once they are recognized can we restore pleasure to its rightful place as a side effect.

A Useless Vice?

One of these vices, gluttony, at least on the surface does not seem to be a big deal. How could a little overeating or carrying a little too much have anything to do with our spiritual life? But, as St. Gregory the Great said, “unless we first tame the enemy dwelling within us, namely our gluttonous appetite, we have not even stood up to engage in the spiritual combat.” His point is that gluttony is a gateway vice that, left unconquered, will most certainly lead to hell. It trains us in the practice of self-indulgence and causes us to more and more of it. Likewise, when we abandon reason when it comes to eating, we are almost certainly going to abandon it in other areas too.

Now I mentioned the connection between being fat and gluttony, but we would err greatly if we thought gluttony is all about whether we are fat or not. The skinny woman who drinks a six-pack of Coke Zero a day is likely to be far more gluttonous than the man whose six pack is buried beneath 25 pounds of fat. The latter might recognize that the purpose of eating is to provide nutrition while the former has no such awareness. She merely wants the pleasure of Coke without the caloric consequences. She is limited only by the amount of pleasure she craves, not by any bodily need or capacity. And herein lies the vice of gluttony: “the sin of gluttony is when the desire for such pleasures goes beyond the rule of reason. And so there is the saying that ‘gluttony is the intemperate desire to eat.’” (St. Thomas Aquinas, On Evil).

The problem is not the pleasure attached to eating—God has attached that pleasure to eating because eating fulfills our nature. Nor is it necessarily that we choose a food we like better than another to eat. Gluttony is deeper than that, it resides interiorly in that it is the pleasure, rather than the reason for eating, that drives us. Right reason says that food is necessary for humans in two ways: first as nutrition and second as a means of sharing life with others. Anytime we go beyond those reasons, we are operating under the vice of gluttony.

As proof that gluttony is more than just about girth, there are five ways in which it tends to manifest itself. These can be remembered by invoking the acronym FRESH—fastidiously, ravenously, exceedingly, sumptuously, and hastily.

In the Screwtape Letters, Wormwood complains to Screwtape about how useless gluttony is for capturing humans. Screwtape quickly corrects him and says that fastidious gluttons are often very easy to ensnare. The Fastidious Glutton is the one who suffers from the “‘All-I-want’ state of mind.” Its hiddenness makes it quite useful in capturing her in a diabolic net because she is so particular about her food and how it is prepared that she is miserably attached to the pleasure of eating foot that is “made your way.” The taste is all that matters for the fastidious glutton. The pleasure dominates her eating rather than coming as a side effect. It also makes all those who have the misfortune of eating with her or preparing her food positively miserable.

There is also the glutton who eats sumptuously. He is preoccupied with the pleasure of being full. He will only choose those foods which are substantial enough to leave him with the feeling of fullness. Reason should dictate when we have eaten enough to sustain ourselves and not the feeling of fullness. When we eat to be full, we are again chasing pleasure rather than being controlled by reason. Again there is no concern for what they are being filled with, only that they experience the pleasure of being full. This is, by the way, the reason the Church in her wisdom traditionally recommends fasting from sumptuous foods during Lent and restricting the menu to bread and vegetables instead.

The ravenous glutton is the one who must eat as much as they can, regardless of whether there is enough food for anyone else and how full they are. Their eyes might be bigger than their stomachs, but their stomachs will soon be bigger than their belts.

Similar to the ravenous glutton there is the glutton who eats hastily. This glutton treats his utensils like a shovel and must always have his mouth full without chewing or eating slow enough for digestion to occur. The glutton who eats excessively. He will eat past the point of fullness in order to indulge the tastes even if it leads to bloating and upset stomach later.

The Only True Antidote

The antidote ought to be obvious and something we have spoke about numerous times in the past—cultivating the virtue of fasting. There is one particular aspect of fasting however that bears mentioning and that is the Eucharistic Fast. We spoke of the reason for food and for eating being nutrition and sharing of life. But the reason from God’s perspective is more expansive than that. God gave us food as a sign of the only true Food that is the Bread of Life. Therefore, we should forego the sign for the reality.

The Church has us fast before receiving the Eucharist so that in experiencing bodily hunger we might recognize what that hunger actually points to. By receiving the Eucharist in a state of hunger, it is Real Food that nourishes us. To show us the truth of this, God gave a grace to the Saint of the Eucharist, St. Catherine of Siena by which she ate only the Eucharist for 7 years prior to her death. This miraculous sign enabled her to eat only the Bread of Life and to suffer no ill effects from what would otherwise be a severe fast. In order to truly hunger for the Eucharist then it becomes necessary to fast for more than just the obligatory hour before receiving. We may choose to do something similar to what the Church had previously held that you could not eat anything during a day until you had received the Eucharist that day.

In his book Victory Over Vice, Venerable Fulton Sheen says that Christ’s cry of “I thirst” was His definitive destruction of the power of gluttony to rule the lives of Christians. What better place then than the Mystical Foot of the Cross of the Eucharistic Sacrifice to receive those hard won graces to finally overcome the Gateway Vice of Gluttony.

What is Actual Grace?

March 10, 2021Grace, HeavenActual Grace, Conversion, Council of Trent, Road to Damascus, Sanctification, Sanctifying Grace, St. Augustine, St. Paultwowingstogod@gmail.com

Our Lord told the Apostles that they were given the power to understand the mysteries of God’s Kingdom. For the rest of the people, He relied on the power of parables to teach them about these same mysteries. To explain one of the most central mysteries of our Faith, grace, Our Lord repeatedly relied on the image of a seed. Just as there is a hidden cooperation between soil and seed, there is a mysterious cooperation between human freedom and Divine power.

While this action remains in the realm of theological mystery, this does not mean that we need to remain fully ignorant or passive to how grace works on and in us. If that was true, then Our Lord would not have bothered using natural things to describe these supernatural realities. Understanding the “mechanics” of grace turns out to be vital (in the truest sense of the word) to our sanctification and personal redemption.

Shedding Light on the Mystery

The problem is that most of us labor under a vague understanding of grace as a concept. As the Latin term gratis implies it involves a gift given freely. But we must take the term also in the sense of being pleasing to someone—as in “I am in his good graces.” Fully understood then grace is a free gift that makes us truly pleasing to God. This bestowing of “pleasing-ness” happens in two ways that have been traditionally categorized as Actual Grace and Sanctifying Grace.

Just as in the natural life, God must both bestow existence and continue to sustain that existence, it is also in the supernatural life. God bestows supernatural life through Sanctifying Grace and continues that life through the power of Actual Grace. This distinction is clearly laid out in Chapter 3 of the Book of Revelation when Our Lord says: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with Me” (Rev 3:20). Our Lord’s knocking and our opening is the action of Actual Grace while the dining together that is the sign of a shared life is Sanctifying Grace. In order to be brief, we will limit our discussion to Actual Grace here and will cover Sanctifying Grace another time.

“Without Me You Can Do Nothing”

Men and women, even in their fallen state, are still capable of morally good actions naturally. What they are not capable of are supernaturally good (i.e. meritorious) actions. For this, they must both have supernatural life (Sanctifying Grace) and the sustained supernatural power that we call Actual Grace. When Our Lord says “without Me you can do nothing” He is primarily referring to the supernaturally good actions we are moved to do by actual grace.

As an aside, some of the Doctors of Prayer in the Church say that at a certain point actual graces are no longer needed in the person in the Unitive Way because the Gifts of the Holy Spirit are fully operative. This makes sense, but because all of us must journey through the Purgative and Illuminative Way first, we can assume that every supernatural act that we perform must first be motivated by actual grace.

By “nothing” then Our Lord means “nothing that will last for eternity”. This includes not just our supernaturally good actions, but conversion itself. This leads to a further distinction between two kinds of Actual Grace: operative and cooperative.

Operative Grace

The sinner finds himself in a literal “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenario. Under his own power, he can never turn or return to God. Justification and sanctification requires Divine intervention. This intervention however must be done in such a way that it is still an act of the person’s will to repent. Put in more theological terms, actual grace must prompt the sinner to return to God. This “knocking at the door” is what is called operative grace. Operative grace, according to the Council of Trent’s Decree on Justification, is the grace that moves that touches the person and movies them towards a desire to conversion. More specifically it tackles the catch-22 so “that in adults the beginning of that justification must proceed from the predisposing grace of God …whereby, without any merits on their part, they are called; that they who by sin had been cut off from God, may be disposed through His quickening and helping grace to convert themselves to their own justification by freely assenting to and cooperating with that grace.”

The whole purpose of this operating grace is to pave the way for the second “type” of actual grace, cooperating grace. Once that operative grace is consented to, once the person decides that “yes, I desire conversion” they must still move to “open the door.” This movement towards conversion is the work of cooperating grace. This grace too, requires the consent of free will and can be rejected.

Two Saintly Examples

Two famous conversion stories will help to shed light on how these two graces work. The first is St. Paul’s Road to Damascus encounter with Our Lord. The story is well known, but we can couch it in terms of actual grace to make the distinction between the two kinds clearer. The powerful operative grace comes specifically when Our Lord invades Saul’s life saying, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” St. Paul acknowledges a desire for conversion by asking, “Who are you, sir?” Now Our Lord offers St. Paul a cooperating grace: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.” St. Paul consents and the actual grace moves him to go to Damascus.

From that moment forward, cooperating grace becomes the motivating force for all the supernaturally good actions in St. Paul’s life. It sustains the supernatural movement in his life always with his free will consent. So powerful is this force that it prompts him to tell the Corinthians “by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God [that is] with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10).

A second famous example shows how operative grace might be accepted but how we can run from cooperative grace. St. Augustine in his Confessions tells how he “had prayed, ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ For I was afraid lest thou shouldst hear me too soon, and too soon cure me of my disease of lust which I desired to have satisfied rather than extinguished” (Book 9, Ch. 7). Consent to the operative grace occurs (he prays), but there is no will to accept the cooperative grace. This is instructive because it shows how operating grace does not come just once, but many times. In Augustine’s case the frequency of the invitation was greatly increased because of the prayer of his saintly mother, Monica. This ought to prompt us to ask God very specifically and repeatedly to send operative graces to those whom we know personally to convert.

To summarize, we can once again turn to Augustine. Like St. Paul, St. Augustine understood the operations of actual grace from experience earning him the title Doctor of Grace. There is no better summary of the action of actual grace then his:

“For He who first works in us the power to will is the same who cooperates in bringing this work to perfection in those who will it. Accordingly, the Apostle says: ‘I am convinced of this, that he who has begun a good work in you will bring it to perfection until the day of Christ Jesus’ (Phil 1:6). God, then, works in us, without our cooperation, the power to will, but once we begin to will, and do so in a way that brings us to act, then it is that He cooperates with us. But if He does not work in us the power to will or does not cooperate in our act of willing, we are powerless to perform good works of a salutary nature.”
Free Will and Grace, 17.33