What is Faith?

Faith and Reason, Grace, , ,

There are certain terms within the Christian lexicon that are so familiar that we can, like St. Augustine’s own struggle with time, define them as long as no one asks.  Faith is just one such term.  It serves as a catch-all term that encompasses in generality belief and trust, although often in such an ambiguous manner that we strain to see what it is clearly.  Yet it remains a most important term, one by which, Sacred Scripture tells us, we are saved.  Therefore it behooves us to spend some time reflecting on faith.

We must admit at the outset that some of the ambiguity surrounding faith stems from a failure to distinguish between natural and supernatural powers.  Faith is both a natural and a supernatural act.  Put more accurately, there are two types of faith—natural and supernatural.  All men have natural faith, but not all men receive supernatural faith.  This distinction is often lost when countering atheists who insist that faith is unreasonable.  What they mean is that supernatural faith is unreasonable, while the Christian apologist insists that even the atheist has faith although what he means is natural faith.  The two end up missing each other entirely because they are on two different planes of argument.  Unfortunately, this distinction often becomes muddled in our mind and not just in our apologetics. 

Faith means an assent given to a particular proposition based not on direct evidence, but on the credibility of the witness.  One accepts the proposition as true because they believe the one who tells them.  As St. Thomas puts it, faith is the assent to those things which are unseen (ST II-II, q.4, a.1).  So, faith has two aspects, the “thing unseen” and the assent.  It is both knowledge and consent, requiring both intellect and will with an emphasis on the latter.   Faith, then, only pertains to those things we do not see—for to see brings certainty and requires no assent on our part.  Faith becomes a source of knowledge of many, many things, and thus we can see how it is indispensable for man to grow in knowledge of anything.

We can further our understanding if we grasp the difference between faith and opinion.  Because it rests upon the credibility of the witness always carries with it subjective certainty.  Opinion on the other hand is always accompanied by a fear or doubt that one is in error leading to some degree of reservation of full assent.  Doubt can move to certainty either by fully assenting to the trustworthiness of the witness or by gathering more evidence.  

Natural vs Supernatural Faith

The distinction between natural and supernatural faith then rests in who the witness is.  For natural faith, the witness is another man.  For supernatural faith, the witness is God Himself.  Blessed John Henry Newman defines faith as ““assenting to a doctrine as true, which we do not see, which we cannot prove, because God says it is true, who cannot lie.”  In short, faith is an act of trust in the authority of God as revealed.  What He has said becomes, in a certain sense, secondary, to the fact that He has said it.  Whatever He says we deem as true because He has said it.  It is in this way that faith becomes synonymous with trust.  Their “reasonableness” then takes a back seat and faith “comes from hearing” (Romans 10:17) the Word of God as such.

One does not “graduate” from natural faith to supernatural faith.  “Our vision of the face of God,” St. John Paul II says, “is always impaired by the limits of our understanding.  Faith alone makes it possible to penetrate the mystery in a way that allows us to understand it coherently” (Fides et Ratio, 13).  Because it is part of the human condition, especially in its fallen state, to abhor a mystery, we naturally shun divine faith.  Therefore, it must be bestowed upon us from above.  Supernatural faith is a gift and not something that we can achieve on our own.  It can grow through our actions once it is implanted, but it is never something we can achieve.  We can make no judgment upon it, we can only submit.  It is the giving of our minds to God so that He might fill them with knowledge of Himself.

To this point we have been overlooking an important aspect: if faith consists in assent to God’s Word, how do we recognize His voice?  The problem as Newman further explains is that “God says it is true, not with His own voice, but by the voice of His messengers, it is assenting to what man says, not simply viewed as a man, but to what he is commissioned to declare, as a messenger, prophet, or ambassador from God” (Faith and Private Judgment).  This is where the previously mentioned motives of credibility come in.  Many men purport to speak for God, but in only one place do we find good reasons to believe in the reliability of His witnesses—the Catholic Church.  Whether it be the prophecy, the miraculous endurance of the Church, or the manner in which it spread, there are reasons to believe that the fullness of Revelation subsists in the Catholic Church.  By having human faith in the Apostles and their successors, it prepares the way for the gift of divine faith given to us in Baptism.

This is exactly what we see during the Peter’s homily on Pentecost.  He provides them with the motives of credibility—the miraculous pouring of the Holy Spirit and an explanation of the prophets so that once they believed him as the messenger, they ask “what are we to do, my brothers?”  Peter tells them to be baptized so that they will receive the gift of divine faith.  Natural faith prepared their hearts for the gift of divine faith.

Practical Consequences

There are two further implications of this, both of which Newman addresses.  First, Catholics are often accused by Protestants of pinning their faith in the Pope or a Council.  But this is exactly what the first Christians did by submitting themselves to the Apostles.  It was reasonable for them to believe that what the Apostles preached was true and through the gift of divine faith they were given certainty that what they preached came from God.  It was their natural faith that gave them the proper disposition to receive the supernatural gift of faith.  They believed that God had revealed it and thus many of them were willing to witness to that truth through the gift of their martyrdom.

Secondly, those who subscribe to “Cafeteria Catholicism” do not have supernatural faith.  Recall that saving faith means an assent of the mind to God’s revelation.  To pick and choose what you will believe is not supernatural faith, but a form a private judgment.  It is only accidental that what you believe coincides with what God has truly revealed.  This is, at best, natural faith, although one would stain to defend it as faith at all since it rests neither on human or divine authority but on opinion.  This is also why the Church does not allow her children to entertain any doubts because a Catholic is only a Catholic while he has faith.  Faith is incompatible with doubt so that Newman says, “No one can be a Catholic without a simple faith, that what the Church declares in God’s Name is God’s Word, and therefore, true.”

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What About the Jews?

Church, End Times, Judaism, , , , , ,

Pope Francis has been particularly vocal, especially as of late, in condemning anti-Semitism.  This comes on the heels of a concerted effort by the Church since the Second Vatican Council to improve relations with the Jewish people.  Motivated not only by humanitarian reasons, this renewed interest stems from theological convictions.  In particular, the Church’s condemnation of anti-Semitism is undergirded by her understanding of the Jews as the “Chosen People” so that Pope Francis can truthfully say that “engaging in any form of anti-Semitism is a direct contradiction with the Christian faith.”  But because this nuanced understanding of the Jews is commonly mistaken, it is helpful for us to articulate it clearly.

The Chosen People

Since the Church’s understanding of the Jews as the Chosen People forms the foundation of Jewish-Catholic relations, what exactly were they chosen for?  God chose them to be a people “peculiarly His own”  (c.f. Dt 26:18) for no other reason than that the Messiah was to come into the world through them.  So that the world was never without hope of redemption, God told Adam and Eve about His plan of redemption (c.f. Gn 3:15) and then set out to form a people through which the Redeemer would come.  We might be tempted to assume that once the Redeemer comes, the mission of the Chosen People would come to an end.  They would then need to move with the economy of salvation or be left behind with the pagans.  They might even be viewed as somehow worse than the Gentiles because they openly rejected God’s Anointed One , killing Him on the Cross.  It was this line of reasoning, founded upon its roots in the Marcionist heresy of the 2nd Century, that has fueled fire of Christian anti-Semitism throughout history.

In response to any heresy, the tendency is to overcorrect.  Rather than subscribing to a theory of total repudiation, there are those who propose that the Jews are operating under a parallel covenant.   Christianity is for the Gentiles and Judaism for the Jew.  Those who subscribe to this view reason that God is faith and His “chosen-ness”  cannot be undone.  The Jews remain a (as opposed to the) Chosen People and therefore any effort at evangelization is unnecessary and, quite frankly, rude and uncharitable.  In an age of religious relativism, especially in the face of widespread anti-Semitism, we should expect to see, and, in fact do see, a rise in the popularity of this view.  But this viewpoint is just as erroneous as the first.

Still Chosen?

In order to understand the proper Christian stance towards the Jewish people, it is necessary to ask an important, although often overlooked question.  If the Jewish people are no longer God’s Chosen People, then how can we explain the fact that they remain a people.  Given their history of suffering and persecution throughout recent history it is nothing short of miraculous that they are still a recognizable people.  This is because, in a very real sense they remain a People favored by God.  This is for three reasons, summarized by St. Paul in Romans 9 and 11, and can be summarized as past, present and future.

First, the Jewish people remain beloved to God because of the great dignity attached to their spiritual patrimony (c.f. Rom 11:28).  Their beloved patriarchs, from Abraham, to Jacob to Moses to David and from “whom according to the flesh is the Christ” (Rom 9:4) came, were faithful to God and His covenant.  Likewise, God is also faithful to His promise for the “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29).  So that while the Old Covenant may have passed away, it remains for God to be faithful to those with whom He made the covenant .

Secondly, the Jews remain as a “motive of credibility” to the truth of the Old Testament.  The people that was founded upon the miraculous redemption of the Exodus remains a people even to this day.  This miraculous endurance lends credibility to the miraculous revelation contained in the Old Testament.  The Jews will always remain distinct from the Gentiles because the revelation upon which their faith is built is true.  It may be incomplete, but that makes it no less true.  Their continued presence in the world today testifies to this very important truth.

Finally, there is the future.  The Jews as a people still have a pivotal role to play in salvation history.  They not only testify to the truth of the Second Coming, but also play a role in signaling that coming.  Although “a hardening has come upon Israel in part,“(Rom 11:25) this hardening will not be forever.  One of the signal events of the End Times is the mass conversion of the Jews.  When the anti-Christ is revealed to be the fraud that he is by the two witnesses (c.f. Rev 11:1-14), the Jews will join the ranks of the true Israel.  This eschatological reality will not only affect the Jews, but will, according to St. Thomas, be a sign to the Gentiles that have fallen away from the Faith.  For them we can properly say that “salvation is from the Jews.”

Cardinal Charles Journet, drawing on Romans 9, makes a very helpful distinction that will help us to adopt the proper stance towards the Jews.  This distinction is between “Israel in the flesh” and Israel in the spirit”.  The goal must always be for all men to be incorporated into “Israel in the spirit” because it is only in belonging to this body that a man can be saved.  In St. Paul’s time, as in our own, the goal was conversion of “Israel in the flesh” to “Israel of the spirit.”  But knowing their eschatological purpose when this doesn’t occur through the plans of Divine Providence, Christians must consider “Israel of the flesh” to be a special people worthy of both our respect and our protection.

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St. Justin Martyr and the Divorce of Faith and Reason

Church Fathers, Faith and Reason, Paganism, Scripture, , , ,

The image of an acorn and an oak tree is often invoked to describe the growth of the Church from its humble beginnings to today.  The image is meant to convey the unity of the Church separated by nearly two millennia, but it is also helpful because it transmits a second, often overlooked aspect.  To grow from acorn to oak, the tree needs not only water, but must grow within the soil it is planted by assimilating the various nutrients found in the ground.  Watered by the Spirit, the Church too grew out of the soil of not just the Jewish faith, but also the Hellenic culture in which it was planted.  Not only were the Jewish people chosen to bring us the Messiah, but the Roman Empire was the chosen soil from which the Church would grow.  And it would grow by assimilating the nutrients found within that culture, most especially its reliance on Greek philosophy.

St. Justin Martyr was the first to recognize this.  Born a generation after the destruction of Jerusalem at the turn of the second century, Justin was a pagan living in Samaria.  Despite his beginnings, God had placed a great desire in Justin’s heart for wisdom.  He was the precursor to St. Augustine.  He sought out masters in every school of philosophy in his day—Stoics, Paripatetics (Aristotelians), Pythagoreans, and Platonists—but it was not until he met an old man while walking on the beach one day that he found Truth.  This man taught Justin about “the Word made flesh” and “straightway a flame was kindled in [his] soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of Christ, possessed me; and whilst revolving his words in [his] mind, [he] found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable. Thus, and for this reason, [he was] a philosopher” (Dialogue with Trypho, 8).

The love of wisdom is what made him cling to the “true philosophy” and to open a school of philosophy in Rome.  But it was God’s Providential love for mankind that placed the philosopher saint in an age of philosopher kings.  Rome put the brakes on its decline when two philosopher emperors came to power—Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius.  God hit the accelerator on the spread of the Church by inspiring Justin to write two apologies for the faith, one to each of the emperors.  Far from apologizing for the Faith, St. Justin was showing how sorry the lover of wisdom would be to dismiss the Faith without trying it against reason. 

St. Justin and the Logos

In was in his Second Apology that St. Justin left his most lasting contribution to the Church.  He laid the cornerstone upon which the edifice of Faith and Reason could be constructed.  And that cornerstone was Christ, Logos Incarnate.  He told the Emperor that,

“[o]ur teachings appear to be greater than every human teaching by the entire rational principle having become Jesus Christ who appeared for our salvation, in body, reason (logos), and soul. Whatever things were well spoken by philosophers and legislators, they did so by participating in the Logos either by discovery or theory. But since they did not know the Logos completely who is Christ, they often said contradictory things.”


Second Apology, 10

The Greeks believed that the logos was the principle of reason that governed and ordered the universe.  Christians professed the same thing, but rather than seeing it as some abstract principle, the Logos was God who took flesh in Jesus Christ.  St. Justin was merely echoing what he had heard in the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel.  “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God” (Jn 1:1).  But St. Justin took it a step further and said that all of the truths found outside of direct revelation were merely participations in the Logos.  For truth cannot contradict Truth.  Clement of Alexandria, a generation later, would speak of the prophetic power of philosophy that  “was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, till the Lord should call the Greeks. For this was a schoolmaster to bring ‘the Hellenic mind,’ as the law, the Hebrews, ‘to Christ.’ Philosophy, therefore, was a preparation, paving the way for him who is perfected in Christ” (Stromata, I, V).

When we speak of the edifice of Faith and Reason we immediately fast forward to our own days where the two appear to be in constant conflict.  But we need to linger a little longer in the early days in order to see the contemporary conflict correctly.  In the designs of divine Providence everything always happens right on time.  The time was right for St. Justin because the Church as it moved away from Jerusalem towards Athens would need to be able to explain the Faith in terms readily understood.  The time was right because the Church would need a language to defend the interpretation of Revelation from the coming onslaught of heretics.  Finally, the time was right because philosophy needed to be purified and elevated to assume its proper role as God’s prophet.

We speak so much of faith and reason, but what made what St. Justin said so profound is the fact that he shows faith in reason.  If it is through the Logos that all things are made, then “there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason—nothing which he has not willed should be handled and understood by reason” (Tertullian, On Repentance, 1).  What the Early Church discovered is not only that there is an observable order to the universe, but that human reason, as a participation in the Logos, is a reliable instrument for observing the universe.  Prior to this time either the world was governed by capricious gods or else there was a pantheistic “personalization” of nature that left each thing under its own control.  In either regard, without faith, human reason remained handcuffed. 

Once Christianity corrected Greek metaphysics, then physics could emerge.   It is only within the Christian conception of the Universe and of mankind that anything remotely resembling science and technology can emerge.  That is why it is absurd to attempt to put faith and reason in conflict with each other.  Their marriage is based on a inherent complementarity.  Any attempt to tear asunder what God has joined will end up destroying both.

The Enemies of Faith and Reason

Nevertheless, there are two schools in the modern world that have granted an imprimatur on their bill of divorce—the Enlightenment and Protestantism.

The Enlightenment is rooted in an absolute exaltation of human reason.  Without anything to purify it however faith in reason is lost.  Unable to bear the weight, we speak of Progress without reference to what it is we are progressing towards.  Progress without an endpoint, an endpoint given by Faith, is just aimless wandering.  Reason yields its crown to feeling and a real Dark Ages is sure to emerge.

On the opposite extreme is the fideism that is marked by Protestantism.  Martin Luther hated philosophy, especially Scholastic philosophy.  But because every man has a philosophy whether they know it or not, he was a nominalist.  The world is just a collection of individual things without any real relation to each other.  Creation has nothing to tell us about God and faith and sola scriptura are the only means by which we know God.  Of course, there are no ways to understand, explain or defend the content of faith so that all that really matters is the sincerity of what you believe and not what you actually believe.  You can believe anything as long as it is somewhere in the Bible.  Faith ultimately is destroyed.

It is not a coincidence that both these schools of thought have a common enemy, the Catholic Church.  We should not be surprised then that the Catholic Church is the lone defender of not only the true Faith, the same Faith that St. Justin Martyr earned his moniker defending, but also human reason.  And just as she stubbornly upholds Our Lord’s admonition about divorce between a man and woman, so does she keep Faith and Reason wedded. 

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Finding the Lost Ark

Mary, Protestantism, Saints, The Life of Jesus, , , , , ,

One of the charges often leveled by Protestants against Catholics, especially when it comes to Marian doctrine and devotion, is that it has no grounding in Scripture.  The New Testament, it is argued, says very little that supports these dogmas.  There is perhaps no defined dogma that more demonstrates this than the most recent, the Assumption.  But when we look at Scripture as a whole, however, we find a completely different story.

When St. Paul goes to Ephesus, the same Ephesus where the Beloved Disciple settled would eventually settle with Our Lady, he encounters worshippers of the female fertility goddess Artemis (Roman goddess Diana).  This was hardly unique as many of the pagan religions had similar goddesses.  It is into this historical reality that the Mother of God, who was a real person that could still be touched and seen, lived.  So, the earlier New Testament writings had good reason to remain relatively silent about her role in salvation.  This helped to keep the message of the Good News focused on Christ and avoided any chance that the pagans would wrongly assume that Christianity was simply offering a new pantheon of gods (like when St. Paul speaks at the Areopagus, Acts 17:22-32).  Without great care, especially when she was alive, there would most certainly have arisen a cult that could have eclipsed or put her on par with her Son. 

How St. John Described Our Lady

If it stopped there, then perhaps the objections that Catholics merely resurrected those practices might be valid.  But it didn’t.  For after she left the earth, St. John, the man who next to her Son knew her best, left the Church all that was needed for the foundation of Marian devotion.  With surprising clarity, in what is an otherwise mystical and confusing book, John tells how he met Our Lady during his heavenly sojourn.  He found the Woman clothed with the Sun with a crown of twelve stars who gave birth to the male child who was to rule all nations of the earth (c.f. Rev 12:1-5).  Readers of John’s gospel would also know that when he uses the title “Woman” he is referring to Mary.       

To make it perfectly clear who he is talking about, he introduces this section by mentioning something that would have immediately grabbed his readers’ attention—the Ark of the Covenant.  “And the temple of God in heaven was opened, and there was seen the ark of his covenant in His temple…” (Rev, 11:19).  In other words, in John’s inspired understanding, Mary is the Ark of the Covenant.  And in calling her such, he now links everything that is said of the Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament to the person of Mary. 

The Ark of the New Covenant

Recall that the original Ark of the Covenant held God’s Word written on Stone in the Ten Commandments.  Now, the true Ark of the Covenant carried the Word written in Flesh.  The original Ark of the Covenant held a piece of the heavenly bread manna.  The true Ark of the Covenant carried the Bread of Life. Finally, the original Ark of the Covenant held the staff of Aaron as a sign of the Old Covenant priesthood while the true Ark of the Covenant carried the new High Priest of the New Covenant. 

This connecting of Mary to the Ark of the Covenant was not lost on the early Church either.  The great defender of Christological orthodoxy, St. Athanasius in homily passed on the traditional link between the two when he said,

“O noble Virgin, truly you are greater than any other greatness.  For who is your equal in greatness, O dwelling place of God the Word?…O [Ark of the] Covenant clothed with purity instead of gold! You are the Ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manna, that is, the flesh in which divinity resides…You carry within you the feet, the head, and the entire body of the perfect God…you are God’s place of repose.”

Once the connection with the Ark of the Covenant is made, we can link it to another key text in the New Testament: the Visitation of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth.  David took the Ark of the Covenant into the hill country of Judea where he leapt for joy and the Ark remained there for three months (2 Sam 6).  After the Annunciation, Our Lady, carrying the newly-conceived Son of God, travels into the same hill country where John the Baptist leaps for joy at the sound of her voice.  She also stays there for three months.  It is clear that St. Luke is deliberately evoking images of the Ark of the Covenant to suggest that Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant.

The eventual resting place of the Ark of the Covenant has been the subject of speculation and rumor for many centuries.  According to 2 Maccabees, the prophet Jeremiah hid the Ark in a cave and God would reveal its location at the appropriate time (c.f. 2 Macc 2:1-8).  When his followers despaired that he did not mark the path to it, he prophesied that “the place is to remain unknown until God gathers his people together again and shows them mercy.  Then the Lord will disclose these things, and the glory of the Lord and the cloud will be seen…” (2 Macc 2:7-8).  During the Annunciation, Mary was “overshadowed by the Holy Spirit,” the description of which would have evoked the return the “glory cloud” that overshadowed the Tabernacle (c.f. Ex. 40).  Now this same cloud is seen and announces that God has gathered the people together and shown them mercy.  This overshadowing then marks not just the presence of God, but the presence of the New Ark of the Covenant.  The Feast of the Visitation then is a celebration of the revelation of the place where the Ark of the Covenant can be found—wherever Mary went.

The connection between the Ark of the Covenant and the Assumption of Mary is made explicit by John during his heavenly vision.  But the Old Testament also teaches that the Ark was never meant to remain on earth or, God forbid rot in a cave, but to go to its resting place with God in heaven (c.f. Ps 132:8).  This is why when St. John Damascene, when marking the Feast of the Dormition of Mary, connects Our Lady’s Assumption with the Ark of the Covenant: “Today the holy, living ark of the living God, the one who carried her own maker within herself, comes to rest in the temple of the Lord not made by hands.  David—her ancestor and God’s—leaps for joy; the angels join in the dance” (St. John Damascene, On the Dormition of Mary, II).

The quest for the Ark of the Covenant is over.  It has been found and she is Our Mother Mary who brings Jesus with her everywhere she goes.

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A Not-So Hard Case

Abortion, Human Dignity, Moralilty, Science,

As the laws supporting abortion continue to be challenged, a common objection is raised that abortion ought to be legal when the life of the mother is at risk.  So common is this objection that the President, who has been arguably the most pro-life executive ever, says that it is a necessary exception.  Like all the other “reasons” for abortion this one too depends upon propaganda and ignorance.  Therefore, we need to have a reasoned response ready to refute this seeming “no-brainer.”

Notice first that I said it depends upon propaganda.  This is because it is an attempt to circumvent the “exception proves the rule” principle.  If this really is an exception, then you must be willing to concede the rule that abortion is otherwise always wrong.  The problem is that even if we were willing to make a concession in this situation, abortion supporters really want abortion on demand.  It is an attempt to play on compassion while creating a smokescreen that makes abortion legal and right in all cases.

That being said, it is also not an exception to the rule, a point that otherwise preys upon general ignorance.  Abortion, that is the direct killing of a pre-born infant, as either a means or an end, is always wrong and admits of no exceptions.  This does not mean that in true cases where a mother’s life is in jeopardy that she must simply suck it up and put her affairs in order.  Instead, in every case in which a mother’s life might be in jeopardy, there are moral solutions that do not involve an abortion. 

This brings up a point that merits further examination before we dive into the specifics.  It is certainly common sense but unfortunately is often overlooked, especially in the name of medical expedience.  There is always a moral solution to a problem of health.  This is not to say that it won’t involve additional suffering, but that these “damned if you do and damned if you don’t” situations always have solutions that are good for the whole person.  I say this not to be callous but as a reminder that we should never think we have to do something wrong.  It is also meant to be direct challenge to the medical community that they only offer and investigate what would ultimately be moral solutions.  If doctors and medical researchers really care about the health of the person then they will care not just about the body, but the soul as well.  The first question for medicine should never be “can we” but “should we”?

Early Pregnancy

Looking then more closely at the specific situations in which a mother’s life is truly in jeopardy will underscore all that has been said so far.  These threats come most often at the beginning of pregnancy with what are commonly called ectopic pregnancies.  As the etymology of the term suggests, ectopic pregnancies occur when the developing person is “out of place” and implants somewhere other than the uterus.  This can occur in the abdomen or cervix, but the overwhelming majority of cases occur within the fallopian tube.  These pregnancies pose a serious risk to the mother’s life because of hemorrhaging.  As an aside, these types of pregnancies are occurring at much greater rates than in the past thanks to scarring from an increase in the incidence of sexual transmitted diseases (most especially PID), IUDs, tubal sterilization and contraceptive pills.

We should mention both that the child will never achieve viability.  There have been a few, though very few, cases of successful transfer of the child to the uterus but this is still an important area of research we should be devoting energies (and prayers) towards. Also of note is the fact that up to 2/3 of ectopic pregnancies resolve themselves, requiring no medical intervention.  In the remaining cases there are three treatment options.

The first is a chemical solution that uses methotrexate (MTX).  MTX directly attacks the outer layer of cells produced by the developing baby that serves as connective tissue to the mother.  The child detaches and then is washed out of the tube.  Note this has appeal because of it is the least invasive, but also has the most serious side effects.  It also does not treat the underlying cause of the ectopic pregnancy, increasing the likelihood that it will happen again.

Although the Church has not spoken definitively upon this issue, most moralists would categorize this as an abortion because it involves the direct killing of the child as a means to saving the mother’s life.  An unborn child may die as a result of treatment, but the treatment itself cannot be the killing of the child.  The death must be an unintended, although it could be foreseen, side effect of the treatment.  That is why one of the surgical options called a salpingostomy is not a moral option either.  The doctor makes a small incision in the fallopian tube and removes the child in the hopes of preserving the mother’s fertility.  This also amounts to an abortion because it is the direct removal of the child that “saves” the mother.

A third treatment is called salpingectomy.  This has been the preferred method of dealing with ectopic pregnancies by faithful Catholic for years.  It involves removing the portion of the tube that is at risk of rupturing.  Unfortunately, it is the same section that also contains the embryonic human being.  Although the baby dies, it is a double effect and not something directly willed.  This moral solution probably represents the best physical health option as well because it removes the damaged portion of the fallopian tube.  Depending on the amount that is removed (if it is ruptured then a total salpingectomy might be necessary), it does put the mother’s fertility at risk.  Therefore, it is not always preferred even though, by removing the problematic portion of the tube, it makes it far less likely that the problem would ever occur again.

This can seem like a very legalistic approach to things considering that the end result—the termination of the pregnancy—is the same in all three of the approaches.  But, like all moral decisions, the means we use to achieve the end matter just as much as the end itself.  The means we use to do anything must also be good.  The mother, even though she has not seen her baby, is still his mother.  Knowing that, despite the difficult circumstances, she did right by her child can bring her great solace.  But either way, the demand for abortion because of ectopic pregnancy is a red herring.

Later Pregnancy

What about later in the pregnancy?  A moment’s reflection also shows that abortion is not needed.  If the child is viable, then the mother can be induced or an emergency c-section can be performed.  There is absolutely no medical reason why a later-term abortion is necessary.  Even when the child is not viable, inducing labor for the sake of saving the mother’s life can be justified even though the child might not survive.  Obviously, this requires clinical judgment, but the situations where it happens that the woman’s life is in danger because she is pregnant, and the child is not near viability, are very rare (and some say non-existent).  Nevertheless, there is still no need for abortion in these cases either.

Upon closer scrutiny then this so called “hard case” really is not so hard.  I say that not because it is an emotionally and psychologically challenging time, but because it offers a clear moral path.  The need for abortion when the mother’s life is in jeopardy is not a real need and we need to present the facts as such.

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Made to Worship

Apologetics

One of the most common objections to the Christian belief God revolve around the question as to why God would create creatures simply to worship Him.  “After all,” they reason, “if He is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good, then why would He need to create anything?  Isn’t it just a little egotistical to create something so that it can worship you?”  Because this challenge often arises from those schooled in the New Atheism, we tend to dismiss it without treating it as a serious objection, one that many people seeking the Truth actually have.  With that in mind, we will examine a line of reasoning that leads to a satisfactory response.

That God is “egotistical” would appear to be a moral assessment of God, but in actuality it carries with it a metaphysical claim.  In fact, it is a metaphysical claim.  It is not just that God is not egotistical, but that He can’t be.  Egotism implies that God is lacking something—the approval of some other being.  This is something that would negate His existence as the Supreme Being and therefore is impossible.  Put in logical terms we are saying that if the Christian conception of God is true, then God cannot be egotistical.  I say “impossible” not to dismiss the question, but because it is a loaded question that contains a contradiction.   If you do not accept the “If”, then the “then” becomes a non-sequitur.  No matter what answer we give to the charge of egotism, it won’t matter because they do not accept His existence. 

This is why the question serves as an excellent illustration of separating the wheat who are genuinely seeking from the chaff who seek only to debunk the “God myth”.  For atheists and non-believers to ask about God’s existence is certainly a valid line of inquiry.  But once they ask about His properties, they must be willing to accept God (or at least assume) as the Christians know Him.  Questions like this really try to ask both at the same time.   The question, then, needs to be properly framed in order to get to the heart of the issue, which is why would God create us and then demand our worship?

God’s Goodness

Looked at from the human perspective where honor is given and never forced, it seems a little backwards.  Backwards, that is, until we are forced to wrestle with what we mean when we call God “all-good”.  We have a tendency to view God’s omnibenevolence as Him being the “best”—the most loving, the nicest, the most morally perfect, etc.  But God doesn’t just have goodness but is Goodness itself.  All things participate in God’s goodness, whereas God is essentially good.  Why this distinction matters is because, if God is Goodness, then He is perfectly happy in Himself and under no compulsion to create.  Nevertheless, He did create, and He did so because one of the properties of Goodness is that it diffuses itself and spreads out.   God freely chose to create so that He could diffuse that goodness.  But this was not enough because it was even better if He created creatures who could appreciate and freely choose to participate in that Goodness.

Once we grasp this we find that it is only through worship of the source of goodness that we can appreciate and participate in it.  God Himself, a Trinity of Three Persons, enjoys His Goodness and by worshipping we are brought into that Goodness.  Worship then is for our own benefit and adds no benefit to God.  God commands worship because we need it and not because He egomaniacally feeds off of it—it is us that feeds.

A Jealous God?

How do this jibe with God describing Himself as a “jealous God” then?  Because worship is something that is good for us, it is written by God into our spiritual DNA.  We have a natural inclination to worship such that the only question is whether we are going to worship the Creator or the creation.  Because God has poured His goodness out upon many things, it is very easy for us to allow the creature to eclipse the Creator.  We substitute the sign for the Real Thing.  By demanding our worship God reminds us not to fall into that trap but instead to look along these things (at not at) to see Him.  Because divorced from Him, these things lose their value and their attraction.  He obviously then cannot be jealous of things He made, but He is jealous in the sense that we settle for far less than He is offering.

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The Bread of Life and the Resurrection

Eucharist, Redemption, Resurrection, Sacraments, , , ,

Each Easter season, the Liturgy carries us through the Bread of Life Discourse found in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel.  We are all familiar with the setting, but this familiarity carries with it a danger of missing the point of  why the Church chooses these passages as part of her Easter celebration.  Of course, in a very real way, because the Eucharist is the “source and summit” of our faith, it is always in season.  But it is the connection between the Eucharist and the Resurrection that the Church wishes to highlight. Our Lord repeatedly issues the command to eat His body and drink His blood and for apologetical reasons that can grab our attention.  But each time He does, He attaches it to the promise of the future resurrection.  This creates an intrinsic link between the Eucharist and the resurrection of the dead that is worth further examination.

To grasp why this is so, we can turn to St. Augustine.  In the Confessions, Augustine recounts the time that he heard the voice of Christ saying “I am the food of strong men; grow and you shall feed on me; nor shall you change me, like the food of your flesh into yourself, but you shall be changed into my likeness” (Book VII, Ch. X).  St. Thomas interprets this passage as referring to the spiritual nature of the food that is the Eucharist.  Bodily food is changed into the substance of the person nourished and supports life as such.  Spiritual food changes the man into Itself and supports the spiritual life as such.

The Sacrament of the Passion

The Eucharist as both the Sacrament of the Passion and “true food indeed” transforms us into Christ  according to which “a man is made perfect in union with Christ Who suffered” (ST III, q.73, art.3, ad. 3).  It is Christ Who is really present in the Eucharist and it is Him Whom we receive, but we receive Him with particular reference to His Passion.  This reception allows us to not just “spiritually” unite ourselves to Him in His Passion, but so that we truly participate in it.  And it is from this that its fruits are truly available to us; or we should say one fruit in particular—a share in the bodily resurrection.  In short the Eucharist conforms us to Christ in His Passion so that we might share in His resurrection.  The Eucharist is then ordered towards the Resurrection, but only by sacramentally passing through the Passion of Christ.

By highlighting the end of the Eucharist, it helps us to understand two further aspects of this “hard teaching”.  First, when Our Lord says that it is the spirit that gives life and not the flesh He does not mean that we should take what He says symbolically and unite to Him spiritually.  Instead He means that it was, as St. Thomas says, “the Cross [that] made His flesh adapted for eating” (ST III, q.3, art.3, ad.1).  It is His resurrected, impassible body that gives life, not the passible, mortal body that they see.  In other words, the Eucharist, because it is the Sacrament of the Passion, would not have achieved its full meaning until “Christ our Passover had been sacrificed.”  This is why Pope Innocent III said the disciples at the Last Supper “received His body such as it was ” (De Sacr. Alt. Myst. iv), that is, mortal and passible. It was not until after the Resurrection that they would have received His immortal and impassible body.

Why It is Necessary

The second point has to do with Christ’s insistence that, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you” (Jn 6:54).  It is difficult not to read this as imposing some sort of necessity that links the Eucharist to salvation.  But this is an often-misunderstood teaching because it requires a bit of explanation.  In fact, this is one of the doctrines that the Calvinists attacked when they broke away from the Church, saying that the Eucharist was not necessary for salvation.

The Council of Trent made a series of distinctions to help throw this teaching into relief.  First, as Scripture testifies, Baptism is absolutely necessary for salvation (c.f. Mk 16:16).  The necessity of the Eucharist is of a different kind—what the Church calls the necessity of precept.  This is a teaching that “is hard” but must be accepted, meaning that the believer must do as Our Lord commanded.  This is why the Church withholds it until one reaches the age of reason.  It is also why there is no absolute necessity like Baptism.  Young children do not need the Eucharist in order to be saved.

This distinction arises because Baptism, the Sacrament by which we are made to be “in Christ” and incorporated into His Mystical Body, deputizes the believer for divine worship, which means the offering of sacrifice to God.    This includes the offering of the Church’s sacrifice of the Eucharist.  So Baptism, like all the Sacraments, is ordered toward the Eucharist.  It essentially completes Baptism.

The moral necessity of receiving the Eucharist then is abundantly clear, but it is not clear how often one should do so.  In order to fulfill the precept, the Church obliges the faithful to receive it at least once a year during the Easter season (Canon 920).  But it is doubtful that one who only receives once a year will be able to preserve himself in a state of grace for very long.  The Eucharist is meant to provide supernatural nourishment for the soul so that when it is deliberately avoided for a long period of time, the person will almost necessarily begin to fill up on the junk food that the world has to offer.

This moral necessity absolves young children prior to reaching the age of reason from receiving the Eucharist.  It also absolves those who are so mentally handicapped that they cannot make a simple act of faith in the Real Presence.  But what about non-Catholic Christians?  Are they all pretty much like the disciples who walked away from Jesus over this hard saying?

Recall that we are bound by necessity of precept.  That implies that we are aware of the precept and understand it.  The person must not be culpably ignorant, although what that actually looks like is up to God.  What we can say for sure is that it will be a miracle if someone is saved without receiving the Eucharist regularly.  The natural means by which God grants the supernatural gift of perseverance is through the Eucharist.  God can circumvent those natural means via a miracle, but how often or even if that happens we cannot know.  That is why the man who does not regularly receive the Bread of Life but knows that He should is, in essence, testing God by demanding a miracle.

The Word of God Made Flesh rarely repeated Himself.  The Bread of Life Discourse is a notable exception as He commanded His disciples four times to eat His body and drink His blood.  This repetition wasn’t directed towards those disciples who “returned to their former way of life,” (Jn 6:66) but to those who continued to follow Him.  We should be constantly aware of just how dependent we are upon the Bread of Life and approach Him as such.

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On Embryo Adoption

Abortion, Bioethics, Conscience, Culture of Life, Fatherhood, Human Dignity, Theology of the Body, , , , , , ,

According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, there are over 620,000 cryo-preserved embryos in the United States.  Even though the “vast majority” of them are still being considered for use for “family building efforts” and others have been “earmarked by the creating couples for use in research,” there are still as many as 60,000 unclaimed frozen embryos currently.  With the growing popularity of IVF, we should expect these numbers to rise dramatically over the coming years.  All this has left pro-lifers scrambling for ethical solutions that free these children from their cryogenic prison.  One Evangelical Christian group called Snowflake Embryo Adoption matches the embryos with women who are willing to “adopt” them.  In essence the embryos are implanted into the wombs of women who carry them to term and raise them as their own children.   This solution, as we shall see, is not without moral controversy.

We must first admit that the plight of these cryogenically preserved children represents one of the greatest injustices of our age because of the sheer numbers alone.  But because many of the “consumers” of IVF are couples struggling with infertility, very few people are willing to call it out.  Instead it remains hidden away in laboratories and freezers.  Despite intrinsic evil of IVF, we must never forget that the children themselves are not an evil but a good that came from the evil.  They are members of the human community, regardless of how they were conceived, and thus are subject with rights, including the right to a safe environment in which they can thrive.  These voiceless children are crying out for justice, a cry that we are obligated not to ignore.  Therefore, it would seem that “embryo adoption” offers a compassionate solution.  The adoptive parents did not bring the children into existence and are simply looking for a way to “right a wrong” by rescuing these children from a frozen existence. 

Adoption?

When framed in this manner, it seems rather straightforward that this type of adoption is an irrefutable good.  But this is a case where we must be careful with our terms.  To label this an embryo adoption is really a form of begging the question.  This is why many moral theologians prefer the term “embryo rescue”.  For everyone know that adoption is praiseworthy, but it is questionable whether this should be classified as a type of adoption.  Adoption has always referred to a legal process by which a child (usually although not exclusively) enters into a family and assumes all the rights and duties of a biological son or daughter.  Nowhere among these rights and duties however would we find the right to gestation.  That right is reserved only for biological children.  The question is whether this difference carries any moral weight.

The Church defines surrogacy as when “a woman who carries in pregnancy an embryo implanted in her uterus and who is genetically a stranger to the embryo because it has been obtained through the union of the gametes of ‘donors’. She carries the pregnancy with a pledge to surrender the baby once it is born to the party who commissioned or made the agreement for the pregnancy” (Donum Vitae, A3).  Based upon this definition, embryo rescue is more akin to surrogacy than to adoption. The only difference is in the intention of the pregnant woman—in one case she carries the child for another and in the other she carries it for herself.  But surrogacy is not wrong because of the intention of the woman who is impregnated, but because of the nature of the act itself. 

A hypothetical will help to see why this is the case.  Suppose a woman and her husband go through the IVF procedure and find that the woman will never be able to carry a child to term.  She approaches her sister and tells her that they still have three “extra” embryos that are destined for destruction and asks if she would be willing to rescue one of them by offering her womb to carry the child.  She tells her that it would not be surrogacy, but “embryo fostering” because she is simply fostering the child for 9 months.  Verbal gymnastics aside, this clearly fits the definition of surrogacy, an action that the Church has always condemned surrogacy as an intrinsically evil act because it is an offense “against the unity of marriage and the dignity of the procreation of the human person.”  In other words, no matter how good the intention is, it can never be deemed morally licit.  Likewise, embryo adoption suffers a similar fate.

Surrogacy and the Rights of Spouses

Understanding why surrogacy is wrong will help to see why embryo rescue is not a real moral solution.  Notice that Donum Vitae said surrogacy was an offense, not against the procreative aspect of marriage, but the unitive.  A woman should only become a mother through her husband.  He has an exclusive right to her procreative powers and faculties.  When those powers are exercised without him, then the unitive good of marriage has been harmed.  She is a mother of the child, but her husband is in no way the father.  He neither had a hand in creating the child nor in its gestation (both of which a biological father does even in utero).  He may become the child’s adoptive father when it is born, but until then he is not a father.

The unitive good of marriage is maintained when husband and wife must become parents through each other.   Even in the case of adoption, they become parents together and not independently of each other.  This is why we should hesitate to call embryo rescue, adoption.  This solution then introduces a new injustice, mainly against the husband’s exclusive rights to his wife’s procreative faculties.  This is ultimately why the Church has said this is “a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved” (Dignitatis Personae, 19).

What can be done about this then?  For the time being we have an obligation to keep the children already in existence alive until a solution can be found.  This form of embryo adoption by which someone keeps the child from being terminated or subject to scientific testing would be laudable.  When St. John Paul II spoke on the topic he made an “appeal to the conscience of the world’s scientific authorities and in particular to doctors, that the production of human embryos be halted, taking into account that there seems to be no morally licit solution regarding the human destiny of the thousands and thousands of ‘frozen’ embryos which are and remain the subjects of essential rights and should therefore be protected by law as human persons”(quoted in Dignitatis Personae, 19).  Putting an end to this sanitized barbarism then should be our primary goal. 

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Knowing when Your Time is Up

Anthropology, Bioethics, Heaven, Last Things, , , , ,

In a study that confirms what fans of The Princess Bride have long known, researcher Dr. Sam Parnia found that those whose hearts stopped and were clinically dead were only “mostly dead”.  He found that nearly 40% of patients who were revived after their hearts had stopped beating reported some level of awareness and consciousness.  The doctor even went so far as to say that “you know you are dead because your brain keeps working” for some short period of time.  Since the results of this study, which he dubbed AWARE, were published in 2015, there have been a slew of studies attempting to better understand death and so-called near death experiences.  Unfortunately, a number of these studies ignore what we already know through philosophical anthropology and so end up taking researchers down into bottomless rabbit holes.

With the advent of the age of the “specialist” these types of studies, that is, studies that apply empirical science to questions philosophy can, and usually already has, provide an answer are becoming more common.  Very often science, because it relies only upon empirical methods, comes up with incorrect conclusions.  We already know, and have known for a long time, that you know when you are dead.  This is because the soul is immortal.

Philosophy as the Handmaiden of Science

Some might think this is a theological claim and dismiss the question a priori has something that must be “believed” and not known.  While the question of the soul’s destiny might be a theological claim, the fact that it is immortal is a philosophical truth.  Human beings are capable of three types of actions.  There are those that depend solely upon the body like digestion.  There are those that depend upon the interaction of the body and the mind like choosing what to eat based upon both knowledge of nutrition and personal tastes.  Finally, there are those actions that do not depend upon the body like abstract thought in some intellectual field like mathematics or even reasoning about the immortality of the soul.  This latter group, because it does not depend upon the body as a completely immaterial operation, means that man has the capacity, at least in part, to act when the soul is separated from the body.  We may use the body (such as our memory and imagination) when we perform these abstract operations, but these operations do not depend upon the body. 

We may not be able to definitively say how we know after the soul has been separated from the body, but we can say with certainty that we continue to know things even after our brains cease operating.  This, because it goes outside of ordinary human experience, would have to be revealed in some way to us.  The point though is that it is not unreasonable to posit that one of those things that we know is that we are dead.

If philosophy already confirms this when it proves the immortality of the soul, then what value do studies like this have?  Death, properly defined, is the separation of body and soul.  Because the soul is an immaterial substance, its presence cannot be directly detected using scientific (materialistic) methods.  Instead medical personnel must look for signs that the soul has, in fact, left the body.  To see how this might be done, we again must turn to philosophy.

What do we mean when we say the soul is “in the body”?  To say that a spiritual substance is in a material substance is to say that it is acting upon it.  So, it is said that the soul is in the body, it does not mean that it is stored in some area of the body, but that it acts upon it.  The soul does not act on every part of the body directly, but instead acts through the brain which serves as the body’s integrative organ.  Once the brain is no longer able to perform this integrative task, then the soul leaves the body.  This is the reason that the Church suggests what is called the Neurological Criteria for determining death. 

Science as the Handmaiden of Philosophy

This study and studies like it seem to empirically verify what we have long known through reason—even if the heart stops beating, this does not mean a person is dead (i.e. the soul has left the body).  Studies like this should also make us pause on questions of organ donation since many people use clinical death as a criteria to determine whether to harvest a person’s organs.  The person, using the Neurological Criterion, may still actually be alive and even capable of higher brain activity associated with human thought.  In so far as these studies help to refine and better pinpoint the moment of death, they are very helpful.  But when they get off on tangents such as “you know you are dead” they undermine the task of true science.  They seem to adopt a materialistic conception of man, without the strings that are attached.  If you are “dead” and your body is all you are, then who is the I that is knowing he is dead?  To even make the statement implicitly assumes there is someone who survives death.

When framed in this way these studies also feed the universal fascination with near-death experiences.  As this particular study showed, these experiences are relatively common place.  There is no reason why we should be skeptical of these accounts in general, especially when as Christians we have examples, including Lazarus, of people who have definitely died and are resuscitated.  But there are reasons why we might be skeptical in particular instances.  Few, if any, of these people describe the presence of the demonic or mention the epic struggle with fallen angels that we know happens in the dying.  To say that all of these people have avoided the same epic struggle that Our Lord instructed us to pray against in the Our Father, stretches the Christian imagination.  In fact, it stretches it thin enough to say that it is probably not common place at all.  It is more likely that most of these are either illusory or demonically caused.   

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Why Divine Mercy Sunday?

Divine Mercy, Mercy, , , , , ,

Within the Church’s liturgical calendar, there are two feasts which as so integral to Christian worship that the Church attaches an Octave to them.  To enter more fully into the mystery of the Incarnation, Christmas is not just celebrated as a single day, but the Church in her wisdom gives us eight full days to harvest the graces of that most solemn feast.  The octave is capped off with a celebration of the first fruits of the Incarnation, the Feast of Mary Mother of God on January 1st.   Along the same line, Easter is celebrated not once, but for eight consecutive days in order to bask in the glow of the Resurrected Lord and it is through a great gift from Jesus Himself that the Church also crowns and marks its first fruits of the Octave of Easter with the celebration of Divine Mercy Sunday.

One of the most common things that Our Lord spoke to St. Faustina about was His desire for a great feast of mercy as it is mentioned 14 times in her Diary of Divine Mercy in My Soul.  St. Faustina describes it most fully in entry 699:

My daughter, tell the whole world about My inconceivable mercy. I desire that the Feast of Mercy be a refuge and shelter for all souls, and especially for poor sinners. On that day the very depths of My tender mercy are open. I pour out a whole ocean of graces upon those souls who approach the Fount of My Mercy. The soul that will go to Confession and receive Holy Communion shall obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishment. On that day all the divine floodgates through which graces flow are opened. Let no soul fear to draw near to Me, even though its sins be as scarlet. My mercy is so great that no mind, be it of man or of angel, will be able to fathom it throughout all eternity. Everything that exists has come forth from the very depths of My most tender mercy. Every soul in its relation to Me will contemplate My love and mercy throughout eternity. The Feast of Mercy emerged from My very depths of tenderness.  It is My desire that it be solemnly celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter. Mankind will not have

peace until it turns to the Fount of My Mercy.

We have talked about the significance of the “divine floodgates through which graces flow” being opened in a previous post, so we will not rehash that here.  Instead, in the spirit of opening those gates even further,  we will ask a seemingly small questions: Why was Jesus so insistent upon the day in which the Feast of Mercy was to be celebrated?

Why the Day Mattered to Our Lord

Returning to the parallel with the Church’s “other” octave an answer begins to emerge.  In Our Lord’s mind the crown of Easter is not us going to heaven, but His mercy.  In overcoming death and revealing Himself as “Lord and God” (John 20:28), He now reveals His greatest attribute.  For He tells St. Faustina to “[P]roclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God” and He wants this proclamation to be forever attached to the celebration of Easter.  It is His greatest attribute, because in the end, it will be the attribute that most manifests His glory to creatures.

Mercy is not just about forgiving sins, but it is much deeper than that.  It is a love that not only recognizes the goodness in the other but is the cause of it.  It is mercy that calls the sinner to repentance.  It is mercy that takes the repentant sinner out of his nothingness and raises Him to the dignity of an adopted son of God.  And it is mercy that enables the beloved disciples of Christ to remain as such.  Every saint in heaven, even the purest of them, knows Mercy was the reward for those who fear God (c.f. Lk 1:50).      

This connection between mercy and Easter was known from an early stage in the Church.  St. Augustine, in an Easter homily, calls the Sunday of the Octave of Easter “the summary of the days of mercy.”  But it is Pope St. John Paul II that made the connection most explicit during his homily for the canonization of St. Faustina on April 30, 2000.  By examining the readings for what up to that point had been called the Second Sunday of Easter, he said that it was “important then that we accept the whole message that comes to us from the word of God on this Second Sunday of Easter, which from now on throughout the Church will be called ‘Divine Mercy Sunday.’”  The Pope looked at the readings, especially John’s account of the first and second encounter of the Risen Jesus with the Apostles in the Upper Room and saw in it a summary of mercy. 

When the Risen Christ encountered the Apostles for the first time in the Upper Room He didn’t just greet them, but because His word is performative, He gave them the gift of peace.  Then He immediately gave them the capacity to spread that same gift to others by empowering them to forgive sins.  In His next encounter He showed them His most Sacred Heart, the same Heart that was pierced by a lance and from which blood and water flowed forth.  It is as if St. Thomas reached into the side of Jesus and brought forth the rays that we see in the sacred image.  When He touched Our Lord’s heart, he believed and proclaimed “My Lord and my God.”  Those of us who have not seen and still believe cry out “O Blood and Water which gushed forth from the heart of Jesus, I trust in You!”

Summing Up the Devotion

We find the whole message of Divine Mercy summed up in the solemnity.  Not only are the “blood and water which gushed forth as a fount of mercy for us” brought to mind, but in entering into the last time the Apostles were in the Upper Room with Jesus we find that the words “Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and the Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your Most Beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ” are also true.  The celebration makes the link between Divine Mercy and the Eucharist explicit.  For the Mass is the place where Christ empowered the Church to truly say those words so that each of us makes a real offering to the Father.  The entire Eucharistic Prayer can be summed up “for the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.”   This connection between Divine Mercy and the Eucharist are what ultimately make it such a powerful and true devotion, whether or not Jesus has revealed it or not. 

Private Revelations play the part of the prophets of Israel.  Their message is not something new, but instead are given as counter messages to the signs of the times.  And the times are reading that for modern man peace has become elusive.  So, in the midst of two great wars, Our Lord appeared to St. Faustina with a simple message: “Mankind will not find peace until it turns trustfully to divine mercy.”  And so it is that Divine Mercy Sunday is ultimately Christ’s recipe for peace in the modern world.

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Protestantism and Infant Baptism

Apologetics, Church Fathers, Ecumenism, Evangelization, Grace, Sacraments, Theology, , , ,

One of the more hotly contested issues between Protestants and Catholics is infant Baptism.  What makes this particular practice contentious is that it really gets to the heart of the fundamental differences between Catholicism and Protestantism by pitting Tradition and Sacramental Theology against two of the Solas, Scriptura and Fide.  Because it is a “test case” of sorts for tackling these differences overall, it is necessary to have a ready answer to this common objection.

Although we have discussed this before, it is helpful to reiterate something related to relationship between Scripture and Tradition, namely the principle of the Development of Doctrine,  Because Sacred Scripture is the Word of God written using the words of men, it cannot fully express the divine ideas that God is trying to convey, at least not explicitly.  Instead it can contain those ideas implicitly.  When those ideas meet different human minds in different times and places, there is development of doctrine in that all of those things found implicitly in the Sacred Word are made explicit. 

Infant Baptism and the Development of Doctrine

As it relates to the question at hand, we must admit that nowhere do we find in Scripture an explicit statement regarding the baptism of infants.  But this does not make it “unbiblical” because there are implicit mentions of it.  In the Gospel of Luke, we find that ““Now they were bringing even infants to him that he might touch them; and when the disciples saw it, they rebuked them. But Jesus called them to him, saying, ‘Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God’” (Luke 18:15–16).  If the Kingdom of God belongs to children also, the same Kingdom of God that “no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.’” (Jn 3:5) then one could infer that infants too should be baptized.  That coupled with St. Paul’s explicit connection of baptism with circumcision (Col 2:11-12), a ritual that was performed on the 8th day after a child was born, would seem to suggest that infant baptism is not only permitted but also recommended. 

This highlights one of the problems with Sola Scriptura.  Because it does not permit any development of doctrine (at least in principle) then its adherents really can’t say anything about this and any number of topics.  Strictly speaking because the Bible does not say “thou shalt not baptize infants” then there is absolutely no basis for disputing the fact that Catholics do it.  To condemn it is to add to Scripture.

The phrases “one could infer” and “would seem to suggest” imply a certain amount of uncertainty.  Any uncertainty is quickly erased when we examine how the Biblical Revelation, especially regarding infant baptism, was received.  We hear of the practice of baptizing entire “households” in Scripture so that the practice of baptizing entire families, some of which presumably included infants, was common practice in the early Church.  At least, that is how the Church Fathers received the message from the Apostles themselves.  St. Irenaeus, who himself was likely baptized by St. Polycarp, a disciple of St. John mentions it as if it is a given in his Against Heresies (2:22).  Origen says that the tradition of “giving baptism even to infants was received from the Apostles” (Commentary on Romans, 5).  In fact, we do not have a single record of anyone in the first two Christian centuries objecting to infant baptism.

This practice however was not universal in the early Church and, in fact, most Baptisms were of adults.  We hear of a number of famous saints like Augustine and Jerome who despite having Christian parents, waited until they were adults.  What is clear though is that if at any point a child was in danger of death, they would be baptized immediately.  They all agreed that baptism was necessary for salvation and that it was the means b which all sins were forgiven.  What they did not agree upon however is what to do when someone sinned gravely after Baptism.  They were well aware of the Sacrament of Confession (see for example Didache, 15 ~AD60), but they did not know how many times someone could receive the Sacrament.  Was it once, twice, as many times as a person sins, or what?  There were rigorists (like Tertullian for example), especially in the 3rd and 4th Century, who thought you could go at most once.  Therefore, a practice of delaying Baptism began to become the norm. 

In other words, the development of the doctrine of infant baptism depended upon the development of the doctrine of Confession.  Once this was worked out, by the 5th Century however we see a concurrent movement towards infant baptism being the norm.  Those children that were baptized as infants would however have to answer for their faith.  The great Catechetical Lectures of St. Cyril of Jerusalem imply that these children are among his audience (c.f. Cat XV, 18).

Sola Fide and The Sacrament of Baptism

This leads to the second way in which this discussion acts as a” test case” in confronting the second sola, namely Sola Fide.  We must first admit that no one, until we get to the 16th Century ever believed in Sola Fide.  The Early Church on the other hand always believed that Baptism was necessary for salvation.  Just like Baptism, faith is, by all accounts, necessary for salvation.  It is the relationship between the two that is at the heart of this part of the discussion.   

Faith, for the Protestant, is always reflexive.  Whatever the believer believes is so.  If he believes he is saved, then he is saved.  If he believes he is forgiven, then he is forgiven.  If he believes that Communion really is the Body of Christ, then it is. If he believes then he shows that belief by being baptized.  In this construct there is no need for the Sacraments and they can safely be replaced by faith.  Faith, not the Sacraments, is the efficient cause of God’s actions.

This is problematic because faith then becomes a work by which we are saved. This is the ironic part of the discussion because it is usually the Catholic that is accused of a “works-based righteousness.”  But Catholics are very clear that salvation, and all the is necessary for achieving it, are pure gifts.  In other words, baptism from the Catholic viewpoint is not a sign of faith, but a cause of it.  Saving faith is not believing you are saved, but believing all that God has revealed.  It is baptism that infuses this habit into us and thus it is necessary if we are to be saved.  “It is,” St. Peter says, “baptism that saves you” (1Peter 3:21).

In conclusion, we can see that Infant Baptism carries with it a number of principles that are absolutely necessary to grasp if we are to advance the discussion of the differences between Protestants and Catholics.  It offers an example of how Scripture is often pitted against Tradition and Faith against the Sacraments.  Only by developing a proper understanding of the issue can we begin to talk about it.

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The Remedy for Desolation

Passion of Christ, Prayer, , , , ,

The first time that God spoke from a mountain, He gave the Ten Words (Decalogue) to His people through the mouth of Moses.  The last time He spoke from a mountain, it was the Mount of Calvary seated on the pulpit of the Cross.  This time, God Incarnate spoke only seven words, each of which represent the last will and testament to His people.  Each of the seven words, spoken by the Eternal Son, has both a timelessness and a timeliness about it.  But there is one in particular, the one packed right in the middle of the seven—“My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”—that bears a special focus in our day and age.  For it is in this word that we find the summation of Christ’s Passion.

The return of pagan thought, supplemented by scientism, has born witness to a reemergence of many of the early Christological heresies.  This is, perhaps, put on display in no clearer manner than when the modern theologians try to explain point number four in Our Lord’s great Sermon.  Whether it be the neo-Docetists who say that the Son really didn’t suffer or the Calvinists who claim that Christ suffering was so intense that He yielded to despair, there is a great need of clarity if we are to pluck all of the fruit off of the true Tree of Life.  In order to have the convergence of the timeless and the timely, we must root ourselves in a proper understanding of the Incarnation.  Mysteries only remain mysteries when we are precise in our language and our thinking.  When we make room for ambiguity and imprecision, we come to explain them away like our Docetist and Calvinist compadres.

A Proper Christology

Because Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, Who took to Himself a human nature without any change to Himself, we must first admit the impossibility of Him ceasing to be God.  He is a Divine Person Who nonetheless had two modes of action or natures—human and divine.  He performed miracles using His Divine Nature.  He suffered using His human nature.  But in either case, it was He, that is the Second Person of the Trinity, that performed the miracle and suffered.  The union of the two natures in the Person, what we call the Hypostatic Union, means that from the moment of His conception, He had the vision of God.  His soul had the most intimate and unique union that a human soul can have with God and therefore His soul looked upon “the face of God and lived.”  “No man has ever seen the Father, except the One Who is from God” (c.f. John 6:46). If all of what we just said is true, then how is it possible for Him to ever experience abandonment from God?

There is, of course, the connection with Psalm 22.  But we must make sure that we do not put the cart before the horse.  Properly speaking Christ did not fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament in the sense that He was bound to do certain things.  The prophecies were made because the Eternal Word of God did certain things.  The prophecies are “after” the events in the mind of God.  The Psalm was inspired because Christ would utter those words from the Cross and not the other way around.  In other words, we cannot simply say that Our Lord was reciting a Psalm and leave it at that.  We must address the fact that in a real sense Our Lord experienced abandonment.

There is the obvious sense in which the words are meant.  The abandonment is not so much a spiritual desolation, but the fact that He was turned over completely to His persecutors without any Divine protection or exercise of His Divine Power.  It can also mean, according to Augustine, that the Son was forsaken in the sense that His prayer in the Garden to have the chalice removed was not answered.

Clearing the Way for the Deeper Meaning

By clinging to the truth of the personal union of the Divine and human natures we are able to also posit a much deeper level of meaning as well.  We said that it was one of the laws of the nature of the Incarnation that Christ experienced the Beatific Vision in His soul.  But through a miracle, the reverse of which was described in a previous post about the Transfiguration, He was able to suspend His awareness of the Beatific Vision in His soul.  Thus, according to St. Thomas (c.f. ST III q.46, a.6 ad 4), Christ was, in His human nature, no longer aware of His union with the Father.  The union was still real but He was prevented from having any consideration of it which would have alleviated sorrow.  Instead He focused only on those things that could produce sorrow and desolation such as the malice of sin, the terrible ingratitude of mankind, and all the souls that would be lost despite His sacrifice.   

In short, this desolation, unlike the desolation we “naturally” experience in the spiritual life, was directly willed.  And like all things He did, it had a twofold purpose.  The first is as an example.  By experiencing the most intense of desolations, Our Lord left us an example to follow by not only “hanging in there” but by speaking words for us.  He has given us a prayer to say in Psalm 22 when no prayer will come.  For those who have experienced true spiritual desolation, when absolutely no words come in prayer, this is an invaluable gift.

The second purpose is that by directly willing it and experiencing it, He sanctified desolation for all of us.  Despite not feeling anything except loss, the Christian is assured that by submitting their will to God’s in desolation, they are, in truth, being sanctified by it.  And this ultimately is why having a proper understanding of what Christ did and suffered is important.  By seeing Christ’s desolation as directly willed and not as a precursor to despair, we know we have been empowered to overcome any amount of desolation and avoid despair.  For Christ redeemed every aspect of our lives including spiritual desolation.  All we have to do then is to submit to it in an act of faith and trust, knowing that is part and parcel of Redemption.

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Judas and the Wages of Envy

Devils, Passion of Christ, , , ,

The first full moon in Spring brings with it two things, both of which are equally predictable.  First there is Easter, celebrated on the Sunday immediately following that first full moon.  Secondly, there is the somewhat predictable “scholar” who will bring forth some long lost “proof” that Christianity is a hoax.  Usually it is by the “rediscovery” of some “lost” gospel.  Never mind that it was lost because the Church Fathers already knew about it and deemed it a fraud.  Easter 2006 was no different in this regard.  National Geographic released an English translation of the Gospel of Judas just in time for the Pascal feast.  This “gospel” paints Jesus and Judas as somehow in cahoots.  But it also has a particular appeal because it appears to answer an age-old question of why Judas did what he did. 

We must admit that it is more than mere curiosity that places this question before us.  Even if Christ ultimately claims the victory, it does not sit well with us that Judas was the collateral damage.  Nor are we comfortable with the fact that many of the Church Fathers place Judas in hell because, as Our Lord said, “woe to him by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.  It would have been better for him to never have been born” (Mt 26:24).  Nor should it.  Even if Judas is alone in hell, the losing of a single soul is the greatest of all tragedies.  But Sacred Scripture and the Church’s liturgical calendar place the question before us this week and so we must resist the temptation, like the heretics of the first Christian centuries, to “psychologize” Judas and try to explain it away as if he was a victim caught up in the tsunami of the Redemption. 

“Watch Out Lord”

We must first admit that neither Scripture nor Tradition gives us a clear answer as to why Judas did what he did.  And the lack of clarity is for a good reason.  Any one of us can be Judas—selling Jesus for something else.  This must be lesson number one or else we cannot even begin to unpack what might be hidden away in what we have been told.  We are each presented with the temptation of the thirty pieces of silver daily, although usually we settle for a whole lot less. We all sell Christ out in small (and big) ways every day.  As St. Philip Neri said every day of his life, “watch out Lord, lest Philip betray you today.”

The point is that we must all see in Judas our capacity to do likewise.  If a man who spent three years with God in the Flesh could do it, then anyone can.  It is only grace that preserves us from the temptations we would otherwise easily succumb.  And this is why when Our Lord warned the Apostles that one of them would betray Him, each of them feared it might be him.  They knew that they didn’t really want to, but they also knew that they were capable of anything given the right set of circumstances.  This is what it means to recognize that you are a sinner—not that you have done a bunch of bad stuff, but to know that at any point you are capable of falling off the wagon.  “Therefore, let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor 10:12).

Judas and the Role of the Devil

Likewise, we must also understand that the Gospel narratives are calling us to go beyond Judas’ personal motivation and to see in this great betrayal the hoof marks of the great enemy of man’s soul, Satan.  This is not to absolve Judas of responsibility but to acknowledge the role he played.  St. John tells us that “the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon’s son, to betray him” (Jn 13:2).  The devil had tempted Judas to betray Our Lord and Judas had made up his mind to do so.  As St. Thomas says in his commentary on this verse, Satan “enters into a person’s heart when one totally gives himself to following his suggestions and offers no resistance at all. Thus Satan first put the plan to deceive Christ into Judas, and then he entered into to possess him more completely and to lead him to accomplish the evil.”  In short we cannot rule out demonic possession in the carrying out of the betrayal.  Even if this is the case, Judas was a most willing participant and not merely a puppet in the hands of the devil.  Judas was willing, but may have lacked the “courage” to carry it out.  Once he consented to the devil’s suggestion, however, he ceded his personal freedom over to him.

This too can be spiritually instructive for us.  Judas shows us that we should not yield to temptations of the mind, even if we “would never actually do it.”  To consent to a temptation is to put ourselves under the power of the Evil One.  Very often we will entertain thoughts of revenge, even though we know deep down we are incapable of carrying it out.  This is very dangerous because when the source of the temptation is the devil, he is only too happy to help give us the strength to carry out our wildest fantasies.  If nothing else Judas teaches us that.

All that being said, I believe we can begin to uncover some of Judas’ personal motivation.  We must first eliminate what appears to be the obvious answer—greed.  Thirty pieces of silver was the price paid for the death of a slave and was not very much.  It would have been far less than Judas was likely making embezzling as keeper of the Apostolic money bag.  He was walking away from a pretty good racket.  That coupled with the fact that, because he inherited his father’s name, Iscariot, he was probably already wealthy, makes it unlikely that greed was the motivating factor.

Biblical Typology and the Judas/Judah Connection

Instead we can look at the Patriarch Joseph as a type of Christ.  For he too was sold for pieces of silver by his brother Judah.  And why did he do this?  For the same reason that Judas would betray Christ—envy.  Envy is the devil’s forte.  It was envy that motivated him to go after mankind when he fell.  And in his role as the Accuser, it is envy that he is constantly seeking to incite in us.  Envy always presents itself by way of accusation making it about what it’s not really about.  It is an attempt to tear down another person simply because they are stealing from your greatness.  Judas was not the thief, Christ was—”why was this not sold for 300 days wages?”.  The devil was not in Judas, it was Our Lord who was the devil. 

So, it was Judas’ envy of Our Lord in His absolute freedom, especially his freedom from a desire for riches, that led Judas ultimately to consent to turning him over.  And in this way, the story of Judas should be particularly instructive for us.  We live in a culture that has been particularly designed to incite envy.  When someone does something great, we scan their social media history to find a way to tear them down.  Supposed class/race/gender/sexual identity warfare is all about envy by demonizing the other.  Envy is the most difficult for us to see because we are living in it.  And that is why we must never forget what happened to Judas and the wages of envy.       

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On Ghosts

Communion of Saints, Devils, Heaven, Last Things, Purgatory, , , , , , ,

A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that almost 1/3 of all Americans have had some paranormal encounter with human spirits after they have died.  This, coupled with nearly half of all Americans admitting to “believing” in ghosts, makes the existence of ghosts a fairly common topic of discussion, especially in our increasingly superstitious culture.  What does the Church have to say about ghosts?

To begin, there are a few preliminary points that will serve as a foundation for the discussion.  First, when we use the term ghost, we are referring specifically to human spirits who have died as distinct from angels or demons.  Second, although Christians often dismiss the question as absurd, there are Scriptural reasons to believe that ghosts do exist.  The most well-known example is when King Saul conjured up the ghost of Samuel and spoke to him (1 Samuel 28:12-18).  Our Lord too spoke of ghosts during His earthly ministry, twice, in fact.  On both occasions (Mt 14:34, Lk 24:39) the Apostles thought He was a ghost.  Rather than saying “ghosts do not exist”, He reassures them that He is not a ghost because ghosts “do not have flesh and bones as I do.”  Our Lord tells us that ghosts not only exist, but that they are in a spiritual state in which they do not have material flesh and bones. 

Why There Are Ghosts

If ghosts are, at least theoretically, a possibility, then what practical purpose might their manifestation serve.  In short, they are meant to communicate some message to the living, although this statement needs to be seriously qualified.  For this, we can rely upon St. Thomas who himself was visited at least three times by ghosts in his lifetime.  We should not be surprised then that he treats this topic in his Summa Theologiae (Supp. Q.69, art. 3).

St. Thomas asks whether it is possible for souls in heaven or hell to be able to appear on earth.  His response is thorough enough that it enables us to come up with guidelines for understanding the purpose of these visitations.  First of all, we are judged immediately upon death.  This means souls are either in Heaven or in Hell, with some making a temporary stop in Purgatory before settling in to their final destination in God’s presence.  There is no such thing as a soul that is doomed to wander the earth or anything like that.  While this might make for a good Dean Koontz book, it is not rooted in reality. 

It is the natural state of these souls then to be cut-off from their communication with the living, but according to God’s will they may miraculously appear to men on earth.  This is also noteworthy because it helps us to understand the Biblical injunction about conjuring spirits of the dead in order to make inquiries of them (c.f. Lev 20:6, Deut 18:3).  It is only according to the designs of God’s Providence that these visitations might occur and not through human manipulation.  To try to invoke spirits of the dead is to usurp a power that only God, as the God of the living and dead, can use.

The saints in heaven can appear to the living whenever they will because their will is always aligned with the Divine will.  They appear so as to instruct men on earth in a similar manner to St. Paul appearing to St. Thomas when he was stuck in his interpretation of a particularly difficult passage in Romans.  The souls that are damned too can appear to men “for man’s instruction and intimidation,” although they would not do so willingly.  Those souls in Purgatory appear in order too seek prayers and suffrages.  St. Thomas was visited by his sister Gui from Purgatory and she asked him prayers and masses to be said in her memory.

The last group, those in Purgatory, bear further discussion.  These are probably the most common type of “ghosts” because they come as members of the Church Suffering in need of the help of the Church Militant.  Their appearance, at least according to most demonologists and exorcists, are usually gentle and they limit their communication to a request for spiritual help in the form of prayers and Masses.  For that reason they are also the easiest to discern their authenticity.  In fact it might be said that there is no discernment necessary—if one has a ghostly encounter then they should simply pray for the dead person and have seek no further interaction.

Ghost and Demons

The ghostly elephant in the room is the action of the demonic.  This is an area, especially because people are in an emotionally vulnerable place, that the devils are particularly active.  They are bullies that like to prey on the weak.  It is for that reason that we need to have our understanding clear about this.  Demonologist Adam Blai says that the demons usually come to places where souls have previously communicated with the living asking for prayers so that they might manipulate the living.  That is why we should never seek information from the dead other than the need for prayer.  Any messages we do receive we should submit to a thorough process of the discernment of spirits, including asking God to verify it in other ways. 

In truth, we should be very suspicious of paranormal communications to the point of rejecting them whole cloth.  This is not because we don’t believe in them, but because our capacity to be deceived is very high.  We can do no wrong in praying for the dead but can easily get pulled into something more through extended conversation.  Better to reject it out of humility and obedience, two virtues particularly pleasing to God, than to succumb to the tricks of demons.  Once we have opened the door for them and inviting them in, it can be very difficult to chase the legalistic demons away.  

Ghosts continue to remain a fascination for many of us.  There are good reasons for Christians to believe in their existence, but they should avoid encouraging any interaction with.

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The Danger of Playing House

Abortion, Bioethics, Contraception, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Homosexuality, Moralilty, , , ,

“Playing house” is a common children’s make believe game where the children take on adult roles usually centering around family life.  What happens when adults, armed with enough technology to make believe believable still like to play the game?  Something along the lines of what happened in Nebraska recently where a “61-year-old Nebraska mom has become a grandmom after giving birth herself — acting as the surrogate for her adult son and his husband.”   Even Aldous Huxley would find this truth stranger than fiction, despite being only half-way down the slippery slope into which our culture is descending.

Imagine little baby Uma, when she is much older Uma, looking at her birth certificate, the one that “looks really creepy for us.”  On it, she will find the name of one of her fathers, Matthew Eledge.  Under the heading of Mother, she will find the name of her grandmother.  Now this permanent public record will look like a case of incest.  Uma may know better, but is it better that she knows better?  In truth she will know that she was pieced together in a laboratory from various interrelated parts.  She will know she was a “product” of conception that originated with her father’s sperm and her other father’s sister’s egg.

Straight Out of A Brave New World?

As the origins of life grow to more closely resemble Huxley’s decanter than nature, it is increasingly difficult to point out this injustice.  Justice requires that equals be treated as equals.  When a child is conceived in a manner such as this, the relationship between parent and child is not truly a communion of persons but one of producer and product.  In essence this is, as Donum Vitae points out, “equivalent to reducing the child to an object of scientific technology.”   

No one can measure the psychological effects of knowing this upon the person, and, interestingly enough, no one has attempted to study it.  Children of divorce often face an identity crisis even though they are told that their parents “love them very much.”  That is because it is not enough to know you are loved, but you must also know that you came from love, that is, you are not an accident.  Likewise children conceived in a laboratory could face a similar identity crisis.

If you doubt the person-product connection, re-read the linked article and notice the description of the process they went through, including a quality control measure called “preimplantation genetic testing which would help determine the embryos most likely to develop into a healthy baby.”  If you are going to spend all the money (again described in detail in the interview) then you want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck.  Meanwhile six other children, Uma’s brothers and sisters, were set aside as byproducts of conception.  The article doesn’t say what happened to these six children but they were likely frozen or test subjects for human experimentation.  At least there was some semblance of a human decency when the men decided that choosing the sex of the child was too much “like playing God.” 

Procreation and the “Right to Make Life”

Perhaps the clearest indication of where this slippery slope leads is revealed in the form of a question.  After laying out all of the specific costs of the procedure and a complaint from the two men that IVF is cost prohibitive for most “couples”, the author asks, “should citizens have a right to make life?”  And this is, the battleground over which must fight if we are to rectify this injustice.

Humans do not reproduce, they procreate.  This is more than a mere semantical distinction.  Reproduction is a closed activity.  It simply requires two material creatures to exchange their genetic matter to produce offspring.  Human procreation is different however.  Like other material creatures, humans exchange genetic matter.  But they lack the capacity to exchange or create the spiritual element within their offspring.  This must be created by Someone else and requires His intervention.  Because procreation requires the intervention of a Third, the child must always be received as a gift and not as something that the couple is owed.  Couples receive children rather than grasp at them. 

The biological limitations that God has written into nature are there for our own good and for our own thriving.  Seizing what should otherwise be a gift, perhaps the greatest gift that God can bestow on us in the natural realm, leads to spiritual ruin for the parents.  But it need not be so for the children.   Even though the children conceived in this manner face an existential crisis and appear to be a mere product of technology, in truth they are not.  They are still persons of inestimable value because despite their immoral beginnings, God, as the ignored Third, still chose for this child to exist.  He still loved them into existence, even if their parents chose to hide that love behind scientific techniques.

One way to put a halt to the skid down this slippery slope is to change our rights language.  Even if the State grants them, there are no such thing as “reproductive rights” and not just because humans don’t, properly speaking, reproduce.  As proof of this, notice how they have little connection to actual duties towards other people connected to these rights.  In fact, they render children’s rights obsolete.  What people do have are procreative rights.  These natural rights are always in reference to their duties to children and ensure the dignity of children both born and unborn.   

In closing, there is one more thing that needs to be said regarding giving up on gay marriage as a battle already lost.  This is no mere “playing house” precisely because of stories like this.  In order to keep the game up, six children had to be condemned to death or a frozen existence.  This couple may be the first of its kind, but it won’t be the last.  The demand for procedures like this (as well as the demand to develop lower cost alternatives) will continue to increase unless we do something to protect these children.

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Tolerating Autism

Autism,

April 2nd of each year marks a day of recognition of the millions of people worldwide who live with Autism.  It is meant to raise awareness of the incredible challenges that people on the Autism Spectrum face and to increase understanding of this disorder.  Insofar as it does that, it is most certainly a good thing.  But that can never be enough.  Instead the enlightened among us who advocate that we should just all accept our brokenness, have decided that it should be renamed “Autism Acceptance Day.”  Gone is the symbol of the Autism Puzzle Piece, sacrificed to the gods of political correctness, and replaced by the rainbow infinity symbol for neurodiversity.  What has always been recognized as a disorder, is now celebrated as being “differently ordered” (Fr. James Martin would be proud). Despite the best of intentions, this will only result in the worst of outcomes for people with Autism and someone must set the record straight.

Normalizing the Abnormal

The movement to normalize the abnormal and naturalize the unnatural is one of the most pernicious evils of our time.  Autism is not natural nor is it just “different.”  It is, as the clinical name suggests, a disorder.  It is the cause of a great deficit in the person’s life, handicapping their ability to give and receive love, communicate with other people and to see the world accurately.  Not only that, but it is usually accompanied by a whole gamut of other medical and mental health issues including sleep disorders and anxiety.    Only the most cold-hearted of people would be willing to “accept” Autism knowing that people with Autism suffer greatly, often in silence, solely because of it.  Perhaps the fact that they want acceptance of Autism says more about them than it does about Autism. 

It is so much easier to tell someone they are OK than to get involved in making them better.  This is why I find professional therapists who advocate for “Accepting Autism” particularly puzzling.  If Autism is something we should accept, then why do we give them any therapy at all?  Why would we teach them social skills, help them with their sensory challenges, and improve their communication if they are just fine?  It is apathy at best.  Just one more thing for us to show faux concern about and drop a pinch of incense to the Twitter god.

It might be the case that what they really mean is that we should be more accepting of people with Autism.  Of that, there can be no disagreement.  Because Autism is often out of sight, it is out of mind so that people fail to recognize that the person in front of them is afflicted with it.  Having a general awareness of how it manifests itself and habitually giving people the benefit of the doubt constitutes an act of compassion.  But the approach of “accepting” Autism actually has the opposite effect. 

The more you paint it with the “normal” brush, the more you open the door to intolerance.  For society to properly function, it must operate under a set of norms to facilitate cooperation and communication.  Norms keep us from descending into chaos.  Those who are capable of following those norms, we label as normal and we set our expectations likewise.  When an otherwise normal person does not adhere to the norms we must not tolerate it.  Now, when a person is unable to adhere to the norms, like say if they have Autism, then they must be met with compassion.  If you were to remove the “label” of disability, what is naturally expected of the other person rises and far from acceptance, the person finds nothing but rejection.  What our innovators are suggesting then harms way more than it helps in the long run.

A New Movement

And this is why rather than accepting  “Accepting Autism”, we should start a counter movement “Tolerating Autism”.  No matter how hard we try, we have to admit that Autism is a bad thing.  We should never accept bad things, only tolerate them.  We can never accept Autism but only tolerate it because the person who labors under the Cross of Autism is a beautiful and uniquely unrepeatable thing.  There may have been good things that came about because of their encounter with this disorder, but that is never a reason to accept it.  People who suffer from cancer often experience positive personal growth, but that would never mean we should accept cancer.  And just like we do with cancer, we should continue to work to eradicate Autism. 

Despite protestations to the contrary, our culture is absolutely obsessed with labeling people.  We label according to race, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, you name it.  The label then becomes the identity rather than something that forms who the person is.  People often rail against the notion that Autism is a bad thing because they see it somehow as a personal attack.  But that is to fall into the trap of defining a person by a label.   There are no autistic people, only people with Autism because Autism can never fully define who a person is.  They are so much more than simply repetitive behaviors and compromised social skills.   This is also why people advocate for the removal of the puzzle piece symbol because “I am not a puzzle piece.”  Well, in truth, you are not a rainbow infinity sign either.  The symbol is only a label for the person if you identify them with their condition.  Otherwise it is simply a symbol for a thing.

Tolerate Autism?  For the time being.  Accept Autism?  Never.

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God and the Gray Lady

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Just in time for the Feast of the Incarnation, the New York Times published an opinion piece written by Professor of Philosophy Peter Atterton that purposes to refute the idea of “deity most Westerners accept” because it is not coherent.  His approach is the same approach is the same tri-lemma that was the topic of a recent post: pitting God’s omnipotence, omnibenevolence and omniscience against each other.  It is worthwhile to examine his argument, well at least part of it, not because it is particularly compelling, but because it was featured in one of the country’s largest fish wraps.  In fact, his argument overall falls rather flat as we will see.

A Stone too Large, Really?

First he experiments with the “stone too large to lift argument” to attack God’s omnipotence.  This seems rather easy to resolve once we define what we mean when we say that God’s omnipotence allows Him to do any thing  and not anything.  Provided that the thing is an actual thing, that is something that could be done, then God can do it.  The rock too heavy to lift is a sophist word game because it is simply a logical contradiction akin to saying that God can also square a circle or make right left (which everyone knows only Lightning McQueen can do).  This is a classic attack (the author even cites Aquinas who addressed it) but it really stems from a misunderstanding of God’s nature.  Those who posit such a thing normally think of the voluntarist God of the Calvinists and Muslims rather than the God Who is Reason and has revealed Himself in the Logos or Word that became flesh.

Professor Atterton may have been trying to set up an attack on God’s omnibenevolence by even mentioning the ersatz dilemma of the stone that can’t be lifted.  He seems to think that a world in which evil does not exist, at least from the Christian point of view, is among those logical impossibilities.  That is certainly not something that Christians believe.  God could have made (and even possibly did) such a world, but for reasons we may not understand (because we are not God) He chose not to.  The point however is that He could have done otherwise, but had a reason for doing it the way He did.   

As far as this part of the tri-lemma, I will refer the reader to the aforementioned post that deals with God and the Problem of Evil.  The part of the argument that bears the most attention is the “conundrum” of omniscience.  In short, his argument is that “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know. But if He knows what we know, then this would appear to detract from His perfection… if God knows all that is knowable, then God must know things that we do, like lust and envy. But one cannot know lust and envy unless one has experienced them. But to have had feelings of lust and envy is to have sinned, in which case God cannot be morally perfect…Therefore, God doesn’t know what it is like to be human. In that case He doesn’t know what we know. But if God doesn’t know what we know, God is not all knowing, and the concept of God is contradictory. God cannot be both omniscient and morally perfect. Hence, God could not exist.”

God’s Omniscience

One must first admit that this has a diabolical ring to it, “for you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (c.f. Gn 3:5) and so we should immediately intuit that it contains a falsehood.  The diabolical delusion is unmasked once we challenge the Professor’s contention that  “if God knows all there is to know, then He knows at least as much as we know.”

The problem is not that it is wrong, but that he is equivocating on the term “knows”.  The way we know things is vastly different  from the way God knows things.  In truth, God knows only one thing—Himself—and this knowledge of Himself embraces everything actual and possible.  Our knowledge comes piecemeal and only after discursion.  His knowledge embraces all things at once without any reasoning out all the possible details of each individual thing.  His knowledge is eternal and unchanging and thus He must come to know all things in light of their cause, Himself.  If this were not so, then there would be an imperfection in God, namely that His knowledge would depend on created things.

God’s knowledge is not determined and measured by things like ours, but is the cause of things.  God’s knowledge in relation to things then is a creative knowledge that gives existence to things.  Ours is an experiential or connatural knowledge.  This point seems to be missed when the Professor speaks of God having to know “lust and envy.”  This train of thought is important because it keeps the Professor’s moral argument from leaving the station.

Evil is foreign to God, but, according to St. Thomas, God can still know evil “through the good of which it is a privation, as darkness is known by light.”  His point is that evil, like darkness, can only be known in contrast to the thing that is lacking.  God is not the cause of the lack, but man is, even if God has permitted it.  In other words, God can know about evil, but only because it is affront to the good of which He has creative knowledge.  But St. Thomas goes even further when he says that “He would not know good things perfectly unless He also knew evil things” (ST I, q.14 a.10).   His point is that to speak of “full” knowledge is to imply degree.  In short, to have full knowledge means one must also be able to know when it is lacking. 

In recent years the New York Times has come under intense scrutiny for its lack of journalistic integrity and a decidedly partisan slant with little regard for truth.  They seem to now be setting their sights on Truth Himself.  Of course, if they are going to succeed in placing God in the Dock, they are going to have to find better arguments than Professor Atterton’s elementary attempt.  Maybe some news isn’t really fit to print.

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Can God Suffer?

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In a recent homily on the Biblical narrative of the Flood, Pope Francis challenged those gathered to have a heart like God’s, especially in the face of human suffering.  The Holy Father said that “God the Father…is able to get angry and feel rage…suffering more than we do.”  So common has this assertion that God suffers become that it is practically becoming an assumption.  But upon closer inspection we come to find that there are a number of faith altering and faith destroying consequences that follow from this false view of God.  Therefore, it merits further reflection why it is that God does not suffer.

The Need for Analogy

We must first admit that our language inevitably fails us when we attempt to speak about God.  In fact, we can say nothing positive about Him.  This is not because we are pessimists, but because we can only speak definitively about what He is not.  He is omniscient because there is nothing He doesn’t know.  He is omnipotent because there is nothing He can do, etc.  To speak of what He is, is impossible because He transcends our categories.  This linguistic limitation can be partially overcome once we allow for the use of analogy.  For example, God reveals Himself as Father because His fatherhood is something like the human fatherhood that we are all familiar with.

The problem with this approach of analogy is that we often get it backwards.  Properly speaking it is human fatherhood that is like God’s fatherhood.   Keeping the primacy of God’s fatherhood in mind keeps us from assuming that it is just like human fatherhood and making God in our image instead of us in His.  Human fatherhood is only true fatherhood to the extent that it images God’s fatherhood as St. Paul is wont to remind the Ephesians (c.f. Eph 3:15). 

More closely related to the topic of God’s suffering is the dictum that God is love.  To say that God is love is to say that God loves fully and for all eternity.  He cannot love any more than He does because it is His nature to love.  We speak of different “kinds” of love from God such as mercy, compassion, kindness, etc. but in God there is no distinction.  He loves fully.  We, however, cannot receive His love fully.  “Whatever is received,” St. Thomas says, “is received according to the mode of the receiver.”  To the sinner, God’s love is received as mercy.  To the suffering His love is received as comfort.  Yet, from God’s perspective it is a completely active and full love.     

To say that God suffers with us reverses the analogy.  The assumption is that because compassionate human love includes suffering, then Divine love must also.  But the fact that it includes suffering does not mean that it must include suffering.  It is the love that is given that makes it love, not the suffering.  In fact you could remove the suffering, the love would still be love.  In fact, it would be a purer love because there would be no need on the lover’s part to succor his own suffering.  Instead it would be a completely free love with no compulsion towards self-interest.  Rather than being somehow cold and indifferent, it is complete and free.  So God, by not be able to suffer, actually loves us more than if He could suffer.  To insist otherwise makes God love us less, the very thing that they think they are avoiding by positing that He must suffer.  As Fr. Thomas Weinandy puts it, “what human beings cry out for in their suffering is not a God who suffers but a God who loves wholly and completely, something a suffering God could not do.”  God is compassionate not because He suffers with but because He is able to fully embrace those who are suffering

Further Consequences of the Suffering God

If reversing the analogy was the worst part about this, then we might simply chalk it up as a misunderstanding.  But the fact that it represents an attack on God’s nature eventually leads us into a theological pitfall that destroys our faith in God.  God, in order to suffer must be capable of change.  But we believe in a God who is immutable.  His immutability comes about not because He can’t change, but because as the fullness of being there is nothing for Him to change into.  No change would make Him more than He is because He is already “I AM WHO AM”, pure act.  He fully alive.  To posit that He can suffer is to posit that He can change and to posit that He can change is to say that He is not the one true God.

He must also be incapable of suffering, that is, impassible for a subtler reason as well.  Suffering is caused by a lack of some good that ought to be there.  If God, in Himself is lacking some good, then He is not All Good.  If the suffering comes about because of the lack of some good in creation, then He becomes a part of creation itself and is no longer transcendent.  As part of creation He is no longer Creator.  Evil and suffering must be seen as having real existence (rather than a lack of some good) since nothing is immune to it.  Our new God is the god of pantheism or process theology and an ontological dualism becomes the result.

The suffering God hypothesis ultimately means the destruction of the Christian God.  If God is not free from suffering, then no one is.  And if no one is, then there is no possibility of redemption.  God simply becomes one being among many striving for perfection.  If He cannot save Himself from evil, then how can He save anyone else?  The Incarnation becomes totally incomprehensible.  The God-Man cannot offer redemption, nor can He sanctify suffering.  In truth, a suffering God need not stoop to our level because He is already there.  The truth that He could love fully without suffering, yet still chose to add suffering carries the assurance of His total love for each one of us.  If He could already suffer, then it looks like little more than masochism.

In short, ideas have consequences. Serious ideas have serious consequences.  The idea of divine passibility has nothing but negative consequences.  Therefore, despite its present popularity, the assertion that Divine suffering is possible must be wholly rejected in favor of the Traditional teaching of the Church so that the Faith may remain intact.

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The Problem of Evil and God’s Existence

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For anyone who has read either of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summas, it is patently obvious that he took objections to the Catholic Faith seriously.  Put more precisely, he felt obligated to address serious objections fully.  So keen was his understanding that he often made his opponents’ arguments more precisely and succinctly than they can.  One can often learn more from the objections and their responses than from the substance of his response.  Christians of today could learn much from the Angelic Doctor in this regard, especially when it comes to the existence of God.  There are most certainly motives of credibility  that honest atheists must take seriously if they are genuinely interested in discovering the truth.  But these can often be overshadowed by what might be called “a motive of discredibility”, namely the problem of evil and suffering, that Christians must also take seriously.

When St. Thomas tackles the existence of God in the Summa Theologiae, he finds this to be the only real objection.  This was not to suggest that other objections don’t matter, but that they begin to fade away once this objection has received a sufficient answer.  St. Thomas articulates the objection like this: “It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word ‘God’ means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist” (ST I, q.2 art 3, obj. 1). 

The Dilemma of Suffering and Evil

Notice that the objector has set up what is essentially a dilemma revolving around God’s infinite goodness.  If God is omnibenevolent then evil cannot exist.  Many have added to this argument by suggesting that the problem is really a tri-lemma in that God could not be infinitely wise, good and powerful if evil exists.  Either he cannot stop the evil (omnipotence), wills the evil (omnibenevolence) or doesn’t know how to stop it (omnisapience). 

St. Thomas, in a certain sense, anticipates the expanded objection when he quotes St. Augustine who said “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil” and adds his own comment that, “This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good” (ST I, q.2 art 3, ad. 1).

What St. Thomas doesn’t say, but that remains just beneath the surface of what he did, is that evil, once properly framed, actually presents an argument for God.  Evil in the metaphysical sense does not exist.  This does not mean it is not a reality or that it causes suffering in people, but this suffering is not a result of the evil per se, but of the deprivation of a good that should otherwise be there.  Blindness is a deprivation of the good of sight and therefore is an evil.  Moral evils like sins and vices are nothing but a lack of the moral good that should otherwise be in and flow from the human heart. 

This distinction, although well known, is important for two reasons.  First, it refutes any dualistic ontological explanations.  Second, and more closely related to our point, is the fact that when good comes from evil, it is always a creation ex nihilio.  Good that does come comes from absolutely nothing.  Only a being Who is all powerful can create out of nothing so that the problem of evil presents no difficulty to the principle of God’s omnipotence.   In fact, a God who allows evil and suffering and brings good out of it is more powerful than a God who simply erects a divine Stop Sign to stamp out any evil beforehand.

Neither does evil or suffering present a difficulty to God’s omnibenevolence.  Especially when we add the principle that God only allows evil to occur when it is the only manner in which a particular good can come about.  Certain goods such as self-sacrifice can only exist in a world in which evil and suffering are possible.  One could see that the world with evil and suffering in it actually manifests God’s goodness more than a world without it (if it didn’t He wouldn’t have allowed it that way). 

Christ Crucified and God’s Wisdom

Once we grasp the preceding two points we see that only a God Who is all-wise could navigate these waters.  And this is why it is Wisdom Incarnate Who ultimately “dwelt among us” in order to prove this point.  When Christ healed the man born blind, the disciples ask Him what the man (or his parents) did wrong to deserve this.  He tells them that his blindness and his healing was so that God’s goodness could be made manifest.  Christ did not alleviate the suffering of everyone He met.  He did not heal those who deserved it either.  He healed only those, like the man born blind, that would glorify God and be better off without it.  There were many people He didn’t heal, but that wasn’t because He didn’t have time or didn’t care.  He was consistently applying His principle.  Those who were left to suffer were glorifying God in their suffering and were better off because of it.  

Those who suffer know that the problem of evil is no mere intellectual problem.  But the Christian must proclaim that there is no mere intellectual solution.  The answer to evil and suffering is not a philosophical proof but Christ crucified.  Christ is the final answer to this problem, because in truth, only by way of participation in His Cross is God’s goodness made manifest to the individual person.  Through suffering and evil God brings the greatest Good, Himself.  Suffering becomes a treasure that never ceases to give a return on investment.  Rather than an obstacle it becomes a launching pad.  Christians who grasp this and live it out become the most effective argument against those who have yet to see it.     

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