Tag Archives: John Paul II

On Marrying Young

November 30, 2022marriage, Natural LawBiology, John Paul II, Matrimony, Naturetwowingstogod@gmail.com

Over the past 40 years, the median age of men and women getting married in the US has risen steeply. Catholics, it seems, are no different in this regard. A Pew Research Center study in 2014 found that only 14% of Catholics between the ages of 18-29 were married. Marrying at a much later age has become the “new normal”. Statistics are helpful, but they do not answer the most important question as to whether this is a good thing or not. The answer, not surprisingly, is a resounding “No”.

To see why this question is answered in the negative, we must first make the distinction between what is normal and what is natural. Normality expresses to what degree a man conforms to a cultural norm. These norms are always relative to the culture in which they are established. In the best of all possible worlds, they are also relative to what is natural. It is when the natural and the normal coincide that the behavior in question leads to true flourishing and happiness (in the fullest sense). While it may be normal to get married older, it is questionable whether it conforms to what is natural.

A Natural Time to Get Married?

Marriage in itself is natural for the human person, but the question is whether the nature of marriage itself demands that the spouses wait until they are older to marry. To address this question we must first ask how we determine what is natural.

One way that we can do this is by looking at the biological reality of the human body. What I mean by this can be best illustrated by an example. We know that, despite being deeply immersed in a Freudian-Kinseyan paradigm, children are not sexual beings. If they were, then they would develop sexual capacities before the normal age of puberty (12-16). This is why, as I have written previously, something like Drag Queen Story Hour is an abuse of childhood.

While we might readily admit that biology reveals the grievous nature of sexualizing children, we tend to make a the same error when it comes to marriage and sexual development. Is it reasonable to think that God made men and women sexually mature by their late teens and early 20s only to have them enter a holding pattern for up to a decade? Perhaps you could say yes, except for the fact that they also experience their strongest libido at the same time.

Sexual desire is the strongest desire we experience because it is meant to fuel the courage to make the necessary gift of self necessary for marriage and family life. It is at its strongest at such an early age because it is meant to propel the man and woman out from their parents so as to become parents themselves. The problem is that we now tell young adults that, despite the fact that they experience strong sexual desire, they are too young for marriage. There is the obvious disconnect then between God’s design and lived reality.

With these considerations in mind, it becomes clear that there is something contra-natural about waiting so long to get married. As mentioned, marriage in and of itself at any age is natural so we cannot say it is against nature. It does however tend towards being contrary to the nature of marriage itself, especially because it is the foundation of the Family. Rather than making it possible to be “fruitful and multiply” it contributes to what would more accurately be called the modern “fruitful and maintain” paradigm. Again to be clear, I am not saying there is anything wrong with waiting to marry in individual cases, but in the general trend and attitude towards the later marriages.

Marriage as a Life Accesory

Once we are able to grasp that younger marriages conform with God’s design for marriage, we can begin to ask why many people fail to see this. To say that “Marriage is natural” means that it is one of the things that fulfills our nature (i.e. become virtuous). This fulfillment comes not just because we biologically passed on our genes, but because Marriage and the Family are foundational for our moral growth. The Family is a school of virtue, not just for children, but for the man and woman as both husband and wife and then father and mother.

Our culture, on the other hand, treats marriage as if it is merely an add-on. The professional has taken precedence over the personal. Marriage is not even considered until a certain level of professional success is achieved. The person trains himself to link fulfilment with professional achievement. They also become very set in their ways and their capacity for self-giving in marriage and family is diminished. We should expect the age to continue to increase unless a fundamental shift in attitude occurs. The longer the person waits, the less they are “ready” for marriage.

This putting of the occupational cart before the conjugal horse fails to acknowledge that, as Pope St. John Paul II pointed out, the communion of persons in marriage is a fundamental human good upon which all human goods are built (Veritatis Splendor 14). To add it into an already settled life is to risk disintegration because the true accessories have been placed before the essential. Professional decisions are for the sake of supporting a family. Rather than seeing education and careers as means to supporting a spouse and family, they have become competitors. The attitude is “once I go to school and get a job, then I will think about marriage” rather than “I am choosing to be trained in this profession because it will allow me to take care of my family.” And this attitude is encouraged even by well-meaning Catholics.

Redeeming Work

November 6, 2021Virtue, WorkJohn Paul II, Laborem Exercens, Personalism, The Falltwowingstogod@gmail.com

Nearly every large company presents itself to potential employees as deeply concerned with helping the new employee achieve “Work/Life Balance.” The particulars might be different for each company, but the promise is the same—we will teach you the calculus by which the scales of life can be balanced. But in truth they offer little more than guilt management techniques enabling the employee to decide how much of his life he is willing to trade in order to be professionally successful. This balancing act always feels like a compromise because balance really isn’t the problem. The problem is work itself. Or, at least the way we experience it living as we do in our post-Edenic world.

Man the Worker

By examining the nature of work itself, we can also see how it can be integrated into a rich and full life. Work is, as John Paul II said, “a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth” (Laborem Exercens, 4). It is fundamental because it is part of his nature to work and be perfected by it. The Book of Genesis reveals this through God’s commandment to “fulfill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28). Man is a worker because he is made in the image of God the Creator. He Who made all things, made those things so that man could bring them to their completion. In perfecting things, man himself would be perfected.

But we know that is not the end of the story. In choosing to “become like God” (Gn 3:5) on his own terms, man damaged his true God-likeness. Work was infected by the curse of the Fall and work became labor. Work itself became disintegrated. Plagued by thorns and thistles, man becomes overly focused about the perfecting of things and forgets that work is primarily meant to perfect him. As Pius XI put it, “for dead matter comes forth from the factory ennobled, while men there are corrupted and degraded” (Quadragesimo Anno, 135).

Even this is not the end of the story however. The Son of God made Himself a worker so that work would get caught up in the Redemption. Rather than succumbing to the heavy burden of work, we can submit to the yoke of Christ. Work is still labor, but by laboring in the Spirit of Christ, it is no longer an obstacle but a means of sanctification. Christ was, as John Paul II called Him, “a man of work…Who preached the ‘gospel of work’” (LE 26). Now by accepting the labor associated with work as punishment for our sins and offering it as reparation, work becomes redemptive.

The Two Dimensions

Work then has two dimensions—objective and subjective—and both must be good in order for the “gospel of work” to penetrate our work. In the objective sense, work is the practical manner in which man “subdues the earth.” This means that the work itself must in a very real way facilitate the Common Good. The good produced must be good for society and the work done on the “intellectual toolbench” must be ordered to the truth. For many of us, our professional work will be the place where we fulfill our obligation to the Common Good. It must in some way help others to truly thrive. That is the only way to ensure a proper return for the talents that the master gave to the servants.

John Paul II had great concern for the changes to the nature of work that were coming about because of technology. He was not a troglodyte who feared technology but thought that efficiency was a dangerous measure. He saw technological development as a great good if it facilitated man’s work and enabled him to grow in virtue. But, “technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave” (LE, 5).

The subjective meaning of work is the pre-eminent dimension. Works gains its value from the fact that it is a person who is doing it and not primarily by the work done. Some work is objectively better than other, but good work is that work which makes the worker morally good. The best work for any individual is the work that will make him grow in virtue. This is why the work itself, as long as it is good, does not matter so much as its character building effect on the person. If more emphasis is placed on the subjective dimension of work, then we will cease to value work merely for its pay.

Realizing that the most important thing we make in work is ourselves, we can see why “Work/Life Balance” goes about the problem of disintegration in the wrong way. It is a subtle attempt at redeeming work on our own, rather than allowing God’s original vision for work to permeate our actions.

The Blueprint for the Reign of the Immaculate Heart

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

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

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

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

Marxism as Identity Theft

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

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

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

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

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

Theology of the Body as Antidote

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

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

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

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

Consequentialism and the Dropping of the Bomb

October 10, 2020Abortion, American Founding, Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Just War, Moralilty, Natural LawAtomic Bomb, Consequentialism, Evil, Good, Intrinsic Evil, John Paul II, Providence, World War IItwowingstogod@gmail.com

The Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen thought that the demise of Western Culture, specifically American culture, began on the morning of August 6,^,1945. That was when the United States dropped the first of two nuclear bombs on Japan at Hiroshima. It was the moment that “blotted out boundaries. There was no longer a boundary between the military and the civilian, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, and the living and the dead. For even the living who escaped the bomb were already half dead. So, we broke down boundaries and limits and from that time on the world has said we want no one limiting me! We want no limits, no boundaries.” As usual, the first televangelist was also a prophet. Since that fateful day, the boundaries between right and wrong, natural and unnatural, good and evil have all broken down. This is because, lost amidst the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was traditional morality and a firm belief in God’s Providence.

By all accounts even down to our own day, dropping the atomic bomb was the only viable option. Continuing to fire-bomb cities like Tokyo was going to kill far more Japanese citizens than the Bomb would ever do and, even more likely, would harden Japanese resolve, leading to a long drawn out war. A full ground assault would lead to thousands, if not millions, of deaths on both sides. In order to save American lives then it was necessary to drop the Bomb as both a show of force and a deterrence to any further Japanese aggression. Many Americans, including the one writing this article would likely never have been born had the Bomb not been dropped. Thousands of men were headed to Japan with the sure knowledge that they would not return. To most of them, Harry Truman is a hero who made the best possible decision.

Another man whose existence is linked to “Truman’s Terrible Choice” is George Weigel. In a web article for First Things last week, he defended Truman saying that he “it was the correct choice” given the options. Weigel’s logic is paradigmatic for many Catholics and follows from the loss of a traditional morality in favor of, what St. John Paul II condemned in Veritas Splendor –Consequentialism. In Weigel’s defense, he mentions that consequentialism is wrong in the article, but he still goes on to employ its logic. Nevertheless, he is defending the indefensible.

The Two Moral Camps

The tradition understanding of morality has always included the notion that there are intrinsically evil acts. These acts, no matter the circumstances or the intention of the person, can never be ordered towards the good. Some examples would be the deliberate killing of an innocent person, lying, and adultery. Among these acts would be the direct targeting and indiscriminate bombing of civilians during a war. This would include the aforementioned “fire-bombing” of German and Japanese cities as well as the dropping of the Bomb on the two Japanese cities. When no distinction is made between military and civilian targets then the dropping of any powerful bomb, atomic or otherwise, is always an intrinsically evil act and is akin to mass murder or terrorism. One can clearly see under this moral paradigm that there could never be any justification for dropping the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Consequentialism, on the other hand, evaluates all moral actions based upon the consequences. It requires a form a moral calculus in which you decide that if there is more good than evil in the consequences of an act then the act is morally permissible. Consequentialism, as St. John Paul II puts it, “draw[s] the criteria of the rightness of a given way of acting solely from a calculation of foreseeable consequences deriving from a given choice…[and] maintain[s] that it is never possible to formulate an absolute prohibition of particular kinds of behavior” (Veritatis Splendor, 75). It is, in essence a form of moral relativism, in that leaves all our actions relative to circumstances and the moral calculations of the individual. With Consequentialism as the guide, the decision to drop the Bomb would depend upon a moral calculation in which the good of American and Japanese lives are weighed against the loss of innocent Japanese lives.

Consequentialism and Providence

Embedded within Consequentialism is a rejection of Providence. Not only does the person assume divine status in thinking they can foresee the actual consequences of their actions, but it also assumes that God could ever leave us in a situation when the Good could not be done. This is the flaw in Weigel’s logic when he says that Truman chose the best option. No situation falls outside of God’s Providence and therefore no situation leaves us without an option to choose good. Truman could have chosen otherwise, and his choice could have been in accord with the good. Perhaps the decision would have been to send the troops in on the ground and allow the men to courageously fight for goodness and truth even to the giving up of their lives. Giving your life in noble defense of other people is always a good. Or perhaps it was to accept the non-absolute terms for Japanese surrender. The point though is that God had allowed the circumstances to be as they were and, incapable of causing us to sin, would always include a way to choose the Good.

Bishop Sheen thought August 6,1945 was the turning point for America because it created a new moral environment. Large swaths of the population owe their existence to the consequentialist logic of Truman and others. America herself, in order to avoid facing the music for such a heinous action, adopted Consequentialism as the new moral order. Gone, thanks to the Freemasonic court-packing of Roosevelt and Truman, was legal reasoning based on natural law. Gone too is the idea of intrinsically evil acts. Try explaining to someone about abortion being intrinsically evil and they will get caught up in the consequences of brining an unwanted child into the world. Or, relevant to today’s political climate, tell them why they cannot support a candidate who promotes and defends intrinsically evil actions. You will instead get some moral ledger that pits immigration against abortion.

When Truman decided to drop the Bomb he opened a moral Pandora’s Box in which true moral reasoning was shed in favor of Consequentialism. Now people with no sense of morality are the ones performing the moral calculus leading to all kinds of evils that have put our society in jeopardy of collapse. The only way forward is to reconnect Americans to the moral tradition of the Founders.

Looking with Lust

July 1, 2020Anthropology, Contraception, Human Dignity, Incarnation, Sexual Ethics, The Life of Jesus, Theology of the BodyAttraction, Freedom, John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, Sermon on the Mount, Virtuetwowingstogod@gmail.com

Our Lord would most accurately be labeled, at least according to modern standards, a total prude. He reached a puritanical pinnacle by inventing a totally new category of adultery which he dubs “adultery in the heart” that occurs when a man looks at a woman with lust. This divine priggishness makes it practically impossible for men and women to even be around each other, or at least that is how it seems. The modern mind, trapped in a world without virtue, can only see two options: puritanical or prurient. But Our Lord is really offering a third option, one that ultimately leaves us with the power to love freely and not free love-ers.

Anyone encountering the Sermon on the Mount for the first time must immediately be struck by the unbelievable idealism of the mode of life Christ is putting forth. He would be the world’s most moralistic man except for one important detail. Whenever Our Lord issues a command, He never simply leaves us to our own devices, but also seeks to give us the power to fulfill His commands. His coming to “fulfill the law” isn’t just a matter of prophecy but a matter of grace. Through the power of His grace we are able to fulfill even the most idealistic of His commands, the command not to look upon a man or woman with lust included.

Christ the True Moralist

Herein lies a major point of misunderstanding about Christ the moralist. His commandments are such that they both contain the path to freedom while simultaneously leading us to freedom. He is the Truth and the Way. What Christ is commanding is really an offer that will free us from looking upon another person with lust. The power to see the other person as a person and not merely an object of pleasure. This power then opens the gates of freedom that enable us to love purely as the only true path to happiness.

This pathway to love however also requires us to properly understand what it means, and more importantly what it doesn’t mean, to look at someone with lust. Lust is not just looking at person of the opposite sex, but is a gaze that is filled desire to use the other person. In this regard it is helpful to turn to Pope St. John Paul II’s teachings in Love and Responsibility.

Love and Responsibility and Lust

The former Fr. Wojtyla sought to explain how attraction is felt between members of the opposite sex. In encountering a person of the opposite sex, a man or woman has a natural response to the sexual value of the other person. These responses come in two forms: sensuality or the reaction to the sexual value in the other person’s body, and sentimentality or the reaction to their perceived masculinity or femininity. This spontaneously felt response, without the governing of reason, finds its culmination in the desire to possess the value. Notice that it is the value itself that we desire to possess regardless of the person who possesses that value. The other person becomes an object of use, rather than a subject to love. John Paul II labels this phenomenon subjective egoism because it is based completely on how the person feels in response to the other person. Lust then is the expression of the desire to possess the value, it is the choice to use the other person.

This distinction between interest and expressing the desire is important because merely acknowledging the sexual value of the other person (we might call this interest) is not the same thing as lust. Interest is perfectly natural and in a very real way something that happens to us rather than something chosen. It is not just the seed of lust but also the seed of love. Once the interest is piqued, desire is sparked. Desire sees the person as an object to be enjoyed but still is not sinful as long as the will resists that desire to use the person. This too is an important element of love, but it must always be purified such that it is directed to the whole person.

A few examples might help. A man sees a woman and is drawn towards some perceived sexual value in her body. His emotional response brings him pleasure and he must now make a decision. Will he continue to linger on the fact that she is “hot” and the pleasure that looking at her brings or will he remind himself that it is a person and that using her (even though all he is doing is looking at her) is wrong? If it is the former, then he has lusted. If it is the latter then he has, even in a very primitive way, expressed love for her by willing her good in choosing not to treat her like an object for his own enjoyment.

Notice that what is being suggested is not repression. The attraction is natural and there can be no love without it. What has to be “repressed” is the urge to use the person. The man may feel the attraction and move to meet her, but in order not to be lust, he must go to her as a person and treat her as such. The attraction is still there, but it must move the man towards its proper end—the woman who has stirred his heart and not just her body. In being free from lust, he is now free to love the woman and not his own emotional response to the sexual value of the woman.

Adultery in the heart has everything to do with what is happening interiorly in the man and it is from this that Christ offers freedom. How this happens can be shown by two further examples.

Imagine a married man meets another woman with whom he has regular contact and she awakens sexual interest in him. He begins to develop sexual desire for her and so now he chooses to avoid her because he fears that he may lust after her. To avoid the near occasion of sin is a good thing, but it is not yet freedom. Freedom comes when there is no threat of lust, that is, when the man is chaste.

Like all virtues, chastity governs the spontaneous arising of the emotions attached to attraction. The man is simply able to acknowledge the woman’s beauty without being stirred to lust. He is free now to see her as a person who is beautiful without any desire to possess either her or her beauty. He can simply appreciate it as beautiful and move on. The truly chaste married man only feels attraction for his wife.

Likewise, the chaste unmarried man will feel the emotions of attraction, but they will be moderated such that they do not move him to use the person. Instead he is drawn towards the person and able to pursue her purely based on her personality and not solely on her attributes. He can see her in truth and not be blinded by those attributes. He is completely free in his love for her.

Our Lord’s prudery then is nothing less than an offer for authentic freedom. Our Lord practiced chastity to the perfect degree and has offered us each a share in His virtue in order to free our hearts to love to the full.

What’s Mine is Yours?

June 20, 2020Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Economics, PoliticsCapitalism, Catholic Social Doctrine, John Paul II, Leo XII, Poverty, Socialism, Universal Destination of Goodstwowingstogod@gmail.com

One of the sure signs that the Catholic Church has access to the fullness of truth in her teachings on faith and morals is that she is consistently attacked from both sides. This is especially true when it comes to the basis of her economic teachings, private property. The capitalists call her too socialistic and the socialists too capitalistic. Because of this, snippets of her teachings are either mocked and co-opted, but mostly misunderstood. As a foundation for justice, it is important then that we be able to understand and articulate her teachings.

The Primacy of the Universal Destination of Goods

When God made the earth, He gave mankind dominion over all its goods. Everything in the material order is meant to be used by man. These goods are meant for all men—each and every one—and thus each man has the right to secure for himself and his family what he needs to both survive and to thrive. This principle, dubbed the Universal Destination of Goods, is part of the natural law and is prior to any right to private property. As Pope St. John Paul II put it in an address in 1981 to the 21^st Session of the FAO Conference, “The primary destination of the resources of the earth to the common good demands that the necessities of life be provided for all human beings before individuals or groups appropriate for themselves the riches of nature or the products of human skill.”

Before linking this teaching to private property, it is important to point out that there is a corresponding duty attached to the Universal Destination of Goods. No one can claim any superfluous property, that is more than he needs, until the existential needs of his neighbor are taken care of. This imposes an obligation to provide for the extreme necessity of others because you are truly returning to them what is rightfully theirs.

The socialist might be tempted to agree and applaud the Church’s teaching until he reads the fine print. The obligation rests in giving (or even offering no resistance if they take) those things that constitute an existential need. In short, the obligation is to give to those who are in a condition of absolute poverty. Poverty, in the Christian worldview is a virtue. But when the Church speaks of it in her social teaching, she usually attaches a modifier, such as absolute to it. Absolute poverty is “a condition in which life is so limited by lack of food, malnutrition, illiteracy, high infant mortality, and low life expectancy as to be beneath any rational definition of human decency. The persistence of such degrading poverty, and especially the lack of the absolutely basic minimum of food, is a scandal of the modern world, in which one finds enormous contrasts of income and standards of living between rich countries and countries that are materially poor” (Pope St. John Paul II, Address to the 21^st Session of the FAO Conference, 1981).

The ”scandal of the modern world” is not so much that we have rich and poor or even that there is an inequality, but that the wealth of the world is concentrated in the hands of so few when there are so many who do not have what they need. The poor have a prior claim on those goods they need for their survival and thus the rich have an obligation to give those goods to the materially poor.

Private Property in Context

Only after the most basic needs are met can we begin to discuss property, but the Right to Private Property, even if it is subordinate to the Universal Destination of Goods, is no less important. Private property is integral to protecting the freedom of men. When a man owns his own property, he does not depend upon others (usually in power) for his own well-being. Not only that, but it also is a means of personal development. When he is responsible for his own well-being and is free to exercise that responsibility on his own property, he also grows in virtue. In short the man who owns his own property develops not just materially but also spiritually. Summarizing the Church’s teaching, John Paul II said:

“in Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII strongly affirmed the natural character of the right to private property, using various arguments against the socialism of his time. This right, which is fundamental for the autonomy and development of the person, has always been defended by the Church up to our own day. At the same time, the Church teaches that the possession of material goods is not an absolute right, and that its limits are inscribed in its very nature as a human right. While the Pope proclaimed the right to private ownership, he affirmed with equal clarity that the “use” of goods, while marked by freedom, is subordinated to their original common destination as created goods, as well as to the will of Jesus Christ as expressed in the Gospel.”
Pope St. John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, 30

In affirming the right to private property then, the Church teaches that this right is not absolute. Property also has a social function that is not only governed by the Universal Destination of Goods, but also the moral law. This means that a man is not free to use his property however he sees fit. Not only can he not infringe on another’s right to private property but also must not impede another’s moral freedom.

Connection with the Just Wage

All that being said, increasing wealth is a good thing provided that it be done “in a just and lawful manner” (Pius XII, Quadragesimo Anno). Those who through their wealth, provide wealth for others provide a service to the common good. And thus “it is only fair that he who renders service to the community and makes it richer should also, through the increased wealth of the community, be made richer himself according to his position, provided that all these things be sought with due respect for the laws of God and without impairing the rights of others and that they be employed in accordance with faith and right reason” (ibid).

But the Universal Destination of Goods also applies here as to how one governs their business. Provided that an owner’s necessities are being taken care of, before taking more of the wealth created for himself, he must make sure that all of his workers too have enough to provide for themselves and their families. A just wage then is not determined solely by supply and demand, but on the demands of the Universal Destination of Goods.

The point is that, while the law of supply and demand might apply to material goods, it cannot be a means of determining wages. The just wage is a recognition of the moral primacy of labor over capital. Labor is indispensable to production and because it is done by human beings, must always respect the Universal Destination of Goods. It is also not an argument for a minimum wage, but instead an argument for what is called a living wage. This wage is individualized and thus employees doing the same job could actually get paid different amounts based upon their needs. So antithetical to the modern mindset is this principle that Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum went to great lengths to explain it:

“Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice…If a workman’s wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income. Nature itself would urge him to this.”
Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 45-46

It becomes clear then why socialists and unbridled captialists both claim the Church’s teaching as their own and yet at the same time loathe it. But the Church is always both/and and not either/or and this is no less true than in the field of economics.

Protecting Marriage

June 3, 2020Culture, Family, marriage, MoraliltyCohabitation, Indissolubility, John Paul II, Love and Responsibility, Sexual Revolutiontwowingstogod@gmail.com

A study recently released by the US Census Bureau found that in the past two decades, the number of couples that cohabitate had nearly tripled from 6 million to 17 million. The study found that the increase was due to the fact that “cohabitation has become increasingly accepted by a broad swath of social and demographic groups.” Most people view this as a sign of “progress”, no longer bound to the Victorian restraints imposed by marriage. It is most certainly progress, but it is likely not progress in the direction of anything other than cultural decay and collapse. The institution of marriage is vital to the life of every society such that without it, the society is sure to crumble.

All of us sort of intuit why this might be the case but having plummeted into the morass created by the Sexual Revolution, we may not be able to articulate why this is the case. Nevertheless, if we are to turn back to a society built upon marriage, then we ought to grasp the logic as to why this is so. Thankfully, the great Counter-revolutionary to the Sexual Revolution, Pope St. John Paul II, has already done the intellectual heavy lifting for us in his book Love and Responsibility. Written just prior to the “Salacious Sixties”, the then Fr. Wojtyla provided an intellectual basis for why the institution of marriage matters. We would do well to examine his argument in order to apply the tonic to our decadent culture.

The future Pope set out to examine how erotic love develops and matures between members of the opposite sex. In order to mature, the strong feelings that govern the relationships must always be subordinate to the true value of the person as a person. When we fall in love with the feelings that the other person stimulates in us, rather than the person who stimulates those feelings, then love can never mature. In fact, rather than being the basis for love, it becomes its exact opposite—use. Once this foundation is laid, Fr. Wojtyla then seeks to set up the conditions by which love can truly mature, and one of which is the Institution of Marriage.

Marriage as an Institution

As the word institution suggests, Marriage is something that is established or instituted in accord with the concept of justice. Marriage justifies, that is makes just, sexual relations between two people. It does this by ordering them to their proper ends. In other words, Marriage ensures that sexual relations between a man and a woman are governed both by commutative justice and social justice.

With respect to commutative justice, that is, the justice that governs the relationship between two people as equals, Marriage protects conjugal love from the threat of use. There is a vast difference between a concubine or a mistress and a wife—the former implies a relationship of use while the latter one of love. Likewise, love is always attached to the value of the person as a whole and not just their sexual value. Therefore, because the value of the person never changes, love must last forever. This is why Marriage, as an expression of this love, is naturally indissoluble. By committing one’s life to loving the other person, Marriage justifies sexual relations between the spouses.

This is also why sexual relations between deeply committed people, even if they are engaged say, is always wrong. “Pre-ceremonial” sex ignores the fact that a Wedding is no mere convention or ceremony, but an entering into the institution of Marriage. A new reality comes into being when vows are exchanged and it is this new reality that justifies sexual intimacy between the spouses. Prior to the wedding there was no permanence, afterwards there is. The permanence of the relationship rests upon the free choice of the spouses. And because sexual relations always carry with them the possibility of becoming permanently parents, there must be a permanent commitment which justifies their sexual expression. It is just that a child be conceived from within a marriage because only the institution of marriage forms the proper foundation for the institution of the family.

There might be a tendency to think that love between two people is a completely private affair between “two consenting adults”, but, according to John Paul II, the couple soon “realize that without this [social] acceptance their love lacks something very important. They will begin to feel that it must ripen sufficiently to be revealed to society.” There is a need to both keep private the sexual relations deriving from love and on the other hand a need for there to be a social recognition of this love that comes only through marriage.

Why Marriage Matters for Society

This felt need directs them to fulfill the requirements of social justice. This may not be immediately obvious, especially when we live in such an individualistic society, but it becomes clearer when we recognize that society itself is built upon the foundation of the family. The institution of marriage is necessary to signal a mature union exists between two people, a mature union that is based upon a permanent love. Thus, society can be built upon that foundation.

One need not imagine too hard what a society would look like when its foundations were unstable or constantly being swapped out, especially given our current plight. It looks like a society in which cohabitation numbers are tripling and marriage rates are falling. It looks like a society that is committing cultural suicide. There cannot be a society without stable families and there cannot be stable families without permanent marriages. A sane society would enact legislation that protects families and legislates justly regarding the family by recognizing the rights and duties of marriage since the family is an institution based on marriage.

Instead, the inmates are running the asylum. We feed a “divorce industry” with lawyers, social workers, and judges to name a few whose economic sustenance comes from the breakdown of marriage. We make divorce “no-fault” and make single parenting “easy” with day-care, public schools, welfare and WIC (why isn’t there a FIC by the way?). The family is then replaced by an elaborate bureaucratic machine that seeks to control the formation of children so that they grow up to see this as “normal”. Meanwhile we all accept this as an accident rather than as a planned attack to seize the power of the family. The sexual revolution was never about liberation but about control and the totalitarians will win unless we begin to think and act like our saintly Counter-revolutionary is instructing us.

Catholic Environmentalism?

May 13, 2020Catholic Social Teaching, Creation, Culture, Culture of Life, Economics, Magisterium, MoraliltyEcology, Environment, John Paul II, Moral Ecology, Pollution, Pope Benedict XVItwowingstogod@gmail.com

In an address given during his return to Germany in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI called upon the legislators who had gathered not to neglect what he called the “ecology of man.” The ecology of man, that is, the realization that “man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will” is at the heart of environmental ecology. Although this was a recurring theme of the Pope, but his repeated call fell mainly on deaf ears because the care of the environment, like nearly all social issues, has been politicized. There is little interest in solving the problem, only using it to exert political control over other people. But for those who are interested in solving the problem, the Church has offered a true path forward with her emphasis on human ecology.

Although this used to go without saying, any discussion of the environment must first point out that man is different from all of the other visible creatures in the environment. He is not just one creature among many, but he is nature’s steward. Both sides of the debate recognize this fact, even if they loathe to admit it. Any discussion of environmental policy is predicated on the fact that only man is responsible for the environment. It would be absurd to speak of curbing man’s actions if he did not have the freedom to do so. In laying the responsibility for the environment at the feet of men, you are, at least implicitly, saying that he is different than the other animals and that he alone can offer a solution. This admission matters because it implies that man, as governor of creation, also transcends it.

Avoiding the Extremes

As awesome as it is then, we cannot worship nature as something divine. We reverence creation because it reveals the Creator, but it is not divine. It is, like all material things, passing away. We, made of matter and spirit, are above it, pilgrims as it were, just passing through. But just because it isn’t divine doesn’t mean that we can use it as we see fit. Nature is made up of natures, all of which must be respected, if they are going to actually serve mankind.

Like all issues that become political footballs, the environment is prey to the either/or fallacy. Either it must be divinized or it must be raped. Politics has no room for qualifications and the blame must always rest squarely on the other side. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church summarizes what might be called a “Catholic Environmentalism” when it says:

“A correct understanding of the environment prevents the utilitarian reduction of nature to a mere object to be manipulated and exploited. At the same time, it must not absolutize nature and place it above the dignity of the human person himself. In this latter case, one can go so far as to divinize nature or the earth, as can readily be seen in certain ecological movements that seek to gain an internationally guaranteed institutional status for their beliefs.”
CSD, 463

Fixing the Problem

But even with a correct understanding of the environment, we cannot fix the environmental problems without first practicing the “human ecology” proposed by Pope Benedict. Until we acknowledge that certain types of activities fulfill our nature and others don’t, the problem of the ecology of the environment will never be solved. These activities are known as virtues and it begins with the virtue of prudence. Prudence is the habit of governing our actions such that we only use things in a manner in which we truly thrive. Justice is the habit of taking responsibility for the effects our actions have on other people and not just being motivated by self-interest. Temperance is the habit of living with sufficiency and not hoarding resources because we can. Fortitude is the habit of remaining committed to the right use of the environment in the face of wide scale abuse where each person is trying to hoard as much as possible.

The environmental movement lacks any real teeth because they systematically ignore, what Pope Benedict called, “the inner pollution” of which the environmental pollution is just a consequence. They speak of what we ought to do, but still exalt license as if it was true freedom. You cannot promote license, especially in the sexual realm, while simultaneously demanding that people act temperately in their use of the environment. If you will (ab)use other people then you will most certainly abuse the environment. It will never gain any moral authority until it acknowledges a moral law. Without a true respect for human freedom and the conditions in which it thrives, it will have to resort to the hammer of power to beat all non-compliants into submission.

It is the inner pollution of overconsumption that causes untold damage to the environment. But until this is framed as fundamentally a moral problem, it will never get better. As John Paul II put it in his Message for the World Day of Peace in 1990:

“Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its life style. In many parts of the world society is given to instant gratification and consumerism while remaining indifferent to the damage which these cause. As I have already stated, the seriousness of the ecological issue lays bare the depth of man’s moral crisis. If an appreciation of the value of the human person and of human life is lacking, we will also lose interest in others and in the earth itself. Simplicity, moderation and discipline, as well as a spirit of sacrifice, must become a part of everyday life, lest all suffer the negative consequences of the careless habits of a few.”

Environmental ecology then is a fruitless endeavor without first emphasizing a moral ecology. The crisis in the environment is first and foremost a catastrophic crisis in the moral environment of mankind. Until we solve that problem, we should only expect the environmental crisis to get worse. A Catholic Environmentalism then would be one that emphasizing the proper use of the environment by inculcating the necessary virtues.

What Happens to Aborted Children?

March 7, 2020Abortion, MartyrdomHeaven, Hell, John Paul II, Limbo, pro-life, Salvation, Summa Theolgiae, Thomas Aquinastwowingstogod@gmail.com

At the heart of the Pro-Life movement is the overwhelming concern not just for the temporal well-being of members of society, but for their eternal salvation. Christians are, by definition, Pro-Life because they desire that society at its core be built upon conditions that are conducive to the salvation of souls. That is what makes abortion and particularly pernicious offense against life—it puts not only the soul of the mother and those who cooperate with her in jeopardy, but the eternal destiny of the child in danger as well. Many Catholics are quick to declare these children martyrs and assume that they are in heaven because of it. However, this belief is by no means definitive and there are good reasons to think that this might not be the case. Once our gaze is turned towards these innocent victims and the question of their eternal destination, we find that our zeal for souls drives us to eliminate abortion all the more.

To grapple with this issue, we must start with what we can say with assurance. Despite not being healed from Original Sin and its wounds, these children are not necessarily destined for hell. Original Sin is not a condition of guilt but one of deprivation. Mankind is deprived of the gift of sanctifying grace, a necessity for entrance into the Beatific Vision, at their conception. This does not make the child guilty, only unequipped. Hell is a punishment for actual sin, and with no actual sins committed, the child does not merit hell. This is why Pope St. John Paul II said in Evangelium Vitae that mothers can entrust their aborted children “with sure hope [to] the Father and His mercy” (EV, 99, Acta Apostolicae Sedis version).

In the Summa, St. Thomas draws a very important distinction in this regard that is worth discussing. He says that often “children are punished in temporal matters together with their parents, both because they are a possession of their parents, so that their parents are punished also in their person, and because this is for their good lest, should they be spared, they might imitate the sins of their parents, and thus deserve to be punished still more severely” (ST II-II, q.108, art.4 ad.3). The “good” that St. Thomas is referring to presumptively would refer to not just towards their temporal welfare but their eternal as well. But this could refer not only to the good of reward but also the good of receiving less of a punishment than a person might otherwise.

So we can say that the child is not destined to hell per se, but this does not mean that they are destined for heaven either. There is still the open question of Limbo as an option. Assuming that John Paul II’s comment about a “sure hope” means hope in the theological sense then the eternal salvation of the child is at least a possibility. In other words we can now turn to the question about how it is that a child might be equipped for Heaven through the infusion of sanctifying grace.

How then might their salvation be possible? The first would be through a special miracle akin to the sanctification that is presented in Scripture. Our Lady, St. John the Baptist, and the prophet Jeremiah whom St. Thomas said were sanctified “outside of the common law as though miraculously in their mother’s wombs” (Commentary on the Sentences, dist.6, q.1). Although this means it is theologically possible, the acts of sanctification were extraordinary and a result of the mission of the three children.

Deprived of the ordinary means of salvation through baptism, it is also possible to posit that they received a Baptism in Blood. In short, the children would be classified as martyrs. Scripture once again offers us an example in the Holy Innocents. In adults martyrdom occurs when a person dies for some supernatural reason such as in defense of some Christian virtue or as testimony of faith. Despite being deprived of the use of reason, the Holy Innocents have long been considered to be martyrs because they died in defense of Christ. This consideration is based upon both Divine Revelation and the Church’s binding and loosing authority. The Church may have the authority to declare martyrdom, but it cannot be without reason. It is not clear that the children are being put to death for a supernatural reason as in the case of the Holy Innocents. Either way though the Church would need to officially declare them as martyrs in order for us to consider them to actually be martyrs.

There is a third option. Because “God wills that all men be saved” we might assume that prior to death each child is given an opportunity to be saved. This would include infants in the womb. We can posit then that they are each tested in some way and given a chance to accept the gift of sanctifying grace. The problem with this view is that it would require cooperation with actual grace and the ability to use their reason.

Given the inherent difficulties which each of these the solutions, we can begin to see why Limbo remains as a theological possibility not only for unbaptized children, but children in the womb. What is clear however is that we need to treat the issue of abortion as a real threat to the eternal salvation of the child in the womb and continue to fight for its elimination in our society.

On Inculturation

February 13, 2020Anthropology, Church Authority, Culture, Defending the Faith, Devils, Natural Law, Pope FrancisAdoration, Amazonian Synod, Culture, Idolatry, Inculturation, John Paul II, Pachamama, St. Francis Xavier, Vatican IItwowingstogod@gmail.com

In his new Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Querida Amazonia, Pope Francis mentioned the process of inculturation as a starting point for the conversion of the region. The Holy Father most certainly had the Pachamama controversy in mind when he exhorted the Faithful to “not be quick to describe as superstition or paganism certain religious practices that arise spontaneously from the life of peoples. Rather, we ought to know how to distinguish the wheat growing alongside the tares, for ‘popular piety can enable us to see how the faith, once received, becomes embodied in a culture and is constantly passed on.’ It is possible to take up an indigenous symbol in some way, without necessarily considering it as idolatry. A myth charged with spiritual meaning can be used to advantage and not always considered a pagan error. Some religious festivals have a sacred meaning and are occasions for gathering and fraternity, albeit in need of a gradual process of purification or maturation” (QA 78-79). Setting aside the fact that all false religions are by definition superstitions, the Holy Father’s remarks call for a deeper understanding of what the Church means when she uses the term Inculturation.

Understanding authentic inculturation begins by grasping what we mean when we use the term culture. Culture is the soil in which the human person grows. As the Second Vatican Council put it, “Man comes to a true and full humanity only through culture, that is through the cultivation of the goods and values of nature…. The word ‘culture’ in its general sense indicates everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and spiritual qualities” (GS, 53).

Against Cultural Relativism

When viewed in relation to “goods and values of nature,” it becomes evident that cultures are not ends in themselves, but instead means for human growth. Likewise because there are objective “goods and values of nature,” we can also evaluate cultures objectively in terms of good and bad. Good cultures are those that cultivate authentic human flourishing and bad cultures are those that do harm to true human goods. Authentic culture must always be, according to the International Theological Commission, that which “reveals and strengthens the nature of man.”

In short, there is no such thing as a neutral culture nor can anything like cultural relativism be tolerated. We must evaluate and judge cultures by the objective criterion of whether true human goods are protected and promoted. It is the Church’s role to be judgmental towards cultures in three specific ways. Those values that are true human values, even if expressed in “local” terms are adopted as part of the vernacular of the Church and are the means by which the Gospel takes root. If they point to true human values, but are deficient in some way then the Church purifies them. Finally, if they are irreconcilable then the Church condemns them. This process of promoting, purifying and purging is what the Church calls inculturation.

The point of reference for the Church is not the culture itself, but as in all things, the transmission of the Gospel. The culture is simply the means by which the message takes root. This is why it is disingenuous to speak of inculturation as a two-way street. The Church has the fullness of truth and thus has no new facts to learn from the various cultures. The culture gives to the Church what is for its own benefit—a language that speaks the truths of salvation. What she does gain is a fuller manifestation of her catholicity. It becomes proof positive that the Gospel can be put in terms that are intelligible to men of every age and place and answer the deepest longings of all human hearts.

Because he was the most traveled Pope in the history of the Church, St. John Paul II constantly emphasized the connection between inculturation and evangelization. In an address to the People of Asia while he was visiting the Philippines he reminded the Church that “Wherever she is, the Church must sink her roots deeply into the spiritual and cultural soil of the country, assimilate all genuine values, enriching them also with the insights that she has received from Jesus. Given the mission entrusted to it by our Lord, the Church’s priority is always the evangelization of all peoples and therefore of all cultures. Inculturation is a means of evangelization, being at the same time its consequence.”

With all of this laid as a foundation, we can see what role, if any, Pachamama would play in legitimate inculturation. Those who defended it treated it as something that could simply be taken up (literally) as an authentic human value. But worship of a false god, however seemingly benign or how “spontaneously” it arises (how do we know if something arises spontaneously or at the prompting of demons?), is not a true human value. Nor is that something that can be purified but instead must be something that is rejected. Pachamama may have crossed the Tiber after it was tossed in the Tiber, but it was only because certain churchmen lacked both the faith and charity towards the Amazonian people to give them the saving truth of Jesus Christ. As St. John Paul II, who was not immune to failures in authentic inculturation, told the people of Cameroon, “the Gospel message does not come simply to consolidate human things, just as they are; it takes on a prophetic and critical role. Everywhere, in Europe as in Africa, it comes to overturn criteria of judgment and modes of life; it is a call to conversion.” Never once was the call to conversion issued to the worshipper of Pachamama.

The great missionary saints, whether it was St. Paul, St. Patrick, St. Francis Xavier, or St. Isaac Jogues, were all masters of inculturation not because they were clever but because theirs was a call to conversion even if they translated them into colloquialisms. It was because they were holy men that they were up to the task. As John Paul II put it, “Only those who truly know Christ, and truly know their own cultural inheritance, can discern how the divine Word may be fittingly presented through the medium of that culture. It follows that there can be no authentic inculturation which does not proceed from contemplating the Word of God and from growing in likeness to him through holiness of life”.

On Spiritual Communion

January 11, 2020Eucharist, Grace, Sacraments, Spiritual LifeCommunion, Council of Trent, John Paul II, Mass, St. Alphonsus Liguori, St. Thomas Aquinastwowingstogod@gmail.com

Gratis vilis, that is, cheap grace, the supposed grace we receive when we treat the grace of the Sacraments as something automatically received is an ever-present danger of the Church. Although the Sacraments do objectively contain grace, the reception of these graces depend upon the disposition of the receiver. To think otherwise is to treat the Sacraments as if they were magic. This “magical thinking” was discussed in a previous post and some of its ecclesiastical manifestations were brought forward in illustration. It was briefly mentioned that all of us can fall into this mentality if we are not diligent. In this post, I would like to discuss how to avoid allowing this Sacramental presumption to creep in.

The Occidental Accident

Despite the fact that the religious freedom is waning in the West, most occidental Catholics have ready access to the Sacraments. They only need to get in their car and drive to their local Parish which is only a few miles away and they can go to Mass or Confession. This blessing carries with it a curse—it can create a Sacramental routine by which they do not always discern how great a gift the Sacraments really are. But this occidental blessing is merely accidental. Catholics in the Middle East and in China, for example, by no means share the same privilege. Neither did the Catholics trapped behind the Iron Curtain nor those in Revolutionary France nor Elizabethan England nor the Early Church. Perhaps the Western “vocations crisis” will get far worse than it already has and availing ourselves of the Sacraments will become far harder. The point is that this privilege is not always a given and it is something that we need to be constantly grateful for.

This Sacramental ease of access can cause us to make their reception routine only if we allow it to. There is a sure-fire way to avoid this by adopting a practice that many of the Catholics (or at least those who remained Catholic) did in those times of Sacramental scantiness—Spiritual Communion.

We are all familiar with the idea what is commonly referred to as a Baptism of Desire. A person may receive the effects of Sacramental Baptism when, unable for some reason to actually receive the Sacrament, they express either an implicit or explicit desire for baptism. This “Sacrament by Desire” is by no means limited to Baptism. In truth the effects of all of the Sacraments can be experienced when a person expresses a desire for the Sacrament but because of some reason outside of their own control they are unable to receive it. As St. Thomas puts it in the Summa Theologiae “This sacrament has of itself the power of bestowing grace; nor does anyone possess grace before receiving this sacrament except from some desire thereof; from his own desire, as in the case of the adult. or from the Church’s desire in the case of children, as stated above (III:73:3). Hence it is due to the efficacy of its power, that even from desire thereof a man procures grace whereby he is enabled to lead the spiritual life. It remains, then, that when the sacrament itself is really received, grace is increased, and the spiritual life perfected: yet in different fashion from the sacrament of Confirmation, in which grace is increased and perfected for resisting the outward assaults of Christ’s enemies. But by this sacrament grace receives increase, and the spiritual life is perfected, so that man may stand perfect in himself by union with God” (ST III q.79 a.1 ad 3).

Communion of Desire

The list of “Sacraments of Desire” is not limited to just Baptism and Confirmation, but also includes, in a very special way, the Eucharist. For a baptized person to express a desire to be baptized would be non-sensical, but for a Catholic who has received the Eucharist in the past to express a desire to receive it again not only makes good sense but is an important spiritual practice. In fact, the Council of Trent said that there are actually three ways in which a person might receive the Sacrament of the Eucharist, the first two of which are Sacramentally and Spiritually. “Now as to the use of this holy sacrament, our Fathers have rightly and wisely distinguished three ways of receiving it. For they have taught that some receive it sacramentally only, to wit sinners: others spiritually only, those to wit who eating in desire that heavenly bread which is set before them, are, by a lively faith which worketh by charity, made sensible of the fruit and usefulness thereof…”( Council of Trent Session 13, Chapter VIII).

It is the third way of receiving that most interests us here. The Council taught that “the third (class) receive it both sacramentally and spiritually, and these are they who so prove and prepare themselves beforehand, as to approach to this divine table clothed with the wedding garment” (ibid). And in so doing they linked Spiritual Communion with Sacramental Communion. Those who routinely express a desire to receive the Eucharist when they are unable, not only receive the effects of the Eucharist in expressing the desire, but more perfectly receive the effect of union with Christ and the Church in faith and charity when they do receive the Eucharist sacramentally. In short, the regular practice of Spiritual Communion is not only for those who are living in times of Sacramental deprivation, but also those who can’t, for whatever reason, receive Our Lord in the Eucharist, whenever and wherever the desire arises within them.

This is a theme that St. John Paul II included in his encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucharistia :“ Precisely for this reason it is good to cultivate in our hearts a constant desire for the sacrament of the Eucharist. This was the origin of the practice of ‘spiritual communion’, which has happily been established in the Church for centuries and recommended by saints who were masters of the spiritual life. Saint Teresa of Jesus wrote: ‘When you do not receive communion and you do not attend Mass, you can make a spiritual communion, which is a most beneficial practice; by it the love of God will be greatly impressed on you’.” (EE,34).

Before discussing how to make a Spiritual Communion, it is good to discuss a few caveats. First, while it is good to receive the Sacrament by desire, the Sacraments were established to be taken in full reality. Spiritual Communion is never a substitute for Sacramental Communion, but only a “holding over” until actually receiving the Eucharist is possible. Secondly, only a person who is properly disposed to receive the effects of the Sacramental Communion can truly express the desire that is a Spiritual Communion. Certainly, a person who is not disposed may still desire it, but it is not yet efficacious because they lack the perfect contrition (expressed through Sacramental Confession) necessary to receive its effects.

St. Alphonsus Liguori was an enthusiastic proponent of Spiritual Communion, so much so that he wrote an entire book explaining how to do it along with a meditation for each day of the month. I cannot encourage the reader enough to grab a copy of this book, but in the meantime, and in closing, I offer the simple prayer that the Doctor of Church left us for articulating our desire in prayer:

My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament. I love You above all things, and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.

On the Special Creation of Eve

January 4, 2020EvolutionAdam and Eve, Creation Account, Evolution vs Creationism, Galileo, John Paul II, Leo XIII, Metaphysics, Mongenism, Polygenismtwowingstogod@gmail.com

As the highest of all the sciences, all other sciences depend upon theology for first principles in one form or another. This is why the Church can never tire in proclaiming the truths of Divine Revelation. We have spoken a number of times previously on using Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy, both of which supply natural science with foundational precepts, as governing paths of inquiry into the origins of man. In this post we seek to provide some further theological guiderails; specifically into the origins of woman.

Among the temptations ever before the Church, especially in the wake of the fallout from the “Galileo affair”, is the seduction of capitulating to the Darwinian Zeitgeist in order to accommodate, not so much a scientific theory, but a worldview. This knuckling under stems from both a lack of faith and a lack of charity. A lack of faith because it does not take God’s word as more reliable than the inductive reasoning of science. A lack of charity because the Church, as the “pillar and foundation of the truth” can protect natural science from wasting its time. “Truth cannot contradict truth” so that if the Church knows something has been revealed, and thus true, she has an obligation to proclaim it. She can thus serve natural science by guiding it to areas of explanation that more closely accord with what we already know. This is not an apology for fideism, but an offer to supply the data from which human reason may find the truth.

Monogenism and the First Woman

That being said, theories abound within evolutionary biology as to the necessity of a single first woman from which all of mankind then proceeds. Not a few of them posit that at some point within the evolutionary process a first man and first woman evolved. There are many variations on it, but the monogenistic ones involve two members of some species of Hominids having undergone some change that led to their being the first humans. Widely accepted by many Christians, these versions suppose that from some group of Hominids the bodies of Adam and Eve were supplied while God infused a rational soul.

There are good philosophical reasons to suppose that this explanation of Adam is false because form ontologically precedes matter. The form of the living creature, that is its soul, organizes the matter of the body, not the other way around. But that is a discussion for another time because Revelation tells us that this explanation for the origin of Eve is necessarily false. Eve was specially created by God from the rib of Adam when “the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam” (Gn 2:22).

The Creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 contain both mythical and symbolic language for the prehistoric account of Creation. But this does not mean that everything that is written there is merely symbolic. Some of it, perhaps even most of it, can and should be read in a literal manner. Specifically, we should read the special creation of Eve as taken from the side of Adam as literally true.

Why It Matters

It might not seem like it matters how we read it, until we begin to reflect on its meaning. There is first the point that St. John Paul II made regarding the fact that the origin of Eve makes it a matter of faith that man and woman have equal dignity and were made for each other. The Woman is taken, not from his head or his feet, making her either higher of lower than him, but instead is taken from beside his heart.

Secondly, and more importantly, Eve being brought forth from the side of Adam is a type of the Church being brought forth from the side of Jesus while He slept on the Cross. As the Council of Vienna put it in 1312,

“And that in this assumed nature the Word of God willed the salvation of all not only to be nailed to the Cross and to die on it, but also, having already breated forth His spirit, to permit His side to be pierced by a lance so that from the outflowing of water and blood there might be formed the one, immaculate and holy virginal Mother Church, the Bride of Christ ,as from the side of the first man in his sleep Eve was fashioned as his wife so that to the specific figure of the first and old Adam, who according to the Apostle, ‘is a type of the one who was to come’ (Rom. 5: 14), the truth might correspond in our last Adam, that is to say in Christ.”

To read the creation of Eve as somehow symbolic or metaphorical opens the path to a symbolic reading of Christ’s relation to the Church. But if Eve was literally drawn from the side of Adam, then the Church must literally be drawn from the side of Christ. For the type can never exceed the archetype. The sign can never be more than the thing signified. This, as an aside, is why the Church has always read Jonah as a historical book, because Christ said his time in the belly of the whale was meant to be a sign of His time in the tomb.

Avoiding the Galileo Pitfall

But aren’t we just opening the door to another Galileo problem of so wedding ourselves to a literal interpretation that any scientific challenge to it clears the way for scandal? In this case, no. The analogy of faith, that is, the principle that Scripture interprets itself, paves the way for a literal interpretation.

In defending Church discipline in his First Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul comments that “For man did not come from woman, but woman from man…For just as woman came from man, so man is born of woman; but all things are from God” (1 Cor 11:8,12). The first woman came from man just as all succeeding men are born of a woman. This is why the Apostle to the Gentiles can later claim to the Athenians without contradiction that : “from one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth” (Acts 17:26). All of mankind, Eve included, comes from Adam.

The direct and unique creation of Eve is part of the Deposit of Faith and has been taught as part of the Ordinary Magisterium since at least the 6^th Century when Pope Pelagius I declared “I confess … that all men from Adam onward who have been born and have died up to the end of the world will then rise again and stand ‘before the judgment-seat of Christ,’ together with Adam himself and his wife, who were not born of other parents, but were created: one from the earth and the other from the side of the man.” It was reaffirmed in the previously quoted Council of Vienna in the 14^th Century and then given a clear affirmation by Pope Leo XIII.

Writing shortly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, the Leo XIII solemnly declared that

“For although the revilers of the Christian faith shrink from acknowledging the Church’s permanent doctrine on this matter, and persist in their long-standing efforts to erase the history of all nations and all ages, they have nonetheless been unable to extinguish, or even to weaken, the strength and light of the truth. We call to mind facts well-known to all and doubtful to no-one: after He formed man from the slime of the earth on the sixth day of creation, and breathed into his face the breath of life, God willed to give him a female companion, whom He drew forth wondrously from the man’s side as he slept.”
Acta Sanctae Sedis, English translation provided here

At the beginning of the 20^th Century, the Pontifical Biblical Commission addressed our question head on when it stated in its Response of June 30, 1909 that:

Question 3: Is it possible, in particular, to call into question the literal and historical meaning where there is question of facts narrated in these same chapters that touch the foundation of the Christian religion, such as, among others, the creation of all things that was accomplished by God at the beginning of time, the special creation of man, the formation of the first woman from the first man, the unity of human race…the fall of the first parents from that primitive state of innocence, and the promise of a future Redeemer?
Response: No.

For those looking for a fuller treatment that traces the path of the Magisterium on this issue and why it should be seen as coming from the Ordinary Magisterium, I recommend this paper.

The issue of reconciling the findings of natural science and the truths of Divine Revelation is always an important work. Nevertheless it is a work that must be governed by principles so ably laid out by St. Augustine in the 4^th Century: “Whatever they can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures; and whatever they assert in their treatises which is contrary to these Scriptures of ours, that is to Catholic faith, we must either prove it as well as we can to be entirely false, or at all events we must, without the smallest hesitation, believe it to be so.” This is especially true for evolution and the origins of Eve.

Bigmouths and Gender Ideology

July 31, 2019Bioethics, Culture, Culture of Life, Defending the Faith, Sexual EthicsGender, Gender Dysphoria, John Paul II, Leo XIII, Sex, Sexual Revolution, Transgendertwowingstogod@gmail.com

When Our Lord issued the Great Commission to the Apostles, He was telling them, and by extension us, to be bigmouths. The Lord of all knew that the Enemy of man would never cease telling lies and that the only way to confront those lies is by never ceasing to tell the truth. The Church has been, throughout her history, the Great Truth Teller. Until recently that is. No longer does she breathe truth upon the ideological lies that the World tells but plays the part of the mute. As proof of this, let’s compare the number of Papal Encyclicals dealing directly with the Socialist/Communist Revolution. Nearly every Pope from Leo XIII to John Paul II addressed this ideological lie directly, never growing weary of repeating themselves. Now compare that with the number of Papal Encyclicals against Sexual Revolution—one. That one, Humanae Vitae, landed with a great thud and has been unceremoniously dismissed. Whatever work John Paul II did in this area has been caught up in the whirlwind of ambiguity that is the current pontificate (i.e. Amoris Laetitia). The point is that the Church attacked Socialism and all its incarnations directly while they have left gender ideology unscathed despite John Paul II calling it the “new ideology of evil”. As the silence mounts, more and more Catholics fall in line with the ideological spirit, especially during the latest manifestation, Transgenderism. This should not be read as a complaint or a rebuke of clergy, but an undeniable statement of fact. Ideologies have a way of silencing dissenters, so I am more interested in mobilizing and arming those willing to speak truth against the lies, than to blame anyone for not speaking out.

Because of the relative silence on this issue, there are no authoritative statements regarding Transgenderism. Clarity is not a habit normally associated with this lie, but for the sake of clarity we will distinguish between gender dysphoria as the internal struggle that one has with their sexual identity and Transgenderism as the act of attempting to alter one’s sexual identity. The former is a psychological condition and the latter is a physical action that is said to solve the conflict. It is relatively easy to show via Catholic moral principles why Transgenderism is wrong. It can never be a real solution to the problem and ultimately does great harm to the person. Nevertheless, because it is cloaked in a medical solution it is important that we understand the principles.

The moral principles involve the recently discussed Principle of Totality. To summarize and review, this bioethical principle says that “except to save life itself, the fundamental functional capacities which constitute the human person should not be destroyed, but preserved, developed, and used for the good of the whole person and of the community.” Whether it is a surgical intervention or hormonal replacement, the “treatment” modalities involved always seek to destroy the biological sex characteristics and replace them with simulated versions of the opposite sex. The use of the term “simulated” is deliberate because “sex reassignment surgery” simply is not possible. The person may resemble the opposite sex, but they can never actually be the opposite sex. No matter how much plastic surgery you perform, you cannot artificially manufacture a sex organ. It will always fail in its primary purpose.

The Harm Done

These principles are masked because the harm that is done to these people is often hidden. It is a pernicious lie that, rather than solving the problem, puts the person into a sexual void. They will have mutilated the bodily capacity that identifies one’s true sex and they will never be their “new” sex. To solve the problem of confusion by causing them to truly identify as neither sex is, self-evidentally, not a real solution. But anyone who questions this, including doctors and psychiatrists are ostracized and vilified, although never refuted.

Rather than acknowledge this they cover it with an ambiguous term gender. It is labeled as a “social construct” because of the inherent failure to construct sex themselves. This is probably why many gender dysphoric people choose not to have surgery. It is also why one of the few (semi-)reputable studies done found that those who had surgery were 19 times more likely to commit suicide (and this was a study done in “tolerant” Sweden).

Hormone intervention likewise have lasting effects and often constitute a chemical mutilation of sort because they render the person sterile. Included in this are so called “puberty blockers” which permanently stunt the growth and development of children. When a child presents with gender dysphoria, this is the standard treatment modality. We do not let children under 16 vote, drink, smoke or choose not to go to school because of their intellectual and physical immaturity. We will however allow them to decide what gender they will be and to begin permanent steps in making that a reality. There is a built-in mechanism to clear up confusion related to sexual identity called puberty. That is why the reputable studies of gender dysphoria all show that between 80-95% of children who express discordant gender identity come to identify with their biological sex over time (a statistic cited in Ryan Anderson’s excellent book When Harry Became Sally). Those two sets of numbers, the 80-95% and the 19 times more likely to commit suicide would suggest that any medical intervention should be delayed until the person has reached full maturity. The fact that these are never mentioned is because the best interest of the person is trumped by ideology.

The Intersex Exception

There is another aspect of this that is important to grasp. Abortion supporters often argue from “the rape and incest and mother’s life in jeopardy exception” in favor of abortion on demand. Transgender ideologues do something similar with their Intersex exception. The argument goes something like “because intersex are biologically neither sex, therefore there are more than two sexes.” Even if this was true, it is an example of the exception proving the rule. Intersex individuals have a genetic defect, that is, they have a deviation from the normal condition. Transgender ideologues, like the abortion advocates, would have us think the exception should be the rule and therefore a person should be able to decide on his own what sex he will be.

Second, the intersex condition is based upon direct observation. Transgenderism is based upon a subjective belief not rooted in any external condition. The intersex individual is not changing their sex characteristics but attempting to repair them. Quite frankly, it is surprising that the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) is so ambiguous in their language and allow the Transgender idealogues to co-opt what is a true medical, as opposed to psychological condition. The ISNA says that persons with disorders in sexual development are not a third gender, but male or female. Those are the only two options, even if may not always be easy to decipher.

In order not to appear to be “obsessed” with all of the issues of the Sexual Revolution, the Church has chosen to be silent. It isn’t the Church that is obsessed but the culture. In order to break that obsession the Church cannot be silent. Millions of people are becoming ideological and there won’t be a culture to save unless we speak out. We must arm ourselves with the truth and a willingness to engage. We must be the bigmouths that Our Lord calls us to be.

An Invitation to Awe

July 24, 2019Eucharist, Heaven, Holy Orders, SacramentsJohn Paul II, Leo XIII, Mass, Mystery of Faith, Novus Ordo, Vatican IItwowingstogod@gmail.com

One of the aspects of the Liturgy that is often overlooked is its inherent power to spark wonder and marvel and therefore leading to praise. At least, it ought to do this. Being no mere work of man, but an Opus Dei, a work of God, the Liturgy is meant to draw us into the “Sacred Mysteries”. A liturgy that doesn’t elicit this response probably has too much man and not enough God in it. Whether or not our current liturgy is awe-full or not, this need to be awe-filled remains key to the highly sought after “active participation” so cherished by the Fathers of Vatican II. Rather than entering into a debate over the merits and de-merits of the Novus Ordo Mass, I want to offer a reflection on how to stir up the necessary awe that allows for a fuller participation in the Sacred Liturgy.

One of the more controversial changes to the Mass was the movement of the words “mystérium fídei” (Mystery of Faith) from the formula of consecration of the wine to right after the consecration. Again, we will forego any critique of it and simply admit that the Liturgy is the way it is right now and we should make the best of it. The words “Mystery of Faith” seem now to be awkwardly out of place, until we go back to the goal of causing us to marvel at what God has done and is doing. The words Mystery of Faith, spoken by the Priest, are meant to be an expression of awe at what has just occurred before our very eyes.

All too often, rather than an invitation to awe, it is treated as a rubrical instruction for the congregation to say something. But if we hover on the exclamation itself, then, rather than simply being a canned response, it can be an exclamation of faith in what has just occurred. In order to grasp this however we must linger a while on the meaning of the words.

The Mystery of Faith

When the Son of God “took flesh and dwelt among us”, there was nothing remarkable about His appearance as a man. But this same man, a man Whom they heard, saw with their eyes and touched with their hands was revealed to them to be the Son of God (c.f. 1Jn 1:1-3). Their senses all supported the gift of divine faith they were given. Never to leave His Church orphaned, this same Son of God extended the Incarnation throughout time and space through the Eucharist. Now we are only in the presence of His words and no longer bound to the experience of our senses. In the Eucharist our senses fail, but once we accept the words spoken by Our Lord we “recognize Him in the breaking of the bread.”

In his Encyclical on the Eucharist, Mirae Cartitatis, Pope Leo XIII reminded the faith that the Eucharist “is the chief means whereby men are engrafted on the divine nature, men also find the most efficacious help towards progress in every kind of virtue.” But it is faith pre-eminently, that is exercised and strengthened—“nothing can be better adapted to promote a renewal of the strength and fervor of faith in the human mind than the mystery of the Eucharist, the ‘mystery of faith’…” When we respond to the Priest’s awe-full utterance with a fervent act of faith, faith grows. It is not merely a declaration on our part, but an exclamation that the entire history of salvation is bound up and made present in what we just witnessed. But it is the Mystery of Faith because the mystery cannot be seen with human eyes but only through faith.

The Mystery of Faith

It is not only an act of faith, but participation in a mystery. We are not just bystanders, but actual participants. Our senses tell us we are in a pew in a church somewhere while faith tells us we are at the foot of the Cross speaking directly to Christ and offering Him up to the Father. It is a mystery then first of all because it is real contact with the foundational mystery of the Cross. And in this one mystery, Pope Leo XIII says, “the entire supernatural order is summed up and contained.” Because in truth it is not just His Passion and death that is re-presented but His Resurrection as well. It is, as St. John Paul II says, truly His Passover in which we journey with Him. Each of the Memorial Acclamations contains the same content; the Passion, Death, Resurrection and “the eschatological footprint of Christ in His return”.

We can see better what Our Lord meant when he told Thomas that those who did not see Him were blessed. It is for our benefit that He presents Himself in a veiled manner. By veiling Himself, His presence grows clearer and clearer in proportion to one’s charity. Knowledge (faith) always leads to love so that His hidden presence in the Eucharist causes charity to grow in our soul.

If this does not excite in us both reverence and awe, then we are merely going through the motions. This Mystery of Faith is the content of eternity because it sums of all the mysteries of our Faith. We will be contemplating this Mystery of Faith when faith gives way to vision. In this way the Mass truly is training for life everlasting and we should treat it as such.

Why Are There Seven Sacraments?

July 13, 2019Apologetics, Church, Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, SacramentsAnalogy, Familiaris Consortio, John Paul II, Romans, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Theologytwowingstogod@gmail.com

Within a generation or two of the first Protestant revolutionaries, the Sacraments became one of the shovels that were used to widen the chasm between Christians. The debate began mostly over the number of Sacraments with Luther, Calvin and friends reducing the number to two or three. Eventually, the Protestant Sacraments became unrecognizable, more because of a flawed philosophy than flawed theology. They became mere signs, given power by the faith of the believer, rather than signs empowered by Christ to bring about the thing signified. Because the reduction of the number of Sacraments was at the heart of their error, it is worth examining why there must be seven Sacraments so that, by removing one, you necessarily set yourself down a path of rejecting all.

To grasp the reasoning for seven Sacraments, it is first necessary to take a theological diversion into the use of analogy. Analogy, in the theological sense, takes what would otherwise remain a mystery in the spiritual life and examines it “in the mirror of sensible realities”. God is the author of both the natural and supernatural and He made them both for the same reason; to reveal Himself to mankind. If they share the same purpose, then we can take the principles behind the things we can see and apply them to the things we can’t see. This follows directly from a principle articulated by St. Paul in his letter to the Romans that “His invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things He has made” (Romans 1:20).

How Analogy Fits into Theology

This parallelism comes with a caveat however. Creation could never exhaust all that God has to say about Himself, falling short in fully revealing Him. To supplement the “Book of Nature” God gave man Divine Revelation. There are things that we can discover about God on our own, but if we are to know Him, rather than just about Him, He must reveal Himself to us. This means that while we can use the principles in nature and extrapolate them to Supernature, we cannot do so indiscriminately or univocally. There is a similarity, but there is also a difference at the same time. The analogical concept of existence is powerful in theology because it allows us to say things about God we would not otherwise be able to say.

Knowledge of this principle is important because when God reveals Himself as say Father, neophyte will tend to equate the visible fatherhood with the invisible Fatherhood. “If God is Father then how could a father watch one of his children die without doing anything?” But God as Father is an analogical concept. God is like an earthly father, but also unlike an earthly father. In fact He is the only true Father, while all fatherhood on earth is a mere reflection (c.f. Familiaris Consortio, 32).

Analogy then become a necessary tool to understand Revelation. God reveals Himself as a Tri-unity of Persons. Human reason is hardwired to never be satisfied with mere facts, even of Revelation, but instead seeks understanding. Now we could never reason to the Trinity, but the analogy of marriage that undergirds St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body helps us to better understand it. Likewise, we could never use reason to prove our supernatural destiny, but by examining our natural life, we can better understand it because both have the same purpose.

St. Thomas Aquinas and the Use of Analogy

St. Thomas Aquinas took advantage of the power of analogy better than any theologian in the history of the Church. He includes these types of arguments throughout the Summa, our topic at hand being one such example. He articulates the principle saying that the “spiritual life has a certain conformity with the life of the body: just as other corporeal things have a certain likeness to things spiritual ” (ST III, q.65, art. 1). Drawing on this analogy, he then goes on to explain why there are seven Sacraments. Keep in mind that this is not proof that there are seven Sacraments, but explains why there are seven, and how ultimately, to remove one leaves the Christian wayfarer at a loss.

Always profound in his common sense, St. Thomas says that there are two ways in which a person reaches perfection in his bodily life; personally and as a social animal, as part of a community. Personally, the man reaches perfection in the life of the body directly by being generated (i.e. birth), through growth and through nourishment. But because he also encounters hindrances and is prone to disease he needs both medicine and those things that will strengthen him against the diseases.

The corporal needs are signs of spiritual needs. A man is generated bodily by birth and spiritually by Baptism. He grows to perfect size and strength which corresponds to Confirmation where the indelible mark of Christian growth is given. This bodily life and strength is preserved through regular nourishment just as in the spiritual life there is the Eucharist. Finally, to restore health to the spirit after sin, Confession becomes the medicine of the soul. To strengthen the soul against the wages of sin, Anointing of the Sick is performed, “which removes the remainder of sin, and prepares man for final glory. Wherefore it is written (James 5:15): ‘And if he be in sins they shall be forgiven him.’” (ibid).

Man is a social animal and so he is perfected in relation to others. “First, by receiving power to rule the community and to exercise public acts: and corresponding to this in the spiritual life there is the sacrament of order, according to the saying of Hebrews 7:27, that priests offer sacrifices not for themselves only, but also for the people. Secondly in regard to natural propagation. This is accomplished by Matrimony both in the corporal and in the spiritual life: since it is not only a sacrament but also a function of nature.” (ST III, q.65, art.1).

It becomes obvious then why a rejection of one Sacrament ultimately leads to the rejection of all. They are a complete package meant to meet all of our spiritual needs. A deficiency in one area always leads to a poverty in another. That is why Jesus left the Sacraments to the Church in order to provide for all the spiritual needs of the members of His Mystical Body. At each stage of life, Christ bestows supernatural aid to facilitate the growth of each person into a saint. To remove one of them means that a need is left unmet and spiritual growth is stunted. The Sacraments protect Christianity from becoming a “works-based” religion because they reflect our radical need upon God to save us, not just once, but throughout our earthly pilgrimage. There are seven because God made us to need them.

On the Heresy of Marriage

February 2, 2019Culture, Eucharist, Grace, marriage, SacramentsCode of Canon Law, Divorce, Familiaris Consortio, John Paul II, Remarriage, Theology of the Bodytwowingstogod@gmail.com

In a previous post, the logical and theological necessity of the Development of Doctrine was discussed. One of the points made was that corruption of doctrine, normally what we label as heresy, always leads to a dead end and ends up destroying the very doctrine it was trying to explain. But there is a sense in which heresy also can be an impetus for the development of authentic doctrine by “forcing” the Church to elaborate more fully on the doctrine in question. History is replete with examples, but we are faced with a prime example today in the attack within the Church on the Sacrament of Marriage.

We do not need to go into the details of the attack specifically other than to say the widescale acceptance of contraception, remarriage, and even gay marriage within the Church all signal an attack on the Sacrament itself. Part of the reason why the response has been so slow is that there is still a lack of clarity within the theology of the Sacrament of Marriage. St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body was a beginning, but it remains just that—a beginning. His teaching is so dense that there remains much work to be done to clarify and expound on what he hoped to accomplish. This essay is an attempt to move the discussion forward by clearing up some common misconceptions.

Natural Marriage vs Sacramental Marriage

The first distinction is between natural and Sacramental marriage. Marriage by its very nature is something sacred because it is ordered towards the co-creative action of procreation. Even in its natural state it acts as a sacrament (note the small s) pointing to God’s covenant with mankind. But this natural state of marriage is different not just in degree but in kind from Sacramenta Marriage. So often people see the Sacrament as something added on to natural marriage but in truth it is a different reality. It is a different reality because it has a different end. Natural marriage is for the propagation of the species, Sacramental marriage is for the propagation of the Church. Natural marriage is for the mutual help of the spouses, Sacramental marriage is for the mutual sanctity of the spouses.

Because natural marriage and Sacramental Marriage (for ease we will call it Matrimony moving forward) are distinct realities we must resist the temptation to lump them together. It would be akin to not seeing bread and wine as essentially different from the Eucharist. They may look the same from the outside, but the interior reality makes all the difference in the world. Matrimony is not just a Catholic way of getting married, but instead its interior life becomes a cause of grace in the souls of the spouses. In other words, its sacramentality is a direct participation in the mystery of Redemption.

The Fruits of the Sacrament

Failing to grasp this and thinking that something like divorce is possible is not just to disobey a commandment of Christ. Instead it is a denial of the Sacrament and threatens the entire Sacramental structure. Matrimony, like all Sacraments has specific fruits. The first fruit is the unity of the spouses. Rather than trying to “hold it together”, Matrimony is a cause of their unity. They are bound together as Christ is bound to the Church and their union continually approaches this ideal. And in so doing, it brings about the thing it signifies by uniting them closer to Christ as members of His Church.

Secondly, the Sacrament also bears the fruit of indissolubility. As St. John Paul II puts it in Familiaris Consortio, “the indissolubility of marriage finds its ultimate truth in the plan that God has manifested in His revelation: He wills and He communicates the indissolubility of marriage as a fruit, a sign and a requirement of the absolutely faithful love that God has for man and that the Lord Jesus has for the Church” (FC, 20).

The Church uses the term fruit very purposefully. For fruit comes about when a tree is matured and it is always sweet once it is ripe. The fruits of Matrimony are felt more deeply as the marriage matures. Lacking this maturity, the fruit often tastes bitter. In other words, the gifts of unity and indissolubility do not guarantee that things will be easy, even if they guarantee they will be possible. Before the fruits are matured the couple will have to have their faith purified. His commands—“you shall not divorce and remarry another”—are not made in a vacuum, but instead ought to be read as promises—“because of the power of the Cross you shall not divorce and remarry another.” As an they grow in faith in God, their faithfulness to each other increases likewise. The fruit day by day matures until it becomes sweet.

Even tolerating divorce and remarriage is not just a practical issue but has theological consequences as a denial of the power of the Sacrament. It says that the Sacrament really doesn’t do anything and ultimately Matrimony is no different than natural marriage. To deny this ultimately is to deny the power of the Cross to save. And this is ultimately why we are facing a heretical crisis. Marriage in all appearance is impossible. Matrimony however is not because “nothing is impossible for God.” It is, as JPII put it, “permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross” (FC, 13). The Church is facing a great modern heresy about the Theology of Marriage and the Faithful must respond in both their living and understanding of Matrimony as a Sign of Contradiction.

Light in the Darkness

October 26, 2018Church, Church Authority, Prayer, Spiritual Life, Spiritual WarfareChurch Scandal, Daily Mass, Eucharist, John Paul II, Novo Millenio Ineuntetwowingstogod@gmail.com

At the close of the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, Pope St. John Paul II drafted a blueprint for the Church in the next millennium in his Apostolic Exhortation Novo Millennio Ineunte. Through his Petrine office, the Pope played the prophet by emphasizing that the Church must “shine ever more brightly” in the third millennium. Not prone to echo merely pious sentiments, the Holy Father’s words are a clarion call to us Catholics living in dark ecclesial times especially by reminding us that Church’s luminosity is nothing more than a reflection of the light of the face of Christ in every historical period. Darkness sets in then when we have “not first contemplated His face.” Confronted with scandalous silence piled upon scandalous actions, many Catholics feel abandoned by the Church. But once we allow the prophetic character of JPII’s program for restoring the Church’s luminosity to invigorate our lives we realize that it is not the Church that has abandoned us, but we the Church. By failing to contemplate the face of Christ we are incapable of “letting our light shine before men”(c.f. Mt 5:16). But if we listen to what the Successor of Peter told us almost 20 years ago, we can find a path back to the light.

Before outlining his program, we would be remiss if we ignored an important point that the Holy Father makes: “We are certainly not seduced by the naive expectation that, faced with the great challenges of our time, we shall find some magic formula. No, we shall not be saved by a formula but by a Person, and the assurance which he gives us: I am with you!” (NMI, 29). Notwithstanding, the program is not something new but a revitalization of those practices that are at the heart of the Christian life. These things are pathways to the face of Christ.

The Plan…

The first is a commitment to a holiness that is devoid of any mark of “minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity” (NMI, 30). We must each strive to attain a “high standard of ordinary Christian living” by which we judge everything on a scale of sanctity. What I mean by this is that we live in a detached manner asking whether each and everything we do is contributing to our holiness. God is, by His loving Providence, is providing at each and every moment means to grow in holiness. We need only say yes and fully embrace what He has planned to give us from all eternity.

The “scale of sanctity” is related to the second pillar of the saint’s program: grace. Fidelity to grace is the key to growing in holiness. The pursuit of holiness is not enough because it is not something we can ever obtain on our own. It depends solely upon how much sanctifying grace we are given. As the word grace (gratis) suggests it is pure gift. What that means is not that we must sit back and wait for it, but that we must be active in receiving the gift. Receptivity and passivity are not the same thing. We must have the docility to receive it in the manner in which God intends to give it to us, but also seeking out those encounters in which God bestows those gifts.

The remaining three pillars are related to those encounters. The first is the rediscovery of the face of Christ in the Sacrament of Penance (c.f. NMI, 37). Mercy is for the contrite and it is through the Sacrament of Penance in which our contrition and Christ’s mercy meet. In an age in which sin remains bound by self-appointed victimhood, freedom is found by approaching the mercy seat of the One Who became a willing victim for us. These true encounters with Christ, mediated by a Priest, should be frequent enabling us to see them as necessary even when our sin is not grave.

Likewise, the Sacrament of the Eucharist must be restored to a primacy of place. The Pope “insist[ed] that sharing in the Eucharist should really be the heart of Sunday for every baptized person” (36) but we should be willing to go further and make the sharing of the Eucharist the heart of every day. By contemplating the face of the suffering and resurrected Christ in the Eucharist, we are being conformed to Him Mass by Mass. If we really believe that Christ is present and the source of all life, “where else would we go” but to Mass? Our Lord will not be outdone in generosity so that when we generously make ourselves available for Daily Mass, we find it harder and harder to stay away.

Marked by the communal prayer of the Eucharist, we must also contemplate the face of Christ in prayer. Prayer, especially mental prayer, is the ordinary means God uses to gift us with His grace. Reading the signs of the times, especially the “widespread demand for spirituality,” the Pope called upon the Faithful not only to pray, but to be educated in the art of prayer. This meant going the great spiritual masters of the Church like St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. More explicitly the Holy Father is saying that rather than looking elsewhere, especially in New Age spirituality, for “methods” of spirituality, that we should all re-connect with the mystical tradition of the Church. All too often Catholics are told to pray, but in truth do not know how to. Therefore parishes should become not just places of prayer, but schools of prayer where prayer is taught.

…And the Difference it Makes

While this plan will help individual Christians, it isn’t immediately apparent how it will help the Church. Holier lay people aren’t going to fix corrupt prelates, especially when those prelates sit in the high places of the Church. To see things this way however is to make a very worldly mistake, namely, seeing the Church as an institution and not as an organism. The Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, is the extension of the Incarnation throughout time (c.f Mt 28:20 and this previous post). The Church is holy because Christ is the Head. The Mystical Body is holy because it has the Holy Spirit as its soul. All those who share the indwelling of that same Spirit are members of that body. But it also has members that have become diseased and are no longer capable of acting as parts of that same body. And just as a body has varied means to heal diseased parts of the body, so too the Church has the same power because it is always the Person of Christ who acts, even if He uses other members of the body as instruments.

Holy Members of the Church, both Militant and Triumphant, are healthy members of the Body that act to heal the diseased members of the Body. They represent the true hierarchy of the Church. The hierarchy of the Institutional Church, a hierarchy that will disappear, is meant only to be a sign of the true hierarchy. Sometimes it fails as a sign and that’s when it is incumbent upon the true hierarchy to step up—not to lead the Institutional Church per se, but to be translucent members allowing the light reflected from the face of Christ to shine through them. And if we put St. John Paul II’s plan into action and seek his intercession, that will be enough to heal the Church and be a light to a desperately dark world.

The Unforgivable Sin

June 9, 2018Bible, Conscience, Divine Mercy, Holy Spirit, Last Things, Mercy, Sin, Spiritual LifeAquinas, Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit, Jesus, John Paul II, Unforgivable Sintwowingstogod@gmail.com

If Jesus does not both shock and disturb when He speaks to us through the Scriptures, then we aren’t taking Him seriously enough. Take as an example this Sunday’s Gospel when Jesus, Mercy Incarnate, returns to Galilee and accuses the scribes of doing the seemingly impossible—committing a sin that will not be forgiven. “Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin” (Mk 3:28-29). These words ought to shake us, especially in an age of exaggerated mercy. While Jesus leaves us clues as to the nature of this unpardonable sin, He does not really come out and tell us what it is. Therefore, there can be great spiritual benefit in investigating this question more deeply.

St Thomas Aquinas found this to be a question of particular importance as well and includes it among the questions dealing with sins against faith. Standing on the shoulders of his saintly predecessors, the Angelic Doctor says that there are three traditional ways in which this has been interpreted.

The First Two Interpretations

The first is the literal meaning based on the context in which Christ said it. To utter a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit (or God in general) is to ascribe to the devil that which comes by the power of God. The best historical example of this is the Golden Calf in which an Egyptian god (which St. Augustine says was actually a demon) is said to have led Israel out of Egypt. So clear was the action of God in rescuing them that the Israelites could not have acted out either weakness or ignorance. Therefore there is no excuse in receiving punishment and the sin is unpardonable. Returning to the passage however, Jesus is not condemning the Scribes per se, but instead issuing a warning. Because Our Lord had yet to reveal His divinity, they acted out of ignorance, an ignorance He reminds the Father of from the Cross (c.f. Lk 23:34).

This is related to the second interpretation that Aquinas mentions. He says it is a sin against the Holy Spirit specifically because it is a sin of malice. Because power is appropriated to the Father, to sin against the Father is a sin of weakness. Likewise, because wisdom is appropriated to the Son Who is the Word, ignorance is a sin against the Son. And because goodness is appropriated to the Holy Spirit, then a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice. With full consent and full knowledge, a sin against the Holy Spirit is a sin of malice, that is in essence saying “evil be my good.” This particular sin is the eternal sin because it removes all of those things from us that might be a cure. It creates a hardening of the heart like Pharaoh in which the grace of conversion cannot penetrate.

As a fruitful tangent, the doctrine of appropriation in which we ascribe to specific persons of the Trinity that which in truth is an action of all three is not only a way in which we learn more about the life within the Trinity, but also a way to develop a relationship with each of the Persons individually. When we need strength we should pray directly to the Father, wisdom to the Son and power over evil the Holy Spirit. This habit of prayer and personal relationship keeps us falling into the trap of believing the doctrine of the Trinity while not really believing in the Trinity.

A Third Interpretation

The third interpretation that Aquinas mentions is also the most favored today, although often in an overly simplistic way. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit can be viewed as final impenitence. In this interpretation, the blasphemy occurs not necessarily in word, but in thought or deed. It is against the Holy Spirit because it acts contrary to the forgiveness of sins which is the work of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Jn 20:22). It is also the favored interpretation of the Great Mercy Pope, St. John Paul II. In his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem he says that “the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit consists precisely in the radical refusal to accept this forgiveness, of which he is the intimate giver and which presupposes the genuine conversion which he brings about in the conscience” (DV, 46).

Standing on the shoulders of these saintly giants then, why is this most widely accepted answer overly simplistic? Because there are two ways in which final impenitence can manifest itself. First there is the obvious stubborn refusal even on one’s death bed, call it an impenitence of the will, to repent. But there is a second, and for many of us more dangerous way, and that is through what we might call an impenitence of fact. Although many of us envision our deaths being something we can plan for, the truth is that many of us die suddenly without much warning at all. That means our temporal impenitence can become final impenitence.

This final impenitence in fact is not necessarily brought about by a hardness of heart, but we become victims to Aquinas’ insight that the sin “unforgivable by its very nature, insofar as it excludes the elements through which the forgiveness of sin takes place.”

In short, we simply a refusal to examine ourselves well and are blocked by presumption. Fear of the Lord, through which we seek the forgiveness of sins is a certain (healthy) anxiety by which we recognize that in truth we are fugitives from hell and that it is only God’s mercy that saves us. This is healthy not because we are morbid, but because each time we accuse ourselves of a sin, we are humbled and God is glorified in His mercy. Each time we stir up sorrow for our sins, God is glorified in His mercy. And ultimately this is why, no matter how we interpret the passage, we should take Our Lord’s warning to heart: to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit is to refuse God the glory of His mercy.

On Nude Art

September 13, 2017Anthropology, beauty, Theology of the BodyJohn Paul II, Nude Art, Theology of the Bodytwowingstogod@gmail.com

On May 13, 1981, a day marking the 64^th anniversary of Our Lady’s first visit to Fatima, Pope John Paul II was shot by a would be assassin just prior to giving his Wednesday Audience address. The attempt on his life, its connection to Fatima and Our Lady’s intercession has been well documented. What has often been overlooked however is the fact that he was in the midst of giving a series of catecheses that was to become the Theology of the Body. Had the assassin’s bullet found its mark, the Church would have been all the poorer without this great corpus on our the meaning of corporeal existence. It was more than just a great personal love for the man Karol Wojtyla that spurred Our Lady to guide the bullet away from every major organ in the Pope’s body that day. It was also motivated by her great love for all her children, especially those challenged by lust. For she had told the visionaries during their “visit” to hell that “more souls go to Hell because of sins of the flesh than for any other reason.” She knew of the Pope’s plan for “creating a climate favorable to the education of chastity” (TOB May 6, 1981) and that by embracing that education many souls would be saved. It is no mere coincidence that the Pope had just completed an extended analysis of what is perhaps the greatest modern day challenge, pornography. It is as if the Pope’s near death was Our Lady’s exclamation point on the previous week’s teaching.

The Pope began his discussion of pornography by pointing out that the human body is a perennial object of culture. Because sexuality and the experience of love between man and woman is so deeply imbedded in what it means to be human, art and literature always find fertile ground in those two arenas. But the Holy Father was also aware that the world, especially in the West, was rapidly being (re)transformed form a culture of the word into a culture of the image. This resulted in a culture in which everything—from photoshoots to movies to reality TV shows to viral videos to hacked personal sex videos— finds its way to an audience. With virtually unlimited access, the idea that certain things should be surrounded by discretion is anathema. The Pope commented that even the use of the term “pornography” is a linguistic addition that represents a softening for what had previously been called obscaena, from which we get the word obscene.

The Puritanical Backfire

In many ways this represents a backfire of the puritanical approach that sought to keep even artistic representations of the naked human body hidden from sight. The Church had forgotten some of what it meant to be Catholic—embracing all that is good, true and beautiful in the world—and adopted this priggish approach instead. Men of the Church had even gone so far as to cover over nudes in Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel with unsightly loincloths. But John Paul II was proposing a different approach, namely learning to distinguish between the obscene and the aesthetic through the development of the ethos of the image. So committed to this approach was he that he would later remove those same awkward loincloths in Michelangelo’s masterpiece in order to show “the splendor and dignity” of the naked human body (Homily at the Mass celebrating the restoration of the Sistine Chapel, 1994).

At either extreme the problem remains the same. Without a guiding ethos, erotic art and pornography remain indistinguishable and we swing from license to prohibition and back again. The ethos of the image provides an escape from this merry-go-round, but only if we are able to grasp two important points.

True art consists in taking ideas and imprinting them in matter. It is the idea and the beauty with which it is presented that moves us. This excitement of our aesthetic sensibilities then moves us to further contemplate the idea. There is a certain universality of beautiful art as the particular is abstracted away. This power to move however can be abused when the artist attempts to move the viewer or the listener merely by exciting their aesthetic sensibilities. Now it is no longer the idea and the clarity in which it is presented that moves us, but the direct appeal to emotions.

The second point is related to the first. Unlike all other objects that appear as the matter of art, a person is an object that is also a subject. This means there is always a certain dignity attached to the human body as the subject of art which can never be lost, even if it is abused. Instead, according to the Saint, the offense comes in the intention of the artist. If the artist intends to present a nude body so as to convey some truth about masculinity and femininity then one should consider it erotic art. If, however, their intention is to present a body so as to excite sexual desire in the viewer then this would be considered pornographic. This may even include someone who is not fully naked. This is a favorite trick of Social Media and sites like FoxNews.com who like to present soft pornography in the form of “See such and such’s Beach Bod” or “Watch such and such’s Wardrobe failure” as click bait.

The Spousal Meaning

While there is a certain grey area between erotic art and pornography, there are far less than 50 shades. In fact John Paul II thought it rather easy to discern the intention of the artist—whether or not the spousal meaning of the body is violated. What this means practically is whether the work of art enables the viewer to more deeply understand the meaning of masculinity and femininity—of what it means to be a person. Just as the body reveals the person in the real world, so too should the nude body reveal that there is a person (even if the model is anonymous) there. As philosopher Roger Scruton puts it “The pornographic image is like a magic wand that turns subjects into objects…It causes people to hide behind their bodies.” They become simply objects of desire and nothing more.

Regardless of the intent of the artist however, the Pope was realistic in that we are fallen and prone to what he calls the “look of concupiscense” in which we may look at a beautiful nude and still be moved to desire. For that we must begin to develop what I will call a “spiritual aestheticism” as a corrective. This means that we develop a taste for objective beauty in all arenas of our lives. Only then will we see beauty in the human body and be moved to contemplation. Returning to Scruton he gives what I think is an excellent tool for self-examination. He mentions that the truly beautiful should stir our imagination (our bodily step towards wonder in our minds) and not fantasy. The moment we find fantasy rising in our minds we know we have crossed over.

George Weigel once called the Theology of the Body a “theological time bomb” that was set to go off some time in our century. Thanks to the intercession of Our Lady of the Rosary on that fateful May day in 1981, the fuse has already been lit. Please God that the first target will be the scourge of pornography—not just to remove it from the moral landscape but to free all of us to see the beauty of the human person in and through the body.

Prophecy and the Third Part of the Secret of Fatima

July 12, 2017Bible, End Times, MaryJohn Paul II, Our Lady of Fatima, Prophecy, Third Secrettwowingstogod@gmail.com

Tomorrow marks the 100^th Anniversary of the third appearance by Our Lady to the children in Fatima, Portugal. It was during this visit that Our Lady disclosed to the children what has become known as the “Three Secrets.” The first two of these secrets included a vision into hell, a prediction of World War II and the spread of Communism. The third secret remained hidden and was not disclosed until the year 2000. At the end of the Mass of Beatification for two of the visionaries, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, Cardinal Angelo Sodano announced its release. He mentioned that the time was ripe partly because “the events to which the third part of the ‘secret’ of Fatima now seem part of the past.” This has not stopped many people from claiming otherwise, insisting on all kinds of apocalyptic interpretations and creating much controversy.

Shortly after Cardinal Sodano’s statement, the then Head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued a Theological Commentary on the Message of Fatima hoping to shine some light upon the third vision the children saw. The Cardinal began by affirming Cardinal Sodano’s assertion saying,

“[I]nsofar as individual events are described, they belong to the past. Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed. Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith in general cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity. What remains was already evident when we began our reflections on the text of the “secret”: the exhortation to prayer as the path of “salvation for souls” and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion.”

Despite such a lucid statement, many still insist that the vision is pointing to something yet to happen even going so far as to insist that the Church is hiding something. There are certainly a number of psychological reasons why a person might do this, but there are those whose insistence comes from a misunderstanding about the nature of prophecy. Cardinal Ratzinger anticipated this aspect of it and spoke briefly about prophecy in hopes that some of the mistaken views could be put to rest and the focus could be placed on the message itself. It is in this spirit that we should examine what the future Pope Benedict XVI had to say and supplement it with St. Thomas Aquinas’ explanation of prophecy.

St. Thomas Aquinas and Prophecy

In addressing the charism of prophecy in the Summa (ST II-II, q.173, art. 2), St. Thomas speaks of three different ways in which a prophetic vision is conveyed. There is the ordinary vision in which something is presented to the exterior senses. Second, there is an interior perception. Finally there is a mystical vision that occurs without images. Regardless of the means by which the vision is conveyed, there is always a subjective element to it. St. Thomas says that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver” (ST IA q.75, a5). What he means by this is that although a person may receive light from on high, how they receive it and how they explain it is based upon their own capacity and experience.

Applying this to what we know of Fatima we can say that the vision was neither the first (only the children could see it) nor could the third (because Sr. Lucia describes it using images). Through process of elimination we can conclude that the prophetic vision the children received would have been through an interior perception. What this means is that the vision as Sr. Lucia describes it, even though it is authentic, uses images drawn from her imagination and memory. This, by the way, is similar to what we see with St. John in the Book of Revelation. Many of the images as he describes them are based on images that were familiar to him, especially things he had seen on Patmos (like the sea of glass). In any regard, Sr. Lucia received an impulse from above that is then translated by her interior senses so that she can receive the message.

A thought experiment will make this more understandable. When I say to you the word “telephone,” you cannot think of a telephone without drawing up an image in your imagination. This telephone is likely drawn from something in your own memory. In that way it is completely unique to you and if you began to describe it, it would like be very different from the image I had in mind when I said the word. In this way, the vision as Sr. Lucia describes it describes is the product of her own imagination and memory. Again, this is not to suggest that it is made up, only that the images themselves are drawn from her imagination.

Any interpretation has to factor how the prophetic light is received in because it is not like she has seen something on TV or a picture on a wall. She has received a light and her imagination has attempted to match the light she received. Of course, it is a prophetic light that is always beyond our natural capacity to know (St. Thomas says of prophecy that it “first and chiefly consists in knowledge, because, to wit, prophets know things that are far removed from man’s knowledge” (ST II-II, q.171, a.1)) and thus much more complicated than my simple telephone example. In other words, it is not the vision that matters so much as the interpretation, that is the explanation of what the actual light that was received consisted in. This is why when asked by Cardinal Sodano whether the interpretation of the vision was correct, Sr. Lucia said she had been given the vision but not the interpretation. She said it was up to the Church to interpret it, but once she was shown the interpretation she thought it corresponded with what she had seen.

Not only do we tend to focus too much on the vision itself, but we forget another important aspect of a truly Catholic understanding of prophecy. Most tend to think of prophecy as a foretelling of future events, but the Catholic understanding of prophecy is broader than this. As Cardinal Ratzinger says in his commentary, “prophecy in the biblical sense does not mean to predict the future but to explain the will of God for the present, and therefore show the right path to take for the future.” By overly focusing on the “prediction” piece of the vision, we can miss the message.

The Vision

With these principles in mind, we can turn to Sr. Lucia directly in her explanation of what she saw in the vision. Just after seeing an angel with a flaming sword crying out “Penance, penance, penance!” at which point Sr. Lucia saw

“an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it’ a Bishop dressed in White ‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father’. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. ‘Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.’”

Cardinal Ratzinger offers the following points of interpretation based on similar Biblical images:

The angel with the flaming sword on the left of Mary represents the threat of judgment looming over the world, just as we see in Book of Revelation—a particularly apt image as today man “himself, with his inventions, has forged the flaming sword.” The image shows the power that stands opposed to the force of destruction—the Mother of God and the seriousness with which we ought to respond to the call to penance
The mountain and city symbolize the arena of human history and how man is in great peril of bringing about his own destruction—the cross transforms destruction into salvation
Time is presented (the entire century is represented) in a compressed form, just as history is directed towards the Cross. It would be a century of a great suffering for Christians. Martyrs and even the Pope himself (“The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.” It is as Ratzinger says a “Via Crucis of an entire century”

Viewed through a wider-angled lens, prophecy is meant not primarily to clear up the incurable human blindness of the future, but the curable blindness of the present time. This is why it is so important not to get caught up in controversies surrounding the secrets and lose focus on the prophetic message of Fatima. While it is clear that the events depicted have come to pass, the prophetic nature of the message has not passed. The events were signs pointing to both the events themselves, but also, and primarily to the overall message of Fatima which is to become a people of both profound penance and dedication to the will of God through an imitation of Mary’s spirit of fiat (that is the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart). The events not only add credibility to the authenticity of the message, but also are signs through the suffering of the martyrs (the extreme form of Penance) and the Bishop dressed in white who cheated death through his dedication to the Immaculate Heart—his spirit of fiat exemplified through his episcopal motto, Totus tuus. As we recall this important Centenary, we can echo the thoughts of Pope Benedict that the events have passed while also saying “we would be mistaken to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.” Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!