All posts by Rob Agnelli

Mercy as the Last Word

Mercy, Pope Francis, Year of Mercy

In his book-length interview with Italian Journalist Andrea Tornielli entitled The Name of God is Mercy, Pope Francis offers what, is in essence, an extended commentary on his Bull of Indiction for the Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy.  Like his three Papal predecessors he is convinced that we are living in an important time of mercy.  Because of this, one gets a sense of urgency in his words as he tries to move us from mercy as an abstract idea to a concrete reality—a reality that in many ways is the Church’s only reason of existence.  “Wherever the Church is present, the mercy of the Father must be evident” (Misericordiae Vultus, 12).  He speaks of his experience as a confessor where he looks for the slightest opening in which God’s mercy might enter.  The Holy Father ardently believes that “when you feel His [Jesus] merciful embrace, when you let yourself be embraced, when you are moved—that’s  when life can change.”   He even draws parallels between the Church’s approach and that of the fictional priest, Fr. Gaston, in Bruce Marshall’s novel To Every Man a Penny.  A young, dying soldier comes to the priest for confession.  The problem is that although he confesses to numerous amorous affairs, he is unrepentant and admittedly would do it all over again.  Distressed that he will be unable to offer him absolution, Fr. Gaston asks the soldier if he is sorry that he is not sorry.  The priest absolves him based on that sorrow.  The Holy Father comments that it is simply proof “His mercy is infinitely greater than our sins.”

This Year of Mercy is not just about indulgences and confession, but as the Pontiff says, the  main purpose for calling this Jubilee is for the Church “to gaze even more attentively on mercy so that we may become a more effective sign of the Father’s action in our lives” (MV, 3).  His point is that while the Sacraments of the Church are efficacious signs of God’s mercy, the entire Church needs to contemplate this same divine attribute so that we all become sacraments of His mercy.  “[W]herever there are Christians, everyone should find an oasis of mercy” (MV, 12).

It is in this spirit of reflection and witness that the Holy Father expresses his “burning desire that, during this Jubilee, the Christian people may reflect on the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. It will be a way to reawaken our conscience, too often grown dull in the face of poverty. And let us enter more deeply into the heart of the Gospel where the poor have a special experience of God’s mercy” (MV, 15).

The Holy Father is inviting all the Faithful to participate in this great Jubilee of Mercy by actively practicing the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy.  These particular acts of love, because they touch those in most need, act as chisels on the hard hearted so that God’s mercy may enter.  The Works of Mercy have fallen into disuse in recent decades and so Francis reminds us all during his interview that the works of mercy are “still valid, still current.  Perhaps some aspects could be better ‘translated’ but they remain the basis for self-examination.”  If what Our Lord told St. Faustina is true, namely that, “I demand from you deeds of mercy, which are to arise out of love for Me. You are to show mercy to your neighbors always and everywhere. You must not shrink from this or try to excuse or absolve yourself from it” (Diary 742) then this is a grace filled time for us to re-introduce these practices to our spiritual lives.

Year of Mercy

It is helpful for us to reflect on two reasons why these practices may have slipped the minds of many in the Church.  The first is that we often fail to see God’s mercy as something personal and real for us.  Most of us don’t have great conversion stories or a real awareness of grave sin in our lives.  Sure we see places where we have drifted from God and He has led us back, but it is often so subtle that we do not even know it at the time.  That in and of itself is mercy.  To see into my own heart and no I am capable of just about anything at times and yet to never have fallen—that is mercy.  In fact to receive the mercy of preservation is one of the most beautiful gifts that God gives us.  He spares us so much pain.  This is why a favorite spiritual practice of St. Augustine when he did his Examen and could not find any sin that day was to thank God in His mercy for all the things that he kept the Saint from falling into.

The point is that we can never spread God’s mercy until we see how He has touched us personally with it.  The word mercy literally means “a heart moved by misery.”  If you do not know what misery “feels” like, it is very difficult to be moved by it in another.  This is why mercy and empathy go hand in hand.  Empathy, according to John Paul II, is “experiencing another person within ourselves as the other person experiences himself.”  It is a path to love and mercy because by seeing the other from the inside, we see them as a subject and not just an object.

A second reason why the Works of Mercy have fallen into disuse is because we set our goals to high.  We assume we must go somewhere to practice them.  We may not have time amidst our family life to volunteer at the Soup Kitchen.  But that misses the point.  How many of the Works of Mercy does a parent perform daily with their children?  Add the supernatural intention of showing them the love of God and all of family life becomes sanctifying.  Children grow up with an innate sense of the Merciful love of the Father.

Jesus addressed a similar obstacle to St. Faustina when he said,

“write this for the many souls who are often worried because they do not have the material means with which to carry out an act of mercy. Yet spiritual mercy, which requires neither permissions nor storehouses, is much more meritorious and is within the grasp of every soul. If a soul does not exercise mercy somehow or other, it will not obtain My mercy on the day of judgment. Oh, if only souls knew how to gather eternal treasure for themselves, they would not be judged, for they would forestall My judgment with their mercy.”

Pope Francis further attempted to simplify things by grouping the first four spiritual works of mercy (counsel the doubtful, teach the ignorant, forgive offenses, be patient with difficult people) are all part of the “apostolate of the ear.”  As proof that these are most needed at this time, look at all the money spent of therapists just because they listen to their patients!

There is one Spiritual Work of Mercy that ought to be of particular focus during this Year of Mercy and that is admonishing the sinner.  If there is one unforgivable sin today even among the most secular it is “being judgmental.”  While obviously this is an abuse of Jesus’ words to “judge not,” there is a truth to it.  Perhaps the greatest tragedy of a culture that is dominated by relativism is that it keeps so many from seeking God’s mercy (no absolute moral law, no sin, no need for mercy).  So it is extremely important that we all realize that to admonish the sinner without pointing them towards the mercy of God is no act of mercy.  It is simply a condemnation.  This is not because sin is inconsequential or because there is no such thing as mortal sin, but because sin can never have the last word.  God’s mercy is more powerful.  The Holy Father is quick to say that “The Church condemns sin because it has to relay the truth: ‘This is a sin.’ But at the same time, it embraces the sinner who recognizes himself as such, it welcomes him, it speaks to him of the infinite mercy of God.”

How different our approach to admonishing sinners is if we do so only with mercy in mind.  For those who have been truly touched by God’s mercy, they want nothing more than for that sinner to experience it too.  A good way to examine ourselves on how we are doing with this is to see our response when we encounter someone who is doing something gravely sinful.  Is my first response, almost visceral in that I despair that the person could be lost?  Or am I concerned only with the fact that they are breaking some rule?  Neither of the two downplays sin, but only the former allows mercy to have the final word.  In truth it might be that for those people who cannot point to specific instances of God’s mercy in their own lives, the greater Work of Mercy is not to admonish the sinner at all.  Blessed are the merciful, for mercy has been theirs!

Evolution and the Church

Faith and Reason, Science

In a 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences entitled Truth Cannot Contradict Truth, Pope St. John Paul II said “the Church takes a direct interest in the question of evolution, because it touches on the conception of man, whom Revelation tells us is created in the image and likeness of God.”  Rather than dismissing evolution as somehow anti-Christian, the Pontiff embraced it as “more than an hypothesis.”  To be clear, the Holy Father never actually endorsed a specific theory of evolution, but instead says it is “more accurate to speak of the theories of evolution” because many of the so-called theories of evolution are wrong because they rest on a flawed metaphysical system.  This shows how the two areas, philosophical and scientific, must remain in dialogue with each other if we are to find the truth about man’s origins.  If the scientific community will turn its evolutionary glance towards the most highly evolved Ox, St. Thomas Aquinas, then he can point them only in the direction of those theories that rest on a firm metaphysical foundation.

Mostly as a matter of polemics, there is a false dichotomy that is often set up between creation and evolution.  But the two need not be mutually exclusive.  All too often a belief in creation is often lumped together with what is commonly referred to in Christian fundamentalist circles as “creationism.”  Creationism starts with the view that the six days of creation are meant to be taken literally and then posits that the earth is about six thousand years old.  Of course when science examines the question of the age of the earth, it comes up with a much larger number.  Since “truth cannot contradict truth” it is the scientific that wins out because it seems to be more in line with human reason.  What starts out as a defense of the Christian faith ends up making it look absurd.  St. Thomas warns about attempting to invoke arguments like these for “the Christian faith that are ridiculous because they are in obvious contradiction to reason” and only serve to provoke the irrisio infedelium, the mockery of unbelievers.

Along the same lines, a second dichotomy is set up in that creation means that the Creator had to make the world perfect.  If it is not perfect, then it must be one based solely on chance.  St. Thomas would reject both viewpoints.  In response to the latter, St. Thomas himself addressed the question as to whether chance could govern the world. St. Thomas countered the neo-Darwinists’ of his time called the “atomists” who saw the variety in the world as the result of a random interplay of matter by arguing that variety is precisely the intention of the Creator.  God “brought forth many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided” (ST, I, q.47 a.1).  In fact, if the purpose of creation is to show forth the Creator, then this diversity would be exactly as one would expect.  Just as no work of art can express or exhaust everything an artist has to say because it is always limited by its material framework, likewise no creature can entirely express the Creator.

In response to those who say the existence of a Creator necessitates that the world be perfect, St. Thomas would say that the world, because it is not an end in itself, is actually is a state of becoming, rather than already perfected.  In fact while St. Thomas affirms the goodness of everything that exists (this is called ontological goodness), this does not imply that everything is the best that it can possibly be.  In fact he even says that God could have created a better world (ST I, q.25, a.6, ad.1).  While the world may be journeying towards its ultimate purpose, it is not yet there.

Meet your relatives

It is the philosophical underpinnings of the response to this false dichotomy that gives us a Thomistic launching pad for philosophically valid theories of evolution.  The idea that each goodness is “manifold and divided” and each creature is limited is expressed by St. Thomas in his distinction between essence and existence.  What Aquinas teaches is that everything that exists (while allowing for a possible exception) is constituted by an inner structure of two metaphysical principles.  The first is the act of existence by which the thing is present is the universe of real things.  The second is the manner in which its existence is limited and that is its essence or type of thing.  Think of existence having two dimensions.  The vertical dimension is like a ladder in that the variety of things each have an increasing “amount of existence” that is determined by how much being its particular nature can hold.  There is also a horizontal dimension in which things can share the same nature or essential form and be multiplied because of matter.  Just as essence limits existence, so too matter limits the number of individuals.  So while two rose plants are identical in nature (and therefore being), they do not have the same level of being as say a bear.

Philosophically, St. Thomas would say that there is a dynamic principle that governs the change by relying on the Aristotelian notion of act and potency.  As things change, there must be a principle of continuity that acts as a means for the thing to receive a new mode of being.  This aptitude is its potency or potentiality.  Potency can be either passive which is the capacity to receive some actual perfection from without or active which is the capacity to act from within.  Creatures in essence shape themselves.  They have an active potency or inner force that is governed by their nature that shapes what they become.

It is also necessary to include as foundational the Principle of Sufficient Reason.  The principle of causality, as it is commonly referred to, states that every being that lacks the sufficient reason for its own existence in itself must have an adequate efficient cause. It seems then that the central metaphysical problem related to evolution is how to explain it without violating the Principle of Sufficient Reason, specifically the causal axiom that “no effect can be greater than its cause.”  Drawing upon what was said above about active potencies as the ability to act by some inner power, we can say that two beings already in existing in nature may have the active potentiality to combine with each other under certain conditions to form a new being.  For example, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, both of which are flammable, combine to form a water molecule which has the opposite property of putting fires out.  This viewpoint may explain evolution in the pre-biological dimension of our world in which all change may be a change in degree.  However this theory cannot explain those changes that require a step up the ladder of being without violating the principle of sufficient reason.

One final principle that needs to be articulated is the distinction between differences in degree and differences in kind.  A difference in kind refers to the fact that there could not possibly an intermediary between the two (called the law of the excluded middle) while a difference in degree admits this possibility.  Two things differ in kind if one possesses a characteristic totally lacked by the other or if one can do something that the other cannot while a difference in degree is a characteristic that one has more of it and the other less.

Any solution to the question of evolution would need to conform to the principle of sufficient reason.  This means that it must present creation as containing some points of discontinuities and cannot be a wholly continuous process that has been set in motion.  Non-living creation shares in existence to a lesser extent than creation that has life.  There is a further division within the realm of living beings.  All living beings have a soul, but they are different in kind and not just degree. These kinds of souls, delineated as vegetative, sensitive and rational, serve as animating principles for living beings.  All living things have vegetative powers in their souls, but only plants have a vegetative soul.  Likewise both man and the animals have sensitive powers in their soul, but only animals have a sensitive soul.  Only man, with reason and will, has a rational soul.  It seems natural to posit that the points of discontinuity would be reflective of these distinctions.  A Thomistic theory of evolution then could be developed by dividing the problem into four distinct areas.

The first would be evolution in the non-living universe from the beginning to the formation of the earth.  In order to satisfy the principle of sufficient reason all that seems to be needed is the infusion of a range of active potentialities (even if they are somehow dormant) in the universe.  This integration would require an Organizing Intelligence but would not require any further special intervention of the Creator (although there is room for such an intervention in theory).

Secondly we could speak of the evolution of plant life.  The principle of sufficient reason requires that an outside source of causality would be needed to move up the ladder of being from non-living to living.  The matter in the plants may have the passive potentiality to receive life, but that life would need to be supplied from an outside source.

Next we could speak of evolution of subhuman animals.  The presence of the sensitive powers must indicate a difference in kind because between the presence of these powers and the lack there are no intermediaries possible.  Therefore this suggests that there is a new level of being here as well.

It should be mentioned that the idea of microevolution within species presents no special philosophical problem because they could be the result of accidental changes with the same nature that produces beings that have only a difference in degree.  Many scientists such as Francis Collins have said that these accidental changes could be brought about by an active potentiality that consists in gene jumping in response to a given environment.  This may in fact become so cumulative that the later entities are no longer able to breed with the earlier and thus a new species is judged.  This however does not imply a qualitatively new level of being.

Finally, we come to the final step and that is the “evolution” of man.  Once again we find that man represents a jump up the ladder of being through the spirituality of the human soul.  The ability to form abstractions is attributed to man along with propositional speech, tool making for future use, and cumulative culture all mark a transcendence of the immediate environment.  These non-material powers cannot be explained by the combination of material causes and in fact would need the intervention of some outside non-material cause.

Notice that throughout the discussion we did not rely on Divine Revelation at all.  This is not because Divine Revelation has nothing useful to say or that we should ignore it.  It was simply beyond the scope of what was being proposed.  Science, philosophy and Divine Revelation are all reliable sources of knowledge and in an ideal world all three should be working in unison to come up with a unified vision of man’s origin.  This essay simply took a bottom up approach that would require no faith on the part of the scientist.  Followed properly, any reasonable person would begin to ask what (or Who) this non-material source might be.  In a future essay we will add the guidelines imposed by Divine Revelation to complete the full picture.

Moving the Grounds

Abortion

When asked about her stance on abortion during the 2008 election, candidate Hillary Clinton said she believes

 “that the potential for life begins at conception. I am a Methodist, as you know. My church has struggled with this issue. In fact, you can look at the Methodist Book of Discipline and see the contradiction and the challenge of trying to sort that very profound question out.

But for me, it is also not only about a potential life; it is about the other lives involved. And, therefore, I have concluded, after great concern and searching my own mind and heart over many years, that our task should be in this pluralistic, diverse life of ours in this nation that individuals must be entrusted to make this profound decision, because the alternative would be such an intrusion of government authority that it would be very difficult to sustain in our kind of open society. And as some of you’ve heard me discuss before, I think abortion should remain legal, but it needs to be safe and rare.”

One could easily multiply the examples of similar responses among Secretary Clinton’s political friends.  There is a certain modus operandi to addressing moral issues that begins with a verbal sleight of hand.  Very subtly, the former Secretary of State moved the grounds of argument against abortion.  By mentioning her Methodist upbringing, she is suggesting that abortion is tied to one’s faith.  She further cements her position by mentioning a “pluralistic” society.   The unspoken assumption is that knowledge derived from faith is entirely subjective and therefore should not be forced upon someone else.  This approach is the genesis of the “I am personally opposed, but…” defense.

As people of faith who see abortion for the true horror that it is, we need to demand that the issue no longer be discussed in terms of faith.  Instead we must move the grounds on which the intellectual battle for life is fought—grounds based on human reason alone.  In truth, the only religious part of the argument is that we believe that man is intrinsically valuable because he is made in the image and likeness of God.  Although it might be for a different reason, even the Constitution in the 14th Amendment recognizes that man has equal protection under the law.  Unfortunately, I think the majority of pro-lifers fail to recognize this and cannot defend their position using anything other than religious reasoning.

March for Life

The argument can be put forward in a very simple manner and we can gain some traction in this sound-bite culture by being able to make it succinctly.  It has three simple premises.  The first is a scientific premise and it is that human life begins at conception.  This is a scientific premise and you would be hard pressed to find a single biologist or doctor that would say otherwise.  In fact when Congress investigated this scientific premise in 1981 they found that “Physicians, biologists, and other scientists agree that conception marks the beginning of the life of a human being – a being that is alive and is a member of the human species. There is overwhelming agreement on this point in countless medical, biological, and scientific writing” (Human Life Bill 1981).  Most Pro-Abortionists will concede the same point.  Long before his conversion, the founder of NARAL, Bernard Nathanson said, “Modern technologies have convinced us that beyond question the unborn child is simply another human being, another member of the human community, indistinguishable in every way from any of us.”  This coming from a man who admitted to having a hand in some 60,000 abortions.

Despite the use of the term “Fertilized Egg”, the newly conceived child is biologically distinct from his or her parents and has his or her own DNA.  Now the only thing necessary for growth and development is the same thing we need—water, food, oxygen and a healthy interaction with its natural environment.

The second premise is the Moral Premise.  All humans have the right to life because they are humans.  Steven Schwarz developed the SLED acronym to defend the moral premise.  He looks at the four main ways that a pre-born child differs from a full grown adult and sees if they carry any moral weight.  The four things are Size, Level of Development, Environment, and Degree of Dependency

Does the size of the person affect their status as persons?  At 7”3, Hasheem Thabeet is the tallest player in the NBA.  Is he more of a person than me because I am only 5”8?  The answer obviously is no.  Does the level of development affect the moral status of the person?  Is a 6 year old less of a person than a 20 year old?  Again, no reasonable person would say that.  Does it matter where someone is as to whether they are a person or not?  Is a person in the Amazon less of a person than a person in the U.S.?  Quite obviously the answer is no.  Finally, does the fact that one is dependent on others for survival determine their personhood?   Is a 14 year old on dialysis less of a person than a healthy 12 year old? No.  So in each of the four physical differences there is no moral difference.  So then then neither the size, nor the level of development, nor the environment nor the dependency should have any moral bearing on the personhood of the preborn child.

I mentioned the third premise earlier and that is the legal premise based on the 14th Amendment.  Justice Harry Blackmum mentioned the same thing in the Court’s opinion in Roe v Wade when he said, “(If the) suggestion of personhood [of the preborn] is established, the [abortion rights] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life is then guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment.”

Keep in mind that to refute this argument, one must reject one of the three premises.  The legal premise is the one that virtually everyone agrees upon.  It used to be that the scientific premise was the one that was rejected, but given our culture’s obsession with science it is attacked less and less.  Now the second premise is the one that is attacked by saying that a human being must perform an arbitrary set of functions to gain personhood.  Not surprisingly, it is those in power who ultimately decide what those functions should be.  That is why the question of abortion is ultimately related to Euthanasia as well.  All they have done is apply the logic that allows abortion and extended it beyond life in the womb.

It is worth addressing as well Mrs. Clinton’s comment regarding the child being “potential life.”  This is another common verbal sleight of hand that should be exposed.  For anything to be a potential “X” it must be an actual “Y.”  The question is, if it is not a child, what is it currently?  Now we get into uncharted waters because no one who is in favor of abortion can actually tell you what it currently is.  They can’t rely on science—no reputable embryologist refers to it as a clump of cells and science already tells us it is a human organism.  So they usually just keep the label “potential.”

In the end, abortion becomes a huge issue, and not just for the women who have one and the children who are killed.  It sets up a mindset in which the practice of arbitrarily drawing lines defining personhood becomes the norm.  People are often scandalized when someone like Princeton Professor Peter Singer advocates for a 28-day waiting period in which it would be morally permissible to kill your newborn.  But he is nothing if not logically consistent.  Why must we draw the line at birth?  In truth the only clear dividing line is at conception and we must do all within our power to show why this is the case.

On Christian Unity

Ecumenism, Evangelization

Historically, the division of Christianity marks the beginning of the end of Christian Culture.  There are a number of historical causes for this, but the most prominent is the “religious wars” that resulted from the Protestant movement.  Rightly or wrongly so, it was the Christian faith as a whole that was blamed for the wars.  Many began to wonder whether doctrinal disputes could be worth so much bloodshed.  This religious division touched the lives of nearly everyone and many had a difficult time believing that the neighbor who happened to have a different set of beliefs, but who they knew so well, was going to hell.  In this climate, the doctrines of the individual churches didn’t seem to matter as much and people began to investigate other arenas as avenues to truth.  In this soil, the Enlightenment philosophy was able to take root especially since science seemed to provide many answers in a rapid fashion to questions about the universe, while issues in theology seemed to go unresolved.  People began to see science as the source for truth and no longer looked to religion. These advances in science also gave assurance of God’s power and wisdom, but led people to a “natural religion that could be established by reason alone.  This natural religion spoke only of the basic truths about the existence of God and human morality known to all mankind.  Eventually religion became merely a means for maintaining decent behavior and social order.  It would seem almost common sense then, that in order to stem the rising tide of secularism, a restoration of Christian unity is necessary.

John Paul II commented numerous times throughout his Pontificate that Christian unity has suffered “deep lacerations” in the course of history through which “large communities came to be separated from full communion with the Catholic Church-for which, often enough, men of both sides were to blame” (Unitatis Redintegratio, 3)  However, the historical situation has now changed in that “(T)he children who are born into these Communities and who grow up believing in Christ cannot be accused of the sin involved in the separation, and the Catholic Church embraces upon them as brothers, with respect and affection” (UR, 3).  In other words, there is very little to be gained at this point in time to play a blame game.  A divided Christianity is our present reality and this reality is a great scandal to the world.   In a world marked by sin and division, unity stands out.  This is why Jesus prayed in His High Priestly Prayer that His followers would remain united because that unity would be a sign that He had come from the Father (Jn. 17:21-23).  In other words, the unity of all Christians has its own evangelical force, drawing people to the Truth Who is Jesus Christ. It is in this spirit that the Church has marked this week as the International Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

In his Encylclical, Ut Unum Sint, Pope St. John Paul II surveyed the ecumenical landscape that was created by the openness of the Second Vatican Council and offered a primer on how this unity could be restored.  He emphasized the need for prayer not just because it is necessary for all things, but because it is both a sign and a fulfillment of the desired unity:

It must not be forgotten in fact that the Lord prayed to the Father that his disciples might be one, so that their unity might bear witness to his mission and the world would believe that the Father had sent him (cf. Jn 17:21). It can be said that the ecumenical movement in a certain sense was born out of the negative experience of each one of those who, in proclaiming the one Gospel, appealed to his own Church or Ecclesial Community. This was a contradiction which could not escape those who listened to the message of salvation and found in this fact an obstacle to acceptance of the Gospel. Regrettably, this grave obstacle has not been overcome. It is true that we are not yet in full communion. And yet, despite our divisions, we are on the way towards full unity, that unity which marked the Apostolic Church at its birth and which we sincerely seek. Our common prayer, inspired by faith, is proof of this.

Drawing on the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the Holy Father also provided the faithful with a game plan of sorts.  Although the Council Fathers sought to enter dialogue with the whole world, they marked a clear delineation between the different groups.  Often it is the case that the terms “ecumenism” and “interreligious dialogue” are used interchangeably.  However the Council makes a clear distinction between these two terms because they have very different goals. Ecumenism is directed towards our fellow Christians with the goal of Christian unity so as to remove the “division openly contradicts the will of Christ, scandalizes the world, and damages the holy cause of preaching the Gospel to every creature” (UR, 1). Interreligious dialogue, on the other hand, involves dialogue with non-Christian religions with the same goal of unity but it cannot be separated from proclamation of the Gospel.

The one Church still is found in physical form today and subsists in the Catholic Church (Lumen Gentium, 8).  There has been some controversy around the use of the term subsists but the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith offered some clarification in 2007 saying:

[T]he use of this expression, which indicates the full identity of the Church of Christ with the Catholic Church, does not change the doctrine on the Church. Rather, it comes from and brings out more clearly the fact that there are “numerous elements of sanctification and of truth” which are found outside her structure, but which “as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel towards Catholic Unity.

It follows that these separated churches and Communities, though we believe they suffer from defects, are deprived neither of significance nor importance in the mystery of salvation. In fact the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as instruments of salvation, whose value derives from that fullness of grace and of truth which has been entrusted to the Catholic Church.

The point is that while the Catholic Church is the one true Church founded by Christ, sources of sanctification can be found within other Churches and ecclesial communities.  These sources of sanctification have their source from within the treasures of the Catholic Church with whom Christ left the whole dowry.

Christian Unity

In general, most Catholics struggle to hold both the truth that the true Church subsists in the Catholic Church and that other communities can be sources of sanctification in tension.  What usually happens is that one aspect is over-emphasized to the detriment of the other and one or two attitudes usually emerges.

Very often those who consider themselves “traditional” Catholics will emphasize the fact that Jesus started one Church.  For them, Protestant communities become a source of mockery.  They see the Church as having the fullness of truth and we should condescend in giving it to them. This “convert or else” type mentality is something that John Paul II addressed in Ut Unum Sint  when he says that  in the other communities, elements of the “Christian mystery have at times been more effectively emphasized.”  The Holy Father’s point is best understood when we examine what he is saying through his personalistic lens.

John Paul II had a unique way of examining the truths of the faith using personalism.  He thought that any truth had two dimensions—the objective (which he called notional) and subjective (which he called real).  There is the objective fact and the subjective experience of that fact.  Faith, for Karol Wojtyla the Philosopher, involved moving the notional knowledge of the truth from the head to a real knowledge that is concrete personal, experiential, and taken to the heart.  So then while Catholics have the fullness of truth (notional and ontological) there are those who may live it better (real and existential) and so we can learn from them how those truths can be better lived out.  This is why Catholics in religious dialogue are not merely condescending but truly in a position of learning.  Many Protestant communities live out certain aspects of the Gospel better than Catholics do and we can learn how to make those truths more present in the Church.  Once these are more present, the Church will look more appealing to those who are separated and they will see how their experience of the truth fits into the fullness of truth overall.

The second attitude is one more in line with “tolerance.”   But if we truly believe that the Jesus has entrusted the Church with a great treasure to be shared, why wouldn’t we share it?  If we examine ourselves we may find that we don’t really believe that.  But if we do, then it is a supreme act of charity to share the fullness of the faith with someone.  Certainly we should take the reminder from the Council Fathers to heart that “the way and method in which the Catholic faith is expressed should never become an obstacle to dialogue with our brethren. It is, of course, essential that the doctrine should be clearly presented in its entirety. Nothing is so foreign to the spirit of ecumenism as a false irenicism, in which the purity of Catholic doctrine suffers loss and its genuine and certain meaning is clouded” (UR, 11).  In an age of religious relativism this serves a stark reminder that while the truth itself may be divisive, we as Catholics must avoid being divisive in the manner in which we present that truth.  But still we should actively engage others in order to share of the fullness that we have received.

This ultimately is why the onus for Christian unity falls upon us as Catholics.  Many non-Catholics have no idea on what they are missing.  Sure, they could get to Heaven even if they aren’t Catholic, but do we love them enough to show them just how full Christ’s Revelation really is?  Do we love them enough to bring them to the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist of which Our Lord warned that it was impossible to have life without?  There will come a day when we as Catholics will have to answer for the ignorance of our friends and neighbors.

Although the Catholic Church was somewhat late in entering the ecumenical arena compared with other Christians, they are the only ones who are still committed to the ecumenical movement’s original goal of the unity in Christ’s one Church in doctrine and practice.  This is precisely because the Council Fathers grounded their approach in solid principles.  In this week of Prayer for Christian Unity let us all examine our commitment to this most necessary cause.

 

How Could I Be Happy?

Last Things

“How can people be happy in Heaven,” my friend asked, “knowing that their unsaved loved ones are suffering in Hell?”  Although this question is often asked by atheists we should have more than apologetical reasons for examining it.   We have probably all been confronted with this question or even pondered it ourselves.  After all it is a valid question, especially when confronted with the fact that people we know and love are very far from God and it would hurt us deeply to know they ended up in hell.  A close examination is merited because the web is filled with responses from well-intending Christians  that make Christians look like unthinking sociopaths.  Never one to avoid the hard questions, St. Thomas Aquinas offers us an answer to this sticky question in the Summa Theologiae (Supp. Q.94).

In order to understand St. Thomas’ response, we have to first admit that the question seems unanswerable.  It seems that either we do not love both God and neighbor perfectly in Heaven or we are not perfectly happy there.  Seemingly, the only way out of this dilemma is to deny one of the two contraries.  This is why St. Thomas is such a master at these types of questions—because he lived and taught by the Scholastic dictum that we should “Never deny, seldom affirm, and always distinguish.”

His point was not that we should be wishy-washy about things but that when faced with a dilemma like this, the answer lies in “both-and” rather than not in “either-or.”  In that regard, it is not just a Scholastic principle, but an eminently Catholic one.  And, for the question at hand, St. Thomas makes an important distinction about the way we love in Heaven.

In asking the question as to whether the blessed in heaven pity those in hell, St. Thomas formulates the following response to the objection that because pity proceeds from charity and charity is perfect in heaven, the blessed ought to pity those in hell.

Charity is the principle of pity when it is possible for us out of charity to wish the cessation of a person’s unhappiness. But the saints cannot desire this for the damned, since it would be contrary to Divine justice. Consequently the argument does not prove.

It seems he does not answer the question.  But what he is doing is clearing up the misconception that love on earth and love in heaven are the same thing.  Love on earth causes not only joy, but also suffering.  The amount of our suffering is in proportion to our love of the other person—the more we love the beloved, the more we suffer (and the more we rejoice in their good).  This earthly love has both an active component in that we work to alleviate or share their suffering and a passive component in that seeing them suffer causes suffering in us.  This is when we “feel sorry for” them.  This is felt most acutely when the beloved is engaged in something that is particularly self-destructive.  We both want them to get better (active), but also feel sorry for them (passive).  In heaven, love is wholly active and the passive component passes away.  The blessed will still love the damned person from heaven, but the passive part of love will cease.  They will no longer “feel sorry for them.”  In other words, the blessed will not suffer because of the sufferings of the damned.

Rich_Man_Lazarus

An analogy may help to clarify more fully.  The experience of many who do prison ministry is almost universal—they find themselves torn.  While they know the prisoner has done something that cries out for justice, they also feel sad for the prisoner’s loss (this is passive love).  This sorrow moves them to work for the prisoner’s conversion (this is active love).  Now in heaven, when the time to convert has passed and they no longer feel the passive love of sadness, all that is left is the joy of justice.

While the argument so far may seem to make sense, it seems awfully cold.  How can one rejoice in justice at the expense of the suffering of the damned?  St. Thomas puts the objection this way:

Now it is most reprehensible in a wayfarer to take pleasure in the pains of others, and most praiseworthy to grieve for them. Therefore the blessed nowise rejoice in the punishment of the damned.

And his reply

It is not praiseworthy in a wayfarer to rejoice in another’s afflictions as such: yet it is praiseworthy if he rejoice in them as having something annexed. However it is not the same with a wayfarer as with a comprehensor, because in a wayfarer the passions often forestall the judgment of reason, and yet sometimes such passions are praiseworthy, as indicating the good disposition of the mind, as in the case of shame pity and repentance for evil: whereas in a comprehensor there can be no passion but such as follows the judgment of reason.

What St. Thomas is saying here relates to our ways of knowing.  In our fallen state as wayfarers, our passions often run ahead of reason and either cause us to judge wrongly or judge slowly.  Using the prison minister being torn as an example is illuminative here as well.  Once he gets emotionally invested in the prisoner, justice seems to fade into the background.  Justice is seen merely as an abstract principle, while the prisoner is real flesh and blood (concrete).  He may eschew justice altogether or he may need to constantly remind himself the just reason for the prisoner’s incarceration.

In heaven, two things will change.  First, justice will no longer be something abstract but something concrete.  What this experience is like we do not know, but there are no abstractions in heaven.  Second, passions will no longer go ahead of reason.  This means the blessed will be able to separate the reasons for their joy from the causes of their sorrow.  In other words, they will rejoice because God’s justice is done while still having active charity and goodwill towards those who are damned.  What they will not do however is feel sorry for them.

In essence what St Thomas is saying is that the blessed do not take pleasure in the sufferings of the damned.  The pleasure that they take is in the goodness of divine justice.  Neither do they feel pity for the damned because they have no reason to.  Yet, they still actively will the good of the damned just as God does.

While this discussion may be philosophically satisfying, will it ultimately satisfy an atheist interlocutor?  Probably not.  The reason is because of their conception of happiness.  Without a proper understanding of what it means to be happy none of this makes sense.  To the modern mind, happiness is synonymous with contentment.  It is seen subjectively as a temporary feeling that is dependent on external circumstances.  That the word happy comes from the Old English word for “chance” is a perfect illustration of this.  Classically understood though, happiness is a translation of the Greek word eudaemonia which defines happiness as a condition of the soul that finds its ultimate fulfillment in the beatific vision.  The point is that this is a question that can only be answered satisfactorily from the inside.  Until one is convinced that having God means having everything and that not having God is nothing, it becomes little more than a red herring.  Best to turn the tables on them Socratically and ask them what they mean by “happy.”

Living the Mysteries

Incarnation, Prayer, The Life of Jesus

Two weeks after being elected as Pope, St. John Paul II gave the members of the Church a glimpse into one of his secrets to sanctity when he admitted that the “Rosary is my favorite prayer. A marvelous prayer! Marvelous in its simplicity and its depth.”  Its simplicity is marked by its humanity.  Unlike any other method of Christian prayer, it engages the entire person—hands, voice, imagination, memory, intellect and will.  Its depth is unparalleled because of its content—the Mysteries of the Life of Christ offered to us food for contemplation.  As Paul VI said, without contemplation “the Rosary is a body without a soul and its recitation is in danger of becoming a mechanical repetition of formulas and of going counter to the warning of Christ: “And in praying do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard for their many words” (Mt. 6:7)…” (Blessed Paul VI, Marialis Cultus, 47).  Unfortunately, for many of us who pray the Rosary regularly, this danger is ever-present.

Why do we refer to the events in which we contemplate as the Mysteries of the Rosary?  What exactly do we mean when we use the word “Mysteries” when referring to the events in the life of Christ?  Once we are able to grasp the meaning and implications of using this term, the Rosary comes alive and becomes a source of grace in the life of every Christian who prays it.

In his book titled Christ in His Mysteries, Blessed Columba Marmion defines mysteries as “human and visible signs of a divine and hidden reality.”  He uses “mysteries” in the plural to differentiate from the Mystery of the Incarnation as a whole in order to refer to the fact that in Christ’s life there were no mere events or circumstances.  Everything He did and said has eternal significance and dimension.

The truth that everything that the Word Made Flesh did during His earthly sojourn was charged with eternal meaning stems from the very nature of the Incarnation; time and eternity meet in each event in the life of Christ.  He may have been performing the simplest human action but it was always the Eternal, Unchanging God Who did it.  It may have been accomplished at a specific historic moment, but it is an act that reverberates through all times.  This means that although the historical duration of His actions are past, “they still influence us because each of the mysteries brings its own special grace for our salvation” (Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 165).

Because of this, Blessed Columba says that all of Christ’s mysteries are meant to become our mysteries.  Christ received the fullness of grace in His sacred humanity but it was not for Himself alone.  Instead it is for us—“of His fullness that we have all received grace upon grace”(John 1:16).    What he means is not just that we collectively receive graces from each of His mysteries, but individually.  The Catechism, quoting John Paul II’s Encyclical Redemptor Hominis, says that “All Christ’s riches ‘are for every individual and are everybody’s property” (CCC 521—emphasis added).  This means that I can say not just Christ came for us but echo St. Paul’s conviction that Christ “loved me and gave Himself up for me” Gal 2:20).

Fra Angelico--Crucifixion with Sts Dominic and Thomas

In order to take ownership of what Christ won for me, I have to come to the conviction Christ had me very specifically in mind when each of these events happened.  Cultivating this conviction is the key to applying the events of the Gospel to our lives and to praying the Mysteries of the Rosary well.

This is where it is helpful to look at some of the effects of the Incarnation.  Specifically, how could Jesus, a man in all things but sin, have had me in mind when He did something?  After all, He was, like all of us, constrained by time.  He did not have “time” to think of all people, at all times when He did something.  But this was no mere earthly man, but the “man come down from heaven” (John 6:46) whose soul was united to the Second Person of the Trinity. In Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer in John’s Gospel, He says that eternal life is that the blessed should know God.  When we speak of the beatific vision, what we mean is eternal union with God.  Christ’s soul had this from the moment of conception because it was more closely united to God than any other soul.  It was united in the Person.  This truth is more than mere theological musing, but has very specific consequences related to our discussion.  In Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII says “[F]or hardly was He conceived in the womb of the Mother of God, when He began to enjoy the Beatific Vision, and in that vision all the members of His Mystical Body were continually and unceasingly present to Him, and He embraced them with His redeeming love. O marvelous condescension of divine love for us! O inestimable dispensation of boundless charity! In the crib, on the Cross, in the unending glory of the Father, Christ has all the members of the Church present before Him and united to Him in a much clearer and more loving manner than that of a mother who clasps her child to her breast, or than that with which a man knows and loves himself” (75).  I never ceased to leave His mind during His earthly life even as I never cease to leave it today.

This awareness that I was present to Christ when a specific event was occurring changes the very tenor of my prayer.  I am able to enter the event in the manner that He intended and participate it.  I may speak to Him about the specific grace that He won for me and ask Him to prepare me to receive it.  Without this, Christian meditation is always in danger of becoming merely pious sentiments or intellectual investigation instead of a Spirit-driven response to the Word made Flesh.

This is what make the Rosary such a powerful Christian prayer.  By contemplating the Joyful Mysteries, I am able to be present in the “Hidden Years” of Christ’s life when He wins the graces of everyday life for me.  By contemplating the Luminous Mysteries, I am able to be present in those moments when Christ sought to reveal Himself more fully to me.  By contemplating the Sorrowful Mysteries, I am able to be present in those moments of His sufferings offering Him consolation.  By contemplating the Glorious Mysteries, I am able to share now in the personal fruits of the Resurrection and Pentecost with Mary, the Queen Assumed into Heaven.  The point is that the Rosary grows in depth in proportion to our habit of placing ourselves within the specific mystery, knowing we were already there in Christ’s mind and that He has something very specific He intended to give us personally.

Very often art can teach us deep truths in ways that mere words cannot.  It seems that no artist captures this truth regarding our presence with Christ during His life than Blessed Giovanni of Fiesole, better known as Fra Angelico.  In many of his paintings that depict scenes from the life of Christ, he also includes a well-known saint alongside Him to reveal this deep truth.  May we too strive to take our rightful places in the life of Our Lord!

 

Our Lady and the Muslims

Islam, Mary

In his Life of St. Francis of Assisi St. Bonaventure tells of his spiritual father’s “glowing charity” toward the Muslims that “urged his spirit unto martyrdom.”  He gained entrance into the presence of the Sultan of Babylon. “When the Sultan inquired by whom, why and how they had been sent, Francis replied with an intrepid heart that the Most High God had sent him to point out to the Sultan and his people the way of salvation and to announce the Gospel of truth.  Inspired from heaven, Francis continued: ‘If you wish to be converted to Christ along with your people, I will most gladly stay with you for love of him. But if you hesitate. . .then command that an enormous fire be lit and I will walk into the fire along with your priests so that you will recognize which faith deserves to be held as holier and more certain.’”  While the Sultan never took Francis up on his offer for conversion or martyrdom, the saint did earn his admiration and was eventually released  The frustration that Francis experienced in preaching the Gospel and leading Muslims to conversion is something that the Church as a whole has long struggled with.  It seems that, with very few exceptions, Muslims as a whole are unconvertable.

Certainly there are within the Islam  corpus of teachings that help to explain this.  First of all, the death penalty for apostasy is deeply ingrained in Islamic culture to the point that it is often the family of the convert who turns them over to the authorities.  This practice has its root in both the Qur’an and the Hadith of Muhammad.  In Surah 9:11-12, the author of the Qur’an declares that “But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then are they your brethren in religion. We detail our revelations for a people who have knowledge. And if they break their pledges after their treaty (hath been made with you) and assail your religion, then fight the heads of disbelief — Lo! they have no binding oaths in order that they may desist.”  While there is some difference in opinions as to whether this particular verse applies to apostates particularly, it is the Hadith (the sayings and teachings of Muhammad) that make this particular teaching binding.  “Abdullah reported Allah’s Messenger as saying: It is not permissible to take the life of a Muslim who bears testimony (to the fact that there is no god but Allah, and I am the Messenger of Allah, but in one of the three cases: the married adulterer, a life for life, and the deserter of his Din [Islam], abandoning the community” (Chapter 6,  Bk.16, no. 4152).

Fear is not the only reason why conversion has been slow.  More fundamentally, conversion is blocked for the same reason that few Christians convert to Judaism—Islam is believed to be the fullness of God’s revelation and to convert to Christianity (or even Judaism) would be a step backwards.  Muslims believe that the history of the world is divided into periods of different prophets.  First there was Moses and Torah (Tawrat), then Jesus and the Gospel (Injil) and then definitively, Muhammad and the Qur’an.  A core Islamic belief regarding the “People of the Book”, that is Jews and Christians, is that they corrupted God’s Revelation.  The Old and New Testaments contain fragments of what used to be a legitimate form of revelation but has been tampered with.

Despite these difficulties, conversion is still a possibility.  When the Church in Mexico could make no evangelical inroads with the natives to the point that he feared armed resistance, Bishop Zumarraga called on Our Lady’s help  In short order, Our Lady of Guadalupe intervened and there were 9 million converts in less than a decade.  So too does she desire to bring Muslims to her Son and home to the Father.

In setting aside some of the apocalyptic interpretations, the number of Marian apparitions in the Middle East has taken a decidedly steep uptick in recent decades.  What makes these particular apparitions so powerful is that they are fully visible to all present, and can even be captured on camera.  While the Church has yet to authenticate them, it might serve as a sign that Our Lady is ready to act in a miraculous way.

Why might we be looking at a situation similar to what was witnessed on this Continent in the 16th Century?  Because of the Muslim regard for Mary.  Just as she served as the bridge between God and Man by lending her humanity to God’s own Son, she may serve as a bridge between Christians and Muslims.

In his biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton said that what made St. Thomas such a great evangelist and defender of the faith was the principle “that we must either not argue with a man at all or we must argue on his grounds and not ours.”  So if we are to win Muslims to the Faith we must find bridges between their beliefs and ours.  Realistically, Jesus is not that bridge.  Their beliefs regarding Isa render the true Jesus practically unrecognizable.  But when it comes to the Mother of God, they are surprisingly close to the Christian belief.

Our Lady and Our Lord infant

Surah 19 bears the name “Mary” and in it we find a narrative of the Annunciation and the Islamic defense of the Virgin Birth.  Clearly drawing from apocryphal sources like the Protoevangelium of James, the Qur’an also says much with regard to Mary’s childhood.  She is portrayed as constantly under direct divine protection, nourished by angels and blessed with heavenly visions regularly (Surah 3:32).  All of this detail serves as confirmation of Mary’s greatness.

The Muslims even believe in a reduced form of the Immaculate Conception.  In Islamic theology, man is incapable of entering into a relationship with Allah and therefore there is nothing like the Christian doctrine of Original Sin.  However they do believe that mankind has a natural defectibility which makes each member impure from birth.  In Hadith 4506 it is said that ” “When any human being is born, Satan touches him at both sides of the body with his two fingers, except Jesus, the son of Mary, whom Satan tried to touch but failed, for he touched the placenta-cover instead.” From this Hadith and from Surah 3:35-37 Islamic commentators have put forth the principle of Mary’s original purity.

While there are some inconsistencies related to the fact that Mary is portrayed as unwed at the time of the Annunciation and a confusing narrative which seems to suggest that she is Moses’ sister (Surah 19:28), these differences are far outweighed by the similarities.  Why is this?  Because one of Mary’s titles in the Old Roman Missal was the “Destoyer of Heresies.”  Wherever she is honored, heresies are destroyed.  All Mary does is lead people to her Son.  When we honor her, she responds by leading us more fully to her Son.  Venerable Fulton Sheen in The World’s First Love says

“Mary is the advent of Christ, bringing Christ to the people before Christ Himself is born. In an apologetic endeavor, it is always best to start with that which people already accept. Because the Moslems have a devotion to Mary, our missionaries should be satisfied merely to expand and to develop that devotion, with the full realization that Our Blessed Lady will carry the Moslems the rest of the way to her divine Son. She is forever a traitor, in the sense that she will not accept any devotion for herself, but will always bring anyone who is devoted to her to her divine Son. As those who lose devotion to her lose belief in the divinity of Christ, so those who intensify devotion to her gradually acquire that belief.”

To the extent that we are faithful to Jesus’ command to take His Mother into our homes and consecrate ourselves to her and her evangelical mission of converting Muslims then we will begin to see waves of Islamic conversions.  For Muslims too have a devotion to Our Lady.  After the Virgin Mary, Muhammad’s daughter Fatima is held in the highest regard among women.  Let us then follow Our Lady of Fatima’s command to pray the Rosary daily and offer it for the conversion of Muslims.

The Effects of Matrimony

marriage, Sacraments

In her excellent book, Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell quotes some alarming statistics regarding the Church in the United States.  One in particular bears mention and that is the number of marriages celebrated in the Church has decreased by 60 percent since 1972.  What makes this alarming is not only that the number of  Sacramental Marriages has decreased, but instead it signals a divorce between marriage and its sanctifying effect in many people’s minds.  This essay offers some reflections in this regard.

All the sacraments confer sanctifying grace but each one also has special graces attached to it called sacramental graces.  Matrimony (for ease of use, I will use the term “Matrimony” to refer to the Marriage that is sacramentally constituted) is no different in this regard.

Nowhere else is the dictum that “grace perfects nature” more visible than in Matrimony.  Marriage is part of man’s constitution “in the beginning.”  Man and woman by nature are drawn to it.  Yet in our fallen state, the relationship between the spouses is marked by strife and division.  The conjugal instinct, that is the desire to give of oneself fully to another person remains, but it becomes tainted with selfishness and division (Gn 3:16).  By wedding Himself to mankind in the Incarnation, God has come to heal this division and make it a living sign of His relationship with the Church, His Bride (Eph 5:22-33).  This visible sign, constituted as a Sacrament, becomes an infallible means of sanctification.

It is important to make two key distinctions at this point.  While the Sacrament of Marriage requires only that the man and woman be baptized and exchange consent (and that there are no impediments like already being married, age, etc.) in order to be valid, this does not mean that its sanctifying effects are felt by all.  Matrimony is referred to as a “Sacrament of the Living” meaning that its effects remain bound when the spouses are not in a state of grace (or fall into sin during the marriage).

The second distinction has to do with the nature of the Sacrament itself.  The sanctifying grace is not simply given on the day of the wedding.  Instead this Sacrament is continually exercised by the spouses and is a means of ongoing sanctification.  Each instance of self-giving love causes the spouses to grow in conformity to Christ.  This does not mean “great” acts of service and love only, but the very simple domestic acts all married couples must deal with.  In other words, every moment of married life causes holiness in both the husband and the wife.  Rather than division and competition, the spouses strive “to outdo one another in love and honor” (Romans 12:10).

Stain Glass Marriage

When seen as a source of sanctifying grace, the demands of marriage ought to be viewed in a positive light.  The harder the trials, the greater the merit.  The harder the trials, the more each spouse becomes a source of sanctification for the other.  Rather than running from or avoiding trials, the spouses can embrace them with the surety that they are being “made holy and without blemish” (Eph 5:27).

Like Baptism and Holy Orders, Matrimony constitutes a person in a state of life.  When God calls to a state of life, He also equips.  What makes the sacramentality so important is that it gives the recipient a continuing right to the sacramental graces needed for the faithful performance of the duties of married life.  In other words, it is not just that God gives sacramental graces, but that He has set up the sacramental system such that He is obliged to give them.  From our perspective this means that we can absolutely expect to receive these graces.

What are the sacramental graces attached to Matrimony?  In short, they are the graces that in some way or another act against the pitfalls of marriage in a fallen world.  Before examining these sacramental graces it is necessary to stress that marriage in a fallen world between one man and one woman for life is a practical impossibility.  For two people to be united such that they are one flesh (loving the other as they do their own bodies) and yet with no reduction in their personality is humanly impossible.  But with God, all things are possible.  This is what makes the numbers quoted in the introduction so alarming.  We cannot save marriage as an institution on our own.  Only the Church can save the institution of marriage by showing forth the splendor of Sacramental Marriage.  Without accesses to the Sacramental Graces and the awareness that they are available, more and more marriages will fail.

In paragraph 1607 of the Catechism, the rupture of the original communion of man and woman was manifested in three ways:

  • Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations;
  • Their mutual attraction, the Creator’s own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust.
  • The beautiful vocation of man and woman to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work.

With these three effects of the Fall, we can consider three specific Sacramental graces.  Msgr. Cormac Burke in his new book The Theology of Marriage goes into these in detail, but a summary here follows.

First, there is the grace to overlook the other spouse’s defects.  All too often, marriage suffers because of the quirks and character faults of the two spouses.  Being yoked to someone who has some particular faults that you are bound to find annoying (at the least) can be extremely taxing.  Insert into this the presence of the Accuser who hates marriage and seizes on the smallest faults in our spouses in order to stir up the embers of hatred, and marriage is in danger.  To counter this tendency, God gives us the graces needed to dwell on the positive characteristics of our spouses and to forgive as He forgives.

Second, the spouses are given the Sacramental Grace to purify sexual love.  In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI speaks of, despite objections from the more secularly minded  to the contrary, Christ’s role in purifying sexual love (eros).  He says that “eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns” (DCE, 4).  He goes on to say how Christianity purifies eros so that it becomes one with agape (that is “gift love”).  This happens most especially through Matrimony.  Yet the conjugal instinct, because it is so powerful, must also be tempered even in marriage and used in the right ways at the right time.  Christ, through Matrimony, gives to the spouses the power of conjugal chastity.

Finally, Matrimony also bestows the grace to live out “the vocation of man and woman.” This is related to more than just “gender roles” but to see the truth of sexual complementarity.  As Msgr. Burke points out, “complementarity implies that each sex can be a humanizing inspiration and guide to personal growth and maturity for the other.”  Something is seriously wrong in a marriage when the spouses are incapable of evoking a sexual response in each other.  This response is not just physical but means that a wife should admire her husband’s particularly masculine qualities which she very likely lacks in equal measure just as a husband should admire his wife’s particularly feminine qualities which he likely lacks in equal measure.  Men tend to have virtues related to being “thing” oriented and therefore have a greater aptitude for technical aspects of life.  Women tend to lack these qualities by nature and can learn from men how to acquire them.  Women on the other hand often have virtues that are more relational in nature.  Men tend to lack these qualities and therefore needs to emulate his wife in order to be more completely a person.  This is what we mean when we speak of complementarity—it is not just a matter of a physical coupling but by discovering and acquiring truly human values that are characteristic of the other sex.  This is why man (and woman) needs a “helper fit for him” (Gn 2:18).  Of course this only happens when men are truly masculine and women truly feminine.  As Msgr. Burke says, “When a man truly runs as a man, he provokes his wife’s admiration; and she, when she runs as a woman, provokes his.  Further, the more a woman the wife is, the more she motivates the husband to be a man; and vice versa.  Sexual excellence stimulates emulation.”

While it is in vogue to blame the problems in marriage on the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, the Church saw these problems coming long before the Revolutionaries struck.  When Pope Pius XI wrote Casti Connubii in 1930, Marriage was already in decline because of the self-absorbing gravity of contraception.  He wrote that “When we consider the great excellence of chaste wedlock, Venerable Brethren, it appears all the more regrettable that particularly in our day we should witness this divine institution often scorned and on every side degraded” (CC 44).  The Pontiff’s prescient words are more appropriate today.  The Church needs to once again proclaiming “the great excellence” of Sacramental Marriage and offer this most precious gift to those who have turned away from the Church.

Keeping Christ in Christmas

Evangelization

When he was hired by the Illustrated London News, G.K. Chesterton was told he could write about anything other than politics and religion.   He responded that there was nothing else and then proceeded to spend the next 20 years writing about nothing other than politics and religion.  He wrote about the truly important things.  Judging by the frequency in which he wrote about Christmas (an average of 5 or 6 articles per year), he thought it to be among the most important.    Never one to beat around the bush, he opens an essay simply titled Christmas with a statement that is just as relevant today as when he wrote it nearly 90 years ago—“There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes as I am doing in this article.  It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.”

With all of the talk about “Keeping Christ in Christmas,” Chesterton’s words seem particularly apropos.  One of the reasons Christians are losing Christmas to the rising tide of materialism is because they have ceased to keep Advent with Christmas.  How many Christmas parties have you been invited to and attended during Advent?  How often have you exchanged Christmas gifts prior to Christmas?  While it may seem like the Liturgical Calendar is meant to be something separate from the “real” calendar, there is a great wisdom behind it.  Advent has a specific purpose behind it and only when it is lived fully and held distinct from Christmas can we truly celebrate Christmas.

The word “advent” comes from the Latin word adventus and means “presence” or “arrival.”  According to Pope Benedict XVI, it was a term from classical antiquity that was used to “express the arrival of a deity who emerged from hiddenness and gave proof of his presence through mighty works.”  In adopting this term, the Christians hoped to express two related truths.  The first is that the Divine Son of God has not withdrawn His presence from us but is in hiding and this hiding will end with His manifestation in glory again.  We use Advent then as a time of reflection upon the ways in which we find the hidden Christ and preparation for His definitive return.

Christmas on the other hand is a great feast that marks the reason for our faith that Christ is Emmanuel, God with us, and our hope that He will come again.  The intensity with which we celebrate this “great day” is always in proportion to how much we have exercised our faith and our hope during those days of preparation.  Only with proper reflection beforehand can we truly find reasons to celebrate the great feast.  Otherwise we will get caught up in the materialist’s interpretation of Christmas.  In other words, Advent is our protection and surest way to keep Christ in Christmas.  If you want to get into the Spirit of the Season, then first get into the Spirit of the Season of Advent.

There is a second aspect of Chesterton’s quote that also bears mentioning.  The Apostle of Common Sense reminds us of something that is so obvious that we easily forget it—“ It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.”

We have forgotten (or perhaps we have never known) how to proper celebrate holidays.  In a short and very approachable book entitled In Tune with the World, Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, develops a philosophy of festivity.  He begins by quoting, of all people, Nietzsche who said “the trick is not to arrange a festival but to find people who can enjoy it.”  His point is that it is not mere arrangements alone that make a festivity, but instead a recognition that what is being celebrated is a good thing.  But it cannot be just some generic good thing, but the celebrant must have shared in a distinctly real experience of that good.  To emphasize this point, Pieper says that “[S]trictly speaking, the past cannot be celebrated festively unless the celebrant community still draws glory and exaltation from that past, not merely as reflected history, but by virtue of a historical reality still operative in the present.”

Christ in Christmas

With this in mind, we see the reason why the Church insists we keep Mass in Christmas(s)—only in the Mass is the historical reality of the Incarnation made actually operative in the present.  All of the mysteries of Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension are made present to us.  Through the Mass, the Incarnation is protected from becoming just a historical event.

But it is more than just keeping the Mass in Christmas that enables us to enjoy the festival of Christmas.  In taking on flesh, the Son has responded to our deepest desire to live with God.  He has shared our human life so that we might eternally share his divine life.  This is the reason for our joy in this festive season.

Although joy is an end in itself (it is absurd to ask why anyone wants to be joyful) this longing for joy is really a desire to have a reason and pretext for it.  In other words, the reason for joy comes first, the joy comes second.  Joy is an expression of love and it is the possessing or receiving what one loves (whether actually in the present or remembered in the past or hoped for in the future) that causes it.  The reason for joy we can call the festive occasion and in order to celebrate men must also accept and acknowledge it as a reason for joy.  They must experience it as a receiving of something they love.

Pieper’s explanation also helps us to see that Christmas is always in danger of becoming an absurdity.  He says that “if the Incarnation of God is no longer understood as an event that directly concerns the present lives of men, it becomes impossible, even absurd, to celebrate Christmas festively.”  In other words, it is nonsense to speak of keeping “Christ in Christmas” when we do not allow Christ to be Lord of every other day of the year.  If the Incarnation is not something that touches someone’s life, then of course they will not see Christmas properly.  Christmas just becomes one of the many celebrations of the “Holiday Season” without any real discernible difference from Kwanzaa or Festivus.

This makes it obvious why Christmas is becoming completely secularized—we  have not preached the Gospel and presented Christ as a gift to be loved and enjoyed.  To put our foot down and insist that people say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” misses the point entirely.  When we wish someone a “Merry” Christmas what we are really wishing is that the person receive all of the gifts that accompany festivity—namely renewal, transformation and rebirth.  Why should we expect someone who has not experienced the real Christmas gift to want someone else to experience it?

Christmas is not being lost because of the “culture.”  It is being lost because we have ceased to preach Christ.  “Cult” is at the heart of culture.  Culture both shapes and is shaped by what we believe.  We can restore culture by restoring our uniquely Christian ways of revealing Christ is all that we do, and not just our words.  One easy way to do this in the remaining days of Advent is by “preaching” the inner meaning of our Advent customs.  Each of the Christmas customs is charged with meaning.  The Christmas tree is meant to preach Christ—“then shall all the trees of the wood sing for joy before the Lord, for he comes” (Ps 96:12).  Our Christmas baking preaches Christ—“in that day, the mountains will drip sweetness, and the rivers will flow with milk and honey” (Joel 3:18).  Lights that adorn the outside of our house preach Christ—like the wise virgins, we keep our lamps trimmed (Mt. 25:1-13).   Christmas itself is not just a single day, but twelve—one for each of the tribes of Israel until Christ’s full manifestation to all the nations on Epiphany.  Celebrate all twelve instead, especially in thanksgiving for His coming to the Gentiles.  May all of our actions in the coming days, preach to the world, the true light that has come into the world.

 

 

 

Our Happy Fault

Sin, Spiritual Warfare,

In his classic book, Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton quipped that Christianity begins with the doctrine of Original Sin, which, he says, “is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved.”  His point is that all men must agree on the doctrine of the Fall regardless of whether they profess it or not.  Each of us experiences tugs in different directions that reveal a war going on in our members.  As we near the close of Advent and prepare to celebrate Christianity’s beginnings, meditating on this most important doctrine can bear much fruit.

Any discussion on Original Sin has to begin by recognizing the platypus-like quality of man whose nature is a spirit/matter composite.  He is formed out of the “dust of the ground” that is animated by the breath (or pneuma, from which we get the word spirit) of God.   This leaves man with in a state of being tugged in two directions.  Like all matter, his material being always tends towards decay and death.  His spirit, because it is not composed of parts cannot be subject to decay, is immortal.  As a material creature, man will strive to preserve his material being.  As spiritual creature, man will always feed on truth and goodness.  Despite these incompatibilities there is also a mutual dependence of the various faculties in man.  The material depends upon the spiritual in order to have life and fuller sensation while the spiritual depends on the material in order to know and love.

It would seem based on this description that man, by nature, is at war within himself.  But the spirit/material composite of man is not merely some haphazard mixture.  The spirit has a certain precedence over the material and the material is in the service of intellectual knowing and loving.  This integration in man’s faculties means that the will perfectly follows the intellect while the material faculties such as the passions enable the will to act with a certain intensity that spills into the body.

Even with this integration in man’s faculties, there is still the problem of death.  Because the body is material and subject to decay, the spirit will no longer be able to act through it when that decay reaches a certain level.  This leads to a monstrosity of a soul separated from its body.  To alleviate what appears to be a fundamental “flaw” in human nature, God bestowed Adam and Eve with the preternatural gift of immortality; the whole person, body and soul.  This gift however was conditional.  It was conditioned on the fact that Adam always oriented his faculties toward God and His will.  This immortality was also a result of a share in God’s eternal life which is called sanctifying grace.

Summarizing we can say that, prior to the Fall, man was gifted with sanctifying grace at his creation and bodily immortality.  It is important to remember as well that the perfect integration of his faculties was a natural endowment rather than a supernatural gift.

the-fall-of-man

While we do not know what the actual sin was that Adam committed, we can say what it was not.  It was not a sexual sin like lust as is often suggested.  To suggest that is more telling of us as fallen men rather than Adam as unfallen.  Because he enjoyed the perfect integration of body and soul, it had to be a spiritual sin.  That is why most theologians think that it was the greatest of spiritual sins, pride.  What we do know is that when Adam sinned he lost the gift of sanctifying grace.  In trying to “be like God” in knowing good and evil, he forfeited the way in which he was actually like God (sanctifying grace).  For being like God was not something to be grasped (Phil. 2:6) but instead something to be received as a free gift.  This loss of sanctifying grace is called Original Sin.  In God’s plan, Adam and all his offspring were to be gifted with sanctifying grace at their conception.  When Adam sinned as the head of mankind, he lost that gift for all his offspring.  He also lost the gift of immunity from death so that he and his offspring were made subject to their material limitation (“For you are dust, and to dust you shall return”—Gn 3:19).

Because of the supernatural height, from which he fell, Adam also did damage to his nature.  This damage is what we call concupiscence.  No longer did he have the perfect integration of his faculties.  The intellect became darkened so that the truth became blurry, the will was weakened so that the good became less desirable and the passions ran amok, inclining man towards unreasonable pleasure.  In other words, man was left worse off for having lost Sanctifying grace than if he had not been gifted with it to begin with.

Why would God leave man worse off?  In short it is because man has a supernatural end.  He was made to be with God.  Because friendship can only occur between equals, man cannot reach this end on his own. Therefore God must raise man up by giving him a share in His nature.

If man was left with his natural faculties intact, he would tend only towards his natural end, which is virtue.  By leaving his nature wounded, God knew that man cannot even reach his natural end.  This experience of frustration leaves man to seek outside help so that when God reveals the path out, man knowingly will follow (this is why the Bad News always must precede the Good News).  God offers this help to mankind through Baptism where the spirit is given the gift of sanctifying grace.  This is why it is said to “forgive” Original Sin.  But the effects or stains remain.  He may endow the soul with actual graces in overcoming these defects, but he leaves it to us to heal from the effects.  It is like when medicine is given for a disease—it is not the medicine that heals, but the body itself.  The medicine simply aids the natural healing process of the body.  This is why the distinction between Original Sin and its effects is important.  We are given an initial “shot” of sanctity, but we must then struggle to grow the divine life within us.  The full effects of the Fall will only be healed at the resurrection of the body.

Viewed through our post-Fall lenses, it seems somehow unfair that we all lost the preternatural gifts because of the act of one man.  To that I would reply that it is just as unfair that the actions of one man should redeem us.  Looked at from a deeper level, we see that we have everything upside down.

This deeper level has to always be from the standpoint of Christ and His act of restoration.  His intention is to restore us as a single people, so closely united that we are referred to as His Mystical Body.  From the economy of salvation God does not look at us as a collection of individuals but as a single body.  This is the doctrine of the Communion of Saints—there can be no good done by an individual member of the Church that does not redound to the welfare of all.   Among the members of the Mystical Body there is a spiritual commonwealth of riches which includes all the wealth of graces acquired by Christ and all the good works performed with the grace of Christ.  We have difficulty seeing this because there exists so much division even within the Church, but it does not take away from the truth that God’s intention for mankind was for us to be one.  Therefore it ought to be very clear that God would deal with us as one.  Otherwise Jesus taking on a human nature to redeem all mankind would not make sense.  Through the Hypostatic Union humanity is now by nature united to God and we, in response, must now become a mixture of Christ nature (both human and divine).

In truth, the question of fairness should really enter into the discussion.  The nature that has been transmitted to us as offspring of Adam may be damaged, but it is still a gift that we have no right to.  If we have no right to our nature, then we certainly have no right to the super-nature that Adam had.  In the end, it makes little difference because maintaining the divine nature requires a period of trial for all of us.  Now God simply grades on a curve by giving us a share in Christ’s virtues.  That is something Adam never had and certainly more than levels the playing field.

 

The Church and Coexist-ing

Islam

In the spirit of Advent, the President of the USCCB, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, issued a statement yesterday calling upon all people of good will to unite in confronting the “Violence and hate in the world around us [meeting them] with resolve and courage.”  Furthermore he promised that the Bishops’ Conference would “advocate on behalf of people facing religious discrimination, including our Muslim brothers and sisters.”  This was followed by the call to “confront the extremist threat with courage and compassion, recognizing that Christianity, Islam, Judaism and many other religions are united in opposition to violence carried out in their name.”

While the Archbishop should be applauded for his effort of sowing seeds of peace, especially with Muslims, his statement papers over some very important differences that it is time the shepherds of the Church address.  Namely, he says that “When we fail to see the difference between our enemies and people of good will, we lose a part of who we are as people of faith.”  While this comment may in fact be true, the opposite is also true—when we fail to see the difference between our friends and our enemies, we also lose something of who we are.  In other words, there is an equal danger of calling someone an enemy who is a friend and of calling someone a friend who is really an enemy.  Rather than issuing statements filled with the puree of political correctness, it would be good to give us the meat of truth about Islam so that we can discern the difference.  Without this, there is a certain gravity that naturally pulls anyone of goodwill into one camp or the other.  Only with a proper understanding of Islam, can someone love Muslims while rejecting Islam.  This can only happen when the Church speaks in a clear voice about the subject of Islam.

The most recent authoritative statement regarding Islam comes from the Catechism— “The Church’s relationship with the Muslims. ‘The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims; these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day’” (CCC 841).  This statement is a direct quote from the Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium (16).  Like many statements contained in documents of the Council, it is plagued by a certain amount of ambiguity.  With some context and explanation, this statement can be better understood and lead to a sense of clarity.

Certainly the accusation that the Council Fathers were overly optimistic about the world, and specifically about Islam, has some merit to it.  But the world of Islam in the 1960s is not the same world today.  The amount of hostility that the Muslim world displayed towards Christianity was at an all-time low.  Most people thought that secularization and Westernization had left the Islamic world in ruins.  So of course in that climate, such a statement that emphasized commonalities was in order.  A plea to “forget the past” and the recommendation that both sides “work sincerely for mutual understanding” is appropriate.  With the “Arab Spring” uprisings came a reassertion of the political aspects of Islam all across the Middle East.

In short, I think the Council Fathers read the signs of the times correctly, but those times have passed.  Many prelates and priests in the Church are still living in those times and need to bring their understanding and teaching up to date.

Coexist

A careful reading of the paragraph from the Catechism yields certain questions that bear further explanation.  Specifically:

What does it mean when it says “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims”?

The context of Lumen Gentium is important here.  First of all in speaking of the “plan of salvation” it refers to the universality of Christ’s redemptive act.  Muslims are awaiting their redemption from Christ, not as Muslims, but as potential Christians.  They should be targets of evangelization (more on this below) just like everyone else is, but in a manner that respects where they are beginning from.   Furthermore, the paragraph also is referring to the fact that among all the non-Christian religions (Judaism excepted), Muslims are “in the first place” because they profess monotheism.  All the other religions mentioned in the document (Buddhism, Hinduism, even atheism) do not have this.

What does it mean when it says “these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day”?

This statement is particularly ambiguous, but the key to understanding lies in the fact that they profess to hold the faith of Abraham.  The Church is not saying that they actually do hold the faith of Abraham, only that they profess to.

There seems to be a contradiction in this interpretation when it says “with us they adore the one, merciful God.”   The point of this qualifier is that they adore the one merciful God in much the same way St. Paul found the Athenians in the Aeropogus.  St Paul tells them,

“You Athenians, I see that in every respect you are very religious.  For as I walked around looking carefully at your shrines, I even discovered an altar inscribed, ‘To an Unknown God.’  What therefore you unknowingly worship, I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:22-23).

The analogy between Islam and the Athenians is that both are aiming at the true God, even if they were missing.  For the Athenians they were blind and could not see where to aim, the Church seems to be suggesting that Muslims are in fact aiming at the correct target, even if they miss very badly.  St. John Paul II in his book-length interview, Crossing the Threshold of Hope suggests the same thing:

“Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of the Koran, but He is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God with us. Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no room for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad. There is also mention of Mary, His Virgin Mother, but the tragedy of redemption is completely absent. For this reason not only the theology but also the anthropology of Islam is very distant from Christianity.”(Emphasis added).

All of which leads to another oft-asked question, namely:

Is the God of Islam the “same” God as the Christian God?

In a 1999 General Audience, John Paul II seems to give an answer to this in the affirmative.  But in many ways this is the wrong question.  Whether we classify Islam as a Christian heresy or not isn’t really that important.  What is important is to understand how fundamentally flawed their conception of God is and to show them the freedom that Christ is offering to them.

In St. John’s Gospel (8:31-59), Jesus engages “those Jews who believed in Him” regarding the question of Abraham’s fatherhood.  He tells them that they are indeed children of Abraham, but not children of the promise like Isaac, but slave children like Ishmael.  Rather than seeing God as master, they should look upon Him as Father.

This dialogue could very easily be applied to “dialogue” between Christians and Muslims.  For Muslims, Allah is Master and man his slaves.  He is not Father, and has no sons.   To call Allah Father is a great sin in Islamic law.  And yet, like Jesus, we need to offer to them the “freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:21) by introducing them to God as Father.

Despite the fact that it may be met with hostility, Christians need to show Muslims the Fatherhood of God.  Ultimately it is God as Father that meets every longing of the human heart.  The path to evangelizing Muslims lies precisely in this—“formed by Divine teaching” having the courage to call Him Our Father.

Here ultimately lies the problem with the Archbishop’s statement.  By referring to Muslims as “brothers and sisters,” Archbishop Kurtz does both Christians and Muslims a great disservice.  If we are brothers and sisters, then this means we have a common father.  Who is this father?

A fundamental belief of Christianity is that despite being creatures, God in Jesus Christ, is offering us adoption as sons and daughters.  But this adoption is not something automatic, but instead something that is offered to us.  It remains our choice to accept this adoption and to live as sons and daughters.  The Muslim conception of God would forbid this view and thus they are not open to being adopted into the Family of the Trinity unless someone preaches it to them.

By calling them “brothers and sisters” we are doing the exact opposite.  We are saying that they already are in that relationship with God.  It confuses both Christians and Muslims alike.

First of all, anyone familiar with Islamic teaching knows that no follower of Islam (radical or not) would ever view a Christian as his brother or sister.  While they may offer solidarity with Christians after a great tragedy like occurred in San Bernardino that solidarity sits on a shaky foundation.  That solidarity sits upon a political unity as Americans that is foreign to the Islamic mindset.  There is only one source of unity in the Islamic mindset and that is the Dar al-Islam, or abode of Islam.  In other words, it is unreasonable to expect that when push comes to shove the moderate Muslims will be allies in a fight against radical elements.

From a Christian standpoint, the only conclusion to the label of “brothers and sisters” is that we do not need to preach the Gospel to them.  Ultimately we can just “Coexist.”  This is why the proper identification of friends and enemies that the Archbishop mentioned is so important.  Muslims certainly can be our friends, but Islamic teaching itself is not friendly to Christianity.  It regards itself as an enemy of Christianity.  But properly understood, Muslims are not yet brothers and sisters.  And the only way to ensure that those who are our friends remain so is to make them true brothers and sisters.  Let’s stop wasting time and energy spouting out politically correct drivel.  If we focus on converting the “moderates”, the blood of the martyrs in the East will take care of the “extremists.”  One has to wonder, what is the USCCB’s plan for converting Muslims?  Could we have a document on that?  While the Archbishop is right that “Policies of fear and inflammatory rhetoric will only offer extremists fertile soil and pave the way toward a divisive, fearful future,” the surest path to a divisive and fearful eternal future for all of us, is to just let them be—“woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel” (1Cor 9:16).

 

The Star of the New Evangelization

Culture, Culture of Life, Devils, Mary

In his 1999 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation, Pope St. John Paul II referred to Our Lady of Guadalupe as the “Patroness of all America and Star of the first and new evangelization” (Ecclesia in America (EA), 11).  In referring to her as the Star of the New Evangelization the Holy Father was calling to mind the profound effect on the evangelization of Mexico after her appearance to St. Juan Diego in 1531 and her guiding role in evangelization today.  With the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe upon us, it is instructive to look at least two ways in which we can look to her to guide us.

The first  is that Our Lady uses lay people who are specially devoted to her as instruments in the spreading of the message of Guadalupe.

At the time of the apparitions, the spreading of the Gospel to the Mexican people was largely unsuccessful.  Even though Cortes demolished all the blood soaked temples where human sacrifice to demons was going on, conversion was virtually non-existent because of a deeply rooted paganism.  Further slowing the process was a fundamental mistrust among the native peoples of the Spaniards because of abuse at the hands of the First Audience, the five administrators appointed by Charles V after Cortes returned to Spain.  Charles V also appointed Bishop Juan Zumarraga as the first bishop of the new world and the Bishop worked to protect the Indians against the harsh rule.  This brought the Bishop himself and his friars under persecution that he described as “worse than that of Herod and Diocletian.”  Eventually he was able to smuggle a message back to Charles V he immediately replaced Guzman with a Second Audience headed by Bishop Don Sebastian Ramirez y Fuenleal.  Knowing that the Aztecs were about to take up arms against the Spaniards Bishop Zumarraga begged Our Lady to intervene.  Secretly he asked her to send him some Castilian roses as a sign of her intercession.

Enter Juan Diego, a simple farmer who was on his way to Mass one Sunday.  When he passed a small hill named Tepeyac, six 6 miles north of Mexico City and the location of a former temple to the great mother god Torantzin (whose head was a combination of serpent heads and dress a mass of writhing serpents), he began to hear music and the voice of a woman bidding him to come to the top of the hill.  She told him she was the Virgin Mary and that he was to present himself to the Bishop and ask him to build a Church on the hill.  After two visits the Bishop and two additional apparitions, she eventually gave him the sign the Bishop had asked for in the form of roses and the beautiful image on the tilma (more on this below).

What makes St. Juan Diego a model for our collaboration with Our Lady’s work of evangelization is what he did after the apparitions.  He was appointed as custodian of the chapel on Tepeyac where the image was kept and he tirelessly explained the significance of the image to wave after wave of pilgrims.  He emphasized the providential location of the apparition as formerly the site of pagan temple and this had such an effect on them that they referred to the image as Teonantzin (God’s Mother).  It was His ability to re-tell his story in the Indian language that served as a major source of conversion.  In fact when many of the Indians presented themselves to the missionary priests for instruction and baptism they had already been converted.

A major obstacle to the spread of the New Evangelization has been a lingering clericalism.  Our Lady of Guadalupe shows us what happens when lay people live their vocation in the Church properly and when clerics live theirs.  Juan Diego, despite being a widower, did not become a priest.  Instead he remained as a lay person and embraced his role as the primary evangelizer of the pilgrims that came to the chapel to venerate the image.  It was only after they had been evangelized that he sent them to the missionary priests for further instruction to prepare them for the sacraments.  Like St. Juan Diego, laity need to see themselves as the primary evangelizers of culture.  We cannot abdicate that role to priests and bishops but instead must embrace it.

When the laity are living out their vocation to evangelize those outside the confines of the Church (and even those who need it within the Church), Priests and Bishops are able to focus on tending their flock through catechesis and the Sacraments.  They also will not feel the need to abdicate this role in order to change the culture.  They can comfortably focus on the formation and sanctification of the laity and support them in their mission to the world.  I dare say that Bishop Zumarraga and his friar priests understood that their role should be to support Juan Diego in his evangelizing mission and they reaped the fruit of it, sometimes baptizing up to 6000 people day—most of whom they had not evangelized.

The second lesson we can learn from Our Lady of Guadalupe is the power of images.

Like our culture today, the Aztec culture was one of the image.  In his account of the apparitions, the missionary Fernando de Alva Ixtilxochitl recalled:

“The Indians submerged in profound darkness, still loved and served false little gods, clay figurines and images of our enemy the devil in spite of having heard about the faith…But when they heard that the Holy Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ had appeared and since they saw and admired her most perfect Image, which has no human art their eyes were opened as if suddenly day had dawned on them.”

The devil in inspiring the creation of the little idols knew that the Indians found them visually appealing and he exploited that even after the destruction of the temples and human sacrifice.  That is why Our Lady did not haphazardly leave the image on St. Juan Diego’s tilma but instead every element was wrought with meaning.  The people were familiar with using glyphs rather than written language and so Our Lady offered them an evangelizing image.  Not only is it edifying for us to discover the meaning of this image but it increases our reliance upon her (for more detail on the image, see Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of the Civilization of Love by Carl Anderson and Msgr. Eduardo Chavez).

Guadalupe

 

  • Clouds — in the image, the Virgin is surrounded by clouds, showing that she is from heaven. The indigenous greeted people they believed came from God with the expression: “Among fog and among clouds.” which is why Montezuma thought Cortes a god at first when his ships came through the fog into the Gulf of Mexico.
  • Sun —golden rays from the second sun, behind her, signify that she is the “Mother of Light” and greater than the dreadful Aztec sun god, Huitzilopchtli, whom she eclipses.
  • Cross medallion — around her neck, Mary wears a gold medallion engraved with a cross. For indigenous people, the medallion symbolized consecration, so the medallion around Mary’s neck meant that she was consecrated to Jesus. It was also the same black Cross that appeared on the banners and helmets of the Spanish soldiers.
  • Hands — the indigenous people expressed prayer not only by the hands, but by the whole body. In the image on the tilma, Our Lady of Guadalupe is shown in a position of dancing prayer, with her knee bent in movement. Presented in the position of prayer, it would  have shown that despite the fact that she was greater than all the Aztec gods and goddesses, she herself was not God.
  • Mantle and tunic — Mary’s rose-tinted, flowery tunic symbolizes the earth, while her turquoise, starry mantle represents the heavens. The mantle also indicates that she is royalty since only the native emperors wore cloaks of that color.
  • Moon — the Virgin stands on a crescent moon. The Aztec word for Mexico, “Metz-xic-co,” means “in the center of the moon.” She is standing upon it as their mother. The moon also symbolizes the Aztec moon god, fertility, birth and life.  This was the serpent-god Quetzalcoatl.
  • Angel — an angel with eagle’s wings appears below Mary’s feet. According to Aztec belief, an eagle delivered the hearts and the blood of sacrificial victims to the gods. The angel holds up the pregnant Virgin, signifying that the child in her womb is the offering that pleases God and only those with eagles wings could go to god
  • Black ribbon — the black ribbon around Mary’s waist shows that she is expecting a child. For the Aztecs, the trapezoid-shaped ends of the ribbon also represented the end of one cycle and the birth of a new era.
  • Four-petaled jasmine — the only four-petaled flower on Mary’s tunic appears over her womb. The four-petaled jasmine represents the Aztecs’ highest deity, Ometéotl. It shows that she is carrying the true deity within her womb.
  • Flowers — nine golden flowers, symbolizing life and truth, adorn Mary’s dress. The flowers are made up of glyphs representing a hill and a river. The indigenous people considered hills the highest points of encounter between God and people. Viewed upside down, the flowers take the shape of hearts with arteries coming out, representing life, which originates from God and that sustains creation not by blood of sacrifice but shedding of His own blood.

One of the most amazing things about the image is the eyes.  In the eyes of Mary miniscule human figures were discovered.   Using digital technology, the images in the eyes were enlarged many times, revealing that each eye reflected the figure of the Indian Juan Diego opening his tilma in front of Bishop Zumarraga.  Obviously no merely human artist could have painted these.

Guadalupe_eyes

With nearly 9 million converts in 8 years (that’s an average of 3260 per day), this approach can be a very powerful force.  I have written about the importance of evangelizing the culture through media before, but I want to re-emphasize just how important that is.  Ultimately the grip that pornography has on many men (and an increasing number of women) is like the little idols that the natives in Mexico turned to.  But the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe also offered a antidote the fear from the horrific images of human sacrifices that they had all seen.  We are surrounded by violent images all day long and it creates a culture of anxiety and ultimately distraction.  As Christians we need to offer different images to the culture—one based on what is objectively beautiful not beauty that has been objectified.  Only Catholics truly know the difference.

In closing, it cannot be emphasized enough how much we can do when we give ourselves over to the hands of Our Lady.  On the day of the third apparition, Juan Diego’s uncle grew deathly ill.  Rather than turning to her to help him, he avoided Tepeyac hill and sought help elsewhere.  When he came close, she came down the hill and confronted him saying,

“Listen, put it into your heart, my youngest son, that what frightened you, what afflicted you, is nothing; do not let it disturb your face, your heart; do not fear this sickness nor any other sickness, nor any sharp and hurtful thing. Am I not here, I who have the honor to be your Mother? Are you not in my shadow and under my protection? Am I not the source of your joy? Are you not in the hollow of my mantle, in the crossing of my arms? Do you need something more?”

The gentle rebuke is for all of us.  We may be anxious about our culture, but for those who in her shadow and protection, we have nothing to fear.  It is ultimately she who will help us lead our culture back to her Son.  In fact, Pope St. John Paul II called upon Catholics in the Americas to rely on the power of Our Lady of Guadalupe to evangelize the culture.  “In America, the mestiza face of the Virgin of Guadalupe was from the start a symbol of the inculturation of the Gospel, of which she has been the lodestar and the guide. Through her powerful intercession, the Gospel will penetrate the hearts of the men and women of America and permeate their cultures, transforming them from within” (EA, 70).

 

 

Why the Immaculate Conception Matters

Mary,

Throughout the history of the Church, the challenge to orthodoxy of heretical teachings has always brought with it the fruit of a development in doctrine.  Nearly every dogmatic definition has come when a particular teaching was challenged.  At first glance however, the feast that we celebrate today, the Immaculate Conception, appears to be an exception to this rule.  As the 19th Century emerged, many in the Church called for a dogmatic definition of the privilege of the Immaculate Conception.  By the middle of the Century, Pope Pius IX began consulting theologians and convoked a “council in writing” asking bishops around the world about the possibility of its definition.  The response was overwhelmingly positive and in 1854, he issued the Bull Ineffabilis Deus which solemnly proclaimed that “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” Despite its relatively recent history and the elevation to a Feast Day and Holy Day of Obligation, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is little understood today.

When Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, he was merely declaring something that the Church has believed from the beginning.  It wasn’t as if he suddenly realized the Church believed this.  It was always believed, but without a direct challenge to its orthodoxy, the Churched lacked some of the necessary clarity to explain how it fit into the deposit of faith.  In other words, it was always a part of the deposit of faith—that which the Apostles left us—but how it connected to the other truths of the faith still needed to be worked out.

We find seeds of the Immaculate Conception throughout Salvation History, beginning with just after the Fall of Adam and Eve when God promised not to abandon mankind but that He would send them a new Adam and a new Eve (Gn 3:15).  The woman and her offspring (a prediction of the virgin birth) will gain ultimate victory over the Serpent by crushing his head and will enjoy enmity with the Evil One.  This enmity, according to John Paul II, is “a hostility expressly established by God, which has a unique importance, if we consider the problem of the Virgin’s personal holiness.  In order to be the irreconcilable enemy of the serpent and his offspring, Mary had to be free from the power of sin, and to be so from the first moment of her existence.”  In other words, enmity means that the devil could have no power over Mary at any point of her existence.

Likewise, we catch a glimpse of the Immaculate Conception during the Annunciation.  The angel Gabriel in his greeting addresses Mary as “full of grace.”  This strange greeting is the name that she possesses in the eyes of God.  The name that God gives is the essence of the person (like Peter being the rock upon which the Church was founded) and so Mary is truly the one who is full of grace.  The Greek word kecharitomene is often translated as “full of grace” but it is more nuanced than that.  It is in the passive participle and is more accurately translated as “made full of grace” to indicate the gift that God gave to the Virgin Mother.

With such strong Scriptural support for the Immaculate Conception, why did it take nearly 1800 years for the Church to declare it as binding dogma?  Using both the liturgy (the law of worship is the law of belief—lex orandi, lex credenda) and the writings of the Fathers of the first millennium it is clearly among the things that the Church believed.  But before it was to be defined, it needed to be better understood.

Ss Ann and Joachim with BVM

The first obstacle was coming to a deeper understanding of Original Sin.  Because of Adam’s transgression, Scripture speaks of all of us as “born in guilt, in sin my mother conceived me” (Ps 51:7).  But rather than seeing Original Sin as something merely tacked on to human nature, the Church came to understand it as a lack.  Specifically it is a lack of the seeds of eternal life or sanctifying grace.  The removal of sanctifying grace also brings with it other effects on human nature such as concupiscence.  In order for one to be “free from the stain of Original Sin” she would need to be conceived with sanctifying grace.

Providentially, we can begin to see what the Holy Spirit had in mind when He waited so long.  Nearly all the philosophical anthropology of man in the 18th and 19th C rejected the idea of Original Sin—it was society that somehow corrupted man, not something that is a result of his fallen state.  In other words, it became widely believed that every man was immaculately conceived.  By declaring that only one such human person was born that way, the Holy Spirit was speaking truth not just about Mary but about mankind.

Once the doctrine of Original Sin was better understood, the main theological problem that needed to be explained is related to St. Paul’s dictum that “all men have sinned” and in need “of the gift of justification come to reign in life through the one person Jesus Christ” (Romans 5:12,17).  What the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was proposing was actually two things.  The first is that somehow Mary was exempt from the “all” men who have sinned.  Secondly it would also appear that because of this exemption, she was not in need of the “gift of justification.”

To explain the exemption, we must first acknowledge that the Supreme Authority has the power to offer exemptions to universal laws in particular cases.  So that when St. Paul says that all men have sinned, he is acknowledging a universal law and like all universal laws there can be exceptions.  The Immaculate Conception means that Mary is the singular exception to this law.  This is why the Church has always seen in Esther a type of Mary.  She alone among all the Jews was to escape the edict of King Ahasuerus that all the Jews in his kingdom must be killed.

If Mary was without Original Sin then it seems on the surface that she did not need a Redeemer either.  This question was the most difficult to address because as a true daughter of Adam, she was still in need of justification.  To explain this, Blessed Duns Scotus developed the idea of her redemption being preventative rather than restorative.  He said that “The Perfect Redeemer, must in some case, have done the work of redemption most perfectly, which would not be, unless there is some person, at least, in whose regard, the wrath of God was anticipated and not merely appeased.”

Blessed Duns Scotus is saying two very important things here.  First is that there are two ways of “saving” someone from falling into a hole.  The first is to rescue them once they are in the hole.  The second is to keep them from falling in beforehand.  He also says that a perfect deliverer would have done both.  A more perfect redeemer is the one who not only rescues mankind from the effects of sin once they are in them but also preserves from falling altogether.

This approach to explaining doctrine is a favorite of St. Thomas and he calls it “fittingness.”  I have also found it a powerful tool to use in order to open Christians (Catholic and non-Catholic) up to important theological truths.  With respect to the Immaculate Conception, it is fitting that Our Lord’s act of Redemption is so powerful that it could redeem at least one member of the human race before she fell.  It also points out how everything we believe about Mary points back to Jesus.  To take away the Immaculate Conception is ultimately taking away the greatness of Jesus’ redemptive act.

The Second Vatican Council reaffirmed this teaching about Mary saying, “Redeemed by reason of the merits of her Son and united to Him by a close and indissoluble tie, she is endowed with the high office and dignity of being the Mother of the Son of God” (Lumen Gentium, 53).  But in the fallout from the Council there has been a movement to de-dogmatize the Immaculate Conception in an attempt to be more “ecumenical.”  The argument goes that belief about the Immaculate Conception is not necessary for salvation so therefore it is relatively unimportant.is based on a false understanding of the idea of hierarchy of truths.

The Catechism says that “In Catholic doctrine there exists an order or hierarchy of truths, since they vary in their relation to the foundation of the Christian faith” (CCC 90).  Cardinal Schönborn in his introduction to the Catechism is quick to point out that “the ‘hierarchy of truth’ does not mean ‘a principle of subtraction,’ as if faith could be reduced to some ‘essentials’ whereas the ‘rest’ is left free or even dismissed as not significant. The ‘hierarchy of truth . . . is a principle of organic structure.’ It should not be confused with the degrees of certainty; it simply means that the different truths of faith are ‘organized’ around a center.”  In other words, the idea of a hierarchy of truths is that there are certain beliefs around which all other beliefs orbit.  These other beliefs support the belief in the core truth.

The truth around which the Immaculate Conception orbits is the true humanity of Jesus.  In order for the Son to become man, He must take on human flesh and be born of a woman (Gal 4:4).  This means that in order for Mary to be a true mother, she must provide Jesus with all that a mother normally gives to her children, namely her flesh.  What happens if her flesh is fallen?  Then Jesus too would inherit a fallen human nature which is an impossibility for God.  God could not take to Himself something that was sinful.  Yes, He could miraculously intervene but then the flesh no longer comes from the woman and she is not a true mother—just an incubator.  But the One who was like us in all things but sin, is a true man and like all men born of a woman.  All of this makes clear why the Immaculate Conception matters—it protects the true humanity of Jesus.  Take away what we believe about Mary and our faith in Jesus begins to crumble.

The Deposit of Faith is truly a seamless garment—tug at any string, no matter how seemingly inconsequential it is, and it falls apart.  Tug the string of the Immaculate Conception and the garment of our faith will be left in tatters.

 

An Allowable Exception?

Abortion

In addition to the exceptions of rape and incest, those who support abortion often claim that abortion is permissible when the mother’s life is in jeopardy.  I am asked this question a lot and I find that most people don’t understand the principles underlying the Church’s teaching.  For that reason, I think it would be instructive to discuss those principles.

That being said, there are two principles in Catholic moral theology that come into play here.  The first is that you may never willingly do evil so that good may come about.  The second is the principle of double effect.  I’ll try to explain these in light of the issue.

Let’s start with a definition of abortion.  In Evangelium Vitae (58) St John Paul II defined abortion as the “deliberate and intentional killing, by whatever means it is carried out, of a human being in the initial phase of his or her existence, extending from conception to birth.”  Abortion defined as such is “always constitutes a grave moral disorder.” (EV 62)

The key to this is the phrase “deliberate and intentional killing” or what is called “direct abortion” which means we are speaking of an abortion that is willed as an end or as a means.  So with this idea in mind, direct abortion is always wrong.

That being said, it is morally licit in the case of extrauterine pregnancy to intervene when both the Mother and Child’s life are in danger because of the pregnancy itself.  However, you still cannot perform a direct abortion in this case.  There is some question from a medical standpoint as to which specific procedures constitute a direct abortion, but the guidelines are as follows

In extrauterine pregnancy the affected part of the mother (e.g., cervix, ovary, or fallopian tube) may be removed, even though fetal death is foreseen, provided that (a) the affected part is presumed already to be so damaged and dangerously affected as to warrant its removal, and that (b) the operation is not just a separation of the embryo or fetus from its site within the part (which would be a direct abortion from a uterine appendage) and that (c) the operation cannot be postponed without notably increasing the danger to the mother.  USCCB, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Facilities

The moral principle at play here is what’s called the principle of Double Effect. To begin, it is important to note that a careful moral analysis of any given human act requires that we look not just to the external act but to the underlying choice of the will.  If we must look at the underlying will then it is necessary to make a distinction in two different types of will.  Classically the distinction is made between a direct will and a permitting will.  Because most human acts are complex acts, even if the will directs some good, there can often be an evil associated with it. Man may never, morally speaking, directly will an evil.  However, they may permit it.

Fertilization

This serves as the foundation of a very important principle in Catholic moral teaching called the principle of double effect.  Simply stated this principle says it is morally allowable to perform an act that has at least two effects provided all four of the following conditions are met.   First, the objective act to be done must be good in itself or at least morally indifferent.  Secondly, the intent of the agent must be to achieve the good effect and to avoid the evil effect as much as possible.  The evil effect must not be directly willed but only permitted.  This is the case even if the evil effect is foreseen.  Thirdly, the good effect is proportional to the bad effect.  Finally, the good effect must follow directly from the action and not as a result of the harmful effect.

It is important to make a further distinction related to this principle that aids in distinguishing it from the notion of a “pre-moral” act that often accompanies the moral teaching of many dissenting theologians.  Morality is always concerned with voluntary human acts.  The evil effect assuming that it is only permitted is the physical effect of a moral decision.  It is not a moral effect or a “pre-moral” effect.  In and of itself it is neither moral nor immoral because it was not directly willed.

It has been suggested by some that it is only the first condition that is really essential and the remaining three are simply prudential checks to make sure this condition is actually being fulfilled.  In this way the third condition checks that the proposed intrinsically good action is not invalidated by circumstances that produce greater evils than the good that is directly intended.  This serves as a guard against those who subscribe to a proportionalist view of morality by using the third condition to support their methodology.  Likewise the second and fourth conditions serve to ensure the person intends only the intrinsically good effect.

Even if the death of the child is a foreseen but unintended side effect of a medical procedure designed to preserve the mother’s life (assuming the procedure is not morally illicit) then there is nothing morally wrong with having the procedure.

With this in mind then what about the question as to whether or not it is morally licit to have an abortion in the case where a mother has something like uterine cancer?  This is a perfect example of applying both the principles mentioned above.  One may not perform a direct abortion even if the good of saving the mother’s life is intended.  However if the mother does decide to have treatment and the treatment ends up killing the child (even if she knew this intervention was highly likely to do so) then this is morally licit.  The death of the child would fall under the principle of double effect.

I think in the coming years this issue is going to come up more and more.  One of the reasons is that Chlamydia is the most common STD today with about 3 million cases a year.  The reason why this is relevant is because one of the things that can happen is that the bacteria can attack the fallopian tubes which could to inflammation and scarring.  What this means is that the incidence of Ectopic pregnancies is rising and will continue to rise making the Church’s teaching important to understand.

 

Abortion in the Hard Cases

Abortion, Politics

Over the last few years, there has been a flurry of activity at the individual state level to declare personhood at conception.  In every case, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, the measures have been voted down.  One of the reasons why voters turned it down was that it would force women to carry to term unwanted pregnancies including those that became pregnant as a result of rape or incest.  This exception is often brought up as a reason for keeping abortion legal.  In fact many who consider themselves Pro-Life will often argue for provisions in laws that keep abortion legal in these cases.  Because this argument is put forth so often, it is instructive to evaluate the merit of the argument to determine whether abortion should be allowable in these, rare, but real cases when pregnancy occurs.

It is important to mention at the outset that those women who become pregnant as a result of rape or incest are victims of the morally reprehensible actions of others.  There is no question as to whether they have suffered a great evil.  Our response must always be one of compassion.  Still, the question is whether as a result of the evil they have suffered, it gives moral justification to commit further evil by taking the life of the unborn child.  Furthermore, as was mentioned above, it is rare that someone becomes pregnant as a result of rape or incest.  Some studies have shown that it occurs in as few as one in a thousand cases and accounts for approximately 2 percent of all abortions.  This is not to minimize the suffering and trauma associated with these cases but to put the frequency in context.  One case of rape or incest is too many.

One further clarification is necessary.  These so-called hard cases should not be relevant to the case for abortion on demand despite the fact that they are often invoked to defend that position.  Supporters of abortion on demand state that a woman has a right to have an abortion for any reason she prefers during the entire nine months of pregnancy and not just rape and incest.  Therefore to argue for abortion on demand from the hard cases is analogous to arguing for the elimination of all traffic laws from the fact that in rare emergencies one might need to violate them. This is important because laws are not made based upon exception.  Laws are meant to conform to normal behavior and nearly every law admits to exceptions.  Nevertheless as it shall be shown, these situations do not constitute valid exceptions to the absolute norm that abortion is always a grave evil.

Finally, it is important to mention as well that because a sexual assault like rape or incest is an act of aggression and cannot be ordered to the unitive and procreative meanings of the sexual act, “a woman who has been raped should be able to defend herself against a potential conception from the sexual assault” (USCCB, Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, 36). This means that she can have recourse to any contraceptive measure provided it is not abortifacient in nature.

With these necessary clarifications in place we can begin to look at the justification that is often offered to defend abortion in these so-called hard cases.  There are a number of arguments put forth why abortion is morally justifiable which are summarized succinctly by Bioethicist Andrew Varga.

It is argued that in these tragic cases the great value of the mental health of a woman who becomes pregnant as a result of rape or incest can best be safe-guarded by abortion. It is also said that a pregnancy caused by rape or incest is the result of a grave injustice and that the victim should not be obliged to carry the fetus to viability. This would keep reminding her for nine months of the violence committed against her and would just increase her mental anguish. It is reasoned that the value of the woman’s mental health is greater than the value of the fetus. In addition, it is maintained that the fetus is an aggressor against the woman’s integrity and personal life; it is only just and morally defensible to repel an aggressor even by killing him if that is the only way to defend personal and human values. It is concluded, then, that abortion is justified in these cases (The Main Issues in Bioethics, pp. 67-68).

 

The underlying principle at play here is that evil may never be done so that good may come about.  Any argument related to these hard cases would amount to a utilitarian ethic.  Certainly the trauma that is associated with being a victim of rape or incest may cause great mental and emotional distress.  The child in the womb may serve as a reminder to the mother of the trauma in which she has undergone.  Nevertheless this cannot justify the taking of the life of the child in the womb.

14horton-600

Each of these arguments begs the question that the child in the womb in fact is a person with an inherent dignity from the moment of conception.  Therefore it has a right to life that ought to be protected from the moment of conception.  The manner in which the child has been brought into being ought not to have any effect on its moral status.  The child may have been conceived as a result of a sexual assault or as a result of a loving union of husband and wife. The result of each of these methods is the same.  A new and complete human person has been brought into being with the full dignity of any human person.  Therefore because the children are the same regardless of the manner in which they were brought into being, the moral status ought to be identical.

Despite the fact that the child is the result of an act of aggression, the child himself is not the aggressor.  It is the perpetrator of the assault who is the aggressor. The unborn entity is just as much an innocent victim as its mother. Therefore, abortion cannot be justified on the basis that the unborn is an aggressor.

In arguing that abortion is justified because of the emotional and mental anguish that the child’s presence places on the mother also presents us with a slippery slope.  From this, one might extend the right to take the life of another person any time that they cause emotional and mental anguish upon the same principle.  For example, suppose a husband were to become disabled later in life and the disability would cause great emotional and mental stress on his wife as his caregiver.  Applying the same principle, the wife would be morally justified in taking the life of her husband.  Although this may seem absurd, it is simply an application of the same principle that a mother uses in justifying the killing of her child that was conceived as a result of a sexual assault.

In conclusion, it should go without saying that the pro-life advocate should not simply stop at protecting the life of the child in the womb.  Much help also needs to be given to the victim of the assault.  Stephen Krason in his book Abortion: Politics, Morality, and the Constitution reminds us that we all have an obligation “to make it as easy as possible for her to give up her baby for adoption, if she desires. Dealing with the woman pregnant from rape, then, can be an opportunity for us—both as individuals and society—to develop true understanding and charity. Is it not better to try to develop these virtues than to countenance an ethic of destruction as the solution?”

A Religion of Peace?

Islam, Relativism, Theology

In his dialogue with Euthyphro, Socrates poses a crucial question that has application even today.  He asks Euthyphro “is what is holy, holy because the gods approve it or do they approve it because it is holy?”  Put in other words, he is asking whether something is good because God commands it or whether God commands it because it is good?  A moment’s reflection reveals a philosophical catch-22.  The question is essentially trying to answer which of the two—goodness or approval of the gods—is the cause and which is the effect.  Euthyphro contends that a thing is good because God commands it.  But this makes God arbitrary and mankind subject to His every whim.  Socrates chooses the second; God commands a thing because it is good.  This too presents a problem, namely that there appears to be something above God, binding His omnipotence.

Which answer is correct?  Both.  Both Euthyphro and Socrates are right.  But because they do not know God in the manner He has revealed Himself to Christians, they are also wrong.  They assume a cause and effect relationship between commandments and God’s will.  Instead it is of God’s nature to act in accord with reason.  The Christian conception of God is one in which God is a God of reason.  We worship the Logos or the Word Made Flesh because we alone recognize God’s true nature.

This problem of somehow seeing laws as constraining God has plagued both the East and the West.  In the Christian West it has led to the rejection of Natural Law and reduced all law to the “will of the People.”  In the East it took the form of a religion called Islam.

euthyphro painting

It is this philosophical problem that plagues Islam and is ultimately the reason why Islam cannot be a religion of peace without being first a religion of force.  There are two ways in which a man can be compelled—by reason and by force.  A god who is pure will and not governed by reason is necessarily a god who will command violence.  A god not governed by reason can only make his law known by commanding it.

In his Regensburg Lecture, Pope Benedict XVI used a quotation of Manuel II to draw out this truth.  Manuel II said that “To convince a reasonable soul one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening the person with death.”  His point is that the truth has a compelling force of its own.  Certainly we are fallen creatures and have difficulty both arriving at and conforming ourselves to the truth, but never the less the truth is ultimately what sets us free.

If you remove truth (through moral relativism) or our ability to know the truth on our own (like in Islam where man can only know what God tells him directly) then the only compelling force to follow laws is through force.  If truth does not make right then “might makes right.”  If Allah is the mightiest then he will ultimately resort to violence to enforce his will.  This violence is not directed just towards non-Muslims, but all mankind.  The violence is done to man’s nature and freedom to come to know the truth and live in accord with it.  For non-Muslims the violence simply extends into man’s material being as well.

This is why any claims that Islam is a religion of peace are logically incoherent with their conception of God.  If we assume that God is a god of pure will then the commands in the Koran such as, “Fight in the way of God against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! God loves not aggressors. And slay them wherever you find them and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter,” (Sura 2:190-193) naturally follow.  When reason or Logos does not govern action then it necessarily becomes a matter of “might makes right.”  What we label as terrorism is simply a logical consequence of a voluntarist Allah to whom the entire world must be submitted.

As an aside it is worth understanding the claim that the Sura quoted above only allows fighting for self-defense.  The problem with this explanation is the definition of what constitutes an act of aggression against Islam.  Some Islamic schools say non-belief in Islam is itself an act of aggression since it is the true and original religion.  It is assumed that the truth of Islam is so obvious that only an obstinate person would refuse to accept it.

It is said that the goal of Islam is peace.  This is why they greet fellow Muslims with “as-salamu alaykum” (“the peace of Allah be upon you “).  This same greeting is never extended to a non-Muslim because in Islam there exists no concept of peace between nonbeliever and devout Muslims.  The peace that is promoted is within Umma or the worldwide Muslim brotherhood and is the fruit of everyone submitting (the meaning of the word Islam) to the rule of Allah.

For Islam the whole world is wakf , which means it is territory belonging to Allah.  This territory has been promised to the Muslims and jihad is the means by which those lands that have been “illegally” held by infidels are brought back into Islamic possession.  In other words, Muslims can never be accused of occupation or oppression because they believe the land is theirs.  Before allowing any mass “migration” into a country this needs to be understood.  A Muslim who is faithful to the Koran does not see himself as an immigrant anywhere, but instead as coming into land that is by right his.

Everyone has a philosophy whether they recognize it or not.  As Cicero once said, the choice is not between having a philosophy and not having one, but between having a good one or a bad one.  By recognizing the underlying philosophy of Islam, we are able to cut through a lot of the false ideas and rhetoric surrounding it.  A belief in a capricious god always leads to violence as his followers enforce his arbitrary rulings.

Know Suffering, Know Love

Suffering

Sacred tradition tells us very little about a key actor in the Passion of Our Lord, Simon of Cyrene.  We know that he was very likely a part of a large Jewish colony in the North African city of Cyrenaica (see Acts 2:10, 6:9) and that he was likely a black man.  In fact he is probably the same Symeon called Niger (meaning “black”) referenced in Acts 13:1.  We also know that he became a Christian because the evangelists mention him by name, which means the Christian communities would have known who he was.  He is also mentioned as the father of two prominent Christians, namely Alexander and Rufus (see Mark 15:21).  While he may have been a “passer-by” and “pressed into service” to carry the Cross, by the time he reached Golgotha with Jesus, he was obviously a willing participant.  What is also abundantly clear is that at some point in his history, he too had suffered greatly.  With very few exceptions it seems that only those who have mounted their own crosses are truly capable of helping others carry their crosses all the way to Golgotha.

This principle has a biblical foundation.  In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul blesses God as the “Father of compassion and God of all encouragement, who encourages us in our every affliction, so that we may be able to encourage those who are in any affliction with the encouragement with which we ourselves are encouraged by God” (2Cor 1:3).  What St. Paul is suggesting is that God strengthens us in our sufferings so that we then will be able to strengthen others in theirs.  Once our hearts have been exposed on the Cross in the way that Our Lord’s was exposed, we are capable of a deeper love.  It is our own passion which fills us with compassion.  As Pope Benedict XVI reminded us during a Wednesday Audience in Lourdes, “[T]he cross reminds us that there is no true love without suffering, there is no gift of life without pain”

simon-of-cyrene

What this reveals is yet another reason why suffering is necessary to live a truly Christian life.  Not only does it conform us to Christ, the Sufferer but also to Christ the co-Sufferer.  St. John Paul II, describes this necessity of suffering “in order to unleash love in the human person, that unselfish gift of one’s “I” on behalf of other people, especially those who suffer. The world of human suffering unceasingly calls for, so to speak, another world: the world of human love; and in a certain sense man owes to suffering that unselfish love which stirs in his heart and actions.”

While suffering opens up our hearts to a new love, it also opens our minds to new way of thinking.  It is as if the raised view from the Cross changes your entire paradigm.  Those who refuse to come down off the cross that God has given them, eat of the fruit of the new tree of life.  It is the fruit that keeps them there and it is the fruit that they want others to share in.  They are willing to go all the way to Golgotha with others in their suffering because they too want them to share in their fruit.  They will not try to assign their own meaning to the other’s Cross but instead will stay with them while they find it on their own.  They will not offer advice, but instead encouragement and solidarity.

Because Pope St. John Paul II had suffered greatly, he wrote beautifully about this solidarity in Salvifici Doloris—“The world of suffering possesses as it were its own solidarity. People who suffer become similar to one another through the analogy of their situation, the trial of their destiny, or through their need for understanding and care, and perhaps above all through the persistent question of the meaning of suffering.”

But can’t we still be compassionate even if we have not suffered?  To a certain extent yes, but there is a certain gravity that is difficult not to succumb to unless you have experience suffering yourself.  Without suffering on our own we will almost always be like Job’s friends.  We will tend towards judgmentalism.  As our endurance for “helping” them is tested, we will start to ask how much of this suffering they have brought upon themselves.  We will rate their response to how we would respond in their situation and evaluate how well they are handling it compared to well we would do.  We will be tempted to think it is time for them to come down off their cross and get on with life.

But for the one who has suffered he knows that it is the Divine Surgeon at work.  Because he has been under His surgical knife and experienced His healing touch it would be unthinkable to stop Him mid-surgery.  He wounds only to heal.  We are like those who work in Post-Op helping the patient recover.

One of the dangers that Simon the “passer-by” must have wrestled with was, whether in their cruelty, the Romans would crucify him with Jesus.  This fear must have grown with each step as they approached Golgotha and yet he remained steadfastly with Christ to the end.  Only someone who has had great suffering has the courage to go all the way to Golgotha because ultimately they do not let the fear of getting caught in someone else’s mess stop them.  They no longer have a fear of suffering themselves because they know God sends it for good.  They stay near to the person because they are convicted that “God is close to the brokenhearted” (Ps 34:18).

They probably recall in their own lives the feeling of having been abandoned by someone who they thought would be their own Simon of Cyrene and would never abandon their own post for that reason.  For most people who are suffering, it is the loneliness of the Cross that is the most difficult.  They already have a sense of abandonment by God and so they need their Marys and St. Johns at the foot of the Cross.

With Thanksgiving this week and Christmas around the corner, ministries to help the poor and needy all receive an influx of volunteers.  What if instead of this (or even better in addition to) we all reconnected with the people we know personally are suffering?  What if we didn’t necessarily try to fix their situation, but instead found ways to carry some of the emotional burden they are carrying?  Because this compassionate paradigm shift can also come as a singular grace and at a moment we least expect it.  In closing I quote author Steven Covey’s own grace filled moment he describes in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People:

“I remember a mini-paradigm shift I experienced one morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly – some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.
Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway.  The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.
The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.
It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”
The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”
Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My paradigm shifted. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant.”

Marriage as a Call to Holiness

marriage, Theology of the Body, Vatican II

At the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, there were 58,632 priests in the United States, serving a Catholic population of 48.5 million.  In 2014, there were 38,275 priests, serving a total of 79.7 million Catholics.  The number of women religious in our country has seen an even more dramatic decrease, plunging from 179,954 to 49,883 during the same time frame (CARA Church Statistics).    We have labeled this reduction in the number of priests and religious sisters as the “vocation crisis.” We are regularly instructed to “pray the Lord of the harvest to send more laborers” (Mt 9:38).  But what if the issue is really our neglect of the seedbed vocations, namely marriage?  What if we have a priestly vocation crisis because we have a marriage vocation crisis?  The crisis is not just that we have fewer people getting married within the Church (the number of marriages within the Church went from 352,458 to 154,450) , but that we have treated marriage as a second-class vocation for far too long.

This second-class designation is not without a seeming biblical precedent.  In his first letter St. Paul tells the Corinthians that “he who marries his betrothed does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (1 Cor 7:38).  Earlier in the letter (7:9) he tells them that “if they cannot exercise self-control, then they should marry.  For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”  The popular interpretation of this is that the decision between whether one should remain celibate depends upon whether one can control himself or not.  If he cannot, then it is better to be married than not.  Read through the lens of our fallen human nature and thanks to a practical denial of marriage as a Sacrament, marriage became viewed as an outlet for indulging otherwise out of control passions.

This view has predominated for centuries in the Church.  The Church even labeled it as the secondary end of marriage calling it the remedium concupisentiae, which was translated as the remedy of concupiscence (or lust).  It is time that we re-examine this viewpoint to see if it really fits with what St. Paul was saying especially in light of Vatican II’s universal call to holiness.  With this as our understanding, marriage is viewed as being only for those who lack self-control.  It is only a short leap from this to the conclusion that self-control is not necessary in marriage because it offers us a place where we can legitimately engage our lust.  In other words, the call to holiness for married people comes despite their vocation and not because of it.

As an aside, I have to say that the need to work out a theology of marriage should have been a major focus of the Synod of the Family the past two years.  Instead they debated secondary issues like gay marriage and Communion for the remarried, wasting the Church’s time and money.  How many people actually want Communion that are remarried?  Why not focus on properly setting the ideal of marriage and showing how that can be a source of sanctification rather than look for loopholes to let a distorted view seem legitimate?

Once Vatican II and the subsequent popes began looking at marriage through a personalist perspective, framing marriage in terms of its unitive and procreative aspects, the term remedium concupisentiae was dropped from the Church’s vocabulary.  But the question is still open and marriage will still be viewed as a lesser vocation until it is addressed.  Rather than dropping the term, we should return to its roots because it contains an important truth.  St. Thomas and the Church fathers before him translated remedium concupisentiae as the remedy against concupiscence.  This change in a preposition makes all the difference.

Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin

St. Thomas says marriage is a remedy against concupiscence because it offers graces to overcome the self-seeking aspects of (married) love.  Love means making a gift of yourself and marriage offers us a unique way in which our love can be purified because it requires a total gift of oneself.  Through the grace of the sacrament of Marriage, the tendency to live a life of selfish taking is overtaken by a life of generous love.  In other words, one of the primary effects of marriage is that it purifies the love of the spouses.  It is not just a purification of the love for each other that occurs, but a purification of the love for God as well.

Each and every Sacrament is a real encounter with Christ and the Sacrament of Marriage is no different.  Although it is a “great mystery,” (Eph. 5:32) the spouses by being ministers of the Sacrament of Marriage bestow Christ on one another.  This occurs not just on the day of their wedding, but every day.  This is why St. Paul commands spouses to be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ (Eph. 5:21).  This isn’t meant to be interpreted poetically, but sacramentally.  The spouses really act in persona Christi to one another.  How often in our married life it is necessary to call this truth to mind!

Returning to the text in 1 Corinthians we can begin to see why St. Paul wishes everyone to be as he is without in any way denigrating marriage.  In the case of celibacy emotional love is purified through a “special gift from God” (1Cor 7:7) while in the case of the spouses, their love is purified through marriage lived out in a “truly human way” (Gaudium et Spes, 49), bolstered by the Sacrament of Marriage.  Both celibates and married however have the same ideal, namely for their love to be purified of concupiscence.  In the case of the married they actually grow in holiness through this struggle, while the celibate simply live out the gift.

This is why the Church has always insisted that the initial discernment should always be between celibacy and marriage.  If one discerns he has been given the gift of celibacy then he would discern how that call is to be lived out (laity or clergy).  Proper discernment would never consist (at least initially) in marriage vs priestly/religious life.

Looked at from the perspective of potential for holiness, Marriage is actually the higher calling.  The celibate gains no merit for the gift of celibacy per se (recognizing there is merit in responding to this gift).  His love is purified by a singular grace.  The married person however must actively cooperate with the grace of the Sacrament of Marriage daily.  St. Paul himself says this when he mentions that married life is the harder path because of the concerns of the spouses and the world (1 Cor 7:32-35).  If the path to holiness is harder, then there is greater merit when it is achieved.

As somewhat empirical proof of this second class status, the number of married persons among declared saints is extraordinarily few as compared to the number celibates.  This sends the message that marriage is not so much a calling but a human concession.  Back in October, the Church canonized Sts. Louis and Zelie Martin who became the first married couple with children to be canonized in the same ceremony, but this should be seen merely as a start.  Surely there are many other married people in heaven and the Church would do a great service to married couples by opening up causes of other married saints.  Sts Louis and Zelie Martin, pray for us!

 

 

 

Dialogue with Islam

Dialogue, Islam

As was mentioned in a previous post, one of the fruits of the Second Vatican Council was a concerted effort on the Church’s part to enter into dialogue with non-Christian religions.  While this always has the aim of evangelizing, it assumes that dialogue is possible.  What I mean by this is that, first, the other group is interested in dialogue and, second, that they are capable of it.  Nowhere are these assumptions challenged more than when it comes to the religion of Islam.  The Church has expended considerable resources on this effort and has had little fruit to show for it.  Could it be that dialogue is simply impossible with Islam?

When his brother Dominicans approached him to ask St. Thomas Aquinas about dialogue with Muslims, he said that they ought to approach them as if they were “natural” men.  What he meant by this is that unlike the Jews, Muslims fully reject Biblical Revelation.  Likewise because of the many contradictions regarding Christian doctrine (most notably the divinity of Christ) found in the Koran, Christians cannot accept theirs.  Therefore, the only approach is through human reason alone.

So even though Islam professes to worship the God of Abraham, the approach is the same as with any other non-Christian religion, through human reason.  What has to be understood however is that Islam rejects the whole notion of human reason.  In the Eleventh Century, there was an intellectual revolution led by perhaps the most influential Muslim next to Mohammed named Al-Ghazali.  As founder of the Ash’arite theology he affirmed that man can only know that which Allah tells him.  This makes entering into dialogue practically impossible.  If man can only know what God tells him, then any search for the truth (the literal meaning of the word dialogue) outside of the definitive revelation of the Koran is fruitless.

In his now infamous Regensburg Lecture, Pope Benedict was addressing this very same issue.  He was calling for an intellectual awakening both in the West and in Islam itself.  The violent response of Islam to Benedict XVI’s lecture showed that there is little room for reasonable discourse about Islam.  But what many Catholics are not aware of is that it actually did result in a gesture toward dialogue when 138 Islamic scholars penned a letter to Pope Benedict called A Common Word between Us and You.  Many within the Church took this as a great sign, but for those who are familiar with the teachings of Islam, it perhaps represents a subterfuge more than a real attempt at peace and understanding between the adherents of the world’s two largest religions.

The Islamic scholars insist that the “basis for this peace and understanding already exists. It is part of the very foundational principles of both faiths: love of the One God, and love of the neighbor. These principles are found over and over again in the sacred texts of Islam and Christianity. The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbor is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.”  One has to ask whether this is true.

The title of the letter comes from Sura 3:64, “Say: O People of the Scripture! Come to a common word between us and you: that we shall worship none but God, and that we shall ascribe no partner unto Him, and that none of us shall take others for lords beside God. And if they turn away, then say: Bear witness that we are they who have surrendered (unto Him).” The scholars connect this verse with the First and Greatest Commandment given by Jesus—“The words: we shall ascribe no partner unto Him relate to the Unity of God, and the words: worship none but God, relate to being totally devoted to God. Hence they all relate to the First and Greatest Commandment.”Church of Holy Sepulchre and Dome of the Rock

The problem with this is that it attempts to gloss over a very real and potentially insurmountable difference.  No Muslim actually believes that to say “we shall ascribe no partner unto Him” simply refers to the Unity of God in the sense that a Christian would understand the unity of God.  For to “ascribe a partner unto Him” is the unforgivable sin in Islam, namely shirk.  Christians, who believe that Jesus is the Son of God, commit this sin with impunity.  The Koran is very clear as to what Muslims are to do to those who obstinately commit this sin,

“Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture and believe not in God nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which God has forbidden by His Messenger, and follow not the religion of truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low…and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of God. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. God (himself) fights against them. How perverse are they! They have taken as lords beside God their rabbis and their monks and the Messiah son of Mary, when they were bidden to worship only One God. None should be worshipped but God alone. Be He glorified from all that they ascribe as partner (to Him)!” (Sura 9:29-31)

A difference this large cannot be a foundation for peace and understanding.  For faithful adherents of Islam, this difference is a foundation for war and dhimmitude (“pay the tribute, being brought low”).  To pretend otherwise is disingenuous at best.

The second commandment as a basis for peace and understanding, namely the love of neighbor also forms a shaky foundation.  After issuing the twofold commandment of love of God and love of neighbor, Jesus is asked by the scholar of the law “who is my neighbor?”.  He goes on to tell him the parable of the Good Samaritan to illustrate that Christianity believes in the brotherhood of all mankind (Luke 10:25-37).  The Christian sees in all men, his neighbor.  For the Muslim who is faithful to the Koran and Hadith, his neighbor is only other Muslims.

One of the five pillars of Islam is Zakat, or almsgiving.  All Muslims are obligated to give alms only to “the poor and the needy, and those who collect them, and those whose hearts are to be reconciled, and to free the captives and the debtors, and for the cause of God, and (for) the wayfarers; a duty imposed by God. God is Knower, Wise” (Sura 9:60).  But these alms can only be given to other Muslims because Allah commands that Muslims “[N]ever be a helper to the unbelievers” (Sura 28:86).  In other words, if the victim was not a Muslim in Jesus’ parable, then Muslims are commanded to pass him by.

It is this foundational truth about Islam that makes dialogue extremely difficult.  Dialogue always assumes an equality between the two parties insofar as their dignity is concerned.  Their ideas may not be equal, but without seeing the other as your equal then honest dialogue can never happen.  Muslims are taught not to see “People of the Book” as their equals.  Only their fellow Muslims can be their equal.  This distinction between believers and unbelievers is made in everything.  It even plays out in Sharia Law with respect to punishments for crimes.  Punishments change based on whether the perpetrator/victim is a Muslim or not because a Muslim is considered to be on a higher level of faith and thus to do him harm is not just breaking some moral code, but also constitutes an act of sacrilege.  The robbers in the parable may even have been faithful Muslims who justified it by saying they were collecting the jizya.

Above I appeared to be overly harsh in response to what appears to be a good will gesture by calling it potentially an act of subterfuge.  This is because Islam is one of the only religions that has a developed doctrine of deception called Taqiyya.  Sura 3:28 commands Islamic adherents to practice deception if it benefits the spread of Islam. Al-Tabari (an early Islamic scholar) explains “If you are under their authority, fearing for yourselves, behave loyally to them with your tongue, while harboring inner animosity for them…”  Because dialogue depends upon both parties being truthful, there can be no movement toward the truth when either party is convinced that they can lie anytime it helps them.  Knowing this, we naturally have to ask whether the scholars are trying to disarm Christians.  Beware of the man offering peace with one hand behind his back.

All of this shows the near impossibility of dialoguing with Muslims.  They can only do so on the basis of the Koran, which is the very text that is in question.  Ultimately in any investigation of the truth, it comes down to “because the Koran says so.”  This was also a point the Benedict XVI stressed as well when he quoted Ibn Hazim “[W]ere it God’s will, we would even practice idolatry.”  The Pope Emeritus was stressing that the Muslim conception of God puts Him  somehow beyond good and evil and that those categories are simply a matter of His capricious will at any given time.

Despite appearing to be a prophet of gloom, I believe there is a path forward in which fruitful dialogue might take place.  Certainly an awareness of what Islam teaches is very important for Catholics.  I am often struck by the level of ignorance of members of the Church.  The reasonable person when confronted with a threatening ideology will learn about it in order to defend themselves against it.  Can you imagine the Church trying to fight Communism without reading Marx and learning how Lenin interpreted him?  Or how about Fascism without reading Nietzsche and seeing how Hitler interpreted him in Mein Kempf?  Regardless of how we divide up Islam into moderate and radical, there is some percentage of Muslims who have become sworn enemies of the Church.  We may choose to fight armed with love and the sword of the Spirit, but not attempt to understand your enemy will not lead to a single conversion.  Perhaps this is why the Church has seen so little fruit in converting Muslims.

Personally I loathe the designation between “moderate Muslims” and “radical Muslims” almost as much “cafeteria Catholics” and “orthodox Catholics.”  In both cases both groups must be prepared to make an explanation for difficult teachings.  The cafeteria Catholic must be prepared to say what the Church teaches about a given issue and why it is wrong or being misinterpreted.  So too the moderate Muslim needs to be prepared to explain the difficult passages in the Koran just as much as the radical Muslim does.  The moderate Muslim needs to be ready to explain why Osama Bin Laden was wrong when he thought “terror in Islam is an obligation” was true based on Sura 9:41 (“Go forth, light armed and heavy armed, and strive hard with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah! That is best for you if you but knew”).  All too often I have found the Church kowtowing to political correctness by staying away from the controversial issues.  The responses to the letter from those inside the Church were no exception.  I recognize there is a certain amount of decorum necessary, but eventually you have to confront the real differences.  Personally had I received the letter, my first question would have been “how can we have peace and understanding between Christians and Muslims when it appears to the average reader of the Koran that you are commanded to kill me?”  Regardless of whether the person is “moderate” or “radical” the movement toward the truth can never be accomplished without asking these types of uncomfortable questions.

 

 

 

 

Finding the Antichrist

End Times

As the Liturgical New Year approaches, the Church turns her focus to the Second Coming of Christ.  We are reminded that although no one knows the hour of His return, we are still to be vigilant in watching (Mk 13:42).  This “watching” includes reading the times so that we might be prepared on that day.  In this spirit, the Church gives us four signs that we should watch for, namely, the Preaching of the Gospel to the whole world (Mt 24:14), the mass conversion of the Jews (Romans 11:25-30), the great apostasy (Mt 24:9-12) and the coming of the Antichrist.  While it is difficult to gage the first three of these, the appearance of the Antichrist is the most easily recognizable.  Therefore if, we are to remain with our lamps lit, it is instructive for us to understand what we should be looking for.

Using Sacred Scripture and the writings of the Fathers of the Church, we are able to piece together seven things that we will know about the Antichrist.  Much of what we can know is based on using the interpretive principle known as typology.  Fr. Hardon’s Catholic dictionary defines a biblical type as a “biblical person, thing, action, or event that foreshadows new truths, new actions, or new events.  A likeness must exist between the type and the archetype, but the latter is always greater.”  By applying what we know about the type, we can learn more about the archetype.  Sacred Scripture abounds with examples, especially related to Christ and Our Lady.  One of the more obvious examples in the New Testament of biblical typology is found in the Book of Hebrews which refers to Christ as forever a priest of the order of Melchizedek (Heb. 7:17).  Melchizedek was a priest that Abraham met who offered a sacrifice of bread and wine (Gen 14:18-20).    So Melchizedek’s simple offering was a type of Christ’s perpetual offering of the Eucharist (archetype).  Christ Himself also uses this principle when He prophesizes the destruction of the Temple.  Because the Temple was views as a microcosm of the entire cosmos and it was literally the center of existence of Israel, its destruction would have been understood to foreshadow the end of the world.   This is why He appears to be referring to both the type and archetype when He speaks of the end times.

In his second letter, St. Paul prepares the Faithful in Thessalonica for the coming of the “lawless one” by alerting them to the fact that “the mystery of iniquity is already at work” (2Thes 2:7-8).  In essence he is encouraging them to apply this typological principle as a means to recognizing the Antichrist.  Because the spirit of the Antichrist is being restrained (2Thess 2:6-7), they know that the antichrists they are witnessing serve only as types of the evil one that is to come.  Therefore, with respect to the Antichrist, we can apply this principle to three historical examples in particular.  The first is Antiochus Epiphanes who is found in Second Maccabees.  After being held captive in Rome for 14 years, he ascended to the throne of Syria.  In 175BC,  he marched against Jerusalem and eventually stripped Temple of its treasures.  By 168 BC the city was completely devastated and he declared one religion and seated himself on the throne in the Temple.  This is the “Abomination of Desolation” that was predicted by Daniel (7:8,11,25) and promised by Our Lord during the end times.

The second is the Emperor Nero. During his reign, he embodied all the cruelties attributed to the Second Beast of Revelation 13.  It is probable that the number 666 refers to him specifically. While he is not mentioned by name, he is also the “Caesar” referred to in Acts 25 who is ultimately responsible for the martyrdom of St. Paul.

Finally, there is Muhammad.  While many in the Church have been duped by the nearly two century dormancy of Islam, Church Fathers and saints label him as a type of the Antichrist.  Islam’s absolute monotheism declares that Jesus is not the Son of God, but a mere man—this according to St. John, is the antichrist (1John 2:22-23).  St. John Damascene said, “[T]here is also the superstition of the Ishmaelites which to this day prevails and keeps people in error, being a forerunner of the Antichrist…. From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst.”  Certainly the institutionalized persecution of “People of the Book” “until they feel themselves subdued” (Surah 29) is a foretaste of the persecution that Christians will face under the reign of the Antichrist.

Relying on the Sacred Scripture, supplemented with typology and the teachings of the Fathers, we can conclude seven things about the Antichrist.

Antichrist--Chapel of San Brizio

First, the Antichrist will be a man and not the devil incarnate.  Try though he might, the best the devil can do is to mimic God.  He is not so powerful that he could effect something like the Incarnation.  Instead as a “thief and a liar” he can only possess the man, even if it is to such a degree that the man submits intellect and will over to him

Second, the Antichrist will perform many signs and wonders.   Because angels (and demons) have control over material creation, the Antichrist will have the power to perform many seemingly miraculous things.  In this way, St. Irenaeus says Simon Magus (Acts 8:9-24) was a foreshadowing of the Antichrist.  When he could not “purchase” the Holy Spirit, he set himself in opposition to the Apostles and devoted himself more fully to the study of magic, claiming to be a god and receiving honor even from Claudius Caesar.

Third, he will be thought to be the Christ by the Jews.  This is why most of the Church Fathers say he will be a Jew (possibly from the tribe of Dan) and will rise to power in Jerusalem (and why we should be careful in thinking that we should always side politically with Israel).  He will also rebuild the Temple and sit in the Desolation of Abomination as Daniel and Our Lord prophesized.

Fourth, he will reign for 3 and a half years.  Both the Book of Revelation, “[T]hey will trample on the holy city for 42 months” (Rev 11:2) and the Book of Daniel “[A] time, two times and a half a time” both predict this.

Fifth, St. Cyril of Jerusalem says, the Antichrist will at first put on a show of mildness, soberness and benevolence and will beguile many (especially the Jews who will think he is the expected Christ) by his lying signs and wonders of his “magical deceit” but afterwards he will be characterized by all kinds of crimes of inhumanity and cruelty and will outdo all unrighteous and ungodly men who have gone before him especially towards the elect.

This is where typology becomes so important for understanding just how bad things will be during the persecution of the Antichrist.  He will set up a world government and a world religion that worships himself.  Because of the harsh persecutions, only the true Faith will remain, even if the Church herself is “given the two wings of the great eagle, so that she could fly to her place in the desert, where, far from the serpent, she was taken care of for a year, two years, and a half-year” (Rev 12:14).  St. Augustine interprets Daniel 12:13, “[F]rom the time that the daily sacrifice is abolished and the desolating abomination is set up, there shall be one thousand two hundred and ninety days” to mean that the offering of the Mass will cease during the reign of the Antichrist.  He even speculates that the persecution will be so bad that there will be no baptisms by water during that time.

The Christians who are on earth during this time will suffer their Purgatory on earth.  When Christ returns after the forty-two months, He will take everyone who is still alive up with Him.  They will have to be so purified that Purgatory is not necessary.

Six, “two witnesses” will plague the Antichrist and he will ultimately slay them.  Revelation 11:3-12 speaks of two witnesses who will prophecy for 3 ½ years.  It is ultimately their witness that will lead to the mass conversion of the Jews. Eventually they are slain and lay in the streets of Jerusalem for 3 ½ days.  After that they are taken up to heaven accompanied by earthquakes.

Many Church Fathers think that these two witnesses are Enoch and Elijah.  Both of them were taken to heaven without dying and the thought is that they will return.  The thought is that Elijah will preach to the Jews while Enoch preaches to the nations.  Part of the Messianic expectation is that Elijah will come again prior to the (second) coming of the Messiah (see Mal 4:5-6) .  This helps to make sense of the veiled answer Our Lord gave to the disciples when they questioned whether Elijah had come—“And He answered and said, “Elijah is coming and will restore all things; but I say to you that Elijah already came” (Mt 17:11-12).

This taking up of the two witnesses is the definitive sign of the beginning of the end leading to the seventh thing we know—the Antichrist will be killed by “the breath of the mouth” of Christ (2 Thess. 2:8).  Whether this means that Christ kills Him with His literal Second Coming or without His physical appearance is questionable.

One of the reasons the Antichrist will garner worldly attention is that he will appear to have been dead and is somehow miraculously healed (Rev. 13:3).  This is an attempt of the Evil One to mimic the Resurrection.  Along those same lines, some theologians have speculated that the Antichrist will try to mimic Christ’s ascension and Christ will slay Him and drop Him into the pits of hell.