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Tim Staples answers a caller who wonders whether it is more accurate to say we pray TO the Saints or THROUGH them, all while keeping God in mind as the final end.

How Does Intercessory Prayer Work?

<div>If I disable my implanted defibrillator and pacemaker and let nature take its course, would that be considered suicide?</div><div>If you are in the advanced stages of heart disease and the shocks of your defibrillator cause pain and anxiety, and there is the frightening prospect of your last moments being full of these shocks, it is permissible to disable it, even though you may die sooner. You will die more peacefully. Disabling the defibrillator is no different from not doing CPR on someone who is clearly about to die: it can be a humane and rational decision.
On the other hand, there does not appear to be a good reason to remove a pacemaker, since it does not cause any discomfort, and removing it, in the case of one who is dependent on it, means pretty much instant or very swift death. It would basically be turning off the switch on your heart. So, effectively, in most cases, this would be a kind of direct killing.
My considered answer is yes to disabling the defibrillator if it is becoming a source of great discomfort, but no to disabling the pacemaker, which involves no discomfort and the removal of which causes death quickly.
Of course, I do not have all the details of your situation, and I trust you are getting sound medical information about your case so as to decide tranquilly and rationally what you want to do. I will certainly pray for you at my Holy Mass here at Catholic Answers.
</div>

Disabling a Pacemaker Is Wrong

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Is purgatory a catholic invention?

Protestants claim the Bible disproves the Catholic dogma of Mary’s Bodily Assumption in 1 Corinthians 15:22-23. But is this true? Karlo Broussard gives reasons why the answer is no.

Does the Bible Disprove the Assumption?

Protestant worship lacks this one thing… the Eucharist.

Jimmy Akin offers a few philosophical and theological counter-arguments to the concepts of karma and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/reincarnation">reincarnation</a>, and cites the letter to the Hebrews as the definitive Christian declaration that we die only once before judgement.
Transcript:
Host: Joshua on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/catholiccom">YouTube</a> Live poses the following question: &#8220;How do we disprove reincarnation through philosophy, if that&#8217;s the best method for resolution?&#8221;
Jimmy: Well, so, it&#8217;s an interesting challenge. There&#8230;reincarnation is something that you can critique on more than one ground. It is possible to mount a philosophical critique of reincarnation, and point out, for example, there are aspects of reincarnation that are potentially problematic.
Like the idea of karma, that whatever you do is going to bounce back on you, and there&#8217;s basically no mercy in the universe, that the universe is a merciless place. And that&#8217;s something that doesn&#8217;t fully appeal to the human heart. The human heart wants to find mercy in the world, and in fact some adherents of Eastern religions talk about mercy and place a value on mercy. But if the universe is fundamentally merciless, per the law of karma, then that would&#8230;then why should they even bother being merciful? Why should that be of value? Well, our hearts tell us that mercy is a value, and so that should tell us that mercy is available in the world, and should be&#8211;there should be some room for cosmic mercy in our worldview as well as cosmic justice.
Now, other forms of the idea of reincarnation may incorporate elements of mercy, so they may not respond to that argument. There are other potential arguments as well. For example, sometimes it&#8217;s proposed, in these religions that believe in reincarnation, that ultimately everybody is going to end up in an ideal spiritual condition, whether that&#8217;s conceived of as Nirvana, or Krishna consciousness, or whatever it may be. But how do you know? How do you know that&#8217;s gonna happen? That&#8217;s&#8211;if the universe is&#8211;it just operates kind of mechanically according to karma, people could descend spiritually as easily as they ascend, so what gives you faith that that people are going to ascend? That&#8217;s not something that falls right out of the concepts involved, and so you can ask for evidence.
Now ultimately, from a Christian point of view, it&#8217;s not a philosophical case against reincarnation that&#8217;s going to be the most convincing. From a Christian point of view, the fact that the idea of reincarnation is not compatible with the Christian revelation is what&#8217;s going to be most convincing. It&#8217;s directly stated in the book of Hebrews that it&#8217;s appointed for man once to die, and then the judgment. So we die once, and then we&#8217;re judged by God. We don&#8217;t die over and over again. That&#8217;s the specific idea that was out there in Greek culture that the author of Hebrews is responding to. He&#8217;s not just saying that out of the blue, he&#8217;s saying that in response to a cultural background where many people did believe in reincarnation. And you find the same theme echoed over and over again in the Church Fathers. You can check out my book &#8220;The Fathers Know Best&#8221; if you want examples of that.
But from a Christian point of view, I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s not the philosophical arguments that are ultimately decisive&#8211;although they can be helpful. I&#8217;d say it&#8217;s the Christian revelation, and so in talking with someone who believes in reincarnation, I would either, if they&#8217;re already a Christian of some sort, even if they&#8217;re at, say, a New Age-er who still has some kind of belief in Christ, I would try to build on that.
I would also say I understand&#8211;if they&#8217;re not, let&#8217;s say they&#8217;re Hindu&#8211;I would say &#8220;I understand and respect your position; here&#8217;s why I don&#8217;t believe in reincarnation, and let&#8217;s talk about the basis of the Christian faith, then. Because if the Christian faith has a good basis, that means you would want to take its teachings&#8211;like resurrection is our fate, not reincarnation&#8211;you&#8217;d want to take those seriously too, so let&#8217;s talk about the reasons why one should take the Christian faith seriously. And to your knowledge, was there ever a time where maybe a Christian group or something grasped on to&#8211;ignored, for example, that admonition from the letter to the Hebrews, and nonetheless believed&#8211;&#8221; You find scattered instances all the way down through history, because, you know, people get crazy ideas that are inconsistent with the teaching of the Church in every age.
And certainly that&#8217;s been true in recent in in recent times. In the last 150 years there has been a lot of interaction between East and West, and various groups have tried to hybridize eastern and western religious concepts, like the Theosophical Society and the New Age movement and things like that. So you do find people who are trying to kind of straddle that east-west divide these days.

How to Disprove Reincarnation

<div>Is there an archangel named Cassiel?</div><div>The Church rejects any attempt to name or identify angels that are not directly referred to in the canon of Scripture. Gabriel and Michael are mentioned in the New Testament and Raphael is mentioned in the book of Tobit.
</div>

Archangel Cassiel?

Responding to a caller who struggles picking one political party over another, Tim Staples explains that the Church is not definitively for or against any political party, but that voting Catholics should keep in mind non-negotiable issues like abortion, euthanasia, and same-sex &#8220;marriage&#8221; when deciding who to vote for.
Transcript:
Host: Patrick in Temecula, California, listening on 1000 AM. Patrick, you&#8217;re on with Tim Staples. What&#8217;s your question, Patrick?
Caller: Well, it seems to me that most people&#8211;most Catholics identify with the Republican party. The quandary that I have is, I see &#8220;Thou shalt not kill&#8221; as&#8230;I&#8217;m having a hard time articulating this, but I can see how people would identify the Democratic party with abortion, and the Republican party with repealing it. I see the Republican party as dragging us into war, and I&#8217;m having a hard time picking a side.
Tim: Right. That&#8217;s a great point, Patrick. First of all, you know, we have what we call at Catholic Answers the <a href="http://stbern-bv.org/Voters-Guide-Catholic-English-1p.pdf">Voter&#8217;s Guide For Serious Catholics</a>, you might want to check that out. We put it out in 2004, and has, oh my goodness, it&#8217;s sold millions of copies. Which is, that&#8217;s quite a feat in Catholic circles. You know, in the world, ehhh, big deal, but Catholic circles, when you sell millions of anything, that&#8217;s amazing. But in our Voter&#8217;s Guide For Serious Catholics, one of the points that we make there is, really, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/catholicism-and-politics">the Catholic Church is not Republican or Democrat</a>. In fact, we call both Democrats and Republicans to repent.
And we challenge our people in our Voters Guide to vote in accordance with the issues, &#8217;cause imagine, Patrick, imagine if you have&#8211;if you have folks who are saying, &#8220;Okay, I&#8217;m gonna vote Republican because I&#8217;m Catholic,&#8221; well, what happens if you have a Republican candidate who is pro-abortion, pro-homosexual marriage, running against a Democrat who is pro-life and for traditional marriage? I mean, are you gonna vote Republican? Of course not. So that&#8217;s point number one.
But point number two: you make a very important point here. You know, what about war and such? Now, we could debate, you know, who has led us into more wars, you know, in fact I argued in this last election that we had a Democratic candidate who never saw a war she didn&#8217;t like. And we had quite a few Republican candidates as well who never saw a war they didn&#8217;t like. I find it somewhat refreshing that President Donald Trump has at least said, &#8220;Let&#8217;s not do this nation-building and, you know, going to war with everybody,&#8221; I mean, my goodness, we&#8217;ve got guys like John McCain who, I think if he had his way, we&#8217;d be fighting wars all over the place.
So, but, you know, we can debate those issues, right, who is really more the warmonger? But I think the most important thing, Patrick, to consider, is that there is an essential difference between war and abortion, in this sense. Now if we&#8217;re talking about an unjust war, alright, that&#8217;s&#8230;that&#8217;s a different animal. But war per se, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-is-a-just-war">wars can either be just or unjust</a>. And we can debate as Catholics&#8211;let&#8217;s take the Iraq war, for example. There were Catholics in good standing that were on both sides of the issue there; many who said, &#8220;That&#8217;s an unjust war,&#8221; and some who said, &#8220;It&#8217;s a just war.&#8221; You are not barred from Communion for holding either position. Catholics can legitimately disagree when it comes to that.
However, when it comes to abortion, my friend, we&#8217;re talking about something that is objectively, intrinsically immoral; there are no exceptions whatsoever. We&#8217;ve slaughtered, as I mentioned before, well over 50 million innocent babies. So I don&#8217;t believe you can put these two&#8211;these two are not on the same level. Abortion is the most grave evil of our time, and we need to consider it as such.
And this is why, Patrick, by the way, in our Voter&#8217;s Guide For Serious Catholics, we talk about abortion, euthanasia&#8211;which has spread all over this country in just the last 12 years. The amount of euthanasia in our country has been&#8211;it&#8217;s gone through the roof. Astonishing. And the line of demarcation, I believe, was the Terri Schiavo case, where we had, basically, this poor woman was euthanized basically on television. They took the cameras out for the last couple of weeks, because of course they don&#8217;t want to show the grim end to this woman&#8217;s life, but the bottom line is&#8230;whereas, 20, 30, let&#8217;s say 30 years ago, we were called extremists if we said, &#8220;Hey, abortion&#8217;s gonna lead to euthanasia.&#8221; My friends, it has, and now we have physician-assisted suicide, and we go down the list there in our Voter&#8217;s Guide, we talk about embryonic stem cell research, human cloning, which is now being experimented on all over&#8211;government doesn&#8217;t pay for it but it&#8217;s fully legal, it&#8217;s being experimented with all across the United States, and a lot of folks don&#8217;t even realize it.
And now, homosexual so-called &#8220;marriage.&#8221; We have these matters that are intrinsically evil that we as Catholics have a duty&#8211;in fact, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, I&#8217;m trying to remember the year, it put out a document on certain proposals to legalize same-sex unions. And notice, it didn&#8217;t use the word &#8220;marriage,&#8221; it said &#8220;union.&#8221; I believe that&#8217;s 2004, as I recall. And it said that we, as Catholics, have a duty to oppose the legalization of homosexual unions of any sort mimicking marriage. It doesn&#8217;t have to be marriage, but any sort mimicking. These are deal-breakers for Catholics, whereas when it comes to war, we can have a real debate as to what is just and what is unjust.
So we&#8217;re not trying to be overly simplistic in our Voter&#8217;s Guide, we recognize you can have particular situations, let&#8217;s say if you&#8217;re living in Nazi Germany and you&#8217;re living under a government that you know is slaughtering Jews, is starting unjust wars all across the country, where you have a situation where that is more grave than the abortions going on. Of course that&#8217;s a possibility. But we&#8217;re laying out objective truths here, Patrick. We have to look at our situation, look at the objective truth, and then we can apply the subjective situation.
But if we don&#8217;t understand that there&#8217;s a difference between, you know, killing an innocent human being and killing someone who unjustly is attacking our nation or&#8211;look, I&#8217;m a father of seven children. Somebody comes into my house and wants to kill my wife and children, guess what? They&#8217;re gonna have to come through me. And I&#8217;m packin&#8217;, my friends, just so you know. If you come in my house&#8211;in fact, I sleep with my 9mm right under my pillow every night. Normally I have my hand on it, so don&#8217;t come in my house. I&#8217;m gonna defend my family, even up to and including, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, delivering the lethal blow, if it is necessary.
But you can never, in any circumstance, slaughter innocent human beings. So Patrick, you can see why Catholics are so up in arms over abortion, whereas when it comes to something like the Iraq war, I know lots of Catholic friends who are strongly opposed to the Iraq war. Bishops, priests, and so forth. But there is not the same level there as there is when it comes to abortion, because we&#8217;re talking about something like abortion. I mean&#8211;just&#8211;Cy, I think sometimes, and Patrick, we miss this. We&#8217;re talking about over 50 million babies that have been slaughtered, and now we&#8217;re right at almost a million a year that continue to be killed.
And then we&#8217;re talking about the wars total in Iraq and Afghanistan for all the years we&#8217;ve been there, what, 12 years or whatever it is now&#8230;we&#8217;ve lost something like 2500, I believe, men and women who have fallen. I mean, that&#8217;s a huge number, but to put things in perspective: you know, we&#8217;re talking about fighting&#8211;these are combatants that are fighting, and so forth, and we&#8217;re talking 2500; we lost almost 500,000 in four years in World War II. We lost right about 50,000 in ten years in Vietnam. And here, in Iraq and Afghanistan&#8211;now, we&#8217;re talking about losses on our side, of course there are losses on the other side, but we have to put these things in perspective.
I think at times, as the great Bishop of Rockford, Illinois said years ago, Bishop Doran, I remember he said, &#8220;Anyone who can vote for a pro-abortion candidate when you have a viable pro-life candidate has lost a sense of what we&#8217;re talking about when we&#8217;re talking about abortion.&#8221; And now we can add the other non-negotiables, like homosexual &#8220;marriage&#8221; as well.
Forgive me for ranting a bit there, Patrick, but I think that you&#8217;ve asked a really, really important question, and I hope I&#8217;ve helped some.
Host: Thank you, Patrick.

Catholics and Political Parties

Gary Zimak gives some advice on staying close to God while trying to discern his will for our lives.
Transcript:
Host: We go now to Jennifer in Algonquin, Illinois, listening to <a href="https://www.ewtn.com">EWTN</a> on WSFI. Jennifer, your question for Gary Zimak.
Caller: Hi, thanks so much for your time.
Gary: Hey, Jennifer.
Caller: So my question is with anxiety and discernment. For me personally, I&#8217;m trying to discern a vocation, and every single person in my life is very much more on the secular side, or even anti-Catholic specifically, so every voice in my life is saying &#8220;No, don&#8217;t do that,&#8221; but there&#8217;s also part of me that&#8217;s like, &#8220;Well, what if?&#8221; So how do you move through the fear to actually determine what God really wants you to do?
Gary: Good question, and this is something that, even though I&#8217;m married, I have a family, I, five years ago, made the decision to go into full-time ministry. So this is a constant question for me: &#8220;Lord you really want me to keep doing this?&#8221; Because it gets challenging financially sometimes, so I&#8217;m very familiar with this whole idea of &#8220;Lord, what do you want me to do?&#8221;
One thing I would recommend&#8211;and I have a lot of details in my book &#8220;Faith, Hope and Clarity,&#8221; that really grew out of my own discernment&#8211;I would say stay close to the Lord, keep asking Him, &#8220;Lord, do you want me to do this? What do you want me to do?&#8221; You can always go through the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, there&#8217;s some books written that simplify the Spiritual Exercises, which were written in order to help people discern vocations.
And then oftentimes the Lord, after we&#8217;ve discerned, we think, &#8220;Well, this is what I should do,&#8221; He wants us to try things and then pay attention to circumstances. I thought I was called to be a permanent Deacon one time&#8211;nothing worked out at all for me in that regard, so now looking back I don&#8217;t think it was the Lord&#8217;s will for me. But I would say stay with Him, keep asking Him, and then if you get an inspiration, try it and see what happens. Mother Angelica was big on that. If she got an idea, she ran with it, and she said, &#8220;If it&#8217;s from the Lord it&#8217;ll work; if not, it&#8217;ll fall apart.&#8221; Hope that helps.

How Do I Tackle Anxiety When Discerning a Vocation?

<div>how does the church reconcile the immutablity of god with the incarnation?</div><div>How can we say that God is immutable or unchangeable, and yet say that God took on a human nature that is subject to change?
When we say God is immutable, we are speaking of his divine nature, which is incapable of any internal change. “Changeableness” would imply the capacity for an increase or decrease of perfection, which would necessarily imply limitation and imperfection. As God, Jesus is necessarily infinitely perfect and thus not subject to internal change. Otherwise, he necessarily wouldn’t be God. For more on God’s immutability, <a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06612a.htm#IIC">see this article which discusses that and other divine attributes</a>.
At the same time, in taking on a human nature, which given its human limitations could be perfected (Heb. 2:10-11; 5:7-10), Jesus illustrates that he can experience changes relative to his humanity and yet not as a divine person. A mystery to be sure, but here we speak of “mystery” as a divine truth that we humanly cannot fully comprehend, nor will be able to fully comprehend, given God’s divine majesty.
</div>

God’s Immutability and the Incarnation: Irreconcilable Differences?

<div>My three-year-old nephew has an imaginary friend he calls "Mark." Are imaginary friends considered guardian angels or demons?</div><div>Imaginary friends are just that: imaginary. Young children often use their imagination to &#8220;bring alive&#8221; their toys and stuffed animals. Some children go a step further and create in their minds an invisible friend. There is nothing to worry about. What your nephew has created in his mind is perfectly normal and is a sign of creativity.
</div>

Are Imaginary Friends Bad?

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer joins Cy Kellett to tackle a common misunderstanding about St. Paul&#8217;s teaching in 1 Timothy 3:2 regarding bishops and marriage. Joe clarifies that Paul’s call for bishops to be &#8220;the husband of one wife&#8221; is not a mandate for marriage but rather a guideline against polygamy and divorce, emphasizing that celibacy can indeed be a valid and even superior path for church leaders.
Transcript:
Caller: So my question I&#8217;m asking kind of on behalf of somebody else. So it&#8217;s about the passage in First Timothy, chapter three, verse two. It&#8217;s about pastors and needing to be married, essentially. They&#8217;re essentially opposed to priestly celibacy.
Joe: Yeah. So when St. Paul says that a bishop must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, for basically 2,000 years, everyone understood that he&#8217;s saying not to be remarried, not to be a bigamist, or divorced and remarried. It&#8217;s a one wife ceiling. And then Protestants come along and say, no, no, it&#8217;s actually a floor. You have to have at least one wife. And it&#8217;s like, no, that&#8217;s clearly not what he&#8217;s saying.
The reason we know it&#8217;s not what he&#8217;s saying is Paul himself is celibate. Like Paul doesn&#8217;t have a wife. So unless he&#8217;s saying, oh, I could never be a bishop, I could never govern a church, but I can govern the people governing churches, it doesn&#8217;t make any sense.
So, like read First Corinthians 7 where he talks about how celibacy is superior to marriage and how he wishes everyone would copy him in being celibate, even though they&#8217;re not required to by God. Now that should be a huge glaring red flag that he&#8217;s clearly not saying celibacy is bad or celibacy disqualifies you from church leadership.
We also have, you know, the example of the other apostles. The apostle there&#8217;s sometimes dispute about is about Peter. But stop and think about the fact you don&#8217;t know the names of any wives of any apostles or any bishops in the early church. Even people who are bishops of local churches like Timothy and Titus, not a word is ever said about them having a wife.
Now that doesn&#8217;t prove not one of them did, but it&#8217;d be remarkable if literally all of them did and somehow none of their wives got mentioned when there are plenty of husband and wife pairs that are mentioned who aren&#8217;t bishops. So there&#8217;s early widespread evidence for celibacy being the normal practice within the church. It wasn&#8217;t dictated early on, but it was normative early on because Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew talks about how some are called to be eunuchs for the kingdom of God.
So both Jesus in Matthew 19 and St. Paul in First Corinthians 7 talk about how celibacy is even higher than marriage. I would also add even in terms of requiring celibacy in First Timothy 5. So you mentioned First Timothy 3. Sometimes people will combine that with First Timothy 4, where he warns against the Gnostics and talks about their doctrines of demons like the forbidding of marriage.
And they&#8217;ll claim that he&#8217;s talking about, oh, clerical celibacy is bad, or mandatory celibacy in particular context is bad. And then you get into literally the next chapter, First Corinthians 5, and he talks about how widows, if they want to be part of what&#8217;s called the ordo of widows, have to take a pledge to remain celibate after their spouse has died.
And so he says in First Corinthians 5, verse 11, but refuse to enroll younger widows, for when they grow wanton against Christ, they desire to marry. And so they incur condemnation for having violated their first pledge. So he&#8217;s clearly talking there about there being some widows who are enrolled. He&#8217;s not saying it&#8217;s wrong for all widows to remarry. That&#8217;s very clear.
But he is saying that widows who are part of this order where they were taken care of by the Church, if they desire to marry, that&#8217;s sinful against Christ. So even, like, obligatory mandatory celibacy is part of Paul&#8217;s scheme within the Church and in places like First Timothy.
So what would you say to all that?
Caller: : I think the response that, like, I was kind of trying to seal out, and one that I think some people would have, is if you look at the Greek there when he says they must be and then goes on with that list, that must there seems to be in the Greek. It seems to almost make it a mandatory thing.
Joe: Oh, yeah, no, I agree. Must be is mandatory. It is mandatory. Be above reproach. And if the husband of one wife means he literally can&#8217;t be a widower, or he literally&#8230; You know, if it would mean that, then sure, I would agree.
I think if you&#8217;re gonna make the argument from Greek, then the fact that the early Greek Christians didn&#8217;t read it that way should be a huge red flag. You know, like, if you were someone who didn&#8217;t speak English natively, or let&#8217;s say somebody else who doesn&#8217;t speak English natively is trying to say, oh, no, in English, this word actually means this other thing, you would say, like, you&#8217;re misreading the passage.
I speak English natively. There is an early work sometimes called the Constitutions of the Holy Apostles. And we were talking before the break when St. Timothy&#8230; Excuse me. When St. Paul says to St. Timothy that a bishop is to be the husband of one wife, Timothy himself doesn&#8217;t appear to be married.
Paul explicitly is not. Is he saying that he and Timothy aren&#8217;t qualified to be bishops? Is he? And I suggested the early Christians clearly didn&#8217;t understand it that way. They understood it to mean you have to be monogamous, as in you don&#8217;t have more than one wife, you can&#8217;t be a bigamist, you can&#8217;t be a polygamist, you can&#8217;t be an adulterer.
And you can find plenty of early Christians talking about this in places like Athenagoras in 180. But in the so-called Constitution of the Twelve Apostles, or Constitution of the Holy Apostles, excuse me, says we have already said that a bishop, a presbyter, a deacon, when they are constituted, must be once married or whether their wives be alive or whether they&#8217;d be dead, and that it is not lawful for them if they&#8217;re unmarried when they&#8217;re ordained to be married afterwards.
So right there it&#8217;s taking First Timothy 3 and saying this means either that you are unmarried upon ordination and therefore you&#8217;re prohibited from ever getting married, or if you are married and your wife dies, you&#8217;re prohibited from getting remarried. That&#8217;s how the early Christians understood. They didn&#8217;t think that this meant you couldn&#8217;t be unmarried and get ordained.
So it&#8217;s fascinating to see how a lot of modern Protestants have taken the passage in 180 degrees opposed from the way that the early Christians understood what St. Paul meant.
Again, Tyler, thank you for the call.
Cy: Let&#8217;s go to Jim in Washington State listening on Sacred Heart Radio. Glad to have you here. Jim, why aren&#8217;t you capping?

I’m Not Catholic Because Your Priests Should Be Married…

<blockquote>As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him. We must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day; night comes, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” As he said this, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle and anointed the man’s eyes with the clay, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). So he went and washed and came back seeing. (John 9:1-7).</blockquote>
Wow! If ever there were a reading that is right on target for our current days of bodily fears and dangers, this is it. Two marvelous truths are both implied and concretely shown in this delightful gospel lesson. (Note: Read the whole passage, not just the portion given above: how charming are the Lord and the Blind Man! They are like true, humble brothers, each made for the other for the glory of God.) There are of course many other truths found in this richly woven tapestry of spiritual power; we will speak of two of them here.
1. We are our bodies.
When you see or touch or hear my body, you see, touch, or hear me. Here, in contrast, is a surprising look into the religious beliefs of some Jews of our Lord’s time (and even among some sects of religious Jews now). Notice that the Savior’s disciples seem to think someone might be able to sin before he is born. They believed that the soul existed before it entered the body. This was a common error: it was hard to eliminate among the first Christians and even was considered by some of the early Church Fathers and writers.
Why do we reject this idea, common as it has been? Because, again, we are our bodies, living by the power of our spiritual souls. The very word soul means that it is a principle of life in a body, not a simple spirit. Our soul comes to be, is created by God, at its union with the body. A body is simply dead without a soul, and a soul is “out of place” without a body. My mother’s body lying in its grave is not my mother. My mother’s soul in the life to come did not give birth to me. She is both.
That is why death is a loss, and why we fear and mourn it. And that is why we are so afraid of epidemics and pestilence. We do not want ourselves or our loved ones to experience the separation of soul and body that is death. Angels do not fear disease; they do not need to take any precautions; they do not observe “social distancing.” Neither do the Risen Lord and His Holy Mother, likewise glorious, because they are immortal; they cannot die. Even the disembodied souls of the saints in heaven and the souls in purgatory, who will not die a second time, still are not “completely” immortal until their bodies are no longer dead, but alive!
Disease points to death, and death is the end of our complete, personal existence. This is a fearsome thought. We know that only a power infinitely greater than ours can heal all bodily disease and overcome death in the resurrection to endless life in body and soul.
2. The Body of God is God. Believe in, touch, receive, love, see, hear, desire, embrace the body of Christ, and you believe, touch, receive, love, see, hear, desire, and embrace God himself. This is because he was incarnate in a body, and he did not abandon it ever. His is always the body of God; he is not dead. He is ever your Jesus. This is why the Lord used his body to work miraculous cures.
St. Thomas Aquinas comments on the passage above and, speaking of the Lord’s miracles, says, “Frequently he uses his body in his miracles in order to demonstrate that his body, insofar as it is the instrument (literally “organ”) of his Godhead, has received a certain saving power&#8221; (Commentary on the Gospel of John).
We must stir up our faith and desire for the body of our God and the saving power it possesses to heal and even to raise up from the dead. It is a truth of the creed that we infallibly profess and declare that he will raise us up from bodily death on the last day by the power of his own incarnation, of his own body.
Let us confront sickness and death with this confidence, and all will be well! The same body that is the battleground of sin, passions, and sickness will be the place of victory, health and healing, and undying life. All glory to the glorious body of the Lord, born of the Virgin Mary, and dwelling in our tabernacles! All glory to the resurrection of his holy ones, unto which happy lot may he draw us by the power of that same body!
He is the one who said, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth [in his body on the cross], will draw all men to myself,” and elsewhere, &#8220;He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.&#8221; Let us feed on him by faith and love, and this will calm our fear of bodily death!

The Christian Confronts Death

<div>Is John the Baptist Elijah? </div><div>John the Baptist is believed to have the role of Elijah. He is not literally the person Elijah.
Elijah did not die but was taken up to heaven (2 Kings 2:1-11) and thus the Jewish people believe he will physically return to Earth from heaven before the coming of the Messiah (Sirach 48:4-11, Malachi 3:23-24). That is why John the Baptist denied he was the literal physical return of Elijah from heaven, but the Gospel affirmed he was a &#8220;typology&#8221; of Elijah (Luke 1:17).
</div>

Is John the Baptist Elijah?

Why would God make a massive universe and then care about one little speck in the middle of it all? Isn&#8217;t that a waste of a universe? Jimmy Akin addresses these questions, showing why the vastness of the universe isn&#8217;t incompatible with the idea of a loving creator.

Why Would God Make Such a Big Universe?

<div>Doesn’t the precious blood make the chalice pure? Why does it get "purified"?</div><div>“Purification” refers to making sure no eucharistic elements remain in the sacred vessels, whether under the appearances of bread or wine. This is done out of great reverence for Christ’s sacred body and precious blood.
After the Communion rite, a priest or deacon gathers and consumes any fragments remaining from the consecrated hosts. Then, using his hand, a priest or deacon transfers to the chalice any small particles of the hosts remaining in the ciborium or on a paten.
Water is then added to the remaining eucharistic elements in the chalice, typically with the assistance of an altar server, purifying in the process the priest or deacon’s fingers that have handled the consecrated hosts. A priest or deacon then consumes the remaining eucharistic elements in the chalice.
Then the priest or deacon uses a purificator to remove any eucharistic elements that remain in the chalice. The purificator is cleansed after Mass, often by a sacristan, and the diluted elements, which no longer contain the Real Presence, are poured down a sacrarium that takes the solution directly into the ground rather than the local sewage system, a further homage to the substantial Real Presence that once existed under the appearances of bread and wine. 
For more information on the purification of the sacred vessels, see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/purification-of-the-vessels-after-mass">this answer</a> by Fr. Charles Grondin.
</div>

Why ‘Purify’ the Chalice?

Put aside what exactly we mean by sight—physical, intellectual, etc. Whatever sight is, it is a form of direct knowledge. Intellectual sight is the direct apprehension of some reality. Physical, sensory sight is the direct sense apprehension of some reality. So to ask the question “Does God see us?” is really to ask, “Does God know us?”
We almost certainly want to say yes. But if we are Christians and thinking rationally, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we do not often act as if this were true.
After all, we do not seem to be aware that God sees us and knows us when we are in the midst of sin. Or perhaps we are aware, but we think that God simply looks away for a moment, for which we feel guilty. I mean, such presence and perception seem overwhelming, and so the mind finds ways of tuning it out. As T.S. Eliot writes, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
There are, furthermore, deep currents of Christian—especially Protestant—thinking that deepen this divide in vision. Often, when teaching the doctrine of justification, I’ve had occasion to discuss the Lutheran concept of imputed righteousness—the idea that Christ’s merit gets credited to our spiritual accounts in a kind of cosmic book-fixing, meaning that we get to go to heaven without actually having our sin-sick souls healed. Where this becomes especially strange is when the legal metaphor turns into a visual metaphor. I grew up hearing that when God the Father looks at us, he doesn’t see us at all; he sees Christ. There’s some truth there that a Catholic can and should accept. But instead of seeing how we grow into the full stature and likeness of Christ, what these preachers more often mean is that God really does not see us because he cannot see sin. Our existence is meaningless. We are but dust, onto which God slaps a picture of Jesus.
I have to confess that I never found that image comforting, because it makes God comfortable with the idea of falsehood; it makes God appear too weak to elevate and heal the creatures that he made in his image. It makes God blind.
But in the tradition, we are the ones who are blind. We are so blinded by the double-darkness of sin and ignorance that we do not even fully know ourselves. God, says St. Augustine in his Confessions, knows us more intimately than we know ourselves. We see in a mirror dimly. He sees face to face. Augustine adds, “And though in your sight I may despise myself and reckon myself dust and ashes, I know something about you which I do not know about myself.” By this I think the saint means, I know that you know more about me than I do, so there must in the end be more to my life than mere dust and ashes.
God sees us. He sees the dust that we were, the dust that we are, and the dust that we will become. And yet there is this wonderful fact, recounted in the Ash Wednesday collect—one of the best treasures in this missal unknown anywhere else in the Roman Rite: “Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou has made . . .”
We might rush through it, but what an extraordinary statement. Undeniably true, theologically speaking, and not just because it’s in part a quotation from the Book of Wisdom: God can hate sin, because sin isn’t something that is made, but rather the corruption of what was made. God’s hatred of sin, then, follows from the fact that he refuses to hate what he has made. Dust, in other words. Us.
Ash Wednesday is normally seen as a reminder of our mortality. And it is. But that statement that we make isn’t just about death; it is also about creation. It’s not just “unto dust shalt thou return,” but also “remember that thou art dust.” In other words, you aren’t an accident, you aren’t a necessity, you exist by the love who crafted you out of the dust and gave you his own breath.
And he sees you. He knows you. Even if you do not.
This theme of sight and blindness is a common one in Lent. It starts with the contrast—I find it interesting to think of it almost like a ritual insistence on our hypocrisy—between being seen by God and being seen by men. It reaches its experiential climax in Passiontide and the sacred Triduum, when the images in the church are veiled, then again unveiled, as on Good Friday, with a command to look: behold the wood of the cross, on which was hung the world’s salvation. You may not want to, but look. See what you have done. See what you have become.
Lent is certainly about self-examination and penance. But the point I want to make is that the perfection of these things is not simply in making a perfect act of penance and self-examination; we do not know ourselves well enough. To know ourselves well enough, we have to know God. We have to see him. Just as I often tell people in the confessional, it is not ultimately good enough to just stop sinning—we have to replace the bad habit with a good one. We have to see beyond what we are doing, what we ought not be doing, to the good that God wants for us.
So we have to clear up all the debris that clouds our sight. Sin, yes, but also the various good things that cloud our vision. I know it’s popular these days to de-emphasize giving up food and drink and such for Lent, but I don’t really know of anything that gets quite so viscerally at our human ability to be distracted by good things.
If we can turn from sin, and turn also from the good things that hold us back, God will “create and make in us new and contrite heats,” raising us from the dust once again—preparing us, this time in the glory of the Resurrection, to behold his face with clear eyes.

Does God See You?

<div>I’m in a Catholic Bible study at our local church. The book we’re using mentions the zodiac in biblical times. Can you give me more info?</div><div>The zodiac is simply the path of constellations visible from the Earth through which the sun appears to travel throughout the year. So the zodiac year begins with the time of the spring equinox when the sun is in Aries and continues on. Thus the zodiac has been used always in Christian symbolism to indicate the seasons and the passage of time.
The zodiac is also important for traditional, pre-modern views of the universe and of human anatomy as well as of agriculture, since the different zodiac signs were thought to have different effects on the human body: for example, Taurus rules the throat and Scorpio the genitals, by the mediation of the sun, and based on the different sun signs planting and harvesting, as well as fermentation projects, were taken up taking the position of the stars into account. Thus even today you can buy the Farmers&#8217; Almanac that carries information about when and where to plant based on the celestial bodies.
Yes, this is old-fashioned astrology, but it is not contrary to our Faith since it does not imply any denial of human free will or fated destiny. Astrology in its Christian use did not imply any denial of God&#8217;s providence or our freedom, but it declined really only because it was understood to be no longer scientifically valid. Even today not everyone is of this opinion. Thus Sacred Scripture written in ancient times assumed the science of the time of their writing to be the standard of expression for certain truths. The Savior even chose to be born under the sign of a miraculous star and to be found and adored by Eastern practitioners of astrology.
</div>

What’s Wrong with Astrology?

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Is the Church hiding Scripture?

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Should we not adore the Eucharist? ✝️

You can hardly tune into a Catholic podcast or read a Catholic publication these days without someone complaining about the lack of manliness. But is a lack of manliness the problem, or a lack of Christianity in men? We asked the world&#8217;s most manly man, Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, to help us get to the roots of the manliness panic.

Getting Manliness Wrong

<div>May I get a mole removed for aesthetic purposes?</div><div>Yes, skin blemishes may be removed for aesthetic purposes. If the mole is particularly prominent, it could also be argued that removing it also serves a preventive healthcare purpose, to guard against future risk of skin cancer.
</div>

Moles Can Go

<div>Is 1 Corinthians 4:6 a possible defense for sola scriptura?</div><div><blockquote>
I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brothers, so that you may learn from us not to go beyond what is written, so that none of you will be inflated with pride in favor of one person over against another (1 Cor. 4:6).
</blockquote>
The problem with the community in Corinth is that they were constantly falling into the practice of combining Christian and pagan practices. Paul spends much of his letters to them correcting their abuses. The fact that he might demand they make no assumptions beyond what is written down for them should come as no surprise. 
In 2 Thessalonians 2:15, Paul has no problem permitting that community to go from memory on what he has said rather than only what the has written, so his words to Corinth could very well be a clamping down on abuses.
It has been proposed by some scholars that &#8220;do not go beyond what is written&#8221; is an idiomatic expression which simply means &#8220;follow the rules.&#8221;
Another issue with seeing this as a sola scriptura reference is that the expression &#8220;what is written&#8221; is usually a reference to the Old Testament (1 Cor 1:19, 1:31, 3:19-20) and thus if taken literally would render the New Testament as non-Scripture.
</div>

Did St. Paul Support Sola Scriptura?

<div>Who said, "By grace man becomes what God is by nature"?</div><div>That quote is a paraphrase from On the Incarnation of the Word (54, 3) by St. Athanasius.
</div>

Who Said this?

Does the Rosary Take Marian Devotion Too Far?

Discussing euthanasia with Monica Doumit.

Discussing Euthanasia

For many believers in the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, the exchange between Gabriel and Mary in Luke 1:28-35 is positive evidence that at least lends credence to the belief that Mary was a perpetual virgin.
Most focus on Mary’s response to Gabriel’s announcement that she will conceive a child: “How can this be since I know not man?” It’s argued that this question makes sense only if she wasn’t intending to have sexual relations with Joseph.
But it’s not just her question that suggests this. Gabriel’s supernatural visit itself also supports it.
We’re told in verse 26 that the angel Gabriel “was sent from God” to visit Mary. And part and parcel of this supernatural visit was to announce to Mary that she would “conceive in [her] womb and bear a son,” and this would happen in a miraculous way: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (v. 35).
Now, think about it: if Mary had intended the normal course of events for a marriage, which would have involved sexual intercourse with Joseph, then why would there be a need for a supernatural visit from an angel, “sent from God,” to announce that Mary would conceive a child and that this conception would happen by the power of the Holy Spirit? The only reasonable answer is that Mary wasn’t expecting to conceive a child in her marriage with Joseph.
Consider the angel’s visit to Zachariah. The reason for such a supernatural visit and annunciation that Elizabeth would conceive John the Baptist was that there was no expectation that Elizabeth would conceive a child, given her age. If conceiving a child was in the cards, then there would have been no need for such an announcement.
Similarly, if conceiving a child was in the cards for Mary—that’s to say, if she planned on conceiving a child by having relations with Joseph—then there would have been no need for God to send an angel to her. But there was a need.
Therefore, like in the case of Elizabeth, there was no expectation for Mary to conceive a child. Hence the need for the annunciation.
And the only reasonable way to explain why Mary wasn’t expecting to conceive a child in her marriage with Joseph is that Mary wasn’t planning on having relations with Joseph. It’s not as if Mary was barren like Elizabeth.
We can summarize our argument as follows:
P1: If Mary intended to have children in her marriage with Joseph, then Gabriel’s supernatural visit and annunciation would have been futile.
P2: But Gabriel’s supernatural visit and annunciation can’t be futile.
C: Therefore, Mary did not intend to have children in her marriage with Joseph.
So the supernatural visit and annunciation that Mary would conceive Jesus itself supports the idea that Mary wasn’t planning on conceiving a child, which in turn suggests that Mary wasn’t planning on having sexual intercourse with Joseph.

Why Bother Sending Gabriel?

New Year’s Day promises two certainties: college football bowl games and Christmas trees on the curb. To Catholics, of course, January 1 is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. It&#8217;s a Holy Day of Obligation, and the final day of the Octave of Christmas.
The Church, however, is so generous with joy. She does not end our celebration of the Incarnation with the conclusion of the Octave of Christmas. She extends it to Epiphany. Twelfth Night, as our English brethren call it, is an event Catholics in America should celebrate with more enthusiasm (think: roaring bonfires, grilled meat, lots of singing, red wine, brown ale) and might very well do if it were observed here on the liturgical calendar on January 6, as it is in England, Australia, and Canada, to say nothing of Vatican City.
But the celebrating doesn’t stop there! After Epiphany, the revelry continues until the Baptism of the Lord, the first Sunday after January 6 (usually). And if you want to be really traditional, you can celebrate what the faithful called “Christmastide” before the liturgical reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council. In the old rite, Christmastide lasted for forty days to correspond with the forty days of Lent, and the forty days from Easter to Ascension Thursday.
A forty-day party? Gloria in Excelsis! (And people say Trad Cats are a dour bunch.)
Christmastide ends on February 2, the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also called Candlemas Day. On this day, the faithful take candles that they will use throughout the year in their homes to Mass to have them blessed.
Here is how the brilliant Benedictine abbot Dom Prosper Guéranger helps us understand the totality of the mystery of Christmastide:
<blockquote>We apply the name of Christmas to the forty days, which begin with the Nativity of Our Lord, December 25, and end with the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, February 2. It is a period, which forms a distinct portion of the Liturgical Year, as distinct, by its own special spirit, from every other, as are Advent, Lent, Easter or Pentecost. One same mystery is celebrated and kept in view the whole forty days. Neither the feasts of the saints, which so abound during this season; nor the time of Septuagesima, with its mournful purple, which often begins before Christmastide is over, seem able to distract our Holy Mother the Church from the immense joy with which she received the glad tidings from the angels (Luke 2:10) on that glorious night for which the world had been longing for 4,000 years. The custom of celebrating the solemnity of our savior&#8217;s nativity by a feast of forty days&#8217; duration is founded on the holy gospel itself; for it tells us that the Blessed Virgin Mary, after spending forty days in the contemplation of the divine fruit of her glorious maternity, went to the Temple, there to fulfill, in most perfect humility, the ceremonies which the law demanded of the daughters of Israel when they became mothers. The feast of Mary&#8217;s purification is, therefore, part of that of Jesus&#8217; birth; and the custom of keeping this holy and glorious period of forty days as one continued festival has every appearance of being a very ancient one, at least in the Roman Church.</blockquote>
The feast in the new rite is called the Presentation of the Lord—same joyful event, different emphasis—but if you really want to be a “sign of contradiction” (get it?), do as they did in ages past! Keep your tree and your decorations up until Candlemas!

Keep Your Christmas Tree Up!

Should everyone become a Catholic Content Creator?

Cy Kellett welcomes apologist Joe Heschmeyer to discuss the concerns of a former Baptist pastor who is contemplating joining the Catholic Church.
Transcript:
Caller: I have been a Baptist pastor for 24 years and resigned last month. And my wife and I have been moving toward the Catholic Church.
Joe: Glory to God. Glory to God.
Cy: And Paul. What a magnificent. That&#8217;s a big move. God bless you. I can&#8217;t imagine that there was anything easy about resigning after 24 years.
Caller: I mean, I obviously have a lot of questions, but one thing that gives me pause is, you know, so many seem to be since Vatican II, you know, all the people, you know, the Catholic Church is abandoning truth and tradition, and there&#8217;s so many of those voices. There&#8217;s just so much of that. And, you know, to be honest with you, it gives me pause. You know, I&#8217;ve actually heard people say that the goal is to rid, you know, Catholicism of the TLM and they&#8217;re moving away from what has been traditional doctrines and traditional practices. And how far does that go?
Joe: Those are great questions. I would step back and I would ask this. Throughout the ages, the Church has been beset by people preaching heresies and error and predicting the end of the Church and saying the Church&#8217;s days are up, they&#8217;re numbered, they&#8217;re over. And, you know, the Church isn&#8217;t going to survive the Roman Empire or, you know, they&#8217;re not going to survive the fall of the Roman Empire, or they&#8217;re not going to survive the Reformation, or they&#8217;re not going to survive the rise of Napoleon, or fill in the blank. Time after time after time after time. It looked like we were toast after Muslims conquered Istanbul. Well, you know, Constantinople and then turned it into Istanbul. They were very clear that Rome was next and Rome was not next. It never happened.
And so God has protected providentially, not through human agency, because if you look at the history of the Church, the human figures were fallible and broken and sinful and sometimes corrupt. And in spite of all of that, through all of that, God has continued to work through His Holy Spirit to keep the Church in the truth and to keep the Church in existence.
And if you look now, it is a matter of objective fact that the oldest government on Earth is the Vatican. Whether you agree with the Catholic Church or not, there&#8217;s just no getting around the fact that this small, relatively defenseless government that has been invaded numerous times by the Holy Roman Empire, by the Germans, by the Vandals, by the Goths, all of them seemingly coming from the same place. As I say that out loud, not a lot of invasions from the city. Napoleon. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough.
And so they&#8217;ve been conquered repeatedly and yet survived. And the Pope was never replaced, and the papacy visibly continued on. The idea that Christ does this for 1900 years, and then at Vatican II is just like, ah, peace out. The Holy Spirit&#8217;s not going to protect you anymore. I protected the first 22 ecumenical councils, but not this one. That goes against every fiber of everything we know about Catholic teaching now.
Were there and are there people who tried to make Catholicism more popular and accessible in ways that backfired horribly? Absolutely. Are there people who were bad shepherds and malicious shepherds, in some cases predators, in some cases wolves in shepherd&#8217;s clothing? Absolutely. That is the case in the recent past. That&#8217;s certainly the case at times now. That was the case throughout the whole history of the Church.
But none of that invalidates the core claims that Christ built this Church and has sent His Holy Spirit to protect the Church, so that amidst all of the chaos, the Church still stands. And there are times that are more placid and times that are more chaotic. There&#8217;s a beautiful passage by St. Basil the Great writing in the three hundreds in the aftermath of the First Council of Nicaea and just describing how chaotic the Church was. And he described it as like a naval battle where every ship was firing upon every other ship and even your friends start shooting at you.
And that circular firing squad is very much what Catholic YouTube can feel like or the Catholic Twitter world can feel like, of just Catholics attacking other Catholics and everybody tearing one another down. And that is, again, even though it&#8217;s new in one way with the media, it&#8217;s not new in another way, because the hearts of men are what they always were.
And as a result of that, I can say with confidence, whatever damage we may do to one another in the online space, however much we may be adjudicated guilty for having torn down our brothers rather than building up the body of Christ, the Church itself will remain, and it has remained in the face of similar controversies and conflicts in the past. So don&#8217;t fall for the lie that for 1900 years, God protected the visible Church. And then, you know, for the past 50 or 60 years, He just decided not to anymore.
Caller: My concern is not that I believe the Church will collapse and cease to exist. My concern is the, you know, the drift toward liberalism and the loss of reverence, which is one of the things that has so drawn me to Catholicism, you know, is when I walk into the sanctuary, there is just a sense of the holy, you know, that&#8217;s so absent. And, you know, so many Protestant churches are just so casual, you know, and I guess I&#8217;m just concerned about a drift toward liberalism and toward abandoning traditional, you know, doctrines and beliefs that have always been, you know, just standard, you know, Christianity.
And I guess that&#8217;s not so much that my concern is the Church will cease to exist. But gotcha is that, you know, there this drift toward, you know, I think you probably understand what I&#8217;m saying.
Joe: I do. I actually did an episode on Shameless Popery five months ago called &#8220;Why Liberal Catholicism Is Dying.&#8221; Just looking at the numbers, and you had a generation, really about two generations ago, that thought that the way forward for the Church was to become much more like mainline Protestantism. And then mainline Protestantism largely died, collapsed terribly. And similarly, people who followed that model of Catholicism died out. The people stopped going to church.
And you can see it in the numbers. So if you interview priests who were ordained back in the 60s, about 2/3 of them describe themselves as theologically and politically progressive. Today, that number for newly ordained priests is maybe 1%. So the future of the Church in terms of clergy, in terms of the governance and leadership of the Church, is very clearly not with, let&#8217;s water everything down and make everything super liberal.
Particularly here in the US you see that in such a marked and pronounced way that there is a real thirst for orthodoxy, reverence, and tradition. And so you still have some older clergy, including some older bishops, who would maybe like to see the Church go in a different direction, but they&#8217;re powerless to accomplish that. They can do a certain amount of, I would just say, frankly, a certain amount of damage, but they can&#8217;t change the direction that the Church is going in because they simply, they failed to raise up another generation of priests.
There were no young men who wanted to follow them into that model of Church. The young people who bought what they were selling simply ceased to call themselves Catholic. And so it led to an exodus from the Church. While those who stayed around, many of them, frankly, became priests or became devout Catholics in spite of weak and bad leadership, not because of it.
Now, those are perhaps harsh words, but I think those numbers are. That assessment is clearly borne out in the data, in the numbers. You see that in a pretty undeniable sort of way, whatever your own leanings might be. So I don&#8217;t think you have to worry that 20 years from now, 50 years from now, whatever, the Church is going to resemble liberal Protestantism. There might be some people who harbor that idea. There was certainly a whiff of that revolution in the air in the 60s and 70s and even into the 80s, and it just never materialized. It never happened.
And I think the reason it never happened has a lot to do with the power of the Holy Spirit.
Cy: I want to come back to you. What do you think about that, Paul?
Caller: Yeah, well, you know, the numbers he gives are encouraging, you know, and it&#8217;s like I say, for me, it&#8217;s. It&#8217;s not, you know, I&#8217;m not a skeptic by nature necessarily, but, you know, there&#8217;s a lot at stake here.
Caller: You know, because I&#8217;m in the Deep South and, you know, the modern thing, but Catholic, you know, so we&#8217;ve. Yeah. So for me. For me, you know, I mean, I&#8217;m going to lose all my friends and, you know, my family&#8217;s going to think I&#8217;m nuts and all of this, which is okay. But, you know, I don&#8217;t want to, you know, I want to make sure that I can have confidence, you know, that I&#8217;m, you know, I&#8217;m not stepping into something that&#8217;s.
Cy: Yeah, something that will support your weight once you get there.
Joe: Yeah. I think that&#8217;s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. And I would just say take heart. Know that this sacrifice, you&#8217;re being willing to place all of your relationships at the altar and choose Jesus, no matter the cost, is something that Christ will richly reward. He&#8217;s promised that abundantly.
And additionally, there are good resources for you. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;re familiar yet with the Coming Home Network, but there&#8217;s some fantastic people over there that in many cases are themselves former Protestant clergy who have created a support network for people in very much your situation.
Cy: Are you familiar with them, Paul?
Caller: I am. I actually went to the clergy convert retreat back in May.
Cy: Oh, wonderful. But I also want to send you Steve Weidenkopf&#8217;s book. Steve Weidenkopf, a wonderful Catholic historian, wrote a book for us here at Catholic Answers Press called *Light from Darkness: Nine Times the Catholic Church Was in Turmoil and Came Out Stronger Than Before*. You know, of course, this is, at the root of this, is that the Catholic Church has been in crisis certainly since about the year 2002, but more likely you would say since the early 1970s, when the whole world went into a crisis following the utter stupidity of the 1960s.
So it&#8217;s a long, simmering crisis. But I do think that one of the things that I hope you take from Joe is that we&#8217;re getting on the other side of that crisis, it looks like. Not that we&#8217;re at the beginning of it. And I can tell you, as a child of the 60s, if you think we&#8217;re crazy now. You should have seen us in the 70s. You should have gone to the folk mass and seen what was going on.
Joe: Just be thankful you didn&#8217;t have to do that.
Cy: So I&#8217;ll tell you what, if you&#8217;ll hang on the line, we&#8217;ll send you those books. And I hope we&#8217;ll talk to you again. If you&#8217;re in touch with the Coming Home Network, you are in touch with the right people. They are good people. And God bless you, Brother Paul. Thank you so much.

Why This Pastor Hasn’t Become Catholic

Is ‘Smudging’ Compatible with Catholicism?

What Distinguishes Devotion From Idolatry?

As lax as our culture is when it comes to sex, it still sees consent as a necessary condition for appropriate sexual behavior. But is consent the only moral criterion for evaluating sexual behavior? In this Ready Reasons video, Karlo explains why it’s not.
Transcript:
As crazy as our culture is when it comes to sex, it still sees consent as a necessary condition for appropriate sexual behavior. And this is a good that we must rejoice in.
But is consent the only moral criterion for evaluating sexual behavior? Here are some reasons why it’s not.
First, we don’t buy this ethical principle when it comes to other behaviors. Take self-injury, for example. We don’t think a so-called transabled person is morally justified in having a doctor render her paraplegic just because she consents to it. That someone says “yes” to cannibalism, as in the case of Armin Meiwes, doesn’t make cannibalism morally permissible.
We’re repulsed at such behaviors because we recognize that they’re bad, and thus should be avoided. But notice that consent is not driving that moral evaluation. What’s in the driver seat is a more fundamental underlying moral theory that says these actions are bad and that we ought not do them.
For consent to have any moral legitimizing power, it requires a pre-existing moral standard that determines which behaviors we’re morally allowed to consent to. You might think of our consent’s moral power as being on loan. It’s currency is derived from a deeper moral standard.
Of course, what that moral standard is would need to be worked out (I claim it’s the natural moral law). But we must admit that there must be a moral framework that gives consent the power to make something morally permissible.
So, if consent has moral significance only on account of a more fundamental moral framework, then it’s futile to appeal to consent alone in establishing the moral permissibility of sexual acts. It’s seeking moral power where no moral power can be found.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com.
For Catholic Answers, I’m Karlo Broussard. Thanks for watching.

Is Consent Alone Sufficient for Evaluating Sexual Behavior?

What is a Cult?

All the modern papal rumors and diocesan scandals have suppressed a much deeper and more concerning aspect of the Catholic religion: cannibalism. The problem of Catholic Communion-goers. Just think of these modern vampires, drinking blood out of golden chalices weekly, or even daily. Somebody needs to bring this to light.
According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 31 percent of Catholics in America believe that a little piece of bread transforms into human flesh before they eat it. Before they eat it. Many Catholic theologians have written about the “alarming” 69 percent of Catholics who don’t agree, but I want to take a moment to focus on these maniacs masquerading as normal people. Why do they believe such antiquated lore? How can they stand by this practice, even in modern times? What should we do about these dangers to society, walking among us?
Let’s see.
The Biblical Approach
The average Catholic could probably recite the script: “Take my body and eat it; take my blood and drink it” (Matt. 26:26ff). But the well-studied Catholic could cite Jesus’ famous “Bread of Life” discourse in the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, offering a more profound justification for the Catholic eucharistic experience.
The commands Jesus gives to take his body and drink his blood are clear enough, if we’re comfortable assuming that Jesus meant those words literally. On the other hand, if every utterance from Jesus were to be taken literally, then we would end up with some odd quotes elsewhere.
Therefore, no, the command alone does not validate the literal interpretation of the Catholic Holy Communion experience. It’s what happens afterward. In John’s Bread of Life discourse, Jesus tells his followers, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:54-55).
If someone spoke these words to you today, you might assume the person had a screw loose. The reaction in the first century was not so different: “After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him” (v. 66). It was not critics, but his followers who reversed their course at this disquieting command.
Challenged with this context, the average English-speaker may feel inclined to interject on Jesus’ behalf, supposing that Jesus did mean what he said but allowing for a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word “body.” After all, “body” can refer to many things: a body of water, a body of people, a cadaver, a person, a collection of writings. Perhaps when Jesus says, “Take my body and eat it,” he means to take his teachings and live them out, or take his scriptures and consume the knowledge.
This is where the pesky problem of translation comes into play.
The Gospel of John was originally written in Greek. In Greek, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/if-you-eat-my-flesh-you-eat-my-body">there are two words</a> that can refer to the body. The Greek soma refers to “body” and is used elsewhere in the New Testament to refer to the body of believers or the Church community.  But in John’s Gospel, Jesus uses the word sarx, which has a meaning closer to “flesh.” Whereas soma can refer to a literal or a figurative body, sarx specifically refers to meat or flesh. With that knowledge, it becomes clear that Jesus really is directing his followers to ingest his flesh, not just absorb his teachings.
The Philosophical Approach
The great philosopher Plato had a whole ideology about forms and matter. He believed that a thing’s “form” is its essence. “Matter” is merely the way in which we understand a thing’s form, or <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/god-is-that-he-is-but-what-does-that-mean">essence</a>. (A shape with three sides is the form or idea of a triangle; a drawing of a triangle is the visible representation, or matter, through which we understand the form.)
Aristotle explained ontology through substance and accidents. A thing’s substance is essential to its definition; a thing’s accidents contribute to the essence of a thing but aren’t inherently necessary to its existence. Flat sides are part of a box’s substance or definition (you can’t have a round box, or else it’s not a box, but a sphere), but the box’s material (cardboard, wood, metal) is accidental.
Applying those ideas to Holy Communion, there is an unusual occurrence in the Eucharist, where the accidents do not match the substance of the object. Usually, we think, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.” In the case of the Eucharist, it looks like bread, feels like bread, and tastes like bread, but it’s actually the flesh of Jesus Christ. As the priest holds it up, everyone can see that it has the accidents of bread, but faith informs Catholics that its substance, or its essence, is God.
So Catholics are not hallucinating some mystical vision of fleshy tissue when they receive the Eucharist. Everyone understands that what he is consuming looks and tastes like bread and wine. Spiritually, however, Catholics believe that in the moment of the transubstantiation, the prayer when the priest asks God to come down and be present in the bread, the object transforms in its essence, from the ordinary to the divine, all the while remaining unchanged in its accidents, or physical properties.
The Logical Approach
Catholics, as do many other religions, believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. Catholics also believe that God is a spiritual being, meaning that he doesn’t have a physical body and isn’t made of matter. This Catholic God took on properties of matter during the Incarnation, when God became man, but God had already been in existence prior to that moment in time, and he was all spirit, and without matter.
Humans, however, are both spiritual and physical beings. We have bodies—matter. Catholics believe we also have souls, which encompass our spiritual nature. When Catholics enter into prayer, the sacraments, or other religious acts, they believe they are connecting spiritually with God, sustaining a spiritual relationship. The problem is that in every other human relationship people have, they relate to others using their bodies. Facial expressions, body language, physical touch—all of these things help us communicate and make meaningful connections with others.
If God is all-loving, why wouldn’t he relate to his creations in the way he designed them to relate to others? It can’t be because he doesn’t realize that humans need physical touch, because he’s all-knowing. It can’t be because he doesn’t possess the capability to relate to us physically, because he’s all-powerful—he can do anything he wants.
This brings us back to the Eucharist. Catholics believe that in the Eucharist, God offers a supernatural experience where, defying logic, he takes on a physical form, in the simplicity and humility of regular bread and wine, so that his people can encounter him physically, as often as they choose to, in the Mass or even in Adoration.
The Jesus of history cannot be around forever in his bodily form, handing out hugs to emotional Christians. So Catholics can understand the Eucharist as a creative, mysterious, mystical solution, offering physical connection to God’s people.
The Miraculous Approach
<a href="https://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/engl_mir.htm">This one is wild.</a> There have been stories of Eucharistic miracles told for hundreds of years, with varying degrees of validity. Some have seen apparitions. Some have claimed that the Eucharist was the source of healing for a physical ailment or infirmary. Others have described the host as bleeding.
Skeptics know that people of earlier times used religion to explain things beyond their understanding, that modern science often holds the answer to. Stories of wonder can turn into legend over time, exaggerated and inaccurate. But four well-known Eucharistic miracles have been documented in just the last twenty-three years, and some are ongoing. Thus far, modern science has been unable to provide an explanation for these events, prompting Catholic bishops to describe these events as supernatural in origin.
<ol>
<li>In 2014, in Legnica, Poland, a consecrated host was revealed to contain heart muscle, including marks that indicated cardiac distress.</li>
<li>In 2008, in Sokólka, Poland, another host was dissolved in water and turned to blood. The molecular structure of human heart tissue was interwoven around the area of the blood stain in a way that scientists have been unable to reproduce.</li>
<li>In 2006, in Tixtla, Mexico, a host was tested three months after showing red markings. The tests confirmed the presence of live heart tissue.</li>
<li>In 2001, in Chirattakonam, India, a priest revealed the blessed host for Adoration. He and others in the room noticed three red dots. Over the next week, the red dots expanded into an image—one that looks suspiciously like a depiction of Christ.</li>
</ol>
All of these phenomena occurred more recently than Y2K, more recently than the advent of the camera phone, and more recently than “google” became a verb. They are not old wives’ tales or legends from long ago; they are well-documented situations with verifiable facts and physical evidence. These Eucharistic anomalies have been studied thoroughly, with advanced technology, and in blind studies (where the scientists analyzing the specimen have not been informed what the specimen is or where it came from).
In each of the aforementioned situations (and in others from earlier times that have also been investigated), scientists found that the specimens contained human DNA, human blood (AB blood type in every one), and tissue from the left ventricle of an inflamed, distressed human heart. It shouldn’t be possible. And yet . . . it is so.
After uncovering all of the explanations for these crazed Catholics, I’ll admit that this is not a lazy belief system. In fact, after exploring these different angles of understanding the Eucharist, I am tempted to say the alternative belief is lazy, conveniently wrapping an entire belief system with a neat metaphorical bow on top that also happens to be socially acceptable.
Cannibalism is certainly a striking allegation, but now it seems Catholics might be up to something far more incredible: physically encountering the divine.

Catholic Cannibals!

Justice is in some ways an overused word, a label attached to all sorts of things, some of which—like “reproductive justice,” arguably—have nothing to do with real justice. What is justice, really?
Justice is the second of the “cardinal virtues.” No, they’re not virtues for senior clergy. “Cardinal” comes from the Latin cardo, meaning “hinge.” The cardinal virtues are the main hinges on which the moral life swings. Beneath them are lots of individual connected virtues. Fortitude, for example, is another cardinal virtue, and beneath it is found the virtue of magnanimity. If fortitude is about doing good despite fear, magnanimity specifically refers to doing good when one has to risk big assets like money to achieve the good.
St. Thomas Aquinas arranges the whole of his discussion of morality around the cardinal virtues, later treating specific virtues as concrete exemplifications of a given overall cardinal virtue.
The classical definition of justice is to give everyone his “due.” Note what that says—and doesn’t. Our “due” is what we are owed, what we have a right to. What is “due” is not necessarily strict equality, because not everybody is necessarily owed the same thing. In justice, we must ascertain what we have a right to.
The traditional treatment of justice identifies three kinds of justice: commutative, distributive, and legal or social justice. Let’s explain each one.
Commutative justice is the most straightforward. It is a relationship, usually between two individuals. It is often, though not always, based on strict equality, and it is usually the simplest kind of justice: what does A owe B? If A buys something from B, did B receive fair compensation for what he sold?
Distributive justice regulates the community’s relationship with its members. It is about how to “distribute” the common wealth (hence the word “commonwealth”) to its members. That relationship is not one of mere equality. At some level, there is a basic equality involved but, beyond that, distributive justice must determine how the allotment of goods serves the common good. That may mean that A gets more than B because, ultimately, distributive justice involves proportionality, not strict equality. And, because it involves how all the members of a community fit into that community, the determination of how to distribute social goods properly is the decision of the sovereign, of him who has “care of the community,” because he should see and is responsible for the “big picture,” the lay of the land.
Social or legal justice regulates the member’s relationship with the community. Here again, beyond basic equality, a certain proportionality also enters the picture. A may owe the community more than B, either because A makes more use of social goods than B or A has the means to contribute more fully to the common good. Somebody who extensively uses a highway (a social good), for example, should contribute more than someone who doesn’t.
If these ideas sound strange to some American ears, it’s because there’s possibly a deeper problem. Catholic social thought, in contrast to some streams of American thinking, considers society something good. Yes, society can get too big and, therefore, too controlling, but at root, society is a good thing. “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18), so God puts man in society—even though it was God, not Adam, who recognized the need for the “suitable companion.”
As John Donne put it, “no man is an island.” No person is so utterly self-sufficient that he does not need the presence and help of other people to develop his own humanity. That’s why society is good: it promotes human flourishing. And that is what puts Catholic social thought at odds with most versions of “social contract” thought—the kind of thinking dominant since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and influential on the Founding Fathers—which takes people fundamentally as individuals, for whom social bonds are artificial and often deemed inimical to their humanity.
That’s why Catholic teaching on justice perhaps grates on some American ears, ears used to hearing about “rugged individualists” without necessary social ties.
But modern politics also deforms the classical approach to justice. The traditional approach to justice envisions the leader of a society as trying to be impartial, to making an honest assessment of what the common good demands here and now. If our politics worked that way, people would likely be much happier.
But it doesn’t. Instead, in the social contract theory of community, where the individual’s interface with others is often seen as adverse to him, real human needs and rights are often reduced simply to “interests.” The leader of the community, instead of trying to determine what serves the common good, focuses on how to coordinate those “interests” in such a way that the greatest number of people at least live with his decision and the least number are actively disaffected (and, therefore, likely to want to “throw the bum out” at the next election).
By the way, the cardinal virtue of justice also finds itself in particular virtues, one of which is “religion.” If justice is about what we owe others, then “religion” is part of justice, because we owe nobody more than God. It also means religion is not just some “optional extra,” but something in fairness—in justice—due to God from each one of us.
Catholic teaching about justice is rich and worth studying, but it presupposes a vision of society that’s even more important: that we need (and not just find useful) other people. For those who want to learn more, Josef Pieper’s oldie-but-goodie, his <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Four-Cardinal-Virtues-Josef-Pieper/dp/0268001030/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.dNd_eLa6yEOcWWY1Rz_MvbrTBUZPcuN1oVPb4RRfg5_GjHj071QN20LucGBJIEps.L1IKb9Ni07VHRTW6jBTYcSSrv5U2xqZEb4t3PW0ooYI&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=pieper+cardinal+virtues&amp;qid=1751299543&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-1">Four Cardinal Virtues</a>, remains the evergreen classic.

What Is Justice?

Tom Nash provides a clear and insightful response to the question of whether Catholics worship saints. He explains the distinction between worship and veneration, emphasizing that only God is worthy of worship, while veneration is a form of respect and honor given to saints for their relationship with Jesus Christ.
Transcript:
Hello. Hello. So I was having a conversation with someone and the topic moves to Catholic&#8217;s so-called worship of the saints. Yes. So I tried explaining about how worship is explicitly a sacrifice before God and due only to God and we do not do that to the saints. And her response was that in Revelations when John frustrates himself before an angel, the angel stops him saying worship is only for God. So if the Bible shows that bowing reparetingly is seen as worship, how do you respond to that?
I would say that&#8217;s the distinction. He was looking and thinking that because he was treating him like God, that&#8217;s the problem. With someone who kneels at an altar at a church with an image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, they are not worshiping her. Why do we have respect for the Blessed Mother of any saints? Precisely because, I always emphasize, precisely because of their relationship with Jesus Christ. She is the Mother of God and that&#8217;s why we look to her and as an intercessor. And quite frankly, it&#8217;s very biblically speaking of the book of Revelation, which you cited a moment ago. Revelation 8, verse 3 talks about the elders who bring forth the bowls of incense, which are the prayers of the faithful, showing that they somehow are interceding. And if James chapter 5 can speak about how a person on earth, or the prayer of a righteous man, avails much, well, how much more a person in heaven? And this isn&#8217;t necromancy where we&#8217;re contacting the dead like a seance and seeking out dead relatives. These are people who we know are canonized because of the authority given by God to the church that affirms that they are in heaven. And in addition to that, when we think about these saints, look what it says in Hebrews 12. Hebrews 12 says, you know, you&#8217;ve come to the throne room of God, to the firstborn enrolled in heaven, to the spirits of just the souls, the spirits of the souls of just men made perfect. Well, if they&#8217;ve been made perfect, then they have something better than we have here on earth. And because of God&#8217;s blessing, not because of anything themselves, they can intercede for us in heaven, and they can handle people. So how can they do that? It&#8217;s not humanly possible. Well, it&#8217;s not humanly possible for somebody on earth to exercise a demon. It&#8217;s not humanly possible alone for that or for healing. And yet the apostles did those things precisely because of God&#8217;s grace. And so with regard to the saints in heaven, we are not praying to them. Excuse me. We pray to them. We are not worshiping them. And whereas when somebody falling down, that case, yeah, in that case, that person is worshiping and need to be corrected that he&#8217;s, this is an angel, this isn&#8217;t God. And for those also with regard to icons or images, we don&#8217;t pray to them. We pray through them. We look at them and they guide our prayer. They keep us focused on the saints who lead us to Jesus Christ.
The Blessed Mother says it so well, &#8220;To whom shall we go?&#8221; Excuse me. That&#8217;s going back to John and John 6, but with the Blessed Mother says, &#8220;Do whatever he tells you in John chapter 2 of the wedding of Canaan.&#8221; In other words, she&#8217;s always leading us to Jesus. And the church always leads us to Jesus with St. Peter and to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life. So I would tell people that just because you are kneeling in prayer doesn&#8217;t mean you are worshiping someone. And number two, just because you have an image of someone doesn&#8217;t mean you are idolizing that or we could convict God of that with regard to back in the Old Testament with Numbers, right? Where they brought out, look upon this serpent, the seraph serpent, which they mounted on a pole and they were able to be healed by that. Now, interestingly enough, a little later as we see in salvation history, King Hezekiah had to destroy it because they were looking at it as an idol. So no,
images help us focus our prayer. They are not. And just, but kneeling itself does not necessarily, I mean, people kneel before a king or a queen and it&#8217;s not necessarily a sign of respect to say that it necessarily is worship, is to fail to make proper distinctions.
Hey, thanks for watching. If you like this Catholic answer, be sure to like, subscribe, and check out our live streams Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific, or find the episode after on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or our Catholic Answers app.

Do Catholics Worship Saints?

Some people say that St. Peter could not have been the bishop of Rome because he was never in Rome at all. Apologist Trent Horn gives reasons why we can believe that he not only spent time in Rome, but was martyred there as well.
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Transcript:
Some people say that St. Peter could not have been the bishop of Rome because he was never in Rome at all. But archaeologists have discovered St. Peter’s tomb right below St. Peter’s basilica in the city of Rome.
According to the Oxford Dictionary of Saints, “it is probable that the tomb is authentic. It is also significant that Rome is the only city that ever claimed to be Peter’s place of death” (353). The Lutheran scholar Oscar Cullman, in his monumental study of Peter, concludes, “The excavations speak in favor of the report that the execution of Peter took place in the Vatican district (152.)
In 1 Peter <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_E-RnmuKls&amp;t=313s">5:13</a> Peter says he was writing from the city of Babylon. This could not be the literal city of Babylon because the Jewish historian Josephus tells us that by the time of Emperor Claudius the Jews had left Babylon. In the second century emperor Trajan found Babylon to be nothing but a ghost town. Sean McDowell, an Evangelical scholar who has written the definitive treatment on the fate of the 12 apostles, says:
“The Old Testament city of Babylon was in ruins, so he could not have been referring to that city. Rather, it was a relatively common cryptic name for Rome, the enemy of God. Like the Hebrews exiled in the Babylon of the Old Testament, Christians in Rome felt themselves exiles in a foreign land, a sinful city that oppressed the people of God.”
Jewish literature, such as the Sibylline Oracles and 4 Baruch, as well as Christian literature like the book of Revelation, all used the name Babylon in reference to Rome. The evangelical scholar D.A. Carson likewise believes that Peter was in Rome about A.D. 63 or when 1 Peter was written and McDowell concludes, “it is historically very probable that Peter was in Rome for at least some period of time.” (60)
For more information about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com.
For Catholic Answers I’m Trent Horn, and thanks for watching.

Was Peter Ever In Rome?

There’s a popular <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cot/more-silly-atheist-memes-rebutted">atheist meme</a> that goes like this:

I agree that if I randomly believed in a god among 5,000 similar gods there would be little chance I was worshipping the true God.
But that’s not what Christians do when they worship God.
“God” is not just some super-powered being people happen to call a god. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/caf/defending-classical-theism">The true God</a> is the infinite act of being itself, unlimited in power, knowledge and goodness. God isn’t a being in the universe, God is the ground of being and so is infinite in all respects.
If God were just some limited, finite being, then atheists could rightfully ask, “Who created God?” But if God is the infinite foundation of all reality, then that explains why reality exists at all and shows God isn’t just one being among many. Asking “Who created God?” would be like asking what is pulling the locomotive on the train. The locomotive isn’t a train car and God isn’t one being among many.
The reason I don’t believe in Thor, Zeus, or Buddha (who isn’t a god in Buddhism, by the way), is that these are finite beings. I believe in “God” and these beings simply are not God no matter what anyone calls them. In their respective mythologies, these beings often come into existence, they change, they’re ignorant, they’re thwarted, and sometimes they do evil. Their existence in time shows they aren’t God because God made time. Finally, their potential to change (or be actualized) shows they are not God who is pure actuality itself.
I agree with ancient Greek and medieval Christian, Jewish and Muslim philosophers that there is one infinite God. We may disagree about how God revealed himself to humanity, but we can agree that one infinite God who is pure actuality exists.
Moreover, atheists can’t say I must reject the God of the Bible because he sounds just like the gods of mythology. I interpret the Bible in accord with what reason tells me about God. So, if I know from reason that God can’t have a physical body as part of his divine nature (since God created all matter from nothing), then that means the Bible’s descriptions of the Father having a body must be non-literal, or examples of God using earthly images to communicate to humans (which is called a theophany).
Finally, this meme backfires on atheists.
Imagine you’re at a party and ninety-five out of 100 people there say they heard a loud sound outside, but they disagree on the nature of the sound, like whether it was low- or high-pitched. Would you agree there was at least a sound of some kind, or would you think the ninety-five people are deluded and the five people who didn’t hear any noise are on to something? Now, large groups of people can be wrong about things, but they are usually correct, which counts in favor of the view, shared by most of humanity, that (at the bare minimum) rejects a strictly material, atheistic view of the universe.
So which “god” do I believe in? I agree with ninety-five percent (give or take) of all people, past and present, that the universe is not a purely material and easily explicable reality. There is instead an “ultimate explanation” that cannot be a lower-case “god” since those raise just as many questions as they allegedly answer. Instead, I <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/argument-from-motion-for-gods-existence">follow reason</a> to believe in the one, true infinite God who became man and dwelt among us.

‘But Which God?’

Jimmy Akin explains why we ask certain <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/patron-saints">patron saints</a> to pray for us based on our names, our hometowns, or our stations in life.

Why Have a Patron Saint?

Jimmy Akin explains to a caller why Jesus&#8217;s words in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them,&#8221; do not contradict the doctrine of free will, and clarifies the sense in which it does limit the actions we are able to choose.
Transcript:
Host: Ryan in Michigan, listening on AM 990, you are on with Jimmy Akin. It&#8217;s open forum, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: My question has to do with the doctrine of total depravity. So in the Fifth Canon of the Council of Trent it says, &#8220;If any man says that after the sin of Adam, man&#8217;s free will was extinguished, let him be anathema.&#8221; And also in the Council of Trent it affirms prevenient grace. John 6:44, &#8220;No man can come to the Son unless the Father who sent him draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.&#8221; And so I was a little confused, because if I can&#8217;t come to the son unless the father draws me, then it seems like my free will is extinguished, so it seems like the Council of Trent&#8217;s Fifth Canon is both contradicting itself and John 6:44, so I was wondering why that&#8217;s not a contradiction.
Jimmy: Okay, there are several ways of looking at this, and one of them is to recognize that when when Trent says that man&#8217;s free will was not extinguished by the fall, it doesn&#8217;t mean that it wasn&#8217;t damaged by the fall. Something can be damaged but not extinguished, and in the case of the Council of Trent, what they were dealing with were some viewpoints that were being entertained in various circles, particularly in the Protestant community, that either denied that man had ever had any kind of free will&#8211;that just everything we do is, we&#8217;re like robots, you know, we&#8217;re God&#8217;s windup toys and never had free will of any kind&#8211; and then there was a kind of mitigated form that said, &#8220;Well okay, maybe we had free will before the fall of man, but then when Adam sinned we completely lost it, and now our wills are wholly bound to sin, so that we don&#8217;t have any freedom, and the only way we can do anything good at all, if we can do anything good at all, is if God causes us to do it, so we don&#8217;t have free will.&#8221;
And that&#8217;s what Trent is reacting against. So it&#8217;s not reacting against the idea that our free will wasn&#8217;t damaged. Trent&#8217;s perfectly happy to say that our free will was damaged, but we still actually retain freedom. We don&#8217;t have a complete lack of freedom. So that&#8217;s one way of reconciling these two things. You could say, well, so maybe our free will was damaged in such a way that we couldn&#8217;t come to God unless he gives us prevenient grace, which is the grace that enables us to respond positively to God&#8217;s message, so we couldn&#8217;t come to him in that sense unless God gives us this grace to compensate for the damage that was done to our free will by the fall.
But there&#8217;s another way of looking at it too, which would be to say this: Man doesn&#8217;t automatically have what theologians call a supernatural vocation, that is, a vocation to be with God and in spiritual union with him. God could have created man in what theologians refer to as a state of pure nature. In a state of pure nature we wouldn&#8217;t have sin, but we also wouldn&#8217;t have the grace of being spiritually united with God. We might know certain things about God that we could tell by natural reason, like the fact that He exists, but we wouldn&#8217;t have the supernatural desire in our hearts to be in union with Him.
And so that&#8217;s another way of looking at this. You could say, well, in order for us to have that desire for spiritual union with God, it requires a gift from God. It requires that, just like He gave us free will in the beginning, He also needs to give us the gift, which is a kind of free will, to desire union with him spiritually, and that&#8217;s an elevated thing above simply natural freewill, it&#8217;s a kind of supernatural-ized freedom where we have the desire and the ability to pursue those desires to have union with God, which is something he didn&#8217;t have to offer us. It&#8217;s a grace. He could have created us in a paradisaical environment with no sin and no suffering, but He just didn&#8217;t bring us into full spiritual union with Himself. That&#8217;s a gift. And so that&#8217;s another way that you could look at how the the existence of freewill squares with the fact that we need God&#8217;s grace in order to come to Him.
Caller: Okay, I&#8217;m still wondering about that the specific ability to to come to the Father without Him drawing you. I mean, you don&#8217;t have the free will to do that, you know?
Jimmy: Correct, but there are a lot of things that I don&#8217;t have the ability&#8230;when we talk about free will, I think you may be thinking of some kind of unlimited freedom. And that&#8217;s not what&#8217;s meant by saying we have free will. There are lots of things I can&#8217;t choose. Not being Spider-Man, I can&#8217;t choose to crawl on the walls, you know? Not being Superman, I can&#8217;t choose to fly. But there are a lot of things that are within the scope of things that I can choose. And so I have freewill with respect to those things that I can choose, I&#8217;m not just a puppet. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s meant when we say someone has free will. We don&#8217;t mean there aren&#8217;t things that they&#8217;re incapable of choosing; we mean that they do have freedom within whatever scope of freedom they have. And so that&#8217;s one of the things that applies here in terms of the ability to choose God.
There&#8217;s also the fact that God ensures that everybody has the grace needed to come to him. This is something the Second Vatican Council teaches, that even if it&#8217;s in a mysterious way, in ways known to God, He can make it possible, and does make it possible, for everybody to come to Him. So it&#8217;s by His grace that that happens, but He ensures that that grace is given to everybody.

Does John 6:44 Contradict Free Will?

I was recently browsing an online Christian forum in which a poster asked, “Where does the Bible say marriage is only between one man and one woman?”
The answers were predictably depressing. As a bulk of Protestant denominations have accepted the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/watch-out-for-the-sin-bin">LGBT movement</a>, most of the respondents just flatly claimed that the Bible doesn’t restrict marriage to one man and one woman.
As Catholics, this might give us reason to be thankful for Sacred Tradition. Regardless of controversies on Biblical interpretation, we won’t face such drastic swings in sexual morality. Yet we should nonetheless be ready to face and refute such Protestant claims. Is it really the case that “biblical marriage”—between a man and a woman—isn’t actually all that biblical?
Indeed, there’s no single passage in the Bible that says, “Marriage is only between a man and a woman.” Of course, there is also no passage in the Bible that says, “Same-sex relationships are allowed and should be considered marriage.” Instead, these moral ideas are argued as conclusions from other, more explicit scriptural texts.
Even though the culturally relevant question is homosexuality, liberal Protestants often focus instead on another point of sexual ethics: polygamy, or having multiple wives at the same time. The Bible clearly records polygamous marriages—not just in Israel’s enemies, but even in the Patriarchs and revered kings of the chosen people. From this, some people will argue that biblical marriage is actually not between only one man and one woman, and if marriage can be between one man and multiple women, perhaps it can also be between two men or two women.
Even if the Bible endorses polygamy, this isn’t a valid argument for homosexuality. Polygamy is still a different kind of sexual union from same-sex relationships, and one doesn’t follow from the other. But does it?
Early parts of the Old Testament seem to. Many holy Israelites take multiple wives. Scripture records this historical fact without condemnation. Abraham, David, Solomon, Jacob—they are polygamous, and God and his prophets don’t speak out against their marital habits.
And not only are they silent, but at one point, Moses appears to command polygamy in the practice of Levirate marriage. Deuteronomy 25:5-10 outlines the practice: if two brothers live together and one dies without a son, the living brother should marry his brother’s widow and try to continue his family line. The living brother is not forced to do so, and the law does not specify whether he already has a wife of his own. But he’s strongly encouraged to marry the widow, and practically, the brother most often would’ve already been married—so, by implication, the law encourages polygamy.
Yet to conclude from this that Scripture endorses polygamy would be a flawed biblical interpretation. The Old Testament unfolded over thousands of years. Much changed over those millennia—in the secular structure of Israelite society, and also in its religious understanding and laws. God never contradicts himself, but he gradually revealed spiritual truth over many generations, culminating in his full self-revelation in his Son.
Jesus says as much in Matthew 19:8. God, through Moses, permitted Israelites to divorce in Deuteronomy 24; now Jesus, who is God, is banning divorce. But without contradiction—divorce was allowed as a concession to a people still spiritually immature, which permission now, in due time, is being revoked.
The Old Testament gives a similar principle. In Ezekiel 18:2-3, God forbids the proverb, “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” The proverb means that the children are being punished for the sins of their fathers. But such an idea comes from God’s earlier word—in Exodus 34:7, when God says the sins of the parents fall upon children down to three or four generations. God was forbidding something that he earlier seemed to imply.
Such things happen with all learning. We don’t teach kids fractions when they’re just learning to count. They’re not ready for it. When they are ready, we give them fractional math, and though it seems very different from the simple numbers we originally told them, we all know that this more advanced arithmetic doesn’t actually contradict our 123s and ABCs.
This takes us back to polygamy. Deuteronomy doesn’t explicitly endorse polygamy. It only implies it. And the later prophets show that such an implication is mistaken.
For one, though the Bible doesn’t say the Patriarchs’ polygamy is wrong, it shows it. Read about Abraham and Hagar, or David and Bathsheba, or Jacob and Leah. Again and again, kings and Patriarchs take multiple wives with disastrous consequences. We can read between the lines. Polygamy is shown to be a bad idea, even if it’s not said to be such.
Second, the prophets started using marital imagery to describe God and Israel. God is Israel’s husband. And he has only one chosen people. If God is not polygamous in such analogies, why should Israelites be?
Later Judaism thus started to have doubts about earlier polygamous allowances. By the return from their Babylonian exile, Jews had largely abandoned the practice. And by Rabbinical Judaism, polygamy was completely condemned.
We can go farther. Even if the Old Testament supports polygamy (as we’ve just shown, it doesn’t), the New Testament is what matters most for if its still allowable for us Christians. And plainly, the New Testament doesn’t allow it. Jesus says a man should be joined to his wife, and they will become one flesh (Matt. 19:3-6). Jesus defines adultery as even looking at another woman lustfully (5:27-28). And Paul commands that “each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband” (1 Cor. 7:2).
A clear picture emerges. Marriage is between two people: one man, and one woman. Polygamy—whether tolerated or condemned in previous generations—is not part of God’s ultimate design.
This should be expected, because polygamy really works only in a culture of male dominion. It doesn’t work if a woman is supposed to be an equal and integral member of family and society, as the Bible clearly teaches. Whose in-laws do we see at Christmastime? Who gets priority when hubby is in the mood? How are the children raised with multiple, equal women acting as mom? How are decisions made? Things inevitably devolve into what actually happened in the Bible’s stories of polygamy: one wife playing second fiddle, one wife domineering, one set of children fading into the background, and one husband with a throbbing headache.
So we can confidently say that biblical marriage is between one man and one woman. Despite the controversy about the “man” and “woman” part of the definition, we need not question the word “one.” Polygamy was once tolerated in God’s plan, but it showed itself prone to domination and domestic strife. And so God’s people abandoned it, and Jesus condemned it. Frankly, I’m happy for that—and so is my wife.

Does the Bible Permit Polygamy?

When discussing the Catholic faith with Protestants, it’s not uncommon to face what I call the Bible blitzkrieg. This especially happens in email or social media exchanges where the other person will defend their position with a string of Bible verses. He might say, “Catholics are wrong about salvation because we are saved by grace alone” and then list a dozen Scripture passages after that statement that he claims proves his point.
Some Protestants are capable of reciting those verses (or at least citations of them) in conversations because they’ve spent their childhood memorizing various Bible passages. And that is a good thing! St. Jerome famously quipped that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.” Therefore, we should always commend a person’s intimate knowledge of Scripture.
On the other hand, it is one thing to know what the Bible says and another thing to know what it means. Jerome said of a heretical group called the Luciferians, “Let them not flatter themselves if they think they have Scripture authority for their assertions, since the devil himself quoted Scripture, and the essence of the Scriptures is not the letter, but the meaning” (Dialogue with Luciferians).
You should point out to your Protestant friend that simply listing Bible passages isn’t the way to determine what theology is correct. The Protestant scholar D.A. Carson once said, “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.” Making a statement and then defending it with only a dozen Bible citations is nothing more than grandstanding, or a mild form of intimidation. It’s like saying, “How can I be wrong when all these Bible verses say I’m right?”
As Jerome shows us, any heretic can string along biblical citations and say he is correct. You can find Jehovah’s Witness literature, for example, that cites dozens of passages that, according to the Witnesses, show that Jesus is not truly divine. Your Protestant friend would rightly tell them that when each of those verses is reviewed one at a time, you can see that none of them disproves the deity of Christ. He just needs to see that the same is true when we go through the dozens of Bible verses he has cited as evidence against Catholicism.
I find in many of these instances that the cited verses aren’t just incorrect interpretations; they are irrelevant interpretations. The verse has nothing to do with the topic being discussed. For example, when defending <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/sola-scriptura-is-not-so-easy-to-kill">sola scriptura</a>, Protestants often cite biblical passages that affirm the goodness and utility of Scripture. But sola scriptura isn’t the claim that Scripture is good. It’s the claim that Scripture is the only source that contains all Christian doctrine.
One gentleman I encountered included a string of citations that included Hebrews 4:12. I then said he should slowly read the passage: “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
I asked him where that verse says anything about Scripture being the only infallible rule of faith or containing all Christian doctrine. He admitted it didn’t. Then I asked him, “And where does this passage say anything about Scripture?” He said, “Well, it says ‘the word of God.’”
“Right,” I told him, “but the word of God and Scripture aren’t identical. First Thessalonians 2:13 says the preaching of the apostles was ‘the word of God,’ so ‘word of God’ doesn’t always mean Scripture. In some cases, it’s talking about Jesus, the Word made flesh, which is what Hebrews 4:12 is talking about. It’s talking about the living word, and we know that because the very next verse says, ‘And before him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.’”
At this point, the gentleman was so startled at having misunderstood the passage for so long that he was more receptive to my concern that he had made similar errors in the other passages he cited in defense of his arguments against Catholicism.
When you are faced with a Bible blitzkrieg, remember that this isn’t an actual war. You’re allowed to ask for a break so you can look up these verses and get back to your interlocutor with your thoughts. You can remind him that studying Bible verses is always better than <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-to-avoid-verse-slinging-with-protestants">slinging Bible verses</a>. Moreover, St. Peter reminds us that Scripture contains difficult passages that people can misunderstand to their own destruction (2 Pet. 3:16), so you want to consult authoritative sources to find out what these verses might mean and, at the least, what they absolutely cannot mean.
This can be helpful, because some Protestants operate under the mistaken assumption that Catholics are prohibited from reading or interpreting the Bible for themselves. They might cite the Second Vatican Council, which said, “The task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church” (Dei Verbum 10).
But the Church has infallibly defined the meaning of only a handful of biblical passages. The Church allows biblical scholars a wide degree of latitude in interpreting the literal and spiritual meaning of biblical texts, provided that they follow the council’s direction to be attentive to the “analogy of faith” and interpret the texts in light of all divine revelation (CCC 114). So, for example, a biblical interpreter could not conclude that a particular Bible passage teaches that Mary gave birth to other children or that Christ is not fully divine, since the Church has infallibly taught that those beliefs are in error, and Scripture is without error (Dei Verbum 11).
Finally, don’t get discouraged if your Protestant friend knows more biblical citations than you do.
<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/blog/scott-hahn-bishop-barron-and-guilt-by-association">Scott Hahn</a>, a professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, once said that Protestants know the Bible the way a mailman knows the neighborhood. The mailman knows that the Johnsons live at 123 Maplewood Street, and so if he needs to get the mail to them, he knows which streets to follow to get there. In the same way, Protestants who have a deep passion for understanding the Bible can cite a biblical passage’s exact chapter and verse.
Catholics, on the other hand, know the Bible the way  kids know a neighborhood. They may not know that the Johnsons live at 123 Maplewood Street, but they do know that the Johnsons live on the top of the hill next to the house with the old green fence and the barking dog. They can get you to the same place, but in a less direct way.
Catholics know a lot of Scripture. Even if they don’t read the Bible, they hear the Bible at Mass, and they might read biblical passages in Catholic devotionals and prayer books. They may not be able to cite Scripture verses, but the chapters-and-verses convention we use to cite these passages came into existence only in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t an original part of the Bible.
When Jesus showed the Sadducees that the Old Testament does refer to a resurrection of the dead, he said, “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush [emphasis added], where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.”
So don’t feel as though you can’t talk about the Bible just because you may not remember the chapter and verse where a passage is located. Even our Lord didn’t cite the Bible in this way! You can survive the Bible blitzkrieg by humbling leading the person through different parts of Scripture with the light of the Church’s teaching as a helpful guide to interpreting it.

The Bible Blitzkrieg

Why did Christ choose Bread and Wine?

Throwing Out Scripture to Save Sola Scriptura

Whether fertility is good might seem a weird question—except, in our times, it seems that those who say it is, as J.D. Vance did during his campaign for vice president last year, are deemed “weird” by cultural movers and shakers. The reaction to Vance’s encouragement of people having babies demands we address this question.
Yes, Virginia, fertility is good. That is the classical perspective of Judaism and Christianity. God pronounces it good in the first words he speaks after creating human beings male and female. “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).
St. John Paul II was wont to note that this is God’s first blessing to newly created man and woman, the “only creature God wanted for himself.” Everything else God creates, he subordinates to human dominion. Man is the only creature whom God directly wanted for himself (for man) and himself (for God)—as a person with whom he could enter into a personal relationship.
God created the human person “in our image and likeness”—not “my” image, but “ours.” Already we see that God is not alone, an isolated individualist, but a communion of persons. And God does not create the human person alone, but in a complementary two-some. (In Genesis 2, where the Yahwist writer does separate the creation of man from woman, God is anthropomorphically presented as recognizing that “it is not good that the man should be alone.”)
So, not only is God a communion of persons, who creates human beings as a communion of persons, but his first blessing on the human couple is fertility, enabling them to perpetuate and expand that communion: “Be fruitful and multiply.”
In traditional Jewish law, Genesis 1:28 is presented as both a blessing and a mitzvah, a commandment—indeed, the first command God gives human beings. It is God’s intent that the human person have babies. This is why celibacy was so radical a New Testament change: it was not a value in Old Testament Judaism.
As Catholics, we affirm that grace builds on nature. That’s why the Church would affirm that this “fertility is good” perspective is not some quirky Catholic doctrine relevant only to Friday fish-eaters. No—it’s grounded in and binding on every human being as part of natural law.
Genesis does not present God making Jews and Catholics in his image and likeness. It presents him as making “man”—i.e., all humankind—in his image and likeness. The fact that something has theological justifications does not mean that it only is justified theologically.
Take Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. Put most basically, they recognize that human development is a progressive getting out from one’s self toward other persons. A child passes critical developmental milestones when he realizes that Mommy is not just the food-and-comfort extension of me, but somebody else. (That’s another reason why fatherhood is more than just insemination and why fathers and mothers are not merely interchangeable, socially gendered “parents.”) He gradually advances from dealing with others to taking responsibility for another (marriage) to taking responsibility for someone who does not yet exist—i.e., children (“generativity”). This progressive going out of self toward another is prerequisite to every human being’s normal development, even if it also tallies with the biblical injunction about needing to lose one’s self to find it (Matt. 10:39, 16:25).
So fertility is good. But what kind of good?
In philosophy, there are two kinds of good: a bonum honestum, or something that is good in itself, and a bonum utile, or something that is good because it is useful. Catholic thought regards fertility as a bonum honestum.
Fertility is good because life is good. Period. Not because it is useful—nor does it cease to be good when it is not useful, when it is inconvenient or problematic.
Here is precisely where the nub of the modern problem lies.
The modern world would have you believe that fertility has no inherent significance, no intrinsic value. Fertility is “good” if it is “good for you,” if it is useful or convenient to your “life project” at this moment. If it’s not, then it’s bad, something to be suppressed, eliminated, destroyed. Fertility—and by extension, life—gets its value from how it fits or does not fit your life project.
That’s why fertility—a perfectly normal and natural dimension of a healthy, post-pubescent human being—is destroyed, temporarily (contraception) or permanently (sterilization). It’s why the current transgender mania defends permanently destroying the fertility of a minor child, even before that fertility has normally developed, as “health care” and “therapeutic.”
But consider this: if fertility has no inherent meaning or value except what a particular person assigns to it, that means that every normal human being is naturally developmentally deformed . . . because every normal person is fertile, a man from puberty onward and a woman intermittently from puberty until menopause. That would mean that the default method of function of only one of the nine systems of the human body—the generative (note what that word entails)—is congenitally defective.
Do you really believe that?
There is a reason why kids once upon a time played Mommy and Daddy. There is a reason why, once upon a time, people—in contrast to our era—married. There is a reason why people wanted to have babies (and why parents and in-laws sometimes obtrusively wanted to nudge that process along). These are natural and normal things of human life and development.
What is “weird” is the idea that human beings develop “normally” by being isolated individuals at odds with their biology, at odds with how human beings have developed for millennia, at odds with “what comes naturally” . . . in order to fulfill the expectations of a particular socio-cultural construct of our time.
The question ultimately comes down to this: is fertility good? And—pace the Planned Parenthood message—the answer of our Judaeo-Christian heritage has been unequivocally “yes.”

Why You Should Have Babies

In this month of remembering the dead, I want to draw attention to someone who passed away in May. I never met him in person, but I see reminders of him every day.
I don’t recall exactly how I was connected with Deacon Lawrence Klimecki, nearly twenty years ago when I was searching for an artist to illustrate the cover for an unusual work of fiction I was editing: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tripods-Attack-Young-Chesterton-Chronicles/dp/1933184264">The Tripods Attack</a>, first entry in the <a href="https://youngchestertonchronicles.wordpress.com/">Young Chesterton Chronicles</a> by John McNichol. We needed someone to capture the steampunk aesthetic crossed with Chestertonian whimsy that the book called for.
When I caught sight of Deacon Lawrence’s arresting take on sacred art, I knew we had found the right man. He did a masterful job not only on the cover and back of the book, but on its interior design. Freelance graphic artists will tell you that they’re usually overworked and underpaid, but I can’t think of another book project where an artist did so much for so little.
It wasn’t guilt over this, though, that motivated me afterward to buy a number of his works for myself and as gifts—it was plain appreciation for his uncanny ability to create popular Catholic art unlike anything else out there. I am a man of letters, not pictures, and I lack the vocabulary to describe what it is that makes his images of saints and holy scenes so unique and compelling. The best I can say is that he combines deep and reverent faith with a touch of sci-fi or fantasy style and an unabashedly masculine, almost militant hand.
How else could I describe his <a href="https://fineartamerica.com/featured/terror-of-demons-lawrence-klimecki.html?product=art-print">“Terror of Demons,”</a> depicting St. Joseph stomping the spine of a submissive devil and cradling the barque of Peter while two priests attend him? Or the <a href="https://i1.wp.com/deaconlawrence.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MaidoforleansColorWeb.jpg?resize=600%2C900&amp;ssl=1">“Maid of Orléans”</a> that captures St. Joan’s strength, humility, and femininity just so? Or the <a href="https://fineartamerica.com/featured/raphael-lawrence-klimecki.html?product=poster">St. Raphael</a> that adorns my office wall: not a pale statue or neutered cherub but a creature of cosmic power and riotous color. Or the large icon of <a href="https://fineartamerica.com/featured/icon-of-saint-junipero-serra-lawrence-klimecki.html?product=poster">Junipero Serra</a> that hangs in the halls of Catholic Answers, safe at least there from the cancelers and the vandals!
Deacon Lawrence Klimecki was <a href="https://www.scd.org/news/funeral-mass-deacon-lawrence-klimecki-thursday-may-18-cathedral-sacramento">only sixty-two when he passed</a>. I lament the unmade future works that died with his hand and the void he leaves as a mentor to artists and as a leader in the Christian-art conversation. But I delight in the thought that he will pierce the veil to glimpse his subject face to face. Let us pray that God will speed him to that sight.
Support Deacon Lawrence’s family and artistic legacy by checking out his work <a href="https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/lawrence-klimecki">for sale here</a>.

Remembering a Spellbinding Catholic Artist

Shortly after our wedding, my wife flew to Chicago on a business trip. We knew that it was to our advantage that she go, but it was a sad parting at the airport all the same. Once her plane had disappeared beyond the clouds, I couldn’t stand it, I missed her so much. So I, never having visited Chicago before, hopped on a flight to the Windy City. The assurance that I would see my beloved again kept me joyful through all the aches and pains of air travel . . . but not joyful enough.
Today is Ascension Thursday, when we celebrate a sad parting—but also one of the most joyful in human history, because of what it promised.
There’s a touch of the Crucifixion’s sadness in the Ascension. In both cases, Jesus left the apostles, left us, left the world. But Jesus’ death sent the apostles scrambling with terror; his rising left them gaping (Acts 1:10) with awe and, later, jubilation (Luke 24:52-53).
When Jesus promised his followers that he would die, St. Peter contradicted him (Matt. 16:22). By the time he told them he’d leave them to be with the Father, they’d caught on, at least enough that there are no contradictions recorded there. But we can’t hold it against the apostles if they felt a little sad when Jesus told them he’d be going. Indeed, the way St. John tells it, he had to take pains to alleviate their sorrow: “It is to your advantage that I go away” (16:7).
They might have felt hopeless, too, because what is hope? The Catholic Encyclopedia <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/hope">calls it</a> “a divine virtue by which we confidently expect, with God’s help, to reach eternal felicity as well as to have at our disposal the means of securing it.” Could there have been the divine virtue of hope among men before the Ascension? If so, it was new—Jesus had opened up heaven only at his Resurrection, forty days prior, and if the apostles were baptized by then, it was likely <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/were-the-apostles-baptized">only recently</a>. So the virtue of hope, God-given at baptism, might not have fit not so well yet. In any event, you could call the pre-Christian world hopeless and mean it literally. Thousands of years of that lay on the apostles’ shoulders when their teacher told them he was hitting the road.
Hope “is an infused virtue,” meaning that it is “directly implanted in the soul by almighty God.” Our Lord throughout his ministry may have been divinely infusing hope in ways his disciples couldn’t see, but his works visibly laid the ground for it. He tended not to make his followers do something without showing them first. He publicly cast out demons (Mark 1:26, 5:13, 9:25) and then empowered his disciples to exorcise (16:17). He showed them healing and then promised that they too would heal. And on the day of his ascension, he showed them—and us, through their witness—the path to heaven. All that remained for the apostles was to follow him, which they now could do, confidently expecting that eternal felicity.
Jesus didn’t have to rise up into the sky right in front of the apostles’ faces, but he did. What better way to instill their hope? It shows: immediately after Jesus left them, off they went, “continually in the temple blessing God” (Luke 24:53), and blessing him on and on through their own ministries and into gruesome martyrdoms for love of him.
Airplanes allow us to do our own little re-enactments of the Ascension. The script has its parallels: your beloved disappears into the clouds, and you stare up, slack-jawed, until some agent not even trying to pass himself off as a white-clad angel tells you to get a move-on, you’re clogging up the drop-off lane with your now suitcase-less and beloved-less car. Usually, you hope for your beloved to come back, confident that that return flight will show up at the scheduled (or, perhaps more likely, delayed) time.
That’s human hope. On a divine level, we wait for Christ to return, as the angels foretold (Acts 1:10-11)—but the Second Coming <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/apocalypse-not">will not be pretty</a>, and we can’t be blamed for preferring to be in heaven already at that point. And then there’s what the apostles did. With divine hope, they hopped to their feet and worked, confidently, with the spiritual means at their disposal, to reach eternal felicity with the ultimate beloved.
We faithful are like earnest children, arranging our lives for God as children draw pictures to impress their parents. In my little crayon picture, I raced to Chicago—cramped, famished, bedeviled for my half of the armrest, but delighted to walk those unknown streets with my wife of only a few months.
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Granted, it wasn’t exactly divine hope, nor is Chicago the best analogue for heaven, if we’re being honest. But marriage is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/man-woman-and-marriage-under-lockdown">a symbol of God</a>, so God must have infused at least a spark of my desire to pursue my wife. More than I knew, it turned out: Anticipating a delightful weekend for two, I’d forgotten that marriage is a symbol of the trinitarian God. There, in Chicago, we learned we were expecting our son, and that was closer to heaven than anything I’d yet experienced.
On Ascension Thursday, God was good enough to give the apostles the theological virtue of hope, to fuel them on the path he showed them to something they knew they wanted but could not fully comprehend (1 Cor. 12). They knew, by the grace of God at the Ascension, that if they pursued him whom we should love above all others, they would attain not just what they knew and hoped for humanly, but also what they couldn’t know and yet still hoped for divinely.
When our loved ones leave us, and we miss them, and we hope so hard to be reunited with them, let’s remember the Ascension and the little pictures we draw for God. All our good acts, all our hopes, are ultimately a shadow of our hope for him, and it’s thanks to him on this <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cal/cal-8032">very special Thursday</a> that we know which way to go.

Hope Until We Meet Again

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<div>Why did Satan reject God?</div><div>There is no definitive answer to this question. We see some references in Scripture to a possible explanation:
<blockquote>How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning? How art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations? And thou saidst in thy heart: I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God, I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north. I will ascend above the height of the clouds, I will be like the most High. But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit (Isaiah 14:12-15).
But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are allied with him experience it (Wisdom 2:24).</blockquote>
In Luke 10:18, Jesus uses the example of Satan falling from heaven as a warning against pride.
Based on these Scripture passages, various theologians throughout the centuries have woven together theories based on pride, envy, and refusal to worship. Ultimately, we do not know what caused Satan and other angels to rebel and be cast out of heaven. We can focus only on our own salvation.
</div>

Why Did Satan Rebel?

Why pray for Pope Francis?

In this video, a caller Joe Heschmeyer and Cy Kellett how to respond to Protestant believers in Christ when you don&#8217;t have the answers immediately available.
Transcript:
Caller: We live in a world of a lot of different ways. I mean, as far as Christianity goes, and what I&#8217;m talking about is Protestant denominations and even Orthodoxy. Along with that, there&#8217;s a lot of claims coming your way, and sometimes it gets overwhelming. And I&#8217;m not like an apologist either, so even when you bring in the Church Fathers, which I think takes down those sort of NeedGod.net arguments pretty fast. However, you still got your Jordan Coopers and other people. Which is kind of like what I&#8217;m entering into as far as apologetics goes, where these people are even using the Church Fathers. So at a certain point, it&#8217;s like, how do we&#8230; I just feel like it&#8217;s nonstop arguments. I feel kind of stressed out because there&#8217;s constantly an argument coming my way. You know what I mean?
Joe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Cy: This is a great point, Logan.
Joe: This is very much kind of the world we can find ourselves in at Catholic Answers. And I think it&#8217;s good to remember you&#8217;re probably not going to single-handedly fix the Reformation, and that&#8217;s okay. So you can do what you can in the place that you&#8217;ve been planted and with the tools that you&#8217;ve been given.
Part of that is going to include knowing, like, which areas do you just not know well enough or have the desire or interest to kind of go down those rabbit holes. So I&#8217;d say this: number one, everyone is called to be a witness to the Gospel. But number two, the chief way in which you&#8217;re called to do that is through your own story, through your own testimony, through your own witness of life.
First Peter 3:15, where Society 315 gets its name here at Catholic Answers, says, &#8220;Always be prepared to make a defense in apologia to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you. Yet do it with gentleness and reverence and keep your conscience clear so that when you are abused, those who revile your good character, your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.&#8221;
So if you&#8217;re living a holy life and you&#8217;re behaving in an upright and holy manner, especially online where it&#8217;s so easy to do the opposite, where it&#8217;s so easy to be a jerk or a creep or whatever, if you&#8217;re living a holy and Christian life and you&#8217;re carrying yourself in that way and you are overflowing with hope and you&#8217;re able to explain why you&#8217;re doing the work of evangelization, that has an important effect.
There are plenty of people who, when you talk to them about their story and who made a really big important change in their life that led them to convert, that led them to consider Christianity, led them to become Catholic, whatever. It&#8217;s not a professional apologist; it&#8217;s not a popular Catholic author. It&#8217;s somebody who was just loving and caring and gentle and showed them by the whole way that they lived the truth of the Gospel. And so we are called to do that.
The third thing I would say is that there are going to be times, no matter how much you know, that you find yourself in a conversation where somebody stumps you. The temptation there is to lie or to guess or to pretend, and don&#8217;t do that. Our fight, as St. Paul says in Ephesians 6, is not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities. This is a spiritual battle, not a temporal one. And if you give in to lying, you&#8217;re letting the enemy win.
It is much better to do the following: just say, &#8220;That&#8217;s a really good question. I don&#8217;t know. Let me look that up and I&#8217;ll get back to you.&#8221; This does a few things. Number one, you validate the person, which does more good than I think we realize. So often people want to know that we don&#8217;t just think they&#8217;re idiots for having questions about the faith. You know, this is totally normal; this is good. And you&#8217;re showing respect to them as a person. That makes them more likely to take you seriously and to respect you in return.
Second, you&#8217;re showing that you care more about the truth than about the sensation of feeling right by admitting that you don&#8217;t know. This is a move of humility, and even the proudest among us admire humility in others.
Third, even though you don&#8217;t know, you&#8217;re signaling the fact that there probably is an answer out there, that the Catholic Church does have an answer, that there are Catholic answers. And so you&#8217;re not just saying, &#8220;Well, I guess we&#8217;ll never know,&#8221; and leaving it there.
But then fourth, you&#8217;re actually doing one of the hardest things. Especially I find this in interpersonal conversations, like in real life, not so much online. You&#8217;ll have these situations where maybe it&#8217;s a coworker or a friend who suddenly opens up to you about the faith in a way they hadn&#8217;t in the past. Sometimes the walls just kind of come down for a little bit, and if you&#8217;re not careful, you can miss the opportunity, and the walls go back up, and then you don&#8217;t know how to re-engage that conversation.
But if there was something where you told them that you were going to get back to them, you&#8217;ve given sort of a key to yourself to re-engage that conversation. Because now you can say, &#8220;Hey, a week ago you asked me why Catholics do XYZ,&#8221; or &#8220;You asked me how to make sense of this Bible verse,&#8221; or whatever it is. And then you come back with an answer. This shows how much you care for the person and care for the truth. And you just bought yourself a second date to talk about apologetics and to talk about Christ.
So when you find yourself stumped or overwhelmed or any of these things, I would go to that.
But then the fourth and final thing I&#8217;ll say, I know this is a very long answer, but I wanted to kind of give these tools both for you and anybody else who may be feeling the same way. If you find that it&#8217;s discouraging you or overwhelming you or causing you trouble, step away from it.
If we just step back and think about it logically, there are plenty of very smart people in every Protestant denomination. There are plenty of people trying to follow Jesus in every Protestant denomination and in every Orthodox church. This is true. But that&#8217;s obviously not enough because there are smart people and people pursuing the truth and trying to serve Jesus in the next denomination and the next one and the next one. You just happen to be seeing whichever one.
So is that the system that Christ calls us to, that just whichever group you happen to see, you go and join that group? Of course not. He founds the Church. And so somebody might have very clever ways of co-opting the Church Fathers or co-opting Scripture, but we know rationally they can&#8217;t possibly be right because Jesus doesn&#8217;t build a Church to have it go into hibernation for 15 centuries until Luther or any Protestant denomination.
And we know that He founds a Church with Peter as the head. So any form of Church that isn&#8217;t A) 2000 years old and B) with the successor of Peter at the head is disqualified from consideration.
Cy: Logan, I want to come back to you. Is that a satisfactory and helpful answer to you?
Caller: Yeah. Thank you, Joe. That brought me a lot of peace. Thank you.
Joe: Good. I&#8217;m so happy to hear that.
Cy: Bless you, Logan. Logan, I don&#8217;t know if we&#8217;ve sent you the book, *The Big Book of Catholic Answers*, but as you&#8217;re mulling things, it&#8217;s got 250 of the main questions about the Catholic faith and the answers. Did we send it to you before or no?

Stumped by a Protestant? Just Say This!

Patrick Lencioni talks about asserting his Catholic identity whenever he gives a talk at any event, from Protestant megachurch services to business conferences, and why almost every reaction he receives is a positive one.
Transcript:
Host: We go now to Rosa in Lowell, Massachusetts, listening on the Station of the Cross. Rosa, you are on with Patrick Lencioni, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: First of all I wanted to say thank you to Patrick. I listened to a conference of his once and he said, &#8220;I am Catholic,&#8221; and I was ecstatic because I&#8217;d never seen anyone in the business conference talk like that, so thank you so much, Patrick. My question is, how do people take that from you when you say that? When you come out of the conference, do people say anything to you?
Patrick: Yes, in fact&#8211; thank you very much, Rosa&#8211;they almost always do, and usually they come to me and they say, &#8220;Thank you for doing that.&#8221; I&#8217;ve had people say, &#8220;I&#8217;m not a Catholic and I appreciate that you do that;&#8221; I&#8217;ve had people say that &#8220;I used to be and I really like that you do that;&#8221; and a lot of Catholics come and say, &#8220;Thank you for doing that.&#8221; More often than not, because we all feel afraid to do that, when somebody does that publicly, it gives people hope and courage to do it themselves.
You know, I&#8217;ve started doing a lot of speaking at the evangelical churches and at leadership conferences, and I always decided that I would come out and I would announce that I was Catholic. And I will tell you a story: I once actually was&#8211;there&#8217;s a megachurch that asked me to be their preacher. Now that&#8217;s not something I can do at a Catholic Church because I&#8217;m not a priest, and I called a priest, and I said, &#8220;Am I allowed to preach at a Protestant Church?&#8221; And he said, &#8220;Yeah, absolutely.&#8221; And so I went there and I got up there, might have been 5,000 people in the congregation, and the the the minister introduced me by saying, &#8220;Pat&#8217;s a Catholic, and you&#8217;ll never guess that he actually went to church before he came here!&#8221; And that&#8217;s the first time anybody has ever done that. Now these were Protestants. They broke out into applause, because they knew I was Catholic and I&#8217;d gone to Mass.
And so I think we Catholics, and Christians that are not Catholic, have to, you know&#8230;they say, &#8220;Go out and preach the Gospel, and occasionally use words;&#8221; it didn&#8217;t say &#8220;never use words.&#8221; Just declaring &#8220;Yes, I&#8217;m happy being a Catholic and I&#8217;m proud of that, and now let me be a good consultant, a good marketer, or whatever else.&#8221; I don&#8217;t think that there&#8217;s anything wrong with saying that, especially today when people are afraid.
And so, yeah, I will tell you Maria, only a few times have I gotten punished for it, and it was not very hard to be punished for it. I&#8217;ve never had it be what I thought&#8230;I will tell you, I did have a company tell me not to mention God in one of my talks, and they said, &#8220;You can&#8217;t come here if you mention God,&#8221; and I said, &#8220;Well here&#8217;s the deal, I&#8217;m a Christian and a Catholic, I&#8217;m not there to proselytize but I can&#8217;t promise&#8211;yeah, I am who I am.&#8221; And they said, &#8220;Ok, that&#8217;s ok.&#8221; And in my talk I said, &#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t think God made us to to have to hate our jobs,&#8221; because I was talking about that, and at the end I said, &#8220;God bless you.&#8221; They never complained, and employees from the company came up and said, &#8220;Thank you for witnessing. We don&#8217;t do that here.&#8221;
So Rosa, I think we can do it more, and you know what Jesus said in the Beatitudes: when they do persecute us for it, let&#8217;s rejoice, because our reward will be great in Heaven. Now it&#8217;s not always easy for me, but I&#8217;ve always found it to be not as bad as I thought.

Preaching as a Catholic at Protestant Events

<div>Is the Catholic Church growing in number of members? </div><div>The Church is growing by leaps and bounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. You can do your own internet search to get the growth numbers in those areas. Here&#8217;s one: <a href="http://www.internetmonk.com/archive/41068">So, How’s the Catholic Church Really Doing?</a>
In the Western/European world, there has been a decline in the numbers of Catholics and practicing Catholics. But that is just one part of the world; it isn&#8217;t the measuring stick for the entire Church. At one time northern Africa was a dominant center of Christianity, and Europe was populated with pagan barbarians. Over the centuries the faith dissipated from northern Africa, and Europe became a dominant center of Christianity.
There have been ebbs and flows, rises and declines of the Church in various parts of the world since A.D. 33. Ultimately, we trust in the promise of Jesus that the gates of hell will never prevail against his Church.
</div>

Is Catholicism Thriving?

Is Mary’s intercession biblical or not?

A caller asks how to respond to those who claim that Christmas traditions such as trees and lights were influenced heavily by pagans. Joe Heschmeyer, staff apologist, answers this question on Catholic Answers Live.

Are Christmas Trees Pagan?

If you pick up an old Catholic prayer book, you’ll probably see the term “Ember Days.” It’s probably an unfamiliar term for Catholics in the United States today, and for good reason: they were universally kept by the Church before Vatican II, but the 1969 Roman Calendar reform left their observation to the pastoral judgment of national bishops’ conferences, and the U.S. bishops allowed them to become dormant.
The “Ember Days” are three days of fasting and abstinence observed four times a year—i.e., on a Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday in each of the four seasons. They occurred on those weekdays after Ash Wednesday, Pentecost, the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), and St. Lucy’s Day (December 13). The next Ember Days are September 18, 20, and 21 and December 18, 20, and 21. They are intended to focus our attention on the good things of God’s creation. They are also times to pray for vocations because, traditionally, they were days of ordination.
Celebrate the “good things of God’s creation” by fasting? Well, yes: Sometimes, we don’t appreciate what we take for granted. Voluntarily depriving ourselves of otherwise legitimate things teaches us to open our eyes and value those good things. Fasting in Catholic tradition means only one full meal in the course of a day (though one may eat additionally, provided it does not add up to another meal). Abstinence means forgoing meat.
Let’s consider the modern American condition. Although there are no doubt poor Catholics, the average Catholic in the United States probably does not lack food to eat. Indeed, he probably could benefit from cutting some calories. And, given our incidence of cardiac disease, cutting back on some meat wouldn’t be bad, either. Many Catholics struggle with weight: the quarterly recurrence of Ember Day fasting may reconnect us to tend to the “good thing of God’s creation” that is our physical health.
But the Ember Days are not just regular diet reboots (though grace supplements nature). They are above all regular spiritual reboots. And in the Jewish and Christian traditions, fasting is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/fasting-means-conquering-yourself">part of spiritual rebooting</a>, a self-denial that makes us ask whether our God is our belly (see Phil. 3:19) or the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (see Matt. 22:32).
Since 1966, the Catholic bishops of the United States tolerated the disappearance of Friday abstinence by stipulating that Catholics should observe “some” form of penance on the traditional non-Lenten weekday recollecting Christ’s passion, defaulting to abstinence in the absence of some other act. In truth, Catholics in the United States heard about the voluntary nature of abstinence but forgot about the mandatory nature of penance—mandatory not by canon law requirements, but by tested spiritual tradition. Meanwhile, fasting in the United States has atrophied to Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
The discipline of fasting is lost if it is observed 0.5% (one half of one percent) of the year.
So, although Ember Days may have “officially” fallen off the Catholic liturgical calendar in the United States and regular abstinence shrunken to Ash Wednesday and Lenten Fridays, there’s no reason you can’t voluntarily keep these days. Why do so?
<ul>
<li>It is a regular reminder, recurring several times throughout the year, to refocus on God.</li>
<li>It regularly connects you to the changing “times and seasons” of God’s good creation. The fall Ember Days this year coincide with the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-harvest-moon-is-christian">Harvest Moon</a> (September 17-18), which reminds us of God’s work even in the heavens.</li>
<li>Pope Francis declared September 1 “World Day of Prayer for Care of Creation.” That day and the feast of St. Francis (October 4) connect this time of year with creation. September, as summer recedes and harvest time arrives, reminds us of the “fruit of the earth and the vine and (with Labor Day) the work of human hands.” The autumn Ember Days should recall the goodness of that world.</li>
<li>As previously noted, in the past, Ember Days were also times for ordinations. Vocations flourish when we “hunger and thirst” for God, not when we are satiated with worldly things. There’s no doubt we desperately need good priests and religious today. Shouldn’t we recover this period of vocational prayer?</li>
</ul>
So, how to observe the Ember Days? As we are reminded on Ash Wednesday, one way is in private. Go, close the door, and spend some time in prayer. Go, wash your face, comb your hair, and do not announce that you are fasting. Go, spend some time in God’s creation. Take a look at the Harvest Moon and understand how, in a pre-electric light farm world, it was a sign of providential care. Go out to a farm or field and pick some apples; people often connect to God in his world. While you’re doing that, pick some extras for a homebound neighbor, a poor family, or your parish food pantry so that your prayer, fasting, and acting are charitable. And don’t neglect the most important ways these quarterly Ember Days can be celebrated by recourse to the sacraments: a good confession and making an effort—especially if it’s not otherwise something you do—to participate in a weekday Mass and Communion.
The Ember Days don’t have to be officially on the liturgical calendar to make them spiritually beneficial for you. Why not try this month?

What Are Ember Days?

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of All Saints. For Protestants, our belief in the communion of saints can be a source of disagreement on multiple points: for example, the saints’ ability to hear our prayers, their power to intercede for us before God, and the devotions that we practice in their honor. But perhaps the most basic question they have is why we single out the saints in heaven at all. Many Protestants say there’s nothing really special about them, because the Bible says that all Christians are saints.
For example, in Colossians 1:1-2, St. Paul says,
<blockquote>Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ at Colossae: Grace to you and peace from God our Father (emphasis added).</blockquote>
This does seem pretty convincing. Why do Catholics refer to only canonized saints in heaven as saints when Paul seems to refer to the Colossian Christians that way?
Revelation 5:8 adds,
<blockquote>And when [the Lamb, Jesus Christ] had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.</blockquote>
Here we have “the twenty-four elders,” representing the people of God from both Old and New Covenants (twelve patriarchs plus twelve apostles equals “twenty-four elders”), receiving and communicating “the prayers of the saints” ascending from earth as incense. So again, we have Christians on this side of the veil referred to as “saints.”
Some Catholics will argue that the term saints is being used in the sense of an aspiration. Paul wills the Colossians to be saints, so he refers to them here in accordance with their ultimate calling rather than their present state. I have never found that line of reasoning to be compelling. It doesn’t seem to work for either text, especially Revelation 5:8.
But even more importantly, that doesn’t seem to jibe with Church teaching.
So what gives?
When Colossians 1 and Revelation 5 refer to ”the saints,” it seems clear they both are referring to Christians who are presently “walk[ing] through the valley of the shadow of death,” as the Psalmist says—at least, in some sense. But I find many among the non-Catholics I converse with regularly to be surprised when I tell them the Catholic Church acknowledges that all of the baptized can be referred to as “saints.” The Catechism says,
<blockquote>In the communion of saints, “a perennial link of charity exists between the faithful who have already reached their heavenly home, those who are expiating their sins in purgatory and those who are still pilgrims on earth. Between them there is, too, an abundant exchange of all good things.”
In this wonderful exchange, the holiness of one profits others, well beyond the harm that the sin of one could cause others. Thus recourse to the communion of saints lets the contrite sinner be more promptly and efficaciously purified of the punishments for sin (1475).</blockquote>
An earlier passage in the Catechism makes it even more clear that all of God’s faithful can be referred to as saints:
<blockquote>After confessing “the holy catholic Church,” the Apostles’ Creed adds “the communion of saints.” In a certain sense this article is a further explanation of the preceding: “What is the Church if not the assembly of all the saints?” The communion of saints is the Church. . . . The term “communion of saints” therefore has two closely linked meanings: communion in holy things (sancta)” and “among holy persons (sancti)” (948).</blockquote>
Sancti, or “holy ones,” is the word from which we get saints.
The Catechism continues:
<blockquote>Sancta sanctis! (“God’s holy gifts for God’s holy people”) is proclaimed by the celebrant in most Eastern liturgies during the elevation of the holy gifts before the distribution of Communion. The faithful (sancti) are fed by Christ’s holy body and blood (sancta) to grow in communion of the Holy Spirit (koinonia) and to communicate it to the world.</blockquote>
Since the Church teaches that the faithful on earth can be called saints, why do Catholics use the term to refer to a special group of canonized persons in heaven?
I think St. Paul best answers this question. In Colossians 1:1-2, as we saw above, Paul definitively refers to all of the faithful at Colossae as “saints.” (The Greek hagioi is comparable to sancti in Latin, meaning “sanctified,” “set apart,” or “holy.”)
From a Catholic perspective, we would say of course Paul would refer to these Christians, and by allusion all Christians, in this way because “being set apart and made holy” is precisely what baptism accomplishes in the life of every Christian. We “have been baptized into Christ Jesus” (Rom. 6:3), who is the source of all holiness.
But here’s the rub: the Catholic Church also acknowledges what Colossians 1:12 says:
<blockquote>Giving thanks to the Father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.</blockquote>
The Greek word for &#8220;share&#8221; in this text is merida, which means “to partake in part or a portion.” According to Paul, the saints on earth possess in part what the saints in heaven possess in fullness. Thus, it is fitting that the Catholic Church reserves the title of saint to those it has declared to be in heaven. They alone (the saints in heaven) possess sainthood, if you will, in its fullness. They have reached the destination that we saints on earth—holy ones by virtue of the graces God gives us for the journey—are in hope striving to reach.

Aren’t We All ‘Saints’?

Liberals really praised this man...?

<div>Our cluster is omitting the Eucharist from communion services and replacing it with prayers. Is this okay?</div><div>Yes. This is the correct liturgy outside of Sundays when there is no possibility for Mass.
A <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-it-lawful-for-a-layperson-to-officiate-at-a-communion-service-if-so-is-it-lawful-for-a">Communion service</a> can never substitute for Mass. If there is no Mass that can be reasonably attended by the faithful, then there is no Mass obligation. In the absence of Mass, the community is invited by the Church to pray the Liturgy of the Word or the Liturgy of the Hours. The Church sees Communion services during the week when there is no priest as an extraordinary exception rather than the norm:
<blockquote>Likewise, especially if Holy Communion is distributed during such celebrations, the diocesan bishop, to whose exclusive competence this matter pertains, must not easily grant permission for such celebrations to be held on weekdays, especially in places where it was possible or would be possible to have the celebration of Mass on the preceding or the following Sunday (<a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20040423_redemptionis-sacramentum_en.html">Redemptionis Sacramentum</a> 166).</blockquote>
Even on Sundays, the Code of Canon Law recommends a simple Liturgy of the Word rather than a Communion service:
<blockquote>If participation in the eucharistic celebration becomes impossible because of the absence of a sacred minister or for another grave cause, it is strongly recommended that the faithful take part in a liturgy of the word if such a liturgy is celebrated in a parish church or other sacred place according to the prescripts of the diocesan bishop or that they devote themselves to prayer for a suitable time alone, as a family, or, as the occasion permits, in groups of families (canon 1248 §2).</blockquote>
Although the Church does foresee a Liturgy of the Word with Communion (i.e., a Communion service) as a possibility on a Sunday, the Church asks that such liturgies be rarely permitted on weekdays.
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No More Communion Services?

<div>Can a non-Catholic receive ashes on Ash Wednesday?</div><div>Ashes are not a sacrament and do not signify communion of faith beyond a need for repentance and a remembrance of mortality. Therefore, it is indeed acceptable for someone who is not Catholic to receive ashes on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/ash-wednesday">Ash Wednesday</a> if they so choose.
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Can a Non-Catholic Get Ashes?

<div>When Jesus told John "Behold your mother," where did John take her? In other words, where did he live?</div><div>Our Lady lived wherever he did. So, at first in Jerusalem, probably on Mount Sion, and then perhaps later in Asia Minor where he ministered and where he died. The ancient Western and Eastern tradition favor the former, and the more recent Western tradition has also the latter opinion.
There is a popular shrine of the house of Our Lady and St. John in Ephesus in modern-day Turkey that is based on revelations given to Bl. Anne Catherine Emmerich, but the Fathers and the ancient liturgies show Our Lady ending her earthly life in Jerusalem, where there are shrines, both Catholic and Orthodox, to her Dormition. Of course, they could have been in Ephesus and then moved back.
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Where Did John Take Mary?

<div>Did those baptized by Jesus and/or the apostles before Jesus’s death and resurrection need to be re-baptized later?</div><div>It is unclear whether Jesus did or did not baptize. John 3:22-26 seems to indicate that he did, but John 4:2 seems to indicate that this was just a misunderstanding and that it was the disciples of Jesus and not Jesus himself doing the baptizing.
The baptism practiced by Jesus&#8217; disciples was most likely similar to the baptism of John the Baptist, a baptism of repentance (Acts 19:4) rather than a sacrament. After all, for a valid sacrament, one must intend to baptize in the name of the Trinity, and the disciples most likely did not grasp the concept of the Trinity until later in Jesus&#8217; ministry. The sacrament of baptism is also an incorporation of ourselves into the death and resurrection of Jesus and that had yet to take place.
So, yes, if someone had been baptized by the disciples during Jesus&#8217; earthly ministry, they still would have needed to receive the sacrament of baptism after the Resurrection.
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Baptism Before the Resurrection

Recently, Catholic Answers received a kind and enlightening correspondence from Cristophe Costi, a Lutheran pastor from Germany and the recent author of <a href="https://www.amazon.de/Maria-wer-bist-verbl%C3%BCffender-evangelischen/dp/3038482994">Mary, Who Are You?: An Astonishing Look Beyond the Protestant Horizon</a>. 
When we learned that Cristophe&#8217;s book was inspired in part by our own Tim Staples&#8217;s <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/behold-your-mother-a-biblical-and-historical-defense-of-the-marian-doctrines/?searchid=9974800&amp;search_query=behold+your+mother">Behold Your Mother</a>, we couldn&#8217;t help asking if he might be interested in answering a couple of questions from us, ranging in topics from Protestants&#8217; and Catholics&#8217; dialogue on Marian doctrines to the state of Christianity in modern Europe. Below you will find Cristophe&#8217;s gracious responses.

The Lutheran Who Loves Mary

Does Baptism Save Us?

Did Jesus get the ‘3 days’ wrong?

Jimmy Akin advises a caller on how to discuss the Biblical evidence for the Trinity with her friend who claims that Matthew 28:19 (&#8220;baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit&#8221;) is a later interpolation made by the Catholic Church.

How to Defend the Trinity’s Biblical Basis

Are ‘Healing Miracles’ a Real Thing?

Having just written <a href="https://wof.org/way">a book</a> dedicated to “both/and,” I was thrilled to stumble on <a href="https://x.com/i/status/1930415482017890480">a clip of Gavin Ortlund</a>—a sharp and cordial Protestant apologist with a substantial following on YouTube—reflecting on whether the principle <a href="https://youtu.be/vwgHGsODNDw">can appropriately be applied</a> to Jesus and Mary.
Ortlund regularly draws not only on Protestant thinkers, but also on Catholic apologists like Pascal, Chesterton, and Peter Kreeft. It’s likely he knows all the standard apologetic <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/meeting-the-protestant-challenge/?searchid=9328491&amp;search_query=meeting+the+protestant+">responses</a> and <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/meeting-the-protestant-response-how-to-answer-common-comebacks-to-catholic-arguments/?searchid=9328491&amp;search_query=meeting+the+protestant+">counter-responses</a> to Marian <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/bible-mary-the-mother-of-jesus-in-the-word-of-god/?searchid=9328510&amp;search_query=bible+mary">skepticism</a>. My hope is that by circling around his comments from this vantage of the both/and, and finding some common ground, we might gain a fresh perspective and perhaps clarify where the disagreement really lies.
In <a href="https://youtu.be/vwgHGsODNDw">the full video</a>, Ortlund defends the Marian title “Mother of God” (theotokos) but seems not to want to go beyond that:
<blockquote>Think of it just like this, to be simple: Mary is theologically important in relation to Jesus. But when she starts being disconnected and pulled over here, and now we&#8217;ve got this whole new theological enterprise devoted at her, that can have the effect of taking focus away from Jesus.</blockquote>
I appreciate his use of and emphasis on the word “can” here. Can Mariology go too far? This is a different question from whether it just is too far already simply by being Marian.
I think the answer—though Catholics are admittedly sluggish to admit this—is plainly yes: it can go too far. The obvious historical case in point is the Collyridians, a fourth-century sect that offered bread or cakes in sacrifice to Mary, giving her the latria (worship) due only to God. As Patrick Madrid <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/collyridianism">points out</a>, this isn’t just a remote danger of the ancient goddess-worshiping past: “Collyridianism is seen today in various forms. Those ‘hyper-Marian’ groups and writers who overly exalt Mary and focus on her to the exclusion (or near exclusion) of Christ are guilty of something approaching idolatry.” That we should at least take the danger seriously is well attested by the first of the ten commandments, Christ’s “greatest commandment,” and really the whole arc of the scriptures.
Ortlund goes on:
<blockquote>We often hear that it&#8217;s always a both/and. People say, “No, no, no; the more we love Mary, the more we love Jesus. They&#8217;re not competitive.” But some things can be an either/or.</blockquote>
The introduction of the categories of both/and and either/or are striking, especially in light of Ortlund’s use of Karl Barth and Martin Luther to make his case. Both men played <a href="https://matthewbecklo.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-the-catholic-bothand">decisive roles</a> in the development of these concepts in theology, and as Hans Urs von Balthasar points out, they represent a strain of theological thought with a particular allergy to—or, in Kierkegaard’s words, “an indescribable horror of”—the both/and instinct: “The ‘Catholic both . . . and,’” Balthasar writes, “has always appeared as a compromise in the eyes of the Augustinians, who think things out to the end, and who include Luther and Karl Barth.”
Some things are indeed either/or. This includes logical contradictions (we can’t coherently claim both x and non-x; only one can be true), moral absolutes (we can’t marry good and evil, heaven and hell; only one can be the direction in which we move); and most importantly, the primacy of God (we can’t serve both God and mammon; there can only be one first place in our hearts, only one aim of our worship, only one God and one Mediator—1 Tim. 2:5). In short, the both/and doesn’t extend into irrationality, immorality, or idolatry. If we fail to erect these boundaries, the principle will go off track.
Ortlund offers John 3:30 as an example of an either/or:
<blockquote>John the Baptist didn&#8217;t say, “He must increase, and I must increase, too, because it&#8217;s a both/and.” He said, “He must increase, and I must decrease.”</blockquote>
Here, the increase or decrease zero-sum game is clearly over the identity of the Messiah—that is, the question of who has the primacy. But then Ortlund—begging the question—ties this example to Mariology:
<blockquote>In principle it&#8217;s at least possible for a focus upon Mary or any other person to displace a focus upon Christ. I&#8217;m amazed, frankly, at the naïveté and lack of concern about this. . . .
What about when Christians love Jesus less than they love Mary and pray to Jesus less than they pray to Mary? And is that always a both/and? Can&#8217;t you see that sometimes it&#8217;s not a both/and? . . .
We can commit idolatry and put someone else functionally in our hearts in the role that Jesus alone should have, and Protestants do it all the time. Everybody can do it. It&#8217;s a perennial temptation.</blockquote>
But what is the precise character of Mariology as it unfolds in the Catholic Church? Is it an increase of Mary where she should decrease—that is, with respect to the identity of the Savior? Or is it, as Ortlund defended at the outset, an extended meditation on Mary’s relation to Jesus? Ortlund subtly suggests the first option: Mariology is inherently dysfunctional and dangerous—far more trouble than it’s worth—and we ought to let it pass us by.
But the question behind the question is precisely the definition—and limits—of the “Catholic both/and.” What is the both/and in a healthy biblical sense? It’s what I’ve called “the Way of heaven and earth”—the communion of God and man, God’s “place” and man’s “place,” the spiritual and the physical, and the spirit and the flesh in salvation history. At the center of that history is Christ, who holds all these realities together in his person. The primary “both/and” is the union of God and man in the Incarnation: Christ has two distinct natures, divine and human, united in his person. A whole series of both/ands flow out from this inflection point: both the spiritual and the physical are united in the sacraments. (Ortlund, though a Baptist, <a href="https://youtu.be/JbPxgZ_AfOI">believes in the Real Presence</a>.) Both heaven and earth will be in the new creation. Both spirit and flesh will be resurrected on the last day. And so on.
What about Mary? Gabriel declares to her, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. . . . You have found favor with God. . . . The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:28, 30, 35). And after her fiat, her perfect yes to God’s will, she sings,
<blockquote>My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name (vv. 46-49).</blockquote>
We might paraphrase these words using the precise formula Ortlund doesn’t see in John: He must increase, and I must increase, too. Mary is transparent to the Lord God and lives only to make him great—and God blesses and exalts her in return. In her glorifying of God, she is glorified. We see this same rhythm between Mary and God the Son. She counsels us to do whatever Christ tells us (John 2:5)—and Christ tells us, from the cross, that she is our mother (John 19:27). From that hour, the beloved disciple takes her into his home—as countless Catholics have done since in prayer and devotion. The Church magnifies Mary because Christ magnifies Mary, and Christ magnifies Mary because Mary magnifies Christ.
This is the heart of Mariology: everything the Church teaches about Mary does, in fact, relate to Jesus, as Ortlund argues it should. At the center of the Hail Mary prayer is the holy name of Jesus; woven through the rosary are the great mysteries of his life. Her perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, assumption—though it might be harder to see at first—emerge, like the title “Mother of God,” out of the same sustained reflection on the Incarnation.
In short, our love for and attention to Mary, as a rule, increases our love for and attention to Jesus. “Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much,” St. Maximilian Kolbe counseled. “You can never love her more than Jesus did.” In order to “risk” the first part of that advice, we must bear in our minds and hearts the second: that Mary matters because Jesus matters, and that we call her blessed because God so richly blessed her. We don’t have to fear idolatry in loving her—even in loving her lavishly.
Rather than John the Baptist’s “I must decrease,” we find a more apt analogy for Mariology in Christ’s “Greatest Commandment”: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40). A few chapters later, we hear in the parable of the sheep and the goats: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me’” (25:40).
Are our love for God and our love for our neighbor in competition? Is this an either/or? On the contrary: although the love of God comes first, we love God best precisely through our love for our neighbor, especially “the least of these.” God doesn’t want our love for him at the expense of our love for his creatures—being, as Johnny Cash sang, so heavenly minded we’re no earthly good—but rather, our love for both Creator and creature, in and through his Son. So, too, with our love for both the Son of God and the Mother of God.
I would conclude with an invitation to Ortlund, one that flips his challenge on its head: can’t you see that sometimes it is a both/and? That, in principle, it’s possible for Mary not to detract from Christ, but on the contrary, to intensify our love for him and for his people?
Granting both possibilities, how do we determine whether swimming with the current of Mariology increases or decreases Christ on the ground, in actual practice? The only way to know for sure is to experience Mariology “<a href="http://wof.org/gate">from the inside</a>.” There we see that it’s all about Jesus—“to Jesus through Mary,” as the Marian adage has it.
Marian devotion is stubbornly Christocentric, because Mary is never far from her son. She doesn’t get in the way. On the contrary, she shows the Way.

Marian Idolatry?

This is why you SHOULD BE CATHOLIC!

<div>Are the books of Deuteronomy and the Apocrypha the same?</div><div>No. The book of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/deuteronomy">Deuteronomy</a> is one of the five first books of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/old-testament">Old Testament</a> and part of what is sometimes called the &#8216;Hebrew canon&#8221; of Scripture. The so-called Apocrypha in Protestant bibles are those books not written in Hebrew in our extant manuscripts. They are called in Catholic Bibles the &#8220;<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuterocanonicals">deuterocanonical</a>&#8221; books, literally, &#8220;the second canon.&#8221; These books, because they were written in Greek and not in Hebrew (for the most part), were counted by the Pharisees as uncanonical, that is, not divinely inspired. Recently some portions of them have been found in Hebrew, thus disproving the criterion of the Pharisees.
</div>

Deuteronomy and the Apocrypha

One of the key events of Holy Week is the betrayal of Jesus by Judas Iscariot—something many Christians are convinced caused Judas to go to hell. I used to be one of them.
However, several times recently, Church officials have stated that—even though hell is a real possibility humans can choose—the Church does not teach that any particular person is in hell.
For example, in his 1994 interview book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul II discussed who will go to hell and wrote:
<blockquote>The Church has never made any pronouncement in this regard. This is a mystery, truly inscrutable, which embraces the holiness of God and the conscience of man. The silence of the Church is, therefore, the only appropriate position for Christian faith. Even when Jesus says of Judas, the traitor, “It would be better for that man if he had never been born” (Matt. 26:24), his words do not allude for certain to eternal damnation (139).</blockquote>
Similarly, in a 2006 audience, Benedict XVI said,
<blockquote>Even though he went to hang himself (cf. Matt. 27:5), it is not up to us to judge his gesture, substituting ourselves for the infinitely merciful and just God (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20061018.html">October 18, 2006</a>).</blockquote>
Despite these statements, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-judas-in-hell">it has long been commonly held</a> that Judas is, in fact, damned. So how can we understand the traditional opinion in light of the possibility of Judas’s salvation that John Paul II and Benedict XVI hold out?
One approach is to review the evidence we have for Judas being in hell and seeing how conclusive it is.
A first type of evidence is something that many people may not be aware of: data from exorcism cases.
Christians are familiar with the concept of exorcism being used for possession by demons—that is, fallen angels. However, there are also occasional reports of spirit possession by human souls.
In Judaism, such spirits are referred to as dybbuks. A <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/dybbuk-Jewish-folklore">dybbuk</a> is “a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a haven in the body of a living person.”
Although dybbuks are more commonly associated with popular Jewish belief, they are also sometimes reported in Christian contexts, and that includes Judas. Exorcists periodically report that during the course of the rite, one of the possessing spirits will identify itself as a former human, typically a famous sinner such as the emperor Nero or Judas Iscariot.
If a possessing spirit identifies itself as Judas and speaks truthfully, then that would support the idea that Judas is a lost soul.
The difficulty is the “and speaks truthfully” part. Demons—and any human allies they have in the possession racket—are working for “the father of lies” (John 8:44), which means that you can’t trust anything they say.
Consequently, the 1614 rite of exorcism—which is still in use—warns that the exorcist must “be on his guard against the arts and subterfuges which the evil spirits are wont to use in deceiving the exorcist” (n. 5). Further, it specifically warns that “neither ought he to give any credence to the devil if the latter maintains that he is the spirit of . . . a deceased party” (n. 14).
The Church does not have a teaching on whether damned souls can ever possess the living, so this is an open question theologically. However, because of how untruthful possessing spirits are, their identity claims are not a reliable form of evidence, and the Church has warned us not to pay heed to such claims.
I thus don’t think we can rely on evidence from these cases to prove Judas is in hell.
Another source of evidence is the common opinion itself that Judas is damned, including by many Church Fathers.
The Holy Spirit guides Christian opinion—including the views of the Fathers—on matters of faith, and so this also could count as evidence for Judas’s damnation.
However, for it to be conclusive, two conditions would have to be met: (1) Judas’s damnation would have to be a matter of the Faith, and (2) the relevant parties would have to agree that this is definitively the case, meaning that there is absolutely no possibility of disputing it.
Neither of these seems fulfilled. For an infallible definition to occur, the members of the Magisterium (bishops teaching in union with the pope) must—at some point in time—come to a position where they are “in agreement on one position as definitively to be held” (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html">Lumen Gentium 25</a>).
However, John Paul II and Benedict XVI indicate that they have not done this. When John Paul II says (above) that “the Church has never made any pronouncement” on individuals who are in hell, including Judas, then that means it doesn’t have a teaching on this position, much less a definitive one.
Individuals—including many of the Fathers—may hold the opinion that Judas is in hell, but opinions—no matter how common—are not infallible Church teachings. Consequently, we can’t appeal to this kind of evidence as conclusive of Judas’s damnation.
What about the idea that this might be a matter of the Faith? Here we come to the subject of what Scripture teaches. The reason that many in Catholic history have held Judas is damned is because of what Scripture says, so does this give us conclusive evidence?
John Paul II and Benedict XVI have already responded to the two passages in Scripture that one might appeal to.
John Paul II dealt with the passage where Jesus said, “Woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born” (Matt. 26:24; see also Mark 14:21), and the pope said that Jesus’ words “do not allude for certain to eternal damnation.”
This is true. Although the warning is reasonably taken as meaning that Judas will go to hell because of what he has done, it—like biblical warnings in general about the consequences of sin—presupposes one thing: that the person does not repent (Jer. 18:7-10).
So if Judas were to heed the call, “Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19), then his sins would be blotted out.
Now, here’s the thing: Matthew’s Gospel—the same one where Jesus warns of Judas’s fate—goes on to say this:
<blockquote>When Judas, his betrayer, saw that he was condemned, he repented and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying, “I have sinned in betraying innocent blood” (Matt. 27:3-4).</blockquote>
Matthew says that Judas repented! He recognized that he had sinned and that Jesus was innocent, and he sought to return the money. When the priests refused to take it back, he threw it into the Temple (27:5a) so that he would not profit from his sin. That sounds like a sincere repentance!
But what about what Judas did next? He hanged himself (27:5b), and this is the second text one might appeal to for Judas’s damnation. Even if he repented of having betrayed Jesus, wouldn’t he still go to hell because of his suicide?
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states,
<blockquote>We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives (2283).</blockquote>
Suicide does not always result in hell because a person may not be fully responsible for his action due to lack of knowledge, or psychological factors, and because “in ways known to him alone,” God may help the person to repent—even in the act of committing suicide itself.
Judas thus may have been so grieved by his offense that he wasn’t fully responsible for his suicide, or he may have repented of taking his own life while he was still hanging from his neck.
As Pope Benedict said, “Even though he went to hang himself, it is not up to us to judge his gesture, substituting ourselves for the infinitely merciful and just God.”
It thus appears that we don’t have conclusive proof that Judas is in hell, and there is still a ray of hope for him.
This Holy Week, let us thank God for his mercy upon all of us. It is a mercy that—in principle—might extend even to Judas.

Hope for Judas?

<div>Why does God allow the devil to be active on Earth?</div><div>Because God respects our free will as creatures made in his image and likeness (see Gen. 1:26-27), for true love is not coercive. We discuss this further in our responses <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/to-hell-with-heaven">on why God created Satan despite knowing that he would r</a>ebel, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/can-free-will-thwart-gods-plan">how our free will can’t thwart God’s plan</a>, and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-god-made-us-though-he-knew-we-would-sin">how God is not responsible for our sins</a>.
</div>

Why Does God Allow the Devil to Be Active on Earth?

3 Things Gavin Ortlund Gets Wrong (About Essential Doctrines)

Tim Staples discusses the practice of receiving Communion in the hand with a caller on Catholic Answers Live.

Communion in the Hand

The belief that Mary is the mother of God is not unique to Catholicism. The vast majority of Christians (Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Lutherans, and Anglicans) accept this dogma, with only a minority in the Protestant community objecting.
One text appealed to in support of this belief is Luke 1:43. There, Elizabeth, inspired by the Holy Spirit, exclaims to Mary, who just arrived in her presence, “Why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Since Elizabeth was a good Jew, and Jews normally used the word Lord in the place of the tetragrammaton (God’s name), YHWH, Elizabeth is calling Mary the mother of God. Therefore, we have a possible biblical foundation for the dogma of Mary, mother of God (see also CCC 448, 495, 2677).
There are many comebacks that Protestants have to the belief in Mary as the mother of God. But there’s really only one counterargument to Luke 1:43. It targets the assumption that “Lord” is intended by Elizabeth to refer to Almighty God.
Protestant Bible scholar Walter L. Liefeld argues that we shouldn’t interpret this as a reference to Mary, “mother of God.” His alternative interpretation is that Elizabeth was referring to Jesus as <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Luke.html?id=0S4aDgAAQBAJ">the Messiah</a>:
<blockquote>Nowhere in the [New Testament] is Mary called “mother of God.” Deity is not confined to the person of Jesus (we may say, “Jesus is God,” but not all of “God is Jesus”). She was, however, the mother of Jesus the Messiah and Lord (834).</blockquote>
The evidence he gives is the fact that Luke frequently uses “Lord” as a title—95 out of 166 occurrences in the synoptics—and not every one is charged with a divine meaning. Moreover, Liefeld argues, Jesus is called “Lord” elsewhere in the Lukan birth narrative in a non-divine way (“For to you is born this day in the city of David a savior, who is Christ the Lord”—Luke 2:11).
It’s not clear whether Luke uses “Lord,” in reference to Jesus, in 2:11 in a divine or non-divine way. There is nothing in the text that suggests either interpretation. Liefeld simply asserts its divine use without argumentation. Given such ambiguity, we can dismiss this text as evidence for Liefeld’s conclusion.
There’s no doubt, however, that the Greek word translated “Lord,” kurios, is used in a non-divine way in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 8:5), and even by Luke (e.g., 12:36, 37, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47). However, it’s not the word by itself that indicates that Mary is the mother of God. It’s how Luke sees Elizabeth using it.
There are several details that indicate that Luke is drawing a parallel between Mary and the Old Testament Ark of the Covenant. Take Elizabeth’s words themselves, for example. They almost perfectly mirror David’s in 2 Samuel 6:9, when he says in the presence of the ark, “How can the ark of the Lord come to me?” Other parallels include John the Baptist leaping for joy in the presence of Mary in Luke 1:44 and David “making merry” before the ark in 2 Samuel 6:5. According to Luke 1:39, Mary remains with Elizabeth for three months, similar to how the ark remained in the house of Obededom for the same amount of time according to 2 Samuel 6:11.
Since Luke is paralleling Elizabeth’s “mother of my Lord” with David’s “ark of the Lord,” it stands to reason that Luke intends for us to take Elizabeth’s cry as a reference to almighty God. “Lord” in the phrase “ark of the Lord” wasn’t a reference to the Messiah. The ark was the ark of almighty God. Therefore, we have good reason to interpret Luke 1:43 as a reference to Mary being the mother of God, contrary to Liefeld’s claim.
Now, a Protestant at this juncture might argue that if we take some parallels with the ark, then we need to take all of them. Protestant apologist James White <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL987171M/The_Roman_Catholic_controversy">poses this argument</a>:
<blockquote>Must Mary have been stolen by God’s enemies for a time, so that she could be brought back to the people of God with great rejoicing (2 Sam. 6:14-15)? Who was Mary&#8217;s Uzzah (2 Sam. 6:3-8)? [Catholic apologist Patrick] Madrid draws a further parallel between the three months the ark was with Obededom and the three months Mary was with Elizabeth. What, then, is the parallel with David’s action of sacrificing a bull and a fattened calf when those who were carrying the ark had taken six steps (2 Sam. 6:13) (205)?</blockquote>
White charges that the use of Mary as the new Ark of the Covenant is violating rules of scriptural interpretation, since he perceives it as picking and choosing “those aspects of Mary’s life [a Catholic] wishes to parallel in the ark and those which he does not.”
In response, there’s a hidden principle on which White seems to base his argument—namely, that some parallels requires all parallels. But this is simply false. That’s not how prophetic foreshadowing or intertextuality works. The New Testament authors themselves, for example, don’t honor the principle contained in White’s argument. Consider the first two verses of Hosea 11:
<blockquote>When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and burning incense to idols.</blockquote>
Matthew takes the phrase “out of Egypt I called my son” in the first statement as a prefigurement of the baby Jesus’ return from the flight to Egypt (Matt. 2:15). Yet Matthew does not intend the latter part of the passage to refer to Jesus: Jesus did not go away from God, sacrifice to the Baals, and burn incense to their images.
There are numerous examples of this in the New Testament’s use of the Old. Whenever prophetic foreshadowing is in play, some elements foreshadow, and some don’t. There are continuities and discontinuities. If the New Testament authors employ this type of hermeneutic when relating the Old Testament to the New, it’s legitimate for Catholics to do the same.
So neither of the above counterarguments undermines a Christian’s appeal to Luke 1:43 as biblical evidence for Mary as mother of God. This being the case, we have confirmation by the Holy Spirit himself, who inspired Elizabeth to utter the words “mother of my Lord,” that Mary is indeed the Theotokos, the God-bearer.

Protestants Against Mom

Using Fictional Writing to Glorify God

To better understand purgatory, the question to ask is not, “Was Jesus’ one sacrifice sufficient to atone for our sins?” It was and is, specifically regarding the eternal punishment due our sins.
Rather, we should first ask, “In saving us, does Jesus require our cooperation, including our detaching from the bad habits associated with our already forgiven sins—unhealthy attachments to ourselves and other persons and things, whom and which we have valued more highly than God, so that we can be truly fit for eternal communion with the Lord?” (See Rev. 21:17.)
We should also ask whether Scripture supports such detachment from already forgiven sins—i.e., doing penance for those sins, and whether any such penance unresolved on earth must be completed after our lives here on earth.
<h2>Forgiveness vs. Penance/Detachment</h2>
When a person commits a crime on earth, he can sincerely repent and receive God’s forgiveness. But he’ll still have to do penance for his wrongdoing. We don’t just let a criminal go free, even if we’re convinced he’s truly contrite. A perpetrator of a heinous crime can sincerely repent and receive forgiveness from God, but society still requires him to do his penance (e.g., life in prison without parole), and the government wouldn’t think of requiring the victim’s loved ones to authorize the criminal’s complete exemption from serving time for his crime.
Penance is where we get the term “penitentiary,” or prison. It’s contrary to logic that we on earth would have a standard of justice higher than our Lord Jesus Christ—that we would require penance for and (implicitly) detachment from our already forgiven sins, yet God would not.
If we do have a standard of justice higher than Jesus’ standard, then “once saved, always saved” (AKA eternal security) is ironically the ultimate plenary indulgence, because one could sin gravely unto death, and not repent and become detached from his disordered love of his sins (including already forgiven sins), and yet the Lord would be on the eternal hook to let him into heaven, given his <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/assurance-of-salvation">one-time, allegedly irrevocable acceptance</a> of his gift of salvation.
Some might counter that a true Christian wouldn’t gravely sin unto death. We should not be so presumptuous upon God’s mercy (see <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s2c1a1.htm#I">CCC 2091-2092</a>), although the “once saved, always saved” doctrine would necessarily accommodate such presumption. More to the point, even if one has repented and received forgiveness, that doesn’t mean he is necessarily fully detached from the bad habits associated with his sins.
Don’t think so? Ask any wife whose husband has repented of his attachment to pornography yet still is prone to treating her like an object, given the lingering nature of his cultivated bad habit. Ditto for the wife who has been a compulsive liar, had a well-established anger problem, etc.
To reaffirm, viewing purgatory as a purification of our heart and character—a purification that extends beyond repentance for and forgiveness of our sins—makes the dogma a lot more understandable. Because everyone can see that detachment from bad habits and vices doesn’t necessarily accompany the repentance of and forgiveness for sins. Indeed, even if we’ve repented of all of our sins on earth, we can still have remaining attachments to our bad habits and related sins— persons and things of which we’ve made idols, including ourselves. Thus, further, the logic of purgatory.
<h2>Jesus on Purgatory</h2>
Jesus speaks of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-jesus-believe-in-purgatory">our need to do penance</a>, distinguishing that penance from receiving forgiveness (see Matt. 5:23-27). In addition, St. Paul speaks of a person who is saved or forgiven yet still needs to be purified after death:
<blockquote>According to the commission of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble—each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20corinthians%203&amp;version=RSVCE">1 Cor. 3:10-15</a>).</blockquote>
The key verses are 12-15, and particularly 14-15 in light of the preceding. Paul clearly notes that some who are saved will receive a reward regarding their work and their choices on earth, a reward distinguished from their receiving the gift of eternal salvation. Paul also notes that although others will be saved, and for whom no reward is mentioned, they will still have to undergo purification, presumably because of their remaining attachment to or affection for their bad habits and vices. And it’s important to recognize that this purification takes place after “the Day”—i.e., after they’ve died and been judged by God.
The Church’s teaching on purgatory, and her related teaching of praying for the dead, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-roots-of-purgatory">has been consistent throughout Church history</a>.
If the Church were wrong on purgatory, to say nothing of even more fundamental teachings like <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/christ-in-the-eucharist">the Eucharist</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-the-mass-when-theres-no-need-for-sin-offering">the sacrifice of the Mass</a>, then it would indicate that the gates of hell have prevailed against Christ’s Church for some fifteen hundred years, contrary to what Jesus promised (Matt. 16:18-19), until Martin Luther, John Calvin, et al. came along. Even then, they and their successors couldn’t agree on key doctrines—e.g., how we’re saved—indicating a further defeat, to one extent or another, of Christ and his Church.
The Church’s teaching on purgatory is also consistent with our Lord’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount: “You . . . must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (see Matt. 5:43-48).
<h2>True Love Is Reciprocal</h2>
Jesus’ plan of salvation requires that we be “all in”—that we personally account for the negative impact our actions have had in this world and on ourselves, for our unhealthy attachments to persons and things, and for which we have not done adequate penance.
This is the reality of bad habits. In purgatory, God mercifully purifies us of these unhealthy attachments so that we will be free to give every ounce of our love and devotion to the Lord.
In their zeal to emphasize God’s sovereignty (Calvin) and mercy (Luther), the early Protestant leaders forgot the basic reality that real love is a two-way street and thus calls for a response in kind—especially with Jesus, who will not simply <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-reformers-distorted-view-of-salvation">overwhelm us</a> with his grace, irrespective of a genuine free-will response (Calvin), or <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-reformers-distorted-view-of-salvation">look the other way</a> regarding our sins (Luther). No, Jesus wants to truly rehabilitate us by enabling us to love as he does—unconditionally and sacrificially. He does so through our self-denying and redemptive cooperation. As St. Augustine says so well, “God created us without us: but he did not will to save us without us” (<a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p3s1c1a8.htm#I">CCC 1847</a>).
Purgatory can be an uncomfortable reminder that salvation is not a one-and-done event, but a lifelong process in which our everyday personal choices definitely have an impact. This process undoubtedly begins on earth, which is why Jesus emphasizes that each of us must bear his cross on our journey to heaven (Matt. 16:24-27).

On Purgatory, Go Deeper

<div>What is the difference between Peter being the rock and Jesus being the cornerstone in Matthew 16:18?</div><div>Sacred Scripture uses images taken from human sense experience. The image of a rock foundation is from nature; the image of a cornerstone is from human art in architecture. They are similar in that they are both stone and on both depend the stability of what is built from them.
There are many images and names that are used both of Christ and his members, of God and his creatures. This is possible because, in the case of Christ, his human creatures are all actual or potential members of his. He says of his member: &#8220;Whatsoever you do the least of these my brothers, you have done it unto me.&#8221; That includes naming. Peter is a &#8220;rock&#8221; because Christ is a rock. In the other direction, the faithful experience or should experience that Christ is a rock because of the rocklike faith of Peter and his successors. So, in a sense there is no difference.
In theology and liturgy, words that speak of God also tell us of creatures, and words that speak of creatures also tell us of God. But in the end we must remember that what and who God is goes far beyond any human words or names. Before this reality, St. Peter the Rock exclaimed, &#8220;Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!&#8221; How beautiful that our Savior and his Father and their life-giving Spirit both correspond in a way to our human words and yet are also so far beyond them. We have a lot to look forward to in heaven!
</div>

Rock and Cornerstone

Protestants often challenge Catholics to provide biblical evidence for their belief in indulgences. Can such a challenge be met? Karlo Broussard shows that it can.
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Transcript:
Paragraph 1471 of the Catechism defines an indulgence as “a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven.”
This presupposes that punishment remains after God has forgiven our sins and that we can do something to satisfy it.
But is this biblical? I think it is.
The Bible is full of examples of God remitting the eternal punishment due to sin while still willing temporal consequences. For example, David is forgiven of his sin in 2 Samuel <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=733s">12:13</a>-18 yet must suffer the death of his son. The Psalmist says in Psalm 99:7-8 that God forgives but avenges wrongdoing. Even Jesus teaches in Luke <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=767s">12:47</a>-48 that the servant who did what is deserving of punishment without full knowledge will be punished, but in lesser degree.
It is such temporal consequences that indulgences remit. By virtue of its authority to bind and loose, the Church declares certain acts to be of such value that, if they are performed under certain prescribed conditions, sin’s temporal consequences can be remitted, either partially or fully. It is no different than Jesus’ teaching in Luke <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=701s">11:41</a>, “give alms…and behold, everything is clean for you.”
The Church grants indulgences to help its children heed St. Paul’s exhortation in Philippians <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TuyZej_SxQ&amp;t=132s">2:12</a>, “work out your salvation,” and to cooperate with God in bringing to completion the good work he has begun in us—Philippians 1:6.
So, the motifs of temporal consequences due to sin and the Church’s authority to bind and loose make a solid biblical foundation for the Catholic dogma of indulgences.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com.
For Catholic Answers, I’m Karlo Broussard. Thanks for watching.

Are Indulgences Biblical?

Trent Horn briefly outlines the Church&#8217;s teaching on capital punishment and how it differs from other end-of-life issues such as abortion and euthanasia.
Transcript:
Host: So why do you reject Catholic morality? That is the question. We go now to Doug in Michigan listening on 990 AM. Doug, why do you reject Catholic morality?
Caller: Well first, thanks for taking the call, it&#8217;s not so much I reject the morality as I have a question about how the Church approaches capital punishment. We seem to be very vocal when it comes to assisted suicide or <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/abortion">abortion</a>, but am I missing the conversation, the dialogue, on how we view natively the capital punish—or what the right moral teaching is on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/capital-punishment">capital punishment</a>.
Trent: Sure, what I would say is that when people get the impression of the Church is &#8220;not as strong&#8221; quote-unquote on capital punishment, I would say that&#8217;s because capital punishment is not intrinsically wrong. It&#8217;s not something that is wrong in and of itself like abortion and euthanasia. It&#8217;s always wrong to directly kill a baby who&#8217;s growing in the womb. It&#8217;s always wrong to directly kill someone who is in the process of dying just so they can die. Now, it&#8217;s okay to discontinue life support if a person is near the end of life and that&#8217;s not helping them, but you can&#8217;t just simply inject someone with poison and end their life because they&#8217;re in pain or you just can&#8217;t directly kill a baby in the womb. You can&#8217;t directly kill innocent people in that way.
However, it&#8217;s not intrinsically wrong for the state to use its authority to protect society by ending the life of someone who&#8217;s committed a very serious crime like murder. So the Church has supported capital punishment in the past and the Catechism says there may be cases where capital punishment is acceptable today; though the Catechism and people like Pope St. John Paul II have offered prudential judgments about moving away from capital punishment, it&#8217;s not intrinsically wrong and there&#8217;s other theologians who put forward very strong cases that capital punishment can be used morally by the Church and actually should be promoted. A good book on that that just come out is called &#8220;By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment&#8221; by Edward Feser and Joseph Bessette, so if you&#8217;d like to look at a great treatment of the issue from that perspective, &#8220;By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed&#8221; by Ignatius Press, the authors are Feser and Bessette. I think you would find that to be very helpful. So thank you very much for calling in.

How Is Capital Punishment Different From Abortion and Euthanasia?

<div>What does the Church teach about divorce? When Catholics ask whether they can divorce, what they’re really asking is how God intended marriage to work, what makes a marriage truly valid, and what happens when a union breaks down, especially when questions of Holy Communion and remarriage arise.</div><div>The better question we might ask is &#8220;May Catholics divorce?&#8221; The Church teaches that a valid marriage between two baptized Christians is indissoluble, meaning that once God has joined a man and woman in such a union, no civil authority may dissolve that bond or declare it null, not even the Catholic Church (CCC 2382). The Church does have the divinely ordained power to determine whether a couple exchanged valid consent in getting married (see Matt. 16:18-19, 18:15-18), and thus possibly to issue a declaration of nullity if determined they did not (see CCC 2384, 1625-1629). The State may claim to end a marriage through granting a civil divorce, but the State has no God-given power to break a marriage covenant or declare one null.
Because God established marriage as a natural and permanent union between a man and woman (Gen. 2:23-24), and then elevated it in Christ to the level of a sacrament (Matt. 19:3-9, Eph. 5:21-33), God hates divorce (Mal. 2:16). Consequently, the Church considers <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/im-thinking-about-divorce-what-does-the-catholic-church-have-to-say-about-it" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">divorce</a> a grave offense when chosen as a way to abandon one’s marriage or to enter a new romantic union. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a divorced person who seeks to contract a new union—without receiving a declaration of nullity regarding his marriage—places himself in a situation of “public and permanent adultery,” harming not only the couple but also their families and society (2384).
However, the Church also recognizes that sometimes civil divorce is forced upon an innocent spouse—or may be the only means to protect oneself, children, or property from an unjust partner. In such cases, the Church teaches that the innocent spouse does not sin and that civil divorce may function as a form of legal separation when necessary, provided it is not treated as ending the marriage (CCC 2383).
What civil divorce cannot do is determine whether the marriage itself is valid or dissolved. Only Christ, through his Church, has authority over the <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-divorce-and-remarriage/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">sacrament of marriage</a>. As Jesus said, “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Matt. 19:6).

</div>

Can Catholics Divorce?

Christians have always considered the bodily remains of their heroic martyrs to be their greatest treasures. Many of them were killed in the sports arenas of the day. They were champions who fought and won—didn’t cave under the fear, the pressure, or the pain. Refusing to recant their faith in Christ, they willingly sacrificed their lives for him. They recalled that he had laid down his life for them on the cross. To be worthy, they needed to do the same for him—and they did it willingly.
<blockquote>Calling the crowd to him with his disciples, he said to them, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:34-35).
</blockquote>
St. Ignatius of Antioch boldly proclaimed his faith in Christ, and his willingness to be devoured by lions in the Colosseum in Rome, in the year 107. The holy bishop wrote, “Please let me be thrown to the wild beasts; through them I can reach God.” An eyewitness said,
<blockquote>Only the more solid parts of his holy relics [bones] were left, which were carried to Antioch and wrapped in linen—a priceless treasure bequeathed to the Holy Church.</blockquote>
In the year 155, eyewitnesses to the martyrdom of the aged bishop Polycarp of Smyrna recalled that
<blockquote>the centurion put [Polycarp’s] body in the middle . . . and burned it. And so, afterwards, we took up his bones, more valuable than precious stones and finer than gold, and put them in a proper place. There, as far as we were able, the Lord will permit us to meet together in gladness and joy and to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom, both in memory of those who fought the fight and for the training and preparation of those who will fight.</blockquote>
The apostles suffered similar gruesome deaths for their Lord. Their memories are preserved in words, but even more so in their bones. St. Paul was beheaded outside the walls of Rome, and his bones were recently rediscovered wrapped in purple cloth, the sign of royalty.
Bones were also recently discovered under St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. They were wrapped in purple-dyed cloth with golden thread. Testing concluded that they were the bones of an average-height, robust first-century man between 60 and 70 years of age. Based on reliable ancient writings and tradition, Peter, the chief of the apostles, was imprisoned in the dank and dark Mamertine Prison by Emperor Nero along with Paul. One misty morning, he and Paul were drawn up from the miserable cistern. Paul was beheaded outside the walls of Rome on the Via Ostia.
The Ager Vaticanus was a swampy area across the Tiber River from the city of Rome. The obelisk towering above St. Peter’s Square today was in the center of Nero’s Circus. In chains, Peter was marched over the bridge to the Ager Vaticanus as a spectacle for the jeering crowds. Not being a Roman citizen, he was prepared for crucifixion. He claimed he was not worthy to die like his Lord and insisted on being crucified upside-down. After Peter expired in the shadow of the obelisk, his limp body was ignominiously buried in the hillside. Nero hoped he was gone and forgotten.
Nero had no idea what he had started when he buried Peter in the necropolis—the “City of the Dead.” Peter was <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/st-peter-ceo-of-the-catholic-church">not just a fisherman</a> from Galilee; Jesus had chosen him to be the head of his Church, and now he became a martyr and a hero. The early Christians wrapped his bones in purple cloth sewn with golden thread. The believers flocked to pray at his rustic burial site, which soon became a shrine. Others who died wanted to be buried near his bones. No one forgot where his precious relics were preserved.
After the Protestant “Reformation,” many tried to deny the primacy of Peter by claiming he was never in Rome. “Show us in the Bible where it says he was in Rome!” One can ask this question only if he insists on “Bible alone” and fails to find any explicit verses. But a careful study of Scripture and the historical record leaves no doubt. Peter arrived in Rome after years of leading the Church in Jerusalem (Acts 15:4, 7) and as bishop of Antioch, as affirmed by the early Church Fathers. It appears he evangelized much of Asia Minor (1 Peter 1:1) before arriving in Rome. In my book <a href="https://www.steveraysstore.com/upon-this-rock-signed-by-author/">Upon this Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church</a>, I provide forty-seven pages of documented archaeological and historical evidence, and the matter is put to rest.
In Rome, Peter exercised the authority of the keys that Jesus had delegated to him. Rome was established as the See of Peter, the mother church of the world, and the circular medallions on the façade of <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/st-john-lateran-pray-for-us">St. John Lateran</a> still declare that fact today.
<img class="size-full wp-image-150139 alignright" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/lateran-medallion.jpg" alt="St. Peter Necropolis lateran" width="332" height="208" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/lateran-medallion.jpg 332w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/lateran-medallion-300x188.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 332px) 100vw, 332px"/>Though he was murdered and buried, Peter’s fame and authority long outlasted Nero. In 313, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, and to honor “the Rock” upon which the Church was built, he undertook one of the most significant earth-moving projects of ancient times, moving Vatican Hill over the tomb of Peter, upon which he built the first magnificent church—the Old St. Peter’s Basilica. Everyone remembered that one sarcophagus containing the remains of Peter. This shrine in his honor secured and protected the knowledge of the site for future generations.
In the 1500s, the new and grand St. Peter&#8217;s Basilica was built over Peter&#8217;s tomb. If you dropped a plumb line from the center of the main dome, it would pass through the papal altar and right down to the bones of Peter.
In the 1940s, while shoring up the foundation of the church, archaeologists discovered a well preserved necropolis, a city of the dead, containing burial places, paintings, sarcophagi, and urns from the first century. They found the marble sarcophagus of Peter with some bones still intact and wrapped in purple fabric. Pope Paul VI announced that the bones of Peter had been rediscovered.
Several excellent books have been written on this subject, and the subterranean necropolis can be visited today under the basilica, with reservations made in advance.
In 2026, we will all be invited on a cinematic tour, spearheaded by <a href="https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2025-12/a-documentary-film-about-peter-s-tomb-guided-by-chris-pratt.html">actor Chris Pratt</a>, of the archaeological discoveries under St. Peter’s Basilica. We will experience this ancient wonder. This film will doubtless demonstrate definitively how the Church has proved and documented Peter’s presence, martyrdom, and burial in Rome.

Yes, Peter Was Really There

Stock Protestant objections to the practice of invoking the saints to pray for us have been around for quite some time: “Jesus is the one mediator,” “we shouldn’t communicate with the dead,” “the dead can’t hear us,” etc. And a plethora of successful responses have been given. So, whenever a non-stock objection comes along, it’s quite nice.
Protestant apologist Gavin Ortlund has provided us such an opportunity. In <a href="https://opentheo.org/i/5431341150608907844/praying-to-the-saints-a-protestant-critique">his video</a>, “Praying to the Saints: A Protestant Critique,” he argues that when we consider “how the prayers to the saints actually played out” in medieval piety, we discover that it led to many distortions.
Ortlund gives several examples. I can’t quote them all. But here are some relevant excerpts that include the primary “distortion” that concerns him:
“Lord, we ask that Thou, placated by the intercession of all Thy saints . . . We pray thee, Lord, that the merits of blessed Mary, who is both perpetually a virgin and the bearer of God, may attend us and always implore Thy forgiveness for us” (Cursus Honarum of the Blessed Virgin Mary, according to the Ordinarium of the Church of Hildeshelm).
“O noble Mary, excellent above all, procure for us forgiveness.”
“O holy virgin Mary, and all the saints and elect of God, come to aid me, wretched one, now and in the hour  of my death, and make the Lord our God propitious to me by your merits and prayers.”
“Through you forgiveness is granted to the guilty” (Sequence to Our Lady and Sequence in Praise of the Virgin).
For Ortlund, the above invocations are “inherently wrong” and in “error” because the soteriology (study of salvation) embedded within them is flat-out contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ. As he puts it, “it is subtracting from the sufficiency of Christ because the specific tasks that are the property of Christ in the gospel are being assigned to Mary here.” Which tasks? Procuring the forgiveness of sins and propitiating or placating God, which, for Ortlund, can be done only by the death of Jesus on the cross.
It’s because of these distortions, Ortlund explains, that Protestants, including himself, are concerned with the practice of invoking the intercession of the saints. And such a concern is good enough reason for him not to engage in the practice, at least when combined with the lack of New Testament and early Christian evidence that Christians requested that the saints in heaven pray for them.
We’ll set aside for now Ortlund’s concern about the lack of early evidence for invocations. It’s his concern about these so-called distortions, and his reasoning about them, that I would like to focus on here.
Assuming for argument’s sake that these requests are distortions, notice how Ortlund concludes that we shouldn’t invoke the saints’ help because such invocations have played out in a way that violate the Bible’s teaching on salvation—namely, that we are forgiven of our sins through the merits of Jesus’ death on the cross.
Now, one might think Ortlund is guilty of committing the association fallacy, which asserts that the quality of some things within a category (when not essential to the things within the category) is a quality of all things within that category. If Ortlund were to conclude that all invocations of the saints are violations of the gospel because some were, then he would be guilty of fallacious reasoning. But Ortlund simply argues that such invocations can lead to violations, and on this basis, he chooses not to engage in the practice.
But why should we reject the invocation of the saints simply because some invocations lead to a violation of the gospel (again, assuming that the above invocations are violations of the gospel)? We don’t reject interpreting Scripture just because some interpretations lead people to destruction (2 Pet. 3:15-16). Nor do we reject the practice of religion simply because some who practice it do so in a way that leads to unjust conflict and violence.
Concerning the interpretation of Scripture, we realize that it’s not interpretation that leads to destruction. Rather, it’s specific interpretations along with whatever method the interpreter is using. Similarly, when it comes to religion, we realize that it’s not religion that leads to conflict and violence. Rather, it’s the perversion of religion by the one causing unjust conflict and violence.
The same line of reasoning applies to the so-called “distorted” invocations of the saints. In the examples Ortlund gave, it would be the specific requests that are “distorted” and the soteriological beliefs driving these specific requests. And if that’s the case, there’s no need for Ortlund to persuade others away from the practice of invoking the saints’ intercession. There could be some invocations that are not problematic and thus worthy of Christian practice.
Now, this response assumes that the requests in the above excerpts are actual “distortions.” But we have good reason to think they’re not.
Recall that Ortlund is concerned with the invocations because they take away from the sufficiency of Christ insofar as they attempt to procure the forgiveness of sins from and propitiate or placate God. Notice the hidden assumption: nobody except Christ can procure the forgiveness of sins from God or propitiate him. 
If by “procure” Ortlund has primary causality in mind, then we agree. Only Christ is the efficient cause of the forgiveness of sins. But that’s not how the above excerpts should be read. The “procuring” is by way of request. In other words, the above prayers are simply asking Mary to pray that God would forgive us of our sins.
Is it okay for Mary to do this? Well, it’s not at all different from Paul praying, “May the Lord grant [onesiphorus] to find mercy from the Lord on that Day [the Day of Judgment]” (2 Tim. 1:18). If Paul can pray for a Christian to be forgiven by God, so can Mary. And if it’s okay for Mary to do this, then the above requests made of Mary is not a “distortion” of the gospel.
Concerning the request that Mary would propitiate or placate God, all this entails is a request that Mary would ask God to be more favorable to us. If Paul and Mary can ask God to forgive our sins, which is just one way in which God can be favorable to us, then Paul and Mary can ask God to be favorable to us in other ways.
As much as I appreciate Ortlund’s honest and charitable expression of his concerns with the Catholic practice of the invocation of the intercession of the saints, when it’s thought through, the concern dealt with in this article doesn’t justify a rejection of invoking the saints. Not only are the requests in the excerpts not violations of the gospel, which is a major motivation behind his concern, but his reasoning is fallacious even if we grant that these requests are perversions. If Ortlund wants to justify his rejection of the practice of invoking the saints, he’s going to have to ground himself in better arguments.

Should Mary Just Mind Her Own Business?

<div>I am terrified of the suffering I will need to endure in purgatory. What is the most effective thing(s) II can do with what tim</div><div>First off, we should be terrified of hell, given its eternal punishments (CCC 1033ff.), not Purgatory, whose sufferings are not everlasting (CCC 1030-32).
That said, we shouldn’t take Purgatory or its sufferings lightly. In that regard, the best thing you can do is to strive to grow in holiness, asking our Lord Jesus Christ to help you become more like him each and every day.
In the process, you’ll become less attached to unhealthy attachments and thus prepare yourself better for heaven (CCC 1472-73). And when you fail, seek God’s absolution in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and begin anew.
Finally, you can seek a partial or plenary indulgence for yourself (CCC 1471), and also for departed loved ones and other souls in Purgatory who—God knows, so trust in him—are most in need of his mercy. And if a loved one is no longer in Purgatory, the indulgence will benefit someone else in God’s providential plan for the Church Suffering in Purgatory.
</div>

Terrified of Suffering in Purgatory

For many, the mercy of God seems incompatible with the doctrine of hell. If God is all-merciful, then wouldn’t he have mercy on the damned and give them the grace they need to repent? Although the damned wouldn’t be able to reorient their wills to God naturally, given the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-blackfriars/article/abs/aquinas-on-the-fixity-of-the-will-after-death/7694E049B34DEB149D311D54A40C3072">irrevocability of the will after death</a>, perhaps God could give such a grace that would enable them to change their wills supernaturally. Since God doesn’t give this grace, then he isn’t all-merciful.
Even if we assume for argument’s sake that God could give a grace of repentance to the damned despite the natural irrevocability of the will after death, the major problem with the objection is that it assumes that God must give the grace of repentance to be merciful. But this assumption is false. And the reason it’s false is that it entails a contradiction.
Mercy, by definition, is an act of giving that which a person doesn’t have to give. For example, if you have a debt and owe me money, I could easily require in justice that you pay the debt. But I could also just as easily exercise mercy and remit the debt. The reason it would be an act of mercy is that I didn’t have to remit the debt, yet I did, gratuitously.
So to say that God must give the grace of repentance to be merciful—whether to the damned or us in this life—is to say that giving the grace of repentance is an act of mercy and not an act of mercy at the same time and in the same respect. It would be an act of mercy simply by virtue of saying that God is merciful. And it would not be an act of mercy insofar as the objection assumes that God must give the grace. That’s a contradiction.
Since the fundamental assumption of the objection—namely, that God must give the grace of repentance to be merciful—entails a contradiction, we can conclude that the objection from God’s mercy has no persuasive force against affirming the reality of hell.

God Owes Us a Ticket Out of Hell!

Back in my Episcopalian days in the Deep South, I remember hearing a fascinating conversation between a mother and son on their arrival at church. The son was asking his mother about why they came. She began to tell him about how they come to learn about God, but he stopped her and says, “But mom, I already like God!”
There’s no special wisdom in this statement, just honesty. If you don’t believe in the holy sacrifice of the Mass, if you don’t believe in the Sunday obligation, if you think Christianity is just having a friendly attitude toward God and other people, it makes sense that, in the long list of priorities, it should fall somewhere below cleaning the house, helping the kids do homework, playing golf, and spending time with family. When all those other things are in order, and we happen to be well rested and not too busy, maybe we can make it to church. And what’s wrong with that? I mean, we already like God.
Is it our job to make people like God? That is, I suppose, one model of ministry, represented well by Amaziah in our reading from Amos. He is a court priest. His job is to fill the king’s ears with happy religious support. His job is to keep the peace in the name of God, or the gods, or whatever convenient powers happen to be at hand. And in today’s passage, that means rebuking the true prophet, Amos. Go back to Judah where you belong, he says. Maybe they’ll appreciate your prophecy there.
But for Amos, unlike Amaziah, this isn’t about personal gain; it’s about the truth. He is, by his own testimony, not a professional: he doesn’t come from one of the prophetic dynasties or the formal groups of prophets devoted to Scripture and prayer. He is not so different, maybe, from the disciples in today’s passage from Mark, where the Lord sends them out two by two. How are they prepared for this mission? By years of training and discipline, by mastering the latest evangelistic techniques and rhetorical styles? None of the above. Their preparation consists of simply watching and listening to Jesus. Their instructions do not include a complicated playbook or set of quotas—just a reminder to keep moving and not worry too much about it if they’re not welcome. Their goal, too, isn’t just to make people like God, but to lead people from shadows into truth, from knowledge to worship.
Let’s bring this back to the present. You already like God. Good. But our job, yours and mine, is not to like God, or even just to know God, but to worship God. Worship literally means to ascribe worth to something or someone. In our beautiful marriage rite, a man says to his wife, when putting on the ring, “With this ring, I thee wed; with my body, I thee worship.” To worship God is to live in such a way as to make it clear, to ourselves, and to others, that God is the source of all worth, all value, all goodness. Worship is a whole way of life. It flows from the altar, through the church, and out into the world. Worship is putting our loves in order; it is arranging our priorities and our lives—from our heads to our wallets to our loins to our feet—in a way that shows that God is the most important thing.
For Amos and the other prophets, worship is the end game. Modern people love quoting the prophets about justice, but injustice, for the prophets, is a problem precisely because it disrupts worship, because it suggests the finality of a world without God, a world without meaning or relationship. Justice is having everything in order—which is to say it is much more than punishment or prevention. The just world is a world ordered and oriented to worship. Worship is what we are for. It is why we were made. In the philosophical way of putting it, it is our final cause: our “meaning of life.”
There is probably no better way in this world to be prophetic than to act as if worship is the most important thing in the world. Prophecy involves both action and word—the ability to name, at times, behaviors that disrupt the Church’s worship. Amaziah shows that priests are sometimes incapable of doing this themselves. Amos the prophet, however, is “a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees.” He’s no cleric, that is. He’s a layman. But he is able to ask the right questions, the sorts of questions that laypeople today can and do still ask. What is the most important thing? Is it God, or is it not stepping on anyone’s toes? Is it God, or is it preserving capital? Is it God, or is it making life easier for ourselves? Is it God, or is it being safe?
You don’t need an advanced degree in theology to answer those questions. In fact, sometimes theologians (and I speak as one) can make things so complicated by nuance and distinction as to lose the point. God is the most important thing. Our lives find their ultimate meaning when they are shaped and ordered around the worship of God. So, despite the Amaziahs of this world telling us to stay in our own lane and not “force our religion” on people, we have to insist, like Amos, that actually all questions about justice and morality and human politics and economics come down to worship—in other words, to what we were created for. Those demanding that we keep “religion” out of the public square are declaring that, in order to talk about the journey, we have to forbid any discussion of the destination or why we are making the journey in the first place.
Whether we are called to the modern-day royal court, or to some other more ordinary place, Jesus sends us out on his business. The question isn’t whether we have all the right skills or the perfect techniques to win the day. The question is whether we are willing to go, or to be, where we are sent, trusting in our Lord—to reveal that the purpose of all things is only found in Christ.

The Meaning of Life

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Ask Me Anything

There’s no getting around the pretty obvious theme in today’s lectionary. Man and woman. Marriage.
In Genesis 2, we see that beautiful, poetic description of Eve coming from the rib of Adam. When speaking of the Incarnation, St. Anselm says that there had been, in human history, three kinds of conception: a human with no human parent—that is, Adam; a human from a man alone—that is, Eve; and, of course, many humans with both a father and a mother. It was therefore supremely fitting that the savior complete the pattern by being born from only a human mother with no human father.
Others like to contrast this in terms of the first and second Adam and the first and second Eve. The first Eve came out of Adam. The second Adam came out of the new Eve.
These aren’t the primary emphases of the readings, but they are key resonances. History has meaning; history has a relationship with the present. Redemption, salvation, the life of grace—these are never an escape from history, a release from creation, but its healing. That is important. So much of modern life is focused on the idea of the new, on getting rid of the past and moving on, starting with a blank slate. For Christianity, that is a delusion. History is what it is. We are where and who we are, and finding salvation, finding the end point and purpose of this life, has to start from this reality. As T.S. Eliot puts it in his Four Quartets, “only through time time is conquered.”
This concept of the redemption of time and history is surely relevant to what Jesus says in Mark about marriage and divorce.
The modern view of marriage and divorce is, as we know, very flexible. In civil law, marriage is merely a contract between individuals that can be formed or dissolved at will. The idea is that, effectively, you can hit pause, or stop, and restart life whenever it is convenient. Of course, no one really believes this to be the case, practically. But on paper, that is how our culture views things. And so the Christian tradition—quite clear here in today’s Gospel—that marriage is a fundamental, indissoluble reality between a man and a woman—is just very strange to many people.
This is not the time or place to say exactly why that is or what we might do about it. But we can spend a moment reflecting on our Lord’s words about marriage. It’s an interesting conversation. People ask about the allowance for divorce in Jewish law, and Jesus gives this subtle response: “For your hardness of heart, he wrote you this commandment.” “He” is Moses. Then he says, “But from the beginning of creation . . .,” and then he quotes Genesis. Matthew’s version of this is a little clearer and more memorable. There, Jesus says, “From the beginning it was not so.” That one phrase is the starting point for a whole group of Pope St. John Paul II’s talks on the “Theology of the Body.”
Again, we can’t do a thorough exegesis in a homily, but we can say this: the Lord’s words here are potentially explosive to his immediate audience. How so? He suggests that Moses should not be 100 percent and exclusively identified with the law of God. It’s difficult to overemphasize the importance of this one line in the Christian tradition. Here we get the implication that there are distinctions to be made in the Old Law. Some things are built into creation. Some things were directly instituted by God. Some things were instituted by Moses as a concession to hardness of heart.
So what’s happening here is not all that different from what happens in the Sermon on the Mount. Although it has always been popular for people to imagine that Jesus somehow tosses aside the Old Covenant law for the sake of some vague comments about love, in fact he radicalizes the law, deepens it, and clarifies it. Classic instance: It’s not good enough not to commit adultery; you should not consent to adultery even in your heart. The law becomes not less stringent, but more.
So when it comes to marriage, the primordial scriptural language is “the two become one flesh.” There is an undeniable permanence to this. You either become one flesh or don’t. And although it may be challenging to the world, this is the Catholic teaching on marriage. If you have a real, valid marriage, it is permanent, “until death do us part.” So either the marriage is fully real or it isn’t. If it’s not, it doesn’t mean that the relationship is nothing, or that the children are somehow wrong. It’s just that there isn’t a marriage.
Sometimes this teaching on marriage can come across as harsh—it’s a way of speaking that contrasts quite directly with mainstream culture and modern law. And it is possible, as Catholics, to lean into this in a way that is not edifying. Running around randomly telling people that their marriages aren’t real is rarely a good approach. But the supreme law of the Church is the salvation of souls, and salvation always involves confronting the truth. This is what we do every time we go to confession. It can hurt, but the pain isn’t forever. Healing is always possible.
Why, I wonder, does this teaching on divorce move straight into this famous passage about Jesus and the children? Some of that is just Mark, who always tells his story with a breathless pace. But the two incidents do go together.
Many in the crowd are annoyed at the children. Any parent knows this feeling, as do plenty of non-parents. We are adults, after all. We have important business to take care of. We cannot be bothered with childish demands and childish questions and silly things like needing to be picked up or needing to notice with awe the way a certain leaf has fallen on the ground.
This self-important adultness is, if we think back about two seconds, firmly rooted in the hardness of heart that results in bad marriage, divorce, and any number of other social ills. And in response to this type of adulthood, Jesus says quite directly: you must become as a little child.
Caryll Houselander says, “Our Lord’s words are a challenge. To become a child is a challenge to our courage: it demands first of all that we dare to grow up, to give ourselves to life, to accept life as it is, and above all to accept ourselves as we are” (see The Passion of the Infant Christ, 51).
We would do well to sit with that statement for a while.
Becoming like a child doesn’t mean becoming childish. Abandoning the adultness of misguided discipleship doesn’t mean not growing up. It means rather to be who we are, to have the humility of recognizing that we are in a world not of our making, full of wonders and truths that will always be beyond us.
Real marriage requires just this childlike approach. We speak a lot about being “ready” for marriage, and rightly so, but no one is “ready” for marriage any more than a person can be “ready” to grow up. It requires humility and openness to life, to the unexpected.
Likewise, no one is “ready” for God. The only one who was—the Lady whose “yes” unlocked the door of our redemption—exemplified this readiness not with a grown-up confidence and a fully worked out plan, but with the humble recognition that it is possible to receive a gift without fully knowing what it is or what it will be.
Let us be like children, approaching the altar of God. We are not here to claim something as a right, but to allow God to grow in us until we reach the full stature of Christ in the kingdom of heaven.

Marriage, Children, and Heaven

As COVID-19 vaccines become available to the public, some Catholics are concerned that abortion by-products may have been used in their production. Is this true, and can we receive any of these vaccines in good conscience? Jimmy Akin gives the answers.

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<blockquote>Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38-42).</blockquote>
I am a Martha. And proudly so! I love to work and, most importantly, serve as a laborer in the Lord’s vineyard. Previously having a fifteen-year career in the Church, I now serve as a volunteer at my parish by teaching marriage prep with my husband, leading story time at Vacation Bible School, and cultivating a family ministry for young parents. Despite not being paid for these roles, I view them just as seriously and with as much commitment as a formal job description. It’s the Martha in me. Give me a task, and I get it done.
However, the Lord said that Mary chose the better part, not Martha. Rather than being distracted by tasks, Mary chose to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen.
St. Gregory the Great wrote, “For what is set forth by Mary, who sitting down gave ear to the words of our Lord, save the life of contemplation? And what by Martha, so busied with outward services, save the life of action? Now Martha’s concern is not reproved, but that of Mary is even commended.” He then arrived at this vital conclusion: “For the merits of the active life are great, but of the contemplative, far better.”
I have never viewed the story of Martha and Mary as a condemnation of my personality and giftings. Rather, it is a lesson that teaches me how to channel my desires to work and serve and from whom I receive the grace to activate these gifts. I find great fulfillment in completing a task and seeing the good fruit stemming from it. Many of us garner satisfaction and a sense of achievement from a completed project, especially when we are credited for our efforts. How many contemplatives are praised by modern-day society? Not many. It’s the activists, the leaders, and the doers of the world who most often receive the accolades.
However, one of the greatest change agents of the twentieth century was also a deep contemplative: St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It still shocks me to this day that she spent two hours daily in eucharistic adoration. And yet she was able to accomplish so much good for the Church and the world and was publicly recognized for it, most notably winning a Nobel Peace Prize. This great modern saint was certainly both a Martha and a Mary.
I have been privileged to spend considerable time with religious sisters in the United States. These consecrated women have been shining witnesses to living like Mary by sitting and listening to the Lord during their daily commitments to prayer. They just as strongly witness to life as a Martha by working to the bone in the service of others—women like the <a href="https://hawthorne-dominicans.org/index.html">Hawthorne Dominicans</a>, who care for the poor dying of cancer; the <a href="https://sistersoflife.org/">Sisters of Life</a>, who live alongside women in crisis pregnancies; and the <a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/36112/how-a-nuns-home-is-helping-girls-freed-from-sex-trafficking">Hospitaler Sisters of Mercy</a>, who run a rehabilitation home for victims of human-trafficking.
Anyone who exhibits peace beyond understanding and joy in the midst of suffering is undoubtedly a Christ-follower and has converted her heart to Christ through a personal relationship. Relationships are built upon undivided, quality time with the other person. Jesus said the better part “will not be taken away from her,” and so what is most stunning about these consecrated women is their deep and everlasting joy.
When Martha was working, she was not fully present with the Lord, allowing him to guide her in the use of her talents. In busy family life, it can be difficult for the laity to look at the lives of the saints and imagine fitting in a holy hour, let alone two! However, a recent event in my own Catholic community led me to believe that I’m surrounded by Marys who have chosen the better part.
A family of eight was celebrating their daughter’s birthday at a local ice-skating rink. Many other Catholic families were present for the festivities. The birthday girl collapsed on the ice and had a potentially fatal heart episode. I was not present at the event, but I heard firsthand from witnesses about how the next fifteen minutes played out, before the paramedics arrived. The mother immediately called everyone to gather around to pray the rosary. While little children were crying and deeply disturbed at seeing their friend suffering, the victim’s mother thought of others and calmed everyone down through prayer until the first responders arrived.
I must admit, as a Martha, I was angry when I first pictured this scene. I kept asking questions: Why didn’t the paramedics arrive sooner? Why did no one physically run outside, where there was better cell service, to call the first responders? And why was the mother standing in a prayer circle rather than holding her daughter, as she was most likely dying? I was angry with the other parents for not being doers and thinking on their feet.
Well, I failed to see the bigger picture. That young lady miraculously survived, and I was able to witness her perform on stage just six months later in a rendition of The Sound of Music. I cannot describe how humbling it was to hear her sing the lyrics: “Climb every mountain, search high and low. Follow every byway, every path you know. Climb every mountain, Ford every stream, Follow every rainbow. Till you find your dream.”
Could the prayers of her mother and others present have been exactly the “task” that saved her life and enabled her to follow her dreams? Due to being raised in a contemplative family, could the disposition of her own heart have aided in her remarkable recovery? If the young lady had passed away, would her mother and all those who spent those critical moments in prayer have felt the consolation of the Divine Healer as she transitioned from this life to the next?
I have taken these questions to prayer many times, and considered why I reacted so strongly against those who clearly “chose the better part,” no matter the outcome.
Martha’s personality as an active task manager does not change after Jesus reproaches her. When Jesus returns to Bethany in John Chapter 11, she runs to greet him while Mary stays home. She clearly goes out and actively does something by telling Jesus he has the power to save her brother, Lazarus. But it is also clear that she has had a conversion of heart. This time, she listens to Jesus and shows great faith that his way and his timing are better than hers.
May we all do the same, showing great faith and a willingness to become more like our Savior through a meaningful, personal relationship. St. Martha, pray for us!