Manage Account

<div>Would God for some reason rescind a person’s salvation?</div><div>Not at all. St. Paul makes it clear that God&#8217;s choice of his elect is irrevocable. God does not take back his gifts. If anything is &#8220;rescinded,&#8221; it would mean simply that the creature, man or angel, refused God&#8217;s gift. That is why we can always return to God with repentance when we have sinned. He wants us to retain his blessings, not lose them.
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Salvation Cannot Be Rescinded

January 24 is the feast of St. Francis de Sales, a 16th&#8211; and 17th-century bishop. Looking at the Church’s liturgical calendar, somebody might ask, “Who cares about some guy that died 403 years ago? How does he matter to me?”
One reason Pope St. John Paul II canonized as many saints as he did was to provide people with more modern examples of holiness. But note the key point: the saints are examples, and holiness never goes out of style.
Holiness is not some ethereal quality, some optional je ne sais quoi. If you don’t end up holy, if you don’t end up a saint, your life was a failure. There are only two places to spend eternity: heaven and hell. And sanctity—holiness—is the admission ticket to the former.
That’s why St. Francis de Sales matters.
Francis came from a noble family of Savoy, a region that today would be the east of France bordering Switzerland, running down to the French coast around Nice, and then extending eastward into Italy around the Turin area. In the 1500s, it was on the frontlines of religious division: Geneva was just over the border, and that city was a Calvinist theocracy. Now, remember that Geneva and its environs are part of French-speaking Switzerland, which meant <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/advice-from-the-guy-who-makes-converts">there were still Catholics</a> left there. Francis was eventually sent to be their bishop. As a Catholic bishop, however, he was not going to get living space in Calvinist Geneva, so his episcopal see was in nearby Annecy, France.
Okay, you say, and so what? Why does a bishop from four centuries ago—even one with a tough assignment—matter to me today? Two reasons.
First, he was accessible. Though of noble birth and aware of the privileges of the episcopacy, Francis reduced himself to simplicity to hike the Alps to personally meet and tend to the spiritual needs of his flock scattered across the valleys. He met people where they were at. He realized that among the reasons the Reformation could spread was religious illiteracy: the debates were about refined theological distinctions, but many average people had only a rudimentary knowledge of the Faith, more the consequence of inheritance, social practice, and custom than explained teaching. Francis sought to remedy that.
He sought to remedy that because he himself, far better educated, had been caught up in it. As a nobleman, his family had big plans for him that included politics, not the priesthood. But at a certain point, Francis began seriously to worry about the question of his own salvation (the kind of anxiety that led a scrupulous Martin Luther into inventing a whole new theology). In the environs of Geneva, that anxiety was driven by the Protestant doctrine of predestination: that God had assigned some people (probably most) to damnation and there was nothing they could do about it, given that good works avail nothing to salvation. At a certain point, however, Francis became conscious of the fact that “God is Love” (1 John 4:8) and wants our salvation perhaps even more than we do. Buoyed by that trust, Francis shook off his anxieties and, with joy, embraced the priesthood.
Second, Francis countered the bleak hellfire and damnation of Calvinism with a focus on holiness. Holiness was not a rarefied virtue for some people: it was sine qua non for everybody. Holiness was not a clerical or religious preserve, while the laity mostly skated on the borderline between sin and grace. Everybody faces that borderline, but it is God’s will not that we simply squeeze under some minimal bar, but that we become holy. “Be ye perfect as my heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48) is directed to everybody.
Nor did Francis approach holiness with glumness and depression, as if “I’ll have so much fun if I’m not holy.” No, Francis presented holiness as joy, as happiness. In our language today, he presented it as self-fulfillment. As Karol Wojtyła would write long before becoming pope, living the kind of life God wants us to live and a truly human life are in direct, not inverse proportion. To the degree human beings live the kind of life God wants, they also live a truly fulfilled human life. Holiness does not “alienate” us from our humanity (to riff on Immanuel Kant); it leads us to it.
Francis did not just talk. He wrote two wonderful books, directed to lay people. The <a href="https://ccel.org/ccel/desales/devout_life/devout_life">Introduction to the Devout Life</a> and the <a href="https://ccel.org/ccel/desales/love.all.html">Treatise on the Love of God</a> offered practical guidance in living a holy life. The Introduction was especially pathbreaking because Francis wrote it for ordinary lay people, not for religious, something quite unusual in his day.
The Second Vatican Council <a href="https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html">reminded us</a> of the “universal call to holiness” (Lumen Gentium 39-42). In doing so, it reminded us of Our Lord’s call to perfection, something we may never obtain but for which we can and should always try. (After all, if your lover ever told you, “I think I love you enough,” would you take that as a sign that everything is wonderful or that something is awry? Love is dynamic: if you are not moving forward, you’re falling backward.) We should not forget, however, that in the Church’s history, all the saints remind us that holiness applies to everyone. Some of them—like St. Francis de Sales—even made the effort to present that teaching explicitly to others.
Space limits us from talking about how Francis collaborated with St. Jane Frances de Chantal to tailor that call to holiness to women. She was responsible for founding the Institute of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin for those women who felt called to religious life. Both saints remind us that holiness is everybody’s affair in every time and place.
And that’s why, four centuries later, Francis still matters.

Why Francis Will Be Relevant Forever

<div>Is the website BlessedIsShe.net in accordance with faithful Catholic teaching?</div><div>Frankly, I had not heard of this website before, but on examining it, it seems surely orthodox. The style of presentation is more media savvy than other more explicitly traditional websites, and so this may have struck you as unusual. But all in all, it looks fine to me!
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‘Blessed Is She’ Website

<div>What is a good Catholic reference for having the sex talk with a preteen/teen son or daughter?</div><div>We have a variety of resources online to aid you, including Jason Evert’s talk on <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/how-to-talk-to-your-teens-about-chastity-mp3/">“How to Talk to Teens About Chastity.”</a>
We have <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/search.php?search_query=chastity&amp;section=product">a good number of other helpful resources</a> for sale as well. If money is an issue, we also have <a href="https://www.catholic.com/search?q=chastity">other good resources</a> that can be viewed or listened to on our website.
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Good Chastity Resources

<div>When is drinking alcohol a mortal sin?
</div><div>Abusing intoxicating drink is a grave sin if it deprives the drinker of the use of reason. This means that the drinker no longer has the freedom necessary to deliberate responsibly about what he should do or not do. Of course, in order to be a grave sin the excessive drinking has to be deliberate, not simply a surprise based on lack of foresight. In this latter case the intoxication would be a venial sin.
It is important to remember that even if gravely wrong actions (fornication, violence, etc.) performed while intoxicated were not freely willed in themselves, they were willed in their cause—namely, deliberate drunkeness—and so the drinker is responsible for them as though he had chosen them deliberately.
There are other aspects of drinking that may be sinful; for example, its impact on the health of the body. For neglect of bodily health due to drinking there has to be a grave physical danger to which the drinker is knowingly exposing himself.
Further, there are the requirements of civil law. The blood alcohol limit established by law is much lower than actual gravely sinful intoxication, but it is the point at which some reflexes may be so impaired as to make driving unsafe. Ignoring these laws can easily be grave matter also, even if the driver is not strictly speaking drunk.
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When Is Drinking a Mortal Sin?

Late last year, the <a href="https://www.rcsouthwark.co.uk/mission/ambassadors-for-christ/">Archdiocese of Southwark</a> (pronounced SUTH-irk) in southern London announced the <a href="https://www.rcsouthwark.co.uk/mission/ambassadors-for-christ/">Ambassadors for Christ</a> apologetics program for 2026. Delighted to find a fellow laborer in the apologetics vineyard, Catholic Answers reached out with some questions, which the archbishop graciously agreed to answer.
Apologetics—explaining and defending the Catholic faith—succeeds best when clergy and laity bring their respective strengths to the endeavor. With gratitude to His Excellency for his time and his thoughtful answers, we provide our interview with Archbishop John Wilson below.

This Diocese Cracked the Code on Conversions

The Greek word that the Bible uses for baptism is &#8220;baptizo&#8221; (βαπτίζω), which means, “to immerse.” Does this mean that Catholic baptisms are invalid since priests pour water instead of immerse? Karlo Broussard gives the reason why the answer is no, and explains why pouring is a legitimate method to baptize.

Is Full-Immersion Baptism Necessary?

<div>At adoration, why would you pray the Rosary, since Christ is truly present right there infront of you?</div><div>Because properly understood, the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-rosary">Rosary</a> is a Christ-centered prayer, and thus can and should aid our adoration of our <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/christ-in-the-eucharist">Eucharistic Lord Jesus Christ</a>.
The Holy See in Rome has specifically addressed this issue. According to the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the Rosary may be prayed during Eucharistic adoration with exposition, provided that’s not the sole reason exposition of the Blessed Sacrament takes place:
<blockquote>One should not expose the Eucharist only to recite the rosary. However, among the prayers that are used during adoration, the recitation of the rosary may certainly be included, emphasizing the Christological aspects with biblical readings relating to the mysteries, and providing time for silent adoration and meditation on them (“Notes on the Recitation of the Rosary During Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament,” Notitiae (1998) XXXIV edition, 507-511).</blockquote>
This statement was reprinted in the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on the Liturgy’s Newsletter (Jan./Feb. 1999). That committee is now known as the <a href="http://www.usccb.org/about/divine-worship/index.cfm">Bishops’ Committee on Divine Worship</a>.
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Why Pray Rosary During Eucharistic Adoration?

Can Christians have tattoos? Does the Bible forbid us from getting them? Are they a form of bodily mutilation? Jimmy Akin answers all these questions on Catholic Answers Live.

Does the Bible Forbid Tattoos?

The relationship between <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/state-and-church">Church and State</a> is thorny. What form of allegiance do citizens owe to their religion? What do they owe to their country? When is it moral to resist state actions—and in what way?
Our ability to pose the questions is part of the heritage of the Christian faith—and not simply because of the word Church.
Every culture in history has had some kind of religion and some kind of government, so “church” and “state” have always existed. And they have always had a relationship, as religion binds people together and promotes the stability of society. The state thus needs to deal with it.
Except even that way of framing the issue is modern. It presupposes that church and state are two different things, and in many cultures, they weren’t.
<h2>Through ancient eyes</h2>
If you lived in a particular culture, you were usually expected to hold to the state religion and worship whatever God or gods it upheld. Thus, in Athens, one of the charges leading to Socrates’s execution was the allegation he did not believe in “the gods of the state” (Plato, Apology).
But that could be the case even if church and state were distinct, and in many cultures, they weren’t. The political leaders were the religious leaders.
In Egypt, Pharaoh was a god—the “living Horus” or human manifestation of the falcon-headed sky god. He was also high priest as well as political ruler. Pharaoh may have had two sets of duties—religious and governmental—but at the highest level, church and state were one.
The same was true in Rome. The priests (pontifices and flamines) were drawn from the political class, and the emperor was high priest (pontifex maximus). Some emperors were declared gods, either after their deaths (Julius Caesar, Augustus, Claudius) or worshiped in Rome during their lifetimes (Caligula, Nero).
<h2>Joined at the hip</h2>
A tight union between Church and State could support the stability of both, but it also made it difficult to change either. The two were joined at the hip and had a natural interest in supporting each other.
If a foreign traveler was willing to worship the local gods, well and good. He would not disrupt the social order. A state might even tolerate minority religions—especially among foreigners.
But if the minority religion started making converts, local religious officials would be alarmed. And if sizeable numbers began adopting a new faith, it would be perceived as a threat to the state. Thus, Christianity was persecuted as it expanded into new lands and began making converts.
Refusing to participate in the state’s prescribed religious rites was seen as an act of disloyalty and thus as treason. This is why such rites were used as a test in the trials of martyrs.
In some places, religious tests still are used. In the United Kingdom, under the Accession Declaration Act of 1910, the British monarch (and head of the Church of England) <a href="https://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/local-news/2022/09/08/formal-steps-after-instant-shift-from-uk-queen-to-king/">is required</a> to profess the Protestant faith as a condition of office.
This isn’t the case in America. The U.S. Constitution provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust” (6:3), though this doesn’t mean you’ll be elected or confirmed if your religion is out of favor.
Despite the historically close association of church and state, Christians have seen a sharper distinction between the two than other cultures—a distinction rooted in the history of the Faith.
<h2>Different from the beginning</h2>
Abraham came from a pagan family that worshiped Mesopotamian gods (Josh. 24:2), but Yahweh spoke to him and called him out of his native land.
In the age of the patriarchs, God’s people were governed along family lines, with the head of the household (or later, tribe) exercising ruling authority. The patriarchs also functioned as priests, building altars to God and offering sacrifices (Gen. 12:7-8, 26:25, 33:20, etc.).
This changed when the tribe of Levi was assigned the Israelite priesthood. That separated it from the governing authorities, in stark contrast from other nations.
When the Israelites first came into the Promised Land, they were governed by Joshua, who belonged to the tribe of Ephraim and thus was not a priest. Afterward, each tribe was ruled by its elders, along patriarchal lines.
There also were a series of “judges” (Hebrew, shopetim), though this translation can be misleading, as their principal function wasn’t hearing legal cases. They led battles against the enemies who often oppressed Israel. The term might be translated “chieftain” or even “warlord.” These leaders could be drawn from any tribe.
The era of judges ended with Samuel. He happened to be a Levite and a priest, but this was unusual. When he was old, he appointed his sons judges, but they were corrupt and took bribes, leading the people to demand a king, like in other nations (1 Sam. 8:1-5).
Until then, Israel was a loosely governed tribal confederacy, with God regarded as its overall monarch. Thus, when the demand for a king arose, “the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them’” (1 Sam. 8:7).
The first king chosen was Saul, who was of the tribe of Benjamin. Later kings, such as David, came from the tribe of Judah. Because the religious and governing authorities were separate, the distinction between church and state was in the consciousness of Israel, even if the institutions supported each other.
The line of kings ended with the Babylonian Exile, but when the people returned, the pattern remained the same. The priesthood stayed in Levite hands, and individuals such as Zerubbabel of Judah were appointed political governors, though ultimate power lay with the Persians.
Judea had only limited autonomy in this period, as various foreign powers sparred for control of the territory.
Around 167 B.C., the Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes issued a decree compelling Jews to abandon their religion. This prompted a priest named Mattathias to begin a rebellion. It was ultimately carried through by his sons, especially Judah “the Hammer” Maccabee, which is why his family—the Hasmoneans—came to be called the Maccabees.
The Hasmoneans assumed the high priesthood and became the effective local rulers. In 104 B.C., one of them, Aristobulus I, assumed the title “king.” This was an unusual situation, not seen since the days of Samuel, when the political and religious leaders were the same.
Intrigues among the Hasmoneans led to their downfall. After political control passed to the Romans, the conniving Antipater the Idumean was given political control of Judea. He was Jewish by religion but an Edomite by nationality, and his son Herod the Great was appointed king by the Roman Senate.
When Herod died, his kingdom was divided among his sons, but the one appointed to rule Judea—Archelaus—proved so bad that he was replaced by a Roman governor, which is why Pontius Pilate was in charge during the ministry of Christ.
Through all this, the priesthood remained in Levite hands. There were dramatic changes in how God’s people were governed politically—by patriarchal elders, judges, kings, governors, and other officials—but the fact that church and state were separate helped the religion continue.
<h2>“Render unto Caesar”</h2>
During Christ’s ministry, the Romans held ultimate authority, but they often used client rulers—such as Herod’s sons Antipas and Philip, who had the title “tetrarch” (ruler of a quarter)—while Judea itself was under the Roman governor.
There also was a Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin, that had limited authority, principally for judging matters under Jewish law. The high priest sat on the Sanhedrin, as did many priests. They were joined by religious leaders such as the Pharisees as well as members of the secular Jewish aristocracy.
The complex relationship between religious and civil leaders is seen when the Jewish authorities determine to put Jesus to death. They had to get the consent of the Roman governor because they were forbidden to impose the death penalty (John 18:31).
The division between religious and political authorities, as well as the many forms the latter had taken, is part of the background to Jesus’ statement about paying taxes: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Luke 20:25).
His opponents, who tried to trap him into making either a seditious or impious statement, were amazed, and “marveling at his answer they were silent” (v. 26).
This was a marvelous answer, one that would have been unthinkable in Egypt or Rome, where religious and political leaders were one and the same. In such nations, there could be no division between religious duties and civic ones, no separate spheres appropriate to church and state.
But drawing on the complex history of Israel and the undeniable situation of Judea at the time, Jesus acknowledged the legitimacy of the two realms.
<h2>“Obey God rather than men”</h2>
This didn’t mean one sphere wouldn’t encroach on the other, so Christians have had to face dilemmas.
When the Sanhedrin arrested the apostles, the high priest informed them, “We strictly charged you not to teach in [Jesus’] name, yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you intend to bring this man’s blood upon us” (Acts 5:28).
He may have been concerned that the apostles’ preaching would lead to a popular uprising against the council, or at least a wave of public disrespect eroding its authority.
“Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather than men’” (Acts 5:29). They thus acknowledged that obligations to God take priority when in conflict with orders from a human authority (either religious or secular, as the Sanhedrin had both).
This principle doesn’t settle all questions about how apparent conflicts are to be resolved. Sometimes people think they have an absolute divine mandate when they don’t (cf. John 16). Or there may be ways to square two seemingly contrary things.
St. Thomas More would have been willing at the time to support the 1534 Act of Succession if it had been worded differently and required him only to acknowledge Anne Boleyn as queen and her children as in the line of succession for the English throne. These were matters of civil law he could accept, though he disapproved of Henry VIII’s marital situation. However, the requirement of repudiating the pope violated his obligations to God.
<h2>“No authority except from God”</h2>
The biblical authors recognized that God is in control of history. He at least allows every event to occur, for with omnipotence he could always stop it.
They also saw God’s providence including plans for running human society, and we have a responsibility to cooperate with these plans. St. Paul says, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1).
This is striking, because most governing authorities were pagan, yet Paul sees them as instituted by God. It’s especially striking that he wrote this to the Church in Rome, which was the seat of the empire. He expects readers to understand that even the pagan Roman Empire is, in some sense, instituted by God as a governing authority and owed obedience.
He underlines this: “Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment” (v. 2). And he explains that the ruler “is God’s servant for your good” by punishing wrongdoers on God’s behalf (vv. 3-5).
St. Peter says the same: “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right” (1 Peter 2:13-14).
This is striking, because the emperor at the time was Nero. Though he hadn’t yet begun persecuting Christians, he had shown himself a dangerous, vain, unstable ruler who killed his mother and had delusions of godhood.
Nero also came to office because of a murderous power play. His mother, Agrippina the Younger, married the emperor Claudius, got him to adopt Nero, and then poisoned him so Nero could replace him. Next, Claudius’s biological son, Britannicus, was poisoned to eliminate him as a rival.
Despite all this, Peter and Paul saw Nero as <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/civil-allegiance">an instrument of God</a> owed respect and obedience—so long as it didn’t require disobedience to God.
No doubt, they weren’t expressing their full views of the emperor in these passages, which are meant to encourage Christians to be peaceable toward the state—something that would protect Christians and further the cause of evangelization. But Peter and Paul wouldn’t have taught obedience toward rulers if they didn’t believe in it.
<h2>Diversity of regimes</h2>
Historically, Christian thinkers have been open to monarchies, aristocracies, and democracies—as well as combinations of them (Aquinas, ST I-II:105:1).
<blockquote>If authority belongs to the order established by God, the choice of the political regime and the appointment of rulers are left to the free decision of the citizens. The diversity of political regimes is morally acceptable, provided they serve the legitimate good of the communities that adopt them (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1901).</blockquote>
But what if you’re dealing with a bad regime?
The New Testament doesn’t go into when it is legitimate to change a regime. Christians were a tiny minority and had no need to deal with such questions.
However, the Romans had to face them. Repeatedly. Rome had been governed by kings, but they grew sick of them. The last, Tarquinius Superbus (“Tarquin the Proud”), was dethroned by a popular uprising around 509 B.C., after which Rome was a republic.
This lasted until the first century B.C., when a series of civil wars occurred. Among the key players were two groups of three men, known as the First Triumvirate (which included Julius Caesar) and the Second Triumvirate (which included Augustus). The triumvirates proved unstable, and when the dust settled, Augustus was declared Rome’s first emperor.
He had a reputation as a good (if ruthless) ruler, but not all his successors did. The mad emperor Caligula (r. A.D. 37-41) was so awful that his own guards killed him. Nero (r. A.D. 54-68) proved so bad that the Senate declared him a public enemy, and he was forced to commit suicide. That touched off the disastrous “Year of Four Emperors” (A.D. 69), which was wracked by civil wars as emperors rapidly succeeded one another.
Jews and Christians lived through these events, but they held no political power and did not have to weigh in on the legitimacy of these actions.
<h2>Tyrannicide?</h2>
That would change when the empire became Christian. Once responsible for public welfare, they had to face what to do about problematic regimes.
The principle that the authorities are owed obedience, however they got into power, meant that in most situations, one needed to tolerate a difficult situation. If a ruler issued orders directly contrary to Christian teaching, they could be ignored, but otherwise one needed to obey.
But what if one was confronted with a regime doing grave harm—with a tyrant such as Caligula or Nero?
Historically, the only reliable way to remove a tyrant was to kill him, lest he try to get his throne back and cause more bloodshed. This raised the issue of tyrannicide, or when it’s okay to kill a tyrant.
Given that the authorities govern on God’s behalf, and the need for social stability, Christian thinkers were reluctant to endorse tyrannicide. They could appeal to the fact that, even when Saul was trying to kill David, he refused to raise his hand against “the Lord’s anointed” (1 Sam. 26:9-11).
But many were prepared to endorse killing a particular kind of tyrant: a tyrant by usurpation, or one who seized power when he didn’t have a legitimate claim to it.
They could appeal to the Jewish queen Athaliah, who seized the throne for six years after attempting to kill the entire royal family. There was one survivor, who was anointed as the legitimate king, upon which Athaliah was killed (2 Kings 11:1-20).
Aquinas held, “He who kills a tyrant [by usurpation] to free his country is praised and rewarded” (2 Sentences 44:2:2).
But there was another kind of tyrant: a tyrant by oppression, one who gravely misused his authority. Catholic authors debated under what conditions such an individual could be killed, but in general there was a negative attitude toward this possibility.
<h2>The state of the question</h2>
The <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/how-much-authority-does-the-catechism-of-the-catholic-church-carry">Catechism</a> doesn’t deal with tyrannicide, but it lays out principles for dealing with problematic regimes.
Christians should be subject to those in authority, but they have “the right, and at times the duty, to voice their just criticisms” for the good of the community (2238). They also need to lead an active political life (2239-40). When civil authorities issue immoral commands, Christians are to refuse to obey them (2242).
But armed resistance is not authorized unless
<blockquote>(1) there is certain, grave, and prolonged violation of fundamental rights,
(2) all other means of redress have been exhausted,
(3) such resistance will not provoke worse disorders,
(4) there is well-founded hope of success, and
(5) it is impossible reasonably to foresee any better solution (2243).</blockquote>
The Catechism thus envisions progressively greater interventions to address problems, from criticism to protest to armed resistance—the latter being permitted only in the gravest cases and under specific conditions.

Rendering to Caesar . . . and to God

<div>What is liturgical prayer?</div><div><blockquote>The word &#8220;liturgy&#8221; originally meant a &#8220;public work&#8221; or a &#8220;service in the name of/on behalf of the people.&#8221; In Christian tradition it means the participation of the People of God in &#8220;the work of God.&#8221; Through the liturgy Christ, our redeemer and high priest, continues the work of our redemption in, with, and through his Church. (Catechism, 1069)</blockquote>
<a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/liturgy">Liturgy</a> is the public prayer and worship of the Church.  Liturgical prayers are prayers set by the Church for a particular liturgy (e.g. Mass, confession, baptism, the Divine Office, etc).  They differ from private prayers in that they are not the intention of any one person or group but are the prayers of the Church as a whole.  As such they should not be altered by the presider since they do not belong to him.
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What Is Liturgical Prayer?

A man from Turkey, raised Muslim, calls in to Catholic Answers Live to ask how he can become Catholic and practice the Catholic faith without putting himself in danger. Karlo Broussard and Jimmy Akin explain how he can be a faithful, practicing Catholic in a dangerously anti-Catholic environment.

Muslim Risks Everything to Become Christian

Atheists often point to science—especially evolution—as a way to explain the world without needing God. One famous voice to make this case is Christopher Hitchens. In his 2009 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tYm41hb48o">debate</a> with William Lane Craig, Hitchens opined,
<blockquote>It&#8217;s not very much contested any more that we are not designed as creatures, but that we evolved by a rather laborious combination of random mutation and natural selection into the species that we are today.</blockquote>
Later in the debate, Hitchens would reaffirm, “I don’t believe that we are here as the result of a design.” Both statements were ordered in the debate to block any appeal to design as evidence for a Creative Designer.
But why? Because evolution, as Hitchens sees it, is driven by “random mutation”—that’s to say chance. If things happen by chance, so Hitchens’s argument implies, then they’re not designed—and if there’s no design, then why assume there’s a designer, like God?
But not so fast. Philosophers have pushed back on this idea by challenging the assumption that chance and design are somehow at odds.
In fact, going all the way back to Aristotle, many philosophers have pointed out that chance isn’t a thing that does stuff. It’s not an existing thing out there bringing about effects all on its own. Instead, chance happens when there’s some effect that results from different causes coming together in a way that none of those causes specifically intended.
Let me give you a down-to-earth example.
Let’s say I head to the grocery store to grab some milk so my kids can eat cereal in the morning. At the same time, Joe Heschmeyer goes to the same store to pick up bread for his kids’ toast. We run into each other, and—of course—we start nerding out about philosophy in the cereal aisle.
Now, that meeting was by chance. But notice: I had a goal, Joe had a goal, and both of us were acting intentionally. The “chance” meeting happened because of our purposeful or designed actions. In other words, it was a byproduct of two things that were already aimed at something—what you might call “design.”
Here’s another classic example. Imagine someone digging a grave and stumbling upon buried treasure. The person digging had one goal—to make a hole. The person who buried the treasure had another—to hide something valuable. The discovery wasn’t part of either person’s plan, but it came about as a result of two separate, directed actions crossing paths.
The key point here is that chance doesn’t stand on its own. It’s not something basic or fundamental. It makes sense only within a world where things are already moving toward goals—that is, where there’s already design or order at play.
And guess what! The same idea applies to evolution.
Sure, genetic mutations might be random. But randomness doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For mutations to occur, there must be living organisms already striving to survive and reproduce. Mutations don’t just pop out of nowhere—they depend on a whole framework of life, biology, and physical laws that are already in motion with design.
Also, mutations follow tendencies. A dinosaur might evolve into a bird under the right conditions, but it’s not going to turn into a daisy. There’s a certain directionality built into the process.
And when one thing acts on another—like a chemical or a gene—it produces a specific kind of result. Philosophers would say that’s because each thing has built-in tendencies toward certain effects. An acorn, for instance, doesn’t randomly sprout into just anything—it grows into an oak tree, not a banana tree. That kind of directed behavior is what we mean by “order” or “design.”
The bottom line is this: chance doesn’t cancel out design. In fact, you can’t even have chance without design already in place.
If that’s true, and design points to a supreme designer (as theists argue), then the random aspects of evolution don’t actually eliminate the need for God. They just happen within a system that’s already designed.
So the first objection—that evolution removes the need for an intelligent Creator—doesn’t hold up.
Let’s look at a second objection. Some people argue that if new creatures emerge through chance, then there must be parts of the universe that are outside of God’s control—things that weren’t part of the plan.
Philosophers who believe in God usually respond by going back to what we already said: chance happens when causes come together to bring about some effect in a way that neither cause intended directly. But in the traditional theistic view, those causes themselves exist and operate because of God. Their activity—the very reason they act at all—traces back to God’s divine power.
St. Thomas Aquinas puts it this way in his Summa Contra Gentiles:
<blockquote>All power of any agent whatsoever is from God, as from the first principle of all perfection. Therefore since all operation is consequent to some power, it follows that God is the cause of every operation.</blockquote>
In other words, God isn’t in competition with the causes he created. It’s not an either/or situation. Created causes are real and meaningful because of the divine cause.
This understanding of divine causality led Aquinas to explain two things that make up what we generally call God’s “providence,” which is helpful for us here (see Summa Theologiae I:22:3). First, there’s the plan—the order of all things foreordained toward an end. God holds this in his mind, right down to the smallest detail. This is technically called “providence.” Second, there’s the execution of that plan—how things actually play out, which often happens through a chain of created things causing other things. This part, Aquinas calls “government.”
So if God is the ultimate source of every cause and effect, then he will also know—and include in his plan—the convergences of causes that we call “chance.” Even in evolution, what we see as randomness still fits within both parts of God’s providential plan: his providence and governance.
This leads to one more helpful point: what chance is in relation to causes that converge in their actions is not chance in relation to God.
Aquinas talks about this, too. He says,
<blockquote>It happens sometimes that something is lucky or chance-like, as compared to inferior causes, which, if compared to some higher cause is directly intended (ST I:116:1).</blockquote>
Let’s go back to that buried treasure example. Suppose the person digging the grave is a poor laborer hired by a wealthy man. And suppose the wealthy man buried the treasure himself years ago, then hired the laborer on purpose, hoping he’d find it—but without telling him.
From the laborer’s point of view, finding the treasure was a total fluke. But from the employer’s point of view, it was fully intentional. The chance occurrence, therefore, ultimately reduces to the directing activity of the employer—the intelligent cause.
Same goes for the world. We might experience some event as a lucky break or a random occurrence, but from God’s vantage point—the ultimate perspective—it was part of the plan all along.
Even things like genetic mutations that help species evolve—like dinosaurs developing feathers, or fish adapting to breathe air—might be beyond what the causes themselves “expect” to do, but they’re not beyond what God intends through them, since he’s their ultimate directing cause in the first place.
So the idea that something “escaped” God’s plan because it happened by chance doesn’t really work, either.
In the end, there’s no need for a believer to feel threatened by evolution. The presence of chance in the process doesn’t rule out God. In fact, without design, there wouldn’t even be chance. And since design points us to God, it follows that chance doesn’t eliminate God—it actually depends on him.

Why Chance Can’t Eliminate God

Protestants, many of us Catholic apologists argue, effectively act as their own popes. The reason why, we allege, is that every Protestant is ultimately accountable to his personal interpretation of divine revelation, which for Protestants is solely the sixty-six-book Protestant Bible. Every Protestant, we posit, acts as his own magisterial authority, both in interpreting the Bible and even in deciding what constitutes the Bible, given their rejection of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuterocanonicals">deuterocanon</a>.
But not so, declare our Protestant counterparts! They, like us Catholics, have confessions and creeds to which they submit. Carl R. Trueman, one of the most brilliant and interesting intellects in modern Protestantism, last year <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/11/protestants-need-to-go-back-to-basics">urged</a> his fellow Protestants to return to “orthodox Christian doctrines as set forth by the creeds, the Great Tradition of theology exemplified by the ancient ecumenical councils, and traditional Protestant confessions such as the Westminster Confession.” Kim Riddlebarger, a co-host of the popular White Horse Inn podcast, <a href="https://www.kimriddlebarger.com/about-the-author">declares</a>, “If you were to ask, ‘what is it that defines Christianity?’, my answer now would be ‘the definition of Christianity is given us in the Creed.’”
Recently, a friend sent me a video of Methodist lay apologist Joshua Pearsall, who <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjbNPvzH8QI&amp;t=105s">makes a similar argument</a> in reference to my book, <a href="https://stpaulcenter.com/product/the-obscurity-in-scripture-disputing-sola-scriptura-and-the-protestant-notion-of-biblical-perspicuity/?srsltid=AfmBOor7SNuNT5o002l6Y6MiuN14F4UagxCOJWCBmGhv1rN3cnnkD79G">The Obscurity of Scripture</a>. Citing confessional standards of such denominations as Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and his own Methodist tradition, Pearsall asserts, “You literally can’t be your own pope. You are accountable to the standards of your tradition and of course the Scriptures on top of that.” Others, such as <a href="https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/10/01/the-reformation-as-renewal-is-an-exemplar-of-special-pleading/">Reformed scholar Matthew Barrett</a> in his recent work The Reformation as Renewal: Retrieving the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, claims much the same.
I can appreciate the thinking behind this Protestant line of argumentation. Indeed, I would have mouthed similar things fifteen years ago when I was a Presbyterian seminary student. Of course I wasn’t like those ignorant, low-church evangelicals with no knowledge of church history, no knowledge of Nicaea or Chalcedon, no knowledge even of their own Protestant theological ancestry. I eagerly submitted to the Westminster Standards, believing them to be an accurate interpretation of biblical truth.
But that, I eventually realized, was exactly the problem. I adhered to Reformed confessional documents based on their conformity to Holy Scripture—but whose interpretation of it? My own, ultimately. Nor was this my own novel understanding of how things are supposed to work within the Protestant paradigm. This is precisely the way they are supposed to work.
Why, for example, was I a Presbyterian rather than an Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist? Why was I submitting to the Westminster Confession of Faith rather than the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Augsburg Confession, or the Articles of Religion and Confession of Faith? Because I, as a conscientious, “Bible-believing” Christian, had determined that the particular confessional documents of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) were sufficiently biblical to merit my allegiance. My own pastors and professors told me that if I believed another Protestant denomination was more biblically faithful, I should follow my conscience and go there instead.
Who is in the interpretative drivers’ seat in such a scenario? The individual Christian, naturally. If Carl Trueman, Kim Riddlebarger, Matthew Barrett, or any other Protestant Christian read his Bible and came to believe that his particular Protestant tradition and its confessional documents are erroneous, it would be his prerogative to either protest those errors within his own denomination or, if he viewed them as sufficiently egregious, to join a different ecclesial community. He might even feel compelled to establish his own.
And that explains not only five hundred years of fissiparous Protestant history, but the remarkable explosion of non-denominational, Bible-based, evangelical churches in the last few generations. All of them purport to be simply returning to the fundamentals of Scripture, and all of them cannot help but offer their own bespoke takes on Christian doctrine and praxis.
Granted, I presume that many if not most Protestants do not intend this. They do not want to be postmodern individualists determining reality for themselves. They want to be embedded in the history and traditions of Christianity. That’s why they constantly cite not only Reformers such as Luther, Calvin, Turretin, Cranmer, and Owen, but also Church Fathers such as Irenaeus, Jerome, and Augustine. What Catholics and traditionally minded Protestants share is a desire to be united to something greater than themselves, a proclivity for the ancient and venerable. We all want to believe that our faith was not born yesterday, but descends from the apostles.
The question is whether the Protestant paradigm, in any of its manifold manifestations, is actually capable of coherently doing so. What I came to realize almost fifteen years ago is no, it cannot. Even Pearsall in his YouTube videos attempting to refute my book cannot help but undermine his position, acknowledging that many Protestants are failing to honor their own confessional standards . . . and then immediately admitting that confessional standards are not infallible and “can be corrected down the line if they need to be.” Corrected according to what standard? The standard of the individual’s interpretation of Scripture.
In other words, Protestant creeds and confessional standards have only as much authority as Protestants are willing to grant them. If a Protestant comes to assess them as inadequate, on whatever grounds related to his conscience, he may edit or even dispense with them. And this applies not only to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant creeds, but the ecumenical councils of the ancient Church. This is why Protestants <a href="https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/ask-ligonier/what-does-it-mean-that-the-first-seven-church-councils-were-ecumenical">pick and choose which ecumenical councils they accept</a>. Indeed, many Protestants even argue that <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/confess-jesus-descended-into-hell/">parts of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed</a> are unbiblical and need not be accepted. And why not?
Catholics do not inhabit the same paradigmatic position. We do not pick and choose which councils or creeds to which we submit. We accept the authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church en totale, because we recognize that it has been granted that authority by Christ himself, preserved by the Holy Spirit. Such a recognition requires an act of faith, but it is based on evidence and reason, pre-eminently the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/my-church-is-more-credible-than-yours">motives of credibility</a>. And, unlike Protestants, whose interpretive authority of divine revelation rests in the conscience of each individual Christian, Catholics acknowledge a living Magisterium, whose voice is manifested not only through ecumenical councils, but, in certain narrow circumstances, through the living pope.
Creeds can’t save Protestantism from its inevitable descent into an individualism that equates to every individual Christian acting as his own pope. Only the Catholic Church with its internally coherent and historically verifiable magisterial authority can resolve the Protestant’s dilemma and give him the certitude that he is indeed following Christ and the fullness of his teaching, rather than the (often well-meaning) whims of his own conscience.

Creeds Can’t Save Protestantism

The Church teaches that anyone can baptize in extraordinary circumstances (CCC 1256). Thus, grandparents often find themselves wondering if they are permitted to baptize their grandchild when his parent doesn’t want him baptized. And not just grandparents, but also other caring individuals. I’ve had folks ask me this question countless times.
The Church is clear that we can’t baptize a child in secret, contrary to his parents’ wishes. For more details on that, and some recommendations for a grandparent or loved one who feels helpless in this kind of situation, check out Joe Heschmeyer’s article “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/can-i-secretly-baptize-my-grandchildren">Can I Secretly Baptize My Grandchildren?</a>”
Now, naturally, the question becomes, “Why?” Why does the Church forbid baptisms of children under the age of reason against the will of the parents? As I point out in <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/baptism-now-saves-you/?searchid=10866197&amp;search_query=baptism+now">my new book</a> Baptism Now Saves You: How Water and Spirit Give Eternal Life, there are several reasons.
First, it is contrary to natural justice. Determination of what a child under the age of reason does and receives is naturally due to the parents. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches as much:
<blockquote>Those who do not yet have the use of free-will (a child under the age of reason), according to the natural law they are under the care of their parents as long as they cannot look after themselves (Summa Theologiae III:68:10).</blockquote>
To baptize a child under the age of reason against the will of his parents, therefore, would be to deprive the parents of what is naturally due to them. And to deprive parents of what is naturally due to them is an injustice. Such an act would be just as much a violation of natural justice as it would be to baptize a person having the use of reason against his will (see ibid).
Aquinas gives another reason behind the Church’s prohibition of baptizing children against the will of their parents: it makes the child liable to unbelief. He writes,
<blockquote>Moreover under the circumstances it would be dangerous to baptize the children of unbelievers; for they would be liable to lapse into unbelief, by reason of their natural affection for their parents. Therefore it is not the custom of the Church to baptize the children of unbelievers against their parents’ will.</blockquote>
One last reason that we’ll give here, inspired by Joe’s thoughts in the previously mentioned article, is that to baptize against the parents’ will is to thwart an aspect of the directionality or goal-directedness of the gift of faith. The Catechism teaches that baptism is a “sacrament of faith,” and the faith that is given in baptism is “called to develop” and “needs the community of believers” (1253).
To baptize a child knowing that the gift of faith imparted to him would not be nourished and developed by a community of believers would be to thwart the very natural directionality of the gift itself, kind of like when people thwart the directionality of the sexual act in the use of contraception, or the directionality of the act of eating by intentionally vomiting the food, or the directionality of the communicative act of assertion by lying.
Now, I sympathize with the person who says, “But this is urgent and serious. Wouldn’t you rescue a child from the danger of physical death? Why wouldn’t you do the same in the case of spiritual death?”
Aquinas also deals with this sort of objection and provides an insightful answer (Summa Theologiae III:68:10 ad 1). He starts with a principle that I think most would agree upon—namely, we can’t go and rescue someone from physical death against the order of civil law. For example, if a judge condemns a man to death on account of a proportionate crime, we wouldn’t be morally permitted to use force to rescue the man from death. The reason is that such a judgment is issued by legitimate authority, and it’s immoral for us to act against such authority.
Similarly, as Aquinas teaches, we shouldn’t try to rescue a child from spiritual death against the will of the parents, lest we infringe the order of the natural law. The order of the natural law dictates that parents have the natural right to determine the actions of their children under the age of reason. And to baptize a child against his parent’s will would violate such an order.
But someone might still counter, “Don’t we belong more to God than to man? It’s God who gave us our soul, the primary principle within us. Only our bodies, which are lower in the hierarchy of being, have been given to us by our parents. Thus, it would seem it’s not unjust for a child to be baptized against his parents’ will.”
Again, here we appeal to the natural order articulated above. The actions of a child under the age of reason are subject to being determined by the parents. Here’s how Aquinas answers this sort of objection:
<blockquote>Man is ordained unto God through his reason, by which he can know God. Wherefore a child, before it has the use of reason, is ordained to God, by a natural order, through the reason of its parents, under whose care it naturally lies, and it is according to their ordering that things pertaining to God are to be done in respect of the child (ibid., ad 3).</blockquote>
The bottom line is that although we belong to God more than to man, it’s God who willed the natural order. Therefore, to act against this natural order by baptizing a child under the age of reason against his parents’ will would be to act against God himself. And that’s something we ought always to avoid.

Mission Impossible: Baptism

<div>Why do I need Jesus to have a relationship with God? Isn’t it possible to have a relationship with God prior to coming to know about Jesus? </div><div>It’s true that one can have a relationship with God before knowledge of Jesus. The reason for this is that it’s possible to arrive at some degree of knowledge of God without divine revelation. But such a relationship is going to be strained for several reasons.
First, the knowledge that we can have of God by the natural light of reason is very limited. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, there are certain things about God that surpass the grasp of our reason. And if God is our ultimate end, and we need to know our ultimate end in order to direct our thoughts and actions to him, then it’s necessary for our salvation that God tell us those things about himself that exceed human reason (see Summa Theologiae, I:1:1).
Second, when left to ourselves, we often have erroneous views about God. Of course, it’s possible to know certain truths about God by reason alone. But it’s often the result of long and hard work and is mixed with error.
Being in relationship with Jesus allows for us to know these truths with ease and to know them without error. As Aquinas says, this brings about our salvation “more fitly and more surely” (ST, I:1:1). With greater knowledge about the one we love comes greater love, especially when the one we love is absolute perfection and goodness itself.
A third reason why our relationship with God would be strained without Jesus is the presence of sin. Without Jesus, we would be left in our sin, which always impedes intimacy with God.
Fourth, we would be left in the dark on how to appropriately worship God and foster our relationship with him. With the advent of Jesus, and the revelation of the sacrifice of the Mass that he gives at the Last Supper, we know how to worship God in a way that is pleasing to him.
Finally, our relationship with Jesus can only enhance our relationship with God because Jesus is God. He is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Through him, we have access to the inner Trinitarian life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. St. Peter sums it up:
<blockquote>His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:3-4).</blockquote>
</div>

Why Do I Need Jesus?

Can we trust the historical accuracy of the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/gospel-and-gospels">Gospels</a> if they were written decades after Jesus? Doesn&#8217;t that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/are-the-gospels-myth">make them unreliable</a>? Trent Horn answers this common challenge from atheists on Catholic Answers Live.

Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?

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Mary shows us the RIGHT WAY to read Scripture.

What happened to St Joseph?

Did Catholics win the internet in 2025?

Matt Fradd joining Daily Wire

Growth of Church in USA

The Flannel Panel looks back on 2025 with a lively year-in-review, asking whether Catholics truly “won the internet,” examining the significance of Matt Fradd joining The Daily Wire, and reflecting on the continued growth of the Catholic Church in the United States. The discussion highlights how Catholic voices are shaping online culture, media, and evangelization in a rapidly changing digital and religious landscape.
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Matt Fradd Joins DailyWire and the Internet in 2025 | Flannel Panel

<div>What is considered praying a rosary; is it once around the beads (five decades) or fifteen times around the beads?</div><div>Praying the rosary normally means praying all five decades of one of the four sets of mysteries: the joyful, luminous, sorrowful or glorious mysteries. So that would be five decades or “once around the beads.” Of course, one could simply pray a decade or two, or, time permitting, all four sets of the rosary mysteries comprising twenty decades.
</div>

What Constitutes Praying a Rosary?

Pope Francis on Female Deacons: Why So Misunderstood?

“Why did they put that road there?” “Who thought this development was a good idea?” “Why don’t we have more nice restaurants in my area?”
These are probably questions we’ve all thought at some point or another. City planning affects all of us, and oftentimes its consequences last generations. It’s important, then, to understand what bearing our Catholic faith has on the matter. It may also be helpful to consider in particular how one Catholic—Charles “Chuck” Marohn, the founder and president of an organization called Strong Towns—has drawn upon his faith in approaching the issue.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church doesn’t have a lot to say explicitly about city-building. What it does lay down, however, is principles that can be applied. These include, among <a href="https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html">other things</a>, the need to consider solidarity (194-195), stability (482), and justice (201) in how we organize human community.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the most applicable principle is one you’ve probably heard of: subsidiarity (419-420). The Catechism defines subsidiarity as the idea that “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good” (1883). We can reasonably conclude from this that city planning should be an intimately local process.
That brings us to Chuck Marohn and Strong Towns. Strong Towns <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/about">defines itself</a> as an organization seeking to analyze “the failures of the post-war North American development pattern while giving citizens the knowledge and tools to start making our places better today.” With that comes a clear four-step process:
<ol>
<li>Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.</li>
<li>Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?</li>
<li>Do that thing. Do it right now.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/23/the-strong-towns-approach-to-public-investment-satbook">Repeat.</a></li>
</ol>
There are some profound implications that flow from this simple process.
One is that, since embarking on what Marohn calls “the Suburban Experiment,” we’ve been going about city-building all wrong in North America. Instead of incremental little “bets” (local investments) by many actors, we have increasingly <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/6/14/the-end-of-incrementalism">consolidated</a> all development decisions into the hands of massive corporate players who build all at once, “to a finished state.” These artificial environments are then “<a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2022/1/18/what-would-mass-upzoning-actually-do-to-property-values">frozen in amber</a>,” so to speak, by zoning law, thus ensuring that they have very little potential to grow or change over time. It’s not hard to see <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2024/5/28/how-affordable-housing-distracts-people-from-housing-affordability">why we have a housing shortage</a> in this country.
The Suburban Experiment leads in the commercial sphere to that ubiquitous feature of our current landscape, the “stroad” (a word coined by Marohn). A stroad is a street-road hybrid that does justice to neither. Consider: a street is a human-scaled, active platform for living, working, worshiping, shopping, and dining. In other words, it’s a place for living. Think Main Street. A road is a high-speed connection between places. Think an interstate highway. Stroads, with their numerous curb cuts, parking lots, businesses, drive-throughs, and deadly high speeds, <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-and-why-does-it-matter">try to do</a> the functions of both, but they result instead in crippling traffic (and traffic accidents); wasteful sprawl; and unimaginative, alienating places. And to top it all off, this development pattern <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/8/25/if-strong-towns-is-right-and-cities-are-insolvent-why-do-so-many-seem-to-be-doing-so-well">doesn’t even generate</a> enough tax flow to <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/7/6/stop-subsidizing-suburban-development-charge-it-what-it-costs">sustain itself</a>!
The message of Strong Towns dovetails with Catholic social teaching in some important ways. Most obvious is the promotion of subsidiarity, which Marohn talks about <a href="https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/strong-towns-a-bottom-up-revolution-to-rebuild-american-prosperity/24200257/item/34585705/?mkwid=%7cdc&amp;pcrid=76828539257984&amp;pkw=&amp;pmt=be&amp;slid=&amp;product=34585705&amp;plc=&amp;pgrid=1229254253723540&amp;ptaid=pla-4580428017120331&amp;utm_source=bing&amp;utm_medium=cpc&amp;utm_campaign=Shopping+%7c+NEW+condition+books&amp;utm_term=&amp;utm_content=%7cdc%7cpcrid%7c76828539257984%7cpkw%7c%7cpmt%7cbe%7cproduct%7c34585705%7cslid%7c%7cpgrid%7c1229254253723540%7cptaid%7cpla-4580428017120331%7c&amp;msclkid=a9cf92c3b85f114420bef5935de6cd20#idiq=34585705&amp;edition=21873596">explicitly</a> (195-198). Everything in our national politics and economic system is trending toward larger picture, top-down control. Strong Towns is therefore a pointed wake-up call to Catholics to take our own tradition seriously and challenge this divisive trend. You should be more concerned about the state of your town’s sidewalks than the latest outrage-grabber in the national headlines. You should be more familiar with your local councilman’s legislative initiatives than with the president’s. I’m not saying these bigger things don’t matter—just that subsidiarity should cause our deepest emotional investment to be closer to home.
One potential source of friction, especially in these uncertain times, is the temptation to adopt a “head for the hills” mindset. It’s tempting to believe that a stockpile of imperishable food and ammunition in some remote location is the ultimate safeguard against disaster. If you live in an established neighborhood, perhaps you’re anxiously looking forward to the day when you can escape to some isolated rural area. Strong Towns offers a different perspective: in a time of societal breakdown, it will probably be strong communities and social bonds that will allow you to <a href="https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/9/21/in-praise-of-neighbors">weather the storm</a>. Unless you live on a truly self-sufficient farm, your best bet lies in the skill and resource sharing that only physically proximate communities can provide.
Strong Towns is one of the few bright spots in our current fraught political landscape. Marohn is a self-described conservative, but his movement is made up of people from across the political spectrum (maybe a majority of them progressives). Strong Towns steadfastly refuses to be pigeonholed into any of the current culture war “camps” on offer today. Catholics can (and probably should) be Strong Towns advocates, fiercely attached to the health and success of their local communities. Paradoxically, it may be just the corrective course our national politics needs.

What’s Wrong with Your City

Every Fourth of July, Americans celebrate freedom. We shoot fireworks into the sky, grill burgers, wave flags, and proudly recall the Declaration of Independence. And rightly so: our Founding Fathers fought and bled for liberty, declaring that every man has been endowed by his Creator with unalienable rights.
But in recent years, the word “freedom” has become increasingly unrecognizable. In fact, we’ve reached a point where most Americans talk about freedom while denying its foundation: truth, virtue, and God. So this Independence Day, Catholics should be asking: what are we actually celebrating? And what does true freedom mean in light of our faith?
If freedom now means the right to redefine marriage, to kill the unborn, to divorce and remarry as we please, to mutilate healthy bodies in the name of “identity,” and to mock the moral law with impunity, then it’s time to admit that our national understanding of liberty is not only distorted; it’s dangerous.
The good news is, the Catholic Church has always been the world’s most faithful defender of true freedom. But real freedom isn’t what the modern world thinks it is.
<h2>The Founders Were Right</h2>
The Declaration of Independence rightly states that freedom comes from God, not government. That’s a deeply Catholic idea: our dignity and liberty are rooted in our creation in the image of God. But here’s where modern culture departs from that vision: it wants the liberty without the Lord. We kept the language of the Founders but stripped it of the metaphysics. As G.K. Chesterton quipped, “the modern world is full of Christian virtues gone mad.”
What began as “freedom under God” has slowly mutated into “freedom from God.” Today, the word has been co-opted by those who use it to justify abortion, gender ideology, moral relativism, pornography, and euthanasia.
This is not what the Church is talking about. And it’s not what Christ came to give us.
<h2>Freedom Is Not Doing Whatever You Want</h2>
The popular notion of freedom today is this: I can do whatever I want, so long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. But that’s license—a distortion of freedom, and the first step toward enslavement.
The Catechism teaches us that “freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act . . . so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility” (1731). “By free will, man is capable of directing himself toward his true good” (1704).
Notice that freedom is not the capacity to follow one’s whims, but to choose what is truly good. Freedom is always ordered toward truth. Otherwise, it self-destructs. A train is most “free” not when it jumps the tracks, but when it runs on them. The same is true of the human soul.
When someone says, “It’s my choice,” a Catholic must ask: Is it a good one? Is it morally true? Is it ordered toward God or away from him?
Without those questions, “freedom” becomes a golden calf.
<h2>Free Will: A Gift That Must Be Directed</h2>
God gave us free will so that we might seek him, know him, and love him—not so we could become little gods unto ourselves. That’s what Satan wanted. The Church teaches that man was created with a rational soul precisely so that, by his own free will, he might come to love God (CCC 1730).
But that also means we are accountable. With free will comes moral responsibility. We are not robots. And our choices carry eternal consequences. That’s why the Catechism also warns that misusing our freedom leads not to independence, but to slavery:
<blockquote>Man’s freedom is limited and fallible. In fact, man failed. He freely sinned. By refusing God’s plan of love, he deceived himself and became a slave to sin (1739).</blockquote>
In the name of freedom, many today have become utterly enslaved: to lust, to ideology, to social validation, to rage, to self-harm, to envy, to addictions of every kind. But Christ offers something infinitely better.
<h2>True Freedom Is Found in Christ</h2>
This is why Scripture insists, “For freedom Christ has set us free; do not submit again to a yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1). Christ came not to affirm our choices, but to liberate us from sin. His truth does not limit our freedom; it unleashes it.
Modern America has forgotten this. We’ve turned away from Christ and then wondered why our society feels increasingly unfree. But the more we ignore objective truth and divine law, the more fractured, chaotic, and authoritarian our public life becomes. The Founders never imagined a free republic without moral virtue. That’s because you can’t have authentic liberty without ordered souls.
<h2>The Protestant Confusion on Freedom</h2>
To make matters more confusing, some Protestant theologies further distort the issue. The Reformation, especially in the Calvinist tradition, introduced the idea that human free will was entirely destroyed by the Fall. This leads to a troubling view: that God predestines some to heaven and others to hell, and man has no real say in the matter. That’s not freedom. That’s fatalism.
Catholic doctrine, by contrast, holds both truths in harmony: grace is primary and necessary, but our response is real and free. God desires all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4), but he does not force us. He respects our free will, even when we use it to reject him. That’s why salvation requires cooperation—our fiat, like Mary’s.
If America’s founding motto is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the Catholic response is that such happiness can be found only by freely choosing the good, in communion with Christ.
<h2>Are We Still Independent?</h2>
This Independence Day, we should ask the hard question: are we still a nation that knows what freedom is?
Many Americans believe they’re free—but they are in bondage to sin, enslaved to false ideologies, and captive to passions they no longer control. We’ve confused liberation from tyranny with liberation from virtue. We’ve mistaken rebellion for freedom and autonomy for excellence.
But there’s hope.
The Church still holds the keys to true liberty. The saints are proof that real freedom is not found in breaking rules, but in being conformed to Christ. St. Maximilian Kolbe died in Auschwitz, but his soul was free. St. Thomas More was executed for defying <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/martin-luthers-most-shocking-opponent">a tyrant king</a>, but he went to his death joyfully free. These are the men who truly embodied “independence”—not from God, but from sin, fear, and falsehood.
<h2>A Call to Catholic Patriots</h2>
If you love your country, then help its people remember what freedom really is. That won’t come through slogans, parades, or partisan slogans. It will come through conversion, repentance, and truth.
Celebrate the Fourth of July—but use it as a moment to proclaim that the highest liberty isn’t political independence. It’s the freedom to say “yes” to God. The freedom to obey when the world rebels. The freedom to choose virtue when sin looks easy. The freedom to become holy.
Because Christ didn’t die to make you autonomous. He died to make you free.
“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (John 8:32). This Independence Day, don’t just wave the flag. Choose the truth. Choose Christ. Choose real freedom.

Is America Still Free?

Salvation often seems more like a Protestant issue than a Catholic one. And when Catholics don’t engage with the doctrine of salvation, they can develop some misunderstandings about it.
For instance, the topic of salvation can be grouped in our bookstores in the “self-help” section. Lots of things under that heading can be helpful, but salvation is not a self-help concept, as we will see. Another misunderstanding is viewing the issue purely from a “fire insurance policy” framework. Salvation is objectively a “saving” from hell, yes, but that significantly condenses the breadth of the matter.
<h2>Not Just Self-Help</h2>
Salvation isn’t something we do to become better. Rather, it is about something that God has done for us. God has given us a gift beyond comprehension.
Before exploring this gift, it will be helpful to get some background on what the ancient Roman Empire thought about gift-giving.
Recently within Pauline scholarship, John Barclay published a monumental work called “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Gift-John-M-Barclay/dp/0802868894">Paul and the Gift</a>.” He notes how gift-giving was a major part of daily life in the ancient world, and how the Greek word charis was used often by nonreligious writers. A wealthy individual would give a gift to somebody he considered worthy—that is, someone who would not pocket the gift and walk away. Rather, the worthy person would gratefully receive the gift and give a gift back in return. A relationship of mutual gift-giving would develop.
With this background in mind, let’s look at Paul’s famous quote on gift-giving. He says, “By grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). God has engaged in gift-giving to humanity! How exciting! Everybody likes to receive gifts.
But there are some differences between what God does in Ephesians 2 and what the ancient world thought of gift-giving.
God does not focus on giving gifts to worthy individuals, as the Romans did. Like the parable of the sower (Matt. 13), God spreads the gift-seeds recklessly, whether on good soil or bad soil. The latter looks like an utter waste of seed! Yet Paul says in his letter to these Romans that Christ died for the ungodly and unworthy (Rom. 5:6). This is saying that the gift God offers to humans is to unworthy receivers. Humans are sinful, defiant, and inclined to nasty selfishness. It flips the Roman concept of charis on its head. Surely humans are just going to pocket salvation and walk away. Yet God gives gifts to all.
A good example of this gift-giving in the Gospels is the episode of Zaccheus. In Luke 19, a worker for the Romans, Zaccheus, is approached by Jesus, who desires to give the gift of his presence. Anybody in his right mind would not offer a gift to this guy. He is not worthy and, from a human standpoint, will not offer a gift in return. Zaccheus is stealing from the people of Israel as a tax collector. His primary concern is taking money with the force of the Romans behind him, not receiving and giving gifts!
Keep in mind who the Romans were, too. They were terrorists and bullies. There are coins that depict them raping their subjects. Any basic respect for the human person went out the window for the Romans. Zaccheus is on the wrong team! He should not be approached by Jesus! Certainly, he will be ungrateful for a gift.
Yet Zaccheus turns into a worthy recipient. He experiences a conversion instantaneously, it seems, and gives a gift back to Jesus in a way that he knows Jesus would want: to return his stolen goods back to the injured parties and to give alms to the poor. Jesus gives a gift, it is received, and a gift is given back.
Now let’s turn to the specific gift God gives to humanity. Primarily, it is the death and resurrection of Jesus. This gift of atonement and payment of debts is for another article, but what needs to be highlighted here is that humans receive this gift by dying and rising themselves. What do I mean? They mystically, invisibly, and spiritually enter into the death and resurrection of Jesus. Humans are “crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20), are “buried with him&#8221; under the waters of baptism (Rom. 6:3), and “rise” to new life (Col. 2:12).
This concept of entering into Jesus’ resurrection life is connected to the second misconception about salvation:
<h2>Not Just Fire Insurance</h2>
Salvation is not just a protection against hell, although that is a weighty advantage in and of itself. Condensing it into a “get out of hell free” card is a tremendous disservice. For it’s also about new life.
Humans receive the gift of Jesus’ resurrection life—the life that involved Jesus being able to defy logic and reality when he appeared to the disciples in their room although their doors were locked (John 20:26). This is the life that changes wealthy people to suddenly give their lives to lepers, whose skin is decaying and falling off (St. Francis of Assisi). It is the life that changes the jobs of comfortable people to the jobs of suddenly picking dying people off the streets and caring for them with tenderness (St. Mother Teresa). In a word, we enter Christ’s school of love.
This new life involves an ontological change in our being. Humans *partake* of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). They share in Jesus’s divinity. Christians truly become the body of Christ, which is why when people persecute Christians, Jesus says they are persecuting him (Acts 9:4-5).
Christians are literally what their title is: Christian means “little Christ.” As Fr. Jose Maria Castillo once emphasized, when I look at my hand, I don’t look at just a hand—I look at Jesus’ hand. This is why numerous miracles occur even today (see the studies found in Craig Keener’s book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Today-Supernatural-Modern-World/dp/1540963837/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1J4GIO1GWC71G&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.IEObadFBzNp20zQW9K9lACoOaVYMT44Yzluw1iWwWxNi6ZpbGpEZ3pzhC1x7f1UndqUbOr8pUid3ms3QnrRJZia7orlcmTBVxWlu5-Urwy-oXzH-AvKGW0zqd9hKc0VUZOkr_ZzbvZpjsF1PTEBjuzuBLSkUe35d3w2B6aTvF9Pl2rchtg0iYCVMIfZ4qzFimh3Kh-d9Nq7BIdQ_abP0EZ3piaiRVY3JHpvJg4u_TXQ.EqAJ7n0m484ej3Sv0hl9e4e74spdn5gv99WC2anfgw8&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=miracles+by+craig+keener&amp;qid=1762965501&amp;sprefix=miracles+by%2Caps%2C118&amp;sr=8-1">Miracles</a>). I witnessed one last year at <a href="https://www.damascus.net/">Damascus Catholic Youth Summer Camp</a>, in fact.
To conclude, salvation is neither a self-help issue nor just about fire insurance. However, there is a sense in which salvation is self-help. For if you truly care about your well-being, you’ll gratefully receive the gift of salvation from Jesus. You’ll die to your old ways of selfishness and pride, enter into a gift-giving relationship with God, and give immense gifts back to God (the highest gift of which is your gift of self). As Paul continues in Ephesians, “we are his [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10). We are made for giving gifts back to God, for God is the one invisibly propelling us to do this. Nor is salvation just fire insurance; rather, it is about receiving the gift of eternal life.
(To learn more about other misunderstandings on the topic of salvation, see the book by my professor at the Augustine Institute called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Salvation-What-Every-Catholic-Should/dp/1733522182">Salvation</a>.)

Salvation Is Better than You Think

<div>Did Pope Francis change the Our Father?</div><div>As of now there are no changes planned for the Our Father. What Pope Francis was referring to was not changing the prayer itself but changing how we translate the prayer in certain languages.
Pope Francis was speaking of the words &#8220;lead us not into temptation.&#8221; The Holy Father was merely pointing out that some people mistakenly think that this means it is God who tempts us to sin. In French, the translation of that line had been changed to &#8220;let me not fall into temptation,&#8221; and the Pope was saying that, in his opinion, this is a much better translation than the traditional one.
How to translate this line from the Our Father has varied and some have used &#8220;do not subject us not to the final test&#8221; or &#8220;do not bring us to the time of trial.&#8221;
If the translation changed, the prayer itself would not really be changed.
</div>

Is the Our Father Changing?

The Summer Olympics open today in Paris, with a flotilla along the Seine reported to be replacing the traditional parade of nations into the main stadium. Very bold, very French. And this is before we get to the entertainment, which is always avante-garde no matter what country it’s in.
Another Olympic tradition seems to be popular cynicism. By the time we reach the opening ceremonies, the advertiser hype has already been cranked up for a year and the networks have been hard at work pre-curating our viewing experience. (It’s not enough for the Olympics to showcase elite international athletic competition—they have to create Memories that Will Last Forever and canonize a new crop of household heroes, every night at 9:38 p.m., live on tape.) And it wouldn’t be an Olympic year without fresh cheating and judging scandals that mar the purity of the Olympic ideal.
For Catholics, it seems like the Olympic ideal itself might suffer under scrutiny. Were not the modern Games, originated in 1896, based on competitions in ancient <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/is-catholicism-pagan">pagan</a> Greece, with their very name taken from the mountain where Zeus &amp; co. lived? Is not the conceit of the Games’ supposed transcendent ability to unite peoples a weak imposture of the only thing that can so unite them: <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/what-does-catholic-mean">Christ and his universal Church?</a>
I would say to both: yes, kind of. Certainly, the lore of the modern Olympics reaches back to ancient predecessors, who were pagan. And you can detect a hint of something quasi-religious about the glorification of athletic bodies (ever-more-immodestly clad with each iteration!) and about the idolization of sport as global Redeemer and Savior.
That said, I don’t think Catholics need to frown on the Olympics or avoid watching them (though I recommend skipping beach volleyball, or at least squinting heavily). In fact, there is much in this biannual festival for Catholics to admire and support.
The ancient Olympians were pagans, but the founder of the modern Olympics, a Frenchman named Pierre de Coubertin, was a devout Catholic. He set out not to revive worship of the Greek pantheon but to recapture what was worthy in classical culture. He saw in sport not a rival religion but a substitute for war; and in the striving for athletic excellence—with neither victory nor profit first in mind but effort and sportsmanship—he saw a chance to build virtue and perfect human nature in its unity of flesh and spirit.
The Olympic motto, Citius, Altius, Fortius (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) was devised, it should therefore not surprise us to hear, by a priest of the order whose philosophers emphasized that unity: the Dominican Henri Didon.
The twentieth century gave us not just the modern Olympic phenomenon but the Church’s premier athlete-pope in John Paul II. During his papacy, the zealous soccer player and skier offered numerous official greetings and blessings to Olympic organizers and competitors and to other athletic bodies. In <a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/messages/pont_messages/1984/documents/hf_jp-ii_mes_19840728_inizio-olimpiadi.html">his message</a> on the opening of the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, he endorsed both the virtue of athletic competition and the Olympics’ symbolic value for fostering international accord. “This great event,” he wrote,
<blockquote>has significance not only for the world of sport as the expression of friendly athletic competition and the striving for human excellence but also for the future of the human community, which through sport gives external expression to the desire of all for universal cooperation and understanding. I offer my heartiest congratulations to the men and women who are representing their countries and I hope that at this world-wide encounter they will be worthy models of peaceful harmony and human fellowship.</blockquote>
If the Olympics are pagan, they’re pagan in that grand, humanistic, admirable sense that the best of classical culture was—a sense that’s better than ninety-nine percent of the profane pablum that mean, mediocre modernity offers in its place. Despite all their imperfections, may they continue to inspire a natural standard of virtue and peace that, someday, grace may perfect in human hearts.

Are the Olympics Pagan?

<div>Is it sinful to leave work early?</div><div>If someone leaves work early with the permission or understanding of his boss then it is not a sin.
If someone leaves work early against the legitimate desire of his boss then it would be sinful.  When we work for someone else we have agreed to perform our jobs to the satisfaction of our boss or supervisor and follow their rules.
I used the term &#8220;legitimate desire&#8221; because there are clearly some circumstances where it would be sinful for the boss to desire his employee remain at work.  For example, if the employee&#8217;s child has been taken to the hospital and the employee wants to leave to go to the hospital.
</div>

Is It Sinful to Leave Work Early?

Can the Saints save you?

For anyone who has grown up in the Christian tradition, the Good Samaritan is a familiar story. Even in mainstream culture, the concept, if not the story itself, is pretty well embedded. And so you might find a lot of people who know something of what a “good Samaritan” is even without knowing anything about the parable as told in the Gospel of Luke.
The meaning of the mainstream concept sticks pretty closely to the literal meaning of the parable. The man asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”—seeking, perhaps, some excuse to limit the concept. The answer is classic Jesus, if we can put it that way. It’s not just that the category of “neighbor” includes people like the Samaritans—a people that any pious Jew in the first century would take great pains to avoid—but such a person, a heretic and a schismatic, is proposed as an example, above even a priest and a Levite, of someone who understands and practices the true heart of the Law.
The Lord is not here suggesting that heresy or schism don’t matter. It’s quite clear elsewhere in the Gospels that the Samaritans are in fact wrong, and they are in fact outsiders to the covenant. Doing good deeds in no way cancels out all those problems, so we should never read this parable as some kind of progressive tale about how religious differences are meaningless and we should all just be nice and get along. But the story does caution us against invoking boundaries in self-defeating ways. The boundaries that we have—whether we’re talking about the social-ethnic boundaries of ancient Israel or the sacramental and religious boundaries of the modern Christian landscape—are supposed to promote the authentic truth and goodness and beauty of divine revelation. They should never be an excuse from rationality or a mere cloak for petty sectarianism.
In other words, if a Samaritan can have mercy on a Jew, we should certainly be able to have mercy on a Samaritan—whoever that is for us. I don’t think this is meant to be very complicated, even if it remains challenging for people in every age.
But the sheer difficulty of this proposition—the fact that we so often do find excuses to avoid loving our neighbor as ourselves—gives us a little opening into the spiritual meaning of this parable that has been long recognized in the Tradition. How, if the priest and the Levite fail to follow the spirit of the Law, do the rest of us stand a chance? Who is this Samaritan?
When you’ve heard all your life, as many of us have, that the Good Samaritan is supposed to be a role model for us, it can be a bit shocking to realize that for the vast majority of Christians in history, our place in the story is not as the (potential) Samaritan, but as the semivif, the half-dead man on the road. (Indeed, if you have a pew missal from any time prior to 1970, you’ll likely see just this interpretation summarized in the notes on the Mass propers for the twelfth Sunday after Pentecost.)
The Samaritan, then, is Christ himself. The priest and the Levite are the ministers of the old Law—or perhaps the Law and the Prophets—who are unable to help. As St. Paul says, the Law is good at offering condemnation, but it does not provide the power to save, the power to heal us and elevate our nature. Christ, the Good Samaritan, heals our wounds—with wine and oil, pretty obvious symbols of the sacraments—and puts us in a hostel—that is, the Church—to provide for all our needs until he returns. He promises to pay for everything from his own resources.
I first encountered this classic interpretation in William Langland’s great fourteenth-century English poem, Piers Plowman. In that version, the priest and the Levite represent faith and hope. The Samaritan—you guessed it—is charity. But again, Langland emphasizes the inadequacy of the Old Covenant, represented by faith and hope, to heal the wounds of sin and death.
Here are the words of Langland’s Samaritan:
<blockquote>“Have them excused,” quoth he,“their help may little avail:
May no medicine under molde the man to health bring— 
Neither Faith nor fine Hope, so festered be his wounds, 
Without the blood of a bairn born of a maid.
And be he bathed in that blood, baptised as it were, 
And then plastered with penance and passion of that baby, 
He should stand and step—as stalwart worth he never 
Till he have eaten all the barn and his blood y-drunk.
(B-Version, Passus XVII)</blockquote>
It’s a graphic image—no doubt a bit much for modern ears. Bairn in Middle English means a child, but otherwise I think the lines are pretty clear. The child is Jesus, and it is only through his blood, which in some sense “bathes” us in baptism and nourishes us in the Eucharist, that we shall ever be able to stand on two feet again.
The wounds of sin are simply too “festered” to be aided by mere faith and hope. We have heard the lesson from Deuteronomy where Moses insists that the word is “very near” to us. It’s a beautiful description of what the Catholic tradition has often called the natural law. In other word, the moral law is not some arbitrary imposition from on high; it is embedded in the structure and reality of creation.
Even in the Old Testament, though, people need God’s help to know this law. It may be written on their hearts, but that writing is hard to read when the heart is weighed down and corrupted by sin. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see that even having an accurate understanding of the moral law is insufficient. It is only through grace—that is, through the intervention of Christ our Good Samaritan—that we can be healed. And it is only in holy Church, his halfway house between the world and our ultimate home, that this healing can continue until he returns.
Having understood this, though, we can return at last to the literal meaning of the parable, which is a lesson about loving our neighbor. If we have been so loved by God, if Christ has laid down his life for us, surely part of the healing and the power that he gives is the ability, in and through his grace, to ourselves act as neighbors—to risk ourselves on the dangerous highways of this world for the sake of the people that God created and loves and wants to bring home. As we receive his gifts of grace, his own body and blood, may we also share in his love for his people and his passionate desire to carry them home by way of the hospital that is the Church.

Heretics and the Good Samaritan

<div>Is applauding for the choir during Mass considered sacrilegious?</div><div>I would not say it is sacriligeous, but it is in very bad taste. Liturgical singing is not performance. The faithful should show their appreciation by singing along or participating, not by applauding. Priests should teach the faithful that this is not appropriate. What ends up happening is that no matter how mediocre or downright inferior the music is, the remaining people in church (since most have already left by the end of the song: in itself proof that hardly anyone understands what the music is for) applaud the choir. How sad.
</div>

Don’t Applaud the Choir

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Infant Baptism isn't JUST CATHOLIC!

A man—I&#8217;ll call him Robert—once wrote to me telling me a horror story about his ex-wife. To say she acted uncharitably during and after their separation and divorce would be an understatement. Of course, I am hearing only one side of the story, but his question boiled down to this: “Am I required to forgive her, even though she is not sorry for anything she has done, and then to forget about what she has done because God &#8216;forgets&#8217; when he forgives and calls us to do the same? I must confess to you that I just cannot live this because I believe she is dangerous to both me and our children.”
Scenarios like this—which, unfortunately, are not rare—raise some important questions about the nature of forgiveness. There are at least four points to be considered for clarifying the issues at hand:
1. We are not called to go beyond what God himself does when it comes to forgiveness. Many Christians believe with Robert that they are obliged to forgive even those who are not in the least bit sorry for their offenses. And on the surface this sounds really . . . Christian. But is it true? God himself doesn&#8217;t do it. He forgives only those who repent of their sins. 2 Corinthians 7:10 says, “Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation.” 1 John 1:9 says, &#8220;If we confess our sins, he . . . will forgive our sins.&#8221;
Our Lord obviously has not forgiven and will not forgive the souls in hell right now for the simple reason that they did not ask for forgiveness. This seems as clear as clear can be.
The question is, are we required to do more than God does when it comes to forgiveness? Jesus seems to answer for us in Luke 17:3-4:
<blockquote>If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him; and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, and says, &#8220;I repent,&#8221; you must forgive him.</blockquote>
According to this text, and as we would suspect, Jesus requires his followers to forgive only those who are sorry for their offenses, just as God does. And this only make sense. Colossians 3:13 says we are to called to forgive each other &#8220;as the Lord has forgiven [us].&#8221;
Some will say at this point, “Didn’t Jesus forgive everyone from the cross when he said, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do’ in Luke 23:34?” Actually, he didn’t. He petitioned the Father for those who had beaten and crucified him to be forgiven, revealing his will that “all men . . . be saved” (1 Tim. 2:4). But this was not a declaration that even these men were actually forgiven, much less a declaration that he was forgiving everyone for all time.
2. We have to distinguish between our calling to forgive those who are sorry and ask for forgiveness and our call to love everyone without exception, including those who have wronged us and are not sorry that they did. Sometimes these two concepts are conflated.
St. Thomas Aquinas tells us love is &#8220;willing the good of the other&#8221; selflessly (see also 1 Cor. 13:5). In a sense, this is all God can do, because &#8220;God is love&#8221; (1 John 4:8). God can do nothing other than will to share the infinite good of himself with every single person ever created or conceived—even the souls who reject his love and forgiveness, because a God not loving would be a God contradicting his own essence, which is absurd.
Thus, God&#8217;s love is unconditional because it comes from within, regardless of what happens outside the godhead. This brings profound meaning to Jesus&#8217; words: &#8220;Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12). In essence, Jesus is calling us to love with that same unconditional love with which he loves as the God-Man. Regardless of varying situations and relationships in our lives, &#8220;God&#8217;s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit&#8221; (Rom. 5:5), empowering us to &#8220;will the good of the other&#8221; regardless of what &#8220;the other&#8221; may bring our way.
On the other hand, forgiveness, as we&#8217;ve said, is not unconditional. It&#8217;s a two-way street. God offers his forgiveness to all out of his unconditional love and, therefore, so must all Christians. But here&#8217;s the rub. Because forgiveness is dependent upon the other, it cannot actually take place until there are willing partners on both sides of the divide.
3. But God says, &#8220;I am he who blots out your transgression for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins&#8221; (Isa. 25:23). Shouldn&#8217;t we do the same?
This was Robert&#8217;s point. &#8220;When God forgives, he forgets. So if we must forgive, we must forget as well, right?&#8221;
First of all, in Robert&#8217;s case, there is no imperative to forgive in the first place, because there is no evidence of contrition. But even if there were to be forgiveness here, forgiveness must be properly understood.
There is no such thing as divine amnesia. Jesus will not be forever in heaven asking, &#8220;How did these holes get in my hands and feet?&#8221; &#8220;I will not remember&#8221; is an anthropomorphic way of saying God will not forever hold sins against us that have been forgiven. This is not to say there are not temporal consequences for sin. <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/purgatory">Purgatory</a> is a stark reminder of this.
I must interject here that Robert was relieved when he discovered he did not have to turn his brain off and endanger his children in order to be a good Catholic. Poor Robert was thinking he had to forget everything his ex-wife had done and act as though she hadn&#8217;t done anything wrong. And that is why he thought he just could not live the faith any longer. The truth is, God does not &#8220;forget&#8221; in that sense, and neither should we. Not only should Robert remember what his ex-wife had done, but he should act with caution in order to protect himself and his children.
4. Jesus said, &#8220;Love your enemies&#8221; (Matt. 5:44). He did not say we have to &#8220;like&#8221; our enemies, and he did not say we don&#8217;t have enemies. If you proclaim and live truth contradicting a world receiving its marching orders from &#8220;the father of lies,&#8221; you are promised to have enemies. We could start with the guys who want to kill us. Put them down in the “enemies” column.
Jesus calls us to “love [our] enemies and pray for those who persecute [us], so that [we] may be sons of [our] Father who is in heaven.” That means love is not an option; it is a commandment. But loving enemies does not mean you necessarily want to have them over to the house for supper. “Love” doesn’t necessarily mean “like.” Indeed, it may be unhealthy or even dangerous to even be around your enemy, as may well be true in Robert&#8217;s case.
So what do we do if we find ourselves in a situation like Robert&#8217;s?
The first step to loving and forgiving as God does is to recognize that we cannot do it apart from Christ. It is essential to meditate upon what Christ did for us on the cross and the fact that he loves us infinitely and forgives us over and over again. Ultimately, we have to get to the place where we acknowledge our powerlessness so that we can allow Christ to love and forgive in us and through us.
I recommended to Robert specifically that he ask God to help him to truly will the good for his ex-wife—and a telling sign of whether this is so would be when he could sincerely pray to God for good to come to his ex-wife—then he could rest assured that he is loving her as Christ commanded.

Must I Forgive and Forget?

<div>I was told people are just parasites on the Earth, including babies in the womb. How should I respond to this?</div><div>A parasite is generally considered to be an organism that lives off another organism of a different type (the host) to the detriment of the host.
A baby in the womb is not a parasite because:
<ul>
<li>The baby is of the same species as the host (the mother). It is to the advantage of the human species that this relationship exist. Therefore, the relationship is not a detriment.</li>
<li>Human mothers have a placenta that shares nutrients with the baby. This is natural and normal and shows that the relationship between a mother and baby is symbiotic rather than parasitic.</li>
<li>The placenta is produced by the mother&#8217;s body for the purpose of nurturing a baby. The human body does not produce anything to purposely feed parasites.</li>
<li>It is a rare condition in which a mother&#8217;s immune system attacks the baby as if it were a parasite. If the baby were a parasite, this condition would be the norm rather than the exception.</li>
<li>A host-parasite relationship is to the benefit of one and the detriment of the other, but the body of the mother cooperates with the body of the baby during pregnancy.</li>
<li>Parasites come from the outside the host; a baby comes from inside the mother.</li>
</ul>
As to whether humans are parasites of the Earth, that too is a mischaracterization of the definition of a parasite. Human beings are not inherently dangerous to the Earth. Human beings can live without being detrimental to their environment. If we consider any living thing that takes anything to survive from some other living thing, then every living thing would be a parasite. Animals eat grass, animals eat other animals; if the balance of nature gets out of wack in a certain environment, then one species could overwhelm the others.
The fact that human beings can live in harmony with the environment and can actually help the environment means that we are not parasites in the true sense of the word. Obviously, we could refuse to do so and harm the environment, but that would be a sinful choice and not a necessity of survival for the human race.
</div>

Why Humans Are Not Parasites

In the Gospel reading for Easter Sunday, we hear a curious detail about the empty tomb of Jesus. Mary Magdalene had run to John and Peter to tell them that the stone had been rolled away and the body of the Lord was gone, and the two apostles, in turn, run to the tomb to see for themselves. John, arriving first, sees the burial cloths, but Peter, arriving second, also sees “the cloth that had covered his head, not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place” (John 20:7).
This is a strange, and strangely specific, description—one that it is easy to pass over as mere decoration. But it merits serious attention, because it shines a light on what was, as far as we know, the very first act of the risen Jesus. The resurrection of Christ from the dead, without which our faith “is in vain” (1 Cor. 15:20)—and indeed, that whole sacred time between his resurrection and ascension, when the glory of the new creation shone in the old—begins with this simple yet deeply mysterious gesture.
What does it mean? Gregory the Great in the sixth century offers three fascinating spiritual senses of this passage, especially focusing on the head cloth (or “napkin”). He writes,
<blockquote>The napkin about our Lord’s head is not found with the linen clothes—i.e., God, the Head of Christ, and the incomprehensible mysteries of the Godhead are removed from our poor knowledge. His power transcends the nature of creature.
And it is found not only apart, but also wrapped together. Because of the linen wrapped together, neither beginning nor end is seen, and the height of the divine nature had neither beginning nor end.
And it is into one place: for where there is division, God is not, and they merit his grace who do not occasion scandal dividing themselves into sects.
But as a napkin is what is used in laboring to wipe the sweat of the brow, by the napkin here we may understand the labor of God—which napkin is found apart, because the suffering of our Redeemer is far removed from ours; inasmuch as he suffered innocently that which we suffer justly; he submitted himself to death voluntarily, we by necessity.</blockquote>
But what about the literal meaning? Why did Jesus leave behind his burial wrappings, roll up the head cloth, and put the latter in a separate place? And why did the apostles notice this, and John record it?
<h2>1. This was no grave-robbing.</h2>
A classic answer, stretching back to John Chrysostom in the fourth century, is that the burial cloths were positioned to debunk Mary’s grave-robber hypothesis: “They have taken the Lord from the tomb” (John 20:2).
“If any persons had removed the body of Jesus,” Chrysostom asks in a homily, “would they have stripped it before doing so? Or if anyone had stolen it, would they have taken the trouble to remove the cloth, and roll it up, and lay it in a place by itself? They would have taken the body as it was.” Myrrh, Chrysostom adds, “glues linen to the body even more firmly than lead”; thus, unwrapping it would have been a painstaking process. No grave-robber could have taken that long or been that careful. “From this,” Chrysostom concludes, “the disciples believe in the Resurrection.” Indeed, the Gospel adds that after “the other disciple” goes into the tomb with Peter, “he saw and believed” (John 20:8).
A complicating factor in Chrysostom’s explanation is the strange clarification in the very next verse: “For as yet they did not know the scripture, that he must rise from the dead.” No less an authority than Augustine draws an uncomfortable conclusion from these two verses taken together: “He saw the sepulcher empty and believed what the woman had said—that is, that Jesus had been taken away from the tomb.” John’s “belief,” Augustine thinks, wasn’t in the Resurrection at all, but rather in Mary’s report that someone had stolen the body; therefore, the cloths didn’t serve as evidence for it—at least not in that moment. In support of Augustine’s view, the disciples, we hear, immediately returned home and locked the door (John 20:10, 19), which suggests a continued attitude of defeat and fear.
Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on this passage, puts forward both Chrysostom’s and Augustine’s reading but seems to favor the former’s by giving him the last word. And this has come to be the majority view: that John’s belief was in the Resurrection, and therefore the cloths served as evidence for it.
As for making sense of the next verse, there are various proposals. Perhaps “they” refers to Peter and Mary, not Peter and John; or perhaps it’s only the full scriptural context of the Resurrection they don’t yet understand, meaning John’s belief was still inchoate; or perhaps the line simply means that he had not yet believed until that moment.
Regardless of where we fall in this debate concerning John’s reaction, one thing seems clear: The cloths do communicate, in themselves, that this was no grave-robbing.
<h2>2. Resurrection, not resuscitation.</h2>
But doesn’t this feel, on its own, inadequate in explaining the risen Christ’s first act? Wouldn’t John, like the others, very soon see him with his own eyes and rejoice (John 20:20, 1 John 1)? And wouldn’t we, centuries later, believe without seeing him (or the empty tomb), regardless of whether John noticed the cloths or not? The cloths are certainly further evidence, in retrospect, in support of the Resurrection, but that evidence doesn’t seem essential either for John or for us.
Here, a second meaning presents itself: the contrast with Christ’s raising of Lazarus, and thus the unique quality of Christ’s own rising. Lazarus, we read earlier in the Gospel of John, is buried in linens and a head cloth, and he emerges from the tomb still bound in them. It is Jesus who commands that he be unbound (John 11:44). Lazarus’s raising is only partial and provisional; he’s been resuscitated, but he will one day be ensnared again by those same “cords of death” (Ps. 18:4).
Jesus, in contrast, leaves all the bonds behind in the tomb, fully in control of every detail. This raising was thus qualitatively different from Lazarus’s, and from anything else in the disciples’ frame of reference. Christ wasn’t back from the dead like a zombie or a ghost; he was standing, somehow, over and against death itself on the other side of it. “The empty tomb and the linen cloths lying there signify in themselves that by God&#8217;s power Christ&#8217;s body had escaped the bonds of death and corruption” (CCC 657).
This could help explain, too, why the head cloth is given such special attention. The head is, of course, the distinctively human locus of sight and thought, and therefore of all that goes wrong with both: the lust of the eyes, the darkening of the mind (1 John 2:16; Eph. 4:18). It’s also the locus of the “wages of sin” (Rom. 6:23)—that is, of biological death. By neatly placing the head cloth off to the side, Jesus underscores, with great subtlety, a message of hope: sin and death have no hold on him—or us. “Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and ever; and I have the keys of Death and of Hades” (Rev. 1:17–18).
<h2>3. A “first communion” of heaven and earth.</h2>
But doesn’t this second meaning, too, leave us looking for more? It seems that Jesus could have communicated this same essential truth by leaving the cloths in two wild heaps. Why this activity of rolling up or folding the head cloth? Is it just an “extra” sign of the unique fact of the Resurrection? Or is there perhaps a third meaning here—one that doesn’t move from the act to the truth of the Resurrection, but the other way around?
Imagine the inside of the tomb in that first sacred moment Easter morning. Picture the silence, the darkness, the lingering smell of blood. Suddenly, there he is: “Death has been swallowed up in victory” (1 Cor. 15:54). The battle is over, and Christ—though still bearing his wounds—is triumphant over all the world’s darkness. The Father gazes at him, and he gazes back. A new world has arrived.
What now? He could immediately roll away the stone and emerge; instead, he lingers. In the tomb, there are only two things: himself and his burial cloths. He is glorified; the cloths are not. He inhabits a new world; they inhabit the old.
Yet rather than change them into something else or even obliterate them, he lovingly folds the head cloth with his pierced hands. He who makes “all things new” (Rev. 21:5) first makes this cloth new. This is, as it were, a “first communion” of heaven and earth post-Resurrection—a first tasting, here and now, of the “first fruits” of what’s to come (1 Cor. 15:20)—and a faint momentum shift after that great inflection point. Though he doesn’t take the cloth with him, he nevertheless claims it for his own by his peaceful action upon it. This is, simultaneously, an exceedingly simple human act—the tiniest sign of good order familiar to anyone who has ever struggled over a laundry pile or bedcover—and sanctified beyond measure by the Lord’s involvement. There is no such thing as too small a matter in his hands. To enter into the life of the pilgrim Church on earth is to enter into this holy work begun in the tomb, gathering with him rather than scattering (Matt. 12:30, Luke 11:23).
Christ’s first act with the burial cloths does indeed provide evidence for the Resurrection and convey its unique meaning. This was no grave-robbing or resuscitation; if it were, the cloths, too, would have been missing. But perhaps we might also see in it a mysterious first enactment, by Christ, of the new creation—and a powerful summation of what it means to live and die a Christian.

The First Thing Resurrected Jesus Did

<div>What was God doing before he created the universe? </div><div>St. Augustine confronted this question in the fifth century. He noted that others jokingly responded that for all eternity God was making hell for people who ask questions like that. Augustine’s more serious response was that prior to the creation of the world there was no time. It makes no sense to ask what God was doing prior to the creation of the world, because<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-it-impossible-that-god-created-the-universe"> the creation of the world</a> also included the first moment of time.
Time can be a difficult thing to understand, but one common-sense view is to think of time as a measurement of change. If God existed in a changeless, perfect state without the universe, then our mental picture of a lonely God passing countless idle eons is a flawed one. God exists without time because <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/god-is-both-immutable-and-active">he does not change</a>. The Bible even says, “Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas. 1:17).
</div>

What was God doing before he created the universe?

<div>A teen wants to know where did Jesus DNA come from? Since we get our DNA from male and female parent, this teen is doubting the humanity of Jesus.</div><div>Mary is the Mother of God, the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. Consequently, Jesus received his DNA from the Blessed Mother, Mary and, by extension, her direct ancestors.
It is biologically correct that Mary could not have provided a Y chromosome for the conception of Jesus. Indeed, modern science affirms that women have XX chromosomes, whereas men have XY.
However, for the X and Y male chromosomes, the Holy Spirit provided them miraculously at the Incarnation, whether by genetically altering Mary’s DNA or in some other way. Which my colleague Jimmy Akin affirms via in a 2020 edition of our Catholic Answer Live show (<a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/cal/weird-questions-11">the Q&amp;A begins at 24:35ff</a>.)
For more on the humanity and divinity of Jesus, please read the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), 456ff.
In addition, St. Thomas Aquinas addresses the issue of Mary&#8217;s divine motherhood indirectly in the Summa Theologiae (ST):
<blockquote>We must therefore say that in Christ’s conception itself she did not cooperate actively, but merely supplied the matter thereof. Nevertheless, before the conception she cooperated actively in the preparation of the matter so that it should be apt for the conception (<a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4032.htm#article4">ST III, q. 32, a. 4, resp.</a>).</blockquote>
In other words, while Mary provided the human matter in terms of what she could, that is, a human ovum, she still needed God’s assistance to conceive. Indeed, as St. Luke provides, Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:31, 34–35). Thus, somehow the Holy Spirit supernaturally provided that which, in purely human cases, would be provided by a human father.
Further, this doesn’t mean that the Holy Spirit is the Father of Jesus. As St. Thomas adds:
<blockquote>And therefore we can fittingly say that Christ was conceived of the Holy Ghost in such a way that the efficiency of the Holy Ghost be referred to the body assumed, and the consubstantiality to the Person assuming (<a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4032.htm#article2">ST III, q. 32, a. 2, resp.</a>, emphasis added). . . .
Wherefore, although in His human nature He was created and justified, He ought not to be called the Son of God, either in respect of His being created or of His being justified, but only in respect of His eternal generation, by reason of which He is the Son of the Father alone. Therefore nowise should Christ be called the Son of the Holy Ghost, nor even of the whole Trinity (<a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/4032.htm#article3">ST III, q. 32, a. 3, resp</a>., emphasis added).</blockquote>
In summary, while the Holy Spirit was fundamental to the Incarnation, and therefore Christ’s assuming a human nature, Jesus’ divine Sonship is a matter of eternal generation, and thus his only Father is God the Father.
</div>

Where Did Jesus Get his DNA?

One of the most dangerous things that we can get wrong in Catholic theology is what the Church means by invincible ignorance. The Catechism reaffirms the traditional teaching that “outside the Church there is no salvation” and then explains that “this affirmation is not aimed at those who, through no fault of their own, do not know Christ and his Church,” quoting the Second Vatican Council (Lumen Gentium 16) that “those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience—those too may achieve eternal salvation” (847). This ignorance—“through no fault of their own”—is what the Catechism means by invincible ignorance.
Understood properly, this is what Catholics have always believed, and what Scripture plainly teaches. But it’s possible to misunderstand the teaching in two serious (and dangerous) ways.
First, let’s consider what this teaching does mean. In short, it means that we’ll be judged based on what we knew (or should have known), not for what we didn’t have the power to know. Jesus gives the standard that “every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required; and of him to whom men commit much they will demand the more” (Luke 12:48). God gives some people more helps than others, but he also expects more of those people. In the parable of the talents, the Master (clearly representing God) “called his servants and entrusted to them his property; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability” (Matt. 25:14-15).
In his commentary on the parable, the Lutheran scholar <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Parables_of_Jesus/P2UvmRVLF18C?hl=en&amp;gbpv=1&amp;pg=PA274&amp;printsec=frontcover">Arland Hultgren points out</a> that “the sums distributed to the three slaves are enormous,” since a single talent was worth 6,000 denarii (a denarius being the standard daily wage for a laborer), or about sixteen years’ worth of salary. In other words, there is no one whom the Master leaves empty-handed or ill equipped. There are only those to whom “much is given” and those who to whom even more is given. When it comes to divine assistance, no one is poor: there are only the rich and the super-rich. Everyone has at least natural law and conscience, as St. Paul points out (Rom. 2:13-16):
<blockquote>For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified. When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.</blockquote>
The first error, then, is thinking people are more ignorant than they are: imagining that there are people out there living in some sort of state of blissful ignorance, unaware of the moral law or the demands of conscience, and that this ignorance is a sort of “Go Straight to Heaven” card. Outside those with severe mental impairments, that’s a terrible misunderstanding of what Scripture and experience teach about those who have never heard of Christianity. Instead, we find people trying to make it through life with only conscience and natural law, without the aids of divine revelation or the saving waters of baptism or sacramental confession or any of the other tools Jesus gives us to aid us in our journey. The truth is, the gospel really is good news, capable of saving non-believers (not endangering their salvation), which is why Christ commands that we “make disciples of all nations” while “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19-20).
But the second error is thinking people are less ignorant than they really are: that invincible ignorance means only those who lack information. The biblical evidence paints a different picture. Jesus, on the cross, cries out, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Reading that, we might think of <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1965-malcolm-x-speech-ford-auditorium/">Malcolm X</a> mocking the nonviolent approach of many in the Civil Rights Movement: “You sit there when they’re putting the rope around your neck saying, ‘Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do.’ As long as they’ve been doing it, they’re experts at it, they know what they’re doing!” Likewise, how can Jesus say “they know not what they do”? Who knew crucifixion better than the Romans, and who knew theology better than the high priest and scribes and Pharisees? Yet St. Peter says the same thing, telling the “men of Israel” that they “denied the holy and righteous one, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and killed the author of life,” but that “I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:12-17).
It’s easy to think of “ignorance” as those who have literally never heard the gospel. But the people the Bible is calling ignorant did hear. Jesus reminds those who arrested him about how “day after day I sat in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me” (Matt. 26:55). They had been closely watching and listening to him. We hear throughout the Gospels about how “the Pharisees came and began to argue with him, seeking from him a sign from heaven, to test him” (Mark 8:11), and how “the scribes and the Pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find an accusation against him” (Luke 6:7), and how they debated among themselves what to do about him by saying, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on thus, every one will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation” (John 11:47-48).
When we talk about those in “ignorance” about the gospel, we might imagine someone on a desert island who’s never heard of Jesus Christ. The scribes and Pharisees were nearly the opposite, yet somehow both Jesus and Peter can say they acted in ignorance.
Instead of lacking information, it’s probably better to think of invincible ignorance with regard to understanding. Think about it this way. In the fourteenth century, the election of Pope Urban VI was disputed, meaning that two different men (Urban and Antipope Clement VII) both credibly claimed to be the pope. As the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/pope-urban-vi">Catholic Encyclopedia</a> notes, “the saints themselves were divided: St Catherine of Siena, St. Catherine of Sweden, Bl. Peter of Aragon, Bl. Ursulina of Parma, Philippe d’Alencon, and Gerard de Groote were in the camp of Urban; St. Vincent Ferrer, Bl. Peter of Luxemburg, and St. Colette belonged to the party of Clement.” Both the saints who chose correctly and those who chose incorrectly possessed the same information (the basic facts were known to all), but some of them understood that information, while others, through no apparent fault of their own, misunderstood.
A Catholic who knew that Urban was the true pope and refused to submit to him would be sinning gravely and endangering his own salvation. But both these fourteenth-century saints, and the first-century Jewish leaders demonstrate that there is such a thing as an ignorance of understanding, even among those who have all the right information.
In the last analysis, the question of which people are and aren’t “ignorant” (and which types of ignorance really are “through no fault of their own”) is known to God alone. I’m reminded of the Seal of the President of the United States, which has an eagle on it with olive branches (representing peace) in one talon and arrows (representing war) in the other. We hope for the best but prepare for the worst. We have been shown enough to know that we need to share the good news widely, and that we need to entrust others (including especially those who seem to knowingly reject the Faith!) to the justice and the mercy of the God who knows their heart.