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Many Catholics are unaware that Holy Thursday commemorates the institution of Christ’s ministerial priesthood. Perhaps this is due to the absence of Christ explicitly ordaining the apostles in the Last Supper narratives. Are there clues that suggest such an ordination? Karlo Broussard gives the answer.
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Transcript:
Most Catholics are aware that Holy Thursday commemorates Jesus’ Last Supper as the First Mass. But what some miss is that Holy Thursday also celebrates Jesus’ institution of the ministerial priesthood.
When you read the Last Supper narratives in the Synoptic Gospels you don’t find Jesus ordaining the apostles. You’re left wondering, “Where does the Catholic Church get off thinking that Jesus made the apostles priests at the Last Supper?”
There are three clues that support this claim.
First, Jesus commands the apostles to “do this remembrance of me.” The Greek verb for “do,” poieo, can be translated literally as “offer” in the sense of offering a sacrifice, as it is in in Leviticus 9:7 of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament).
Now, offering sacrifice is a priestly function. Therefore, Jesus’ command to offer the Last Supper as a sacrifice suggests that Jesus made his apostles ministerial priests.
A second clue is the washing of the apostles’ feet in John 13:5. This calls to mind the ritual washings of Aaron and his sons, which included the washing of their feet, at their priestly ordination in Exodus 40.
Finally, Jesus says in John 13:8 that the apostles could not take “part” in him unless they were washed. The Greek word for “part,” meros, echoes Numbers <a class="yt-simple-endpoint style-scope yt-formatted-string" spellcheck="false" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdGd59Yj8r4&amp;t=1100s">18:20</a> and Deuteronomy 10:9, which refer to the “portion” (Greek—meris) that Aaron and the Levites have in God as priests.
So, did Jesus make the apostles priests at the Last Supper? I think these exegetical points give us sufficient reason to answer yes.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com.
For Catholic Answers, I’m Karlo Broussard. Thanks for watching.

Did Jesus Make The Apostles Priests?

<div>May a baby be baptized during lent? </div><div>Yes, infants may be baptized during Lent.  There is no Church law or liturgical guideline that prevents or discourages the baptism of infants during the Lenten season.
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May a Baby Be Baptized During Lent?

There is a joke that Jesuits don’t worry about meeting Christ in the afterlife as much as they worry about meeting St. Ignatius.
There are reasons why Jesuits are called “Jesuitical,” referring to the perception that they employ fast-and-loose justifications around hard facts of faith that Ignatius of Loyola lived and died for. It’s tragic that the Jesuits now evoke a slinking, sidewinding spirituality that integrates too closely with the wayward world, compromising Catholic teaching to justify a “new” Catholic position.
The great missionary and founder of the Society of Jesus departed this earth on July 31, 1556. The current state of his order would likely incite his soldierly wrath. Such heroic Jesuits as Francis Xavier, Claver, Borgia, Brébeuf, Hopkins, and Schall once dominated our view of the Society of Jesus; now, on the contrary, it seems people can summon to mind one or two remaining “good Jesuits” amid a whole lot of “less good” ones. The Jesuits as an order have entrenched a reputation in recent times as the radical progressives of the Catholic Church. And the tendencies that have taken root in the Jesuits are the same as in progressive politics, so it is little wonder that Jesuits not infrequently take up <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/confusion-in-the-kingdom/">leftist causes</a> in a dangerous blend of Church and state.
The Jesuits leaned into action and breaking new ground. Ignatius himself, for example, vied to <a href="https://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/2009/10/compendium-of-reforms-of-roman-breviary_06.html">unshackle his men</a> from the well-respected custom of singing the Divine Office in choir—this not to disdain tradition, but rather out of single-minded zeal to open up opportunities for apostolic missionary work. Regardless of their saintly founder’s motivation, this trailblazing inclination brought the Jesuits more into the political sphere, and over time, more into the liberal sphere. The Jesuits have been drinking political water for some time—and now there’s something in the water.
Let us take a brief look at the life of Ignatius, this hero of the Faith, to see the origin of the Society of Jesus. Born in the Castle of Loyola in Guipuscoa, Spain, 1491, Ignatius was reared from his boyhood in the arts of chivalry, and after his unruly and amorous service at the court of Ferdinand V of Aragon, he was stationed at the barracks of Pamplona in 1517. Ignatius heroically led his comrades in the defense of the city against France’s siege, falling only after a cannonball shattered his right leg.
Ignatius’s convalescence was prolonged and painful. The boisterous knight lay restless, and though his reading had to that point been devoted to the escapades of Amadis of Gaul and El Cid, all he had on hand at this time were the life of Jesus Christ and the lives of the saints. Ignatius found in them chivalric battles and enraptured ends that put all his beloved legends in the context of a larger drama of which he had never dreamed. The Crusades were enkindled in the wounded knight of Loyola as he vowed to rival the saints in sanctity. He swore to take Jerusalem from the hands of the heathen, laid his naked sword across his knees, and waited.
As soon as he could walk, Ignatius went to the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria de Montserrat, placed his armor before an image of Mary, and then went to a cave in the solitude of Manresa, where he spent ten months in self-mortification. Ignatius prepared his heart for a new type of battle, training in the arms of the spirit, strengthening his resolve to serve heaven through prayer and fasting. There in that cave, Ignatius learned asceticism and discovered the foundation of his Spiritual Exercises. He emerged lean and battered but happy—ready to storm the Holy Land.
Six followers gathered around this strange and striking ascetic. Ignatius led them like a military officer in serving the poor, in study, and in community prayer. Together, they vowed lifelong labor as missionaries. The Society of Jesus was born. These first Jesuits crossed the Alps toward Jerusalem, but they found Venice ravaged by war with the Turks and their passage blocked. In Venice they were ordained to the priesthood, and turning their footsteps toward Rome, they placed themselves under Pope Paul III, who approved the order in 1540 and named Ignatius the first superior general.
Jesuit spirituality was marked by unwavering faith, indomitability, and intellectual acumen. The Jesuits clashed with Protestants, rescued beleaguered Catholics from England, and defended the borders of France from heresy. No challenge was too daunting, difficult, or dangerous. They marched to India, China, and Japan. They sailed to the New World. They conquered countless souls for Christ.
The Jesuits have always sought to be the tip of the spear. Such motivation can lead to new ideas that are not as sound as old ideas. The healthy urge for discovery goes astray when liberal humanitarianism creeps in, with openness, however mentally justified, to shifting traditional paradigms. The cutting-edge quality of the Jesuits is a reason why they are often accused of being more political than theological. The progressive character of the Jesuits has brought the order to slippery theological places while giving it a place of regard within the eye of progressive politics, who are comfortable on slippery slopes. The unnatural positions adopted by both the left and many Jesuits regarding human sexuality and society are clear indications of a bad direction.
All this is not to denounce the holy order of St. Ignatius or wallow in thoughts of its decline. The Jesuits’ missionary zeal changed the world in tremendous ways. But now the world is having its revenge. It is terrible how effectively the secular can seize and twist the spiritual. But the world will not have the last word.
Ignatius was a knight who charged the giants of his day with the unconquerable valor of Don Quixote, proving himself, through buffets and bruises, a mighty champion who led an army on for the greater glory of God. It is never too late, and the Jesuits, by the persistence of their patron, can yet be brought back from the brink and earn a better judgment.

St. Ignatius and the Jesuits

<div>What is non-theism?</div><div>Non-theism includes a range of beliefs that reject traditional belief in God. This includes denials of God&#8217;s existence, such as atheism, or skeptical attitudes toward God&#8217;s existence, such as agnosticism. It also includes religious beliefs that do not include worship of God, such as pantheism and some forms of Buddhism.
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What Is Non-Theism?

Does the Good Thief Disprove Purgatory?

Yesterday’s reading at Mass contained that most marvelously pithy saying of John the Baptist from John’s gospel: “I must decrease. He must increase.”
Today we see this play out in Luke’s account of the Lord’s baptism in the Jordan. This is, let’s remember, pretty incredible. People wanted John to be the Christ. If he had said he was the Christ, they would have had no trouble believing him. And John takes that potential power and influence and casually sets it aside.
His humility paves the way for the even greater humility of the true Christ, who himself enters the waters for John to baptize. Our Gospel selection for today doesn’t include some of the dialogue reported elsewhere between John and Jesus, but in a way, it’s predictable. John is confused. He has been talking all this time about the one who is greater than he, whose sandals he is not worthy to untie, who will baptize the world with fire, and this great anointed one approaches him and asks to be baptized like everybody else. Really, Lord, why? I mean, shouldn’t you be baptizing me?
This is part of a large pattern in the Gospels. Perhaps one reason this story appears to us in the immediate context of the Christmas season is that we are conscious of the Son of God’s human vulnerability and humility. This is all headed to the cross, but before that we find Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and declaring that he calls them not slaves, but friends.
At the baptism, Jesus is publicly identified as the Son of the Father, and this identity is witnessed by the Spirit in the form of a dove. Various heretics in the early centuries, grouped together under the loose label adoptionism, saw this as a moment when the human person Jesus was somehow elevated to divinity. Church councils repeatedly rejected this theory in the first several centuries, even as the formal articulation of Trinitarian and Christological doctrine developed. But the problem I have with this view of the baptism is that it seems to miss the way it fits in with the whole gospel trajectory. If the baptism necessitates some kind of progression or elevation of Christ, so does virtually every other incident of his life. If it is merely human to submit to baptism, what would it take to submit to crucifixion?
In fact, the Fathers’ reading of this story show how it is precisely Christ’s divinity, in his baptism, that makes the difference. Christ was not baptized so that he might be sanctified in the water and become somehow more divine. He was baptized so that he might sanctify the water.
What does it mean to sanctify or consecrate something? It means to set it apart, to mark it somehow. That is the most fundamental meaning of holiness—including, as a transcendent example, the holiness of God. God is utterly unique; he has no equal, no real comparison. When we are baptized, we are consecrated; we are set apart by what the Letter to Titus calls the “laver of regeneration” and the “renovation of the Holy Ghost.” And water has specifically been set apart for this purpose.
But think about this: when we are baptized, is this consecration something ultimately contrary to our nature? True, it is an elevation of our nature, yet it is an elevation that was always intended—our nature was, from the beginning, oriented toward supernatural fellowship with God. And so it is not so much that baptism changes us—though from the perspective of sin, it certainly does that—but that it restores and reanimates what we truly are.
We can apply that to other kinds of consecrations. When we bless water for baptism, we aren’t adding something to water; we are in a way reminding water of its true purpose, which is the life of God. When Jesus entered the waters of the Jordan, he wasn’t somehow invading nature with a foreign substance. He was meeting his own creation face to face and saying, “Remember me?”
There is a liturgical and sacramental shape to creation. When we celebrate the Mass, part of the miracle is not so much to realize that bread and wine can become body and blood, but to realize that so much of the time, they do not do so even though they could. Think of it as pulling back the curtain and showing the true purpose of all time and space—which is to say that it is the time and the place for fellowship with God. This is why we have—in the normal sense—sacred times and sacred places: to heighten our senses and our intellectual contemplation of the fact that God has entered all times and all places to the end of bringing all things into the light of his glory.
Today, as we remember the Lord’s baptism, remember also the hope that it contains—the hope that all things can and will be restored to God’s goodness. In our own baptisms, we were restored to who we are, but it is only in holding fast to our communion with Christ that we can remain who we are. We can say, with John the Baptist, I must decrease; he must increase.
Another way of putting it is this: if I am only myself alone, I am not even that. I can find who I am only in the voice of the one who calls me beloved, who knew me even before I knew myself, and who will call me again to himself in the last day. Amen.

Jesus Greets the Water

Easter Vigil Mass celebrated by Fr. Paul Check at St. John Fisher Seminary.
Exsultet
Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven, exult, let Angel ministers of God exult, let the trumpet of 
salvation sound aloud our mighty King&#8217;s triumph! Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her, 
ablaze with light from her eternal King, let all corners of the earth be glad, knowing an end to gloom 
and darkness. Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice, arrayed with the lightning of his glory, let 
this holy building shake with joy, filled with the mighty voices of the peoples. Therefore, dearest 
friends, standing in the awesome glory of this holy light, invoke with me, I ask you, the mercy of 
God almighty, that he, who has been pleased to number me, though unworthy, among the Levites, 
may pour into me his light unshadowed, that I may sing this candle&#8217;s perfect praises.
V. The Lord be with you. 
R. And with your spirit. 
V. Lift up your hearts. 
R. We lift them up to the Lord. 
V. Let us give thanks to the Lord our God. 
R. It is right and just.
It is truly right and just, with ardent love of mind and heart and with devoted service of our voice, 
to acclaim our God invisible, the almighty Father, and Jesus Christ, our Lord, his Son, his Only 
Begotten. Who for our sake paid Adam&#8217;s debt to the eternal Father, and, pouring out his own dear 
Blood, wiped clean the record of our ancient sinfulness. These, then, are the feasts of Passover, in 
which is slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb, whose Blood anoints the doorposts of believers. This 
is the night, when once you led our forebears, Israel&#8217;s children, from slavery in Egypt and made them 
pass dry-shod through the Red Sea. This is the night that with a pillar of fire banished the darkness 
of sin. This is the night that even now, throughout the world, sets Christian believers apart from 
worldly vices and from the gloom of sin, leading them to grace and joining them to his holy ones. 
This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the 
underworld. Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed. O wonder of your 
humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son! 
O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that 
earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer! O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and 
hour when Christ rose from the underworld! This is the night of which it is written: The night shall 
be as bright as day, dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness. The sanctifying power of this 
night dispels wickedness, washes faults away, restores innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners, 
drives out hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty. On this, your night of grace, O holy 
Father, accept this candle, a solemn offering, the work of bees and of your servants’ hands, an 
evening sacrifice of praise, this gift from your most holy Church. But now we know the praises of 
this pillar, which glowing fire ignites for God&#8217;s honor, a fire into many flames divided, yet never 
dimmed by sharing of its light, for it is fed by melting wax, drawn out by mother bees to build a 
torch so precious. O truly blessed night, when things of heaven are wed to those of earth, and divine 
to the human. Therefore, O Lord, we pray you that this candle, hallowed to the honor of your name, 
may persevere undimmed, to overcome the darkness of this night. Receive it as a pleasing fragrance, 
and let it mingle with the lights of heaven. May this flame be found still burning by the Morning 
Star: the one Morning Star who never sets, Christ your Son, who, coming back from death&#8217;s domain, 
has shed his peaceful light on humanity, and lives and reigns for ever and ever. R. Amen.

Easter Vigil Mass: April 11, 2020

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DAY 121
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CHALLENGE
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“Catholic apologists say we must not use ‘private judgment,’ but we can’t avoid it. The point of apologetics is to convince someone to use his private judgment to accept a position.”
DEFENSE
This misunderstands the role that our exercise of reason plays.
It should be pointed out that, whatever happens in apologetic discussions, the theme of “private judgment” is remarkably rare in Church documents. The phrase does not appear at all in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and when it does appear in Church documents, it does not reject the role of the intellect in theology.
That would scarcely be likely given the rich intellectual tradition of Catholic theology, which has always celebrated the contributions of theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and others as gifts from God. Indeed, God has granted every individual an intellect, and he expects them to use this gift “that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” (Acts 17:27; cf. CCC 31–38).
Apologetics thus has an important role providing evidence so that people can understand the reasons for embracing the Faith—whether it is understood as the Christian faith broadly or the Catholic Faith specifically.
When understanding and appreciating this evidence, the individual exercise of reason is indispensible. However, once one has come to the point of faith, the situation changes, because we no longer rely on reason alone but on God’s revelation.
Jesus did not start a philosophy club but a religion. He “taught them as one who had authority” (Mark 1:22), proclaiming God’s definitive word to man (John 1:4; Heb. 1:1–2; Jude 3). Consequently, when one embraces faith in Christ, one must accept certain things as authoritative that one did not accept before the point of faith. It is here that the individual exercise of reason can become problematic.
It is praiseworthy to exercise one’s intellect in accord with the authorities established by Christ, as the great theologians have done. How- ever, it is problematic to exercise one’s intellect contrary to them. This was the origin of the heresies that have arisen in Christian history.
Both Protestants and Catholics agree that it is a mistake to prefer one’s “private judgment” to the authorities established by Christ. The question is what the authorities are and how we are to understand them.
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Private Judgment

For several decades now, our culture has associated Christianity, and especially traditional, creedal, Catholic Christianity, with “family values.” This association cuts across the Catholic/Protestant divide, and the idea is further tangled up in American political identity and modern disputes about the direction of liberal society.
Back when I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, there was “Focus on the Family” in the evangelical world. Now we have a variety organizations attempting to promote what they see as authentic human and social virtue amid the increasingly hostile secular space, where pride, pleasure, and personal autonomy have emerged as the lone permitted path to peace and happiness. Whether the shrill voices on the so-called left and right are anything more than noise, we can certainly understand the basic problems that go with a culture seems intent to untether itself from basic human realities, which we would call natural law. The natural human family—the natural relationships among fathers, mothers, and children—does in many places seem lost to the competing vision of human life as merely the quest to do whatever we happen to want, to be whatever we want to be, and to employ science and technology as unregulated tools to accomplish those arbitrary ends.
So if we have been accustomed to a certain role in that culture war, as Catholics who defend the moral principle behind the Fourth Commandment—honor your father and mother—against these hostile forces, it can come as a shock to recall the Lord’s hard words here in Luke 12:
<blockquote>Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division; for henceforth in one house there will be five divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against her mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.</blockquote>
Perhaps at the moment, having experienced such divisions in real time, the words did not come across quite as shocking. But we have to read these in the aftermath of the many declarations of the Lord’s peace, especially after his resurrection! Isn’t he the Prince of Peace? Doesn’t he say, in the upper room, “Peace be with you”?
These are contradictory only if you take for granted that there is only one kind of peace. But the Lord does clue us in here. Before his passion, Jesus says to his disciples in John’s Gospel, words echoed quietly by the priest at every Mass, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27).
Not as the world gives. What does that mean? The world’s “peace” could be the temporary end to conflict. It could mean compromise between opposing forces. It could be the peace imposed and protected by a victorious army. It is external, pragmatic peace. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is distinct from the “peace that passeth understanding,” the peace that is harmony and communion with the triune God.
The two kinds of peace aren’t always and inevitably at war, but they do often conflict. Our observation about “family values” is a case in point. Families are good. God made them as the ordinary and natural structure of human life. But the family is not more important than God. It is not even more important than the divine family of the Catholic Church. If this is challenging to us, it was even more challenging to the Jewish culture of the first century. Scholars have pointed out that this is one of the more subtle ways that Jesus claims his divinity: For a pious Jew, the only thing that could possibly be more important than the family was God himself.
One of the ways, I fear, that our conservative Catholic culture has at times lost itself, is in a subtle assumption that “family values,” the promotion of the traditional, natural family, is somehow opposed to larger social values. When you combine this with the larger trend to geographical transience, not to mention the sheer size and de facto anonymity of many American Catholic parishes, you have a situation where many Catholics and other Christians feel that the Christian life means somehow valiantly going it alone as a family, without any broader support network, against a hostile world.
But the good of the natural family is a relative good, a good that finds its place in the Church. There are far, far too many Catholics who, when faced with separation, or intractable division, or many other problems, feel, and are made to believe, that they simply can no longer be good Catholics because of their family situation. For them, I wonder if the Lord’s hard words about division may be something of a comfort. “Family values” cannot just mean some pious ideal of a mother and father and 2.5 kids—or maybe 7.5 kids in the more pious Catholic circles. It has to mean the submission of all natural family relationships to our relationship with God.
Is it sad to have a family without a natural father or mother? Of course. But this is why we have godparents; it is why we have a whole range of spiritual fathers and mothers and cousins. We cannot focus so much on preserving one good thing that we neglect the even greater things that the Lord provides for us.
Put another way, we cannot define ourselves by the things we like to complain about. Perhaps our moral situation, in the modern West, is something like Jeremiah being thrown down into a muddy cistern. We could complain about it. We could try to figure out how we got here. We could ask God why he allows bad things to happen to good cultures. Or we could remember the point of the story and look for and expect God’s rescue, ready to grab the rope that he throws down.
One way out was discussed just this past week in <a href="https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-solution-to-the-churchs-biggest-problem/">an interesting article</a> by a pair of social scientists analyzing several decades’ worth of material on the decline of the Catholic Church in America. Things aren’t looking good, from a demographic standpoint. Lots of people are leaving the Church—or rather, lots of people aren’t even staying in the Church, because the most striking figures are those showing how few Catholics stay Catholic as they get older.
But the silver lining to these statistics is pretty obvious: it is very clear that the difference between those who stay and those who leave centers not on family life, or even on clear doctrine, as important as those are, but on the larger communal and social life of the Church. On one end of the spectrum, you have someone who is baptized, who goes to Mass occasionally, but whose family doesn’t really practice the Faith in any meaningful way. Such a person is very unlikely to practice the Faith later in life. A little better is a child raised in a family where the parents take the Faith seriously, where they catechize and discuss matters of faith. But such a person is still quite likely to leave. Those who stay have not only a living faith in the family, but a regular social connection with a parish community. In other words, faith is more than just for the family. They know other adults who practice the faith, not just other children. They spend time with them outside Mass.
I like to think that we naturally practice this social dimension of the Church better in the Ordinariate because of our small size, but we don’t get a free pass. We’re not just talking about whether people are friendly; we’re talking about the salvation of souls.
Let us join the fight against the false peace of the world and seek the peace that only Christ brings. This is a peace worth sharing, a peace that alone can bring us true happiness through all the changes of the world.

‘Family Values’ Is Not Enough

I can’t stop thinking about a conversation I just had with my sister, a therapist. She poured out her heart to me about an encounter that began as one of the most challenging moments of her career—and ended as a profound example of how God works through us.
She became a marriage and family therapist to help people through their darkest times—addictions, post-traumatic stress disorder—and to provide a safe place for those in need. Sometimes her work tests how well she can balance her Catholic faith with her professional ethics and responsibilities. This was one of those times.
Her client—let’s call her Jane—was facing an unimaginable situation. She was planning to end the life of her unborn son, who had been diagnosed with Down Syndrome and water on the brain. Jane’s anguish was heartbreaking. Through tears, she explained that she didn’t want to have the abortion but felt she had no other choice. She believed it was an act of love to spare him from suffering, but her doubts were palpable.
My sister was deeply moved. She knew this was a moment of mission, one she hadn’t expected but to which she had been called. She silently prayed for the Holy Spirit to guide her words, to give her client clarity and courage, and to bring about a miracle. Within the constraints of her profession, she gently advocated for life, focusing on the emotional and psychological toll an abortion could bring.
After their session, my sister felt a mix of hope and helplessness. She had done all she could, but the decision ultimately rested with Jane. So, she continued to pray, trusting that God could work even where her influence seemed to end.
Then, the miracle came. The next morning, Jane told her that she and her husband—after hours talking, crying, and searching for answers—had canceled the abortion. Her relief and newfound hope were overwhelming. My sister saw the fruit of her prayer and cooperation with God’s grace. She had responded to his call, and a human life was saved.
In moments like this I’m reminded that love isn’t about avoiding suffering—it’s about embracing life and trusting that God will provide the strength to carry our crosses.
It is also a powerful reminder to me that we are all God’s agents in the world, often in ways we don’t expect. We might not see ourselves as capable of great things, but God uses us in small, situational missions to carry out his work. Whether we’re counselors, teachers, students, apologists, or parents, God will give us opportunities to be his partners, his instruments, in his good works. When we respond to his call, even in ways that seem minor or are constrained by circumstances, we become part of his plan.
For those of us engaged in apologetics and evangelization, this is the heart of our mission. We are called to be ready, to listen for God’s voice in the moment, and to act in cooperation with his grace. Just as my sister did not, we may not immediately (or ever!) see the effects of our choices, but in those moments, lives can be changed—and even saved.

We’re Always God’s Agents

Jimmy Akin explains the Biblical basis for free will in man, which is indicated wherever Scripture instructs us to make the right choice, and then walks through the concept of logical contradictions to show exactly what we mean when we say that God has free will.

Is Free Will Biblical and Does God Have It?

Often when asked where the Bible condemns contraception some Christians appeal to Genesis 38:8-10. There, Onan, son of Judah, is told to have intercourse with his deceased brother’s wife to “perform the duty of a brother-in-law to her and raise up offspring for [his] brother” (v.8). But knowing the offspring wouldn’t be his, Onan “spilled the semen on the ground, lest he should give offspring to his brother” (v.9). The author immediately reports that “[God] slew” Onan because of his deed. This, it’s argued, reveals that contraception is contrary to God’s will.
Recently, <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@catholicanswers/video/7269917297798794542?is_from_webapp=1&amp;sender_device=pc&amp;web_id=6983056260526589446">someone in our TikTok comment section</a> was not convinced:

Let’s take the latter objection first—that the text only describes what happens and doesn’t give us the prescription that we ought not to contracept.
Our critic is simply wrong. The text does tell us Onan’s deed conflicted with God’s will: “And what he did was displeasing in the sight of the LORD” (v.10). Given the implied assumption for this kind of religious text that we should avoid doing what displeases God, we can conclude that the passage is prescriptive and not merely descriptive. We can derive an “ought” from this event pertaining to at least one form of contraception: spilling semen to avoid conception.
This leads me to the first objection.
Our critic is right in saying it would be fallacious to move from God’s displeasure with one form of contraception to His displeasure with all forms of contraception. Spilling semen is not the only way a couple can contracept. Since that’s the only form of contraception that the above passage deals with, the appeal to Onan’s sin would only achieve the goal of providing evidence against that specific form of contraceptive act that Onan committed. More work would have to be done, whether biblically or philosophically, to determine whether other forms of contraception (e.g., the pill) are also displeasing to God. For an introductory philosophical explanation, see my articles <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/for-goodness-sake">“Sex for Goodness Sake,”</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-contraception-thwarts-love">“How Contraception Thwarts Love.”</a>
This is not to say, however, that a Catholic who makes the above argument is blameworthy for his lack of nuance. Often, the argument is given as an answer to the basic question of whether the Bible condemns contraception without any specification as to a particular form. And for a general question like that, Genesis 38:8-10 suffices.

Onan Died for This (and Nothing Else?)

<div>In 1 Samuel, David and Saul’s son Jonathan make a sacred covenant. What type of covenant was it?</div><div><blockquote>By the time David finished speaking with Saul, Jonathan’s life became bound up with David’s life; he loved him as his very self. Saul retained David on that day and did not allow him to return to his father’s house. Jonathan and David made a covenant, because Jonathan loved him as his very self. Jonathan took off the cloak he was wearing and handed it over to David, along with his military dress, even his sword, bow, and belt (1 Sam. 18:1-4).</blockquote>
The exact nature of the covenant is not explained. The fact that Jonathan hands over his clothing and weapon, which as the king&#8217;s son and a military commander would have been royal clothing and a royal weapon, is generally interpreted as a sign that Jonathan is ready to hand over the future throne to David. The general idea seems to be that Jonathan knows that David is a potential rival to the throne after Saul dies. Jonathan&#8217;s actions symbolize that he does not care if David is the one to ascend to the throne instead of him; he values David&#8217;s friendship too much to fight over the throne. This appears to be a covenant to mutually support one another as close friends, no matter what happens.
We see this arise when Saul plots to kill David (1 Sam. 20). Saul, knowing Jonathan&#8217;s affection for David, conceals his plan from his son. When David confronts Jonathan about the plot, Jonathan pleads his ignorance and promises to find out the truth and warn David if his life is truly in danger. For upholding his half of the covenant, Jonathan is rewarded by never having his family and descendants cast off as enemies of David when he ascends to the throne.
</div>

What Was David and Jonathan’s Covenant?

Jimmy Akin delves into the profound question of why God doesn&#8217;t erase hell after a certain time. He explores the concept of annihilationism, a minority view in Christianity, and explains why it doesn&#8217;t align with biblical descriptions or Catholic teachings. Akin emphasizes that damnation is everlasting, but the Church doesn&#8217;t have a definitive teaching on why God doesn&#8217;t delete hell.
Transcript:
I was just wondering why God doesn&#8217;t delete hell after a certain amount of time. I&#8217;m not saying like those suffering in hell are now allowed in. I&#8217;m just saying why doesn&#8217;t he just erase it instead of forever enduring those creations suffering, whether it was by their choice or not?
Well, there are some people who think he does from a certain point of view, or at least he deletes the people who go to hell. This is a minority view in Christianity. People who believe this are called &#8220;annihilationists&#8221; because they believe when a person is sent to the lake of fire in Revelation, the fire annihilates them, and so they cease to exist.
That&#8217;s problematic because the book of Revelation says that they have no rest day or night, and the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. So the way the book of Revelation presents it, you&#8217;re not annihilated if you get put in the lake of fire.
Also, in addition to humans going to the lake of fire, demons are thrown into the lake of fire, and they are immortal spirits, so they wouldn&#8217;t die either. So it doesn&#8217;t look like the purpose of the lake of fire is to actually annihilate people. So this view has always been a minority view in Christianity, and it is not the Catholic view. If you look in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you&#8217;ll see that it holds that damnation is a tragic but real possibility, and that the Church teaches that it is something that is everlasting. It goes on forever. So that would imply God doesn&#8217;t delete the people who go to hell, or he doesn&#8217;t delete hell itself.
Why does he not do that? Well, here the Church doesn&#8217;t have a teaching, so this is a matter that we can speculate on, but we don&#8217;t have a certain answer.
According to a common historical speculation, the reason that God doesn&#8217;t do it is because, or one of the reasons that God doesn&#8217;t do it is because if he did, it wouldn&#8217;t satisfy justice. The people who are in hell are people who have chosen to receive justice rather than mercy, and since their sins were against an infinite God, justice would require that they pay an infinite price. And any finite, any limited time spent suffering is not going to pay a finite price if you&#8217;re a finite human being.
So the only way that a finite human being could fully experience justice, the justice that they had chosen, is if they suffer forever, because that&#8217;s the only way you pay an infinite price if you&#8217;re a finite human being.
So the justice argument is one that has been proposed in the past. There are other speculations, though, too, that don&#8217;t depend on that understanding of justice. For example,
one of the things that it has been pointed out is that existence itself is good, and even if your existence is not perfectly comfortable,
even if you have frustration because you&#8217;ve cut yourself off from the source of all joy, it&#8217;s still better to exist than not exist. And so God is still being generous on this speculation, even to the people in hell, by allowing them to continue to exist. The pains of hell on this view do not outweigh the goods that the people who are in hell are still receiving. Now, that may seem counterintuitive, given the imagery of fire, for example, that&#8217;s associated with hell, because humans find fire extremely painful. But,
you know, that&#8217;s imagery, and we don&#8217;t know what it really corresponds to in the afterlife. So it could very well be that, you know, even though there&#8217;s some frustration and some, you know, pain of an emotional sort or whatever for those in hell in the afterlife, it still doesn&#8217;t counterbalance the good that they&#8217;re receiving, the chance to still exist. And so that could be why God doesn&#8217;t delete them. He&#8217;s actually being merciful by keeping them in existence, despite the fact that they&#8217;ve cut themselves off from him as the source of all goodness. So those are two speculations. Then there&#8217;s the, well, you know, to be honest, we don&#8217;t fully know because God hadn&#8217;t told us everything about this. And so these are possible speculations, but there&#8217;s still an element of mystery here.
And so there remains room for discussion and debate on this subject.
Hey, thanks for watching. If you like this Catholic answer, be sure to like, subscribe, and check out our live streams Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. Pacific, or find the episode after on YouTube, your favorite podcast platform, or our Catholic Answers app.

Why Doesn’t God Delete Hell?

Does the Bible Contain Errors?

<div>If we defy religious assent and then the Church’s opinion changes, then is sin variable?</div><div>Our religious assent is to the authority of the Church, not to an opinion as such. Sometimes there are teachings that are not defined—for example, some of the teachings regarding the authorship or forms of certain books of the Bible, that a Christian may accept in obedience to authority while still hoping for a clarification. So what we really do is express our love for the Church when we obey regarding certain opinions; we do not do violence to our minds, which can still see that these opinions might be changed.
As for dogmatic teachings, if any churchman would tell us to reject those in favor of new ones, we would know right away that we do not owe obedience to that. St. Paul says in the epistle to the Galatians that even if an angel should appear and teach a different gospel from that which he taught, we should not submit in that case. In practice, in the history of the Church, those who are faithful Catholics intent on remaining in the communion of the Church have been able to see the difference.
</div>

Is Sin Variable?

<div>What is the process for convalidation?</div><div>A convalidation is when someone has been married civilly, but due to an impediment the marriage was invalid as a sacrament. The impediment must first be removed, and the couple then makes a new exchange of vows to enter into a sacramental marriage.
The usual impediment would be what&#8217;s called lack of canonical form, which is when a Catholic marries outside the Church without permission. In such a situation, a new exchange of vows is performed in the Catholic form in order to make it valid.
The process to have a civil marriage validated in the Church is essentially the same as any other couple getting married in the church:
<ul>
<li>Provide sacramental records</li>
<li>Evidence/testimony of freedom to marry in the church</li>
<li>Copy of civil marriage</li>
<li>Normal pre-marital paperwork</li>
<li>Exchange of vows before Catholic clergy and two witnesses</li>
</ul>
</div>

Convalidation Process?

As a Gen Z Catholic woman, I find it funny when beliefs that secularists labeled “outdated” become increasingly popular in my generation today. One of these beliefs relates to birth control and natural family planning.
Following the release of Humanae Vitae, secularists panned the Church’s view against artificial contraception as “outdated and incomplete.”  With the development of the birth control pill, women were able to more effectively space out the number of children they had or even avoid having children altogether. This newfound agency over their reproductive systems gave women a sense of empowerment: women could go to work full-time or pursue whatever opportunity they wanted without having to leave due to pregnancy or children.
One of the <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nqbnt">first advertisements</a> for the Pill tapped into this exact sensation: “From the beginning woman has been a vassal to the temporal demands . . . of the cyclic mechanism of her reproductive system. Now to a degree heretofore unknown, she is permitted normalization . . . of cyclic function” (132). Women are depicted as slaves to their reproductive systems, so the promise of regulating reproduction gave women hope that they could be more detached from it and, frankly, more like men.
But this newfound “hope” and “freedom” felt by Catholic women on the Pill was squashed in 1968 by the words of Pope Paul VI: “The Church . . . condemns as always unlawful the use of means which directly prevent conception, even when the reasons given for the latter practice may appear to be upright and serious” (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html">Humanae Vitae 16</a>). Critics viewed this teaching as the Church placing restrictions on what a woman could or could not do with her body and derided it as oppressive. After all, the feminists sneer, “what do celibate clergymen know about reproduction and a woman’s body?”
Furthermore, what’s really the big deal with taking the birth control pill? After all, the argument goes, is it really so different from practicing NFP? Both have the same goal in mind but just achieve it in different ways.
Without addressing that question directly (which is done <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/contraceptions-dark-fruits">here</a>), I want to respond that many Gen Z secularists are realizing that the birth control pill really is a big deal. <a href="https://www.news-medical.net/news/20250113/Study-reveals-decline-in-hormonal-contraceptive-use-and-increase-in-fertility-awareness-methods.aspx">One recent study</a> reveals that between 2018 and 2023, there was a decline in the number of women on artificial contraceptives and a nearly sixfold increase in the number of women practicing fertility awareness to avoid conception. With more research revealing an increased risk of <a href="https://www.cancer.org.au/about-us/policy-and-advocacy/treatment-care/medicines-devices/combined-oral-contraceptives-and-cancer-risk">cancer</a>, <a href="https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/35039562/common-medication-pill-contraception-stroke">stroke</a>, and <a href="https://www.factsaboutfertility.org/oral-contraceptives-and-risk-of-depression-a-review-of-research">depression</a> associated with oral contraceptive usage, it is understandable why more and more women have shied away from artificial contraceptives and have opted for more natural means to avoid pregnancy.
The advocacy for women to track their cycles naturally and practice NFP is also ever-increasing across <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT62HHscK/">social media pages</a>. Since modern technology has given women the ability to more easily track their cycles (such as cycle tracking apps and the new Oura ring), Gen Z women have even greater opportunities to understand and track their fertility compared to women in previous generations.
Ironically, this same ability now is more in tune with “female empowerment” <a href="https://drtanyakelloway.com/blog/empowering-yourself-through-understanding-your-menstrual-cycle">online</a>. Feminists who once received Pope Paul VI’s words as restrictive and oppressive now find this knowledge empowering. It seems a deeper, more holistic understanding of their bodies allows women to be feel more informed and, in turn, contributes to a stronger sense of agency. Instead of having to rely on doctors or medication, women can just rely on their own understanding and knowledge to regulate their pregnancies.
This attraction to real freedom is not surprising, considering that it is God’s desire for us to be most free, and this can be attained only when a holistic understanding of the human person is found. This understanding is not a threat to the Church, nor is it unscientific. In fact, it is through the Church that we understand the extent of the dignity and agency owed to the human person.
This is exactly what Paul VI desired to promote throughout Humanae Vitae. Instead of placing arbitrary restrictions on what a woman can or cannot do (which is how feminists can interpret it), Paul VI outlines what healthy boundaries look like in a flourishing, Christ-centered marriage. One of these boundaries includes preventing the objectification of wives by their husbands, which the usage of artificial contraceptives can reinforce, since “a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman” and thus may “reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection” (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html">Humanae Vitae 17</a>).
Nobody perceives guardrails on balconies as restrictions unjustly placed on tenants, diminishing their freedom. Instead, they’re looked at as reasonable safety measures. This same mindset should be had for boundaries put in place within marriage, which is a sacred institution created by God. Being the “sanctuary of life” and foundation of society, how much more safety and protection should it be given? (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus.html">Centesimus Annus 39</a>). The safe is not for replaceable items, but rather for priceless valuables. That is how the Church views the sacrament of holy matrimony.
Although many of these secularists are using NFP for sexual acts outside marriage (read <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/may-my-girlfriend-and-i-be-intimate-with-one-another-before-marriage">here</a> for why that is bad), I still consider it a win that more and more people are aligning with a Catholic appreciation for NFP and fertility tracking. Understanding that the Church’s morality is not outdated or arbitrary is huge in a day and age that views objective morals as nonsensical. Who knows what “outdated” Catholic belief will be trending online next?

How the Outdated Became Empowering

Cy Kellett is joined by apologist Joe Heschmeyer to tackle the intriguing question of reincarnation and its implications for the nature of life and souls.
Transcript:
Caller: Yeah, I&#8217;m not Catholic because I&#8217;m Hindu. And so I&#8217;ve been reading a lot recently. I&#8217;ve gone through the Bible in a year with Father Mike Schmitz. And particularly, I&#8217;m in the ISKCON sect of Hinduism. I wanted to get your guys&#8217; thoughts on reincarnation and what is the Christian or Catholic refutation on reincarnation?
Cy: Well, let&#8217;s do that and then we&#8217;ll come back to you and see what you think of the answer.
Joe: Joe, I&#8217;ve got a couple of questions. ISKCON, this is a group someone called the Hare Krishna, right?
Caller: Yes, that&#8217;s right.
Joe: Okay. The Krishna consciousness is the &#8220;Khan,&#8221; I assume, in ISKCON.
With reincarnation, how do you harmonize that? Well, okay, let me step back even a little further. Within the cycle of reincarnation, I know that includes humans and at least some animals. How low in the kind of evolutionary org chart does that go? Like, does that include single-celled organisms? Is there a chance you would die and come back as like an amoeba?
Caller: Yes. So in our tradition, everything that has life has a soul, basically. And there is a chance that if you die, you can be a clean amoeba.
Joe: It seems like for this to work you would need a fixed number of living things throughout all time. Is that fair to say?
Caller: Right, right.
Joe: But it also seems like we know that the number of living things has grown from zero to a few to a bunch. That&#8217;s true whether you look at human history, the history of animals, or the history of organic life on earth. So how do you harmonize that with a view of reincarnation?
Caller: Yeah, so I mean, I have to say I&#8217;m not particularly a scholar in my faith, but what I do know is that there is this idea that there are always souls that are fallen, and they&#8217;re entering the material world and thus populating the world that we live in.
Joe: Okay. And so they go from like a pre-existent spiritual realm to becoming material. And then is the goal eventually to escape that and reach nirvana in that way?
Caller: Exactly, exactly. And so one thing that we actually are quite similar on, as opposed to like the Buddhists and other people who believe in reincarnation, is that we believe that there is a God above all other gods. I know the purpose of life is to develop a personal relationship, a loving personal relationship with Him and to be reunited with Him in heaven, so to speak.
Joe: And so what words&#8230; I&#8217;m sorry, I didn&#8217;t mean to interrupt you. What would be good evidence you would see for that? Because I assume we don&#8217;t have any conscious experience or memory of having lived some other existence. And a lot of the beings that we&#8217;re even talking about, I don&#8217;t know what it would mean to say that this human used to be an amoeba because an amoeba doesn&#8217;t have any of the elements of a human soul.
And so this thing used to kind of move around and then it died. Okay. There&#8217;s a certain sense we could talk about it having a material form, and we can call that a soul, but we don&#8217;t really mean the same thing by that word as we do when we talk about a human being having a soul with an intellect and will. So what would it mean to even say that you used to be an amoeba or an animal or whatever else?
Caller: Yeah, so it would mean that you are. Because we believe that the soul is less of our qualities as a human and it&#8217;s the spark of life. So like that spark is the soul, and everything else is either your physical, material body or something like your mind, which would be considered part of your subtle body.
Joe: Okay, yeah, yeah, that&#8217;s a good point. I&#8217;d forgotten about the subtle body. That does make for a different metaphysic. Yeah, because it seems like the spark of life thing&#8230; We want to affirm that there is something like that. Like even the word &#8220;anima&#8221; in Latin, which is the word for soul, is like the animating principle.
So if you were to take like two&#8230; Peter Kreeft gives the example of like two identical cows. One of them dies. The difference between them isn&#8217;t at the physical level, at least not right away. They might have the same number of cells, they might have the same identical looking organs, but one of them has this spark of life within it and one doesn&#8217;t.
That there is, in the case of one, an animating principle of the body, and in the case of the other, that animating principle no longer exists. And so the body decomposes. And so that part, I think we would find some common ground.
I think the difficulty is in the case of an animal, and even more so with like a lower life form. These are not subsistent souls. These are not souls that can exist apart from the body. To talk about that spark of life going into another thing would be like saying, well, this one thing I have has an on switch and then it gets destroyed. But this other thing I have also has an on switch.
And I think in some way those on switches are spiritually connected to each other. And it&#8217;s just not clear what that kind of claim would even mean. Because if they&#8217;re not physically one turned into the other, what kind of spiritual quality that&#8217;s bringing in is a little amorphous.
So I think we would just say we don&#8217;t see any evidence that subhuman life forms have immaterial souls and that therefore a cross-species reincarnation would be precluded. For that reason, at the level of reason, the number of living beings, the number of humans, or the number of all species, whatever, would have to be fixed.
And all evidence seems to point to the fact that it&#8217;s instead going up, and we don&#8217;t have any conscious experience, like memory of past lives that would put any weight on the other side of the ledger. Just to support maybe that being the idea that rather everything seems to point to the fact that we didn&#8217;t exist before we were conceived and that when we die there is a certain permanence to death, while at the same time we would believe death doesn&#8217;t have the final word.
There is a finality to death, that the decisions we make in this life are permanent, for better or for worse. So you&#8217;re not going to have a situation where you live a holy life and then die and then have to do it over again. But you&#8217;re also not going to have a situation where you live an unholy life, reject God, die, and then, you know, get another bite at the apple.
So whether that&#8217;s good or bad news, I think depends on the kind of life one leads. But we would argue that, I think, both from reason but also pretty clearly, you know, Scripture teaches it is apportioned unto all men to die once, after which comes the judgment. That there is a clear biblical denial of anything like reincarnation in favor of what&#8217;s called the specific judgment upon death.
Caller: Yeah, yeah, that&#8217;s a good point. And there are a lot of things in my own faith that I have a hard time reconciling, like the things that you mentioned. And in a certain sense, it comes down to something like, what is the definition of a soul? Because even in our faith when we die, we forget everything and then we get put into a new body.
Joe: And so&#8230; But that would be a completely different person or living being.
Caller: Right, right, right. Like what it means to even call that you. If you have no connection bodily or psychically, or, you know, psychologically, you know, like, how is that still you is one of the questions that I&#8217;ve grappled with in trying to understand it.
Joe: Yeah, I had some exposure to ISKCON and the Bhagavad Gita when I was in my teens and early 20s, and I found some good impetus to delve more deeply into these questions. I mean, the Bhagavad Gita is beautiful, but at the same time, I think the message that it has is deterministic in this way that as a Christian, I&#8217;m, as much as I&#8217;ve appreciated kind of what it did for me, if I&#8217;m being honest, I&#8217;m grateful that the Christian message seems to me much more optimistic and hopeful than I get from any of the early Hindu texts.
Caller: Right, right. I guess my last question would be like, in short, what would your definition of the soul be from a Christian point of view?
Joe: So, okay, you&#8217;re asking a philosophy nerd to do a short answer to a question that could go much longer. But at the very broadest level, it&#8217;s the immaterial principle of life for material things. So that&#8217;s for all things. And in the case of a human, because we have a rational soul, it is also the seat of the intellect and the will.
It is that part of us that isn&#8217;t reducible to the body and that part of us that can survive even when the body is destroyed. There are parts of you that are just your&#8230; you know, they&#8217;re so tied up in your body, you can&#8217;t even imagine, like, what does it mean to, you know, stub your toe without a foot? It doesn&#8217;t seem like it means anything.
But there are other things where to remember, to contemplate, to pray for. Those things don&#8217;t appear to be reducible to the body, that we have evidence that there&#8217;s more to ourselves than just our bodies. And the term for that spiritual center is the soul.
Joe: I get the feeling like you&#8217;re very open to kind of exploring the spiritual riches of what the Catholic Church has to offer. And I wonder if&#8230; oh, what, I&#8217;m blanking. What is the book we just came out with?
Cy: The Soul of Apologetics.
Joe: Oh, yeah, send them both. Apologetics.
Cy: Send them both. Of course. The Soul of Apologetics. Okay, we&#8217;ll send you both of those, Arch, if you&#8217;d like them.
Why? We&#8217;re Catholic and the Soul of Apologetics. It&#8217;s actually&#8230; it&#8217;s lovely that you called and talked about your Hindu faith, because I must admit, and it probably has to do with the demographics of the United States, we don&#8217;t get as many calls from Hindus as we would like to get from time to time.
We do, but we&#8217;d love to get more. So, you know, if you&#8217;re Hindu and you didn&#8217;t call today, Arch is just better than you. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m saying.

I’m Not Catholic Because I’m Hindu…

<div>Who will be the Antichrist?</div><div>One can have the spirit of the Antichrist, and some men, because of the great evil of their actions and because of Scripture’s plural use of the word “antichrist,” have been termed <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/who-or-what-is-the-anti-christ">precursors of the Antichrist, e.g., Nero, Hitler, and Stalin</a>.
We can’t be certain on the identity of the Antichrist, but <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-antichrist-0">Jimmy Akin provides a good overview on the Antichrist</a>, and I also refer you to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-antichrist">our tract</a> on the Antichrist. Finally, my colleague <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/how-to-defeat-the-antichrist">Tim Staples provides a good overview on how to defeat the Antichrist</a> and those who act in the spirit of the Antichrist.
</div>

Who Will Be the Antichrist?

Both Catholics and Protestants of the Reformed tradition actually agree on something pretty important: when we’re initially justified, we become a “new creation.” To back this up, both sides regularly point to two passages from St. Paul:
<ul>
<li>2 Corinthians 5:17—“Whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”</li>
<li>Galatians 6:15—“For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.”</li>
</ul>
So where’s the disagreement? It’s not over whether Paul is talking about being a new creation. Rather, it’s over what that has to do with justification.
Catholics see these passages as evidence for their view that justification is rooted in an interior transformation—what we often call sanctification. Reformed Protestants agree that these texts describe sanctification, but they resist identifying sanctification with justification. On their view, sanctification certainly accompanies justification, but it isn’t what justifies us.
So which reading is right? I’m going to suggest it’s the Catholic one.
Before getting into that, though, let me say this: I don’t fault our Protestant friends for missing the connection between “being a new creation” and justification. After all, the word justification doesn’t appear in either passage. If the connection is there—and I think it is—it takes a bit of unpacking to see it.
Let’s start with 2 Corinthians 5:17.
Paul tells us that the condition for being a new creation is being “in Christ.” That phrase is doing a lot of work here.
In Romans 8:1, Paul explains what it means to be in Christ: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” To be in Christ, then, is to be free from condemnation.
Now, here’s the key move. The state of being justified and the state of being free from condemnation are logically identical. To be justified—to be in a right relationship with God—is precisely to not be subject to condemnation. And the reverse is true as well: if you’re not subject to condemnation, you’re justified.
Romans 6:23 reinforces this point. Paul writes, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” To possess eternal life is to be justified. And Paul tells us that eternal life comes only in Christ. So once again, being in Christ and being justified are the same reality.
Now take that insight back to 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Whoever is in Christ is a new creation.”
Since being in Christ means being justified (as Romans 8:1 and 6:23 indicate), and since being in Christ also means being a new creation, which entails interior righteousness (as Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:17), it follows that Paul is linking justification with becoming interiorly new—interiorly righteous. In other words, to be justified is to be transformed within. Or, said another way, interior righteousness belongs to justification itself.
That’s exactly how Catholics understand justification: as an interior state of righteousness that God brings about in us, not merely a legal declaration made from the outside.
Now let’s turn to Galatians 6:15.
The context makes it clear that Paul is talking about personal salvation—about justification. Just one verse earlier, in Galatians 6:14, Paul says he boasts in “the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ,” because through it, “the world has been crucified to [him], and [he] to the world.” That’s Paul’s vivid way of saying he’s no longer under the dominion of sin. He’s describing his new, justified state.
Immediately after this, Paul contrasts circumcision with “a new creation.” Given what he’s just said about being crucified to the world, it’s reasonable to assume that he’s including himself—and every other Christian who has been crucified to the world—among those who are new creations.
This contrast is crucial. Circumcision was something some were relying on to be justified before God. Paul even spells this out earlier in Galatians 5:4, where he speaks of those who week to be “justified by the law.”
So Paul is setting two models side by side. On the one hand, there’s justification sought through circumcision and the Old Law. On the other hand, there’s being a new creation in Christ. The implication is hard to miss: being interiorly renewed—being a new creation—is the new basis for justification.
In short, our interior righteousness is not just something that is present alongside justification; it belongs what to justification is. It’s that on account that we are justified.
All of this means that Paul’s “new creation” language does support the Catholic understanding of justification—once the relevant texts are carefully unpacked.
And that leads to an important takeaway for Catholics today. Simply pointing to a verse about sanctification isn’t enough to make the case. We have to do the extra work of showing how Paul himself connects sanctification and justification. When we do that, the Catholic reading comes clearly into view.

Catholics and Protestants Agree! Kind Of . . .

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Andrew Wilson criticized me...

<div>How do you explain to someone why a man and woman would get married when one of them is expected to die the same day from cancer?</div><div>The reason is that if the couple have been previously married invalidly, then they can receive the grace of the sacrament before the death of one of them, and that is no small benefit to their souls. Even if they were not previously married at all, the bestowal of the grace of the sacrament is a more than sufficient reason. Of course, this is not an obligation. Sometimes also there can be economic reasons of inheritance and so on that might indicate that they should be legally married to protect the interests of the surviving partner.
</div>

How Do You Explain a Deathbed Wedding?

During the time of the apostles, were the local churches headed by single bishops (as Catholics claim), or by co-governing elders (as many Protestants claim)? Catholic apologist Dave Armstrong has a recent <a href="https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2024/02/revelation-2-3-monarchical-bishops-by-95-ad.html">blog post</a> in which he points out some interesting biblical evidence on this question: that the seven “angels” of Revelation 2 and 3 have long been understood, even by Protestant scholars, as referring to the seven bishops of the churches of Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea.
In my book <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/the-early-church-was-the-catholic-church-softcover/">The Early Church Was the Catholic Church</a>, I make a similar point: reading the “angels” as bishops is the best interpretation of the biblical data. As the Evangelical scholar <a href="https://shorturl.at/pKO26">Colin J. Hemer explains</a>, there are basically five ways of interpreting this passage:
<blockquote>A choice is generally offered between (1) heavenly guardians of the churches, and (2) human representatives of them, generally their bishops. Three other principal variants deserve consideration: (3) that the “angels” are personifications of the churches; (4) that they are literally human “messengers”; and (5) that the term is used in some complex and elusive way or at differing levels, so that we cannot expect to assign it a lexical equivalent that tells the whole story.</blockquote>
Jesus’ warning to these “angels” about their possible imprisonment and apparent spiritual lukewarmness (see Rev. 2:5, 10) suggests that we&#8217;re not to understand these to be literal angels (option 1). They’re also not personifications of the churches (3), since Jesus explicitly says that “the seven stars are the angels of the seven churches and the seven lampstands are the seven churches” (Rev. 1:20). The stars/angels are clearly connected to the lampstands/churches, but they’re not the same thing.
So unless we’re going to give up on interpreting the passage (5), that leaves us with theories (2) and (4): that the “angels” are bishops or else some kind of messengers for the local churches. But they don’t appear to be simply messengers: they’re being praised or rebuked for the state of each of their churches.
What English readers may not realize is that the word for angel in the New Testament is ággelos, which means “messenger.” As <a href="https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/archangels-michael-gabriel-and-raphael/">Pope St. Gregory the Great explained</a>, “the word ‘angel’ denotes a function rather than a nature. Those holy spirits of heaven have indeed always been spirits. They can only be called angels when they deliver some message.” In other words, when God sends one of the heavenly spirits (like Gabriel) to deliver a message, we call that spirit a “messenger,” or “angel.”
Why does that matter? Because the Septuagint translation of Malachi 2:7 (“the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and men should seek instruction from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts”) refers to the priest as an ággelos, angel/messenger. The one delivering the message of God has an angelic mission to the Church. So reading the seven “angels” (or “seven messengers”) as the seven bishops makes the most grammatical and contextual sense.
This is a good reminder that (1) the structure of the Church (in which there’s one bishop per local church) dates to the time of the apostles and (2) we should pray for our bishops, who have been entrusted the task of being messengers of the good news of the Gospel.

When Bishops Are Literal Angels

Are Miscarried Babies in Heaven?

Our real problem is the failure to help Catholics stay Catholic.

Most Catholics have heard of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is referenced dozens of times throughout the Catechism, mentioned in the sermons of bishops and priests quite often, and generally known as the “main character” of Catholic theology even by those outside of the Church. Few, however, know about the theological tradition that the Angelic Doctor belonged to—and which bears significant importance for us today.
As opposed to dogmatic or positive theology, which explains and proves the truths of the Faith from Scripture and Tradition, scholastic theology (or scholasticism) explores the nature of these truths and their place within the Catholic faith. It enables the theologian to synthesize the faith and resolve apparent contradictions. To put it succinctly, the maxim of scholastic theology is “faith seeking understanding.”
The rise of scholasticism was concurrent with—and in many ways caused by—the rise of universities in Christendom. Scholastic theologians, also referred to as schoolmen, often belonged to theological schools that held to and preserved their own theological tradition. Thus, it is not uncommon to hear about disputes between Thomists (followers of St.
Thomas Aquinas) and the Scotists (followers of Bl. John Duns Scotus) on how the sacraments cause grace in the recipient, and, though belonging more to speculation, whether or not God would have become man if Adam had not sinned.
At the center of medieval scholastic theology is Peter Lombard (d. 1160)’s Sententiae or Sentences, a four-book work on theological judgments about the Christian religion. The work systematically covers questions about the one God, his triune nature, creation, man, sin, the Incarnation, redemption, and the last things. It is divided into four books and sectioned by “distinctions.” Shortly after its publication and approval from theologians, a commentary on the Sentences became a requirement for a Master’s degree in theology. Thus, the procedure later theologians followed when inquiring into what different theologians taught on a certain question was to refer to their commentary on the Sentences, each of which was uniformly organized after Lombard’s original work. For example, if I want to know what St. Bonaventure taught about the different aspects of purgatory, I simply go to the locus classicus of purgatory: book four, distinction 21. Every commentary on the Sentences is uniformly structured like this, allowing one to easily compare the teachings of the scholastics by simply referencing the proper book and distinction.
<h2>Should We Reject Scholasticism?</h2>
Many today want to forget and move past this historical period of theology, labeling it irrelevant and outdated. Others reject scholasticism due to its “heavy” reliance on extra-biblical, Aristotelian terms, such as “substance,” “virtual,” and “relation.” But these charges fail to demonstrate any true reason to reject such a powerful and beautiful theological system.
First, several recent popes have commended scholasticism as being integral to Catholic theology. Pope Benedict XVI said:
<blockquote>Still today, in reading the Scholastic summae one is struck by the order, clarity, and logical continuity of the arguments and by the depth of certain insights. With technical  language, a precise meaning is attributed to every word and, between believing and understanding, a reciprocal movement of clarification is established.
Dear brothers and sisters, in echoing the invitation of the First Letter of Peter, Scholastic theology stimulates us to be ever ready to account for the hope that is in us (cf. 3:15), hearing the questions as our own and thus also being capable of giving an answer. It reminds us that a natural friendship exists between faith and reason, founded in the order of Creation itself” (General Audience, October 28, 2009).</blockquote>
Pius XI, in his reformation of Catholic universities, commended the scholastic method as an authentic medium of doing theology in the Church:
<blockquote>Sacred theology is to be handed on with both the positive and the scholastic method; therefore, having explained the truths of faith and proved them from Holy Scripture and Tradition, the nature of those truths and their intimate reason are to be studied and illustrated according to the principles and teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. (<a href="https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/la/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-xi_apc_19310524_deus-scientiarum-dominus.html#%3A~%3Atext%3DHaec%20autem%20disciplina%20methodo%20cum%20positiva%20tum%20scholastica%20tradenda%20est%3B%20ideo%20veritatibus%20fidei%20expositis%20et%20ex%20sacra%20Scriptura%20et%20Traditione%20demonstratis%2C%20earum%20veritatum%20natura%20et%20intima%20ratio%20ad%20principia%20et%20doctrinam%20S.%20Thomae%20Aquinatis%20investigentur%20et%20illustrentur">Deus scientarum Dominus</a> 29).</blockquote>
In fact, Pope St. Pius X identified the dislike of scholasticism as one of the errors of the modernists.
<blockquote>For scholastic philosophy and theology they have only ridicule and contempt. Whether it is ignorance or fear, or both, that inspires this conduct in them, certain it is that the passion for novelty is always united in them with hatred of scholasticism, and there is no surer sign that a man is on the way to modernism than when he begins to show his dislike for this system (Pascendi Dominici Gregis 42).</blockquote>
As for the application of extra-biblical terms, we should keep in mind that the early Church, before scholasticism, also did this in its defense of trinitarian orthodoxy, with terms like “consubstantial” and “person.”
<h2>Why Read the Scholastics?</h2>
Scholasticism is not even primarily about niche theological questions, like whether the fire of purgatory is material or not. In exploring the nature of the mysteries in our faith, the mind, already believing in these, begins to understand their interconnectedness, opening the path for deeper meditation and contemplation before the Lord.
Scholastic theology also helps us synthesize Catholic doctrines. Some that seem to contradict at first, such as the belief that baptism is necessary for salvation and that a baptism of desire can substitute the absence of the sacrament, are easily resolved when we understand that baptism is necessary per accidens but sanctifying grace is necessary per se; the former may be substituted but is the ordinary means to an end, and the latter, being absolutely necessary, cannot be substituted, which is supplied by repentance, faith, and the desire for baptism. When asked how baptism can save us while upholding that we are saved by Christ alone, we may reply that baptism is the instrumental cause of our justification, whereas Christ’s passion is the meritorious cause: Christ achieved our salvation on the cross but applies it through the sacraments.
<h2>Where to Start?</h2>
Aquinas’s works, most of which have an English translation, are available for free at <a href="http://aquinas.cc/">aquinas.cc</a>. There is his famous Summa Theologiae, in which he treats the Christian faith systematically, which he never finished.
In his exposition on the Ave Maria, he comments on St. Gabriel’s annunciation to the Virgin Mary, reflecting the contemplative mind of the medieval Church regarding the Mother of God. His commentaries on the Pauline epistles are especially illuminating for understanding Catholic teaching on grace, which Aquinas claims is the subject of Paul’s “entire teaching.” Aquinas synthesizes all of Paul’s letters by showing how the Apostle presents the grace of Christ as diffused throughout the body of Christ: from our head to the pastors and the faithful of the Church—both considered in itself and in its operation through the sacraments.
Some prominent contemporaries of Aquinas, like his teacher, St. Albert the Great, have also written wonderful works, such as <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Medieval-EN/XCT.011.html%3Bchunk.id%3D00000007">On Cleaving to God</a>. One may also read <a href="https://www.franciscan-archive.org/scotus/">Scotus</a> or St. Anselm’s <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Medieval-EN/XCT.005.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxMDAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000007">Why God Became Man</a>.
Later Thomists, like Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., have amazingly edifying works like <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Contemporary-EN/XCT.145.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxODAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000005">On</a> <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Contemporary-EN/XCT.145.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxODAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000005">Providence and Trust in God</a>, along with <a href="https://catholiclibrary.org/library/view?docId=Contemporary-EN/XCT.144.html%3Bsurl%3DaHR0cHMlM0ElMkYlMkZjYXRob2xpY2xpYnJhcnkub3JnJTJGbGlicmFyeSUyRmJyb3dzZSUyRmNlbnR1cnklMkYxODAw%3Bchunk.id%3D00000005">his commentary</a> on Aquinas’s treatment on grace.
In fact, some of the best defenses of the Catholic Faith were written by scholastics. One interested in defending the Faith against Islam or Eastern Orthodoxy may read St. Thomas’s De Rationibus Fidei (“Reasons for the Faith”), in which he explains and defends uniquely Catholic doctrines against these groups. Bellarmine has several volumes in his work Controversies where he defends the Catholic faith against the Protestant Reformers and their successors. Cardinal Franzelin, S.J.’s On Divine Tradition offers a fantastic explanation of the Catholic view of Sacred Tradition, occasionally responding to Protestant objections. The Sacrae Theologiae Summa is a great theological manual that covers all aspects of Catholic theology written by theologians who attended and influenced the Second Vatican Council. All of these have English translations and many be published online for free under public domain. Dozens of important theologians could be listed for each century, but when one becomes acquainted with just a few, he quickly becomes introduced to their contemporaries and grows in understanding of the scholastic tradition all the more.
In sum, scholasticism is not dead. It remains alive within the ecclesial tradition, practiced by those in the theological schools and commended by the Magisterium as most helpful.

The Way a Catholic Should Think

One hundred years ago, on July 21, a Tennessee jury convicted John Scopes of violating a state law banning the teaching of evolution. That case—especially as memorialized in the play and movie “Inherit the Wind”—is taken as a symbol of religiously fundamentalist ignorance allayed by “science.”
A century after Scopes, what lessons should Catholics draw?
Religion and science are not opposed. The Scopes trial helped cement a caricature of religion as opposed to “science,” a bastion of obscurantism. That may have been true of the biblical literalists in Dayton, Tennessee—but not of the Catholic Church.
It’s not just that the Church founded universities and hospitals—two places where science is rather active. It’s that Catholicism birthed science. In order to have a “scientific method,” you have to believe that
<ol>
<li>the universe functions according to certain laws, which make it</li>
<li>intelligible and</li>
<li>repetitious—i.e., under similar conditions, similar things happen.</li>
</ol>
Without those presuppositions, you can have no science. That’s why you should pick up books by Fr. Stanley Jaki (Science and Creation, The Road of Science and the Ways of God, The Savior of Science) and read about Catholicism’s hand in science as we know it.
Allied to this was the Church’s rejection of the so-called “double truth” theory—i.e., something could be true for science but false for religion (or vice versa). That might work for Protestantism, with its <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-protestant-roots-of-the-pronoun-wars">nominalist roots</a> (right and wrong are what they are because God said so, not because they are inherently good or evil), where everything’s a label. But if there’s one God, he doesn’t teach X here and lie over there. If there’s a supposed contradiction, it’s a challenge to dig deeper to find the underlining unity (see Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).
The Bible teaches that God created, not how he did it. Genesis is a theological text. It makes theological points. It is not the textbook for Biology 101.
The idea that God created establishes certain basic theological truths that are beyond science’s capacity to refute. Among the truths we hold is that the world is personal and designed and that God remains active in it.
Catholicism does not regard creation as some impersonal and maybe even accidentally serendipitous confluence of events that just so happened to produce the relatively orderly cosmos we know and love. Science may propose a Big Bang, but it cannot—one way or another—say anything about the one who made the Big Bang. Creation didn’t just happen—it happened out of love.
Those who grew up in the Anglophone thought world are perennially at risk of some form of deism—i.e., the idea of splitting the loaf by saying, “Yes, God created, but then—on the seventh day (or sometime thereafter) just disappeared.” Deists usually portray God as a clockmaker. He made the clock, wound it up (so well that it never needs subsequent rewinding or adjusting the time), and left to let it run by itself.
What’s wrong with this picture? Four things:
<ol>
<li>The world is not self-sustaining. Catholic teaching on creation is that God created and continually sustains Without God’s sustainment, everything would fall back into nothing, because nothing is self-caused, is self-sufficient, or can give itself life. So God is not out of the picture.</li>
<li>God created man to be his “co-creator,” to have dominion in his image over the world (Gen. 1:26-28). I like to say God made the world like IKEA: assembly required. God didn’t build houses. He gave man a brain and trees: figure it out! Responsible co-creation—fiduciary care of our common home—is man’s duty.</li>
<li>When parents let their child venture out independently, they usually don’t do it as “sink or swim.” While preserving a degree of autonomy, they also remain in the background to step in as needed. The same can be said—against the deists who denied the possibility of divine intervention—regarding God. Christianity is a faith that recognizes that God was and is active in history. That’s called <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/do-you-believe-in-providence">Providence</a>. His is not the Real Absence.</li>
<li>Man’s co-creatorship in God’s image and likeness makes a value judgment about man that pure biology cannot (and which I suspect haunted the background of the Scopes trial): the uniqueness of man. Man is part of the created world, but not just a part. He is part of the “circle of life,” but not just one species among many. Whether that “flattening” of human distinctiveness is a function of caricatures about evolution (man as overgrown monkey) or now about <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/baptize-the-environmentalist">environmentalism</a> (man is an ecologically hazardous species), the result is the same: in the name of “science” (which trespasses beyond its domain), man is treated as just another living thing.</li>
</ol>
Those who thought they were doing “God’s work” in prosecuting John Scopes may have wrongly believed that we have to read Genesis literally. The trial’s consequence has been to disparage the whole idea of creation, including ideas that “science” itself is incompetent to address. Those ideas include the distinctive nature and value of man and the supposed “closedness” of creation to ongoing divine intervention. I suspect that no small number of Catholics take a schizophrenic approach here, imagining God having an active role in history maybe up until the Acts of the Apostles (or more nebulous “ages of faith”) but certainly not being so gauche in our own “scientific” times. But the Catholic truth is that man is distinctive—even if he has one foot in a material world and developed according to steps—and Providence is real.
With the anniversary of the Scopes trial this week, let’s adopt a more nuanced approach to the issues it raised.
Want to read more? Two suggestions: The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 282-301, and a short book by Joseph Ratzinger, <a href="https://ignatius.com/the-divine-project-dvpp/?searchid=2595375&amp;search_query=divine+project">The Divine Project</a>.

IKEA and the Monkey Trial

<div>Can artificial means of maintaining life be terminated if there is no sign of brain activity?</div><div>If there is absolutely no brain activity, then life supports can be removed, but often what is called &#8220;brain dead&#8221; in popular language is actually not. One must be insistent and know whether all activity whatsoever has ceased or just some principal functions of the brain. This is an important point, since sometimes there is pressure to remove supports for extraneous reasons, such as the harvesting of organs for donation.
</div>

OK to Pull the Plug If No Brain Activity?

Overcoming the Struggle with Impurity

Genesis 6 contains a mysterious passage about the “sons of God” marrying “the daughters of men” and giving rise to a group of giants known as the Nephilim.
In <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/rebellious-angels-and-the-great-flood">my previous post</a>, we saw that evidence both before and after Genesis points to the sons of God being fallen angels, which was the original interpretation of the passage in all of the existing Jewish and Christian literature.
This raises questions about what we should make of this passage, but before we turn to that, is there any way we could get confirmation of this interpretation?
One thing that Christians should take seriously would be a passage in the New Testament that confirms this interpretation, and we have such a passage.
The book of Jude warns its readers against false teachers in Christian communities, and Jude warns about how God has sent judgment on wrongdoers before. In verses 6 and 7, he writes:
<blockquote>And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling, he has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day—just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire.</blockquote>
This passage refers to a group of angels who “did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling” in heaven.
That could be any group of fallen angels except for the next part of the verse, which says that Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities “likewise indulged in sexual immorality.”
If these earthly cities “likewise” did something, that means somebody else did it first. In context, the individuals being referred to are “the angels who . . . left their proper dwelling.”
Only the Greek text is even clearer than this translation would suggest, because the word rendered “likewise” is a four-word phrase in Greek that would be literally translated “in the same manner as these.”
The plural “these” points back to the previous plural noun “angels.” This is obvious when you read it in Greek, because it cannot refer to “Sodom” (a singular neuter noun), “Gomorrah” (a singular feminine noun), or “cities” (a plural feminine noun). The word for “these” is a plural masculine noun, so it points to a plural masculine antecedent, and the only noun that will serve is the plural masculine noun “angels.”
This makes it clear that Jude is saying that both the angels who left their dwelling in heaven and Sodom and the surrounding cities “indulged in sexual immorality.” The angels did so first, and then “in the same manner as these [angels],” Sodom and the cities of the plain did so as well.
Jude’s statement about the angels is thus an unmistakable reference to the event in Genesis 6, which is the only biblical passage he could be referring to.
There’s also a further aspect, which also is not obvious in this translation. In addition to saying that these two groups indulged in sexual immorality, it also says they pursued “unnatural desire,” but that’s not what it literally says in Greek.
The phrase used in Greek for what they pursued is sarkos heteras, which would mean “other flesh” or “different flesh.”
This points to something interesting. The men of Sodom are famous for attempting the homosexual rape of the two angels, who appeared to be men, and there are multiple passages in the Bible that condemn homosexuality. But this doesn’t seem to be the aspect of the act that Jude is thinking of.
If he were highlighting the homosexual aspect of what the Sodomites did, he would have expressed himself differently, because the apparently male flesh of the two angels would not be different (Greek, heteras) from that of the male Sodomites. Instead, it would be the same (Greek, homos).
What was different was not the sex of the flesh, but the species to which it belonged. Commenting on Jude 7, Richard Bauckham states,
<blockquote>Sarkos heteras, “strange flesh,” cannot, as many commentators and most translations assume, refer to homosexual practice, in which the flesh is not “different” (heteras); it must mean the flesh of angels. The sin of the Sodomites (not, strictly, of the other towns) reached its zenith in this most extravagant of sexual aberrations, which would have transgressed the order of creation as shockingly as the fallen angels did.</blockquote>
The fallen angels and the Sodomites, knowingly or unknowingly, thus were engaged in attempts to break the natural order by having sex with another species of God’s creatures.
Even if one disagrees on this point, the fact remains that Jude has an unmistakable reference to the events of Genesis 6 as involving “angels who did not stay within their own position of authority but left their proper dwelling” and “indulged in sexual immorality.”
We thus have New Testament confirmation of the angelic interpretation of the sons of God in Genesis. But how could this be? How can we make sense of this passage?
That’s what we’ll turn to in our final post in this series.
Posts in series: <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/are-the-nephilim-biblical-aliens">one</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/7-mysteries-about-the-nephilim">two</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/did-angels-mate-with-human-women">three</a>, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/rebellious-angels-and-the-great-flood">four</a>.

Angels Go Rogue

<div>What is or are some scholarly resources for why we accept the Apocrypha as inspired? </div><div>Here is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-defend-the-deuterocanonicals">a good summary</a> of arguments defending the inspiration and canonical status of the so-called Apocrypha, called by Catholics the &#8220;deuterocanonical books.&#8221;
Ultimately, the inspired status of the books of Scripture is verified by the teaching Church, and this is why Catholics and Orthodox maintain that these books are inspired.
</div>

Why Accept the Apocrypha as Inspired?

<div>Can you tell me about consecration to St. Joseph?</div><div>In short, consecrating oneself to St. Joseph is an act of entrustment to his fatherly care, protection, and guidance. In the same way that St. Joseph was Jesus’ guardian, the Church calls us to put ourselves under his faithful care and patronage. 
Redemptoris Custos:
<blockquote>
Leo XIII explained “Joseph was in his day the lawful and natural guardian, head and defender of the Holy Family&#8230;. It is thus fitting and most worthy of Joseph&#8217;s dignity that, in the same way that he once kept unceasing holy watch over the family of Nazareth, so now does he protect and defend with his heavenly patronage the Church of Christ&#8221;(44).
</blockquote>
What are the reasons for such great confidence? Leo XIII explained it in this way:
<blockquote>
Recalling that God wished to entrust the beginnings of our redemption to the faithful care of St. Joseph, she asks God to grant that she may faithfully cooperate in the work of salvation; that she may receive the same faithfulness and purity of heart that inspired Joseph in serving the Incarnate World; and that she may walk before God in the ways of holiness and justice, following Joseph&#8217;s example and through his intercession (48).
Even today we have many reasons to pray in a similar way: &#8220;Most beloved father, dispel the evil of falsehood and sin . . . graciously assist us from heaven in our struggle with the powers of darkness . . . and just as once you saved the Child Jesus from mortal danger, so now defend God&#8217;s holy Church from the snares of her enemies (49).
</blockquote>
Today we still have good reason to commend everyone to St. Joseph.
</div>

Consecration to St. Joseph

Calvinists teach that man is powerless to resist God’s grace; hence, there is no truly free will.
The Catholic and biblical position, though, holds that we must “work out our salvation with fear and trembling”—meaning we must do something—“for it is God who works in you both to will and to do according to his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12-13)—meaning God’s grace must precede and accompany every meritorious action that brings about our salvation.
The Catholic teaching emphasizes both God’s grace and man’s cooperation. But there is no room in Calvinist teaching for St. Paul’s inspired notion of man as “co-laborer” with God (1 Cor. 3:9). In Calvin’s words,
<blockquote>if [by free will] is meant that after we are once subdued by the power of the Lord to the obedience of righteousness, we proceed voluntarily, and are inclined to follow the movement of grace, I have nothing to object. . . . If, again, it is meant that man is able of himself to be a fellow-laborer with the grace of God, I hold it to be a most pestilent delusion (Institutes, Bk. 2, Ch. 3, Para. 11).</blockquote>
Catholics agree that man cannot “of himself” merit anything from God—meaning, apart from God’s empowering grace. But Calvin’s meaning is very different. For him, “subdued by the power of the Lord” means that man cannot resist the movement of God’s grace.
If God wills for you to go to heaven, he will give you grace to that end, and you will be irresistibly moved to act in accord with it. If God wills for you to go to hell, then you will not be given grace, and you will be moved to sin by God’s eternal decree.
Before we proceed, two notes. First, many Calvinists will claim, as the Westminster Confession does, that they believe in “free will.” But “free will” for the Calvinist means acting in accord with irresistible grace that he cannot do anything but accept. The term voluntary, which Calvin used in the passage above, becomes meaningless. According to Calvin, when God extends his “special grace” of salvation and mercy, he “does not suffer a refusal” (para. 6). Yet man is “free”? This would be like Vito Corleone, in The Godfather, making “an offer you can’t refuse” and then claiming that the offer was “freely” accepted.
Second, honest Calvinists acknowledge the contradiction here. Clifton Kirkpatrick, who at the time held the highest elected staff position in the Presbyterian Church (USA), <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL673338M/What_unites_Presbyterians">wrote</a>,
<blockquote>If a sovereign God decides to elect persons to eternal life, that is a decision for all time and eternity. . . . Presbyterians have endorsed this conviction, but with Calvin, we have always had trouble with it for two reasons.
First, if God predestines every person, and not all are called, elected, or predestined for salvation, then God has predestined (the Westminster Confession says “fore-ordained”) some persons to hell or eternal damnation. Second, if God has determined the ultimate fate of all persons, then the individual has no power to make any important decisions.
Presbyterians have learned to believe, also, in free will, realizing that these two doctrines are logically impossible to hold at the same time, but that each is true, as taught in the Westminster Confession. . . . Those persons who can with a clear conscience accept what they are taught, regardless of apparent inconsistencies, are in some ways better off than those who think (17).</blockquote>
Notice the almost cult-like acceptance of this logical contradiction. The Catholic and biblical faith never asks anyone to check his intellect at the door. Although we recognize that certain truths of our faith are supra-rational, there is nothing in our faith that is irrational. 
I have to agree with Kirkpatrick that a thinking man will have trouble with this Calvinist notion of double predestination. In fact, I would say that a thinking man is not going to remain Calvinist unless he can learn to believe what he knows to be irrational. And that is not faith; that is closer to superstition.
The grace of God is resistible, according to Paul:
<blockquote>You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law; you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love. You were running well; who hindered you from obeying the truth? (Gal. 5:4-7).</blockquote>
Paul warns these Galatian Christians not to be seduced by “Judaizers” who were telling them belief in Christ is great, but they must also return to the Old Covenant temple, sacrifices, law, circumcision, etc. in order to be saved. He warns that if they do this, they forfeit Christ; they “fall from grace.” To “fall from grace” means they resist God’s grace.
The inspired author of Hebrews also teaches that we can “fall from grace”:
<blockquote>Strive for peace with all men, and for that holiness without which no man will see God. Take heed lest anyone be wanting in the grace of God [Gr.—usteron apo tes karitos tou theou—“falling from the grace of God”]; lest any root of bitterness springing up cause trouble and by it the many be defiled; let there not be any immoral or profane person, such as Esau, who for one meal sold his birthright (Heb. 12:14-16, Confraternity Bible).</blockquote>
The Greek verb ustereo, translated above as “wanting,” means “to fall short of, lack, or want.” Because the preposition apo, or “from,” is used immediately after the verb, a literal translation would be “falling short of from the grace of God.” I translate it as “falling from the grace of God.”
Similarly to Galatians, Hebrews warns Christians not to “sell their birthright” as sons of God and forfeit the glory of heaven that is their inheritance as Christians. Indeed, we truly are sons of God, and if sons, “then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17). The context of Hebrews emphasizes the truth that Christians can, in fact, “fall from grace” and lose their heavenly inheritance.
St. Stephen chimes in specifically when it comes to resisting the grace of God. He almost seems to have Calvin in mind 1,500 years before Calvin when he speaks to his “brethren and fathers” (Acts 7:2) among the sons and daughters of Abraham:
<blockquote>You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you (v. 51).</blockquote>
The Holy Spirit calls us by grace; thus, to “resist the Holy Spirit” is to resist God’s grace.
And finally, the words of our Lord himself are most clear:
<blockquote>O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, you house is forsaken and desolate! (Matt. 23:37-38).</blockquote>
Jesus here speaks as God and informs us that he is ever calling to his people by his grace to come to him, as a hen calls to her chicks. But he is equally clear that he respects the freedom he has gifted us. It is their choice whether they will resist his call—resist his grace—or cooperate with it unto salvation (Gal. 6:7-9, Rom, 5:1-2, 2 Cor. 6:1-2).

John Calvin, the False Optimist

<div>Does doubting make God angry?</div><div>This depends on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-is-the-difference-between-obstinate-doubt-and-ordinary-doubt">what you mean by &#8220;doubting.&#8221;</a> Sometimes we use this word simply to indicate that we find it difficult to understand a particular truth or see how it could be true at all. St. Cardinal John Henry Newman said, &#8220;A thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.&#8221; So it is reasonable to examine the Faith and to try to resolve the problems our mind has with its teaching.
The same goes with the sometimes extremely troubling events of life that we have a hard time reconciling with what we understand to be God&#8217;s will, or plan, or goodness. A sinful doubt would be to refuse the testimony of God&#8217;s word in preference for our own or someone else&#8217;s reasoning, like the serpent&#8217;s persuading of Eve in Eden, so she followed his words instead of the divine command.
This, of course, leads to some punishment for our sin of doubting—for example, confusion, further errors we ourselves commit because we have cut ourselves off from the light of God&#8217;s word (this is perhaps the most common punishment), frustration in our activities, and so on. These punishments for doubting God&#8217;s word are experienced as though God were angry at us. Of course, God cannot be really angry in the human sense, but his corrections and punishments in order to establish justice and to further instruct us are described in Sacred Scripture as effects of God&#8217;s anger because <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/does-god-have-emotions">that is how we experience them</a>.
Let us put all our faith and trust in God, so that as difficult as things may seem to us, we always cling to him. As Holy Job said, &#8220;Even though he kill me, still will I praise him!&#8221; And yet Job had difficulties that he openly expressed to God about the trials he was made to undergo.
</div>

Does Doubting Make God Angry?

What is purgatory?

Tim Staples clarifies the meaning of the term scapegoat to explain why Scripture does not describe Jesus as such.

Was Jesus a Scapegoat?

Media depictions sell the &#8220;Rapture&#8221; as a Christian doctrine. But the event generally understood as the Rapture is not Christian doctrine at all. Karlo Broussard, the author of Purgatory Is for Real, decodes the truth about the end times.

The Rapture Code

The Book of Genesis teaches that the world of nature is to be honored and cultivated according to the divine wisdom who created it, and this respect should also transfer to the human body—created male and female with the God-given blessing of fertility.
Our modern world, however, treats fertility not as a blessing to be received and honored, but a problem to be solved. In order to get a hold on human fertility, something must be done to the human body—and thus, to the human person, you adopt the neo-gnostic view that says, “Sex organs do not make babies—persons do.” Embedded in this mentality is the idea that the human body—particularly human reproductive organs—are not constitutive of the person. Rather, they are extrinsic to authentic human nature and humanized only when they come under rational control. How contrary this is to the optimistic, joyful outlook of Genesis, which proclaims in a kind of celebration, “Male and female he created them . . . be fertile and multiply.”
At the heart of this conflict is the question of whether the ability to procreate is a true good of the person or just a physical function that may be turned on and off as needed. The latter view sees a baby conceived against the will of the couple as a kind of accident or, even worse, an inhuman intruder—unnatural to the couple’s love-making, somehow unrelated to the very act that by nature is ordered toward life! So the question ultimately involves a true appreciation for natural law. If human reproductive powers are God-designed, God-willed, what it means to be created male and female, when a couple deliberately impede fertility by recourse to contraception, they violate not a mere physical, mechanical process, but rather the integrity of the person. If human fertility is not a true human good or human end, the modern contraceptive/abortive mentality makes sense and logically follows.
But Genesis 1:26 destroys such neo-Gnosticism, affirming that the body and fertility are inherently linked to the creation of man as male and female and are constitutive of human gender. As with the rest of God’s creation, they are not accidents, but are imbued with meaning. They are not mere objects to be exploited, but gifts to be respected. Man’s dominion over them should be not a tyranny, but a cooperation with God’s sovereignty.
St. Paul teaches that even those who do not know the true God nonetheless honor him when they honor the natural law evident in his creation (see Rom. 1:18-20, 2:13-15). In this respect, those without God were tied to divine truths. Christ told the pagan Pilate, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice” (John 18:37). Commitment to truth is preparation for the gospel. The Vatican II document Dei Verbum tells us that the first source of God’s revelation isn’t Sacred Scripture or even the initial calling of the Jews. Rather, it is the created order itself, as “God gives an enduring witness to himself in created realities” (II, 3).
Natural human ends are in no sense mere biology propelling the human being to a fate he cannot control. There is no gulf between the body, the intellect, and divine wisdom. Human “animal” nature is filled with divine—one might even say sacred and transcendent—meaning because “natural inclinations” have no other end than God himself. For us, corporeal nature has a spiritual meaning. We can’t know the truth about ourselves, or God, without it.
Immediately after teaching in Romans 1 that God can be known in the things he has made, Paul has harsh words for those who abandon knowledge of the true God in favor of idolatry. Because human beings can know the moral law of God as it is written in nature—true worship is connected to upright moral behavior. Conversely, false worship, the failure to honor the true God by idolatrous practices, leads to immoral behavior.
Interestingly, Paul calls out such people specifically for their immoral sexual behavior. False worship leads to false sexual practices—the “mutual degradation of their bodies”:
<blockquote>They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator. . . . Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. . . . Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper (Rom. 1:24–28).</blockquote>
According to Paul, sexual rebellion against nature is the consequence of spiritual rebellion against God (see the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, 259).
Many authors interpret the Pauline passage on women exchanging “natural intercourse for unnatural” as a reference to lesbianism. This interpretation certainly makes sense, as it is immediately followed by Paul’s condemnation of males “burning with lust for one another.” However, Paul’s description of what women do when they fail to honor God isn’t exactly the same perversion of nature as what Paul says about men. Paul doesn’t say that females burn with lust for one another. Instead, he simply states that the females “exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural.” Indeed, the literal Greek renders the passage “for the females of them changed the natural use to the use against nature.”
It is quite possible that here Paul is talking about women who violated their God-given nature by rendering sterile the use of sexual intercourse—contradicting nature by deliberately acting against the good of fertility. Some might think that contraception wasn’t practiced in the ancient world, due to a lack of reliable scientific methods, but this is hardly the case. Besides coitus interruptus, the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians of New Testament times were known to practice several crude contraceptive methods. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul teaches that several sins proceed from the flesh, such as “immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds,” etc. (5:19-20). The Greek word often translated “sorcery,” <a href="https://biblehub.com/greek/5331.htm">pharmakeia</a>, can refer to the use of drugs, and indeed drugs or potions were employed then in the practice of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery. But as John F. Kippley, an expert on the subject of contraceptive use, <a href="https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2015/02/07/pharmakeia-contraception-interior-life/">points out</a>, pharmakeia may also refer to artificial birth control:
<blockquote>Pharmakeia in general was the mixing of various potions for secret purposes, and it is known that potions were mixed in the first century A.D. to prevent or stop a pregnancy. The typical translation as “sorcery” may not reveal all of the specific practices condemned by the New Testament. In all three of the passages in which it appears, it is in a context condemning sexual immorality; two of the three passages also condemn murder (Gal. 5:19–26; Rev. 9:21, 21:8). Thus it is very possible that there are three New Testament passages condemning the use of the products of pharmakeia for birth control purposes.</blockquote>
Even if Paul used pharmakeia to refer not to contraceptive methods of the ancient world, but to actual occult arts, in a real sense, the condemnation still applies when we consider the underlying philosophy of contraceptive use. The goal of sorcery is to control the world, control the future, control the forces of nature—to cause those forces to comply with one’s personal wishes. Sorcery seeks to alter and manipulate the dispositions of reality. This is exactly the aim of the practice of contraception through modern pharmaceutical methods—a kind of modern “sorcery,” a contemporary “casting of spells,” by which the reality of the human body is altered, manipulated for personal ends.
We may further note that this interpretation gains strength in the fact that lesbianism does not involve sexual intercourse. It is the “use” of sexual intercourse that is rendered unnatural. In any case, homosexual sexual acts and contracepted sexual acts share one common element: they are inherently barren, contrary to the natural good and God’s first blessing in Genesis.

Contraception as Sorcery

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What would you do?

Sometimes I feel as though I’m the last to know things. Maybe you feel the same. I’m coming from the perspective of a husband and father, as a boss in my day job, but also as a lay Catholic who wants to share the truth of our Faith with the world. Information and skills with using that information are vastly important to all of these activities and states of life.
It’s easy to be impatient or frustrated in “I didn’t know” or “not knowing before I should” moments, because let’s face it: the stakes are high. A child wants to know why it’s immoral to do this or that when everyone at school is allowed, and the parent struggles to explain why outside “because I said so.” Or, at a New Year’s party, religion comes up, and someone who knows you are Catholic asks why you don’t just confess your sins to God, and you fumble to come up with a practical explanation rooted in biblical truth. There goes a chance to put the issue to rest and vindicate the Catholic Faith.
We’re all familiar with this. I’ve had my own moments of frustration, when I don’t know what I’m supposed to. But something happened in 2015 that began to straighten things out. The details don’t matter here, except that it ended with a friend saying something profound: “Knowing you don’t know something is still knowing.”
This statement carries profound truth, particularly for those who walk the path of faith. As Catholics, we are invited to embrace the mystery of God and to approach the unknown with both humility and trust. Our faith deals with incredible concepts like revelation, mysteries, miracles, and divisions of authority. Whether we were raised in the Catholic faith or came home through a conversion, even with a lifetime of study, the task of pulling these concepts together is requires a most humble rigor: recognizing the limits of our knowledge. It is not a weakness at all, but a strength—a doorway to deeper wisdom, faith, and understanding.
The Bible reminds us repeatedly of the value of humility in the pursuit of knowledge. In the Book of Proverbs, we are told, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (9:10). This verse underscores that true wisdom begins not in certainty, but in reverence and an acknowledgment of our dependence on God. And God, let’s face it, didn’t back the FedEx truck up to the Garden of Eden with instructions and diagrams of everything we want to know. To “fear the Lord” is to recognize our finite understanding in the face of God’s infinite wisdom.
Job’s response to God is a profound example of what I call “holy ignorance.” After chapters of questioning and wrestling with his suffering, Job ultimately declares, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (42:3). Job’s humility in acknowledging his limited understanding leads to a deeper relationship with God. His story is a powerful reminder that it is not our answers that bring us closer to God, but our willingness to surrender to His mysteries.
The saints, too, have much to teach us about intellectual humility. St. Augustine, one of the Church’s greatest theologians, famously wrote, “If you think you understand God, it would not be God” (Sermon 117). Augustine’s insight challenges us to embrace the mystery of God rather than confining him to the limits of human reason. His own journey of faith—from skeptic to believer—was marked by a growing awareness of his dependence on God’s grace and wisdom.
St. Thomas Aquinas, often regarded as the pinnacle of Catholic intellectual thought, experienced a moment of profound humility near the end of his life. After having written volumes of theological works, he had a mystical experience that left him declaring, “All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.” This confession did not diminish his contributions, but rather highlighted his awareness that even the greatest human intellect pales in comparison to the fullness of divine truth. St. Teresa of Avila offers yet another perspective, reminding us of the importance of recognizing our limitations. “The real truth,” she said, “is humility.”
The Catholic Church has always encouraged intellectual humility as a cornerstone of faith. Pope St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, emphasized that faith and reason are complementary, but human reason must always remain open to the transcendent. He wrote, “Faith liberates reason from presumption, the typical temptation of the philosopher” (76). Meaning all human people, John Paul II was communicating that by acknowledging what we cannot know, we create space for the mystery of God to fill our hearts and minds.
As we settled in to pray the rosary as a family recently, my son, who is eight years old, asked, “What’s a mystery?” I had to think on my feet to get this mighty concept down to a third-grade level. I said something like, “These are things we understand on a basic level, but make us ask questions we cannot have the answer to—and by doing this, they build our faith through trust in God. Like the wedding at Cana—we know that Jesus performed a miracle, but it’s more than that. It was the start of his public ministry. He obeyed the request of his mother, and the whole situation made for an analogy about new wine coming last. On the basic level, we see the story of a miracle, but really there is a lot more we don’t know that informs us about who Jesus is, which deepens our need act in faith, not according to mere narratives.”
Okay, maybe I overexplained, but Dominic said he understood, so I’ll take it as a win.
How can we, as Catholics, cultivate this intellectual humility in our daily lives, especially as we get older? First, we can embrace the mysteries of our faith rather than seeking to explain them away. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the Trinity, and the Incarnation all transcend human understanding. By approaching these truths with reverence rather than skepticism, we open ourselves to deeper faith.
Then we can practice humility in our conversations, whether friendly or adversarial. St. James reminds us, “Let every man be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger” (1:19). Recognizing that we do not have all the answers allows us to listen more attentively to others and to learn from their perspectives.
Always, we must turn to prayer. In moments of uncertainty, we can echo the prayer of the father in the Gospel of Mark: “I believe; help my unbelief!” (9:24). This simple plea acknowledges both faith and doubt, and it invites God to lead us into deeper trust.
“Knowing you don’t know something is still knowing” is more than a clever aphorism; it is a spiritual truth with deep roots in Scripture, tradition, and the lives of the saints. As Catholics, we are called to walk in humility, recognizing our limitations while trusting in the infinite wisdom of God. This intellectual humility is not a surrender, but an invitation to grow in wonder, faith, and love.
In a world that often prizes certainty and control, the Catholic perspective reminds us that true wisdom lies in surrendering to the mystery. As St. Paul wrote, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor. 13:12). Until that day, may we embrace the beauty of not knowing, trusting that God’s truth will always surpass our understanding. Whether we are defending the Faith, teaching it to our littles, or searching for the bits of knowledge that help us retain and appreciate the divine mysteries, we must always apprehend the strength of humility over all other forms of knowledge.

When You Just Don’t Know

Lent is no Catholic Ramadan, and we as Catholics should be boldly honest about it. Although both seasons include fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, the two seasons arise from different visions of God and different understandings of salvation. Therefore, treating them as parallel religious expressions confuses what each one claims about the human condition and about the nature of the relationship man has with God.
First, Lent is rooted in the person and work of Jesus Christ. The Church enters forty days of prayer and fasting because Christ himself fasted in the wilderness. The Gospel tells us, “Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And he fasted forty days and forty nights” (Matt. 4:1-2). Accordingly, Catholic fasting participates in his obedience. The season prepares believers to celebrate the cross and the Resurrection, where redemption was accomplished. St. Paul writes, “While we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Therefore, Lent overflows from within a covenant already established through the grace of Christ’s finished work.
By contrast, Ramadan is an obligatory pillar of work within Islam. It marks a month of daytime fasting, intensified prayer, and communal devotion. Many Muslims understand the month as a time of seeking forgiveness and increased reward. A well-known hadith states, “Whoever stands in prayer during Ramadan out of faith and seeking reward, his previous sins will be forgiven” (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī). That line reveals a central feature of Ramadan’s spiritual logic. Forgiveness in Islam appears closely tied to faithful observance and pietistic work during a prescribed period, especially Ramadan.
The Christian faith thinks vastly differently about forgiveness. Scripture declares, “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace” (Eph. 1:7). Moreover, salvation for the Christian rests upon grace rather than accumulated merit. “By grace you have been saved through faith; and this is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8). Consequently, Lent is not a spiritual transaction designed to secure divine favor. Instead, it calls believers to deeper repentance within a covenant relationship already initiated by God.
Furthermore, Christianity diagnoses the human problem as a wounded nature in need of healing and transformation. The prophet Ezekiel records the Lord’s promise: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you” (Ezek. 36:26). Jesus teaches that sin flows from within, from the heart of man (Mark 7:21). Therefore, Christian conversion aims at interior renewal through the grace of divine life. In that reality, fasting serves that interior renewal by disciplining our base desires and turning our hearts toward God.
In Islam’s theological traditions, the central doctrinal issue is the slave’s insufficient submission to divine command and law. Consequently, the remedy is more stringent compliance with concrete revealed law. Nabeel Qureshi, the late Christian convert from Islam, wrote in No God but One, “Islam diagnoses the world with ignorance and offers the remedy of sharia, a law to follow. Christianity diagnoses the world with brokenness and offers the remedy of God himself, a relationship with him that leads to heart transformation.” Hence, in Islam, the believer demonstrates obedience through highly structured practices, including the fast of Ramadan. That framework shapes an entirely different spiritual posture. The worshiper seeks to fulfill what God has commanded in order to transactionally receive mercy and reward.
Christianity, conversely, has always taught a covenantal and filial vision. Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven” (Matt. 6:9). That address changes the spiritual atmosphere and approach. The child approaches God as Father through the Son. St. John proclaims, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1). Therefore, all Christian Lenten practices arise from a spiritual adoption into God’s covenant family. The baptized fast and pray as sons and daughters seeking deeper communion and intimacy with the heart of their Father.
Moreover, Lent stands within a very specific historical drama. It leads toward Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The Church contemplates and relives Christ’s paschal mystery in suffering and victory. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ was “tested as we are, yet without sinning” (Heb. 4:15). Consequently, believers lovingly unite all their small sacrifices with his perfect obedience. Salvation in the Christian framework rests entirely upon his conquest of sin and death on the cross and the faithful’s subsequent participation in that sacrifice. The Christian fast therefore expresses a sense of both gratitude and repentance in response to that magnificent victory.
Ramadan, by contrast, commemorates the revelation of the Quran and reinforces communal, slavish, voluntaristic submission to Allah’s will. It does not culminate in the celebration of a redemptive event in which God enters history through incarnation and sacrificial death in benevolent love. Christianity proclaims that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Lent draws its meaning from that astonishing claim—a claim that, I’ve personally witnessed, simply outrages and scandalizes the Muslim. The Son of God took on human nature, bore human sin, and rose in triumph to save mankind from sin and death. Therefore, Lenten fasting participates in a mystery of complete divine self-giving; it is ordered in love precisely because of divine love.
The difference extends also to divine assurance. In Christian teaching, believers rest entirely on Christ’s finished work. Jesus cries from the cross, “It is finished” (John 19:30). That declaration signals completion of the great work of man’s atonement back to God. Through repentance and faith, the sinner receives forgiveness grounded in Christ’s sacrifice. In Ramadan, earned forgiveness is directly linked to stringent observance within the sacred month. The spiritual logic of each of these traditions greatly shapes the believer’s interior life in distinct and disparate ways.
At the same time, Catholics can honestly recognize a sincere sense of devotion among Muslims during Ramadan. Regardless of one’s creed, physical hunger sharpens a person’s spiritual awareness. Extended prayer tends to build a desire for closeness to God. Jesus teaches, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Matt. 5:6). That longing for righteousness reveals something about God’s plan for the human person, even if someone doesn’t have faith in Christ. Therefore, Catholics should pray that these longings among the Muslims this month lead to conversion to the fullness of truth in Christ.
Charity, however, always necessitates truth, or it ceases to be charity. The gospel proclaims that “there is salvation in no one else” and that “there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The season of Lent compels us to renew that proclamation with conviction, boldness, and joy. It invites all of us as believers to repentance, confession, and renewed fidelity to the covenant way of life. Paul urges, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2). Lent embodies that urgency of the Gospel message.
Therefore, calling Lent a Catholic version of Ramadan simply ignores profound theological differences. The two seasons share outward similarities, yet their core foundations significantly diverge. One is based on a covenant sealed by Christ’s blood. The other is based within a framework of prescribed slavish submission seeking reward from a divine master. Consequently, their spiritual direction and meaning differ at the deepest level.
Even so, the overlap of the two seasons can serve as an opportunity for real witness. Catholics can live Lent with humility, sincerity, and joy. They can fast discreetly, give generously, and pray fervently. Jesus teaches, “When you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites” (Matt. 6:16). Instead, the Christian fast flows from love of the Father who sees in secret. Through such witness, neighbors may glimpse the difference between fasting for performance and participation in the life of grace. This should also, thereby, be an opportunity to pray for and work toward the conversion of Muslims to the lordship of Jesus Christ and life in his covenantal family.
Finally, Catholic hope is secure, because every human heart longs for mercy and communion with God. Lent directs that longing toward the crucified and risen Lord. As we believers walk through the forty days, we are called to remember that Christ has already secured our redemption. Therefore, Lent is a season of repentance within hope, sorrow within Christ’s promise, and fasting in divine joy that anticipates the resurrection of Easter morning. In that light, Lent remains uniquely Christian, beneath the shadow of the cross, yet also illuminated by the light of the Resurrection, all within the grace of Almighty God.

Lent Versus Ramadan

I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times. I know I have. “I can’t worship a God who would send people to hell for not worshipping him.” Some will make a similar claim: “I can’t believe God would send my loving family member to hell for simply being atheist.” These claims make sense to many, but do they hold up to scrutiny?
First things first: I am not here to make judgments on any specific person who has died. God would not be very happy with me if I tried to do that. However, there’s a good reason why Catholics generally claim that we have to believe and worship God in our lifetime in order to be in heaven in the next lifetime.
Many people describe God as “loving”—but there is more to it than that. God actually is love itself. We have two main reasons for believing this.
First, it’s explicit in Scripture. St. John tells us in his first letter that “anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8) John doesn’t tell his audience that God is loving. He tells them that God actually is love.
Another reason we have for believing that God is love itself comes from philosophy. All theists believe that God is necessarily all-loving (i.e., God cannot exist if he is not all-good). All theists also believe that God is self-sufficient, meaning that God is not reliant on anything outside himself to exist. This all seems straightforward. But what if love were something outside God? This would mean that God is reliant on something outside himself to exist. After all, if love does not exist, then God would not exist. This would then mean that God is not self-sufficient—a nightmare for Christian theology!
Another way to think about this would be to consider a situation in which God were “accidentally” all-loving. Essentially, this means that God can be all-loving or not all-loving, and it would not change who he is. God could still exist if he were not all-loving. If this were true, love would either be:
<ul>
<li>caused by something outside God</li>
</ul>
or
<ul>
<li>caused by God.</li>
</ul>
If something outside God made him who he is, we run into problems. This means that God is reliant on something outside him to make him who he is. And so God cannot be God without something that is not God. Likewise, if God caused himself to have these accidents (i.e., God caused himself to be all-loving), then he would change in time: God was not all-loving before, and after, he is. But because there is no “before” or “after” in the general view of God, this cannot happen.
This type of philosophy also helps us to make sure we are worshiping God and God alone. For instance, say someone starts worshiping God because of his love. This would be a rational thing to do, since God’s love is the reason we exist and have the ability to go to heaven. Many Christians throughout history have worshiped God because of his love.
However, what happens if God’s love is something outside himself? In that case, we would be worshiping God and God’s love. This isn’t to say we aren’t worshiping God when we do this; rather, we are worshiping God and something else that is not God as well. If we want to worship God alone, we had better not worship God because of his love . . . if God’s love is something outside God. But since it’s rational to worship God because of his love, and Scripture tells us to worship only God (Exod. 20:3), we can conclude that God is the same as his love. Similarly, in worshiping God’s love, <a href="https://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2015/01/divine-simplicity-and-uncompromising.html">we are really worshipping God</a>.
No matter what reason seems more persuasive to you, it’s vitally important that this technicality is discussed. If God is love itself, the hypothetical quotes I gave in the introduction do not hold up. If God is love itself, and I tell him I do not want anything to do with him in this life, he will allow me to do as I choose and go to a place without love (hell). Alternatively, when we spend time with God in this life, we are showing him that we want to be close to love. That is what allows us to enter heaven.
All in all, it’s vitally important that we make the clarification that God is not merely a loving being, but actually love itself. We have different reasons for believing this, from scriptural to philosophical, but it’s the conclusion to that realization that is most important—when we show God we do not want anything to do with him in this lifetime, we are showing God we do not want anything to do with love. This concludes with God allowing us to go to a place that has no love: hell.

A Loving God Requires Hell

<div>Is centering prayer true prayer?</div><div>Fr. Thomas Dubay, an author and teacher on contemplative prayer, wrote the following response to a question asking if he thought <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-danger-of-centering-prayer">centering prayer</a> is helpful:
<blockquote>The simple answer to your question is no, I do not. Rather, it is more of a hindrance to <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/contemplation">contemplative prayer</a>. It seems that the promoters of centering prayer have recently been changing their message, due perhaps to criticism. However, I shall respond to what has been generally presented to many people. Centering methods have been much influenced by oriental ideas, and that is the main problem. For the sake of clarity and brevity, I shall make three points.
The first is that one should beware of techniques for emptying the mind to prepare it for contemplation. This is unnatural. Our minds are made to be filled, not emptied. Nowhere does Scripture advise this. Rather, the beginner is told to fill his mind by pondering the word of God day and night (Ps. 1:1-2). This is meditation, not emptying our minds. St. Teresa rightly said that when we are ready, God gives us something better than our efforts can produce, namely, infused communing with himself. . . .</blockquote>
<blockquote>Secondly, it is an illusion to think that techniques can produce an immersion in God. He is not one to be manipulated as one can manipulate a machine or appliance.
And thirdly, emptying methods can frustrate both the beginner who needs input on which to reflect and the advanced person who needs freedom from human efforts to be able to receive the light and love God wishes to communicate (Prayer Primer: Igniting A Fire Within, 155-156).</blockquote>
</div>

Is Centering Prayer True Prayer?

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What is "sacrifice"?

“Where’s <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/purgatory">purgatory</a> in the Bible?” Protestants ask this all the time.
Any Catholic who is familiar with apologetics knows to answer with 1 Corinthians 3:11-15:
<blockquote>For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.</blockquote>
Paul is talking about the Day of Judgment, which comes after death (see Hebrews 9:27). And in light of the “fire” that tests the quality of a person’s works, Catholics argue that the person is being purified. Fire is used metaphorically in Scripture as a purifying agent—in Matthew 3:2-3,11 and Mark 9:49—and as that which consumes: Matthew 3:12; 2 Thessalonians 1:7-8). This state of existence can’t be heaven because the individual has the defilement of bad works and is suffering loss. Nor can it be hell because Paul says the person “will be saved.” A state of purification in the afterlife that is neither heaven nor hell—that’s purgatory!
But for Protestants it’s not so clear. They offer a few reasons why they think this doesn’t refer to purgatory.
One is that Paul says these things will only happen at the Final Judgment—“for the Day will disclose it” (v.13; emphasis added). For this text to support the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, so the argument goes, it would need to speak of an intermediate judgment before the Second Coming. Since it doesn’t, a Catholic can’t use it to support purgatory.
What should we make of this Protestant counter? Is it a precious stone that would survive the fire of scrutiny? Or is it more like straw? Let’s test it and find out.
It’s true that when Paul speaks of “the Day” he is referring to the Final Judgment—that is, the judgment at the end of time when Christ comes in glory (Matt. 25:31-46). But this doesn’t prevent a Catholic from using this passage to support purgatory.
Paul was not envisioning this passage for such an intermediate state because, as some scholars point out, Paul wrote this at a time (c. A.D. 53) when he thought the Second Coming was imminent, and that he and most of his audience would experience it. For example, he writes in reference to it, “we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thess. 4:17; emphasis added. Cf. 1 Cor. 15:51).
Given this, we wouldn’t expect Paul to think that these events take place during an intermediate judgment before the Final Judgment. But what if the time horizon shifted and most people died before the Second Coming? Could we say they received some kind of judgment prior to the Last Judgment? And would these events that Paul describes have taken place at that judgment?
The time horizon indeed does seem to shift for Paul. In 2 Timothy 4:6, he tells Timothy that he knows his death is imminent: “For I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come.” If he knows he’s about to die, then surely he doesn’t expect to be alive for the Second Coming.
What about an intermediate judgment before the Final Judgment? Scripture reveals that such a judgment does exist, and it occurs immediately after death when God determines a person’s final destiny—what the Catechism calls “the particular judgment” (1022).
Jesus makes this clear in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Lazarus is “carried by angels to Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22) and receives a fate of comfort (v.25). The rich man is taken to Hades where he experiences “torment” (v.23) and “anguish” (v.25). The different fates assigned to each man immediately after death imply a particular judgment.
Hebrews 12:23 speaks of our union with “the spirits of just men” as members of the New Covenant. That we approach their spirits suggests they are dead. And that they are a part of the heavenly reality that Christians participate in tells us that they exists in heaven, and thus have been judged.
Revelation 6:9 implies the same thing, for the martyrs in heaven beg God to avenge their blood on their persecutors who are still on earth. Revelation 7:9-14 describes those “clothed in white robes” who “have come out of the great tribulation” of the first century experiencing their eternal reward in heaven.
Now that we know there is such a thing as an intermediate judgment (“the particular judgment”) before the Final Judgment, the question becomes: “Can we apply the events that Paul speaks of in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 to the particular judgment?” We have good reason to think that we can.
The events that Paul describes have no intrinsic relation to the timing of judgment, but to judgment itself. Works are being weighed, and the soul receives its final destiny (in this case it’s heaven).
This is what happens at the particular judgment. According to the Catechism, each person has his works weighed (1021) and receives his “eternal retribution in his immortal soul at the very moment of his death,” “either entrance into the blessedness of heaven—through a purification or immediately,” or “immediate and everlasting damnation” (1022).
Since the type of judgment that Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 (e.g., works are tested, the soul’s final destiny is determined) is the type of judgment that takes place for souls at the particular judgment, then it’s reasonable to use this passage to describe what happens at the particular judgment. And if the particular judgment, then purgatory.
Pope Benedict XVI points out in Spe Salvi that the “fire” could be “Christ himself, the Judge and Savior,” before whose gaze “all falsehood melts away.” “This encounter with him,” he explains, “burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves” (47). The particular judgment for those who die in friendship with Christ, and thus are guaranteed heaven, could be the purgatorial experience itself.
Therefore, Paul’s reference to the final judgment in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 in no way stops a Catholic from using this text for purgatory. The “Last Day” objection has been tested and proven inadequate.

Testing a Biblical Objection to Purgatory

The book of Ecclesiastes shows up in the current Sunday lectionary only this once every three years, so we ought to consider that briefly before looking at its connection with today’s Gospel.
I’ve always loved Ecclesiastes. I think this love began when I was a teenager and wrestling with matters of faith as a Protestant. I grew up in something of an anti-intellectual tradition (not that we would have ever used the word “tradition”), so my questions about the Bible and theology weren’t always very welcome by many of my Sunday school teachers or youth group leaders. I was barely aware of the existence of Catholicism at that point in my life, but looking back, I can see how easy it was to call the bluff, so to speak, on much of the Protestant teaching I received. You can’t go around criticizing Catholics for their authoritarian tradition while at the same time insisting that the Bible has to be read a certain way just because. There’s an intellectual and cognitive incoherence there that I and many others found hard to bear.
Ecclesiastes comes into my story as an example of . . . well, a somewhat annoying series of questions without obvious answers. Right there in the heart of the Old Testament is a thought experiment where the writer, known as the Teacher, for the sake of argument, just puts aside everything he knows about divine revelation and tries to figure out whether life makes any sense. It can come across as dark, or as whimsical, but it struck me all those years ago just as it does now, as real. For something written thousands of years ago it feels very postmodern.
What Ecclesiastes shows us is, among other things, a world without hope. There are all sorts of things we can know with reason alone: things about the natural world, even the existence of a creator. But we cannot know anything about meaning, or hope, or love, except in the most superficial and ephemeral ways. Ecclesiastes boldly asks the question almost taken for granted by many people in our age of idle wealth: What if this is really all there is? What if the only meaning in life is what I make of it, what I do with my time and my money, how I pursue pleasure and happiness before I inevitably die?
Ecclesiastes isn’t the final canonical answer to these questions, of course, even within the Old Testament. It needs to be read along with the other books of Solomon, especially Proverbs and the Song of Songs. There we can see, in rough outline, a sort of three-act drama. In Proverbs, Solomon asserts the conventional practical wisdom of the natural law. In Ecclesiastes, he explores the absurdity of following merely natural law in a world of death and chance. In the Song, he finds that the ultimate human vocation is not merely in the virtues of this world, in wealth and pleasure, but in the ecstatic embrace of divine love, which is mirrored in human marital love.
But the more cynical moments of Ecclesiastes continue to resonate, and it seems that our theoretical rich man in the Gospel takes a this-worldly approach to life’s meaning. His strategy, of building up his business may strike a modern businessperson as basic prudence. Yet the prophets would have reminded him that, although doing good work is indeed virtuous, and making wealth is also good, he has to remember that this material success brings certain obligations to the common good as well as certain temptations to his own soul’s health. To treat his success as something to simply capitalize on for his own benefit, or even for that of his heirs, is to neglect a basic principle rather bluntly stated by St. Ambrose in his commentary on this passage: “The things we cannot take away with us are not even ours. Only virtue is the companion of the dead. Compassion alone follows us.”
If this seems to cut into the heart of the “American Dream,” then perhaps we begin to understand aright what the Lord wants us to hear. Those of us more comfortable in a classic economic “conservatism” may then fret that the Lord wants us to become socialists or something, but this isn’t the point, either. The Catholic ideal is not some sort of flattening economic equality, where everybody must forcefully get the same thing all the time. It is rather the insistent awareness of what material things are for, and what they are meant to do: they form us either in virtue or in vice. They can aid us in seeking communion with God or stand as obstacles in our way.
In his reading of this passage, David Lyle Jeffrey points out that Jesus is warning here against the hypocrisy and covetousness of not just the rich, but also his poor disciples, who might resent and covet that same wealth. In other words, sitting around being envious of the rich is just as dangerous as sitting around hoarding your wealth
Whatever our present status, the Lord calls us to invest in what matters. This doesn’t mean we can’t also invest in the things of this life. It is not a bad thing to make provisions for our children or our friends, because this can be an aid to their spiritual growth insofar as it provides for their material health. But there are very real dangers to the soul if we do not take seriously the Lord’s call to be generous with what we have, and to prioritize the things of God. If we treat our possessions as merely ours, we will form our souls not for heaven, but for the dust of the ground. And this is a matter of not just money, but every aspect of life.
Do we regard having more than two children as “too expensive” because we take as normative the expectations of American consumer culture? Do we shrink from the idea of our children pursuing celibacy in religious or clerical life? Do we think we are being generous when we throw a small bill into the offering plate every so often? Do we resent it when the Church asks us to show up on a weekday, or fast, or abstain from meat?
Hard questions for reflection, maybe, but worth asking if we want to be prepared for the life to come, where the size or our granaries or our investments accounts mean exactly nothing, except insofar as they were used to cultivate the divine life in us and those around us.

A World Without Hope

How to become Saint Patrick

What do we know about the language Jesus spoke? Jimmy Akin shares the basics (and teaches us a new word!) on Catholic Answers Live.

What Language Did Jesus Speak?

My heart sank when I saw Monday’s news of the Vatican&#8217;s <a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/260129/meet-luce-the-vatican-s-cartoon-mascot-for-jubilee-2025">unveiling of Luce, a cartoon mascot</a> intended to promote the upcoming Jubilee Year. After decades of attempts to make church cool and relevant had failed to reverse Christianity’s hemorrhaging of young people, Vatican leaders decided this was a perfect time to . . . try to make church cool and relevant.
In their own words:
“Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican’s chief organizer for the jubilee, described the mascot as part of the Vatican’s goal to engage with ‘the pop culture so beloved by our young people.’”
Everybody say the line!

This was my gut reaction.
And yet!
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143626" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-300x181.png" alt="" width="326" height="197" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-300x181.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-768x464.png 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502-662x400.png 662w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-e1730418440502.png 1282w" sizes="(max-width: 326px) 100vw, 326px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143627" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-300x81.jpg" alt="" width="394" height="106" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-300x81.jpg 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-768x206.jpg 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1-1200x322.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-1.jpg 1284w" sizes="(max-width: 394px) 100vw, 394px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143630" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-300x258.jpg" alt="" width="390" height="335" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-300x258.jpg 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-768x659.jpg 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1-466x400.jpg 466w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture1-1.jpg 827w" sizes="(max-width: 390px) 100vw, 390px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143628" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-095715-e1730418597171-300x137.png" alt="" width="307" height="140"/>
At least some Catholics—across age groups!—are embracing Luce. Scores of <a href="https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/luce-the-vaticans-anime-mascot">fanart variants and memes</a> have exploded into the zeitgeist. Of course, the outcry against Luce has been just as loud and passionate. But that’s not surprising; it is surprising to see this many young Catholics voice such full-throated approval for Luce, rather than roll their eyes at the umpteenth attempt by these old men to “appeal to the youth.”
So what’s going on here? As a Gen Z staffer at Catholic Answers whose job is literally to be online, I observe the following.
First and foremost: as an anime character, Luce instantly appeals to an obsessive demographic that overlaps with a significant portion of online Catholics (the “anime profile pic trad” is a well-known archetype). I have never taken interest in anime, so I couldn&#8217;t say why other fully-grown adults find it so captivating; suffice it to say that this subculture is a major driver in Luce’s initial positive reception. But I don’t think it’s the only one.
Second: Luce is undeniably adorable. Maybe you disagree, but I have to hand it to the creators: they nailed the look of childlike faith and innocence. And the pilgrimage symbols embedded in her character—muddy boots, Camino de Santiago shells in her eyes, pilgrim’s cross, and World Mission rosary—are subtle. Nothing evokes the overbearing “Jesus is COOL, kids!!” lunkheadedness of, say, <a href="https://christchurchusa.org/questministries/blog/what-a-tripp-mascots-revealed-quest-kids-ministry/">VBS mascots</a>.
Finally, I take these folks at their word: they think Luce is fun.
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143631" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-091117-300x57.png" alt="" width="553" height="105" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-091117-300x57.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-091117.png 737w" sizes="(max-width: 553px) 100vw, 553px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143632" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2-300x238.jpg" alt="" width="429" height="340" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2-300x238.jpg 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2-503x400.jpg 503w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Picture2.jpg 667w" sizes="(max-width: 429px) 100vw, 429px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143633" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-300x91.png" alt="" width="544" height="165" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-300x91.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-768x232.png 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916-1200x363.png 1200w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-105916.png 1462w" sizes="(max-width: 544px) 100vw, 544px"/>
I find myself agreeing more as the days pass. If nothing else, a cute Catholic mascot makes great <a href="https://i.imgur.com/0LYdOvf.png">meme fodder</a>—and the <a href="https://i.imgur.com/YQ8YonY.png">memes</a> have been <a href="https://i.imgur.com/IBDJJ7e.png">fantastic</a>. But I think it runs deeper.
Most of the time, Catholic social media (especially X) is just not fun. People accuse each other of heresy, bicker and squabble over nonessentials, post and re-post vain platitudes, popesplain, refute the popesplainers, refute the refutation of the popesplainers, say unthinkable things about “the Jews,” and generally conduct themselves with a degree of arrogance that would make a saint convulse. Gongs clash and cymbals clang. Meanwhile, news breaks every day about another church scandal, another confusing statement from the pope, another example of why everything is too trad or not trad enough and why the Church is therefore doomed; and if that wasn’t enough, election season is coming to a head.
<a href="https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/486/992/0f8.png">It’s all so tiresome.</a>
Enter a wide-eyed child with a Vatican-yellow raincoat and an unflinching smile:
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143634" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-261x300.png" alt="" width="406" height="466" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-261x300.png 261w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-768x882.png 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334-348x400.png 348w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-31-110334.png 1297w" sizes="(max-width: 406px) 100vw, 406px"/>
I get it. Luce is <a href="https://i.imgur.com/dRP4QOK.jpeg">above it all</a>. Our Lord tells us we must “change and become like little children” to enter the kingdom of heaven, and she portrays that in a disarming way. That’s why Luce has won me over.
However, memes, trends, and hype are fleeting. The buzz will die down, probably sooner than we expect. And then it will be time to face the real question: did this help save souls?
Well…
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143635" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-090727-300x59.png" alt="" width="514" height="101" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-090727-300x59.png 300w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-090727.png 737w" sizes="(max-width: 514px) 100vw, 514px"/>
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143636" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-291x300.jpg" alt="" width="366" height="378" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-291x300.jpg 291w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-768x792.jpg 768w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2-388x400.jpg 388w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Image-2.jpg 1284w" sizes="(max-width: 366px) 100vw, 366px"/>
Maybe!
I mean, with God all things are possible, right? And he likes to work through the simple and the unexpected. We talk a lot in apologetics about the importance of planting a seed and letting God water it. I see no reason why this mascot, paired with an unusual outburst of online Catholic joy, can’t be a seed to outsiders.
But that&#8217;s speculation. Unfortunately, I have a more concrete reason to be pessimistic about a cartoon mascot&#8217;s salvific potential. You may be thinking about it already.
This move, like every move the Church makes these days, takes place in the shadow of a looming specter that hasn&#8217;t gone away since 2002. The institutional Church has yet to fully reckon with it and make complete restitution, and until such time, I can&#8217;t help but feel that a child cartoon mascot is just poor optics.
Father Paul Hedman puts it well:
<img class="aligncenter wp-image-143639" src="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346-248x300.png" alt="" width="447" height="541" srcset="https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346-248x300.png 248w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346-331x400.png 331w, https://cdn.catholic.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2024-10-29-092346.png 740w" sizes="(max-width: 447px) 100vw, 447px"/>
Luce is a hit for some, but Vatican leaders can’t rest on their laurels. After the hype dies off, the stench of scandal will remain, still warding off souls. It takes more than a mascot to overcome that.