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

How Does Intercessory Prayer Work?

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

Disabling a Pacemaker Is Wrong

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Is purgatory a catholic invention?

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

Does the Bible Disprove the Assumption?

Protestant worship lacks this one thing… the Eucharist.

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

How to Disprove Reincarnation

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

Archangel Cassiel?

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

Catholics and Political Parties

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

How Do I Tackle Anxiety When Discerning a Vocation?

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

God’s Immutability and the Incarnation: Irreconcilable Differences?

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

Are Imaginary Friends Bad?

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

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

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