Manage Account

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 If anything is &#8220;rescinded,&#8221; it would mean simply that the creature, man or angel, refused God&#8217;s gift.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Salvation Cannot Be Rescinded

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

Why Francis Will Be Relevant Forever

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

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

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

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

This Diocese Cracked the Code on Conversions

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

Is Full-Immersion Baptism Necessary?

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

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

Does the Bible Forbid Tattoos?

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

Rendering to Caesar . . . and to God

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

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

Muslim Risks Everything to Become Christian

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

Why Chance Can’t Eliminate God

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

Creeds Can’t Save Protestantism

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

Mission Impossible: Baptism

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

Why Do I Need Jesus?

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

Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?

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Mary shows us the RIGHT WAY to read Scripture.

What happened to St Joseph?

Did Catholics win the internet in 2025?

Matt Fradd joining Daily Wire

Growth of Church in USA

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

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

What Constitutes Praying a Rosary?

Pope Francis on Female Deacons: Why So Misunderstood?

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

What’s Wrong with Your City

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

Is America Still Free?

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

Salvation Is Better than You Think

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

Is the Our Father Changing?

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

Are the Olympics Pagan?

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

Is It Sinful to Leave Work Early?

Can the Saints save you?

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

Heretics and the Good Samaritan

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

Don’t Applaud the Choir

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Infant Baptism isn't JUST CATHOLIC!

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

Must I Forgive and Forget?

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

Why Humans Are Not Parasites

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

The First Thing Resurrected Jesus Did

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

What was God doing before he created the universe?

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

Where Did Jesus Get his DNA?

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

The Truth About Invincible Ignorance

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Before you prove it, make them care.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen famously <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/radio-replies-classic-answers-to-timeless-questions-about-the-catholic-faith/">remarked</a> that “there are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.” He penned this observation many decades ago, but today the problem of mass religious ignorance—and the spiritual indifference it causes—is worse than ever.
How can we evangelize this apathy-ridden culture?
A long-term solution to the problem of religious indifference begins in the home, in the context of the family. Christian parents have a responsibility not only to teach their children about the Faith (and how to pray), but to familiarize them with common objections to Christian beliefs and teach them how to respond. They must also teach their children how to think, emphasizing the Church’s deep reverence for science and reason—and reason’s intimate compatibility with faith. Crede, ut intelligas wrote St. Augustine: “Believe so that you may understand.”
The pressing circumstances of today necessitate some immediate interventions as well. Few Christian thinkers have thought more deeply about the problem of religious indifference than <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/wanna-place-a-bet-on-god">Blaise Pascal</a>, so let’s start with the approach he outlined in his classic <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Pensees-Penguin-Classics-Blaise-Pascal/dp/0140446451">Pensées</a>:
<blockquote>Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first [1] to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next [2] make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then [3] show that it is.</blockquote>
1. Show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect.
There are many compelling arguments that can be given to explain and defend the Catholic faith. But the more elementary case for reasonable religion requires a more elementary step: the defining of terms and the dispelling of caricatures.
Skeptics often rush to define faith as something like “holding a belief for no good reason” or “believing something despite stronger evidence for the contrary.” Neither of these definitions is helpful. Rule number one, therefore, is this: do not let skeptics define your terms for you!
Properly understood, faith is the assent given to a proposition based on the authority of another. Faithful assent is what students give to teachers, what plaintiffs give to lawyers, and what historians give to war veterans. But such trust does not close itself off to further investigation. Reason is used to confirm belief, and although the mysteries of faith are often perceived as “barricaded” truths inaccessible to reason, we may instead view such mysteries as wellsprings of truth and insight. Mysteries are gifts that keep on giving to the human intellect. As G.K. Chesterton <a href="https://amzn.to/2wjlO2Z">remarked</a>, “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
2. Make Christianity attractive so that indifferentists desire it to be true. 
Christianity is beautiful. We can tell people that, but often, it is better to show it.
In a 1970 <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html">lecture</a>, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian novelist and survivor of the Soviet labor camps, asserted that “the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable, and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender.” Beauty draws its beholder in. Through the visible, the invisible becomes intelligible. The beautiful is unimposing—even disarming—which makes it an attractive starting point for evangelism. As Bishop Robert Barron has said, “beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization.”
There is no icon more attractive than the eikon (to use St. Paul’s Greek term) of God, Jesus Christ (Col. 1:15). Particularly through Christ&#8217;s death and resurrection, man has been able to comprehend in a newly profound way not only the seriousness of sin, but also the infinite love of God. This is why Paul decided to “know nothing” among the Corinthians he was evangelizing, “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). We need to show people that the crucified Christ is alive—and, indeed, alive within ourselves.
3. Third, show that Christianity actually is true.
It doesn’t matter how attractive a religion is if it is a counterfeit. This is where apologetics comes in. Catholicism makes three basic truth claims, each serving as a pillar of the religion’s entire doctrinal system.
The first is that God exists. But why should anyone care about this in the first place? “The first step in answering,” <a href="https://amzn.to/2I3vqQJ">writes</a> philosopher Richard Purtill, “is to point out that if the traditional idea of God is true, we would cease to exist if God did not think of us and will to keep us in existence. God is interested in us; that in itself is a reason.” Indeed, that an immanently present God exists and is at work in the world is not a mere assertion, but can be formidably defended by way of reason. (See St. Thomas’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)">Five Ways</a>, for instance.)
The second pillar is that Jesus Christ is God incarnate—<a>which he demonstrates definitively by rising from the dead as he predicted. This resurrection is the keystone of the Faith.</a> “If Christ has not been raised, then we are still in our sins,” Paul declares (1 Cor. 15:17). Luckily for Christians, there are good reasons to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. “The evidence for the Resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion,” skeptic Antony Flew has <a href="http://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1336&amp;context=lts_fac_pubs">admitted</a>. “It’s outstandingly different in quality and quantity.” Catholics should be familiar with this <a href="https://amzn.to/2I0Yuse">evidence</a> and be prepared to share it.
Finally, the Catholic Church claims to be the Church Christ founded. Defending this claim, we find, is the robust work of not only Catholic apologists, but also the early Church Fathers, some of whom were disciples of the apostles. From St. Ignatius of Antioch to St. Augustine to St. John Damascene, all of the Fathers from the earliest centuries prove themselves, in their writings, to be unmistakably Catholic. Thus, the Catholic Church has Sacred Scripture and early Church history on its side.
We have to remain realistic about the challenge ahead. Evangelization is hard work, and the fruits are not always immediately apparent. There is no magic bullet that will automatically awaken every spiritually indifferent person and bring him to faith. Conversions tend to happen in baby steps, and often neither the evangelist nor the evangelized knows that a conversion has begun, when indeed it has. We must, therefore, move forward patiently in faith, hope, and love, remembering always Paul’s words to the Corinthians:
<blockquote>Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers (1 Cor. 3:6-7).</blockquote>

3 Steps to Evangelize the Indifferent

Dr. Michael Barber briefly discusses how some Protestants have a kind of tradition, before expounding more fully the Greek etymological roots of the word and how its uses in Scripture relate most of all to the Catholic Liturgy.
Transcript:
Host: Ben in Fairfield, California, listening&#8211;also listening&#8211;on Immaculate Heart Radio. You are on with Dr. Michael Barber, what&#8217;s your question?
Caller: Yes, Dr. Barber, just a quick question. Non-denominational Protestants, even though they claim not to have tradition, the Sola Scriptura, they still do have the tradition, and they&#8217;re not anarchists, they have some kind of structured organization, and they do have their own rituals.
Dr. Barber: Absolutely. That&#8217;s 100% true.
Caller: Basically, they&#8217;re just disagreeing with Catholic tradition&#8211;but Catholic tradition can be sourced back through the Bible, and also has a separate authentication, you know, historical authentication, compared to their newer rituals, and traditions, would you agree with that?
Dr. Barber: Right, I think that&#8217;s certainly&#8211;I think that&#8217;s true. Non-Catholic Christians do have tradition. Can we take a step back, or are we up against a break here?
Host: You have about a minute.
Dr. Barber: Okay, one thing that I really want to underscore is, I don&#8217;t want us to fall into a trap that I think we can sometimes fall into: Tradition isn&#8217;t just a bunch of data. It&#8217;s not like, okay, here are a whole bunch of key concepts, and key ideas, that have been passed on. It&#8217;s not just that, right? And if you look at Scripture very carefully, you&#8217;ll recognize this, because the word that&#8217;s used for tradition, &#8220;paradosis&#8221; in the Greek&#8211;or, you know, that&#8217;s the noun form&#8211;the verb is &#8220;paradidomi.&#8221; So &#8220;paradosis&#8221; means &#8220;tradition,&#8221; the noun; &#8220;paradidomi&#8221; would be &#8220;to &#8216;tradition&#8217; something,&#8221; &#8220;to pass something on,&#8221; right? &#8220;To hand something over.&#8221;
And it&#8217;s a really important word. It&#8217;s used throughout the New Testament in ways people may not expect. So for example, in Romans 8, it talks about how God the Father &#8220;paradidomi,&#8221; how he gave us His Son. And we also read in Galatians, too, about how the Son gave us&#8211;or, delivered Himself up for us, He gave Himself up for us, &#8220;paradidomi.&#8221; In John 19:30, we read about how Christ delivered over the Spirit.
So this whole idea of tradition is a lot broader than just a concept. What is tradition? It&#8217;s ultimately nothing less than the communication of the fullness of revelation. And the fullness of revelation is not just an idea, it&#8217;s the Word. It&#8217;s Christ Himself, right? So tradition is not just, &#8220;I got this idea,&#8221; right, or, &#8220;Here&#8217;s the truth: The Assumption.&#8221; It&#8217;s more than that, right? Tradition is the giving over of the fullness of the Word, the passing on of the Word.
Right, and so for us, where does that happen? Where does Christ&#8211;where is the Word fully communicated to us? Well, it&#8217;s especially linked with the Liturgy, right? It&#8217;s especially linked with the Eucharist, and you might think, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s a Catholic notion;&#8221; that&#8217;s actually a Pauline notion. So I&#8217;m actually working on a book right now, with Brant Pitre and John Kincade, called The Apostle Paul, it should be out, oh, hopefully next year. And one of the things, in researching and writing the book, that really stood out to me was what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11. In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul says, &#8220;I commend you because you remember me in everything, and maintain the traditions (&#8220;paradosis,&#8221; there&#8217;s that word, right, &#8220;tradition&#8221;) even as I paradidomi (even as I &#8220;traditioned&#8221;) them to you.&#8221;
Well, what is it that you &#8220;traditioned&#8221; to them, Paul? This is what he goes on to say: &#8220;For I received from the Lord what I also paradidomi (what I also &#8220;traditioned&#8221;) to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when He was betrayed, took bread&#8230;&#8221; and you know the rest, right? So for St. Paul, the idea of tradition is inextricably linked to what? The Lord&#8217;s Supper. And that shouldn&#8217;t be surprising to us, because elsewhere in his letters, that&#8217;s the word, &#8220;paradidomi,&#8221; tradition, to hand over, that&#8217;s the idea that you find in reading about, or in Paul&#8217;s preaching of the way God the Father gives us the Son, the Son gives us Himself, and so on and so forth. That happens especially in the Eucharist, when we receive His Body and Blood, and so in Catholic theology, tradition is especially linked to the LITURGY.
So, how do you know which books belong in the Bible? Okay, well, yes, the Church defines that, but we already mentioned that the whole list of the Biblical books is a sort of tradition. It really was; in the early Church, the reason they needed to know which books belong in the Bible was because they needed to know, &#8220;Which books can you read in the Liturgy?&#8221; They didn&#8217;t sell Bibles in a Barnes &amp; Noble down the street, right? If you went to Mass, you were gonna hear&#8211;if you went to the Liturgy, if you went to the Lord&#8217;s Supper&#8211;you were gonna hear Scripture read. The big question was, &#8220;Which books can you read in the churches?&#8221;
And so, right there, the question of the Canon is a tradition question, it&#8217;s a Liturgical question. See, all these things sort of come together there.
Host: Yes, and the Eucharist, as you said, is the full handing over, or &#8220;traditioning,&#8221; to use your term, the full handing over of Christ to us, and that&#8217;s what the whole thing leads to, and then the whole thing proceeds from.
Dr. Barber:That&#8217;s correct.

Do Non-Catholic Christians Have Tradition?

<div>I have heard that groups that claim to follow Jesus are not true Christians. Why is this so?</div><div>The Church accepts as Christians only those faith communities that have valid baptisms. Faith communities that do not accept the Trinity are not considered to validly baptize, because their theology of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is incompatible with the Church&#8217;s. As such, they cannot in any meaningful way be considered to intend to do what the Church does in the sacrament of baptism.
Faith communities that accept the Bible and claim to be disciples of Jesus but do not acknowledge the divinity of Jesus or the basic theology of the Trinity are not considered Christians by the Church.
</div>

Why Are Some Groups Not Considered Christian?

<div>Do we discover moral truths like we do scientific and philosophical truths?</div><div>First, it’s incorrect to assert that scientific and philosophical truths are discerned according to the same investigational methods.
Science, as defined and governed by the scientific method, is concerned strictly with the material world, whereas philosophy transcends the material. Philosophy literally means “the love of wisdom” (etymology: Greek, philein, to love + sophia, wisdom: philosophus). So <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/philosophy">philosophy</a>, as Fr. John Hardon, S.J., summarizes in his Modern Catholic Dictionary, is the discipline “in which natural reason, apart from divine revelation, seeks to understand all things by a knowledge of their first causes.”
Thus, science, strictly speaking, cannot answer the great questions of life, e.g., “What is love?” or “What is the meaning of life?” Those are covered, in part, in the realm of philosophy, whereas science aids us to navigate more efficiently our everyday lives through various discoveries and improvements, e.g., regarding housing, transportation, and the related use of electricity and water.
One branch of philosophy is <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/ethics">ethics</a>, in which we determine moral truths. We can determine right and wrong based on the nature of a human person, who, apart from divine revelation, we can discern is made in the image and likeness of God (see Gen. 1:26-27). Because of the inherent dignity of a human person, we can rationally conclude that an innocent human person should not be murdered. In addition, including in part because the possibility of procreation is an outcome of sexual intimacy, we can rationally conclude that a man and woman who engage in such conjugal activity should be married, both for their children’s welfare as well their own in general.
Moral truths are also attained through divine Revelation, as the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20) and the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7) illustrate.
Finally, <a href="https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-the-church-developed-the-scientific-method-If-not-what-are-the-other-alternatives-If-it-is-true-why-isnt-it-acknowledged-more-often">as even atheists will recognize</a>, it’s not a coincidence that the scientific method was developed in Christian Europe:
<blockquote>One of these was a very medieval Catholic idea that the cosmos is a rational product of a rational mind—that of the Christian God—and so could and should be apprehended rationally. This is why logic was one of the very first things you learned in a medieval school and why carefully structured dialectical debate, ordered by the rules of logic, was how ideas were (vigorously) thrashed out in medieval universities. It also meant that the universe was seen to run on rational rules—if something could be observed to work today, it was going to work the same way tomorrow. That seems obvious to us, but that&#8217;s because we are heirs to this idea—it was not obvious to, say, the Chinese or to many Muslims in the same period.</blockquote>
</div>

How Do We Discover Moral Truths?

In Quadragesimo Anno (1931), Pope Pius XI reflected on the debate between capitalist and socialist economic systems. Like his predecessor, Leo XIII, Pius had strong words for capitalists who hoarded wealth and treated workers as dispensable commodities on par with machines or sacks of coal. But he also said that capitalism “is not to be condemned in itself. And surely it is not of its own nature vicious” (101).
Pius went on to say that “when it comes to the present [capitalist] economic system, we have found it laboring under the gravest of evils.” But whereas these evils could be remedied, the same was not true for socialism.
Regarding this latter system, Pius bluntly declared, “We have also summoned communism and socialism again to judgment and have found all their forms, even the most modified, to wander far from the precepts of the gospel” (128).
Jose Mena, one of the authors of the socialist Tradinista! manifesto, <a href="https://thecatholicherald.com/the-catholic-turn-to-socialism-is-something-to-celebrate/">claims</a>, “The Church’s condemnations of socialism tend to focus on other facets of left-wing political tradition: its thoroughgoing materialism and atheism, its hatred for God and for the natural family, and its totalitarian historical aspect.” He insists that the Catholic tradition still allows for a moderate socialism that orders private property to the common good through governmental oversight.
Yet is it a coincidence that the major socialist states throughout history have always been atheistic or suppressed religious freedom? Vladimir Lenin <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm">said</a>, “Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organization, as instruments of bourgeois re action that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”
In order to complete their revolt against the upper class, the communists’ allies in religion had to be done away with as well. In 1922, the Soviet Union <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Catholic-Cold-War-Politics-Anticommunism/dp/0823224597">murdered</a> twenty-eight Eastern Orthodox bishops and more than 1,200 priests (28). A friend of Sergius I, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Union-Brink-Christianity-Glasnost/dp/0880704004">grimly recalled</a>, “We [were like] chickens in a shed, from which the cook snatches out her victim in turn” (83). The much smaller Catholic Church fared no better, as by 1926 there were no Catholic bishops left in the country, and by 1941, there were <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Daily-Soviet-Union-Katherine-Eaton/dp/0313316287">only two Catholic churches</a> (289).
Pius XI was aware of a socialism that “not only professes the rejection of violence but modifies and tempers to some degree, if it does not reject entirely, the class struggle and the abolition of private ownership” (Quadragesimo Anno 112). He commended the “just demands” of these socialists (such as stronger unions and worker protections) but said their advocacy is unnecessary because there is “nothing in them now which is inconsistent with Christian truth, and much less are they special to socialism. Those who work solely toward such ends have, therefore, no reason to become socialists” (115).
Pius then spelled out the matter to Christians waiting “in suspense” to see if Christianity and socialism could ever be compatible with each other:
<blockquote>We make this pronouncement: Whether considered as a doctrine, or an historical fact, or a movement, socialism, if it remains truly socialism, even after it has yielded to truth and justice on the points which we have mentioned, cannot be reconciled with the teachings of the Catholic Church because its concept of society itself is utterly foreign to Christian truth (117).</blockquote>
Even if it doesn’t reject the existence of God, or send dissenters to the gulags (forced labor camps), or terrorize the population with secret police, true socialism is not compatible with Christianity. One reason is that socialism rejects the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. This is the belief that a central authority should subside or “sit back,” intervening only when lower, local authorities cannot address a problem. Pius formulated this principle, which “cannot be set aside or changed,” this way:
<blockquote>Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do (79).</blockquote>
Although this principle wasn’t formally articulated until the twentieth century, its precedents go all the way back to the Bible.
In the Old Testament, Moses’ father-in-law Jethro warned him against using his leadership office to hear every dispute among the Israelites. “The thing is too heavy for you,” he told Moses, and “you are not able to perform it alone” (Exod. 18:18). Jethro then gave Moses this advice: “Choose able men from all the people, such as fear God, men who are trustworthy and who hate a bribe; and place such men over the people as rulers of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens” (v. 21). In the New Testament, the apostles came to a similar conclusion when they felt overwhelmed by problems in local communities, and so they selected deacons to serve the people’s needs (Acts 6:1-7).
Even Brianne Jacobs, in her defense of democratic socialism, <a href="https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/10/01/yes-democratic-socialism-compatible-catholic-social-teaching">admits</a> that “[Catholic social teaching] has a clear warning about socialism” that is “related to the principle of subsidiarity, which states that individuals’ needs should be met by local government or civil society whenever that is feasible.”
A big problem for socialism, be it radical or moderate, is that it says local authorities can’t routinely provide for their own welfare ,and so a central authority (like the federal government) must do it for them. This rejection of subsidiarity is especially evident in socialism’s scorn for the most fundamental local unit of authority in society: the family.
In 1930, Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage and the family called Casti Connubii, which upheld the Church’s teaching on contraception when many people were justifying it in light of the Great Depression. But he also spoke of another sin against the family that seemed appealing to the economically disadvantaged: Communism.
He gives as one example “the daily increasing corruption of morals and the unheard of degradation of the family in those lands where communism reigns unchecked.” He repudiated the modern acceptance of divorce and warned how the destruction of the family leads to the destruction of the state, because the family is the foundation of the state.
But for socialists, a collective state could not exist without the destruction of the family. Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s co-author of The Communist Manifesto, argued in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State that families bound together in matrimony were a modern invention created for the purpose of consolidating wealth. Wealth could be redistributed, then, only once the family unit was broken apart and dissolved into society. The early Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/%20trotsky/1936/revbet/ch07.htm">said</a>, “The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called ‘family hearth’” and replace it with a “complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society.” This absorption included the indoctrination of children in government schools, or as Pope Pius XI described it:
<blockquote>There is a country where the children are actually being torn from the bosom of the family, to be formed (or, to speak more accurately, to be deformed and depraved) in godless schools and associations, to irreligion and hatred, according to the theories of advanced socialism; and thus is renewed in a real and more terrible manner the slaughter of the Innocents (Divini Illius Magistri 73).</blockquote>
Another early Soviet revolutionary, Alexandra Kollontai, said marriage would soon <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Era-Routledge-Sources-History/dp/0415182980">no longer be needed</a> because, through “the collectivism of spirit,” as she calls it, “the ‘cold of inner loneliness’ from which people in bourgeois culture have attempted to escape through love and marriage will disappear” (154).
It’s no wonder that Pope Leo XIII denounced those who “think that the inherent character of marriage can be perverted with impunity . . . disregarding the sanctity of religion and of the sacrament.” He warned that both private families and public society risked being “miserably driven into that general confusion and overthrow of order which is even now the wicked aim of socialists and communists” (Arcanum Divinae 32).
This assault on the family is not a bygone relic of Soviet Communism. It still appears in modern works based on Marx’s philosophy—particularly those that connect economic inequities with perceived cultural ones.
But the family as instituted by God is not an egalitarian institution—the father has a different role from the son, and the daughter-in-law from the mother-in-law. The family is the classic example of unity arising from complementarity. Since communism wants none of that natural difference to play itself out in society, it must stamp out the family as the “cell” of society and as the first “school” of complementarity.
Although moderate socialism should be lauded for its rejection of class warfare, Pius XI points out that it still ends up either redundantly adopting the same ideals of Christian social teaching, or else it “sinks into communism.” If it does that, then it is beyond any hope of salvaging because, as the pope wrote in Divini Redemptoris, “communism is intrinsically wrong, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever” (58).

The Church’s Socialism Problem

<div>What is the difference between looking and lusting?</div><div>Lust is a disordered desire for sexual pleasure. It’s necessarily self-centered and objectifies the person desired (CCC 2351). This is why Jesus says a man who looks upon a woman lustfully commits adultery with her in his heart (Matt. 5:27-28). Or fornication, depending on the circumstances.
Looking doesn’t necessarily imply lusting but could instead mean appreciating someone’s beauty as a whole person. However, men especially should be wary, because the longer one looks at a woman not his wife, the more vulnerable he becomes to lusting, and the progression can be rather quick. 
In addition, to circumvent trouble, I suggest men instead may notice the beauty of a woman, but then quickly move on. The more a man grows in the virtue of purity, the easier this discipline will become (CCC 2520-27). Yet, on this side of the grave, any mere man will never be completely free of temptation in this moral area. 
</div>

What’s Looking and What’s Lusting?

How can the Catholic Church teach that we need Tradition as well as Scripture when the Bible says that Scripture is sufficient as a rule of faith and for making a man “complete”? And how can the Catholic Church teach that Scripture is not our sole infallible source for doctrine when the book of Acts praises the Bereans for using Scripture alone to determine the truth?

Two Failed Passages on Sola Scriptura

Catholic apologist Joe Heschmeyer joins Cy Kellett to tackle the common objection that Jesus&#8217; words about eating His body and drinking His blood are merely symbolic. Joe clarifies how understanding the context of Jesus&#8217; language reveals that He often speaks both literally and metaphorically, emphasizing the importance of discerning His intent in Scripture. Dive into this insightful discussion to deepen your understanding of the Eucharist!
Transcript:
Cy: The most obvious objection, it seems to me, is that this is all just symbolic. Jesus says, &#8220;I am the vine, you are the branches.&#8221; Do you eat vines and say, &#8220;That&#8217;s Jesus&#8217; body&#8221;? Jesus says, &#8220;I&#8217;m the sheep gate.&#8221; Every time you see a sheep gate, do you go, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s really Jesus&#8217; body&#8221;? So am I making this objection clearly enough?
Joe: I usually just hear it with like, &#8220;Oh, Jesus says, you know, I&#8217;m the door.&#8221; Does he actually have like a hinge and a handle? And he&#8217;s made of wood?
And look, let&#8217;s give the objection the weight that it deserves. Because this is just another way of saying sometimes Jesus speaks metaphorically. So how do we know he&#8217;s not speaking metaphorically here? Yeah, because once you say it that way, it&#8217;s like, well, it&#8217;s not that strong of an objection. The fact that sometimes Jesus speaks metaphorically is no reason to believe that he always speaks metaphorically. Sometimes Jesus speaks literally. That doesn&#8217;t mean he always speaks literally.
Cy: And so he&#8217;s using actual human communication. So his incarnation means that he speaks like a human being. Sometimes he&#8217;s metaphorical, sometimes he&#8217;s literal.
Joe: Exactly. And so when you&#8217;re reading the Bible, there&#8217;s no special gold star because you say, &#8220;I&#8217;m a biblical literalist.&#8221; Because if you just say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to interpret this literally,&#8221; it depends on what we mean by literally. The historic sense was according to the letter, which meant you&#8217;re interpreting it the way the authority seems to mean it to be read. But the way we use literally now means non-metaphorically.
And so if you&#8217;re interpreting the Bible non-metaphorically when it&#8217;s using metaphor or using allegory or using hyperbole, you know, if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, that&#8217;s hyperbole. Don&#8217;t go mutilate yourself, those kinds of things. Like, you should not interpret it by prejudging that you&#8217;re going to take everything non-metaphorically. So that&#8217;s the weight that it deserves, right? We agree on that.
And you know, we don&#8217;t say everything in the Bible should be read non-metaphorically. A good way of interpreting this is by looking at the biblical context. A bad way of interpreting it would be to say, &#8220;Well, if John 6 is literal, that&#8217;s a hard teaching, therefore I reject it.&#8221; Because we know from John 6 itself that it&#8217;s a hard teaching, but I&#8217;m getting a little ahead of myself.
Cy: Well, Jesus says other hard things like, &#8220;Be perfect as your Father in Heaven is perfect.&#8221; I think I may be paraphrasing that, but basically, &#8220;Be perfect&#8221; is an impossibly hard teaching. So is Jesus being figurative when he says that?
Joe: No, because you can&#8217;t decide, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to accept some level of sin in my life.&#8221; Like, if you&#8217;re not aiming for perfection, then you&#8217;re not aiming high enough for holiness.
Cy: So just because it&#8217;s hard doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s not literal. Exactly. That&#8217;s a great point.
Joe: A good way to tell is by looking at things like the context: how did his original listeners understand him? And then do we have any indications whether they understood him correctly or incorrectly?
And you&#8217;re going to get two types of indications. Frequently, Jesus will correct them if they misunderstand him. That&#8217;s a good way of knowing what he means. The other category is that sometimes the evangelist will correct a misunderstanding.
So I&#8217;ll give you a few examples. In John 2, Jesus says, &#8220;Destroy this temple, and in three days I&#8217;ll rebuild it.&#8221; And John tells us that he was speaking of the temple of his body. Now, John wants to make it clear Jesus&#8217; body is not just metaphorically a temple. I mean, his body literally is a temple because a temple is a divine dwelling place and a place of divine sacrifice. He meets in his body all of the definitions of what a temple is, but our imagination, when we hear the word &#8220;temple,&#8221; runs through the building in Jerusalem.
And so Jesus truly, he&#8217;s not just speaking metaphorically there, but he&#8217;s also not speaking of the temple in Jerusalem. He&#8217;s speaking of the temple of his body.
Cy: May I say something there?
Jimmy: Yeah, you may.
Cy: The mind runs because Jesus is using the temple as a metaphor for his own body. He&#8217;s doing that on purpose. So, for example, when Jesus says, &#8220;I am the bread of life,&#8221; he&#8217;s not saying that so we won&#8217;t think of bread. He&#8217;s saying that so we will think of bread.
And one particular type of bread too, the manna, which is the bread come down from heaven, which was called the bread of angels in the Psalms, which is this miraculous bread. So he wants to draw your mind to miraculous bread as a way of understanding what he is saying in the Eucharist.
Joe: Right, right. So to say that he&#8217;s speaking metaphorically is not to say that he&#8217;s not also speaking literally in a certain way. Do you see what I&#8217;m saying?
Cy: I do.
Joe: And in fact, what we&#8217;re going to see in John 6 is that there is one layer of metaphor.
So the problem with a Protestant interpretation—and I&#8217;m speaking very broadly there, not all Protestants believe the same thing about the Eucharist—but if you think that we&#8217;ll get into this in just a second, we want to watch out for a double metaphoric interpretation where you say his language is a metaphor for a metaphor for some vague spiritual principle. That&#8217;s going to be a bad interpretation of Jesus. The fact that he sometimes uses metaphor is not bad.
So I gave you John 2. In John 3, Jesus talks about being born anew or born from above and born again. This is where that comes from. And Nicodemus thinks that this means physical birth. And Jesus has to explain that he&#8217;s using this non-literal kind of language to describe spiritual rebirth.
So we see in John 3 Jesus correcting Nicodemus directly when he misunderstands. In John 2, Jesus doesn&#8217;t correct them directly. And this is actually going to be very important because this will be one of the allegations raised against him at his trial. But John explains so we won&#8217;t misunderstand.
I want to contrast that with John 6, because if John 6 is just another metaphor like we saw in John 2 or 3, where, you know, &#8220;bread of life&#8221; just means something like, &#8220;My teachings are really good, you should really chew on what I&#8217;m telling you,&#8221; something like that, then, okay, we would expect it to read like that.
But I would encourage as a good bit of biblical exegesis to just go carefully through the back and forth and just look at what Jesus says and then look at how the crowds understood him. And then whether Jesus seems to affirm or redirect or refute that understanding. Because those are how you figure out the interpretation.
Like if Nicodemus says, &#8220;I have to be born again physically,&#8221; and Jesus said, &#8220;Absolutely,&#8221; that would totally change how we understood John 3. Right? So you want to look at the interaction, not just what does Jesus say, but how does Jesus respond to people saying some version of, &#8220;Do you mean X?&#8221;
Cy: Yeah
Joe: Because you see a lot of that in John 6. Most of the chapter in John 6 is dedicated to this Eucharistic teaching. And so you have Jesus saying that he&#8217;s going to give them this bread, this heavenly bread, and they&#8217;ve just received the multiplication of the loaves the day before. So their first thought is that this is just going to be food because they&#8217;ve just received miraculous bread.
Joe: And so they&#8217;re just imagining that they want this always. Jesus then corrects them that this isn&#8217;t what he means. He&#8217;s not going to give them the same thing he gave them the day before. He says, &#8220;I am the bread of life which came down from heaven.&#8221; It&#8217;s John 6:41.
And so they murmur at this saying, &#8220;Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, &#8216;I have come down from heaven&#8217;?&#8221;
Now notice what they&#8217;ve done when he says that the bread is him who&#8217;s come down from heaven. They now think, &#8220;Okay, so the bread is just a figure of speech for Jesus.&#8221; And all he&#8217;s trying to tell us is that he came from heaven.
So that&#8217;s what bothers them because we know where he&#8217;s from.
And notably, a lot of the Protestant exegesis on John 6 ends up somewhere like that. That when Jesus talks about the bread, it&#8217;s just his teaching or it&#8217;s just a reference to him being from heaven.
And if that was right, the chapter could just end there, like, &#8220;Okay, this is what he said.&#8221; And then people were confused because they knew where he was born. But Jesus corrects this understanding and explains that this is not true.
And he then compares this to the manna. And then in verse 51, he says, &#8220;I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever.&#8221; And then he says, &#8220;And the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.&#8221;
Cy: So he&#8217;s just explained what the metaphor means. He could have said, &#8220;The bread which I will give for the life of the world is my life-saving teaching.&#8221; He could have said, &#8220;The bread which I will give for the life of the world is the substitutionary atonement on the cross.&#8221; He says, &#8220;It is my flesh.&#8221;
Joe: And so is he using a metaphor of bread in one way? Yes, he&#8217;s using the manna, but it&#8217;s a metaphor for his body. And so when he says, &#8220;You have to eat this bread,&#8221; he doesn&#8217;t mean you have to really ponder his teachings. He&#8217;s just told you bread here means flesh.
Cy: So eat this bread means eat my flesh.
Joe: And so it is a metaphor, but what&#8217;s it a metaphor for exactly? It&#8217;s a metaphor for his physical flesh.
Exactly. Yeah. So is it, you know, bodily? Is it metaphorical? Yes, in a way that is satisfied by the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist pretty uniquely.
Because at that point, they have a new objection. Their objection now is, &#8220;How can this man give us his flesh to eat?&#8221; But notice this is now John 6:52. Like the Eucharistic teaching really begins on verse 22, so we&#8217;re 30 verses deep.
Cy: They don&#8217;t, you know, the other times where Jesus speaks symbolically and people take him literally, it&#8217;s usually right away. They just hear a figure of speech. They don&#8217;t understand it&#8217;s a figure of speech. And so their minds run to the wrong place. Their minds didn&#8217;t do that here.
Joe: Jesus slowly, carefully, methodically kind of leads them into, yeah, there is a way this is a figure of speech because it&#8217;s not literally bread, it&#8217;s literally my flesh.
Cy: Right? So he&#8217;s working them towards what the person who does not believe in the real presence in the Eucharist would say is the wrong conclusion.
Joe: Like, he&#8217;s not working them towards the right conclusion; he&#8217;s working them towards the wrong conclusion, if that&#8217;s what you think.
Like, if you take a sort of a non-sacramental read of John 6, Jesus seems to be steering in exactly the wrong direction because he&#8217;s leading them deeper and deeper into that understanding of his teaching. They didn&#8217;t start there. Jesus slowly led them there.
And then in verse 52, as I said, they say, &#8220;How can this man give us his flesh to eat?&#8221; So now we&#8217;re at a juncture. If that is a wrong conclusion, one that Jesus seems to have led them into, Jesus would seemingly have a basic duty as a teacher, to say nothing of a moral duty.
Like if someone says, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m supposed to literally cut off my hand to follow you,&#8221; you should say, &#8220;No, this is a figure of speech. Let me explain what a figure of speech is.&#8221;
Cy: Yeah, right.
Joe: And so here, if they&#8217;re saying, &#8220;How can this man give us his flesh to eat?&#8221; We know now the kind of interpretation they&#8217;re taking. We don&#8217;t know exactly, but we have enough of a sense of what they have in mind.
And Jesus responds by doubling and tripling and quadrupling down. In fact, let&#8217;s just go through this, if we may, and just count the number of times he seems to redouble this direction, the sacramental view.
Cy: He says to them, &#8220;Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man.&#8221;
Joe: Well, the verbiage here has actually shifted. In Greek, it went from the normal word for &#8220;to eat&#8221; to &#8220;trogon,&#8221; which means, like, to gnaw. It&#8217;s more of an animalistic eating. So he&#8217;s already doubling down just on the imagery.
He&#8217;s not just saying &#8220;eat,&#8221; but like &#8220;chew,&#8221; &#8220;gnaw my flesh&#8221; and &#8220;drink my blood,&#8221; or actually say &#8220;his blood&#8221; because he says, &#8220;Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood.&#8221;
Now, drinking of blood, even of an animal, is strictly forbidden. So now if this is a figure of speech, what kind of figure of speech is it to say we have to drink the blood of Christ?
To say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to drink Cy&#8217;s blood&#8221; does not mean to any normal person, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to listen to what Cy has to tell me.&#8221;
Cy: Yeah, that&#8217;s really weird.
Joe: Yeah, right. As a metaphor, it doesn&#8217;t make sense. If you just mean something like ponder his teaching or take them to heart or follow Jesus, those are not normal expressions, you know.
Cy: Well, could you though? Because sometimes Jesus&#8217; metaphors, and I think the bread one that you said, it&#8217;s rooted in Jewish teaching. So like when he&#8217;s saying about the bread come down from heaven, he is—that&#8217;s a weird metaphor. But he&#8217;s drawing on an already well-established, thousand-year-old historical item that they know about.
Joe: In a way, yes. But notably, there&#8217;s no Jewish precedent for the drinking of blood. Again, like under the Mosaic law, the drinking of the blood of an animal was strictly forbidden.
Cy: But Leviticus explains that the reason it&#8217;s forbidden is because the life of the thing is in the animal and so in the blood.
Joe: Sorry, in the blood. Yes. So to drink the blood of an animal would be to enter into communion with it in a way that was unseemly. For you to like become communing in the life of a cow would be completely inappropriate.
Cy: Yeah, right.
Joe: So you weren&#8217;t allowed to have any animal blood in your food at all because it was a sign of basically communion.
And so if you have that Jewish understanding, then when Jesus is saying, &#8220;Drink my blood,&#8221; on the one hand, the drinking of blood is strictly forbidden. On the other hand, if you understand why it was strictly forbidden, then you can see why the very reasons you wouldn&#8217;t drink the blood of an animal would be the reasons you would want to drink the blood of God.
Cy: Yeah, because if you drink the blood of the cow, you&#8217;re taking on the life of the cow into your own life. That&#8217;s weird. That&#8217;s a thing lower than you. You&#8217;re debasing yourself.
Jimmy: Right. It&#8217;s bestial.
Cy: But if you take on the life of the Lord,
Jimmy: &#8220;No longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me&#8221; would be the kind of thing you could say if you have been transformed by the body and blood of Christ.

Why The Eucharist Can’t Just Be “A Symbol”

A couple years back, I was getting gas the day after Christmas to prepare to visit family on the other side of Ohio. It may not be a psychologically or spiritually healthy practice to yell at the car radio, but not one of the blasted radio stations that had been cranking out “Sleigh Ride” since the week after Halloween had a single song, hymn, or carol for me to hum along to. So I yelled.
Every year, I gripe about the November onslaught of Christmas music, lights, and yard displays. I then bemoan their premature disappearance on December 26, because I deeply love the Christmas music and festivities and think them highly important. Secular Christmas songs and art that celebrate the mystical quality of winter and warmth of family gatherings foster an appreciation for the good and beautiful. And we can catch a glimpse of heaven and God’s love and glory in the Christmas carols and hymns that directly invite us into the mystery of the Incarnation.
By this winding way I come now to almost my main point, which is that Catholics ought not play Christmas music and engage in full-scale Christmas decorating until very late Advent, or at very least definitely not before we have had a chance to enjoy Thanksgiving.
But this is actually only the “shadow” or negative space around the real (and actually happy) idea that for the Christian, the Christmas season ought to be full of a palpable, mystical, and even almost magical sort of reverence that invades the spaces of our lives such as our homes, offices, and churches. It ought to because the time has been dedicated to calling to mind the historical and yet earth-shaking fact that God took on our nature to save us from eternal death and offer us eternal life. Indulging in Christmas festivities before the proper time undermines our preparation for this holy season, the same way eating several candy bars at 5 PM ruins your enjoyment of an otherwise excellent steak dinner.
This is not just personal preference. The Church has set aside a specific liturgical season, Advent, for preparing our hearts to enter into the next liturgical season of Christmas. The music and when we choose to listen to it and what we fill our homes with are a significant part of how we go along with (or thwart) this preparation.
Dragging Christmas music and decorations too far away from the time they are meant for can cause a sort of “inflation,” making these beloved songs and hymns hit with less impact or significance than they should. It would be unwise for a priest to wear vestments around on his errands or while he slept. Vestments are good, but they are set aside for something holy. Taking them out of that proper liturgical zone wouldn’t spread the holiness around; it would devalue and desensitize our response to it.
One of the major forces driving the sea change of the past few decades in the preferences of younger Catholics (priests and laity) for more traditional liturgies is that they desire that the Mass and prayer life of the Church be “reverent.” Reverence is showing proper respect for a person, place, or thing. And showing respect usually translates into dressing, speaking, and acting in ways that are not ordinary.
When we opt for Christmas festivities during Christmastime (whether Christian carols or secular jingles, Nativity sets or green wreaths), we reinforce that this time is sacred, different, and deserving of awe. Partaking in them too far in advance undermines the attitude and practices of hopeful anticipation that should fill the preparatory and lightly penitential season of Advent. And casting them aside so soon after December 25 runs the risk of closing our hearts to God’s desire for us to enter into this mystery and be formed by it.
We carve out sacred places in the forms of churches and prayer spaces in our homes because we are physical beings, and it benefits us to have separate areas for various activities. Exercise is a good thing, but doing dead-lifts or jogging in church would distract others and desensitize yourself to what you are supposed to focus on while there. Similarly, we carve out distinct times throughout the year so that we can focus on and re-enter into divine mysteries, and to have our hearts and minds sculpted by their author. We fast and don’t sing “Alleluia” on Good Friday because it is good for us to gravely enter into Our Lord’s Passion and death, just as we don’t do those things on Easter Sunday because it is good for us then to be open to his joy and the hope and power of the Resurrection on that day.
So when is it okay for a Catholic to play some classic Frank Sinatra or listen to Mariah Carey? I like the fourth Sunday of Advent. But a much more helpful suggestion to fostering better observance of this holy and happy time would be to ask yourself,
<ul>
<li>Are my house and what I listen to on November 1 indistinguishable from what they look and sound like on the morning of December 25?</li>
<li>Am I utterly sick of Christmas carols and decorations before New Year’s?</li>
</ul>
If the answer to either is “yes,” you might want to hold off on the Christmas tree and Spotify playlists for a week or two longer than you normally would, so that you can focus on Advent and enter into and enjoy the whole of the Christmas season.
I deliberately say “hold off” and not “dial back.” Christmas is a time to dive in and celebrate. We ought to rejoice more than any time, with the possible exception of Easter. But celebrating in an incarnate reality takes work and energy, and it’s sad when we wear ourselves out before the party has really begun. (My hunch is that it will be different in heaven, but we are not there yet!)
So while enduring your local Grinches’ “it’s too early for Christmas music” lectures this year, please charitably forgive their crankiness. Take it as a call to reflect on the beautiful truth they are most likely trying to share. We ought to joyfully yet seriously use Advent to get ready for God’s birthday, because it is, in many ways, “the most wonderful time of the year.”