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Lying about Catholicism?

<div>Is it wrong to masturbate, without climax, to thoughts about your hypothetical future spouse?</div><div>
Masturbation is always wrong, as true conjugal love is necessarily other-centered, not inwardly focused in a selfish way, which is characteristic of lust (CCC 2351-52). So masturbation is wrong, whether one thinks of his real wife, his fiancée, or his “hypothetical wife.” In each case, a person would be making a woman into an object of selfish satisfaction, not valuing her as a whole person. And that would be the case even if a man doesn’t complete the act. The immorality of masturbation is not contingent on whether one sexually completes the act.
In contrast, there’s nothing wrong with a husband’s anticipating being conjugally intimate with his wife later in the day, provided there is no masturbation or lustful thoughts otherwise (see Matt. 5:27-28). In addition, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being attracted to a woman. One can recognize a woman’s beauty without lusting after her. However, if the woman is not your wife or fiancée, don’t dwell on that attraction. It’s a moral dead end. For more on this subject, see this <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-masturbation-is-wrong">related answer</a>.
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OK to Pleasure Oneself to Thoughts of Future Spouse?

The Sign of Peace, the handshake that takes place at Sunday Mass between the Our Father and the Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) before Holy Communion, is sometimes a source of friction and confusion.
The friction derives from the experience of it getting out of hand—being disruptive and even an intrusion. These problems were serious enough to raise the question, at the 2009 Synod of Bishops in in Rome, of moving the Sign of Peace to before the Offertory. Here, I want to shed some light on the meaning of the rite, which helps to put the question into some context.
The “Pax” (“peace”), or kiss of peace, is a very ancient rite—so ancient, in fact, that the Irish word for “kiss,” póg, derives from the Latin “pax” thanks to this ceremony. Confusingly, however, in the Latin Church, the Pax was historically found in two different places. In France and other places, it took place before the Offertory; in Africa and Rome, it took place before Holy Communion, after the Our Father. The Church’s modern rites, both traditional and post-Vatican II, use the second location for the Pax, and this makes a difference regarding its meaning.
Liturgical commentators regarded the exchange of Peace before the Offertory as a symbol of mutual affection, connected with Matthew 5:23-4: “If therefore thou offer thy gift at the altar, and there thou remember that thy brother hath any thing against thee; leave there thy offering before the altar, and go first to be reconciled to thy brother: and then coming thou shalt offer thy gift.” The Offertory is literally the offering of the “gift” to God, so this is our chance to renew our charity, to make ourselves more worthy of making this offering.
After the Offertory and the Consecration, the Pax was said by Pope Innocent III to be a “seal” of what had gone before, like an “amen.” However, it also reminds us of what we have just prayed in the Our Father: “And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors” (Matt. 6:12).
In addition, with the consecrated host then present upon the altar, the Pax gained another kind of significance. As the rite developed, before starting the exchange of peace, the priest kissed the altar next to the consecrated host. In some early versions of this, he actually kissed the host, or the crucifix. Then he turned to give the Pax to the assistant clergy, who gave it to the people. The Pax, then, is the peace of Christ, represented by the altar and by the crucifix, and really present in the consecrated host.
A liturgical rite can have several meanings, and some can be stressed more than others. Having the Pax after the consecration, and with the preliminary kissing of the altar, downplays the aspect of mutual love and reconciliation and plays up the aspect of receiving peace from Christ: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you” (John 14:27).
This is reinforced further by the parallel between the Pax and the blessing at the end of Mass, which is preceded by the priest kissing the altar—again, to indicate that the blessing comes not from the priest as an individual, but from Christ. Something similar happens at the beginning of Mass, when the priest kisses the altar before turning to the people (if he needs to) and saying, “The Lord be with you.” (In the pre-Vatican II Mass, he kisses the altar and says this no fewer than four times during the course of Mass.)
Looked at in this context, the Pax is not so much an opportunity to make friends as it is a blessing. A blessing, emanating from the consecrated host, has a special importance for those who are not receiving Holy Communion, and of course, for much of the history of the Church, most of the faithful did not receive Communion at most of the Masses they attended.
If we think of the Pax as a blessing, it matters less if the people take part directly in the ceremony. This has its usefulness, as their participation created a number of problems over the centuries. A stylized kiss or embrace was not thought, by our predecessors of ancient times, as suitable to be given between men and women, who used to sit in different parts of church (usually women on the left as you face the altar). One solution, developed in England, was the use of an object, the Paxbrede, which was kissed by one person after another. This underlined the passage of the Peace from the altar to the people, but not only did it take some time, but it also led to disputes about who should kiss it first. Finally—and this seems to have finished the practice off in most places—there were concerns about hygiene. Today, in the traditional liturgy, you will find the Paxbrede used only in certain places, notably in Spain and by the Dominicans.
In the post-Vatican II liturgical reform, there was a desire to include the people more closely in the ceremony, which revived these dilemmas. At least in principle, a simultaneous handshake is quick, is hygienic, and can be done between men and women. Its weakness lies in undermining the connection between the peace exchanged among the people with the peace that comes from Christ, really present on the altar. To minimize disruption, the celebrant is actually forbidden from leaving the sanctuary to give the Peace to the congregation (General Instruction of the Roman Missal 82, 152), though this rule is often ignored.*
As already noted, the rite is most often criticized for causing disruption, which is indeed regrettable. The decision of Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 not to move it from before Holy Communion to before the Offertory, despite this, underlines the remaining importance of seeing the Peace as something emanating from Christ—however many, or few, of our fellow Catholics we actually shake hands with.

The Meaning of the Sign of Peace

Why do we believe so strongly in purgatory? What is the best Scripture passage you can give me for purgatory?

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Why do some apologists say that protestants are going to hell and others don’t?

Is the apostolic blessing a total remission of sin?

Why doesn’t the church focus on what we need to do to get into heaven instead of what won’t get us there?

&#8220;How Are We Certain of Purgatory?&#8221; This episode explores the Catholic understanding of purgatory, including key scriptural support and the conditions for forgiveness when confession isn&#8217;t possible. Additionally, we delve into why Jesus&#8217; crucifixion details are often overlooked and discuss Mary&#8217;s marriage to Joseph, shedding light on these important topics.
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How Are We Certain of Purgatory? Forgiveness and Mary

Lee Strobel joins Cy for a conversation about his new movie – The Case for Christ. Cy and Lee also discuss how Christians can evangelize in a post-Christian era.

The Case for Christ

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Weird Questions

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Is the Hail Mary idolatry?

<div>If a man undergoes an orchiectomy due to cancer or some other medical reason, is that man able to get married in the Catholic Church?</div><div>In canon law, perpetual impotence is an impediment to marriage (can. 1084 §1) but infertility is not (can. 1084 §3).
The resulting infertility of the surgery would not prevent the marriage from taking place.
If the surgery resulted in perpetual impotence, then the marriage would not be able to take place. The impotence must be prior to the exchange of vows and be a truly permanent condition. If the surgery only rendered engaging in the marital act difficult but not impossible (within moral means), then the upcoming marriage would not face any canonical impediments.
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Cancer Surgery and Marriage

Joe Heschmeyer explores the complex biblical concept of God hardening Pharaoh&#8217;s heart. Joe explains how this relates to God&#8217;s sovereignty, human free will, and our responsibility for our choices.
Transcript:
We&#8217;re going to start a Bible study pretty soon, and we&#8217;re going to go through Exodus. And one of the things is God saying, &#8220;I will harden Pharaoh&#8217;s heart.&#8221; So I want to know about that.
Wonderful. About five minutes before I needed to get on the call for the show, I had just been putting together biblical stuff on this because I&#8217;m going to cover this in a podcast in about a week. So I was very excited to think, &#8220;Oh, I have all those verses. Right in front of me, that in Exodus, we&#8217;re actually given a very complex picture of Pharaoh&#8217;s heart being hardened. So if we ask who hardened Pharaoh&#8217;s heart, some verses just say in the passage, like Pharaoh&#8217;s heart was hardened. Like Exodus 7:13 and Exodus 7:22, Pharaoh&#8217;s heart remained hardened. Other verses, as you say, sounds like God is hardening Pharaoh&#8217;s heart. For instance, Exodus 9:12, &#8220;But the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.&#8221;
But then you also have these same passages, like Exodus 8:32, where it says Pharaoh hardened his heart. So you can find the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh referred to in all three different ways. In fact, so I don&#8217;t know if you have a pen, but the one to keep track of is at the end of Exodus 9, beginning of Exodus 10. So as the seventh plague is ending, and right before the 10th plague, there is a series of three verses in a row where we&#8217;re told what appear to be three different answers to this question. So in Exodus 9:34, &#8220;When Pharaoh saw that the rain in the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned again and hardened his heart, he and his servants.&#8221; So it sounds very clearly, okay, this is Pharaoh&#8217;s doing.
Verse 35, the very next verse, &#8220;So the heart of Pharaoh was hardened.&#8221; Okay, so in the passage, so can&#8217;t say, the very next verse is actually the next chapter, Exodus 10:1, &#8220;The Lord said to Moses, &#8220;Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart in the heart of his servants.&#8221; So it just said two verses prior to that, that Pharaoh and his servants hardened their hearts, their own hearts. And then it sounds like God&#8217;s doing it. So how can all of that be true? The Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, gave a beautiful example that I regularly go back to for this, where he said, &#8220;The same sun which melts wax hardens clay, and the same gospel which melts some persons to repentance hardens others in their sins.&#8221; So it is not that God is hardening Pharaoh&#8217;s heart in the way that he&#8217;s taking away Pharaoh&#8217;s free will. No, Pharaoh is hardening his own heart in response to God&#8217;s action.
That&#8217;s actually very clear, even in Exodus 9:34, when Pharaoh saw what? That the rain in the hail and the thunder had ceased. So God stops the seventh plague, God acts, and Pharaoh responds to that by refusing to obey. If you&#8217;re not going to punish me, I&#8217;m going to just go right back to disobedience. That is, on the one hand, Pharaoh freely hardening his own heart. On the other hand, we can talk about that as God hardening Pharaoh&#8217;s heart, because it was God&#8217;s action, in this case, stopping the plagues. That led Pharaoh to respond in the hateful way that he did. So we can talk about it in both senses. This is one of the things we want to recognize, that God is sovereign, even in the things that he lets us do, even things he doesn&#8217;t want us to do, but then permits us to do nevertheless. He&#8217;s still in authority. He could have struck you dead before you sinned, so he permits you to sin, but he doesn&#8217;t do your sinning for you. So God doesn&#8217;t harden Pharaoh&#8217;s heart in the sense that God makes Pharaoh be disobedient. It wouldn&#8217;t be disobedience if he&#8217;s just doing what God wants him to do.
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Why Did God Harden Pharaoh’s Heart in Exodus?

<div>John 6:53—“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood you have no life in you”—cannot be reasonably taken literally. That would be cannibalism.
</div><div>There are at least three reasons this is not so. First, Catholics do not receive our Lord<a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/is-receiving-the-eucharist-cannibalism"> in a cannibalistic form</a>. We receive in the form, or under the appearances, of bread and wine. Think about it: the cannibal kills his victim; Jesus does not die when he is consumed in Communion. Indeed, he is not changed in the slightest. The communicant is the only person who is changed in this exchange. The cannibal eats part of his victim; in communion the entire Christ is consumed, body, blood, soul and divinity. The cannibal sheds the blood of his victim; in eucharistic Communion, Our Lord gives himself to us in a non-bloody way.
Second, if it were truly immoral in any sense for Christ to give us his flesh and blood to eat, it would be contrary to his holiness to command anyone to even <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/christ-in-the-eucharist">symbolically eat his body and blood</a>. Symbolically performing an immoral act would be of its very nature immoral. This simply cannot be.
And third, the expressions “to eat flesh” and “to drink blood” already carried symbolic meaning both in the Hebrew Old Testament, and in the Greek New Testament, for example, in Isaiah 9:18-20; Isaiah 49:26; Micah 3:3, and Revelation 17:6-16. In these texts and others we could cite, we find these very words: “eating flesh” and “drinking blood,” to be understood as symbolic for persecuting or assaulting someone.
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Can Transubstantiation be Reasonably Taken Literally?

<div>May Catholics celebrate ’Dia de los Muertos’?</div><div>Día de los Muertos, or &#8220;Day of the Dead,&#8221; is a popular celebration in Latin America. Despite the title being in the singular, the celebration usually lasts two days (November 1 and 2). Although it is not a Catholic celebration, many Catholics celebrate it in the areas of the world where it is popular. The fact that it is not technically a religious holiday does not deprive it of meaning. After all, Memorial Day in the United States is not a liturgical holiday, but attending Mass and visiting graves of veterans is certainly a pious and commendable thing to do on that day.
Some believe the holiday to have originated with the Aztecs, later becoming Christianized and moved to coincide with <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/all-souls-day">All Souls</a> and <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/all-saints">All Saints</a> Days. Others reject this theory and place its origins in medieval Europe. In either case, Catholics have usually celebrated the feast by having family meals at the graves of loved ones, decorating altars of prayer in their homes with pictures of deceased family, and having communal meals with neighbors, friends, and family.  The essence of Catholic celebration of this feast has been an emphasis on the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/communion-of-saints">Communion of Saints</a>, that we are all still connected to each other both in this world and the next.
Another popular activity is painting faces to look like skulls, but it is important to note that the meaning behind this is not the same as Halloween. On Halloween, a skull is meant to be creepy, scary, or funny. For Día de los Muertos, it is actually considered reverent. Part of this tradition comes from the image of La Catrina, which has a long history of being used in satire, social commentary, and cultural imagery.
The main reason, though, is that Día de los Muertos is meant to embrace death as part of the cycle of life and as something that need not be feared. Death is embraced almost like any other milestone in life. The skull face painting is seen as normalizing death and stands in complete opposition to the themes of Halloween.
So long as the elements of celebrating Día de los Muertos do not contradict our faith or blur the essentials of our faith, there is nothing wrong with Catholics celebrating it. In my personal opinion, the more I read about the feast, the more I wish Catholics in the United States would celebrate this instead of Halloween!
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May Catholics Celebrate ‘Dia de Los Muertos’?

Episode 153: 30th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C 
In today’s episode, we focus solely on the Gospel reading, taken from Luke 18:9-14, which is the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The apologetical topic that comes to the fore is justification, and specifically the nature of justification.
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