Manage Account

<div>What is the Black Madonna?</div><div>A &#8220;black Madonna&#8221; is a state or image of Mary that depicts her with black or dark skin. The most famous one is Our Lady of Czestochowa, a Polish image that has been proclaimed the &#8220;Queen of Poland.&#8221; Various pious legends abound as to its origins. One claims it was originally painted by St. Luke. Another claims that it was discovered by Emperor Constantine&#8217;s mother in the fourth century, and the Emperor built a shrine to venerate it. Various miracles are also attributed to it, and it is credited with saving various Christian armies and communities from destruction.
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The Black Madonna

<div>What are the suggested readings for a funeral Mass?</div><div>The readings for a funeral Mass may be found in the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/lectionary">Lectionary</a> in the volume that has the Ritual Masses and Votive Masses. Often a parish has a commercially produced booklet that provides a selection of readings for a funeral along with other possible choices for the Mass. These booklets rarely give all the available options. It would be good to ask to see the actual Lectionary, rather than just the planning pamphlet if you want to have the greatest selection possible.
All this being said, letting the family choose the readings is a courtesy. It is actually the right of the priest or deacon celebrant of the funeral to choose the readings, since he will base his homily on them. So, if one is given the opportunity to choose the readings, one might politely choose them while making clear that one is happy with any choice the celebrant may prefer.
Another point, added here for the fun of it: those reading at the funeral should read from the actual Lectionary rather than off sheets of paper or from pamphlets. This is due to the reverence due to the word of God. If such sheets have to be used, at least they should be in some nice, Lectionary-like binder. The best practice is to photocopy the readings from the lectionary that will be used at the Mass and have the readers practice the readings from those. Then the text in the lectionary will appear exactly as they practiced it, but they won&#8217;t have to bring a floppy or folded piece of paper to the ambo, which would be something like bringing up the bread on a paper plate at the offertory.
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Readings for a Funeral Mass

When does a fetus become a ‘person?’

Today’s feast is rare in that it falls on Sunday only once or twice a decade. But even on other days, it is unusual.
In every church, it is normal to observe the anniversary of the dedication, much in the way that we might observe our own birthday, date of baptism, or wedding anniversary. The four major Roman basilicas have, at least in recent centuries, had their anniversaries observed by the whole Latin Church—that is, St. Mary Major, St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John Lateran. But most of these are optional memorials, whereas today’s feast not only is obligatory, but outranks a Sunday in Ordinary Time.
Though those writing calendar rubrics rarely leave a complete set of explanatory notes about their decisions, we can suggest two primary reasons for this unusual pre-eminence of a particular church building. First, the proper title of the Lateran Basilica is in fact the Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior and Saints John the Baptist and John the Evangelist at the Lateran. Quite a mouthful, that—no wonder we shorten the name. But the point is that whereas dedications to both St. Johns were added in the ninth century, the original dedication was to Christ the Redeemer, and so this effect makes the day a feast of Our Lord under that title. Second, the Lateran Basilica has long been considered the “mother” of all the churches of the world. Yes, even more so than St. Peter’s. So we honor this particular building, as Pope Benedict declared at an Angelus address in 2008, as “an expression of love and veneration for the Roman Church, ‘which,’ as St. Ignatius of Antioch affirms, ‘presides in charity’ over the entire Catholic communion.”
What a beautiful gesture for us—especially those of us who have chosen, from much prayer and wrestling, union with the Holy Roman and Apostolic See.
Perhaps we should say something about this particular basilica and why it is so significant. It is probably the oldest building made specifically for public Christian worship in Rome. It was dedicated on this day in the year 324 by Pope Sylvester I. Its construction was thanks to not the pope, but the emperor Constantine, who, when he entered Rome in triumph in 312, wanted to offer some sign and gift to the God of Jesus Christ.
This is not the place to judge the extent of Constantine’s personal faith. Whatever his theology at that point, it seems his conviction that it was this God who gave him victory was firm enough that he refused, on entering the city, to offer the customary sacrifices to the gods. Supposedly the Roman establishment was so scandalized by this sleight that Constantine hid from public view for a while.
The site he chose for a new temple was not in the midst of the city alongside the temples of Jupiter or Vesta or Mars, but to the southeast, just inside the walls, next to the Celian Hill on the site of an old barracks and adjacent to a palace that was part of the dowry of Constantine’s wife, Fausta. Yet a traditional Roman temple was a place for the deity, not for the people, hence unsuited for Christian worship, in which the new sacrifice offered was integrally related to the people offering it and the form of offering. So when the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer was built, Constantine used as a model the Roman basilica, a multipurpose rectangular building designed to hold large numbers of people.
The Lateran Basilica, as it came to be called, was the first such building made as a church. But whereas Roman basilicas were modest structures, this church was built on a grand scale, with opulence and beauty, designed to hold 3,000 people. Though Constantine was careful in not thrusting this too much into the face of the Roman establishment, the symbolism was clear enough: this was a symbol of the triumph of Christianity.
The Lateran Basilica from that point became the seat of the bishops of Rome, the popes. And the palace attached to it came to be their official residence all the way up to the Avignon papacy in 1309. The original basilica was destroyed by earthquake in the ninth century and rebuilt; it was destroyed again by fire in the fourteenth century and rebuilt. Later in that same century, it was destroyed by another fire and rebuilt.
Although the popes haven’t lived in the palace since the fourteenth century, the church remains the seat and throne of the bishop of Rome. When Pope Leo took possession of the church and celebrated Mass there for the first time this past spring, he was formally taking up the most tangible aspect of his ministry: the pope leads the universal Church because he leads a particular church with a particular relationship to the universal Church.
There is a concrete, material aspect to the Church that we disregard at our peril. There was something of a modern trend, a moment in history that I think is blessedly now fading away, suggesting that, because ultimately the Church is the people, not a building, the buildings are merely functional and can just as well look like a supermarket or a sports arena as a place of solemnity. This was taking a certain truth and using it as a weapon against other corollary truths. As a comparison, we might remember that the Christian tradition has always insisted on the priority of spiritual things. The state of a person’s soul is ultimately more significant than the state of his body. But this does not mean we can do whatever we want with our bodies, that they are of no significance at all, or that material things are of no significance. We often seem to live, in the twenty-first century, in a constant swinging pendulum between the gnostic extremes of materialism and spiritualism. The fact that many people in this world act as if temporal, bodily things are the only things that matter does not permit us to discard them for some supposedly pure realm of spirit.
“You are God’s building,” St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3. “You are the temple of God.” And so the basilica, in the imagination of the early Roman Church, became a kind of temple of temples, a holy of holies. Rather than something in competition with the ecclesia as people, they saw it as proof and a sign of that reality. How we house Christ’s body tells an important story to the world, and to ourselves, about what we value and how we treat God’s gifts.
The Church’s greatest “treasures” were, and are, God’s people, as St. Lawrence famously told the pagan authorities of Rome less than a century before the construction of the Lateran basilica. All the more reason to consecrate for them a place worthy of that high calling. Again we can see this in Constantine’s architectural decisions in the fourth century. As far back as we can find them, the rites of the dedication of a church building echo the initiatory rites of the faithful themselves: the building is instructed in the faith through a symbolic writing on the ground; it is purified with salt and washed with holy water; it is anointed with holy oil; upon the altar, which is its heart, incense is burned in the fire of charity; and there, at last, it becomes a place of sacrifice, like the human body and soul, where God’s own creation is returned to him in love and where the fire of God’s own love comes down to us to give life and power.
The story of Christ’s cleansing of the temple in John gives an interesting window into the early Church’s understanding of this dynamic. The old Temple was, they knew, soon to become almost irrelevant in view of the temple that was Christ’s own body. Even so, his disciples could look back and recall the words of Scripture: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” If the Temple was of no consequence in comparison with the true temple to come, why was the Lord so consumed with zeal for it?
The simple answer is that zeal for the Lord’s ultimate abode in heaven must take concrete form on earth, even while we know that here we have, in the words of Hebrews, “no lasting city” (13:14), but seek “a city which is to come.” The movement, emphasized over and over again in the great tradition, from visible things to invisible things, rarely means that we must discard the visible things.
The sacraments are the first and most obvious proof of this. We are asked to look beyond the visible form of bread and wine to the truth of the substantial body and blood hidden within, but this vision of faith does not destroy our sight. Our senses are elevated, educated, vivified, clarified. But they remain, because the Lord died not for us to become some sort of gnostic pure spirit, but to become human beings fully alive, body and soul, shining with the glory of God. The streams of grace flowing out from the holy temple, like in Ezekiel’s vision, bring new life to all creation. The many tangible and visible things that the tradition gives us, from the historical church of St. John Lateran to this and every parish church, are not merely doorways to some secret spiritual realm; they are engines of our sanctification, vehicles that invite us to peer through the mystical veil not just once, as some paltry symbol that can be discarded, its meaning spent, but over and over again as we move further into the beauty of God.
We are on our way home to heaven. To go there, we must first learn to love the home he gives us here, even while we look through and beyond it to the world to come.

‘St. John Lateran, Pray for Us’

<div>Why did Nicodemus bring such a large amount of spices to the tomb?</div><div>As with the sinful woman who anointed the Lord&#8217;s feet in the house of Simon, the amount used was not dictated by practical necessity but was a sign of the honor due and given to the Lord himself. Forty pounds were used for the funeral of the Rabbi Gamaliel, so a hundred pounds (or more likely about seventy-five of our pounds) would be a sign of extreme veneration of the person of Jesus. This excess is a sign both of the love of Our Lord&#8217;s followers and of his surpassing dignity.
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Why Did Nicodemus Bring So Much Spice?

The gospel is central to the Christian faith, but few people realize how the Bible itself understands the concept.
Previously, I showed that—based on passages in the Old Testament—the New Testament understands the gospel to be the message that <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/what-does-scripture-say-about-the-gospel">the time has arrived</a> for God to inaugurate his kingdom and begin ruling in the world.
Once you realize this, you find echoes of the gospel in other passages that don’t even use the term. For example, if God’s kingdom is now arriving, who has been ruling the world up to now?
There are two answers to this question. One is the human kingdoms that have ruled the world thus far and oppressed God’s people. But now these kingdoms are being supplanted by the kingdom of God. In Revelation, we read,
<blockquote>Then the seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (11:15).</blockquote>
So the kingdom of the world has been replaced by the kingdom of God and Christ. But this announcement—like the gospel itself—is not coming out of the blue. It’s also predicted in the Old Testament. For example, the prophet Zechariah predicts that there will be a day when “the Lord will be king over all the earth” (Zech. 14:9).
In Daniel, we read of a series of pagan kingdoms that oppress God’s people, and then we are told,
<blockquote>And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall the kingdom be left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever (Dan. 2:44).</blockquote>
Later, we read about a similar line of pagan kingdoms, and we learn about the role of the Son of Man in their overthrow. Daniel says,
<blockquote>I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him.
And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed (7:13-14).</blockquote>
The idea of the pagan kingdoms of the world being replaced by God’s kingdom through the Son of Man—or Christ—is one of the expectations established in the Old Testament.
However, the pagan kingdoms of the world are not the only answer to the question of who was ruling before the time of God’s kingdom. The other answer is found on the angelic level—in the invisible world that operates behind the visible, earthly kingdoms.
Scripture gives us glimpses of that invisible world, such as when John tells us, “The whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).
And when Jesus was tested in the desert, we read:
<blockquote>The devil took [Jesus] up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
And Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’” (Luke 4:5-8).</blockquote>
So God had allowed the devil to have spiritual control on the angelic level of all the nations of the earth. And to test Jesus, the devil offered him all these nations in exchange for worship, but Jesus knew that this was not God’s plan and rejected the offer.
Consequently, John tells us, “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8).
And in John’s Gospel, as Jesus is preparing to go to the cross, he says,
<blockquote>Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (12:31-32).</blockquote>
Thus, Hebrews says that Jesus partook of flesh and blood so that
<blockquote>through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil (2:14).</blockquote>
All this forms the conceptual background to the New Testament understanding of the gospel. It’s the good news that—although the devil has reigned in the world up to now, and there have been a series of pagan empires that have oppressed God’s people—the time has finally arrived for God to come and begin reigning through his kingdom.
This happens because his Son defeats the powers of darkness by his atoning death on the cross and by his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God, where he now sits and reigns while the final defeat of the powers of darkness and death is implemented. As St. Paul says:
<blockquote>As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.
Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Cor. 15:22-26).</blockquote>
We thus see that there is a central role for Jesus as the Son of God in the New Testament’s conception of the gospel, and that’s not surprising.
Of the more than thirty references you’ll turn up if you search for the “gospel of” or the “good news of,” they don’t all refer to God and the kingdom. Eleven of them—or about a third—refer to variations on the gospel “of Christ,” “of Jesus Christ,” “of our Lord Jesus,” and “of his Son” (Mark 1:1; Rom. 1:9, 15:19; 1 Cor. 9:12; 2 Cor. 2:12, 9:13, 10:14; Gal. 1:7; Phil. 1:27; 1 Thess. 3:2; 2 Thess. 1:8).
In addition, the four documents about the life of Christ are called Gospels—a usage that dates back to the apostolic age.
So Jesus has a very prominent place in the New Testament understanding of the gospel, but this is not the original way it was conceptualized. The Old Testament prophets, John the Baptist, and Jesus all initially announced the gospel as the arrival of God’s kingdom, and this is how it was publicly announced for years—all through Christ’s earthly ministry.
Only Jesus fully understood the role he would play in bringing that kingdom about, he disclosed this only gradually, and even his own disciples did not understand it until he rose from the dead.
Therefore, the role of the Son in the gospel was a secondary announcement. It was added to the original, primary understanding of the gospel of God and his kingdom at a later stage to explain how that kingdom would come about. That’s why the earliest announcements of the gospel put all the focus on God and his kingdom, and the announcements of the gospel in connection with the Son were all given later.
The primary proclamation of the gospel is thus the announcement that the time for God to inaugurate his kingdom has arrived, and the secondary proclamation is that this kingdom will be implemented through God’s Son.
But notice that there’s still something missing from the way the New Testament conceptualizes the gospel. The passages where the New Testament refers to the gospel just do not focus on individuals. They don’t focus on you, your sin, your forgiveness, you being delivered from hell, or you being united with God in heaven.
That’s not what we find in these passages, and that understanding reframes the gospel away from the New Testament’s conception to present the gospel as if it were about what happens to individuals like you and me. To put it bluntly, the gospel is not about us. It’s about God, his Son, and his kingdom.
Of the more than thirty references to the “gospel of” and the “good news of,” only one of them explicitly refers to salvation. In that passage, Paul says,
<blockquote>In [Christ] you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit (Eph. 1:13).</blockquote>
Here Paul identifies “the word of truth” with “the gospel of your salvation.” Salvation is one of the implications of the gospel for us. It is because of the gospel that we can be saved. But a single verse that mentions this fact does not radically change the focus of the New Testament in how its authors think of the gospel.
The primary proclamation of the gospel is still that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived. The secondary proclamation of the gospel is still that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And the fact that we can be saved through the Son is an addendum to these proclamations of the gospel, but it is not the essence of the gospel itself.
We thus see that there are a lot of misconceptions about the gospel—at least if people are taking their own definitions to be what the New Testament means by the word. I covered many of these alternate conceptions <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/misunderstanding-the-gospel">here</a>.
Different groups can use terms however they like, but they are not representing the New Testament understanding of the gospel if they say it is equivalent to
<ul>
<li>the whole of Scripture,</li>
<li>the whole of Christian doctrine,</li>
<li>the whole of Christ’s teachings,</li>
<li>Lutheranism’s idea of anything that preaches God’s grace and forgiveness,</li>
<li>the distinctive doctrines of Full Gospel Pentecostals,</li>
<li>the distinctive doctrines of Calvinism,</li>
<li>the idea of justification by faith alone,</li>
<li>the idea of justification by grace alone, or even</li>
<li>the idea that God has saved us—as individuals—through the death of his Son since we could not save ourselves.</li>
</ul>
No, the core of the gospel, beginning with texts in the Old Testament, is that the time for God’s kingdom has arrived and all opposing powers will be overthrown. The elaboration of the gospel is that God’s kingdom will be implemented through his Son. And a happy consequence of that fact is that we can be saved through his Son.
The New Testament’s understanding is not about us as individuals and how we can benefit. The gospel is not about us. Instead, the good news is about what God and his Son are doing in the world, what they’re doing to their enemies—like the devil and the pagan world order. How we can benefit as individuals, how we can get on board with God’s plan, is a consequence of the gospel, but it’s not the essence of the good news.
So what do we need to do to benefit from the good news? Jesus himself told us:
<blockquote>The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel (Mark 1:15).</blockquote>
Or, as St. Peter put it on the day of Pentecost:
<blockquote>Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).</blockquote>

How People Get the Gospel Wrong

<div>How does one reconcile the doctrine of purgatory with the doctrine of Justification? On the one side, we are sent to purgatory to be made holy, but the doctrine of Justification says that we are actually made righteous when we are justified. </div><div>In short, one must distinguish between initial and ongoing justification.
In initial justification at baptism, the believer is forgiven of all theirs sin, remitted all temporal punishment due those sins, and is inwardly transformed by the indwelling of the Holy Trinity.
However, unless they die right after Baptism, that’s not the end of their walk with the Lord. They are called to grow in their holiness through the process of ongoing justification, and their bad choices can pull them away from God and his Church from one extent to another. If they subsequently die and have unforgiven venial sins and temporal punishment due their sins in general, e.g., being attached to sinful behavior despite having been forgiven or related transgressions, they will need the purification of Purgatory (CCC 1472). In this light, Purgatory fosters holiness through our postmortem purification.
For more on the distinctions between justification, good works and Purgatory, please read <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/we-can-work-it-out">this article by Tim Staple</a> and also <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/justification-process-or-one-time-deal">this one</a>, plus our two <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/the-roots-of-purgatory">tracts</a> on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/purgatory">Purgatory</a> and also our two <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/primer-on-indulgences">tracts</a> on <a href="https://www.catholic.com/tract/myths-about-indulgences">indulgences</a>.
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Reconciling Justification and Purgatory

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Are Christians atheists?

<div>What do I say to parents who tell me they will let their child decide on baptism?</div><div>It seems that the parents need instruction in the faith, or that their own faith is not strong. You should encourage them to go to Mass each Sunday and pray with the child at home, even if they are not having the child baptized. How will the child decide if he or she has never been taught anything about the Faith at all? This is just a recipe for having no religion and being ignorant, and ignorance is not a good way to prepare to make such an important decision.
I doubt, however, that these parents know very much about the Faith. Encourage them cheerfully and maybe they will come around.
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Let a Child Decide About Baptism?

<div>Would it be appropriate for me to use the sign of the cross when I pray if I am not Catholic yet? </div><div>Certainly you may and should make the sign of the cross. It is not reserved for Catholics, and it is a powerful prayer for enlightenment and protection. If you make it while saying, &#8220;In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen,&#8221; then you are combining an act of faith in Christ&#8217;s Cross and Passion with the profession of faith in the Holy Trinity, and this will be very good for your soul. But become a Catholic as soon as you can. I will pray for you.
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Should a Non-Catholic Sign Himself?

Do Pets Go To Heaven? Jimmy Akin and host Cy Kellett tackle this question in light of records of near death experience.
Transcript:
Caller: We just lost our cat. And I told my son that you have an argument that pets go to heaven. So if you could give your argument that good pets go to heaven, we would really appreciate it.
Jimmy: Okay, so I should introduce a clarification, which is I don&#8217;t claim. Okay, so first of all, this idea that you hear that animals don&#8217;t have an afterlife is not church teaching. That is a theological speculation that is based on Aristotelian physics or metaphysics.
Physics in this case. And I, in episode 203, which is where I discuss this more fully of *Mysterious World*, which you can get to by going to Mysterious FM203, I go through the arguments for animals not having an afterlife and I conclude they don&#8217;t work. I think they&#8217;re bad arguments.
So I&#8217;m not convinced by that. I would say that I don&#8217;t propose they go to heaven. I don&#8217;t know whether they go to heaven or not. Heaven is full spiritual union with God. But I do think there is evidence that they have an afterlife and that at least some animals do, and that it may be a positive afterlife, even if it isn&#8217;t the kind of full union with God, you know, where you have this intellectual vision of God known as the beatific vision that humans can get.
I don&#8217;t know what animals get, but I do have evidence that they may well have an afterlife and that it may be a positive afterlife. Whether it would or would not count as heaven is a separate question.
So there are a number of lines of evidence, and I&#8217;m going to propose at least three lines of evidence that we have in favor of some animals having an afterlife.
One, and I&#8217;ve already mentioned the first one, which is that when humans have near-death experiences, they not only see like their departed relatives in the afterlife while they&#8217;re temporarily clinically dead, they also see animals.
And I did it. And I talk about this in episode 203 of *Mysterious World*. I did a search of a major database of near-death experiences. It has like more than 5,000 near-death experiences in it. And I found by searching on terms like, you know, cat, dog, rabbit, horse, pet animal, things like that, that as many as a quarter of the near-death experience reports that the database contained might have references to animals in them.
Now, I can&#8217;t say it&#8217;s exactly a quarter because what I didn&#8217;t do is read all 5,000 of the reports, but I did find that many. I did find like a quarter of that number that mentioned animals in some way. The actual percentage may be lower than a quarter because you might have one that has the word animal in it and pet in it and dog in it. And so that would look like three hits when really it would count as one if you actually read them.
But this is still a very common thing in human near-death experiences. So that&#8217;s piece of evidence number one.
Piece of evidence number two is a sub-case of piece of evidence number one. There is a kind of experience, and this occurs both in deathbed visions and it occurs in near-death experiences. It&#8217;s what&#8217;s called a peak in Darien experience.
And that&#8217;s P, E, A K, like a mountain peak. This is based on a literary allusion to a poem about a mountain peak in Darien Province, Panama. And I won&#8217;t go through exactly what the allusion involves, but basically the term has become attached to a kind of experience where you see someone in the afterlife, or you see. Basically you see someone in the afterlife that you did not previously know was dead.
For example, an early peak in Darien experience that got recorded about 100 years ago, you had this woman who had just given birth to a child, and she had this heart condition, and the birth was too much of a strain on her system. And so she was in the process of dying.
And they&#8217;d been afraid during her pregnancy that she might not even survive to give birth. So they had her in this maternity hospital and they were rigorously screening what information she was exposed to. But then as she&#8217;s in the process of dying, she starts having a deathbed vision and she&#8217;s like, oh, here&#8217;s my father, and he looks very happy and he&#8217;s welcoming me into the afterlife and oh, hey, what&#8217;s my sister Vita doing here too?
Because as far as the woman knew, her sister Vita was alive. But in fact, her sister Vita had died three weeks earlier. And they had asked the matron of the maternity hospital, is it safe to tell her with her heart condition that her sister Vita has passed on? And the matron said, no, don&#8217;t mention that to her.
And they even had the woman&#8217;s husband screen the woman&#8217;s mail to avoid anyone accidentally mentioning that Vita had died, because they thought that could trigger a cardiac event and she might not survive to give birth to the baby.
So as she&#8217;s having the near-death experience, she sees her father, which would be expected because everybody knew he had passed on. But then she sees someone that she didn&#8217;t know had passed on, namely her sister Vita. And that&#8217;s an example of a peak in Darien experience.
If you see someone in either a deathbed vision or a near-death experience that you did not previously know was dead, and then it turns out it&#8217;s true that they&#8217;re dead, that&#8217;s a peak in Darien experience.
So here&#8217;s the thing. Peak in Darien experiences happen with animals. So someone will be having a near-death experience or a deathbed vision and they&#8217;ll say, oh, here&#8217;s my grandmother and she&#8217;s holding my cat. And the person knew previously the grandmother had died, but they didn&#8217;t know that their cat had died. And it turns out to be true.
So they just like they saw their grandmother in the afterlife, they saw their cat in the afterlife. And in this case, what makes this different than the first type of evidence I mentioned is that it&#8217;s verifiable their cat had died while they were in the hospital and they didn&#8217;t know that.
So this would be, you know, preternatural evidence that they&#8217;re having a real experience that they&#8217;re really learning about their cat being in the afterlife because they had no natural way of knowing that. So it would be a preternatural experience.
Then there&#8217;s the third form of evidence that I would point to, which is that we have so. And again, this parallels other things with humans. Humans very frequently, it tends not to be talked about in our culture, but humans very frequently have experiences that are what are known as after-death communications.
And this is after-death communications are where you have like lost somebody who is close to you and then after they&#8217;re dead they show up again. And they can show up in a number of different ways. I also have *Mysterious World* episodes about after-death communications. So you can check those out for more info.
But like 40 to 50% of the population globally has at least one after-death communication at some point in their lives. Okay, well, turns out it happens with animals too. There are animal after-death communications.
I haven&#8217;t yet done a *Mysterious World* about those, but I have in the last couple of years there have been some research papers done on this, and I will be doing an animal after-death communications episode in the near future. But you can hear about the other stuff that I talked about, for example, by going to Mysterious FM203.
So the three pieces of evidence I pointed to here, and I could name others, but the three pieces of evidence I pointed to here are, number one, people having near-death experiences report seeing animals in the afterlife.
Piece of evidence number two, people have peak in Darien experiences involving animals that they&#8217;ve known which are then verifiable. And piece of evidence number three, people have after-death communications, particularly from animals that they&#8217;ve known.
So those would be the three pieces of evidence I would mention. Also, and this is something you might be interested in, but I just recently did an episode on animal end-of-life experiences.
So if you go to, and I can get the number for you for that pretty quick I think. Yeah, it&#8217;s episode 366. So if you go to Mysterious FM 366, you can learn about the kinds of end-of-life experiences that animals frequently have and see if you think your animal, your cat may have had any of the experiences that have otherwise been reported.
Cy: Annie, thank you. Thanks very much.
Jimmy Very sorry to learn that you lost your cat. That&#8217;s always sad.
Cy: Thank you for the call, Annie. Mike&#8217;s in Pennsylvania watching on YouTube. Mike, welcome. Go ahead with your question.

Do Pets Go To Heaven?

<div>Is it acceptable to sell my art in a gallery that is rented by other artists if the building is owned by Freemasons?</div><div>Yes. We are not responsible for the convictions and religious and political activities of those with whom we do business, unless the relationship is explicitly based on those convictions. So renting from the Freemasons does not constitute formal participation in their sect.
There is only here what we would call &#8220;material cooperation,&#8221; which is not wrong if it is for a sufficient reason. Even if you had the choice between a devout Catholic landlord who charged too much and a masonic one who had reasonable rates, you could choose in your own interest the mason&#8217;s property.
After all, our republic was founded by Freemasons. Our laws were largely formulated by them, and they are still a significant force in American, Latin American, and European society. Catholics have to be able to live in such a society as justly and reasonably as possible. We are always free to have a private preference not to rent or buy from someone, but this cannot be presented as a moral obligation.
There are those who in their praiseworthy zeal for right social order, and in their frustration at their inability to make an impact, can fixate on boycotting businesses or media outlets that do not promote true public morality, but it is very rarely the case that a boycott is a moral obligation. It is a political instrument, which can be effective or ineffective.
In short, you may rent from a Freemason, and you may buy coffee from Starbucks, even though its CEO supports gender ideology. None of this implies any approval of their opinions. You are also free not to because you find their actions repugnant and want a lifestyle that is less involved in their power and influence. Many wise people do this, but that is a free choice, not an obligation.
</div>

Material Cooperation Explained

Why does the widow put her two coins into the treasury?
That is the question. All the rich men, they give out of their abundance—generously, in an absolute sense, but only out of what they consider expendable. I remember a fascinating conversation at coffee hour in an Episcopal group in New England, some years ago, discussing the idea of the tithe  (a tithe is, by the way, a tenth—that’s just what the word means), and a certain British gentleman commented to me that surely that is 10 percent of one’s readily available income. I am not completely sure what he meant; certainly tithing doesn’t mean you cut off and sell a tenth of your house every year, or something like that. But if he meant that the tithe was meant to be simply a portion one’s disposable income after all the bills have been paid, etc., I think he may have missed the point. For the ancient people of God, the tithe was the tithe; whether it was money from trade, or fruits of the harvest, one gave the first portion to God. Not a piece of the leftovers. Without too much stretch, we might translate this as follows: give your first hour’s wages to God, whatever that may be.
But still there’s the question of why. For the rich men in the Temple, we might translate the why into today’s terms: perhaps there is a tax benefit to giving a certain amount. Perhaps by giving a certain amount they will please an important patron or board member. Perhaps they give, in a simple way, because they want to and because they can. There is no judgment necessary here: in highlighting the widow’s gift, Jesus is not suggesting that the other gifts are meaningless or unworthy.
But the why does matter in the end. The widow gives, Jesus says, not out of her excess, but out of her substance—in fact, she gives all that she has. So for her, the donation is not merely an act of supporting some cause that she likes, at a time when she has some money to spare that maybe needs to go to a good cause. For her, this is an act of personal faith: she is giving not just her coins, but her own hope of health and well-being. For her, this small amount is of far greater significance than the larger amounts given by others.
It’s an act of faith, but also, I think, of joy. People give sometimes out of obligation. People give sometimes with a sense of self-interest. But this one gives willingly, almost as if she were not the true owner.
And there we have the key: this power of gift. St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 4: “What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?” If God’s grace—God’s gifts and favor toward us—is a constant theme for Paul, it is also the constant theme of the whole Bible. Genesis begins with grace: with God’s creation out of nothing, his gift of life to all creatures, his gift of divine dignity and freedom to humanity. The widow of Zerephath in 1 Kings receives God’s unexpected gift of food. Revelation ends with grace—with the heavenly city descending to the new earth, where God will dwell with his people together.
And in the middle, at the crossroads of history, we find Jesus: the incarnate Son of God, who gives the world himself. Our reading from Hebrews speaks of this gift and its unique character. It is a sacrifice unlike any other, because it is total, complete, and forever. We remember it at every Mass; we make it present once again, we offer again—in an unbloody way—the once-for-all sacrifice of Christ, presenting before God God’s own flesh and blood for the renewal of creation. Grace upon grace upon grace.
We can legitimately celebrate the right to private property—a right the Catholic Church affirms—and take a real and rational pleasure in the work that we do in building up treasure, so to speak, in this world, whether for ourselves or for following generations. So tradition is clear that we need not take from the widow’s mite some kind of universal rule of poverty, much less some kind of Marxist deconstruction of the value of individual work. But the spiritual principle is quite real, and no less powerful: in an absolute sense, from the perspective of eternity, we own nothing. We come into this world empty-handed, and we take nothing with us when we leave. The Christian concept of “stewardship” is a reminder of this. We are, as human beings, stewards of creation. We are also stewards of the resources we have at the present time. But they do not finally belong to us; they belong to our Lord and Master.
I think some of the great benefactors and philanthropists among <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/a-glimmer-of-hope-for-the-rich">the very rich</a> have understood this. And many people in great poverty understand this as well, which is why charitable giving among the poor remains, even today, much more common than it is among those with more. It is those of us somewhere in the middle who find it hard, probably because we convince ourselves that being comfortable is the same thing as being good stewards.
There was risk involved in God’s self-gift to us—first in creation, and then even more in the incarnation. This risk is obvious—we see it fully on the cross. Giving us himself meant being vulnerable. Do we think, then, that following this Lord will involve no risks? Do we think it will be safe? Do we think it will make demands only on our leftovers, on our spare time, on the parts of life that we already happen to have available? As C.S. Lewis reminds us, Aslan is not a tame lion. This Lord who suffered death for us is not very interested in a half-hearted faithfulness.
We know that stewardship is much more than money—it is also about time, energy, resources, talent. In all these things, God wants our first fruits, not our leftovers. Christianity is not a part-time club, but an all-consuming romance. If we all acted on this truth, with a whole heart, imagine the power of such witness in a world aching for the touch of divine grace.

Decoding the Widow’s Mite

Why do we know some things are wrong? Evolution can’t answer that.

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Video

Whenever morality comes up in discussions, some atheists argue evolution is sufficient to explain morality. In this video, Karlo explains why this argument fails and why God is necessary for a complete account of morality.
Transcript:
Whenever morality comes up in discussions, some atheists argue evolution is sufficient to explain morality. They’ll say, “Morality is merely a product of evolution—the behavior patterns we call morality have been naturally selected for the survival of our species.”
Is evolution sufficient to explain morality? Do we need to give God the boot when it comes to morality? The answer’s no, and here are some reasons why.
For argument’s sake, let’s say morality is merely the product of evolution. The question still remains why I ought to behave in a way that will benefit the survival of our species. Whence does my moral obligation come?
If there were no God, then the dictates of our evolved nature wouldn’t express the intelligence or will of any rational being superior to humans.
But if that’s the case, then how could something that is the byproduct of random and chaotic non-rational processes morally bind anyone? Intuitively we see that this doesn’t make sense. But we can do better than intuition.
As Thomas Aquinas explains in his Summa Theologiae, law is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community” and is “imposed on others by way of a rule and measure.” But this necessarily presupposes a being of intelligence and volition who can impose it.
Therefore, if the evolved order of human nature that determines what’s good for us is to be a law that morally binds us, there must exist a being superior to humans who have intellect and will and has care over the human community. Without such a personal being, like God, there could be no moral obligation.
So, unless one is willing to say moral obligation doesn’t exist, one should reject the idea that evolution is sufficient to explain morality.
If you want to learn more about this topic and others like it, visit our website at catholic.com. Also, visit catholicanswersspeakers.com to learn how you can bring me out to speak at your event.
For Catholic Answers, I’m Karlo Broussard. Thanks for watching.

Can Evolution Explain Morality?

<div>I am an Orthodox Christian. If the ancient church truly believed that the bishop of Rome was the leader that could clarify the dogmas, why did the emperors call for the ecumenical councils? Wouldn’t it be much more easy and orthodox to just ask the bishop of Rome? </div><div>First of all, I am heartened to hear that you recognize how close Catholics and Orthodox are. Although there remain tragic divisions, we shouldn’t overlook the profound agreement between the two. In terms of ecumenical councils, I think that this was largely pragmatic. For instance, the emperor Constantine paid for the travel (and board!) of the 318 participating bishops at the Council of Nicaea, even permitting them to bring guests (for instance, influential monks). The cost and logistics involved would have been difficult or impossible for Pope Sylvester to manage back then. 
But I think that your deeper question is whether the pope makes ecumenical councils irrelevant. As Catholics, we believe in both the infallibility of the pope and in the infallibility of ecumenical councils. Think about it this way: on the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/judaizers">Judaizer</a> question (the question of whether Gentile Christians need to follow the Mosaic Law to be saved), we get the answer first from St. Peter (Acts 10–11), and then from the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15). Did Peter have the ability to settle the question? Yes, in the sense that God had shown him the correct answer and preserved him from error. But it was clear that there were some Christians who thought that the apostle was wrong, and the Council of Jerusalem provided additional support. Peter, the first pope, was an apostle. As such, he had the ability to not only speak infallibly, but (unlike modern popes) to enjoy divine inspiration in particular contexts, such as when he preached on Pentecost (Acts 2), or when he wrote 1 Peter and 2 Peter. Nevertheless, the Judaizer controversy wasn’t settled by his acting alone. 
Far from making ecumenical councils irrelevant, I would argue that it’s only through the pope that we know which are the <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-authority-of-ecumenical-councils">true ecumenical councils</a>. Between the legalization of Christianity and the end of 787, there were more than seven attempts to hold an ecumenical council. Famously, in 449, Emperor Theodosius II convened the so-called “Second Council of Ephesus,” under the authority of Patriarch Dioscorus of Alexandria. But the pope condemns this as a “robber council,” and today, neither Catholics nor Orthodox accept its legitimacy. So why do we only have “seven ecumenical councils” during this period? Because these are the seven accepted by the pope. 
Without the pope, there’s no clear principle by which to determine which councils are real, and which are robbers. Even the late Orthodox theologian and Bishop Kallistos Ware admitted, <a href="http://orthodoxeurope.org/print/11/1/6.aspx">“All Orthodox know which are the seven councils that their Church accepts as ecumenical, but precisely what it is that makes a council ecumenical is not so clear.”</a> (And in fact, some Orthodox claim there are really eight or nine ecumenical councils, which demonstrates the lack of clarity on the matter). 
The Bible doesn’t render the Church irrelevant, as some Protestants believe—and it’s actually from the Church that we know which are the proper books of the Bible. Likewise, the pope doesn’t render ecumenical councils irrelevant—it’s actually from the pope that we know which are the proper councils. 
</div>

Papal Infallibility Does Not Make Ecumenical Councils Irrelevant

<div>Does water have to be poured thrice, or a person immersed thrice, for a valid baptism?</div><div>For the purpose of validity, it does not matter if the water is poured once, twice, or thrice. All that is required is the pouring of water and the trinitarian formula.
The Catechism of Trent, The Sacrament of Baptism:
<blockquote>It is a matter of indifference whether the ablution be performed once or thrice. For it is evident from the Epistle of St. Gregory the Great to Leander that baptism was formerly and may still be validly administered in the Church in either way. The faithful, however, should follow the practice of the particular Church to which they belong.</blockquote>
</div>

Are Three Pours Required at Baptism?

The Book of Acts does not tell us the full story of early Church history. It provides only partial information.
This is obvious from the fact that it covers just the period between A.D. 33 and 60, when it suddenly stops (providing us an important clue to when it was written). Even within that time frame, though, it is only a partial record.
For example, the book of Acts tracks the activities of basically three individuals:
<ul>
<li>Peter (chapters 1-6, 9-12)</li>
<li>Philip the Evangelist (chapter 8)</li>
<li>Paul (chapters 9, 11, 13-28)</li>
</ul>
This gives us a big clue about who Luke’s main sources were in composing the book—at least for those parts that he didn’t personally witness, which are found in the so-called “we” passages later in the book, where Luke describes what “we” did.
Luke tells us almost nothing of the activities of the other apostles, or of other Christians, and so the book is also incomplete in that way.
It does not even give us a complete record of what its main figures did:
<ul>
<li>Peter vanishes from the narrative after chapter 12, except for a brief reappearance in chapter 15.</li>
<li>Philip has only a single chapter devoted to his activities.</li>
<li>And, as we will see, Acts does not record many of the activities of Paul.</li>
</ul>
Some time ago, I did a study of the flow of time in the book of Acts. Periodically, Luke will provide time cues, saying that Paul spent three years in Ephesus (20:31) or that he stayed in Thessalonica for three weeks (17:1-2) or that they sailed from Mitylene and the next day arrived at Chios (20:14-15).
As a Bible chronology geek, I couldn’t resist going through the book of Acts and making a list of all the explicit time cues—as well as providing estimates for the  implicit ones (e.g., when Paul goes from one place to another and we can estimate how long it took based on ancient travel times and methods) and the vague ones (e.g., if Luke says Paul spent “many days” somewhere, I might reckon that as a month).
I wanted to add all these up and see if they fit within the chronological framework that the book covers as a whole. Could all of the activities ascribed to Paul have taken place in the years within the book that he was active?
The good news, from an apologetic perspective, is that they did. Acts appears to cover a period of twenty-seven years (A.D. 33 to 60), but my time estimates for the events it mentions came to only thirteen years in total.
That means that there is plenty of room in the twenty-seven years that the book covers for all of the events Luke records—and more! So Luke passes that test as a historian. He does not give us an impossible chronology. But he also does not give us a complete chronology.
We know that the record is incomplete because of the information recorded in Paul’s letters. For example, in 2 Corinthians, there is a famous passage where Paul is so frustrated with some of the people at Corinth that he has an epistolary meltdown, and he says some very interesting things about what he has done in his life. When comparing himself to his opponents, Paul writes:
<blockquote>Are they servants of Christ? I am a better one—I am talking like a madman—with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death.
Five times I have received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one.
Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned.
Three times I have been shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brethren; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure (11:23-27).</blockquote>
So here are the totals:
<ul>
<li>Forty lashes minus one from the Jews: 5</li>
<li>Beaten with rods: 3</li>
<li>Stoned: 1</li>
<li>Shipwrecked: 3</li>
<li>Adrift at sea for a night and a day: 1</li>
</ul>
How many of these does Luke record in the book of Acts? Exactly two.
The thing is, 2 Corinthians was written some time between A.D. 55 and 57, depending on which chronology you accept. No matter what, though, it was written before Paul went to Jerusalem for the final time, because in 2 Corinthians 9:1-5 he tells the Corinthians to be ready to make donations so that he can take them to the Jerusalem church when he makes his final visit.
That trip is already underway—and he has already passed the city of Corinth—by Acts 20:5-6. We know this because in that passage, Paul is in Troas—a city to the east of Corinth. Therefore, 2 Corinthians had to be written before this point on his final journey to Jerusalem, and so what is found in 2 Corinthians must have happened before Acts 20:5.
This means that all the perils Paul mentioned above must have occurred before this point in Acts.
But only two such perils are mentioned by Luke. One is the stoning at Lystra that occurs in Acts 14:19. This is the single stoning that Paul mentions in his list. (Another stoning, at Iconium, was attempted in 14:5, but it apparently fell through because Paul mentions being stoned only once.)
The second is in Acts 16:22-37, where Paul is beaten with rods at Philippi. That’s likely one of the three beatings he refers to in 2 Corinthians.
But these are the only events in 2 Corinthians that can be referred to in Acts.
There must, therefore, be two other beatings with rods. They happened during the period that Acts covers, but they are not mentioned in Acts.
In addition, all five of the times that Paul received the “forty lashes minus one” from the Jews are not mentioned in Acts.
Nor are the three times he was shipwrecked, because the only shipwreck mentioned is in Acts 27, which is after his final journey to Jerusalem and thus after 2 Corinthians was written.
Furthermore, when that shipwreck occurs, Paul and his companions ran the ship aground in a bay of the island of Malta (27:44-28:1). They do not spend a night and a day in the sea. That must refer to an earlier event.
There are several other events mentioned in Paul’s letters that aren’t found in Acts. Some of these are in the pastoral epistles (1-2 Timothy, Titus), but these letters likely were written after the book of Acts closed.
This is not the case, however, for events found in Galatians, which was clearly written during the time period covered by Acts.
An example is the fifteen-day visit Paul made to Jerusalem, where he saw only Peter and James the Lord’s brother (Gal. 1:18-19). That’s not in Acts.
Neither is the much more consequential visit that Peter (Cephas) made to Antioch while Paul was staying there. There were fireworks between the two during this meeting (Gal. 2:11-16), but Luke does not mention it in Acts.
We thus see that Acts is not just a limited record of a few key figures (Peter, Phillip, and Paul). It is restricted even in what it records about all of these three. Undoubtedly, each did many more things than are recorded in Acts.
In particular, Paul experienced many things that aren’t mentioned in the book even though they fell in the period it covers.
Why didn’t Luke record them? In some cases, he may not have wanted to because he didn&#8217;t want to distract the reader from his overall message. For example, if he included Paul&#8217;s rebuke of Peter at Antioch, it could have distracted from the fundamental agreement (present both in Acts and Galatians) between Peter and Paul.
In other cases, Luke may not have known about the event. He wasn’t by Paul’s side during the whole time of his ministry. Indeed, the first “we” passage doesn’t occur until Acts 16:10-17, so there was a lot of Paul’s ministry that Luke didn’t witness.
Paul may have recounted some of them to Luke, though, just as he did for the readers of 2 Corinthians. So why wouldn’t Luke include those?
Likely, because they would have been too repetitive for his own readers. Recording five lashings, three beatings with rods, and three shipwrecks before we get to the one in chapter 27 could be seen as overkill.
It also could have taken more space than Luke felt he had available to him if he were going to keep Acts approximately the same length as his Gospel, which was the length of a typical scroll.
Luke thus may have had good reasons for not recording everything that happened to Paul. Still, it would be fascinating to know more.

What Acts Leaves Out

Saying you’re “<a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/why-catholics-cant-be-pro-choice">Catholics for choice</a>” (i.e. the choice to kill unborn children) is like saying you’re a vegetarian for beef and pork BBQ. It doesn’t make sense, but if you repeat loud enough and long enough some people will let you get away with it and maybe even some other doozies.
I think Catholics for Choice could change their name to “Catholics for Clout Chasing” because their recent X post is a shameless example of that. Just say something blasphemous about the Blessed Virgin and guarantee yourself publicity in a world where there is no such thing as “bad press.”

Most informed people recognize this is a dumb argument, but they may not know the specific logical fallacy it employs. That’s the fallacy of equivocation: using the same word but with two different meanings.
The argument appears to be saying, “Mary had a reproductive ‘choice’ so everyone should have a reproductive ‘choice.’” And sure—Mary was free to choose to not conceive a child in her womb, and every woman should also have that choice because the marital act involves a free gift of self. But abortion is not a “reproductive choice.” <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/how-to-prove-life-begins-at-conception">Reproduction has already happened!</a> Abortion is instead the choice to kill a child before he or she is born.
Saying Mary was free to not become pregnant doesn’t mean women should have the freedom to not remain pregnant. That’s like saying the choice to not become a pilot means a person should also have the choice to not remain a pilot and be able to parachute out of a packed plane mid-flight, leaving the passengers to do the flying instead.
Pregnancy isn’t a job. It’s a sacred responsibility God entrusted to women. Mary received the most sacred responsibility of all: bearing the savior of the world. It’s blasphemous to use the sublime beauty of the Incarnation to argue for the evil of abortion—but when an organization’s very name is a nonsensical blasphemy, what more can you expect from them?

A New Low for “Catholics for Choice”

<div>Who are the Nephilim and where did the Nephilim come from? Were the Nephilim aliens?</div><div>The <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/7-mysteries-about-the-nephilim" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nephilim</a> were a group mentioned briefly in <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/explaining-the-nephilim-of-genesis" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Genesis 6:4</a> and again in Numbers 13:33. The best-supported reading, both linguistically and historically, is that &#8220;Nephilim&#8221; refers <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/are-the-nephilim-biblical-aliens">to unusually tall, powerful humans</a>. The term is likely a loanword meaning &#8220;giants,&#8221; and the biblical text itself describes them as &#8220;mighty men of old, men of renown.&#8221; However, there is no biblical or other historical basis for believing them to be aliens, as some have claimed.
Genesis links the Nephilim to the union of the &#8220;sons of God&#8221; and the &#8220;daughters of men.&#8221; The oldest Jewish and Christian interpretation holds that &#8220;<a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/tjap/who-are-the-nephilim" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">sons of God</a>&#8221; refers to angelic beings who rebelled, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/audio/tjap/who-are-the-nephilim">fashioned temporary bodies for themselves</a>, took human wives, and produced offspring who were large in size and possessed super-human strength. This reading was standard in ancient Judaism and appears in some apocryphal texts like 1 Enoch.
Genesis 6:4 explicitly notes that the same kind of unions happened again &#8220;afterward,&#8221; which explains why the Israelites later encountered tall peoples in Canaan who were identified with the Nephilim. In brief, the Nephilim were human giants, and Scripture ties their origins to illicit unions between fallen angels (demons) and human women. This is an interpretation that best fits the language of the text and the earliest historical understanding of it.
For more information, including another perspective on who the sons of God in Genesis 6:4 may be, <a href="https://www.catholic.com/qa/explaining-the-nephilim-of-genesis">please see this resource of ours</a>.
</div>

Who Were the Nephilim?

<div>If we have to do good works to keep our right standing with God, how is salvation by grace alone?</div><div>Read the letters of St. John in the New Testament and you will see the delicate but real connection between fulfilling God&#8217;s commandments and being in his grace. Our Lord himself said, &#8220;If you love me keep my commandments.&#8221; A thing&#8217;s being or nature is only shown by its actions; if we contradict the life of grace in us by evil deeds, then we cannot be in God&#8217;s grace. If we show by our deeds that we love God, then our life of grace is strengthened and renewed. We cannot separate the two things, grace and works, completely.
It is true that nothing we can do can place us in God&#8217;s grace if we have lost it by sin. That is the work of his sheer mercy. But to persevere in God&#8217;s grace, we have to continue to do the good works &#8220;he has prepared for us to walk in,&#8221; as the apostle says. We cannot make ourselves alive if we are dead, but if we are alive we can cooperate with our Maker in preserving and maintaining the life he has given us. This is simply common sense in the spiritual life.
</div>

Faith and Works

I mindlessly ate a piece of ham at 7 a.m. on the morning of Ash Wednesday. This took place while I packed my three oldest children ham sandwiches for school and made my husband one for work. Lent was off to a strong start, and it has regrettably progressed with approximately the same level of recollection.
My twin boys (babies numbers five and six) were born just six weeks ago, and although I blame sleep deprivation for most of my forgetfulness, I confess that the idea of entering into a willing death to self feels redundant. I was in Lent while the rest of the world enjoyed Christmas. Isn’t it Easter yet?
When we walk the path of the Church calendar, it is inevitable that our lives will sometimes feel incongruent with the season. You may be faced with the passing of a loved one during a time of feasting or have reason to celebrate in the times of fasting. Or you may, like me, simply feel too submerged in the needs of daily life to engage with the season. The Church year is the pattern by which we live our lives, but the rhythm may sound loud and triumphalist some years and feel distant in others.
A beautiful aspect of being a part of the Church is its oneness. In this phase of my life, when small children are so often demanding my attention, I have come to a deep appreciation for the fact that my actions or lack of actions don’t impact the activity of the Church. When I am in the back of the church changing a diaper, Mass goes on, sweeping me and my baby along with it. When I kick off Lent with a mouthful of meat, the beauty of the season is unmarred. This means there is grace and room for my weakness and fatigue within the greater strength of the Church. If I make space and time for the needs of my newborn sons, how much more will Mother Church care for me?
When I recently expressed the dryness of my attitude toward this Lenten season to a friend, he referred me to a delightful little book titled <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Practice-Presence-God-Brother-Lawrence/dp/1614279683/ref=sr_1_9?crid=3UREAX2MU37BB&amp;dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.zdcT0sY2Zt3_e3YF7e9Mhu1jl73f-eYADLVnXfXem2VdZcPlNPqL74dE6CPwE9I7Bsvsg2y51hw-jT4d5LdiHQFoR27RyB9ltqXpkhTCWiDrLKVLuhd3FPcFKZXZuJ4P5tKfUl7iI0OdVxKZw-ibKpS66x3GsPKsNX4Jz3V7FKRjN6RAJ0cGB3YOowRfR7BOKn-jLmRW041STMw1De0z4-ySgqNsIRqA7z1AGjQV5Ik.-WH_JSru8sww1IHBWxgVv9b6dUn4LxCNc5fyhfqG_yI&amp;dib_tag=se&amp;keywords=the+practice+of+the+presence+of+god&amp;qid=1741891208&amp;sprefix=the+practice,aps,135&amp;sr=8-9">The Practice of the Presence of God</a>. Brother Lawrence was a monk who found that the most direct path to God is one of simplicity. He strove to complete every daily task entirely out of love while basking in a childlike awareness of God’s presence. Brother Lawrence taught that “our sanctification does not depend on changing our works, but in doing for God’s sake what we commonly do for our own.”
This may bring to your mind another beloved saint, Thérèse of Lisieux, who preached this “little way” when she <a href="https://youth.rcdow.org.uk/voices/inspiring-quotes-from-st-therese-of-lisieux/">explained</a>, “It pleases him to create great saints, who may be compared with the lilies or the rose; but he has also created little ones, who must be content to be daisies or violets, nestling at his feet to delight his eyes when he should choose to look at them. The happier they are to be as he wills, the more perfect they are.”
The Church doesn’t strictly require much throughout the Lenten season. We are all required to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday—with exceptions like children, pregnant or breastfeeding mothers, and the ill. Additionally, we must abstain from eating meat on Fridays throughout the season. Other sacrifices we choose to make should be done purely for the love of God.
Lent is a season of being aware of our own sin and repenting; however, giving up something sinful isn’t an appropriate Lenten sacrifice. Rather, these sacrifices are a practice of giving up something good so that you can receive it back at Easter and enjoy it all the more in the season of feasting. All this is done out of love for Christ, who first loved us “and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:2).
If you are feeling fatigued by Lent, and even small additional burdens feel beyond your capacity, perhaps God wants you simply to sit with him in your weariness and offer the discomfort of your daily work. Remember that the three pillars of Lent are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. If you are struggling with one, then lean more deeply into the others. Embrace the childlike way of Brother Lawrence, who reminds us that “we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”
When carried out with prayer and love, the small duties of your day are worth far more than rigorous mortifications without them. Take a deep breath. Your striving doesn’t need to be for greater sacrifices, but only for consistent love in the ones set before you.
Hang in there, my friends—Easter is coming!

Fatigued by Lent

<div>If Padre Pio will be my son’s confirmation saint, which name should he use: Pio or Francesco?</div><div>Your son would use the name Pio as his confirmation name, which is the saint&#8217;s religious name and the name by which he was canonized. Francesco was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padre_Pio">Padre Pio</a>&#8216;s birth name, but he did not ordinarily use that name and was not commonly known by that name after he entered the Capuchins.
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Padre Pio as Confirmation Saint

If you listen to Catholics discussing the Blessed Sacrament today, you’re likely to hear—not just, but especially in traditional circles—an emphasis on the Eucharist as “sacrifice” and a complaint about overemphasis on the Eucharist as a “meal.”
Maybe you’ve wondered: what are they talking about?
Well, discussion of the Eucharist as sacrifice is certainly no novelty. In fact, it’s probably how most Catholics predominantly discussed the sacrament, certainly until not too long ago.
But sacrifice? We’re in the twenty-first century, remember?
Okay, but that doesn’t make the Eucharist any less real as a sacrifice.
In the ancient world, including the times described in the Old Testament, sacrifice was the way one sealed a covenant. A covenant was not just a “contract” or an “agreement.” It was a life commitment between two parties. To enter a covenant was to undertake a most solemn obligation on which the parties staked their lives. You’ve heard the expression “cross my heart and hope to die”? That child’s phrase today expresses something of the gravity of the commitment two parties that bound themselves to each other made.
Covenants were brought into being with blood because, for most human beings in antiquity, blood was the seat of life. If your blood was spilled, you were weak. If spilled too much, you were dead. That is why animals were offered in sacrifice: their blood was supposed to represent the human covenant-makers.
Covenants could be between equals, but they usually were between unequals, between a superior and a subordinate. A defeated king who now became a vassal to his conquerer was bound by covenant.
And when God made covenants—with Abraham, with Moses, with Israel—those were most definitely covenants between unequals.
Covenant partners bound themselves by their lives to do (or not do) something vis-à-vis the other. A vassal bound himself not to be disloyal to his king and to defend him. Israel bound itself to keep God’s Law, and God bound himself to be their God and they his people.
God’s first covenant is creation: God bound himself to man in a special way by creating him in “his image and likeness.” Man broke that covenant by wanting to be not God’s image and likeness, but rather “like God” himself, deciding for himself what is good and what is evil. Israel broke God’s covenant by its constant religious backsliding.
“Again and again you offered a covenant to man and . . . taught him to hope for salvation.”
The final and definitive covenant, “the new and everlasting covenant,” is made with God in Christ. It is made with his blood, “not the blood of bulls and goats” (Heb. 9: 13-14), but of a human being who, at the same time, was God. As man he offered himself absolutely to God; as God, his offering is absolutely perfect. Jesus did what we could not but needed to do. He offered himself on the Cross, unto death.
But what does this have to do with the Eucharist?
Jesus explicitly speaks of the Eucharist as his body and his blood. They do not “represent” or “symbolize” his body and blood; they are his body and blood, “the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” That act of Jesus’s absolute submission to his Father’s will, even unto death, is re-presented in every Mass.
Jesus clearly intended the Eucharist to be part of his offering on the cross. Catholic theology speaks of the Eucharist as making the “sacrifice of Christ present.”
But Jesus instituted the Eucharist on Holy Thursday night, and he didn’t die until Good Friday afternoon. So how are they connected?
Let’s remember that, for God, time is not past, present, and future. Jesus is not sitting at God’s right hand, waiting to see how history will turn out. “All time belongs to him,” we say during the inscription of the paschal candle at the Easter vigil. For us, mortal creatures, time is experienced as unfolding: past, present, and future. For God, all time is now.
So, yes, Jesus offered himself once and for all (a prime Protestant contention that also corresponds to Heb. 10:10). But Jesus’ offering encompassed his passion, death, and resurrection on Calvary that was already anticipated in the Last Supper and is made present in every Eucharist that has been celebrated from then until the end of time. This is Jesus offering himself.
Jesus enjoined his apostles to “do this in memory of me”—not as an afterthought, not as a “hey, Jesus did this, and isn’t it nice?” No, “memory” here in a Jewish context has a specific meaning. It is a making present of the thing being remembered here and now.
The Last Supper was a Passover meal. The Passover prefigures the Eucharist. When God institutes the Passover, he instructs Moses that Israel is to keep this “memorial” forever (Exod. 12:14) because every generation of Jews stands together with Moses and Aaron and the Jews of Egypt with whom God made this covenant. Even today, during the Passover meal, the youngest child asks, “Why is this night different from all others?” Take note of the verb and adjective: the child does not ask “why was that night different,” but “why is this night different?” Before Almighty God, every Jew who was, is, or will be was part of that Passover.
And if the Passover merely prefigures the sacrificial offering of the Lamb of God, the real offering on Calvary presupposes just as real a memory: whoever belongs to Christ is joined, in every Eucharist, to the Upper Room and Calvary. If by baptism we become part of Jesus’ death (Rom. 6:31-11), well, baptism makes us participants in that death in order to make us part of the mystical body of Christ.
So is the Eucharist a meal? Yes, but a unique kind of meal, because it is also a sacrifice, thanks to which (and thanks only to which) we are saved.
By taking part in and receiving the Eucharist, we—the mystical body of Christ—join the supreme offering of our head to God. That is why we speak of the priest as celebrating in persona Christi. It’s not “Father John’s Mass.” It’s Christ’s Mass, who acts through human ministers to accommodate us, mortal creatures bound to space and time, raising us up to God’s dimension not bound by such limits.
(To read more on the Eucharist as sacrifice, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, <a href="http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c1a3.htm#1367">1362-72</a>.)

The Eucharist as a Sacrifice

<div>Why can’t I find "Catholic Answers Live" on my radio station, 1620 AM?</div><div>I infer you’re referring to KSMH 1620 AM, which serves the Sacramento area. Relevant Radio, with which KSMH is affiliated, made a decision not to carry Catholic Answers Live on its member stations. For more detail, please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/news/top-rated-catholic-show-no-longer-on-relevant-radio">our article addressing this matter, </a>which includes other ways you can listen to our radio show, including via our phone app.
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Why Can’t I Find Your Radio Show On Air?

Tim Staples highlights several key passages in Scripture which directly refute the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone and show that Jesus established the Catholic Church as the true authority of His Word.

Why Protestant Doctrine Is Unbiblical

A common charge against the rosary is that it violates Jesus’ prohibition of “vain repetition” (Matt. 6:7, KJV). Catholics often answer this charge by pointing to the fact that Jesus isn’t condemning repetitious prayer as such, but mindless prayer—prayer that involves repeated words with no attention, no intention, and no engagement of the heart. This makes sense, given that Jesus instructs his disciples not to pray “as the Gentiles do,” which involved repeated prayers aimed at appeasing their gods rather than forming the heart.
But you might wonder, “How attentive do we have to be in praying the rosary?” And what’s the point of the repetition to begin with, even if it’s not bad as such?
These are great questions. And they need answers. So let’s see what we can come up with.
Concerning the first question, I think we can look to St. Thomas Aquinas for some help. In the second part of the second part of his Summa Theologiae, question 83, article 13, Aquinas explains that when it comes to the end of prayer being better obtained—which is devotion (a movement of the will to readily subject oneself to things pertaining to God)—Aquinas says that conscious attentiveness is necessary. But when it comes to the effects of prayer, sustained attentiveness is necessary only for one of the three.
For meriting an increase in grace (the first effect) and obtaining what we ask (the second effect), the original intention with which one begins the prayer is sufficient. But for what he calls “spiritual refreshment of the mind” (the third effect), continued attentiveness is necessary. For support, he quotes 1 Corinthians 14:14, where St. Paul writes, “If I pray in a tongue . . . my understanding is without fruit.”
Now, you might be asking yourself, “What kind of attentiveness does Aquinas have in mind here?” He lists three kinds.
First, there is attention to words—making sure we don’t say the wrong thing. Second, there is attention to their meaning. Third, there is attention to the end of prayer—namely, God—and what we’re asking for.
For Aquinas, all three matter. But the last one is most important, especially because when prayers are committed to memory, the first and second senses of attention are easily fulfilled.
Here’s another important question: even if repetition is okay, what’s its purpose?
I can think of four things repetitious prayer achieves.
First, it orders the will toward God. Every Hail Mary and Our Father that we pray involves a new act of desire for the spiritual goods we’re asking for in the prayers. Such repetitive requests keep the will fixed on these spiritual goods, which in turn keeps the will fixed on God, because we recognize he’s the source of these goods.
Second, repetition intensifies love—for Jesus and for our Blessed Mother. Each repeated prayer expresses renewed trust in God’s grace and renewed trust in our Lady’s assistance, thereby deepening our love for both. As St. Augustine says in Epistle 130, his Letter to Proba, “by means of words and other signs [in repeated prayer] we arouse ourselves more effectively to an increase of holy desires.”
Third, repetition provides a stable verbal framework, freeing the mind to contemplate the mysteries of Christ’s life rather than scramble for new words, while at the same time willing the requests that each prayer expresses.
Fourth, the repeated pursuit of the good in and through each prayer forms virtue, building stable dispositions of faith, hope, and charity. That shapes the soul over time into a saintly soul.
So there we have it: a fourfold purpose of repetitious prayer.
Okay. There’s one last thing I want to share. And it’s not so much a theological question, but more of a pastoral point. Again, it comes from Aquinas.
In article 14 of that same question mentioned above, Aquinas provides us with a helpful principle: the quantity of a thing should be commensurate with its end. 
In layman’s terms, that just means you use as much of something as the goal calls for—no more, no less. For example, you use only the amount of medicine that’s needed for restoring health. You don’t use ten painkillers for a mild headache—the amount should fit the purpose.
Applied to prayer, Aquinas says prayer should last long enough to arouse devotion—but if it causes weariness, it should stop. Here’s what he says:
<blockquote>Prayer should last long enough to arouse the fervor of the interior desire, and when it exceeds this measure, so that it cannot be continued any longer without causing weariness, it should be discontinued.</blockquote>
If we apply that to repetitious prayer, Aquinas would have us stop the repetition and employ another form of prayer if such repetition is causing weariness within the soul—a loss of fervor of devotion.
That matters pastorally. Some Catholics feel guilty for not wanting to pray the rosary. But they fail to recognize that it might be due to the simple fact that they’re weary of the repetition and need to foster devotion in some other way. Perhaps at that moment the Holy Spirit is moving them to another form of prayer for a season. Just like in human relationships, our relationship with the Lord involves a variety of different ways in which we express love for him.
So here’s the wrap-up!
Catholics would do well to continue being prepared to answer the “vain repetition” charge. But we’d also do well to equip ourselves to explain the spiritual benefits of repetitious prayer and the pastoral counsel surrounding it. This isn’t just for the purpose of persuading others about the rosary; it’s for our spiritual benefit as well.

When NOT to Pray?

A caller asks how to respond to a Jehovah Witness who claims we should not celebrate Christmas because the three wise men were astrologers and the horrible acts Herod committed. Trent Horn, proprietor of The Counsel of Trent Podcast gives the Catholic answer.
Article referenced by Trent written by Jimmy Akin: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/mysteries-of-the-magi

Did the Three Wise Men Practice Astrology?

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One size doesn’t fit all Protestants.

<div>Are the principles of the Socialist Party the same as those of the Catholic Church?</div><div>No, the Catholic Church explicitly rejects socialism.
<blockquote>If Socialism, like all errors, contains some truth (which, moreover, the supreme pontiffs have never denied), it is based nevertheless on a theory of human society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are contradictory terms; no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist (Pius XI&#8217;s <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html">Q</a><a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html">uadragesimo Anno</a>, 120).</blockquote>
<blockquote>The Church has rejected the totalitarian and atheistic ideologies associated in modem times with &#8220;communism&#8221; or &#8220;socialism&#8221;  (Catechism, 2425).</blockquote>
Pope Leo XIII&#8217;s <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html">Rerum Novarum</a> explicitly rejects several main tenants of socialism.
Socialism severely curtails rights to private property. The Church, on the other hand, upholds the individual&#8217;s right to private property (Catechism, 2401).
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Does Catholicism Support Socialism?

<div>Please provide information on atheism.</div><div>Please see <a href="https://www.catholic.com/search?q=atheism">this link</a> for various resources from Catholic Answers.
You may also want to purchase our <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/20-answers-atheism/">20 Answers</a> booklet on atheism as well as Trent Horn&#8217;s <a href="https://shop.catholic.com/answering-atheism-how-to-make-the-case-for-god-with-logic-and-charity/">Answering Atheism</a>.
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Information on Atheism

Is Birth Control More Sinful Than War?

How can missing church on Sunday be a mortal sin? It isn&#8217;t even the Sabbath, so why would Catholics refer to attending mass on Sundays as a grave matter? Jimmy Akin answers this question in an excerpt from Catholic Answers Live.
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Transcript:
Even though Sunday is not literally the Sabbath, it is the Christian equivalent of the Sabbath. It&#8217;s described in the Bible as the Lord&#8217;s day. And so, since the first century, Christians have met together on Sundays. St.Paul, for example, in the Corinthian Correspondence, talks about taking up a collection on Sundays when Christians meet together. So we know Christians were meeting on Sundays as the Lord&#8217;s Day for religious services. The question then becomes, how serious is that obligation, using the Jewish Sabbath as a parallel under the law of Moses, if you were a Sabbath-breaker, that&#8217;s one of the Ten Commandments, it&#8217;s right up there against don&#8217;t commit murder, don&#8217;t commit adultery.
Right up there is, remember the Sabbath to keep it holy. In fact, you could even under the Mosaic law, you could even be killed, executed, if you were a Sabbath breaker who just disregarded the Sabbath. So this was regarded as an extremely serious obligation in the Jewish community, and it is among the Ten Commandments. And so even though we&#8217;re not obliged to keep the same day holy, the obligation to keep that day holy is a grave one. It&#8217;s not something that should just be ignored because we meet on that day. The obligation is a grave one because we have a grave obligation to render proper worship to our Creator. And this is how we do that. So that&#8217;s the basic reason.
Now, there can be good excuses for missing Mass. If you&#8217;re sick, don&#8217;t go. There are legitimate reasons for not going. But as a matter of principle, the obligation to meet together for communal worship, to give proper worship to our Creator together, is a grave one. And we need to honor that.

Is Missing Sunday Mass a Mortal Sin?

<div>If we don’t have our bodies in heaven until the end of the world, how are we present to each other there? How do we see and interact with each other?</div><div>This is a good question. Of course, the answer comes from theological reflection with help from some philosophical principles. The human soul separated from the body is naturally very restricted in what it can actively know and experience. This is because the human soul, even though it is spiritual in nature, requires the use of the senses for its natural knowledge, and without a body, there is simply no natural sense experience. So, if the soul separated from the body is to have any specific knowledge beyond the awareness of its own existence and its dependence on God, it will need to be helped and strengthened by higher beings—namely, God and the angels.
So we can say that in heaven the souls perceive each other in their vision of their common source and cause: the essence of God. They may also be enlightened by the angels and Our Lady (who has a body already) about God&#8217;s effects in his creatures. Once they are given this knowledge, then they have a simple, intuitive understanding of each other and any of the things that have been shown them. The real question, given all this, would appropriately be &#8220;Is there anything they do not know?&#8221; St. Gregory the Great exclaims in a concise phrase, &#8220;What is it that they cannot see, they who see Him who sees all things?&#8221;
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How Do Souls Without Bodies Interact?

The Church’s liturgical calendar throws up some oddities sometimes. One set of Sundays, and other feasts and fasts, is fixed in relation to Easter, which moves around the spring. Another of feasts is fixed to Christmas, and a third is fixed to calendar dates. And so different occasions can coincide: a feast of the “sanctoral cycle” can fall on a Sunday, and all the feasts of the spring and early summer are vulnerable to being swallowed up by the events of Lent and Eastertide.
A feast day like Christmas will fall on a Sunday only approximately once every seven years. Even less frequent are the occasions when significant dates of the sanctoral and paschal cycles coincide. The most famous of these occasional coincidences is that between Good Friday and the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25. It last happened in 2016 and will not happen again until 2157.
This year, we have the coincidence of Ash Wednesday and the traditional date of the feast of the Roman martyr St. Valentine.
The tidy-minded modern mindset is inclined to see these clashes as inconvenient. Not only are there elaborate rules about which occasion takes precedence, but sometimes the celebration of one is moved by a day to avoid it. (March 25 this year is the Monday of Holy Week, which means that, like with Good Friday, the Annunciation will be moved to the Monday after the Octave of Easter, April 8.) Huge efforts were made over the course of the twentieth century to stop Lent being cluttered up with feasts of a non-Lenten character.
This was not the attitude of our predecessors in the Faith, who celebrated both coinciding events on the same day and looked for a symbolic significance in the coincidence. The feast of the Annunciation marks the day of the Incarnation, and tradition has it that Good Friday fell on the same day. The <a href="https://msf-america.org/blog/333-holy-thorn-relic">Holy Thorn of Andria</a> in Italy seems to agree: over the centuries, this relic of the Crown of Thorns has <a href="https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/33630/italys-bleeding-thorn-marks-the-coincidence-of-good-friday-annunciation">shed a few drops of blood</a> when Good Friday falls on 25th March. The same coincidence marked the day the English martyr St. Margaret Clitherow <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/extreme-catholic-heroism">suffered in 1586</a>. In a different way, the feasts of St. Patrick and St. Joseph, which always fall in Lent, give us something to look forward to.
St. Valentine and Ash Wednesday create a particular kind of clash because of the way they have become embedded in popular culture. St. Valentine was moved from February 14 in the liturgical reform of 1969, but he has remained there stubbornly in the popular imagination, as the patron of young couples. Ash Wednesday’s significance as the start of Lenten observance has been overwhelmed in some cultures by the celebration of &#8220;Carnival&#8221; or &#8220;Mardi Gras,&#8221; the &#8220;farewell to meat&#8221; that precedes it. This has taken on such a life of its own that it has spread over several days, swamping Ash Wednesday itself.
For this reason, Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, who oversaw the reform of the liturgy in the 1960s, expressed regret that he could not move Ash Wednesday to a Sunday. (See The Reform of the Liturgy, p. 307, n. 7.) He did manage to break the connection between the greeting-card industry and the liturgical feast of St. Valentine, sticking in St. Cyril and St. Methodius on February 14 instead. Despite this, even the Vatican Information Service called the 14th St. Valentine’s Day when Pope Francis, in 2014, thought it a good day to <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/pope-invites-engaged-couples-to-spend-valentines-day-with-him/">bless engaged couples</a>. Bugnini’s fear of the secular significance of the day <a href="https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/halloween-and-the-triduum-of-death">overcoming its religious meaning</a> was itself overcome by the desire to make something of religious significance out of a day noticed by the secular world.
There are various theories as to why Valentine’s Day has become associated with romantic love, but the association has no obvious connection with his holy life and heroic death in the third century. It is an example of popular culture simply making use of the Church’s calendar, at a time when this was not just the &#8220;liturgical calendar,&#8221; but everyone’s calendar. In Britain, the Monday after the “twelfth day” of Christmas, <a href="https://nationaltoday.com/plough-monday/">Plough Monday</a>, was the day to return to work after the break, and rents were (and in some places still are) collected on &#8220;quarter days&#8221; fixed by the great feasts of Christmas (December 25); the Annunciation (March 25); the Nativity of St. John the Baptist (June 24); and Michaelmas, or the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel (September 29). Phrases from the liturgy became associated with particular actions or attitudes: the word placebo <a href="https://www.etymonline.com/word/placebo">comes from</a> a psalm (114 in the Vulgate) commonly recited for the dead, including by those wishing to ingratiate themselves with the deceased’s family. This isn’t the secularization of the holy; it is the penetration of ordinary life by a ubiquitous devotional culture.
Placing romantic couples under the patronage of a celibate who was executed for his love of Christ in the distant past, for the sole reason that his feast falls in the early spring, seemed perfectly logical and appropriate to the pre-modern Catholic mind. Personally, I can’t see anything wrong with it, either. The couples certainly need his protection today, and, as St. Thérèse of Lisieux said in the context of her own eccentric devotions, &#8220;there is no jealousy in heaven.&#8221; Trying to turn the day into something not connected with the kind of love ordered to the goods of this world—marriage and children—is both quixotic and puritanical. These goods are good, and God made them. They have to be treated with care, and this is where the Church’s teaching can genuinely help out the world.
St. Valentine’s falling on Ash Wednesday this year is a reminder, like some of the more spectacular calendrical coincidences, that life is made up of both feasting and fasting. There must be no feasting without fasting, and no fasting without feasting, either.
Ash Wednesday is unusual as a day that is not a holy day of obligation but still widely observed as a devotional day, with people attending church to receive their ash. I would recommend this year that celebrations associated with St. Valentine take advantage of the proximity of Shrove Tuesday—“Fat Tuesday,” the feast before the fast of Lent—so that the importance of Ash Wednesday is not forgotten.

Valentines and Ashes!

When I was a Baptist, I was stunned to learn that Martin Luther anachronistically read his disagreements with Catholics into the Bible, taking St. Paul out of his original context and making the text on salvation say something it doesn’t. During my time at Harvard, now as a Catholic, I’ve heard the same point on Luther reaffirmed, but this time directly from some of the world’s top biblical scholars. If Luther got justification wrong because he read his sixteenth-century context into the first century, then what else might be off?
The dispute between Jesus and the Pharisees on the tradition of the elders is another example of a Protestant misreading of the Bible. Although Jesus disputes the oral, extrabiblical tradition of the elders, which the Pharisees cite as an authority, Jesus does not reject oral tradition itself. In other words, Jesus rejects certain oral traditions here, but not because they are oral tradition rather than the written word.
Let’s first read the debate in context.
The argument erupts because the Pharisees note that Jesus’ disciples do not wash their hands before eating, which is a Jewish tradition or custom (Matt. 15:1-2, Mark 7:1-5). Jesus charges the Pharisees with hypocrisy, citing Isaiah 29:13, and says, in Mark 7:8, “You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” In Matthew 15:6, he says, “So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word of God.”
How does Jesus back this charge? He seemingly changes topics by mentioning that the Pharisees would force someone not to help his mother and father, thus violating one of the Ten Commandments, if the money with which he would have helped his parents is declared “Corban,” or pledged as an offering to God (Matt. 15:3-6, Mark 7:9-13). Jesus emphasizes in both Gospels that the Pharisees are willing to side with a human tradition against the scriptures.
So how does Jesus’ argument deal with the hand-washing tradition? After all, this hand-washing ritual does not technically contradict anything in the Bible. The tradition is likely meant to make the everyday people pure, or pure according to the Pharisees, like the priests in the Temple who are biblically commanded to wash their hands (Exod. 30:17-21).
Rather than dealing directly with the hand-washing tradition itself, Jesus undermines the credibility of the Pharisees, or their vision of how to obey God, which calls into question their traditions, including hand-washing. It’s the equivalent of discrediting a politician and his policy proposals by mentioning a terrible law he once supported.
The earliest document of Rabbinic Judaism, the Mishnah, explains why the Pharisees had extrabiblical laws. It says in m. Avot 1:1, “Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be patient in [the administration of] justice, raise many disciples and make a fence round the Torah.” The idea of building “a fence round the Torah” echoes Deuteronomy 22:8, where a fence is supposed to be made around rooftops so that it is impossible for someone to fall off.
The tradition of the elders is part of this fence. It is supposed to help people not to violate God’s law. Jesus, however, is calling into question the fence of the Pharisees and whether it successfully helps people follow God. Christ does this by questioning whether the Pharisees really understand what God wants, especially given what God has said in Scripture.
There are two things worth noticing. First, Jesus does not completely reject extrabiblical tradition. At most, Jesus is rejecting traditions that contradict Scripture or come from a system that fundamentally misunderstands Scripture. The burden of proof, then, is on the Protestant to show that Catholic traditions actually contradict the Bible or come from a system that fundamentally misunderstands Scripture. That’s a high burden of proof.
Second, Jesus’ argument in its original context concerns moral customs and not the later debates on Tradition between Protestants and Catholics. The fundamental debate between Jesus and the Pharisees is on righteousness according to the Torah. It has nothing to directly say about other kinds of oral traditions, meaning Jesus could technically agree that Moses and Joshua orally commanded later Jewish leaders to make a fence around the Torah, but Jesus simply questions the fence in operation during his time on earth.
Thus, the debate in its original context does not ultimately say what Protestant apologists need it to say.