My great-grandmother’s 100th Birthday, September 3, 1990
“I should live to be 100!” How many times have we heard people say that? It appears we believe that those who live to a ripe old age have received a special blessing. I’m not so sure that is true. Those who die old are often neglected and forgotten.
Tomorrow I will celebrate the funeral Mass of a woman who died at 100 years old, and I just came back from the wake. Now, usually wakes are crowded places where the mourners are overwhelmed by people coming to pay their respect to the dead and to comfort the family. That’s terrific! That’s just what a wake is for! In addition to flowers and condolences, there is usually a pile of Mass cards from friends and acquaintances. Well, at this wake, there were only eleven people present – all members of the woman’s immediate family. This is by no means an exception; in fact, I would say it is the norm. All these people no doubt have friends and acquaintances that would be there if the person lost someone at a tender young age. So where were they? Why do we not attend the wakes of the very old?
I think that somehow we decide that, since the person was very old, the family will be dealing with it better than if the person died young. To a certain extent this is true, and I certainly admit that, when a funeral is called in to the rectory and we hear the person was 100, that’s a lot easier to bear than if the person was 26. But that 100-year-old woman is still someone’s mother, someone’s grandmother, someone dear to them, and even if their grief is not as poignant as one mourning a child, they still have lost someone dear to them and can use our comfort. Even if we only stay at the wake for a few minutes, and even if we only can think to say “I’m so sorry for your loss,” that alone is so helpful to them. Our presence is reassuring that we care for them. And most importantly, as Catholics, the most important thing we do when someone has died is offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for the repose of his soul, and people need prayers for their soul whether they die at 100 or at 20. So whenever you hear someone has lost a loved one, attend the wake, send a Mass card, make a phone call. The family will be grateful for your thoughtfuness and concern and might even need it, even if the person lived to be 100 years old.
Years ago, I remember reading an article someone had written in the local newspaper to the effect that she was Catholic and her sister had become a Jehovah’s Witness. She mentioned how she struggled with her sister’s decision until she eventually reached the conclusion, “To each his own!” She said that being a Catholic worked for her, and if being a Jehovah’s Witness worked for her sister, then that’s great! Her ultimate conclusion was that everyone should find whatever religion he likes and stick with it, as they’re all fine. I disagree.
Religion is not a country club. Religion is our response to the revelation of God. We worship God according to the truth we believe he reveals about himself. Virtually every society on the face of the earth has come to believe in the existence of God. Many people have shown how belief in God can be deduced logically, and many of these arguments are quite compelling. But while we can logically deduce his existence, there is wide disagreement on what he is like. Ancient civilizations believed in many gods, and most of these were angry gods that needed to be appeased with sacrifices, incense, throwing virgins into volcanoes, even child sacrifice! If we came across such religions today, I don’t think any of us would merely say, “To each his own!” No, we’d be horrified! In time we’ve come to realize that certain religions are not true and have rejected them. But there are many others still widely practiced across the globe whose adherents will die for their belief that this is the truth. The beliefs of different religions sometimes contradict each other, thus they cannot both be true. For example, Hinduism believes in several gods, while Judaism, Christianity, and Islam believe in only one. Logic tells us that Judaism’s claim that God has said, “I am God, and there is no other” prohibits the possibility that we could reconcile Hinduism with Judaism. At most only one of them is revealing the truth about God, but not both.
So why be Catholic? I can best respond to that question by relating my own process of reasoning which led me to believe that the fullness of truth subsists in the Catholic Church.
When I was in the 7th grade, I was automatically launched on the program of preparation in my Catholic grammar school which would get me ready for the Sacrament of Confirmation. I was told about the “big decision” I was making to choose Christ and his Catholic Church. Being the person I was, I could never consent to anything without asking myself if I agreed with it. I therefore launched myself on an exhaustive soul-searching enterprise to see if this is in fact what I believed.
Since we are talking about religion and not science, I knew I had to start somewhere with a leap of faith. I certainly believed in the existence of God. I took the leap of faith to believe in the God of Israel. To me that made sense. With that as a foundation, I asked myself, “Okay, Judaism or Christianity?” I discovered that the crux in the whole question here was the person of Jesus. Israel had been longing for a messiah, and Jesus ultimately claimed to be that messiah. If he was truly the messiah, then Christianity was true; if he was a false prophet, I would be duty bound to become Jewish. It seemed obvious to me that the belief in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was the key issue: did he or didn’t he rise? If he did, I felt he had proven himself to be truly what he said he was. If he did not rise, he was a fake. So could anyone prove he had risen from the dead?
It seemed strange to me at first that the accounts of the resurrection claimed that Jesus only appeared to his followers and not to Pontius Pilate, the Sanhedrin, Caiaphas, or King Herod. But then I realized that these unschooled men went out and boldly proclaimed to the very people they had previously been afraid of that they had seen Jesus risen on numerous occasions. They couldn’t have all been mistaken or have hallucinated. No, they firmly believed they’d seen Jesus risen, and they went to foreign countries preaching his name and died horrible deaths defending it. I couldn’t conceive of eleven of the twelve apostles willingly dying for something they knew they’d made up or if they couldn’t be sure they hadn’t hallucinated. No, they were crucified, boiled alive, sawed in half and skinned alive convinced they’d seen Jesus risen. That to me was proof! They wouldn’t have suffered so terribly for something they knew was a lie! So I realized I beleived in Christ. That also valdiated my leap of faith in the God of Israel. If Jesus rose from the dead, and he was the fulfillment of the promise to Israel, then the God who made the promise was real!
Okay, so I was a Christian, but how about Catholic? Many verses of scripture convinced me that Jesus gave the apostles his authority and sent them as his witnesses, and that we had to remain one with them and the tradition they handed down. That tradition is what Ignatius of Antioch first called “The Catholic Church” around the year 107 AD. I knew that, since Jesus had given his authority to them, only he could take it away. Even though there were periods in history when everything wasn’t rosy, when some of the popes and priests were not giving the greatest of example, even sinning terribly, that still didn’t take away the authority that Jesus gave them.
I thought of it this way: suppose a President of the United States committed a serious crime and had to be removed from office, maybe even sent to prison for his crime. He was an embarrassment to his Office, no doubt. But what do we do now? We get a new president! No one would say that the Constitution of the United States was rendered null and void by the sins of the president. Similarly, even if some popes had sinned and were a disgrace, that still did not remove the authority Jesus gave to St. Peter. In order for the Catholic Church to lose her authority to speak in Jesus’ name, Jesus himself would have to return to earth and formally remove it and give it to another. He never did that with Martin Luther, John Calvin, Henry VIII, Zwingli, or any other reformer, and none of them ever claimed he did! I therefore concluded that the Catholic Church still possesses the authority to teach in the name of Christ and not any of the other denominations of Christianity, that those who separated from the Catholic Church were not in full Communion with Christ, and I was therefore duty-bound to embrace the Catholic faith. On October 16, 1976 at 11 AM, I did so at my Confirmation and have not looked back since.
The following is an excerpt from an article I found online by Edward Pentin, written on August 24th. I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem this year, and was bitterly upset by their blatant depiction of Pius XII as having done nothing to save Jews during the Holocaust. They made only a passing mention that his role was controversial. The following adds support for the belief that he was in fact framed by the KGB and that the world has bought it.
When former Romanian intelligence chief General Ion Mihai Pacepa made sensational claims in 2007 that Pope Pius XII was the victim of a Soviet plot to frame him as a Nazi sympathizer, historians and even even some of Pius’s defenders were skeptical.
Yet as new evidence has come to light, Pacepa’s claims are gaining wider support. The former spy chief, who defected to the United States in 1978, has just completed a new book called “Disinformation” in which, together with Ronald Rychlak, an expert on Pius XII and the Holocaust, he explains how the intricate framing operation was carried out.
The book promises to paint an intricate picture of the nefarious methods and labyrinthine plots used by the KGB to frame anti-communists such as the wartime Pope. CIA director James Woolsey writes in the book’s introduction that it “will change the way you look at intelligence, foreign affairs, the press and much else.”
Its authors hope to show the extent to which the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign thwarted the truth becoming known about Pius XII — a Pope who, according to recently discovered historical evidence, saved more Jewish lives during World War II than any other religious and political leader combined.
Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi, was initially sceptical of a Kremlin plot, but rather than let the claims pass and fade away, he spent the next two years combing through documents to see if Pacepa’s claims would add up. “Bit by bit, all the pieces fell in place,” he told me. “The new picture answered many questions and made sense out of things that had previously been inexplicable.”
The former Romanian spy chief remains in hiding for his own protection, but through the Pave the Way Foundation, a charity that seeks to bridge sectarian divisions, he explained via email his proof of a KGB plot against Pius. But he said that to recognize such evidence of disinformation, “one should be familiar with the Kremlin’s very secret “science” of changing the past in order to suit current priorities.”
“In KGB jargon, changing the past was called “framing,” and it was a highly classified disinformation specialty,” he explained, adding that the operations were “like mosaics made up of hundreds or even thousands of tiny pieces fitted together.”
“Only a handful of master designers know how the final image will turn out,” he continued. “I was peripherally involved in changing the past of Pius XII, but at that time, even I did not know what the final image would look like.”
He gave examples of how such framing operations were executed, such as Stalin’s ruthless methods to falsify historical facts to fit into his own plans in the 1930s, and Pacepa’s own disinformation operations as head of Romanian intelligence in the 1970s. He explained how he managed to hoodwink Western heads of state, intelligence officers and others into believing that Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, was an admirable, pro-Western leader when, in fact, “he was a two-bit Dracula.” Ceausescu was executed by his own people in 1989, but Pacepa said that few in the West “looked back to speculate about how they had been so misled.”
His upcoming book, he explained, “contains solid, primary evidence documenting how the immense KGB disinformation machinery was able to flip the image of Pius XII from lily white to coal black — just as it flipped the image of Ceausescu in reverse.”
Pacepa further revealed how the framing of the ardently anti-communist Pope actually began in 1945. Concerned only for his own image, and fresh from victory after World War II, Stalin had one more enemy he wanted to defeat: the Ukrainian Catholic Church — the last Vatican enclave in the Soviet Union.
According to Pacepa, after persecuting the Church there, he set about trying to portray Pius XII as a Nazi collaborator, proclaiming on Radio Moscow in 1945 that Pius XII had been “Hitler’s Pope.”
But the campaign fell flat as those who knew Pius XII knew he could never have been a Nazi sympathizer. At the time, his wartime efforts to protect religious minorities were being roundly praised by such prominent world figures as President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill (who described Pius as “the greatest man of our time”), and Albert Einstein.
“They knew who Pope Pius XII really was,” Pacepa said. “[So] the Kremlin tried again in the 1960s, with the next generation, which had not lived through that history and did not know better. This time it worked.”
Central to that framing effort — codenamed Operation Seat 12 — was the 1963 theatrical play, “The Deputy,” written by the communist German playwright, Rolf Hochhuth.
Pacepa and Rychlak explain in the book that it had the KGB’s “hands all over it” and proceed to present evidence of deep Communist and Kremlin involvement in its promotion.
In his interview, Pacepa lamented that such disinformation methods continue to be used by Russia today, not least in its efforts to manipulate religions in order to consolidate its power.
Here is the text of a letter to the editor I sent to our local newspaper:
Planned Parenthood Hudson Valley has posted a video on its Facebook page that shows several very young ladies – teens to early twenties – singing a parody of the song “Call Me Maybe” that begins with the following lyrics: “Met a guy at the mall, head over heels I did fall. I need to buy birth control, but now you’re in my way…I’ve never met you and this is shady. It’s my {female organ}, so hands off, crazy.” At first I thought it was a joke! But then I realized they were very serious about this message to young girls. So what they’re advocating is this: a young girl meets a guy at the mall and right away needs birth control so she can have sex with him. They used to have a name for girls like that! I ask every parent reading this to ask yourself this question: if your daughter were to tell you she was going to the mall, would you hand her a condom and say “Here! This is for you in case you meet a young man and want to have sex with him!”? Absurd! Planned Parenthood is now publicly advocating loose sexual morals among our young people. If this is what you as a parent want for your daughter, then Planned Parenthood is the group for you! But if have any desire for your children to learn responsible sexual behavior and to respect themselves, stay away from Planned Parenthood! Planned Parenthood has lost touch with today’s parents and is now encouraging harmful lifestyles to our young people. They don’t belong in our schools, and they don’t deserve to receive any public funds to advocate sexually irresponsible behavior to our young people.
I frequently have people mention to me that they could never bring something into confession because they don’t think God will ever forgive them for what they did. Well, there are two things I usually say about this:
Suppose Adolf Hitler, right after he shot himself, had a moment of regret and asked God to forgive him. Do you think God would forgive him? They always respond, “of course!” (There would still be penance and Purgatory necessary, but God would forgive him.) If Satan himself should ever turn to God and say, “Father, I’m sorry for rebelling against you, and I’m sorry for harming your creation all these years! Please forgive me!” Would God forgive him? Again the answer is always, “of course!” So, I tell them, if God could forgive Adolf Hitler or Satan – with all the evil they did – do you think He will forgive you your sin, no matter how serious it is?” They immediately see the logic and say, “of course!” Remember that God is trying to get us into Heaven, not to keep us out!
Another help: When the Lord Jesus was revealing the Divine Mercy to St. Faustina, the priest who was her confessor was having difficulty figuring out whether the apparitions she reported were real or fantasy, so as proof, he asked Faustina to ask Jesus to reveal to her what the priest’s last mortal sin was. When she asked Jesus “What was Father’s last mortal sin?” Jesus responded, “I don’t remember!” Jesus did not die on the cross to hold us forever accountable for our sins but rather to take them away and forget about them! So don’t be afraid to bring your sins to Jesus for forgiveness, no matter how serious they may be. He WILL forgive you!
“Okay,” they may add, “but what if I keep committing the same sin over and over?” Well, one thing a priest is never allowed to ask you is “Will you promise me you will never commit that sin again?” He can’t ask that because you can’t promise that. All you can promise is that you’ll try, even if in the back of your mind you know you may fall again. Of course, if we have no intention of trying to avoid sin then we are not forgiven, but why would you bring it up in confession in the first place if you’re not sorry and are not even going to attempt to change?
“But does God ever get tired of forgiving us? Does He ever say we’ve exhausted our supply of forgiveness/ Will He ever say, ‘Hey! you’ve confessed this over and over and nothing changes! It’s time to bite the bullet and stop?'”
We might think He should – but He doesn’t! I find sometimes when I go to confession that the priest should say that to me, but he never does. God always forgives me, over and over and over, even if I don’t think He should. God has patience with me when I’ve lost patience with myself. That only tells me that God loves me even more than I love myself!
I came across an excellent video by Matt Fradd, a Catholic apologist, on this topic. It speaks of forgiveness, in this case for the repeated problem of viewing pornography. It is well worth viewing. Here is the link: http://mattfradd.com/2012/08/23/ive-confessed-this-1000-times/#respond
From time to time I’ll read a letter to the editor or a column in a newspaper from someone accusing the Church of being wimpy, especially when it comes to dissent from Catholics on church teachings. They usually feel that the Pope should just excommunicate everyone who doesn’t tow the line. Well, yes, dissent is indeed a problem. I’m not merely talking about difference of opinion or people who don’t fully understand the church’s teaching on a particular matter; I’m referring to true dissent, where people know what we beleive and should be able to give full consent but instead dissent. So why doesn’t the Pope just excommunicate them all? Maybe today’s feast will help!
Today we celebrate the feast of two Roman martyrs, St. Pontian, pope, and St. Hippolytus, priest. Both were active in the early 3rd century. Hippolytus was frequently critical of the popes. He thought the popes were too soft on heretics and should excommunicate them all. Only a church of rigorously committed Christians was good enough for Christ and would survive, so anyone who was lukewarm should be spewed out of the Church’s mouth. While Hippolytus’ desire for faithful service to Christ is commendable, he seems to me to have made the mistake of holding up the goal as the starting line. Somehow he seems to have expected everyone to be automatic saints, rather than realizing that saithood is the goal we strive for. As a result, he became “holier than the Church” and a self-appointed defender of the truth, even against several popes! When Pope Zephyrinus refused to make a definitive statement condemning a heresy (because the Pope did not yet feel it was sufficiently understood to warrant condemnation), Hippolytus gravely censured him, representing him as an incompetent man, unworthy to rule the Church of Rome and as a tool in the hands of the ambitious and intriguing deacon Callistus. Consequently when Callistus was elected pope on the death of Zephyrinus, Hippolytus immediately left the communion of the Roman Church and had himself elected antipope by his small band of followers. These he called the Catholic Church and himself successor to the Apostles, terming the great majority of Roman Christians the “School of Callistus.” He accuses Callistus of having through avarice degraded ecclesiastical, and especially the penitential, discipline to a disgraceful laxity. Hippolytus continued in opposition as antipope throughout the reigns of the two immediate successors of Callistus: Urban and Pontian. During the persecution by the Emperor Maximinus, Pontian and Hippolytus were sent into exile in the salt mines of Sardinia. While there, Pontian was able to work his charm on Hippolytus and help him see the errors of his excessive rigorism. Hippolytus made a full confession, renounced his claim to be the pope, was completely reconciled with the church, and died a martyr.
Did you notice that Hippolytus, in his desire to try to get everyone else excommunicated, actually was in the very position he berated? I’m sure there were many people wondering why the Pope didn’t excommunicate Hippolytus! Pope Pontian had a better idea: reconciliation. He remembered that, as shepherd of the flock, his first duty is to try and bring back those who stray and correct their errors so as to bring them back into the loving embrace of Christ, not to kick everyone out who disagrees. Sometimes an excommunication is necessary, either to help the person see the error of his ways and bring him back – the primary desire of using this censure, as a medicinal device – or in extreme cases, like when one has a gangrenous toe, to cut it off so as to protect the health of the rest of the body.
We can all disagree about when something has gotten so bad that the Pope has no choice but to excommunicate someone, but that needs to be a last resort and not an immediate reaction. Our desire is to call every soul to salvation. No one is outside the call to reconciliation with Christ. If we must resort to excommunicating someone to bring him back to his good senses and back into the fold, so be it, but we should only use excommunication as a final solution when it is absolutely necessary for the health of the rest of the body and we have no choice otherwise.
I have been engaged in a debate on another blog with a young man who asserts that any parent whose son tells them he’s gay, if the parent loves him, must show him the empathy that is at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus and support him in living a gay lifestyle. Obviously I disagree. But the question still remains: what should a parent say to a son who tells them he is gay? Here is my answer to the question:
“Empathy” is not at the core of Jesus’ teachings; love of God is. What did Jesus say was the greatest commandment? “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Therefore, loving obedience to God is the first rule of Christian life. If I were a parent and this were my son who just told me he was gay, I wouldn’t love him any less! He is still my son and I would still die for him. But at the same time, any parent who loves his child can never counsel the child that in his situation it’s okay to disobey God. The loving thing for a Christian parent to do is to promise to help his son in any way possible to carry the cross that has been laid on his shoulders and be faithful to what God has clearly taught. Let’s imagine it this way: suppose the son was not gay but instead was a homely young man that no woman has ever found good enough to love. He knows his appearance is so horrible that the chances of anyone loving him for whom he is are slim. The son did nothing to cause or deserve his homeliness, but there it is nonetheless. Does his father, in an attempt to show empathy, tell him that there really is nothing homely about his appearance, that he’s just as good looking as the most attractive of Hollywood heartthrobs, and that therefore he should go out and demand everyone admit that he’s good looking? Of course not. Or does he say, “well, since no girl will have you and you have the right to sex, go find a prostitute- here’s the money!” Absurd! No, if he truly loves him, he tells him the truth and helps him deal with it. Perhaps he might tell him not to despair, that there may yet come a girl who will love him for the person he is, but he doesn’t give him a false hope by telling him she will eventually show up. Instead, he would prepare him for the life outside of marriage that he will end up living and show him how happiness can be found there just as much as in marriage. We as a society are so caught up in the concept that sex is the key to happiness and that everyone needs good sex to be happy and has a right to it. That does a tremendous disservice to scores of people, including those who are perfectly straight but simply have no desire to marry or never met the right person. Marriage does not possess the monopoly on happiness. I am celibate and chaste and am enormously happy with my life. Ultimately, we can never find true happiness until we are living a life that reflects the image and likeness of God, in whom we are created. If my son were gay, I would counsel him not to continue to try to convince God and the Church that they have erred in saying that homosexual activity is sinful (which is never going to happen and is a lie), for that would only set him up for a lifetime of struggle against God in a battle he will never win. Instead, I would tell him to prayerfully ask God how He wishes him to serve Him and how to use his condition to do His will. Only that would bring my son happiness.
In the aftermath of the horrible theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado, one local pastor asked the question, “Why did God allow this to happen?” and his answer was, “I don’t know.” It’s a common knee-jerk question we ask whenever there is a tragedy. It happened after 9/11, after the Colombine murders, after Hurricaine Katrina, and will probably always be asked. My response to this question is simple: “Trash that question, and go back and start all over with a different question!”
The minute we ask the question, “Why did God allow this to happen?”, we have already lost. We are working from the faulty presupposition that God should shield us from all evil, and if He doesn’t He is not loving. That is not a valid argument. God is all goodness, all truth, all beauty; He cannot do evil. Directly or indirectly, all evil comes from Satan. He brings evil into the world hoping we will blame God, declare Him unloving, and separate from Him, whereupon he can simply reel us in as he snickers at how easily we were duped. How come no one responds to tragedies by saying, “Satan, why do you hate God so much that you’re leading people to do all kinds of evil and blame God for it?” No, everyone blames God. But when we respond to tragedies not by asking why God allowed it but by turning to Him for comfort and for wisdom in how to respond, we discover that instead of the evil turning us away from God, we let it turn us to God; in effect, we use the devil’s own weapons against him! We destroy evil by its own power. That’s what Jesus did by the cross. The devil seduced Judas and the High Priests to betray Him and hand Him over to the Romans, and Pilate was too weak to defend Him and sent Him to the cross. Satan must have been laughing the whole time, figuring he finally had his victory over God by getting Him killed. I can just hear him saying, “You call yourself a God?! You came and told them how important they are to you and how much you love them, and instead of loving you back, they confused you with me, declared you evil, and crucified you! You think you’re so loving? Well, look at how they responded to your love. You’re just pathetic!” He couldn’t have been more wrong! In the midst of his celebration, Jesus pulled the rug right out from under his victory by rising from the dead! Now the Lord can turn to Satan and say, “Look! You thought you defeated me, but I defeated you! I just freed every prisoner you had, and have now turned your greatest weapon – death – into their greatest triumph! Now when they die, they will enter my kingdom and not yours. The only ones you’ll have are those who reject me and refuse to follow me.” Of course, ever since that time, Satan knows his time is short and he’s on a mission to win back as many souls as he can. In addition to false promises and the quest for pleasure, one of his most effective tools is to get us to blame God when he works evil deeds.
Making sense out of tragedies is never easy, especially for families who lose a loved one because of them. But if we want healing, the only way to find it is not to blame God and ask why He allowed it but to turn to God and ask Him how he wishes us to respond so as to bring us through the tragedy and closer to His redeeming embrace.
I read with interest that New York State law currently prohibits children under fourteen years of age from using indoor tanning booths, and that teens from fourteen to seventeen years of age require a parent’s permission. It was even more interesting to read that New York is now seeking to completely ban those under sixteen from using indoor tanning booths. So if a fourteen-year-old girl walks into a tanning salon and asks for a tan without a parent’s permission, she is turned away. But if that same girl should enter a Planned Parenthood clinic and request an abortion, she may legally receive an abortion and her parents not only don’t need to give permission but do not even have to be notified afterwards. What logic is there in our laws whereby a girl cannot receive a tan, an ear-piercing, or an aspirin from a school nurse without a parent’s permission, but she can have an abortion?
Even though tanning salon owners claim that when properly used, tanning salons are not harmful, the government feels the need to protect young people who may not understand the potential dangers of getting an artificial tan before the prom from their lack of information by banning them from using tanning salons. But the same girl who is pregnant, frightened, is not thinking about the serious medical, psychological, and spiritual dangers associated with abortion – including death – without being required by law to receive any information whatsoever as to what the procedure entails and how it may affect her physically or otherwise, is deemed by the government fully competent to make a rational, informed decision without the input of her parents. Something is very wrong here.
The pro-abortion forces are continually talking about “pro-choice” and helping a woman make the best choice for her. But to make a clearly proper choice, does she not need to have all the information necessary to weigh the pros and cons of an abortion and decide what is the best option for her? And when a teenage girl is pregnant and frightened, is this not more than ever a time where she needs the support and input of her parents to help her make the choice that is best for her? How could we logically ban a suntan but permit an abortion? There is only one possible reason why Planned Parenthood opposes Parental Notification and Informed Consent – the parents may not permit her to have an abortion, or the girl may choose to have her baby instead. It is now amply evident that “pro-choice” is a lie. Planned Parenthood and their similar groups are interested in only one thing – seeing how many abortions they can get performed.
Question (submitted by a fictitious friend): A friend of mine told me that the Catholic Church is sinning by giving honor to the saints. He said we are guilty of idolatry, worshipping someone other than God. While I know this is not true, I couldn’t explain it well enough. How do I respond to my friend’s question?
Answer: Your friend’s objection, while common, is based on a misunderstanding of our practice of giving honor to the saints. We are not in fact worshipping the saints at all. There are several levels of what in English is commonly called “worship”. In matters of faith we are careful to make distinctions between them. The worship due only to God is what is called in Greek latria. (We take our English word idolatry” from this, meaning “false worship”.) True worship is the praise and honor of God for whom He is and the humble submission of ourselves before His sovereign majesty. The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives the following explanation of worship of God:
“To adore [worship] God is to acknowledge, in respect and absolute submission, the ‘nothingness of the creature’ who would not exist but for God. To adore God is to praise and exalt him and to humble oneself, as Mary did in the Magnificat, confessing with gratitude that he has done great things and holy is his name. The worship of the one God sets man free from turning in on himself, from the slavery of sin and the idolatry of the world.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2097)
Hopefully, anyone would clearly see that this is not at all what Catholics do when we honor the saints. We show toward the saints what is called in Greek dulia. (Our English word “adulation” comes from this word.) It is best translated as esteem or honor, but not as worship, certainly not as latria. We admire them somewhat like heroes. They are people who have lived this life and shown us that it can be done. They encourage us to keep the faith and remain in the ways of the Lord, knowing that if we follow their example, we too can obtain the glory of God’s Heavenly Kingdom. Some of them we honor as particular patrons, and we develop special devotion to certain saints due to their occupation, their homeland, their particular trial in life, or because we bear their name. So, for example, a doctor might have special devotion to St. Luke, the patron saint of physicians, because Luke was a physician. Irish Catholics have great devotion to St. Patrick because he Christianized Ireland. In Siena, Italy, St. Catherine is especially honored because she came from Siena. People with throat ailments turn to St. Blase, who, according to legend, miraculously healed a young boy who was choking on a fish bone. Women named Ann might have great devotion to St. Ann because they bear her name. Or sometimes, people are simply affected by the saint’s life, and they find a helpful example in their story or their writings. And this is why the Church directs us to venerate the saints. They show us that this life can be lived according to the Gospel. They have survived the period of trial here on earth, and their life gives us an example and thereby strengthens us in our efforts to follow Jesus. We are not worshipping them; rather, we are turning to them to ask them to pray for us. It is best to say that we venerate them, but we worship God!
Objection: My friend also asked me why I feel I have to go through a saint? Why don’t I just go straight to God and pray to him?
Response: Have you ever asked a friend to pray for you? Wouldn’t you be surprised if your friend responded by saying, “Well, why are you asking me to pray for you? Why don’t you just go directly to God yourself?” I’m sure you didn’t mean to imply that you yourself were not going to pray for your need. You were asking your friend also to pray for you. That’s what we’re doing with the saints: in addition to our own prayer, we ask them to pray for us as well, since they are in God’s Kingdom and can help perfect our prayer, as they are wiser than we. It’s amazing that some people have no problem asking ministers, parents, friends and others to pray for them, but when we ask the saints to pray for us, they raise objections. If we can ask our friends on earth to pray for us, why can we not ask our friends in heaven to pray for us as well? Who better to ask to pray for us than Christ’s friends who are at his side? It is part of our belief in the Communion of Saints, that because we are one body in Christ, all the members of the body not only can but also should care for and be concerned about the welfare of the others. The saints in heaven are not excluded; on the contrary, they live in the fullness of the presence of Christ, and desire to be of help to us in our struggle to join them in God’s Kingdom. This hits on another common misunderstanding: we are not really praying to the saints, but through them! No proper prayer asks a saint to respond directly to our need as if he were personally able to respond and grant our request. We ask the saint to pray for us. We’re not praying to the saint instead of to Jesus; we’re praying to Jesus through the saint, and asking him to pray with us. Are there abuses? Sure there are! It’s bound to happen in any part of life that involves human beings. But we work hard to try to correct them. An example of a faulty notion of prayer that we’re forever trying to correct is the “magical miracle prayers” that are often left in the candle racks in churches or are published in the personal pages of newspapers, usually on the same page as the obituaries. These prayers promise results if a person says the prayer and leaves copies in church. They claim the prayer is “never known to fail.” Such prayers are not official Catholic prayers, are contrary to Catholic belief, and are not sanctioned by the Church. They are the product of probably well-intentioned individuals with a somewhat warped understanding of what prayer is. Whenever we find those prayer sheets in our church, we simply throw them away. But just because some people distort and abuse the practice of involving the saints in our prayer doesn’t mean the practice is bad. It is our job to correct abuses and help people understand what proper prayer is.
Question: My friend also said our practice of using statues is sinful because it violates the commandment to not make a graven image. Is he right?
Answer: No, he is not, although at first glance it may seem so. We need to understand precisely what God was forbidding when he forbade carving idols, or graven images. The commandment reads as such: “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them.” (Ex 20: 4-5) We need, however, to understand the difference between an idol and a statue. In the ancient world, it was common practice for people to carve images and worship the image itself as if it were actually the god it represented. They thought the statue itself was the god. This was what was happening in the instance when the Israelites made the golden calf and worshipped it. They declared, “This is your God, 0 Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” (Ex 31:4) The Lord grew angry with the Israelites because they worshipped the calf as if it were God Himself A similar situation can be seen in the Book of Genesis in the story of Rachel – Jacob’s wife – who stole her father’s household gods. Her father runs after Jacob asking him why he stole his gods. (cf Gen 31) The implication in this story is that she has stolen more than mere images: in effect, she has actually stolen his gods! This is what the commandment in fact prohibits. If someone were to enter our church and steal the crucifix, we’d have to go out and get a new one. No one, however, would think that Jesus Himself had actually been stolen from us. Furthermore, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “already in the Old Testament, God ordained or permitted the making of images that pointed symbolically toward salvation by the incarnate Word: so it was with the bronze serpent, the Ark of the Covenant, and the cherubim.” (Catechism, 2130) We must not forget that, with the incarnation of God as Man in the person of Jesus, we are under a new system. As proof of this, observe what happened at the Transfiguration of Jesus. In the Old Testament, it was forbidden for anyone to look upon the face of God and live. When God appeared before Moses on Mt. Sinai, God covered Moses’ face as He passed by, so that Moses could only see His back. (cf. Exodus 33:18-23) Similarly, when the Lord appeared to Elijah on the same mountain, when Elijah heard the voice of the Lord in the tiny whispering sound, he hid his face and stood at the entrance of the cave. (cf. l Kings 19:13) At the Transfiguration, however, Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus as His glory is revealed, and they are permitted to look into His face. And not only they, but Peter, James, and John are also privileged by Jesus to do so. (cf. Mark 9:2-8) It is therefore clear that Jesus is introducing a new understanding of the relationship between God and man. While the Jews never called God by name, we now may do so freely by calling upon the name of Jesus. We can see Him, touch Him, even eat His body and drink His blood. By becoming man, God has introduced a completely new relationship with us, not one of fear and distance, but of love and closeness. The catechism continues,
“By becoming incarnate, the Son of God introduced a new ‘economy’ of images. The Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first commandment which proscribes idols. Indeed, ‘the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype,’ and ‘whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it.’ The honor paid to sacred images is a ‘respectful veneration,’ not the adoration due to God alone.” (Catechism, 2131, 2132. Quotes are from St. Basil.)
Basically, what the Church is saying is that, by venerating images of Jesus, and even the saints, the Blessed Mother and the angels, we are actually giving honor to Jesus Himself. We are honoring the person they represent, not the images themselves. It is interesting to notice that many people who object to the use of statues of Jesus or the saints have no problem with paintings or drawings of them. Well, statues are simply three-dimensional drawings. Surely God is not declaring that sin is determined by the number of dimensions in an image. That would be an example of the very hair-splitting differences for which Jesus criticized the Pharisees. How could anyone honestly say that a two-dimensional figure is holy but a three-dimensional one is idolatry? We must look to the heart of the law, not merely the letter of the law. Once again, it is important that we remember the significance of the Incarnation, of God becoming man. In doing so, He has introduced a new order – a new economy – of salvation. Because Jesus took on flesh, He has brought the divine into our world in a human way, so that our representation of Him or of anyone who now beholds Him face to face has become a pious act. Since we can now view God in human form, we can also represent Him in human form and venerate that image – and the image of any creature in His kingdom, including the angels and saints – for in doing so, we reflect upon the fact that our mortal flesh has been called to share in the dignity that is His and that has been granted to those in His kingdom. He has taken on our nature so that we can take on His.
Rev. Andrew P. Carrozza 