The Charitable Anathema

From homosexual activists in Chicago to Catholic politicians in Washington D.C., an enormous discussion has arisen about who should or should not be permitted to receive the Eucharist. This kind of discussion is not new to the Church, but today it is deeply misunderstood. 

We think of excommunication as an act of punishment, when in fact, it is an act of charity that finds its roots at the very beginning of our history. For instance, the first excommunication happens in Genesis 3. In Genesis 1 and 2, Adam and Eve had communion with God: they could speak to Him in the cool of the morning. But, due to their disobedience, they were cast out of this communion, out of the Garden of Eden. This casting out was an act of extraordinary mercy and charity on God’s part. After all, they had offended against the Most High – in perfect justice, He could have annihilated them or allowed them to live eternally in that complete separation from God that we call hell, for that was the level of separation they had chosen. But He did neither. Instead, He permitted salvation to come to mankind, even though He would have to spend thousands of years preparing humanity for the salvation He promised at the moment He excommunicated us. Far from damnation, our excommunication was a blessing, as the Easter Vigil liturgy attests: “O happy fault of Adam, which merited for us so great a Saviour!” 

 Moses likewise experienced excommunication, not once, but twice. As the leader of the Chosen People, he spoke with God face-to-face in the Tent of Meeting, as a man speaks to a man. Yet, when God threatened to destroy the Chosen People because of their grievous sins, Moses intervened on their behalf. Because of Moses’ intervention, the Chosen People were instead simply excommunicated – none were to see the Chosen Land. But Moses chose excommunication for himself in order to help atone for their sins. He was no longer permitted to see God as he had (Numbers 14). Later, when Moses disobeyed God and struck the rock for water, God forbad him entry to the Promised Land – he was cut off from communion with Israel. 

Miriam, his sister, was likewise excommunicated, stricken with leprosy, for joining with those who argued that there was no such thing as an ordained priesthood (Numbers 12). Jesus likewise cuts people off from contact with the holy. In John 2, He whips the money-changers out of the Temple, while in John 6, He allowed those who disagreed with His teaching to leave – He did not call them back. Indeed, He simply turned to His apostles and asked which they would prefer: His presence or excommunication? 

Paul follows this example. He tells the people of Corinth that the infamy of their sexual sins has reached his ears, and further orders that one man, infamous for his sins, should be delivered “over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.” (1 Cor 5:5). Notice how Paul phrases it: he orders the excommunication in order to help assure the man’s salvation. His order was an act of charity. 

In fact, excommunication is always a mercy. God is love. Everything He did and does is an act of love. He chastises those whom He loves (Proverbs 3:12). So, He showed His love for the Pharisees and Sadducees by charitably pointing out to them that they were “blind guides… fools… hypocrites… a den of vipers.” If He had not told them the truth, they would have suffered even more from laboring under their own illusions than they did under the scourging lash of His accurate description. Indeed, one can argue that Jesus loved the Pharisees, Sadducees and scribes even more than He loved the other inhabitants of Jerusalem precisely because we know He chastised them more than He did anyone else. He recognized that they really wanted to serve God and that they worked hard at doing so. That’s precisely why they received such enormous chastisement. They had been given an enormous grace to be the spiritual leaders, and “to whom much is given, much is demanded.” (Luke 12:48). 

Through the ages, the decision to cut someone off from the sacraments has been an exercise of the deepest charity, an example of divine love for the sinner. The Church first dialogues with the sinner, trying to make sure that the error the sinner is living or promoting is not simply the result of ignorance. Once it becomes clear that the sinner is firm in his wrong understanding and refuses to take correction from the divine authority of God’s ministers, he is cut off. And this is the last kind deed the Church can do for such a man. We are made to be in communion with the holy. Hell is precisely this lack of communion: our refusal to join ourselves to the thing we were made for. When we sin, we refuse communion with holiness. We can spend our whole lives in such refusal, but God’s “grace springs new every morning” (Lam 3:22-23). He sends us new grace every morning, new power to accept his invitation to communion with Himself. If it were not for His grace, we could never choose Him. If it were not for His grace, we would always choose to be agonizingly incomplete. If we die still refusing, then God finally takes us at our word and allows us what we want: permanent excommunication. He respects our decision and stops sending us the grace, the power, to change our mind. We have definitively refused His grace. Once the grace is no longer being sent to us, we are no longer receiving the power necessary to want anything else. That’s why the people who are in Hell want to be there. They are too weak to want anything else, and they have definitively refused all attempts to change their mind. 

Thus, the act of excommunication is meant to give the sinner a chance to taste of hell during his life on earth, during the time God sends new grace every morning and there is still a chance to repent. If we are cut off from communion with the holy while we are still alive, perhaps the agony of being incomplete, perhaps the emptiness of life without God, will finally bring us to accept the grace God sends new every morning of our lives. Perhaps the memory of that agony will drive us to embrace Him from that moment on, through all eternity. The refusal of the Eucharist and the act of excommunication: these are the kindest things God can do for unrepentant, sinful man. These acts honestly recognize and fully respect where we have decided to put ourselves in relationship to Him and they give us the opportunity to live out our decision while we still have a chance to change our minds. Praise God for the charitable anathema!

Dazed and Confused in Chicago

Don Wycliff, the ombudsman for the Chicago Tribune, is frankly puzzled. It’s easy to see why. He recently received a letter chastising the Chicago Tribune for quoting Frances Kissling, the head of a group called “Catholics for a Free Choice.” This group claims to be Catholic, but also claims to support abortion. In response to a reader who questioned why the Chicago Tribune would quote such radical dissenters, Mr. Wycliff responded this way:

Are Kissling and Catholics for a Free Choice truly Catholic, or are they simply trading on the word to sow confusion and division among Catholics on the issue of abortion?

"We have never claimed to be an official Catholic organization," Kissling said in a telephone interview. "We know our positions are in disagreement with the official positions of the Church." Indeed, she said the church has several times issued statements underscoring both of those points… Nevertheless, Kissling argued, all of her group's board members are "Catholics who have not been personally sanctioned by the church," she said. They attend mass (sic), they receive the sacraments and they "certainly represent the viewpoint of the Catholic people.

It is not for us to referee contests within the Catholic Church over who is legitimate and who is not. We don't have the expertise to make theological judgment calls. Heck, we find it hard enough to get basic religious facts and terminology correct.

Our practice here … is generally to call people what they call themselves, and let the readers decide whether they are being honest or phony.

So if Kissling and her organization want to call themselves Catholic, we'll honor that. If the bishops want to contest that use of the name in the marketplace of ideas, we'll report that.


Now, his response seems quite reasonable. It isn’t his job to adjudicate these disputes. That job belongs to the bishops. If the bishops don’t want to clarify Kissling’s position in the Church, it’s hardly the Tribune’s job to correct the situation.

Like Wycliff, Frances Kissling also has good reason to think her disagreement with the Church is not really that serious. How can it be? While it is true that both Kissling and her organization has been excommunicated in the Lincoln diocese in Nebraska, it is also true that essentially no other American bishop has publicly re-iterated that excommunication in other dioceses. All the members of her board are free from canonical censure. They can receive the sacraments whenever and however often they like, anywhere in the United States – except, of course, Lincoln, Nebraska.

Cardinal George, an outstanding man heading perhaps one of the most difficult dioceses in the United States, recently said, “"Before a bishop moves, he better listen a lot… He better consult, particularly something which is political, because political issues divide." He is, of course, absolutely right. Political issues divide. So do religious issues. That’s why rules of polite company insist one should never discuss religion or politics with company.

Thus, it is interesting to see Cardinal George – who has to date remained silent on whether or not politicians who support legal abortion should receive the Eucharist – inform all the members of the archdiocese that anyone wearing a rainbow sash must be denied the Eucharist.

The rainbow sash is supposedly a sign of the gifts active homosexuals bring to the life of the nation and the Church. Cardinal George correctly sees the sash as a visible sign of dissent from Church teaching. Those who wear it are actively proclaiming that homosexual activity is not a sin, but a blessing. Scripture tells us that those who call evil acts “good” are not acting in their own best interests.

Thus, Cardinal George is to be commended for discerning the dissension present in the hearts of the men and women who choose to wear these sashes to Mass. He is perfectly correct in taking the appropriate measures to safeguard the sacrament from being profaned. And, he’s actually handing quite a compliment to the active homosexuals in his diocese.

Consider the facts. Several bishops have refused to deny the Eucharist to politicians who support legal abortion. They assert that it is not possible to judge a politician’s heart. On this specific point, it is hard to disagree. After all, as the court jester says, you can’t judge what isn’t there. But what the bishops mean is simply this: they can’t trust the words and actions of the politicians under discussion.

It’s a telling statement, really, and it places the bishops into quite a dilemma. All the bishops agree that public support for abortion is a Bad Thing. So, by continuing to give the Eucharist to Catholic politicians who support legal abortion, the bishops tell us that these men and women are liars of the first order – we cannot trust either their words or their actions. The Catholic politicians in question are apparently simulating sin as perfectly as they can in order to win public approval and public office. But, if they refuse give the Eucharist to these same politicians, the bishops thereby tell us that these men and women are heretics. Given the choice, many American bishops have decided to emphasize the first conclusion: these politicans are completely untrustworthy liars.

Cardinal George, to his credit, fully recognizes the honesty the homosexual community is bringing to the discussion. He has no intention of implying that they are liars or that they in any way say something they do not believe. He simply points out that what they say and believe places them outside communion with Jesus Christ, outside the wedding feast. Cardinal George answers their honesty with Christ’s honesty.

And that is, perhaps, the most honorable gift that can be given. Truth is answered with Truth. But with the likes of Kerry, Kennedy and company, many bishops answer their lies with... well... hmmm... Let’s just say that we should perform an act of enormous charity towards these wayward politicians. Let’s send them rainbow sashes.

Let’s Talk!

Many Catholic politicians say Jesus, though privately opposed to abortion, is not the kind of God-man who imposes his views on American public figures. After all, Jesus was really a very nice man; the episode with the whip in the Temple (John 2) or the numerous times He called the leaders of Jerusalem’s community “fools” and “hypocrites” just shows that even God can get a little stressed and inadvertently go “over the top.” He didn’t mean for anyone to change their life.

American bishops, of course, disagree. Several point out what Jesus inspired St. Paul to write down – anyone who eats and drinks Jesus’ body and blood without first discerning his own sins and being forgiven for them eats and drinks judgement on himself. “That is why many of you are sick, and some are dying,” says St. Paul.

Now, some American bishops want Catholic politicians who promote legal abortion to be protected from divine judgment. These bishops forbid the distribution of Eucharist to any Catholic who scandalously promotes abortion. After all, a politician who simultaneously promotes abortion and receives Eucharist might well be damning himself to hell. That’s not good.

For other bishops, the damnation of politicians is not the most serious issue. Rather, they are concerned about another problem. They realize that if Catholic politicians who support abortion are not permitted to risk eternal damnation, the Church might look partisan. It is better that one man be eternally damned than that the whole Church look politically partisan in an election year. Thus, they explicitly refuse to forbid the Eucharist to such politicians. “These people are adults,” the bishops point out. The subtext? If these people want to risk hell in exchange for a four-year term of office, that’s their lookout.

The whole argument is proving quite a poser. Some Catholic theologians offer a way out of the quandary. After all, some participants in ecumenical dialogue find the Eucharist to be equally off-putting to what they are trying to accomplish. Take the ecumenical dialogue between Lutherans and Catholics, for instance. While Martin Luther was himself an Augustinian priest and could validly consecrate Eucharist, the Lutheran Church does not have a valid priesthood. According to Jesus, that means no Lutheran can consecrate the Eucharist. This is an uncomfortable fact. There is a way around it.

A recent article in the Milwaukee diocesan newspaper quotes one Susan Woods, a faculty member at St. John’s University in Collegeville, MN, who said, “ever since Vatican II, task forces have acknowledged that the Lord’s Supper has the power to engender light and grace. The idea that [Eucharist] is not valid without (the benefit of) orders is not true. Our ecclesial communions are in real but imperfect communion. We share baptism, Scripture, the early church, pre-division."

That is, Dr. Woods recommends that we simply do one of two things: either we categorically deny the fact that Jesus really is present Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Eucharist or we deny that only a validly ordained priest acting in the person of Christ can accomplish such a thing. In short, we deny the sacrament of Eucharist or we deny the sacrament of Holy Orders or both. That solves the ecumenical problem. We can all sit down at tea and agree. It sounds wonderful

But there is one fly in the ointment. Miss Woods, who received her doctorate from Marquette University, is a little inaccurate in her statement. She indicates that Catholics and Lutherans “share baptism, Scripture, the early Church, pre-division.” Well…. yes… except we don’t.

Let’s examine Scripture, for instance. Lutheran Bibles are missing Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (aka, the Wisdom of Solomon), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, parts of Esther (chapters 10-16, or A-F), and parts of Daniel (3:24-90 and 13, 14. Worse, Missouri and Wisconsin Synod Lutherans consider the epistle of James to be “an epistle of straw.” We don’t share Scripture. Sorry.

Worse, since all of these books were accepted by the early Church as true and valid Scripture, and all were used to support various doctrines of the Church, we don’t share early Church history either. The three elements of Lutheran theology: (1) Salvation by Faith Alone (2) through Grace Alone (3) by the authority of Scripture Alone – all were condemned heresies in the pre-division Church. That was the reason for the division, after all – Luther desperately wanted these teachings to be true, even though they weren’t.

On the bright side, it is true that Christians share baptism, but only in the sense that every validly baptized person is Catholic, whether he knows it or not. Every child born, including my own three little darlings, were born unbaptized, that is, they were born pagans. My children needed baptism in order to be transformed from pagans into Christians. The Lutheran minister and the Lutheran parents who present their unbaptized child for the sacrament may believe the baptism renders the child Lutheran, but in reality, baptism transforms the child from an unbaptized pagan baby into a Catholic. That’s why the Catholic Church doesn’t re-baptize Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans or any other Christian who has received valid baptism.

There is “one Lord, one Faith, one baptism,” and that one baptism is Catholic. There isn’t any other kind.

When we consider things in this light, the solution is obvious. Politicians like Senator Kerry have quite a bit in common with theologians like Dr. Wood, and both have quite a lot in common with our separated brethren. Clearly, there is a need for ecumenical dialogue, a call to “come and reason together.” Perhaps the current ecumenical dialogue between Catholics and Lutherans can be expanded to include Dr. Wood, Senator Kerry and people with their beliefs. Let's bring them all into the fullness of Catholic Faith.

Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk of Cincinnati said he does not support barring pro-abortion politicians from receiving the sacrament. "We need to be very cautious about denying people the sacraments on the basis of what they say they believe, especially when those are political beliefs," he said.

Fascinating. Does he apply this standard to all the sacraments?

Marriage:
Harry: "I don't believe marriage needs to be exclusively between man and woman, or between two people, period. But I want a church wedding. Archbishop Pilarczyk says you really should be careful not to discriminate on the basis of what we believe, especially since this is a political belief."
Bill: "That's right, Harry. So, Father, will you start us out in marriage prep? We're thinking of a Christmas wedding, isn't that right, Harry?"
Harry: "That's right, Bill. Equal rights for gays, bisexuals, polyandrists, polygamists, pet-lovers and all the rest - that's our motto. By the way, will you marry us to our dog, Toto, as well? We really love him. You can't imagine how."

Holy Orders
Mary: "I believe women can be ordained. Political power needs to be shared. Archbishop, would you do the honors?"
Fr. John: "I believe priests can be married just like gay people. Political power needs to be shared. Archbishop, would you officiate at my marriage to the nun who runs my parish school? She's really a knock-out and very capable. She virtually runs the parish."

Eucharist
Fr. John: "If it is politically wrong to withhold Eucharist from Senator Kerry, why are we withholding it from non-Catholic politicians? We need to stop attempting to influence their votes through our intransigence on shared communion. Wouldn't you agree, Archbishop?"

Dan Brown and His Books of Renown

Before he wrote The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown wrote another novel, Angels and Demons. Anyone who has read the two will immediately notice the similarities: both are conspiracy novels, both describe nefarious Catholic bishops, in both the protagonists make the same points, sometimes even in the same words. So why was the first book a moderately successful also-ran while the second turned into a runaway best-seller?

There isn’t terribly much difference between them. While the stories are tightly plotted, the characters are one-dimensional, the “facts” presented are preposterous and the writing is relatively banal. Both have been compared to the Doc Savage novels of days gone by, with every character black or white, good or evil – exactly the kind of thing our shades-of-grey culture rejects. So why would one languish while the other took off? After all, Angels and Demons hit the best-seller lists only by riding the “code-tales” of the latest book, so to speak.

The difference in their relative successes lies only in this: the latest book spends a fair bit of time talking about sex, the first does not. We might write it off to our sex-drenched culture and leave it at that, but this would be a mistake. The Code phenomenon actually proves what the Holy Father has been saying for the last thirty years. In a perverse way, Dan Brown is preaching the Theology of the Body and he’s getting better response than any Catholic has yet. This is how he does it.

As has been noted elsewhere, the Catholic Church has always taught the indissoluble unity of faith and reason, the necessary goodness of creation and of the human body. Luther’s protests changed all that. He made reason the enemy of faith, insisting “reason is the whore of the devil.” Likewise, he put soul and body in artificial opposition to one another, insisting that man was totally corrupt, that every good deed, no matter how laudable, was sin if done without faith.

He denied that marriage was a sacrament, insisting instead that it was merely God’s way of dealing with our lust. Sex was sinful, evil, dirty, and marriage made sex legal in name only. God permitted the legal fiction only so that we could slake our evil lusts without fearing loss of heaven.

Now, as we saw previously, the Enlightenment’s defense of reason was the answer to Luther’s attack on reason. Unfortunately, the Enlightenment so adamantly opposed Luther’s “faith alone” theology that it went overboard in the other direction: it insisted that faith was useless.

Luther and Voltaire battled over the wishbone of the soul, finally tearing it in two, separating faith and reason and setting the two in opposition to one another. Dan Brown recognizes this in Angels and Demons. He provides several long passages in which he advances the erroneous idea that faith and reason have always been at odds. In fact, they always worked together, at least until Luther and Voltaire set them to fighting. But that was last century’s battle.

Two hundred years of deeply Protestant American culture has finally produced its own backlash in America against a different aspect of Lutheran theology. For centuries, Protestant pastors have thundered about the evils of the flesh, refused to recognize the goodness of the body, built revival after revival on a rejection of God’s creation, the gift He gives us in our own flesh and bone. Agnostics and atheists, having successfully set reason in opposition to religious faith, entered into battle again. But this time the battle is over the flesh.

Just as the original Voltaire insisted on the goodness of reason, today’s volunteer Voltaires insist on the goodness of the flesh. The appetites of the flesh are not evil, as Protestant theology insists they are. Those appetites are good. In fact, they are so good, that they trump the appetites of the soul. For atheists, the soul is just a fiction of religion, a way of casting mud upon the goodness of the body.

There is a great irony here. The atheists are right. The flesh is good, there is nothing sinful about the properly ordered appetites of the body, including the desire for sexual union between persons of the opposite sex. In that respect, atheistic reason has reached an understanding of God’s design that is much more accurate than Protestant theology.

But this is where the atheists fall down: because they deny the existence of man’s spiritual soul, they necessarily deny the needs of man’s spiritual soul. They attempt to prove the non-existence of the spiritual soul by cleaving ever more closely to the desires of the flesh. “If only fleshly desires can be slaked,” they think, “ultimate happiness will be ours and these cloddish Christians debunked! It’s a win-win situation!”

Dan Brown may have execrable theology in most respects, but he recognizes this much: the atheists are wrong. The soul exists, its needs must be met and these needs can be met only through contact with the holy. Likewise, he knows what Protestant theologians do not: sex is a good and proper thing. He had to meld the two ideas together. He did. He wrote The Da Vinci Code.

This is why Code is a record-breaking best-seller. In proclaiming the sacredness of sexual union – which is a centerpiece of the novel – he answers a cultural need which Protestant theology created and Penthouse, Playboy and Hustler cannot touch. By putting this same Protestant theology in the mouths of Catholic bishops, he simultaneously condemns all the twisted Christian theology that has roiled the waters of human culture for the last five hundred years.

Why does Dan Brown pick on the Catholic Church? Simple. He was raised a non-Catholic Christian, the kind of Christian who is taught that every heresy of Christianity finds it source in Rome and the Pope. He knew the “Christian” teaching on sex was wrong, so he must naturally have assumed that this twisted teaching originated in Rome, where it spread to infect other Christian churches. From Protestant preachers pounding the pulpit to gay priests cruising for teens, our culture has seen every manifestation of deformed Christian sexual theology there is to see. Given the set of facts Dan Brown had to work with, anyone who is unfamiliar with adult Catholic Faith (including many adult Catholics), would draw his conclusions.

There are many ironies in his novel, but the greatest is this: when it comes to announcing to the world that sex is holy, Dan Brown stands together with Pope John Paul II and the whole college of bishops throughout the history of Christendom. Mr. Brown gets everything else wrong, but this much he gets right.

And, in the final analysis, it is enough. Despite the enormous flaws of his novel (and every Catholic needs to know how to discuss those) he is, in his own way, preparing the world for the proclamation of the Theology of the Body, if only because he tells everyone that sex is, indeed, holy, that there is such a thing as Hieros Gamos – sacred marriage, sacramental marriage. He helps our culture accept this by placing this message in the context of non-Christian religion. He instinctively knew that if he placed it in a Christian context, no one would ever believe it.

We might not like the facts, but there they are. A very confused Christian is getting a core aspect of papal theology into everyone’s lap, and he’s doing it primarily by denying that it is Christian. He has prepared the way to talk about the Theology of the Body. Now it’s our turn to follow up.

Just a thought

It seems Leon Panetta is one of the four people resigning from the bishop's lay review board. The man who supported and campaigned for partial-birth abortion is apparently too disgusted by the bishops to stay in their employ.

That's quite a commentary.

Arcbhishop Curtiss and Kerry

This is Archbishop Curtiss' official response to the Kerry problem. My comments are in parantheses.

Omaha, Nebraska
May 7, 2004


The candidacy of John Kerry: A dilemma for Catholics in Nebraska and the nation
Senator John Kerry makes a strong distinction between his personal life as a Catholic and his public life as a politician. He cites the separation of church and state as the rationale for this duality.

I think Kerry is right about the separation of church and state in terms of one not trying to dominate the other or one not interfering with the legitimate roles of the other. (His is a good sentiment, but watch the nuance carefully. An uncareful reader might conclude he is denying the principle of the two swords, the fact that the law of the Church is always superior to and capable of overriding the laws of the state. He is not denying the principle here, of course, but wouldn't it be nice to see that principle explicitly endorsed instead?) But when it comes to moral issues that touch upon basic human rights, such as the right to life, then we Catholics are not free to go against our consciences formed by our Catholic faith. We cannot separate what we believe privately about human life from our public statements and positions. Otherwise we contradict ourselves.

John Kerry claims that he accepts the teaching of the church about the sacredness of all human life – this is his personal belief and stance. But he thinks that, in a pluralistic society like ours, public policy should support the right of women to make their own decisions about whether to have an abortion or not. Therefore he supports legislation and laws supporting abortion, even the barbarism of late-term abortion. Somehow the Catholic conscience about supporting the rights of pre-born infants to life does not register in his public persona. It is fundamentally dishonest to claim one’s conscience is opposed to abortion and then support abortion as public policy.

Church teaching forms our consciences
Our Catholic tradition and teaching makes it clear that we cannot support privately or publicly any human behavior which is immoral, and in the case of deliberate abortion, seriously sinful. By publicly supporting immoral acts, John Kerry has to be acting against his conscience if it is formed by Catholic teaching. We cannot act against our conscience and then declare that we are faithful to the church which helped form our conscience. This is a contradiction.

The recent declaration from the Vatican about Catholic politicians makes this important point – Catholics are not free, if they are faithful to the Church, to take public stands against church teaching on essential issues. If they do so, they are no longer faithful to the church.

(He has just given a very nice summary of Rome's position.)

My past stand against public dissent
In the past I have reminded Catholic politicians who are Democrats in this archdiocese that they have an obligation to be pro-life in their public statements and their voting record. They have an obligation in conscience to work actively against their party’s platform and policies that support abortion. If they are not willing to do this, then they may not serve in any ministry or office in the archdiocese.

I have also reminded Catholic politicians who are Republicans in the archdiocese that they have an obligation in conscience to be pro-life in all matters, from beginning human life to natural death. They must actively support pro-life policies of their party and resist all efforts to promote anti-life agendas. If any publicly disagree with church teachings about the sacredness of all human life, they may not serve in any ministry or office in the archdiocese.

My policy is based on Catholic theology

If a Catholic politician in this archdiocese is reported to me as being publicly supportive of abortion (or not supportive of other human life issues) then I will visit with that person and explain the position of the church. Individual pastors should be willing to do the same. Public dissent against church teaching is a serious matter for Catholics and a serious matter for the one who dissents. Hopefully, through dialogue, we could come to some agreement about avoiding public statements and public stands contrary to Church teaching. It may be that I or one of our pastors will have to inform a certain person that such continuing public dissent will be incompatible with continuing to receive the Eucharist. This will remain a private matter between that person and me or one of our pastors. I will not make a public statement about refusing Holy Communion to certain Catholics in this archdiocese. This also applies to any Catholic candidates coming from outside Northeast Nebraska.

(Alright - refusal to publicly notify the diocese of the private recommendations given to a penitent is reasonable. However, if the person is not penitent, if that person is, in fact, publicly refusing the directive, then exactly what purpose does this policy serve? It would seem to perpetuate the scandal and worsen it, by adding the appearance of complicity in the person's public position by the archbishop's refusal to censure it with the ecclesial penalties outlined by canon law.)

If full communion with the church on all matters of faith is the only criterion for Catholics to be able to receive the Eucharist, then I would have to challenge a considerable number of people in the archdiocese about receiving the Eucharist regularly. My pastoral task is to try to bring people to an understanding and appreciation of church teaching so that they can embrace it with a good conscience. I will keep at the task now and in the future.

(And there's the kicker. Cardinal Ratzinger has already said that "being pastoral" means "applying appropriate canon law" to a situation. "Pastoral" does not mean "nice," in the 21st-century understanding of the phrase. Archbishop Curtiss seems to think there is some kind of opposition between the first and second sentence in his paragraph above. His first sentence is absolutely correct - in fact, it is his job description - he just doesn't seem to want to do it. His pastoral task is also to defend the sacraments against profanation. For some reason, he thinks challenging "a considerable number of people... about receiving the Eucharist regularly" is implicitly incompatible with his "pastoral task". Given the constant teaching of the Church on these subjects, for the life of me, I can't figure out why.)

The candidacy of John Kerry
I regret that John Kerry insists on giving public support to the abortion industry that promotes a culture of death in this country. He needs to be challenged by Catholics everywhere in this country. Because of the scandal his position is causing for the church, he should refrain from receiving the Eucharist in public liturgies.

(Scandal is a sin of two types. There is the sin of taking scandal where none should be taken, and the sin of giving scandal where none should be given. Right now, Kerry and the US bishops are giving scandal since both parties refuse to live by canon law - one refuses to receive it, the other refuses to apply it. If the bishops did their job and publicly refused Kerry the Eucharist, they would not be giving scandal. Anyone who was offended by the act would be improperly offended - it would be their sin for taking scandal. Thus, this is a very easy problem to solve. The bishops just don't want to solve it. If Archbishop Curtiss is taking this stance, then you know Cardinal McCarrick and his committee is going to be soft as summer butter on it as well.)

Original Intent

“When the framers of the American Constitution wrote, ‘We, the people,’ they did not mean me.” Condaleeza Rice’s comments are well-taken. Now that John Kerry’s religion has become an issue in the campaign, we should take another look at the phrase “original intent.” It doesn’t mean what we tend to think.

Political conservatives love to talk about original intent. Except when they don’t. After all, today’s conservatives do not argue that only landed white males should have the vote, although that was clearly the original intent of the founders. Political liberals love to point this out. Liberals tend to deride “strict constructionists”, those who believe original intent is the key to applying the law to the culture.

But the liberals really shouldn’t laugh too loudly at the idea. After all, they suddenly find “original intent” deeply relevant when anyone tries to introduce prayer in school or religion into politics. “Our founders originally intended a wall of separation between church and state. That wall must not be breached!” Heaven forbid.

The problem both sides have, of course, is that man’s understanding of what is best for man has changed over the years. For instance, only white men who owned land were originally thought to be responsible enough to bear the responsibility of voting. Women and people of other races were not reliable enough to undertake the responsibility. That is, the vote was restricted to rich white men because the founders had a very specific understanding of who was capable of acting responsibly.

The very fact that rich white men eventually allowed the vote to be placed on the shoulders of women and minorities demonstrates that rich white men are, in fact, capable of being swayed by facts and capable of acting responsibly. After all, the ancient Greeks, who developed the idea of democracy and upon whose example the Constitution was modeled, never permitted either group the vote.

Similar ideas can be found elsewhere in our history. For instance, despite the vaunted “wall of separation between Church and state,” many states long had religious tests for holding office. If you were not a Christian or if you did not at least profess belief in God, you could not hold state office. Why? The same rationale applied: belief in the Christian God demonstrated at least a certain willingness to be held responsible for one’s own actions. After all, if anything characterizes the Christian, it is the willingness to admit his own sinfulness, his own responsibility for the problems in the world. And that is the key to original intent.

Ultimately, the question of responsibility lies at the heart of the founders’ concerns precisely because it lies at the heart of everyone’s concerns. In this, the founding fathers were not particularly insightful. We all want people to be responsible. We just have different ideas of what that means.

The American Revolution was almost simultaneous with the French Enlightenment, indeed, the French Revolution – Enlightenment in action – would follow close on the heels of our own. With the Enlightenment, the idea of what constituted responsible character changed. For the first time, prominent men began to argue that religion was irresponsible because faith was an illusion. Only reason mattered.

Now, keep in mind that the Catholic Church has always taught that faith and reason were two wings on the same bird: the intellect could not soar to its full potential without both faith and reason. In the mid-1500’s, Luther made the rejection of this concept a center-piece of his rebellion. He explicitly said “reason is the whore of the devil”, indeed, to this day, many Protestant pastors teach substantially this idea. By the 1700’s, learned men began to deny Luther’s assertion in the strongest possible terms. This is the essence of the Enlightenment. Indeed, the Enlightenment of the mid-1700’s so strongly insisted that reason was good and useful, that its promoters entirely dispensed with the need for faith. “Crush the infamy [of Catholic Faith]!” shouted Voltaire.

Two hundred years of Protestant thought had finally generated the reaction that we are still spinning through today. It is now two hundred since the incredibly violent reaction to Protestantism that we call the Enlightenment. “Faith alone” started the endless religious wars of Europe. “Reason alone” started the endless executions of the French Revolution, the national slaughterhouse that led inexorably to the vast international slaughterhouses of national socialism (Nazism) and international socialism (Communism).

When it comes to responsibility, neither “faith alone” nor “reason alone” is good enough. Today, we see tie-dyed Voltaires combating latter-day Luthers on a host of issues, and each appeals to the fallible founding fathers as their light.

Unfortunately, the founding fathers were neither God nor gods. They were bright men doing the best they could, but men after all. They understood the goal – create a mode of government that will ensure both people and government act responsibly. They simply failed in attaining the goal. Now, they created the most spectacularly successful failure the world has ever seen. The Constitution is, after all, the oldest document ever continuously used as a national governing tool. But it is a failure. It could not be otherwise.

“Democracy,” said Winston Churchill, “is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Why? Because we are all rational sinners. Each day, we knowingly choose to act in ways that deny us communion with God. The Constitution answers works precisely because it is a document that describes how men of faith are to rationally govern themselves. The rational document only works when it works with divine faith, the faith that celebrates the central importance of reason in coming to understand the ways of both God and man. Only Catholic Faith joins the two. Only Catholicism can heal today’s crisis. To the extent that Catholicism is moribund, law – especially the American Constitution – is a dead letter. If we can say anything with certainty, we can say this: the Catholic life is God’s original intent.

Is That Legal?

Years ago, a heard an apologist give a piece of very sage advice. If you want to bring a certain class of people to knowledge of Christ, make friends with several and don’t try to convert them. Just listen to them. Hear their concerns. That’s one of the reasons I try to stay in conversation with all kinds of people, one of whom happens to be a follower of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX).

Now, the SSPX and its splinter groups are schismatics who refuse to recognize the authority of the Second Vatican Council and the Pope. Their priests and bishops are validly ordained, consequently all seven of their sacraments are valid. Sadly, none of them are licit.

Whenever I say this, people inevitably respond with, “And what, exactly, is the difference between being valid and being licit?” Instead of going into a long theological discussion, it is best to use an example.

When a man and a woman get married, they generally tend to have sex. Sexual relations between spouses is both valid and licit – it is valid because it is ordered towards the indivisible gifts of procreation and unity, it is licit because the relationship is consecrated and elevated by God to the status of a sacrament. Thus, God’s law and man’s law coincide – that is what it means to be licit.

Now, if these same two people had sex without benefit of marriage, they would be involved in a valid expression of sexuality – the union could still produce a child, at least on a theoretical level – but their union would not be licit. God may bless them with a child despite the fact that they refuse to allow His authority in their lives, but their actions are not in conformance with the level of obedience God desires from each of us. They have valid but illicit sex.

What of invalid and illicit sex? The best example of that is homosexual sex. It is invalid because it is simply not ordered to procreation or unity. It is illicit because that sexual act between those two people can never be elevated to a level of obedience to God. Fornicators, and to a lesser degree adulterers, can make their actions both valid and licit by obeying the laws of God's Church and allowing Him to sanctify their relationship, but homosexual sex can never be either.

You may think it an enormous leap to jump from liturgy and sacraments to sex, but it isn’t. The Mass is the Wedding Feast, where Eucharist, the Flesh of the Bridegroom, enters the flesh of the Bride. As the Holy Father tells us, sex is meant to be a foreshadowing, a dim way of imaging, the enormous love God pours out to us in the liturgy. When properly done, “sex is, in a certain sense, liturgical.” It is precisely our failure to make this connection that causes us so much problem in discussing our Catholic Faith.

The orientation that worship has matters. We can worship God incorrectly or we can worship God correctly or we can worship demons. It is incorrect to say that those who worship God incorrectly are at the same level as those who worship demons – after all, though certain fundamentalist sects call the Catholic Church “The Whore of Babylon”, still, I have a fellowship with them that I simply don’t share with followers of Wicca. My Wiccan friend is very nice, loves her pagan form of worship and certainly doesn’t believe she is doing anything satanic, but she is also certainly not my separated brother in the same sense that the Baptist woman down the street is.

Now, as noted above, sex is a dim reflection of liturgy. The difference between valid and licit, taht is, the difference between the illicit, invalid liturgical worship of Wicca, the valid liturgy of the SSPX and the valid, licit liturgy Catholics attend every Sunday is intimately woven into the problem of sexuality.

The Catechism tells us that in God there is neither male nor female (CCC #239). So why do we always use the masculine pronoun in reference to Him? In part, because God penetrates us, He impregnates us with His word, as the Holy Father says in Catechesis in Our Time. He acts first, we respond. That is how it must always be when we deal with God – since God is creator, Since God holds us in existence from moment to moment, He must also always be First Actor. We don’t penetrate Him, He penetrates us. He is Bridegroom, we are Bride.

This is why St. Paul says sins of the flesh are the worst kind of sin, for these offend against the Temple of the Holy Spirit, which is the body. Sins of the flesh are the worst precisely because sins of the flesh are intimately linked with sins of the liturgy.

In the Catholic Mass, the Bridegroom meets the Bride, He enters us, and the mystery of divine loving union with God is consummated. In the SSPX Mass, the Bride takes advantage of the Bridegroom, using Him in a way that does not respect Who He is and what He wills, but the marriage itself still exists, even if the relationships are distorted. In Wicca, it is different.

Wicca is goddess-worship. In Wicca, the bride meets the bride. It is not valid worship, it is not licit worship. It is intrinsically disordered worship. It is worship irretrievably skewed. Of all the liturgical errors one can make, nothing matches the error of attempting Wicca worship. It is an error of a different class.

It has been pointed out by numerous people that, just as the act of eating has natural consequences, so does the act of sex. Eat too much and you gain weight. Have sex, and you eventually get pregnant. People who want to eat but don’t want to gain weight sometimes try to rectify the problem by becoming bulimic – they constantly force themselves to throw up. Abortion has been called the sexual form of bulimia. If we follow this kind of analogy, we can see that homosexuality is the sexual form of Wicca. Thus, we should not be surprised to find that a culture that promotes New Age beliefs, including Wicca, suddenly also finds itself awash in problems involving homosexuality.

Many people think the Catechism of the Catholic Church reflects a basic homophobia, because the Catechism calls homosexuality “intrinsically disordered.” Homosexuality is the only mode of life that is described that way by the Magisterium. Now that we understand the difference between valid and licit, and the link between sex and liturgy, it is, perhaps, more clear why the Magisterium provides this description.

Just as there are different levels of venial sin, whose deeper levels eventually induce the sinner to plunge into mortal sin, so there are different levels of mortal sin. Some are easier to recover from than others. In that sense, some mortal sins are, indeed, worse than others. As has been pointed out elsewhere, mortal sin against the Ninth Commandment – coveting a neighbor’s goods – is not nearly so bad as mortal sin against the Tenth Commandment – coveting a neighbor’s spouse. Wicca worship is much worse than SSPX worship. Homosexual behaviour is much worse than fornication and adultery.

It’s a simple problem to solve, really. We just need to explain the connection between sex and liturgy and the difference between valid and licit.

Dreaming is Believing

George Weigel appears to be at odds with the USCCB. In a recent interview with Newsmax.com, Weigel said, “[T]he bishops [must] as a group to make clear that Senator Kerry is systematically misrepresenting the nature of Catholic teaching on the life issues… when Kerry says the Church's pro-life teaching is a sectarian position which cannot be imposed on a pluralistic society, he is willfully misrepresenting the nature of the Church's position – by suggesting that this is something analogous to the Catholic Church trying to force everyone in the United States to abstain from eating hot dogs on Fridays during Lent."

Unfortunately for Mr. Weigel, Kerry is not mis-representing the USCCB position. He has described the USCCB position to a “T”. Watch closely and you’ll see how it’s done.

Back in December 2003, Cathy Cleaver Ruse, the official pro-life spokeswoman of the USCCB told the New York Times in part, “when it comes to contraception as a policy issue - access, availability - the Catholic bishops do not get involved in that debate."

Now there’s an amazing statement. Catholic bishops don't get involved on a debate concerning mortal sin. One wonders why any of them bothered getting consecrated bishop. But wait – it gets better.

I held onto that quote because the thing was so remarkably odd. Now, the entire quote she made to the Times was pretty strange, but this was easily the strangest part of it. So, I recently asked her a straightforward question. If the USCCB was lobbying to abolish abortion, why wasn’t it lobbying to abolish contraception? Both are mortal sins, both take human lives. I couldn’t see how the bishops distinguished between the two.

She quickly set me straight. The bishops don’t distinguish between the two.

“No, there is no ‘lobbying to ban abortions for everyone’ as that too has been precluded by the Supreme Court, for the time being,” she wrote in reply, “rather, there are efforts directed toward achievable goals…” She then went on to list a few of the USCCB goals: “the partial-birth abortion ban, [work] against mandating inclusion of contraception in health benefits packages; against making its acceptance a condition for providing other kinds of developmental assistance; protecting parents' rights in the case of minors, [etc.]”

It takes one’s breath away. Instead of preaching on the intrinsic evil of contraception, instead of insisting on the total abolition of contraception and abortion, US bishops are merely attempting to maintain the status quo circa, say, 1975. Pope John Paul II has repeatedly asked them what they are doing to change the culture. Well, now we know the answer: nothing. They aren’t trying to change the culture, they are trying to freeze-frame the culture in one of its most delectable states – the year Maude had her abortion on a national sitcom. We all know people who yearn for the 1950’s. Some benighted souls even yearn for the 1960's. But who knew there was anyone that yearned for the seventies? The bishops have been told in very stern terms by the Unites States Supreme Court that they are to stop trying to abolish contraception and abortion, so… they scrape, bow and obey.

What might George Weigel say about Mrs. Ruse’s answer? Well, we can look at what he says about Kerry’s position "This is simply false," Weigel told NewsMax.com. "The Church's pro-life teaching is something that can be engaged seriously by anyone. You don't have to believe that there are seven sacraments to deal with this, you don't have to believe in the primacy of the bishop of Rome to engage this position. You don't even have to believe in God to engage this [pro-Life] position because it's a position rooted in basic embryology and in basic logic, and anybody can engage that."

But that’s part of the problem, you see. The bishops are ignorant as the babes about embryology and basic logic. Take a look at the insanity they show in regards to the morning-after pill.

According to the USCCB, the morning after pill is A Bad Thing. It causes chemical abortions, don’cha know. Well, yes, bishops, we do know that. And anyone who has bothered to read the Physician’s Desk Reference, the standard handbook on drugs in the United States, also knows that the morning after pill (MAP) is just a regular contraceptive at an unusually high dose. MAP works exactly the same way every other hormonal contraceptive works because it is simply another contraceptive – it tries to suppress ovulation, but even if ovulation is not suppressed, it always destroys the uterine lining so the embryo can’t implant, that is, it causes an abortion. All hormonal contraceptives do.

But MAP is high-dose. Low-dose contraceptives are not good at preventing ovulation. Because MAP is high dose, it is more likely to prevent ovulation than normal contraceptives are. Why does this matter?

Because it means normal contraceptives are actually much more likely to cause a chemical abortion than MAP is. After all, sperm can’t fertilize an egg that isn’t there. MAP prevents the egg from being there much more reliably than normal contraceptives do. Now, MAP also plays merry hell with the woman’s health and her reproductive system to an extent far beyond any normal contraceptive, but chemical abortion is much less likely to happen with MAP than it is with any other hormonal contraceptive you care to name.

So, why do the bishops oppose MAP but remain silent on other hormonal contraceptives? That’s a darned good question. I pointed all of this out and asked Mrs. Ruse to explain why the bishops fought MAP but none of the other contraceptives. Her answer? Simplicity itself. Cathy Cleaver Ruse simply stopped replying. To be honest, I couldn’t blame her. I would have done exactly the same thing in her position.

So, this is the situation. The USCCB is not working to ban abortion. It is not working to ban contraception. The Supreme Court has forbidden it to do either, and the USCCB takes its marching orders from the US Supreme Court on these two issues. Instead, the USCCB is simply trying to limit damage. That’s all. It is trying to keep the culture from getting any worse than it was in 1975. It opposes MAP primarily because MAP wasn’t part of the 1970’s status quo. If it had been, the USCCB presumably wouldn’t be working to ban it either.

George Weigel has a dream. "The most important thing for the bishops of the United States to do is to make very clear that Kerry is misrepresenting the nature of the Church's pro-life position..."

It is very important to have dreams.

The reality is this: if you want the situation to change, you need to do something about it. First, pray. Being a bishop means being crucified. Christ hung on the Cross for three hours – these men spend years on it, and sometimes the pain drives them to make mistakes of judgment that we who are out of the spotlight wouldn’t have made. Pray for them and for yourself. Pray hard.

Then, start making appointments with your bishop, start writing him, start calling him. Be respectful. But make it clear to him that you want to hear the whole Gospel, in the pulpit and in the newspaper. You have a right to hear it. He has a duty to preach it. Catholics don’t take their marching orders from nine men in black robes. We follow one man, with holes in His hands and His feet and a bloody crown on His head. We aren’t democrats or republicans, we are monarchists. The King is calling us out. It’s time to march.

Calling Catholic Moms

Despite our best attempts at natural child birth, my wife has had three C-sections – one for each of our children. As she was wheeled into the operating room last June for the birth of our most recent child, we prayed the Rosary together. Just as we reached the beginning of the third Joyful mystery, the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, I saw our little boy lifted out and raised on high by the doctor, his umbilical cord still pulsing with each heartbeat. Blood is the source of life, says the book of Leviticus, so life’s blood, specifically umbilical cord blood, is the perfect topic for Easter week.

God is amazingly good at keeping His promises. When He says blood is the source of life (Leviticus 17:11), He means it quite literally. Not only is it the source of life for each of us through the oxygen it carries, it is the source of life in another most amazing way. Let me explain.

For years now, scientists have had the most excellent and laudable goal of trying to use stem cells as a means of healing those who are suffering grievous illness. Diabetes, cancer, stroke: the list of diseases which could be healed if only we know how best to manipulate stem cells is endless.

Unfortunately, many people have twisted this laudable goal in order to advance their own political agenda. Instead of looking for the best source of stem cells to advance healing, they have sought to shoe-horn a specific source of stems cell into the forefront as a way to justify the killing of very small children. The pro-abortion agenda has oiled and squirmed its way into stem cell research; many otherwise reputable scientists now allow their pro-abortion agenda to influence the direction of their work. Thus, instead of seeking the best source of stem cells, these men and women use the worst possible sources of stem cells – human embryos – and pretend to themselves and the world that success will eventually crown their efforts.

This is a fight every Catholic mother should join. You see, the stem cells from cord blood can do everything stem cells obtained from human embryos cannot. Lifesite News quotes Dr. John Gearhart, of John Hopkins University, “[Embryonic stem cells are] surprisingly genetically unstable [and] may complicate efforts to turn cells into cures." Bioethicist Glenn McGee agrees: "the potential that they would explode into a cancerous mass after stem cell transplant might turn out to be the Pandora's box of stem cell research.”

These men aren’t speaking theoretically. Nearly every such experiment has sparked uncontrollable cancerous growths in one or more of the test subjects. Not once has a set of stem cells obtained through the destruction of a human embryo ever cured anyone. Even optimistic researchers don’t expect this to change anytime soon.

With the blood from umbilical cords, life is much different. You see, cord blood is a rich source of embryonic stem cells. And, unlike the stem cells obtained by killing short people, transfused cord blood has already eliminated disease from the lives of thousands of children and adults. Cord blood works. Right now.

As Gretchen Clavey, who is a Catholic contemplative, a wife, and a mother of eight (five here, three in heaven) in Champaign, Illinois points out, “this is precisely the kind of topic my vocation and state in life gives me a platform to speak about. Women like me should be of the most vocal on this issue because we have the ability to convey to other moms or anybody else that will listen about the need to donate cord blood. What other group of people out there think a whole lot about umbilical cords anyway?”

“Consider the profound beauty of the way in which God has made this option for treating disease available, that is, through the gift of a mother open to life. She is open to the life of her own child and now can even help save other people's lives by simply requesting that the cord blood be donated. There are many layers of profound Catholic theology that can be used to uncover how beautiful this is! It's very Marian, very Catholic!

"Many unsuspecting Catholics are being led down the primrose path of agreeing with abortionists - without even realizing that cord blood is the obvious solution to the problem. Hidden like diamonds in the rough, however, is a beautiful gift from God to his people, one that will get ignored if someone doesn't get on the horn and raise awareness! Let's not miss this opportunity to take back one of those topics the abortion proponents have taken control of in the public square.”

Now, many private organizations inadvertently limit the usefulness of cord blood in order to make a dollar. These groups tell you that you should donate your child’s cord blood to their private registery, reserving your child’s blood just for him, and cordoning it off from anyone else’s use. Sadly, this is precisely the wrong way to approach the problem. Stem cells from cord blood are most critically useful in the treatment of genetic disease. If your child has a genetic disease, then that disease, by definition, is already present in his cord blood. This means your child often can’t use his own cord blood to be healed. He needs cord blood from some other child, a child free from the genetic disease in question.

Cord blood is most useful when it is in a public registry, available for anyone’s use. At the moment, there are only about twenty public cord blood banks in the country. Begin investigating this resource. Check with your local hospital and find out if they participate in a cord blood registry. Notify the papers about this resource and start a campaign to get your hospital on board. Registries generally require a few months lead time in order to properly track donated cord blood, so if you are pregnant or likely to become pregnant soon and would like to donate, you need to start investigating now.

Would the American Red Cross be likely to start storing cord blood? To this point, they haven’t shown an interest, but if enough people ask, they might change their mind. It’s worth investigating.

Donation of cord blood is completely moral, completely useful, and doesn’t harm your child a bit. Your son or daughter can save another child’s life from the moment his own life in the larger world begins. What a great birthday present to give him! What a great accomplishment for her!

So, get on your soapbox now and keep your eye on the news in the future. When, years later, it comes time for the tooth fairy to visit, you might want to save those teeth. Reuters reports that Mr. Howard Morris of Royal Adelaide Hospital, South Australia says the pulp in the teeth children shed naturally is more accessible and richer in stem cells than adult tissue. Dr. Stan Gronthos agrees, "They usually go to the tooth fairy and that's the end of it, but we can use them. One stem cell can be grown in culture into a colony of thousands of cells, then into millions of cells. They can regenerate into connective tissue such as bone, cartilage, fat and muscle."

Isn’t God good?

For more information on public cord blood banks, see

www.marrow.org
http://www.parentsguidecordblood.com/public.html

Our Bodies, Ourselves

Our Bodies, Ourselves

At the Last Supper, which we commemorate on Holy Thursday, Jesus Christ held His own resurrected body in His hands. It’s an amazing thing. With the words, “This is my body… This is my blood…” His made Himself present in the breaking of the bread, though none of the apostles would realize it until many days later. If you have ever wondered why our bodies resurrect, this is the place to start your meditations.

Now, we know only three kinds of persons exist: the three uncreated Persons of the Godhead, and the two kinds of created persons – angels and men. In order to understand why we get our bodies back, we first have to understand what it means to be us. What are we? What is a human person? More important, why are we human persons?

The question is kind of interesting because the answers are not as obvious as they appear. One of the first people to deal with the question was a man named Nestorius. He said, “Look, the Church teaches that Jesus is fully human. He has a fully human body and a fully human soul. Therefore, He must have be a fully human person. But, He is the Son of God, so He must be a Divine Person as well.” It seemed pretty logical – according to Nestorius, Jesus was two persons at once. The human person and the divine Son of God, both united in one body, sort of like a split personality, only in a good way.

When Bishop Nestorius proposed this to the Church and began teaching it to his flock, other bishops objected. An ecumenical council of the Church was called to decide the issue. By the end of the council, Nestorius found he was wrong, a heretic. The council agreed that the apostolic teaching was this: there is only one Person in Jesus Christ – while He is fully and completely man, he is not a human person. He is the Divine Person, the Son of God.

Well, that’s quite a poser, isn’t it? How can you be fully man, but not even the teeniest bit a human person? It seems impossible, unless you remember one thing: the Three Persons of the one God are distinguished only by their relations and we human persons are made in His image.

God is pure spirit. He does not have a body. The Three Persons of the Godhead are pure spirit. The angels are made in God’s image in three ways. First, they are pure spirit, like God. Also, they are enormously powerful intellects, so knowledgeable about the results of their own actions that they can see the furthest consequences of everything they choose. Their decisions are irrevocable. In that, they are like God too. Third, each angel is a distinct person.

But we humans, we are not pure spirits. How are we like God? Well, we image Him by the fact that we are persons. We also image Him by the fact that we can generate, we can beget families. God the Father begets the Son, the Father and the Son generate the Spirit. God is a family of persons whose life is love. In fact, the three persons of the Trinity are so closely intertwined in love that each Person can be distinguished from the other two only by their relations to one another. Father begets Son, Father and Son together generate Spirit. If it were not for these relations, there would be no Divine Persons. That’s how important relationship is to being a Divine Person. If relationship is that important for God, it is likely to be pretty important for us as well.

So, what does is it about angels and men that makes us persons? Well, think about what is unique about us. Only angels and men are called to intimate communion with the Three Divine Persons of the Godhead. Only angels and men are called to be part of God’s family. Nothing else is. Birds, ducks, dogs, giraffes – all of these may appear in the new heaven and new earth that comes after the Day of Last Judgement, but none are called to personal intimacy with God. We are persons because we are called to be in communion with the Divine Persons.

Communion means total gift of self. Each Person of the Trinity gives of Himself so fully, that each Person of the Trinity totally interpenetrates the other two Persons. What does that mean? It means that no matter which Person of the Trinity you are thinking of, the other Two Persons are totally contained within Him. Each Divine Person makes Total Gift of Himself to the other Two, each gives Himself totally away to the other Two, holding nothing back.

The angels who rebelled chose to hold something of themselves back. This withholding was enough to prevent them from entering into communion with God. They are called to communion – they are persons – but their personhood can never be the fullness it is meant to be simply and only because they are not in full communion with the First Persons, the Trinity.

God made us a unique composite of body and soul. “Man is a person in the unity of his body and spirit. The body can never be reduced to mere matter. It is a spiritualized body, just as man’s spirit is so closely united to the body that he can be described as an embodied spirit.” So says Pope John Paul II, so say we all.

We are called into total communion with God. Total communion. That means we have to give Him everything we are if we want to be fully human persons. Death is the separation of spirit and body, and death was never what God intended for us. Since we are body and spirit, since body and spirit were meant to be joined forever, we must give Him everything we are. Our bodies are necessary to our personhood because they are part of what we give to God. We get our bodies back at the Day of Last Judgement precisely so we can give ourselves totally away to God, just as Mary gave herself totally to God when Gabriel asked her the question, just as Jesus gave Himself totally to us on the Cross.

And this is why Jesus is not a human person even though He is human in every other respect. His relationship to God is infinitely superior to our own. He is God, after all. He is already totally contained within the other two Persons of the Trinity – something that we will never accomplish. We will be in communion with God in heaven, but never that level of intimate communion that the Son has. He possesses the one Divine Nature, we only share in it. He owns it, through the grace of the sacraments, we only dabble our fingers in it. He is the Divine Person of the Son, we are human persons.

At the Last Supper, the one God who is simultaneously present at every moment of time and space made Himself specially present in His resurrected body when He uttered the words, "This is My Body... This is My Blood." He chose to take a body at the Incarnation and He chooses to keep His human body and human nature even now, because He wants us to understand what a precious gift our body is. Our bodies are part of who we are, and if we did not have them, we would not be everything God intends us to be. He took flesh so we could triumph over the Fall. He held His own resurrected Body in His hands at the Last Supper so we could hold His resurrected bodies in our arms in heaven. With our bodies, we worship Him.

This Triduum, think on these things.

Vulture Culture

What do gay marriage, abortion and reality TV shows have in common? In famously Protestant America, each of these culturally reflect and enshrine the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments, the commandments Judge Moore and company fight about. This may seem a remarkable statement, but it is true. 

Take gay marriage, for instance. One-third of teens who choose to be actively gay will be dead from disease by the age of thirty. Disease will kill half of them before their fiftieth birthday. The lifestyle of active homosexuals is deadly. Though they have access to the most advanced medical technology in history, gays today have a life expectancy virtually identical to someone living in the late 1800’s – when we had no antibiotics and few survivable surgical procedures. 

Because of this, many civic planners, influenced by Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, are cultivating a gay subculture in their cities. Neither city officials nor Mr. Florida mention the real reason: active homosexuals pursue personal pleasure above all else, which means they spend lots of money on themselves. They have, after all, no one else to spend it on and no particular reason to save it. Their lifestyle pumps millions into the local economy, their lingering deaths from disease pump in millions more from the insurance companies. For those few gays who chose to adopt or IVF a child before they die, the orphans become wards of the state, and bring in still more federal dollars. For city officials, it’s a sweet setup – the city isn’t exactly written into the will, but by encouraging debauchery the city coffers profit enormously. Homosexuals are a revenue source, a set of substantial bank accounts to tap. 

Throughout the country, the death tax is notoriously high. Both city and state profit from encouraging a high population of wealthy people who die rapidly. So, our city planners now echo the abortionists, the only doctors who don’t accept charge cards or checks. “It’s their right to live as they wish,” say proponents as they ring up the sales, “and who are we to interfere with a right? Cash only, please, and step to the left as you die so as not to upset the others in line.” 

Abortionists don’t tell women what the March 2004 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology reports: women who abort are three times more likely to be dead within a year of their abortion than they would be if they gave birth. Likewise, city officials don’t mention what everyone knows: the city’s homosexual neighborhood always has real estate agents hustling empty housing units. Everyone just wears black armbands when a particularly wealthy homosexual kicks the bucket. Loving funeral notices are written, and the number of funeral homes increase. Everybody wins but the corpse. 

In a society uncontaminated by Christ, people are tools, and we reward those who recognize this. Is it any wonder that the first reality television show, Survivor, was won by a homosexual? This is not to say that heterosexuals cannot coldly and callously use people as instruments – we do it every time we sin – but using people like objects is part of the fabric of homosexual society to a unique degree. According to a 2003 issue of the journal AIDS (vol. 17), “monogamous” homosexuals typically have between six and ten anonymous sexual affairs a year outside of their “monogamous” relationship. No heterosexual would think to define monogamy that way. The homosexual life is about use – who uses whom, and what do I get out of it? Likewise, reality television shows are all about how I can use other people in order to get what I want. Thus, it is fitting and right that the homosexual Richard Hatch win the first reality gameshow, Survivor. In an interview after having been voted off a later All-Star Survivor game, Richard Hatch was asked who the smartest member left in the game was. His reply, “I've been voted off, so... who cares?” 

In a vulture culture, we talk about me or we don’t talk. And this is ultimately why gay marriage is a contradiction in terms. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church points out “Matrimony [is] directed towards the service of others; if [it] contributes as well to personal salvation, it is through service to others that [it does] so” (#1534). Marriage is a sacrament of service because it makes me the primary servant to my spouse. Through marriage, I voluntarily bind myself to the service of my spouse before all others. 

The Catholic understanding of marriage is radically at odds with American culture. The vulture culture asks, “Is my spouse doing a good job of serving me? Is my spouse helping me achieve my goals?” Orthodox Catholics ask, “Am I doing my job of loving service? Am I giving myself entirely to my spouse so that she has all she needs to become more perfect?” How many heterosexuals get divorced because they know they aren’t serving their spouse well enough? In that sense, the homosexuals are right: homosexual marriage cannot threaten heterosexual marriage because heterosexual marriage in the Catholic sense is a concept that really doesn’t exist in America. It never has. 

The great irony in the gay marriage/Ten Commandments fight lies precisely in the fact that non-Catholic Christians have no idea their position is self-contradictory. They haven’t thought it through. Catholics separate the sins of coveting your neighbor’s wife and coveting your neighbor’s house. Coveting a person, that is, treating a person like an object, is a sin against the ninth commandment and entirely different from coveting someone else’s goods, the sin against the tenth commandment. 

Contrast this to non-Catholic Christian theology where a person is treated as an object – the two different kinds of coveting are not distinguished. They both offend a single commandment, the tenth. Likewise, when considering God, non-Catholic Christians concentrate on the means more than the end. They concentrate on separating the mis-use of words (taking God’s name in vain violates their second commandment) from the mis-use of things (using idols violates their third commandment). Catholics know all of these are offenses against the infinite majesty of God’s Persons, and condemn all such offenses in a single commandment, the second. 

Protestant theology doesn’t really understand the difference between an object and a person. Catholic theology does. And that is why homosexual marriage is simply the next logical step on the road that redefines social justice. Homosexual marriage will not only change our understanding of monogamy, as we have already seen, it will also change our understanding of social justice, but not in the way you might think. 

Consider: lesbians are three times more likely to be alcoholic than non-lesbians (nearly half reported frequent drunkenness), and most pointed to money problems, not social acceptance, as the cause. Gays make up 80% of the both the AIDS and the syphilis cases in the US, their rate of syphilis is ten times that of the heterosexual population, and hepatitis-B transmits nearly nine times more efficiently than AIDS among homosexuals. 55% of homosexual men with ano-rectal complaints have gonorrhea, one-third have herpes simplex, 15% have chlamydia. Gays contract gonorrhea of the throat at a rate four times higher than heterosexuals. 91% of homosexual men have intestinal protozoa: the majority of shigella and amoeba infections among non-travelled immunocompetent patients are homosexuals. Indeed, one New York study found that every single such patient with giardiasis was homosexual. E. histolytica infection is a staggering twenty-seven times more prevalant in homosexuals. Not surprisingly, the most powerful predictor for both giardiasis and E. histolytica infection is homosexual behaviour. The list could go on, but you get the point. 

Unsurprisingly, “monogamous” gays are as diseased as promiscuous gays: The American Journal of Public Health published a 1990 study that found, "Being in a monogamous gay relationship was associated with higher risk sex throughout the entire study." The AIDS article referred to above agreed: “monogamous” homosexuals were more likely to be infected, not less so. So, this is the love homosexuals have for one another: my partner must give me pleasure until s/he dies from it. The principle is already enshrined in heterosexual law via legal contraception and legal abortion. Homosexuals want the same rights heterosexuals have to use their partner like Kleenex. Who can deny them? 

Historically, society has regulated harmful activities, such as alcohol use, tobacco use and drug use. Prostitution, contraception, abortion and homosexual activity also used to be heavily regulated. After all, these activities tend to kill you and the rest of us have to pay your medical bills and take care of your widows and orphans. But the pursuit of sexual pleasure appears to hold a special place in the hearts of Americans. Apparently, we want to keep people from using alcohol, tobacco and drugs, but we want to encourage people to use people. Homosexuality, contraception, abortion, gay marriage, embryo screening, reality television shows: these are all social justice issues. Social justice now means I have a right to use you. Use you until you die. 

Can this be attitude be beaten? Yes. John Paul II has given us the answer. Learn to speak the Theology of the Body . It is the only coherent way to explain to our separated brethren and our pagan friends that people are not objects. Properly used, it speaks the language of every person’s heart, expressing what we each know. I am a person, I am important, and I am not to be used like an object for someone else’s pleasure or gain.

The Facts of Life

Want to hear something strange? Not once, never in the history of mankind, has a fertilized egg ever implanted in a woman’s womb. Surprised? It’s true. Misunderstanding this single fact destroys the ability to think clearly about a host of issues, yet even medical doctors regularly mis-speak when they discuss it. There’s a reason for this.

When a woman’s ovary releases an egg, the clock starts ticking. That single cell has only one of two possible fates: disintegration or fertilization. On average, the ovum disintegrates in about twelve hours; it certainly doesn’t last much more than twenty-four. The Fallopian tubes, the egg’s highway to the womb, are about six to eight inches long. The egg will disintegrate before it travels more than a third of the distance. Unless, of course, it meets a spermatozoon.

Since sperm have flagella, they move quite a lot faster than eggs. If they can make it to the egg before it disintegrates, the egg will be fertilized. Keep in mind what this means. As soon as the egg is fertilized, it meshes the new DNA into its own and starts using the new information immediately. That is, the fertilized egg almost immediately begins to divide.

Now, according to every embryology text in the world, as soon as a fertilized egg begins to divide, it is no longer a fertilized egg, she is an embryo. She will remain an embryo until about the end of the eighth week, when she is old enough and mature enough to be called a fetus. Yet even with that first cell division, the cells within the embryo are organizing themselves. As the embryonic child travels down the Fallopian tube, she is constantly growing, dividing, creating and organizing more and more cells within herself, getting everything ready to prepare for implantation in the womb.

Unlike fertilization, which is the work of a moment or two, it takes days for implantation to occur. The embryo typically makes it into the womb about four days after fertilization; the growth necessary to complete implantation won’t finish until roughly day ten. Like God in Genesis, it takes the embryo six days to create the right conditions and get everything in the womb arranged as it needs to be.

The moral of the story? No egg, fertilized or not, ever makes it to the womb. Not ever. Only embryos enter the womb because only an embryo can implant in the womb. A fertilized egg can’t implant. Even the pagans at the local IVF clinic recognize this. After the lab technicians conceive a child, they wait until the embryo is ready before they attempt implantation.

And herein lies the irony. The same people who deny the existence of the child in the womb or in the petri dish likewise can’t seem to keep their medical terminology straight. Back in the early 1980’s, researchers who had both the curiosity and the moral scruples of a hyperactive three-year old wanted to tear little boys and girls into little pieces in order to see how they worked. But they knew that tearing apart embryos might get them into trouble with ethics committees. So, they simply invented a brand new term: pre-embryo.

“Pre-embryo” was the smokescreen term for an embryo prior to the fourteenth day of growth. By changing the name to “pre-embryo”, the researchers neatly got around the ethics panels who didn’t want anyone messing with “embryos.” They could IVF and tear up little kids all day long, and no one would yell. The American media, which supports slicing and dicing little boys and girls no matter what the reason, went along with it. So did many OB/GYNs who performed abortion on the side. They avoided violating their Hippocratic oath largely through never having taken the real thing.

Embryologists, the people whose life’s work is the study of very small children, were uniformly livid at the invention of the term. From their point of view, a bunch of nut-cases masquerading as medical professionals were perverting a solid century’s use of scientific terminology, the very terminology whose accurate definition was necessary for embryologists to do and discuss their own work. This was not acceptable. As a result of their protests, the term “pre-embryo” gradually fell out of favor, but the embryologists were never forgiven for their rashness in objecting to the politically correct takeover. From 1973 through to the present day, embryologists have never been consulted by any American court as it considers issues of human embryology, such as contraception and abortion, nor have embryologists been invited to sit on any of the major ethical boards that have discussed embryonic stem cell research, IVF embryology or abortion technology like the morning after pill. Their views are not welcome.

And what are the views of honest embryologists? Well, honest embryologists note how the people who used to promote talk about “pre-embryos” are the same medical idiots who now consistently mis-use the phrase “fertilized egg.” Honest embryologists point out that embryonic stem cell research has never healed a single disease, while morally acceptable adult stem cell research has already healed dozens of diseases.

A good embryologist points out that every attempt to treat diseases in real people using stem cells from embryos has met with failure, often catastrophic failure. Embryonic stem cells injected into the brains of Parkinson’s patients, for instance, make the symptoms radically worse. Autopsies of test subjects, both animals and people, who had embryonic cell injections reveal that these embryonic cells often begin to grow into fetal body parts inside the skull. This is fairly typical.

Honest embryologists point out that anyone can get perfectly good embryonic stem cells from umbilical cord blood: hundreds of children are delivered in maternity wards each day in America. All we have to do to get hundreds of unique, clean, usable embryonic cell lines is ask for the umbilical cords after each delivery. That’s it. Oddly, researchers argue that they should be able to dissect children left over from IVF treatment because “the embryos will just be thrown away”, yet they have never extended the principle to umbilical cords, even though the stem cells from umbilical cords are actual useful in treating disease, whereas the stem cells obtained from dissecting IVF embryos are not.

Honest embryologists point to the fact that both cord blood and adult stem cells are actually being used to treat dozens of different diseases, from cancer to diabetes, right now, and have been for several years. They ask why certain scientists pretend embryonic stem cells are useful when both moral theory and repeated hard experience shows these cells are trash when it comes to treatment. They ask why these same people pretend adult and cord blood stem cells are barely useable when, in fact, adult and cord blood stem cells have provided the only cures that stem cell therapy can claim. Not one person on either side of the debate argues that this will change anytime soon.

But worst of all, anyone who listens to an honest embryologist might discover that embryonic stem cell researchers tears apart very small boys and girls for one damned reason: it’s one hell of a lot of fun to rip apart small children.

That, in a nutshell, is why the media never interviews embryologists. We can’t let medical professionals use that kind of language in front of children.

The Facts of Life

Want to hear something strange? Not once, never in the history of mankind, has a fertilized egg ever implanted in a woman’s womb. Surprised? It’s true. Misunderstanding this single fact destroys the ability to think clearly about a host of issues, yet even medical doctors regularly mis-speak when they discuss it. There’s a reason for this.

When a woman’s ovary releases an egg, the clock starts ticking. That single cell has only one of two possible fates: disintegration or fertilization. On average, the ovum disintegrates in about twelve hours; it certainly doesn’t last much more than twenty-four. The Fallopian tubes, the egg’s highway to the womb, are about six to eight inches long. The egg will disintegrate before it travels more than a third of the distance. Unless, of course, it meets a spermatozoon.

Since sperm have flagella, they move quite a lot faster than eggs. If they can make it to the egg before it disintegrates, the egg will be fertilized. Keep in mind what this means. As soon as the egg is fertilized, it meshes the new DNA into its own and starts using the new information immediately. That is, the fertilized egg almost immediately begins to divide.

Now, according to every embryology text in the world, as soon as a fertilized egg begins to divide, it is no longer a fertilized egg, she is an embryo. She will remain an embryo until about the end of the eighth week, when she is old enough and mature enough to be called a fetus. Yet even with that first cell division, the cells within the embryo are organizing themselves. As the embryonic child travels down the Fallopian tube, she is constantly growing, dividing, creating and organizing more and more cells within herself, getting everything ready to prepare for implantation in the womb.

Unlike fertilization, which is the work of a moment or two, it takes days for implantation to occur. The embryo typically makes it into the womb about four days after fertilization; the growth necessary to complete implantation won’t finish until roughly day ten. Like God in Genesis, it takes the embryo six days to create the right conditions and get everything in the womb arranged as it needs to be.

The moral of the story? No egg, fertilized or not, ever makes it to the womb. Not ever. Only embryos enter the womb because only an embryo can implant in the womb. A fertilized egg can’t implant. Even the pagans at the local IVF clinic recognize this. After the lab technicians conceive a child, they wait until the embryo is ready before they attempt implantation.

And herein lies the irony. The same people who deny the existence of the child in the womb or in the petri dish likewise can’t seem to keep their medical terminology straight. Back in the early 1980’s, researchers who had both the curiosity and the moral scruples of a hyperactive three-year old wanted to tear little boys and girls into little pieces in order to see how they worked. But they knew that tearing apart embryos might get them into trouble with ethics committees. So, they simply invented a brand new term: pre-embryo.

“Pre-embryo” was the smokescreen term for an embryo prior to the fourteenth day of growth. By changing the name to “pre-embryo”, the researchers neatly got around the ethics panels who didn’t want anyone messing with “embryos.” They could IVF and tear up little kids all day long, and no one would yell. The American media, which supports slicing and dicing little boys and girls no matter what the reason, went along with it. So did many OB/GYNs who performed abortion on the side. They avoided violating their Hippocratic oath largely through never having taken the real thing.

Embryologists, the people whose life’s work is the study of very small children, were uniformly livid at the invention of the term. From their point of view, a bunch of nut-cases masquerading as medical professionals were perverting a solid century’s use of scientific terminology, the very terminology whose accurate definition was necessary for embryologists to do and discuss their own work. This was not acceptable. As a result of their protests, the term “pre-embryo” gradually fell out of favor, but the embryologists were never forgiven for their rashness in objecting to the politically correct takeover. From 1973 through to the present day, embryologists have never been consulted by any American court as it considers issues of human embryology, such as contraception and abortion, nor have embryologists been invited to sit on any of the major ethical boards that have discussed embryonic stem cell research, IVF embryology or abortion technology like the morning after pill. Their views are not welcome. (link in this http://www.all.org/abac/ab020326.htm)

And what are the views of honest embryologists? Well, honest embryologists note how the people who used to promote talk about “pre-embryos” are the same medical idiots who now consistently mis-use the phrase “fertilized egg.” Honest embryologists point out that embryonic stem cell research has never healed a single disease, while morally acceptable adult stem cell research has already healed dozens of diseases.

A good embryologist points out that every attempt to treat diseases in real people using stem cells from embryos has met with failure, often catastrophic failure. Embryonic stem cells injected into the brains of Parkinson’s patients, for instance, make the symptoms radically worse. Autopsies of test subjects, both animals and people, who had embryonic cell injections reveal that these embryonic cells often begin to grow into fetal body parts inside the skull. This is fairly typical.

Honest embryologists point out that anyone can get perfectly good embryonic stem cells from umbilical cord blood: hundreds of children are delivered in maternity wards each day in America. All we have to do to get hundreds of unique, clean, usable embryonic cell lines is ask for the umbilical cords after each delivery. That’s it. Oddly, researchers argue that they should be able to dissect children left over from IVF treatment because “the embryos will just be thrown away”, yet they have never extended the principle to umbilical cords, even though the stem cells from umbilical cords are actual useful in treating disease, whereas the stem cells obtained from dissecting IVF embryos are not.

Honest embryologists point to the fact that both cord blood and adult stem cells are actually being used to treat dozens of different diseases, from cancer to diabetes, right now, and have been for several years. They ask why certain scientists pretend embryonic stem cells are useful when both moral theory and repeated hard experience shows these cells are trash when it comes to treatment. They ask why these same people pretend adult and cord blood stem cells are barely useable when, in fact, adult and cord blood stem cells have provided the only cures that stem cell therapy can claim. Not one person on either side of the debate argues that this will change anytime soon.

But worst of all, anyone who listens to an honest embryologist might discover that embryonic stem cell researchers tears apart very small boys and girls for one damned reason: it’s one hell of a lot of fun to rip apart small children.

That, in a nutshell, is why the media never interviews embryologists. We can’t let medical professionals use that kind of language in front of children.

Pain: Da Vinci’s Code versus The Passion

“What kind of God would want that kind of pain inflicted on someone?” This is one of the central questions posed in Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. It is also the question posed by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Mr. Brown’s answer is simple: God, whoever he or she might be, does not want the scourging and Cross that Jesus embraces. Thus, Jesus cannot be God.

The idea is logical in a certain sense. It demonstrates an understanding that pain is evil. But it also demonstrates a failure to understand why pain is evil, or how pain is evil. Mel Gibson understands the answers to these questions, his secular critics, critics who embraced The Da Vinci Code, do not. And that, as the poet says, makes all the difference.

While pain is a natural evil, it is morally neutral. A natural evil is something that was not originally part of God’s design for the world. God created everything good. Pain, at least to the extent it is present today, is not part of God’s original design for the world.

Now, there is a difference between natural evil and moral evil. Natural evil is a result that man created for himself, it is not what God intends for man. Hurricanes, tornadoes, blindness, plague, physical or mental deformity: these are all natural evils. But wait: if man causes natural evils, and hurricanes are natural evils, am I saying men cause hurricanes? That’s absurd! How can that be? Well, we have to understand how the world works.

First, we have to understand that grace is power. It is the power that keeps the universe running harmoniously. God set mankind up as stewards who care for the world. God sends grace into the world. We are supposed to direct this grace, this power so as to help all creation bring greater glory to God.

Man has two choices. He can accept the grace God sends new every morning, or he can reject it. If mankind rejects grace, then the world does not have the power needed to work harmoniously. We are all acquainted with machinery that breaks when it is run with insufficient power. The world is exactly that kind of machine. When we choose to reject the power of grace, the world inevitably fractures. Natural evils such as those listed above are some of the fractures.

As stated above, there is a difference between moral good/evil and natural good/evil. Morality refers to the consequences that are visited on persons. A morally good act fills a person with grace. A morally evil act strips grace away from that person. Each person can only affect his own state of grace. I cannot strip grace from you, nor can you strip grace from me. Conversely, I cannot add grace to you, nor can you add grace to me.

A natural good or natural evil refers to a created thing that is not a person. If a created thing is working the way God intended it to work, it is a natural good. If it is not working the way God intended it to work, it is a natural evil. Natural goods and natural evils also have no direct effects on persons. A natural good will not add grace to a person, nor will a natural evil remove grace from a person.

However, when created things work the way they are supposed to, we generally find it easier to act in a morally good way. When created things do not work the way they are supposed to, that is, when we encounter a natural evil like plague or drought or physical deformity, we tend to find it more difficult to act in a morally good way.

Now, earlier we noted that no human person can add to or injure another person’s state of grace. However, we can each add to or strip away the grace in a situation. This is a poor example, but it will have to do: suppose I see you sitting in front of a malfunctioning computer. I fix the computer. I have “graced” that situation, because I have turned a natural evil (your broken computer) into a natural good through the skills that grace has bestowed on me. As a result, your ability to retain the grace you have is much improved.

On the other hand, if you were sitting in front of a working computer and I harmed it or harmed you (perhaps blinding you with acid), I have used the skills given me by grace in order to strip away grace from the natural objects around you. Now you are forced to deal with natural evils, a situation that shouldn’t be the way it is. As a result, you are much less likely to be able to hold onto your own grace. For my part, I have misused the grace within me, and I am now emptied of it. Grace is power precisely because it is the presence of God, and God will not abide in one who does evil.

How we respond to the natural goods and evils we meet every day influences how we decide to cooperate with the grace that dwells within us. The idea is this: no matter what comes our way, we will choose to cooperate with the power of grace within us, we will not choose to empty ourselves of it in despair.
When we take something good and grace-filled – the human act of sex, for instance – and intentionally empty it of grace, we simultaneously empty ourselves of grace. But God sends grace new every morning. When we use the grace He sends to fill and thereby heal a situation that lacks grace, the very act can open us up so that God can fill us with even more grace if He chooses.

God is the source of grace. We experience pain because the world is short on grace. If the world is the road to heaven, pain is one of the potholes, a possible impediment to reaching our destination if we hit it with the wrong attitude and/or use it wrong. However, if at the moment we encounter pain, we remain open to the God Who is the source of grace, we become a pipeline. If we cooperate with the grace He places within us, He can use us as instruments to fill the potholes in the road. The world’s pain is lessened. Not only do we find ourselves on the road to heaven, but we have also helped make the road smoother for others to follow. Thus, like an athlete training for a marathon, a Christian can say “pain is good” only in reference to the pain he himself endures as part of the work he does with God as God goes about healing the world.

Dan Brown doesn’t understand any of this. All he sees is the pain of the Cross. He doesn’t understand that one man chose to stand still in the middle of our desert of pain. One man stood tall in the thrashing, fractured world, stood still and absorbed into Himself all the pain the world could deal out, all so that the grace, the power, necessary to heal the world could pour in through Him like water through a pipe, like water to a dry desert, to heal a dying world.

This column is a slightly adapted chapter from Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code, available through Bridegroom Press.