Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

Waiting To Exhale

So, I surfed into an article that was billed as reporting a "an unprecedented [pro-choicepro-abortion] summit [for pro-choicepro-abortion advocates] to re-examine their strategies — and the ethical aspects of the [abortion] debate" and found out that pro-abortionists are now seeking to capitalize on the post-abortion healing services sponsored by pro-life groups by offering their own post-abortion "healing services."

"Aspen Baker does something most women don’t do: she talks about her abortion. When she got pregnant at 23 she wasn’t ready to be a mother and her relationship was already dissolving. Pro-choice, Baker unexpectedly found herself facing a moral quandary about her decision. ‘I really struggled,’ she says. After the abortion, she figured she’d be given a list of support groups or even just a number to call. But the California hospital that performed the surgery sent her home with only a prescription.

"The procedure left Baker relieved, but sad enough to seek out counseling. What she found, though, were mostly judgmental pro-life Web sites and religious groups. Even when her search led her to volunteer at CARAL, the California affiliate of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, she didn’t find many sympathetic ears. The battle to keep abortion legal left no room for emotional turmoil. Neither side of the polarized political debate really spoke to her. ‘Abortion is either tragic or a simple choice,’ Baker says. ‘But I had a lot of complicated feelings about it.’

"Today, six years later, Baker finally has a number to call. In fact, it’s a post-abortion counseling hotline that she helped to create, called Exhale. She has joined a new generation of pro-choice activists and abortion providers that is insisting on talking about the emotions — and, yes, morality — surrounding abortion. Exhale recently went national and fields hundreds of calls a month in five different languages."

GET THE STORY.

Immediately I set aside the reason I checked out the article because I was intrigued by the notion of a "pro-choice" post-abortion counseling hotline. So, I went googling to find it.

SEE THE SITE.

And what exactly does Exhale offer women who have suffered abortions?

"Exhale offers a free, After-Abortion Talkline that provides emotional support, resources and information. The talkline is available to women and girls who have had abortions and to their partners, friends, allies and family members. All calls are completely confidential and counselors are non-judgmental.

[…]

"At Exhale, we believe there is no ‘right’ way to feel after an abortion. We also know that feelings of happiness, sadness, empowerment, anxiety, grief, relief or guilt are common. Abortion can be hard to talk about and finding the right person to talk with can be even harder. Exhale provides the opportunity to talk with someone that supports and respects you, in a safe and confidential environment."

GET THE STORY.

Or, to put it more pithily, in the words of one of Exhale’s satisfied customers:

"After calling Exhale, I felt relieved because I realized that I don’t have to feel ashamed about my abortion."

This isn’t about healing from an abortion; it’s about numbing the pangs of conscience. Screwtape must be proud.

PigsPolytheists In Space!

A reader writes:

I have a massive quandry…  I am having a problem rooting for the colonials in Battlestar Galactica due to the fact they are polytheists.  The cylons are Monotheists.

What did you think of [last week’s episode] Downloaded??!!!  <SPOILER DELETED> is great.

Okay, second question first. I thought that "Downloaded" totally rocked. Having an episode from the cylons’ viewpoint was totally great, and I can’t way to see how they play out the implications of this episode in the two-part season finale that starts this week.

I also thought that <SPOILER DELETED> was really, REALLY great. (For those who have seen the episode, <SPOILER DELETED> is the revelation that Caprica 6 has as soon as she wakes up in the rebirth tank–the one that "could cause a problem" for her with the other cylons. DO NOT spoil this in the combox for those who haven’t seen the episode. Just refer to it as "<SPOILER DELETED>".)

It was also nice to have numbers assigned to some of the other cylon models–to know that Sharon/Boomer is an 8, that the Lucy Lawless character is a 3, and that that TV-reporter-male-cylon guy is a 5.

Now to the main question: the monotheism/polytheism question.

In principle, I don’t have a problem watching a drama in which the good guys are polytheists and the bad guys are monotheist, because in reality some polytheists are good and some monotheists are bad.

For example: Suppose Battlestar Galactica got re-envisioned as an earth-based drama occuring in Kashmir.

Instead of the twelve colonies, we’ve got twelve Hindu villages–which are then wiped out by an invading hord of Taliban that have been skulking around Pakistan after their defeat several years ago in Afghanistan. The surviving Kashmiri villagers then are forced to flee for their lives to the lost, thirteenth village–called Earthstan–while constantly being persecuted by the Taliban hordes.

In watching such a series, I wouldn’t have any problem at all rooting for the villagers over the Taliban. It doesn’t matter that the villagers are Hindu and thus polytheists, while the Taliban are Muslim and thus monotheist.

Being a monotheist is not enough to get you on the side of right in my book. If you’re a monotheist who persecutes innocent polytheists, you’re a bad guy in my book, and I’ll root for the polytheists against you.

Now let’s apply this to the complexities we actually see in the series.

Yes, it’s true: The human culture presented in the series is largely polytheistic. But it’s not entirely polytheistic. There are atheists in the population (like Baltar) and agnostics (like Adama).

And there even seem to be human monotheists. If you watch the original mini-series, you’ll notice that the cylon they find at Ragnar Anchorage is walking around with Adama and talking about God (singular) and what he wants and Adama talks back to him about God (singular) and the conversation plays naturally. The fact that the guy is a monotheist isn’t a dead giveaway that he’s a cylon (something else gives him away, but not that), so there seem to be human monotheists out there somewhere.

So human culture isn’t monolithically polytheistic. (I guess it’s polylithically theistic.)

The cylons, by contrast, do seem to be solidly monotheistic, except for lone individuals who have "gone human," like the original Galactica Boomer (who is now on Caprica).

So what are we to make of this? Are we to approve or disapprove of polytheism?

I don’t think that the series means for us to do either. The polytheism of the main humans in the series is something of a relic of the original Galactica, with its Mormon-Egyptian-Greco-Roman themes. (They even visited the tomb of one of their gods of Kobol in the original series.) What’s new is that they’ve made the cylons monotheists.

Since our native sympathies are with the humans rather than the cylons, this could be read as an endorsement of polytheism over monotheism, but that doesn’t seem to be what the producers are doing.

Watching the show carefully, it seems that they’re trying to explore the viewpoints of both sides and not establish either side’s religion as right or wrong. It’s certainly true that the cylons were wrong to wipe out human civilization, but that doesn’t make their monotheism wrong in the eyes of the show.

Thus there are episodes in season 1 in which Galactica 6 stresses to Baltar that one of God’s main commands is procreation (true) and in which she tells him God loves him (true) and wants to redeem him from his sins (true) and that he needs to open himself to the will of God (true) and that he can thereby become an instrument of God (true)–which he then does BY HELPING THE HUMANS BLOW UP A CYLON BASE.

6 also tells Baltar that God doesn’t take sides in this conflict–that he transcends our conflicts and is not to be viewed as a tribal deity who always endorses the wars of one side over the other. Instead, God wants the love of all. This is certainly a rather enlightened view of God that doesn’t square with a monotheism=evil interpretation.

We also have the cylons distinctly calling into question the deity of the colonists gods, suggesting that they were mortal beings (like Athena, who lept to her death on Kobol) and calling them "idols"–which we from time to time see the colonists actually using. The monotheist perspective is thus allowed to critique the polytheist one in a way that does not happen in reverse. The polytheists on the show never attack the monotheistic view. They may attack the cylon’s beliefs about what God is like, but they don’t mock the notion that there might be a single, supreme God.

Except for occasional expletives like "gods d*mn it!" or "oh my gods!" or an occasional prayer for the soul of a dead person, the polytheism of the humans really doesn’t come into the plot that much. (The tomb of Athena story on Kobol was an exception.)

For the most part, there is much more exploration of monotheism and the monotheist viewpoint. Monotheism is where the action is on the show.

And it’s not clear that God is pleased with either society we see in the series. The cylons, for example, can’t reproduce on their own and are thus unable to fulfill what they acknowlege to be one of God’s commands. This is apparently because they lack love (which also allowed them to destroy human civilization). Those cylons who have learned to love from humans (Caprica 6 and the two Boomers) immediately start questioning whether it was right for their people to wipe out ours. In the most recent episode, two of these characters are forced to conclude that the cylon invasion was just wrong and that they must work to atone for it.

Similarly, the humans (particularly Adama) have been driven to recognize the sins of humanity and to question–at least in the abstract–whether human civilization deserved to survive, what with having enslaved the cylons and (one might add) having permitted abortion. This isn’t to say that the cylons were right to invade, but it points to significant sins for which humanity deserved a comeuppance.

Of course, when the series first premiered, I was quite nervous about the polytheism/monotheism thing and where the series creators were going to take it, but as the show has unfolded, it’s become clear that they aren’t making a statement about whether polytheism or monotheism or atheism is true. They’re simply exploring the dramatic tensions that are latent in these worldviews.

That’s okay. In fact, that’s something I’d do if I were writing the series. Drama is all about tension and unease, and if you can make the viewer tense and uneasy then you’re creating drama–you’re hooking into the emotions that will bring him back for more.

If someone handed me a series about a bunch of polytheistic humans pitted against a bunch of robots and asked me to re-envision it (essentially what Sci-Fi did for exec producer Ron Moore), I might very well make the robots monotheists. That’s a good move dramatically, because it forces the viewers to not view this as a simple good vs. evil battle.

Nobody in a drama should ever be purely good or purely evil, because nobody in real life is purely good or purely evil (except for Jesus and Mary being purely good, but it is so hard to write dialogue for them).

Purely good and purely evil characters are what you may find in fairy tales, but in works written for adults they make the drama flat and uninteresting. If the creators of Battlestar Galactica flipped the religions of the two groups, making the humans
monotheists and the cylons polytheists (or atheists) then the series
would be a lot less interesting than it is.

The viewer’s native emotions will be on the side of the persecuted humans (because, well, they’re humans), but if you want the villains to be anything other than the Evil Walking Toasters that they were in the first series, you need to give them some good points–and a religion that the viewers sympathize with is a good way to do that.

The viewer thus feels tense–uneasy. He’s torn between sympathizing with the humans because they’re humans and sympathizing with the cylons because they’re monotheists. We know, ultimately, that the cylons were wrong to wipe out human civilization, but as long as you can keep that tension going–as long as you don’t resolve it by endorsing one religious view over another–you’re doing drama, which is what you’re here to do.

Silly Streets, USA

Streetsign_5

Reason #1957346 to get yourself a post office box:

If you live on one of the streets below, named among the wackiest street names in the United States, no one who mails you letters will know.  (If you know of a wacky street name in your area that did not place in the contest, feel free to add it to the combox.)

The runners-up, in descending order from tenth-place to second-place in the contest:

  • Tater Peeler Road in Lebanon, Tenn.
  • The intersection of Count and Basie in Richmond, Va.
  • Shades of Death Road in Warren County, N.J.
  • Unexpected Road in Buena, N.J.
  • Bucket of Blood Street in Holbrook, Ariz.
  • The intersection of Clinton and Fidelity in Houston
  • The intersection of Lonesome and Hardup in Albany, Ga.
  • Farfrompoopen Road in Tennessee (the only road up to Constipation Ridge)
  • Divorce Court in Heather Highlands, Pa.

And the winner for the wackiest street name was…

**DRUM ROLL**

  • Psycho Path in Traverse City, Mich.

GET THE STORY.

Living on Psycho Path might be a lot of fun on Halloween, but I’d hate to live there year-round.

Annual Lent Fight!

Oyez! Oyez! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, for that annual powerhouse of pugilism, that feast of fisticuffs, and that mother-of-all-liturgical-battles,

THE ANNUAL LENT FIGHT!

Yes, indeed. It’s time once again to hash through all those vexing questions about Lent that are caused when Catholic folk tradition smacks into the Church’s official documents, with all their ambiguities, complexities, and lacunae!

Countless illusions and popular rumors about Lent will be dashed! Disputes will be started! Friendships will be ended! Ashes will be smeared! Hamburgers will be skipped!

Yes, the annual Lentomachy has it all!

To prepare yourself for the Annual Lent Fight, please check out the following links:

GENERAL

DURATION

PENANCE IN GENERAL

ABSTINENCE

ASH WEDNESDAY

HOLY THURSDAY

GOOD FRIDAY

FRIDAY PENANCE OUTSIDE OF LENT

Good Listening For Fat Tuesday

Nick Alexander has a new song out.

For those who may not be aware, Nick Alexander is a musician doing the Weird Al Yankovic schtick in a Catholic vein.

His latest song is "This Time Of Forty Days," based on the Police song "King of Pain."

It’s available for download on the Catholic Music Network and makes suitably lighthearted listening for Fat Tuesday (before we get all serious on Ash Wednesday).

CHECK IT OUT.

Raiders Of The Lost Sun Temple

Suntemple

A large sun temple of the Egyptian pharaohs has been dug up under an outdoor market in Cairo:

"The partially uncovered site is the largest sun temple ever found in the capital’s Aim Shams and Matariya districts, where the ancient city of Heliopolis — the center of pharaonic sun worship — was located, Zahi Hawass told The Associated Press.

"Among the artifacts was a pink granite statue weighing 4 to 5 tons whose features ‘resemble those of Ramses II,’ said Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities."

GET THE STORY.

<tongue in cheek>

Don’t these archaeologists remember what is commonly believed to have happened to the raiders of King Tut’s tomb?  Not to mention to the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

</tongue in cheek>

JIMMY ADDS: It’s always nice to hear from our old friend Zahi Hawass. Nice to know he’s keeping busy.

Old Testament Saints

A reader writes:

Are the Old Testament Prophets considered saints? And, if so, why aren’t they spoken of with the title of St Jeremiah, Isaiah, etc. I thought they were raised from the netherworld by Christ after His crucifixion and brought into heaven.

Anyone who died in God’s friendship before the time of Christ is now glorified with Christ in heaven, so they are saints in that sense.

For some reason, however, the custom of referring to Old Testament figures as saints never developed in Christian circles. This is a matter of linguistics and devotion more than theology, though.

With a few exceptions, we also don’t know for a fact which Old Testament figures made it to heaven and which didn’t. That, however, wouldn’t have been the reason that the custom didn’t arise. Most of the saints who are in the Roman Martyrology got there because of popular acclaim, not because of a papal intervention. Since the Old Testament presents many of these people as if they were God’s friends (even if we don’t have knowledge of the very ends of their lives in omst cases), there was certainly as much evidence for regarding them as saints as many in the Christian age who were canonized by popular acclaim.

I suspect that part of the reason early Christians didn’t acclaim them in this way is that they weren’t viewed as examples for us as directly as people living in our own age. They seemed more distant from us in a certain way because of the age in which they lived.

It also may be partly because–as revered figures from the Old Testament–their salvation was never really questioned, and so there was no push to have the recognized as saints. The approval that the Old Testament seems to give them may have been considered approval enough, so there was no need to get them extra recognition.

(The latter would also apply to those in the New Testament, but they’re closer to us in time; as dwellers in our own age, they’re more direct examples for us to follow.)

This is all just speculation, though. I don’t think we can say with certainty what the reasons were that the custom of who get’s called a saint developed as it did.

The Temporal Prime Directive

After the recent post about time travel, some readers wondered about the morality of interacting with the past and whether we would be obliged to refrain from changing historical events or not. In other words, would we be bound by a "temporal prime directive" against interfering with history if we travelled into the past.

This is actually something I’ve thought about, so here are some reflections.

The fundamental moral axiom is "Do good and avoid evil." This axiom is binding on all people, all the time. It is part of human nature. If we were transported into the past it would be binding on us then. We would have to do our best to do good and avoid evil, just as we are bound to do it now.

The question is whether interfering with history is a good or an evil–and whether it is even possible.

As sci-fi writers, among others, have speculated, changing history may not be possible. It may be, for example, that if we end up in the past then this does not represent a change to history. We were always part of history, and so whatever actions we take in the past played their proper role in how history did unfold.

If this is the case then three things follow: (1) We can’t change history because our introduction into it was always there, and it will unfold exactly as it did in our timeline and (2) we therefore don’t have to worry about whether we’re changing history. We can just do our best to do good and avoid evil. Also (3) we can avoid wasting our time trying to prevent outcomes that we already know (e.g., we may as well not try to stop 9/11 from happening). The issue of a temporal prime directive thus fails to arise if this is how time travel works.

There is also another version of how history is unchangeable. It could be that we were NOT part of history the "first time" it unfolded, and our insertion into the past OF ITSELF represents a change. It would appear, if this is how things work, that arriving in the past of itself creates an alternate timeline–one that is different than the timeline in which we originated.

But if that’s the case then, no matter what we do in the alterate timeline, we aren’t really changing history–not OUR history. That’s back on the original timeline that we left. The new timeline that we’re living in is one that budded off of ours.

If that’s the case then we are under no obligation to protect our own history because we have no ability to affect that history. That’s a timeline we are no longer part of.

It might be possible (depending on how time travel works) to get back to that timeline, but that would mean leaving the alterate timeline (no matter what good or bad we’ve done in it) and getting back to our original reality, in which we never appeared in history. If this is the case then visiting the past is like visiting an alterate universe. No matter what we do there, we won’t have to live with the effects of it once we return to our own home timeline.

So while in the "past" (really an alterate past) we would have the liberty to do good and avoid evil to the best of our ability. Stop 9/11? Sure! It’ll help the folks out who live in that timeline, even if our 9/11 will still be there when we return to our own timeline.

On the other hand, it may not be possible to get back to our own timeline. If we jump forward into the future, we may be jumping into the future of the alterate timeline that was created by our insertion into the past. In that case, we’ll have to live with the effects of what we’ve done. That’s an added incentive to be careful about what we do, since we’re now personally invested in the future of this timeline, but it doesn’t affect the fundamental moral calculus of how we should behave in it. Even if we weren’t going to stay in this timeline, the Golden Rule would tell us "Don’t mess up someone else’s timeline if you wouldn’t want someone else to mess up yours."

Since, on this option, we’re not really changing our own timeline, the issue of a temporal prime directive does not arise–at least not directly.

Of course, we could get scrupulous about the effects out actions will have on the timeline. Perhaps all kinds of "Monkey’s Paw" situations will arise and by trying to fix problems, we’ll actually make them worse.

Could be.

But that’s something we have to live with all the time back home in our original reality. We don’t know what the ultimate effects of our actions are going to be. We just have to do our best, based on the knowledge we have at the moment, to do good and avoid evil. If we’re in an alterate timeline but have an idea where it’s going to go based on the way our timeline did then that’s a bit of extra knowledge for us, but we can’t start out by second-guessing ourselves to death, worrying excessively about whether we’re helping or harming. We have to just do the best we can with the info we’ve got.

(And if we don’t like the results, we can jump back into the "past" again and bud off a new timeline where we can try to do things better. This, however, isn’t really fixing the existing timeline; it’s just transferring us to a new timeline where we hopefully won’t make the same mistakes.)

At this point we don’t have any experience with changing the "past," so we don’t really know whether attempting to do so generally produes good or bad (or neutral) results. It could turn out that attempts to change major historical events invariably makes things worse, but at this point we don’t have evidence for that. If evidence started accumulating then instituting a temporal prime directive of some kind would make sense, but imposing one up front would not make sense.

The mere fact of us being in the past when we weren’t originally means that some changes are made to history, and once we’re there we can’t avoid affecting things–just breathing and taking up space does that. So we may as well not second guess our ability to help the new timeline that we’re in until we get solid evidence that such attempts are more harmful than helpful.

(NOTE: God could have a "Please don’t mess with history" rule, but since he didn’t put it in the deposit of faith in our timeline means that we would likely only figure it out by experience. However, the very fact that he lets us go into the "past" when we weren’t originally there is an indication that he doesn’t mind us working to improve alternate timelines.)

On both of the two theories I’ve just sketched out, changing history isn’t really possible: in the first case because we were always part of history and in the second case because we are in an alterate timeline and not our own.

But is there a third possibility?

Could we really go back into OUR history when we weren’t there originally and change things?

I don’t think so. If we weren’t in history originally and then we put ourselves there then it seems to me that it’s no longer OUR history. It’s a new history–an alterate timeline. That seems to be true by definition.

And, as always happen when you try thought experiments that involve breaking things that are true by definition, you get paradoxes.

Thus if you suppose that we can inject ourselves into a history that we weren’t originally part of, you get things like the Grandfather Paradox. Since I don’t think that physical paradoxes can exist in actuality, I don’t think that this kind of time travel is possible.

There are other ways conceptualizing all this. In fact, there are a mind-numbing number of other ways (see that Grandfather Paradox article for examples). But seems to me that in the end it boils down to the two kinds of considerations I’ve mentioned here: Either our actions in the past were always part of history or we aren’t really living in "our" history as soon as we’ve entered the past.

Either way (and in any other scenario one might want to propose), the fundamental moral axiom still applies to us: Do good and avoid evil. The knowledge we had of how "our" history unfolded simply gives us extra information as we attempt to do that.

Forgiving The Unrepentant

Since I am notified of all new comments to my posts, whether or not they are old, I’ve been following a discussion currently raging on my original post at JimmyAkin.org, About A Blogger… The originator of the discussion was horrified over a question-and-answer I did sometime back on the Catholic Answers Forums and that was published in one of Catholic Answers’ newsletters.

"Recently I received a Catholic news flyer in the mail, in which Michelle Arnold answered someones question regarding forgiving others who do not repent first for their sins. Michelles answer was very startling to say the least, and for which her reponse was… we are not obligated to forgive others who do not ask for forgiveness (paraphrasing here).

"Her teaching on this matter is extremely in conflict with what Christ Himself taught us to do. Christ taught us through His example and words. Christ forgave all those who were crucifying Him on the cross, despite the fact that the perpetrators were not asking for forgiveness while torturing Christ on the Cross. In fact, Christ said ‘forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.’ Christ also instituted the Lord’s Prayer for us to pray, and in it, it clearly states that we must forgive others who tresspass against us, and does not state to wait for their repentence first!"

Ordinarily, my practice has been to avoid commenting on very old posts so that old discussions will not be perpetually rehashed. But since this discussion is still going strong in the combox, I finally decided to comment.

First, a link to the original Q&A from which the published Q&A was drawn:

GET THE THREAD.

My answer in the thread:

"[T]here is no requirement for a human being to forgive someone who is unrepentant. Indeed, if the person disagrees with you that he has even sinned then announcing your forgiveness may prove counter-productive since it is likely to cause annoyance and resentment. All that is required is that you continue to hope for that person’s ultimate salvation.

"That said, sometimes those who have been deeply wronged find it personally healing to try to forgive that wrong, even though the person who wronged them may not want their forgiveness. If a person who has been wronged wishes to try to forgive the evil committed against him, that can be meritorious and may make it easier to offer that forgiveness to the wrongdoer should that person ever request it."

If you have ever had someone with whom you have had a disagreement approach you and say "I just want you to know I forgive you," then you’ll understand what I meant when I said that offering forgiveness to someone who hasn’t asked for it and may not be repentant "is likely to cause annoyance and resentment." In order for your forgiveness to matter to someone, that person has to believe that he has sinned and needs your forgiveness. If he feels that he is perfectly justified in his actions, he is not going to be grateful for your forgiveness and your presumptuous offer of it can actually cause further damage to the relationship.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t internally try to forgive someone a wrong you believe that has been done to you, which is why I said that some people find it personally healing to try to forgive great wrongs done to them. It just means that it may be better not to announce your forgiveness to that person until it is requested. If nothing else, your preemptive offer of forgiveness may short-circuit any promptings that person may feel to examine his conscience (e.g., "I don’t need to seek forgiveness; I’ve already been forgiven and didn’t even need to repent.")

The reader’s reference to Christ’s own actions on the cross is also problematic. Christ wasn’t just forgiving his executioners, he primarily was petitioning the Father for the forgiveness of all of mankind collectively. That he said so aloud was necessary for the unique action he was accomplishing and should not be indiscriminately modeled by those whose individual circumstances differ radically in nature from the universal redemption of mankind accomplished by Christ.

As a side note, this is why the WWJD slogan ("What Would Jesus Do?") sometimes annoys me. There are things that Jesus did that cannot and should not be modeled by Christians because what he did is unique to his being God. For example, it would be wrong to overturn tables and chase out the bingo players at your local parish on the premise that Jesus cleansed the temple of the moneychangers. In that case, trying to apply a WWJD template to the problem would give you exactly the wrong action to take in addressing the question of Wednesday-night bingo at Our Lady of the Gambling Den Parish Community.

For more information on the subject of forgiveness, see the article by Jimmy that I linked in the online Q&A.

THE LIMITS OF FORGIVENESS.

First Confession Advice

A reader writes:

My husband is in RCIA, and he thinks he has to be in the Confessional for 6 hours, relaying every horrid thing he ever did in his childhood, like the one time he killed a bird out of meanness, and all those times he didn’t keep holy the Sabbath growing up, etc.

Okay, just to make sure you know: Your husband doesn’t need to confess anything from before he was baptized. Baptism wipes out all sins prior to it, so if he wasn’t baptized until sometime after he was an infant then he doesn’t need to worry about that chunk of his life.

And he keeps asking me for an example of a venial sin. Believe it or not, I can’t think of an example.

Well, killing a bird out of meanness and not keeping the Sabbath holy as a non-Catholic strike me as two good examples.

Killing a human is a grave sin, but killing an animal is not–unless by killing it you somehow gravely damage a human being (e.g., by killing the horse of a man who needs the horse to earn his livelihood or killing a very expensive purebred pet or something).

Similarly, non-Catholics are not obliged by canon law to attend Mass or to refrain from servile labor on Sundays. Their obligations for Sunday observance are much more general and, not being bound by a specific standard, they generally do not sin mortally if they fail to go to church or otherwise observe Sundays. This is especially so for those raised in households where Sunday observance was very lax.

Second, our pastor and instructor, whom I love and respect, kind of laughed and said, "I’ve been a priest for 35 years and I haven’t yet met someone who’s broken all ten Commandments."

I was thinking to myself, "Oh, yes you have. You’ve met me."

Further, my husband has also broken all ten. All one has to do is read one of those Examination of Conscience books to figure out that most people have broken all ten.

True, but you have to realize that the things listed in an examination of conscience aren’t all mortal sins. For example: "Have I stolen the property of another?" is only mortal if you gravely harm the person from whom your steal. If you take a box of pens home from work then that’s going to be venial (unless for some really weird reason the existence of your place of employment hinges on its having that box of pens or something).

If you steal a thousand bucks from work, though, that’s going to be mortal since that thousand dollars represents a thousand dollars of damage that was done to some person or persons (like your fellow employees) who would otherwise have it (the loss of a thousand bucks being a serious matter for anyone who isn’t very wealthy).

My husband was raised in a single parent home where religion was not a priority. I asked him the other day, "When you (stole the candy, killed the bird, missed Church) did you know it was a sin?" He replied that he knew in his heart those things were bad, even if he didn’t know they were ‘sins’. So, does he have to confess them?

The fact that he couldn’t articulate the word "sin" in connection with them doesn’t of itself mean that he’s off the hook, because he still knew they were wrong and did them anyway. But the fact that he was raised in this kind of religiously lax family (in the case of missing church) and that he’s talking about very small things (stealing candy, killing a bird) mean that the grave matter needed for mortal sin is not there.

Am I going to be an old woman before my husband emerges from the Confessional?

That would depend on whether there is a mini-black hole or other extreme gravitational force in the confessional that could warp spacetime while your husband is making his confession.

I mean, we’re trying to have kids, for crying out loud.

Good luck with that! We need more kids around!

Can you, at your leisure, please explain ‘First Confession: What to Say, What not to Say"?

In a post I did earlier today (by a strange coincidence), I talked about how the process of making a confession generally works, and I’m sure that they’ll give your husband additional guidance in his RCIA course.

I would say this, though: It is clear that your husband is currently suffering from a case of confessional scrupulosity, by which I mean that he’s overestimating what sins he needs to confess. This is a normal thing in persons just coming into the Church, because he hasn’t yet had a chance to learn what does and does not need to be confessed. As he learns more, this tendency should go away.

A standard piece of advice for people who have scrupulosity is that they are to confess ONLY those sins which they are CERTAIN were mortal sins and to refrain from confessing everything else, simply saying "And for all my sins I am sorry."

I would therefore look through the Ten Commandments, with a knowledge of the different ways one can offend against them, and say, "Can I remember any cases where I KNOW that I GRAVELY offended against one of these DELIBERATELY and KNOWING that it was a grave violation at the time?"

Since he was raised in a religiously lax family, he likely did not know that many of the sins he may have committed in his life were grave violations, even if they were.

Making this kind of confession will suffice. As long as he doesn’t deliberately hold back something that he KNOWS to be a mortal sin then the absolution will be valid, and if he later comes to the conclusion that something he failed to mention was mortal then he can confess it at that time.

I’d also be patient with him. First confessions of adult converts can often take a while. I think that my first one lasted for something like 45 minutes (though that may be a bad memory and it may have been considerably less). It took so long not because I had that many mortal sins to confess, but because I was new to confession and was in the same situation as your husband.

I didn’t know what to confess and I wasn’t efficient at it, so I went into too much detail and confessed all kinds of things I didn’t know to be mortal, just to be sure. I didn’t know, for example, that I could just say "I have THIS to confess and THAT to confess" and move through things swiftly. Today the same initial confession would take me five minutes–ten tops, depending on any questions the priest wanted to ask me.

Also, if it is going to take a long time, you can simply stay home while your husband does it. He also might want to make a special appointment for it rather than making other people wait in line during a really long confession.

One thing that might help your husband get through it would be to write out a list of what he needs to confess. If he does this, he should do it BY HAND (NOT on a computer, where there could be an electronic record of it created accidentally or by spyware).

If he thinks he may be overcome by emotion, he can also hand the list to the priest and say "I confess THIS." If he does that, he should afterwards get the list back from the priest and DESTROY it (tearing it into little bits and flushing it down the nearest men’s room toilet would be a good way).

Measures such as these should allow him to get through the confession more quickly and get back to your marriage . . . already in progress.

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