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."

Being Precise About Church Teaching on Hell

Pope Francis recently sparked a discussion when he told an Italian television program, “What I am going to say is not a dogma of faith but my own personal view: I like to think of hell as empty; I hope it is.”

I was not surprised he would have this view. It is common in some ecclesiastical circles and was proposed by theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved?

Given how Pope Francis’s comments often function as a lightning-rod, I was not surprised by the discussion that followed, and one contribution was a recent article by Ralph Martin.

Although framed as a piece about what the Church teaches on hell, Martin spent much of it arguing for his own view, which is the traditional one, that hell is both a real possibility and an actual reality for many people. He explores this further in his book Will Many Be Saved?

I wish Martin well in arguing his case—and arguing it vigorously. The thought that hell might be a real but unrealized possibility is a comforting one that can be attractive to many today. However, Scripture contains serious warnings about hell that do not sound hypothetical in nature.

As a result, the theological field should not simply be ceded to what we moderns find comfortable and reassuring. If there is to be any reassessment of the traditional view of hell as an actual reality for many, Scripture’s statements need to be taken seriously, and both sides need to be argued vigorously.

(I’d note, in particular, that in his book von Balthasar never even addresses Luke 13:23-24, where in response to the question, “Lord, will those who are saved be few?” Jesus responds, “Strive to enter by the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will seek to enter and will not be able.”)

My sympathies are thus with Martin, but I would refine a few things about his article.

First, in regard to Pope Francis’s statement that what he was about to say was “not a dogma of faith,” Martin offers a definition of dogma that could suggest it is essentially connected with salvation. I would point out, by contrast, that in current theological jargon, a dogma is a truth that the Catholic Church has infallibly defined to be divinely revealed, whether or not it has any direct connection with salvation. (Culpably rejecting a dogma is a mortal sin; but the truth itself doesn’t have to have a direct connection with salvation.)

Second, there is a passage where Martin conveys a misleading impression about the views of Cardinal Avery Dulles. First, he says that “the traditional interpretation . . . . by the Church’s greatest theologians is that it is very likely that many people go [to hell],” then he identifies Dulles as “perhaps the leading American theologian of the 20th century,” and then he cites a 2003 article that Dulles wrote in First Things.

The problem is that Martin quotes a part of the article in which Dulles refers to several passages of Scripture and says, “Taken in their obvious meaning, passages such as these give the impression that there is a hell, and that many go there; more in fact, than are saved.” The impression is thus that Dulles is firmly in the line of “the Church’s greatest theologians” who believe that “many go there; more in fact, than are saved.”

However, this is not Dulles’s view! Dulles noted the obvious interpretation of various Bible passages without asserting that the obvious one is the only possible one. In fact, he concludes:

The search for numbers in the demography of hell is futile. God in His wisdom has seen fit not to disclose any statistics. Several sayings of Jesus in the Gospels give the impression that the majority are lost. Paul, without denying the likelihood that some sinners will die without sufficient repentance, teaches that the grace of Christ is more powerful than sin: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). Passages such as these permit us to hope that very many, if not all, will be saved.

All told, it is good that God has left us without exact information. If we knew that virtually everybody would be damned, we would be tempted to despair. If we knew that all, or nearly all, are saved, we might become presumptuous. If we knew that some fixed percent, say fifty, would be saved, we would be caught in an unholy rivalry. We would rejoice in every sign that others were among the lost, since our own chances of election would thereby be increased. Such a competitive spirit would hardly be compatible with the gospel.

Martin’s article thus conveys a misleading impression of Dulles.

What does the Church actually teach? This is found in the Catechism, which says, in part, “The teaching of the Church affirms the existence of hell and its eternity. Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell” (CCC 1035).

The Church thus teaches that hell is a real possibility. If you die in mortal sin, you go there. But does the Church leave room for the idea that God might rescue all from mortal sin—even at the last moment?

The Catechism states: “The Church prays that no one should be lost: ‘Lord, let me never be parted from you.’ If it is true that no one can save himself, it is also true that God ‘desires all men to be saved’ (1 Tim 2:4), and that for him ‘all things are possible’ (Mt 19:26)” (CCC 1058).

The Catechism thus seems open to the possibility that God—for whom “all things are possible”—might be able to rescue all from mortal sin and thus hell might be empty.

This view seems to be permitted on other grounds. After von Balthasar proposed it in Dare We Hope, John Paul II named him a cardinal—specifically for his theological contributions—though von Baltazar died before the consistory.

Further, as Dulles notes in his 2003 article, John Paul II seemed to have a change of view on this subject. Dulles notes that in his non-magisterial 1995 interview book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, the pope raised von Balthasar’s view and says, “yet the words of Christ are unequivocal. In Matthew’s Gospel he speaks clearly of those who will go to eternal punishment.”

However, in a magisterial text in 1999, Pope John Paul seemed to have shifted, saying, “Eternal damnation remains a possibility, but we are not granted, without special divine revelation, the knowledge of whether or which human beings are effectively involved in it” (Audience, July 28, 1999).

Based on what he said, the pontiff was open on the question of “whether” human beings actually go to hell, and Dulles concludes that “the Pope may have abandoned his criticism of Balthasar.”

It should be noted that in the version of the audience currently on the Vatican web site, the words “whether or” have been deleted. However, this does not alter what John Paul II apparently said, and we cannot know why the words were deleted or whether John Paul II gave his approval to this edit.

For his part, Benedict XVI also took an optimistic view regarding hell in his 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi. He states:

There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell (n. 45).

He then contrasts these with people who are so pure they go straight to heaven and then concludes:

Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God (n. 46).

This latter category goes to purgatory to be purified. Pope Benedict thus thought that “we may suppose” that few go to hell, few go directly to heaven, and “the great majority of people” go to purgatory before heaven.

We thus see the three most recent popes taking optimistic views of hell, with the later John Paul II seemingly open to the idea it may be empty, Benedict holding that we may suppose those who go there are few, and Francis hoping that it is empty.

I’m firmly convinced of the value for theological discussion of vigorously arguing the traditional view that some and even many go to hell—and hearing what the optimists have to say in response. At the same time, when presenting the teaching of the Church, we should be aware of the flexibility that is being displayed on this matter, including by the recent popes.

Why Did Joseph Go to Bethlehem?

In the words of British archaeologist William M. Ramsay:

Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy; he is possessed of the true historic sense. . . . In short, this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians” (The Bearing of Recent Discovery on the Trustworthiness of the New Testament, ch. 18).

Despite this, numerous modern skeptics—many of whom are just repeating what other skeptics have said—treat Luke as if he’s hopelessly historically confused, particularly with regard to his birth narrative of Jesus, which says:

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all went to be enrolled, each to his own city. [So] Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David (Luke 2:1-4).

One of the skeptics’ criticisms of this passage is the statement that Joseph went from Nazareth to Bethlehem because he was of the lineage of David.

Here is where mockery commonly begins.

“This is ridiculous!” the skeptic will say. “David lived a thousand years before the time of Jesus! The Roman Empire would never conduct a census this way! It would never require people to go where one of their ancestors lived a thousand years ago! Nobody would even know that! I mean, do you know the city where your ancestors lived a thousand years ago?”

Despite the vigor with which some skeptics pound their pulpits on this subject, their criticism is simply misdirected. They are misreading what Luke says.

Prior to this point, Joseph has been mentioned only once in the text, when the angel Gabriel came to announce the birth of Jesus:

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary (Luke 1:26-27).

This passage indicates three things about Joseph: (1) he was betrothed to Mary, (2) he was of the house of David, and (3) he apparently has some kind of connection with Nazareth, since that’s where Mary was when the angel appeared. That’s all the reader knows at this point.

So let’s read the second passage discussing Joseph (2:1-4) and see what one of Luke’s normal readers would make of it.

Luke tells us that “all went to be enrolled.” The first thing to note is that Luke doesn’t tell us what kind of enrollment this was. He expects the reader to already know that from the events of the day. Many have assumed that this was a tax census, but we don’t know that. It may have been something else. In fact, there is a good chance that it was a loyalty enrollment that we have other records of, in which subjects of the Roman Empire swore their loyalty to Augustus Caesar.

However that may be, people needed to be somewhere that they could participate in the enrollment, so they went “each to his own city.” Obviously, this only applied to people who were away from their city during the period of the enrollment. If you were already in your own city, you didn’t need to go anywhere.

Did Romans require people to go to their own cities for enrollments if they were away from them? Yes, they did. In A.D. 104, the Roman governor of Egypt, Gaius Vibius Maximus, issued a decree that stated:

Since registration by household is imminent, it is necessary to notify all who for any reason are absent from their districts to return to their own homes that they may carry out the ordinary business of registration and continue faithfully the farming expected of them (lines 20–27; in Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, 268).

So—if you were away from your home city—you needed to go back there for events like this.

Luke then says, “So Joseph also went up.” From this, we can infer that—at the time of the registration—Joseph was away from his “own city.” Therefore, he returned there.

Where was he at the time? Luke says he went up “from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth.” Okay, so he was in Nazareth in Galilee. That’s not surprising in light of the fact he was betrothed to Mary, who was in Nazareth when the angel appeared.

So where was Joseph’s “own city”? Luke tells us that he went “to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem.” Thus, Bethlehem was Joseph’s “own city.”

We now come to the statement that really sets skeptics off: “because he was of the house and lineage of David.”

Luke includes this line to help explain why Bethlehem was Joseph’s “own city,” but skeptics draw a completely unwarranted inference from this and assume that everybody in the Roman Empire was required to return to where one of their ancestors from a thousand years ago lived.

Does Luke say that? Of course not! It would not be remotely practical to conduct a census—or any other kind of enrollment—in that way.

And that’s not only obvious to us; it was just as obvious to Luke and to Luke’s readers. Everybody knew that there was no such requirement for Roman enrollments, and neither Luke nor his readers would have ever dreamed that someone would make such a ridiculous inference.

If Luke had the ability to speak with a modern, mocking skeptic, one can easily imagine him wanting to say something like, “Don’t be an idiot. That’s obviously not what I meant!”

So what did he mean? What would an ordinary, first century reader have inferred from what Luke wrote?

A logical inference would be that Bethlehem was Joseph’s “own city” because he had a contemporary connection with Bethlehem, because “he was of the house and lineage of David.” In other words, it was his place of residence because he was a Davidite.

And that would not be surprising. Inheritance was very important in ancient Israel. The whole land was an inheritance from God (Exod. 32:13), and each tribe inherited a particular portion of land (Num. 34:18). This area had to be preserved, and parcels of land could not be transferred from one tribe to another (Num. 36:1-9). Parcels could only be temporarily “sold” (really, leased) to another person, and the owner got it back in the Jubilee year (Lev. 25:13-16). This included houses in unwalled cities like Bethlehem (Lev. 25:31).

All this created a legal framework that that tended to stabilize the possession of properties within particular families. This had the effect of anchoring the family of David in Bethlehem, and so there were Davidites there. We’re thus meant to understand that, because Joseph was of the family of David, he had a residence there—a home. In fact, it was his primary residence.

How, then, are we to explain Luke’s statement just a few verses later?

And when they had performed everything according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city, Nazareth (Luke 2:39).

This is at the end of Luke’s birth narrative, and so it is meant to be read in context of what has preceded it. The logical inference that Luke would expect his readers to make is that Nazareth was also Joseph and Mary’s “own city.”

In other words, they had two residences: Joseph’s residence in Bethlehem and their joint residence in Nazareth.

Why would they have two residences? Were they rich? Far from it. Luke relates that when they made the post-childbirth sacrifice for Mary, they offered “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons” (Luke 2:24). That was the offering prescribed for a poor woman who could not afford a sheep (Lev. 12:8).

We thus should not imagine that Joseph and Mary were rich and had two opulent homes. Instead, we should infer that their dual residency was a situation based on economic necessity.

Even today, many people have to live away from their family homes in order to find work, and they don’t just stay out on the streets. They find some kind of accommodation where the work is, but they still consider their family home their primary residence, and they travel back to it periodically. Usually, there are other family members there on a permanent basis. This is a pattern that happens in countries all over the world.

To cite just one example, if a couple is native to Sinaloa, Mexico but comes to Arizona to find work, they’ll have some kind of residence in Arizona and their primary, family residence in Sinaloa. The same is true of those who migrate for work elsewhere in the Americas, in Africa, Asia, the Philippines, and in the Middle East.

I’ve written about this before, but the logical inference that Luke would expect his readers to draw from this data is that Joseph had a residence in Bethlehem, which was his primary, legal residence (in keeping with Jewish property inheritance practices), so that’s where he went for the enrollment. However, for economic reasons he spent most of his time in Nazareth and also maintained a no-doubt humble residence there.

No mockery is warranted. This all makes perfect sense if you read what Luke says and interpret it sensibly.

BONUS! Click here for information about the “no room in the inn” verse?

What Does the Church Teach About Pet Euthanasia? (Dangerous Pets)

A correspondent writes:

On what grounds may a pet be euthanized?

We have an adopted dog that is highly destructive, more than we are willing to support financially, and more than we can manage with our limited time and attention. We are afraid for our one-year-old child’s safety, as the dog plays rough and has injured both my wife and me. The dog is confined to a kennel most of the day, since we cannot supervise and control him to prevent damage. We do not feel we can provide a good quality of life for this animal.

Day-training and boarding-school are not feasible, since the dog cannot ride in a car. We are not willing to pay for an expensive in-home behaviorist. We don’t have the time or expertise to train him ourselves.

We have tried re-homing the dog for months now. The foster family we got him from will not take him back. The local shelters will not take him as they are all at full capacity. Family, friends, and coworkers will not take him. We posted him on a couple of re-homing websites, with no success. We believe his chances of re-adoption are low due to his behavior and a pre-existing health condition.

We regret our decision to adopt this dog. We do not want to have an otherwise healthy dog put to sleep. But we do not know what else to do. We do not believe we are acting out of frustration alone. We are trying to consider what is best for our family’s wellbeing. Above all, we want to do what is right in the sight of God. If we are about to do something evil, we want to know it. So far, we have not found any clear teaching from the Church.

Can you help us?

I believe that I can.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

2415 The seventh commandment enjoins respect for the integrity of creation. Animals, like plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity

2417 God entrusted animals to the stewardship of those whom he created in his own image. Hence it is legitimate to use animals for food and clothing. They may be domesticated to help man in his work and leisure.

2418 It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly. It is likewise unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to the relief of human misery. One can love animals; one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons.

These passages do not directly address your question, but they do contain the principles that provide its solution.

Animals do not have rights the way humans do. Consequently, they are “by nature destined for the . . . good . . . of humanity” (2415).

“God entrusted animals to [our] stewardship. . . . Hence it is legitimate to use them for food” (2417), meaning it is legitimate to terminate their lives when human need requires it.

While “it is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly,” this is not the case when there is a human need requiring their death and it is “unworthy to spend money on them that should as a priority go to” human needs. Consequently, “one should not direct to them the affection due only to persons” (2418).

In your case, the animal is dangerous, it has already injured you and your wife, and you have a vulnerable child that it may injure. You have not been able to re-home it, and you do not have money to reasonably spend on alternative solutions (e.g., an animal behaviorist). At present, the dog is spending most of its time in a kennel for safety reasons, meaning it is not having a good quality of life, either.

In light of the principles and circumstances just described–and the lengths you’ve already gone to to try to find an alternative solution–Catholic moral theology would understand the decision to have the animal put to sleep. It would not be something evil. In light of the circumstances you describe, it sounds like it would be the best solution, even if it is a regrettable one.

For what it’s worth, a similar situation happened in my own family when I was a child. We adopted a dog that had been largely raised without human company, it was quite aggressive, and it attacked and harmed my little sister. My parents made the decision to have the dog put to sleep. This pained me as a child, but as an adult, I understand the decision they made.

Bottom line: We are not required to keep dangerous pets, and if there are no better solutions, they can be treated like other dangerous animals and put to sleep.

I hope this helps, and God bless you!

Can Science Reverse Death?

Popular Mechanics recently re-shared an article on social media with the audacious title, “A Groundbreaking Scientific Discovery Shows that We Can Reverse Death.” Is that true?

It depends on how you understand death. In the old days, it was relatively easy to determine whether someone was dead: he stopped breathing and his pulse disappeared.

That was a useful way of determining death because breathing is necessary to get oxygen to the blood, and a beating heart is necessary to push oxygen-laded blood to the cells of the body. Without that happening, every cell in the body would die.

Of course, mistakes could be made. Someone might be breathing really shallowly, and he might have only a faint pulse, but if he really stopped breathing and his heart really stopped, he was dead. End of story.

Things got more complex in the twentieth century. Techniques became available to keep someone breathing and to restart his heart.

In the 1950s, ventilators were introduced. These are machines that act like bellows to move air in and out of the lungs.

Also in the 1950s, the first (external) mechanical hearts became available, and by 1960, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) could help keep blood moving during a cardiac arrest, adrenaline could encourage the heart to resume beating, and defibrillators could hopefully shock it back into a normal rhythm.

All this raised the question of whether people who met the previous definition of death (no breathing and no heartbeat) should be considered dead.

By the late 1960s, a new criterion was proposed: absence of brain activity. This could make sense because a functioning brain was needed to keep things like breathing and hearts going without mechanical aid.

So perhaps—some reasoned—if the brain was no longer working, if the patient was “brain dead,” you could forego artificial respiration and heart stimulation and treat the patient as dead.

This meant you could harvest his organs, if he was an organ donor—including his precious heart. The first successful heart transplant took place in 1967, so maybe someone else could use the organ if the donor was brain dead.

There has been a lively debate about whether lack of brain activity should be used to define death, and advocates of brain death as the key criterion have won a lot of converts to their view.

At the same time, there have been concerns that doctors have been defining brain death in a loosey-goosey way, such as merely being in a persistent vegetative state rather than truly and permanently lacking brain function. This would let them take more people off life-support—freeing up medical resources—and harvest organs from more people.

Personally, I am not at all convinced that the brain death criterion is adequately defined—or applied—today, and so a person who is actually still alive may be killed by the removal of their heart for a transplant. Consequently, I have not agreed to donate my organs on my driver’s license.

While the brain death debate has been going on, the concept of death has begun to be questioned on a new front: the cellular level. Hypothetically, one could argue that a person’s body isn’t fully dead unless all of the cells in it have died, and things like brain function, respiration, and heart action are just things needed to keep the cells alive.

We thus might be able to help save more people if we could intervene to keep their cells alive long enough to fix whatever is wrong with their brain, lungs, heart, or other organs.

The Popular Mechanics article discusses a team of researchers who have been working on how to support the cells of the body when critical organs are not functioning. They call this system OrganEx, and preliminary trials on pigs have been successful, though human trials are still years off.

Other advances are also being made. It turns out that, if a person’s body and brain are cooled down in the right way, they can be brought back to normal functioning as much as six hours after cardiac arrest has occurred (see Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death).

We also now have implantable artificial hearts, and—though they aren’t yet as convenient and reliable as the one the biological version of Captain Picard had on Star Trek—we’re approaching the point where not having a functioning human heart may no longer be useful as a criterion for irreversible death.

What all of these advances have done is make death—which used to look like a simple either-or state—to look more like a process, and a process that in many cases can be reversed.

As medicine continues to advance, we may expect it to become more and more reversible, which will make it more challenging to define precisely when “final” death occurs.

Why Didn’t Jesus Defend Himself Before Pontius Pilate?

Readers of the four Gospels are struck by the fact that—when Jesus appears before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate—he says nothing in his own defense.

This isn’t just surprising to us; it also was striking to Pilate himself. We’re told:

Pilate said to him, “Do you not hear how many things they testify against you?”

But he gave him no answer, not even to a single charge; so that the governor wondered greatly (Matt. 27:13-14).

What should we make of Jesus’ silence? There have been many proposals.

During his trial, Jesus has been silent, a fact that has no genuine analogies in Greek, Roman, or later Christian trials. Jesus’ silence has often been explained with reference to the silence of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 53:7 (with whom Jesus is thus identified), but Mark and the other Gospel writers do not alert their readers that such an allusion is intended; or with the silence of the righteous sufferer (Pss 38:14–16; 39:9); as fulfilment of Psalm 22:15; as a reflection of Jesus’ portrayal as a sage or teacher of wisdom; as an expression of self-control and perhaps nobility; as Jesus proving that he is in command or showing his contempt for those who sit in judgment over him; or as showing that he is the eschatological judge before the final verdict (Eckhard Schnabel, Mark: An Introduction and Commentary, at 14:60-61a).

But what’s the real explanation?

It helps to note that his appearance before Pilate is not the first time Jesus has been silent. A few hours earlier, when he appeared before the Jewish ruling council, he was similarly quiet:

Now the chief priests and the whole council sought testimony against Jesus to put him to death; but they found none. For many bore false witness against him, and their witness did not agree.

And some stood up and bore false witness against him, saying, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands.’” Yet not even so did their testimony agree.

And the high priest stood up in their midst, and asked Jesus, “Have you no answer to make? What is it that these men testify against you?”

But he was silent and made no answer (Mark 14:55-61a).

However, there was one thing that did prompt Jesus to make a response:

Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?”

And Jesus said, “I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61b-62).

From this we see that Jesus apparently isn’t interested in responding to the charges made against him—even false ones like him saying that he would destroy the temple—but there is one thing he is interested in answering: the question of his identity.

When directly asked if he is the Christ, the “Son of the Blessed” (i.e., the Son of God), he responds straightforwardly: “I am.” He then identifies himself with the heavenly “Son of Man” figure from Daniel 7:13-14, who was given everlasting dominion over all peoples by God.

At the time, this figure was believed by some Jews to be a divine person who was sometimes referred to as “the lesser Yahweh,” and Jesus’ identification of himself with this figure was regarded by the high priest as blasphemy, so he tore his robes (Mark 14:63-64).

Jesus’ silence before the council on everything except one point is then replicated when he is brought before Pilate:

Pilate asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?”

And he answered him, “You have said so.”

And the chief priests accused him of many things. And Pilate again asked him, “Have you no answer to make? See how many charges they bring against you.”

But Jesus made no further answer, so that Pilate wondered (Mark 14:2-5).

Here again, Jesus is willing to address one question: the issue of his identity. When asked if he is king of the Jews, he responds affirmatively but somewhat cryptically. He could have simply said, “I am”—just as he did when the high priest asked if he was the Christ—the Jewish Messiah—who was understood as a coming king of the Jews.

However, here he says, “You have said so.” This is an acknowledgement that he does have that role, but he’s being cautious for a reason that we will come back to.

Other than this one point, however, Jesus does not respond to any of the other things said against him. Mark does not tell us what the charges were, but Luke fills at least some of them in:

They began to accuse him, saying, “We found this man perverting our nation, and forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ a king. . . . He stirs up the people, teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee even to this place.” (Luke 23:2-5).

Jesus had no interest in responding to these charges—including the false one that he forbade paying taxes to Caesar (in fact, he had done the exact opposite; Mark 12:17, Luke 20:25).

When Pilate heard that Jesus was Galilean, he then sent him to Herod Antipas, but here again, Jesus was silent:

When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had long desired to see him, because he had heard about him, and he was hoping to see some sign done by him. So he questioned him at some length; but he made no answer.The chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him (Luke 23:8-10).

Apparently—unlike the high priest and Pilate—Herod did not raise the issue of Jesus’ identity in a direct enough way, and he ignored the accusations being made.

So what’s the reason for his silence? The answer is found by looking at Jesus’ recent actions.

Jesus has already made three major predictions of his coming death and resurrection (Mark 8:31, 9:30-31; 10:33-34), the most explicit of which is the final one:

Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem; and the Son of man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and deliver him to the Gentiles; and they will mock him, and spit upon him, and scourge him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise (Mark 10:33-34).

He thus foresaw that—upon going to Jerusalem—he would be taken into custody by the Jewish authorities, turned over to the Romans, and be sentenced to death.

Upon arriving at Jerusalem, he fulfilled a messianic prophecy from Zechariah 9:9 by triumphantly riding the foal of a donkey into the city, depicting himself as the king of Jerusalem described in Zechariah, and being proclaimed by the joyful crowd as “the king of Israel” (John 12:13), “the king who comes in the name of the Lord” (Luke 19:38), and “the Son of David” (Matt. 21:9). He even refused to silence the crowd when urged to do so by the Pharisees (Luke 19:39-40).

Then he set himself on a collision course with the Jewish temple authorities by driving out of the temple those who bought and sold sacrificial animals and by overturning the tables of the moneychangers (Matt. 21:12-13, Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-46; cf. John 2:14-22).

He was then arrested, tried by the Jewish council, and delivered to Pilate for execution—just as his passion predictions indicate he had planned.

This gives us the key to understanding both Jesus’ silence and his responses to the question of his identity.

He is silent to the charges against him because he is here to die. He is not interested in defending himself against false charges like saying he would destroy the temple or that one should not pay taxes to Caesar. His disciples knew the truth about these matters, but he isn’t interested in convincing the authorities of his innocence. He’s planning on being put to death.

His silence also may be a fulfillment of messianic prophecies, such as Isaiah’s statement about the Suffering Servant:

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth (Isa. 53:7).

However, fundamentally he is here to die and therefore he needs to be convicted of something that carries the death penalty.

This is why he responds on the question of his identity when the high priest asks if he is the Christ. He frankly says, “I am.” However, claiming to be the Messiah was not guaranteed to be regarded as a crime by the Jewish council, so Jesus does not leave it there: he also claims to be a divine figure, the Son of Man, which he knows that the high priest will regard as blasphemy and worthy of death.

However, claiming to be a divine figure was not necessarily a crime to the Romans. Their emperors—among others—were popularly regarded as divine, and Pilate likely would not have known about the Jewish Son of Man, anyway, so he drops this part in front of Pilate.

Instead, when Pilate asks him if he is king of the Jews, he acknowledges this but in a cryptic way that gives him what we now call “plausible deniability”—i.e., you’ve said that I’m the king of the Jews; I haven’t said that.

John clarifies that Jesus even told Pilate that “My kingship is not of this world” (John 18:36)—indicating that he isn’t interested in political power and thus not interested in challenging the authority of Caesar, who then held the authority to appoint Jewish kings.

Pilate thus emerges from his conference with Jesus and tells the Jewish authorities that he doesn’t find Jesus guilty of any crime, which causes the authorities to stir up the crowd to demand Jesus’ execution, and Pilate finally capitulates.

Jesus thus gives Pilate only an acknowledgement of his royal status, but it’s cryptic and he clarifies that he’s not interested in political power.

This makes it appear that Jesus wanted responsibility for his execution to ultimately fall on the Jewish authorities, in accordance with messianic prophecy. As Jesus himself said:

Have you not read this Scripture: “The very stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes”? (Mark 12:10-11; quoting Psalm 118:22-23).

We thus see Jesus performing a complex set of maneuvers in order to fulfill his mission: He is silent against false charges because he is here to die; he says enough to the Jewish authorities to bring about his conviction; he is truthful with the Roman authorities about his lack of interest in worldly rule; and ultimately it is the action of the Jewish authorities that causes Pilate to capitulate and order his execution—in accordance with the prophecy that the Jewish authorities (the builders) would reject Jesus (the stone).

Why Isn’t the Bible More Explicitly Catholic?

Under the heading “Why isn’t the Bible more explicitly Catholic?” a Redditor asks:

For example, why didn’t Jesus just directly say “Peter, you and your successors will lead my Church as Vicar of Christ until I return.” Or why didn’t He say outright “priests are to bless ordinary bread and wine and through that it will become my body.”

Questions of this sort appear in a lot of forms, and on a lot of different topics—“Why aren’t people nicer to each other?” “Why don’t we have a cure for cancer?” “Why can’t I find my car keys when I want them?” “Why isn’t the existence of God more obvious?” and so on.

“Why not?” questions like this express a wish that for something and ask why this wish is not fulfilled.

Taken as a group, “Why not?” questions are all subcases of what philosophers and theologians call the problem of evil. The thing that we are wishing for is a good, and since we don’t have it, we are experiencing a deprivation of that good—an evil. The question is why the evil exists, and if the question is asked in a theological context, why God would allow the evil to exist.

We have partial answers to the problem of evil, and sometimes the answers to “Why not?” questions are straightforward: If you’re regularly having trouble finding your car keys, it’s likely because you haven’t established the habit of putting them in a single place so that you know where to find them.

But there is a limit to our knowledge, and some evils have an element of mystery that remains even when we’ve explained as much as we can. We know that God would not allow an evil if he weren’t going to bring about an equal or greater good from it (CCC 324). But we don’t see the big picture, and so—in this life—we don’t always know what that good is, and thus we don’t always know why God allows a particular evil.

What about the question of why the Bible isn’t more explicitly Catholic? Well, it’s already pretty darn Catholic.

Jesus declared Peter to be the rock on which he would build his Church (Matt. 16:18-19), which makes Peter the head of the Church once Jesus ascends. If he didn’t mention Peter’s successors reigning in later ages, it’s likely because it had not yet been revealed that there would be any later ages. The first generation of Christians tended to assume that Jesus would return in their own day (1 Thess. 4:15), and the fact that there would be a long period before the end of the world wasn’t revealed for some time (Rev. 20:1-6).

That much of the answer is easy, but why didn’t God reveal it sooner that the world would go on for so long? We can’t say for sure.

When it comes to a clearer statement on transubstantiation, the Gospels are already quite clear: Jesus takes ordinary bread and wine (Mark 14:22a, 23a) and says, “This is my body” and “This is my blood” (Mark 14:22b, 23b). He says, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you” and “my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed” (John 6:53, 55).

Could he have been even more explicit and given a technical statement of the doctrine of transubstantiation? Sure, but not without using the language of a later age of history, and as we’ve seen, the existence of later ages hadn’t yet been revealed.

Then there’s the issue of whether giving a fuller statement would actually solve the problem. Even if Jesus referred to successors of Peter, people could still find ways of denying their authority. And even if he’d been more explicit about transubstantiation, people could still say he was “speaking symbolically.”

Ultimately, we can’t be fully sure of why God has done everything the way he has. However, we can tell—from the way that the Bible is written in the language of a particular culture—that he wanted to use that culture’s language and modes of thought to communicate his message—not the styles of communication used by other, later cultures.

We also can tell that he didn’t want to make it too easy on us. He apparently wants us to learn by wrestling with the text. That’s the purpose of Jesus’ teachings in parables and of the prophets seeing symbols in their visions.

There is, apparently, a good to be gained by struggling with texts whose meaning isn’t immediately transparent, even if we can’t see all of the dimensions of this good until the next life.

New Near-Death Experiences Study Released

The subject of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) came to public attention with the release of Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life.

In it, he recounted numerous incidents from people who were on the brink of death or who had even clinically died.

They reported things like leaving their bodies, looking down and seeing doctors and nurses working on them, traveling through a tunnel, encountering a bright light, meeting dead loved ones and religious figures, experiencing a review of their entire life, glimpsing a beautiful realm, feeling peace and joy, and ultimately being told that they needed to return to their bodies.

Since Moody’s groundbreaking work, other researchers have continued to look into NDEs. One of them is British doctor Sam Parnia, who now works in New York.

Between 2008 and 2012, he led what is known as the AWARE study (for AWAreness during REsuscitation), which examined the Near-Death Experiences of people who had undergone cardiac arrest and were in the process of being brought back.

More recently, he led a follow-up study called AWARE-II, and the results were recently published in the journal Resuscitation.

AWARE-II studied the cases of 567 people who experienced cardiac arrest. Unfortunately, only 53 of them survived, and only 28 completed interviews, so the sample size was small. Of the interviewees, 6 of them (21%) recalled transcendent experiences that have commonly been called NDEs. This is broadly in line with previous studies.

When the study was published, press accounts misleadingly claimed that it suggested dying people access “new dimensions of reality,” which without context would suggest other planes of existence.

Dying people may do that, but this isn’t what the authors of the study meant. They meant something more mundane and named the “other dimensions” as “including people’s deeper consciousness—all memories, thoughts, intentions and actions towards others from a moral and ethical perspective.” In other words, as part of the “life review” that NDErs commonly report, they are accessing other dimensions of themselves as they look at the events of their lives from a moral perspective.

Among the things that the study did find is evidence that consciousness persists even when it is not detectable, which the authors pointed out has broader implications, such as for people in “persistent vegetative states.”

They also found that substantial brain activity could resume as long as 60 minutes into cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), challenging the idea that irreversible brain damage occurs by 10 minutes after the heart stops.

The surprising lucidity of the patients’ transcendent experiences—such as their detailed life reviews—suggested that a form of “disinhibition” occurs that allows them to access long-dormant memories.

When it comes to the nature of consciousness—whether it is generated by the brain or by a separate entity (i.e., soul) that interacts with the brain, the authors concluded:

Although systematic studies have not been able to absolutely prove the reality or meaning of patients’ experiences and claims of awareness in relation to death, it has been impossible to disclaim them either. The recalled experience surrounding death now merits further genuine empirical investigation without prejudice.

However, they also noted that “the paradoxical finding of lucidity and heightened reality when brain function is severely disordered, or has ceased, raises the need to consider alternatives to” the idea that consciousness is generated by the brain.

Hopefully, future studies of NDEs will further clarify matters and provide additional evidence that consciousness is not generated by the brain and thus provide scientific data supporting the existence of the soul.

Mass Stipends and Simony

If you look at the bulletin for a typical Catholic parish, you’re likely to see a schedule of upcoming Masses along with notes for “Mass intentions” like “for the holy souls in purgatory,” “pro populo,” “the Brown family,” “John and Jane Smith,” etc.

Some of these are straightforward. If the Mass intention is for the holy souls in purgatory, that means that the priest will intend to apply the spiritual benefits of the Mass in a special way to these souls.

Similarly, in Latin, pro populo means “for the people,” and so that Mass will be intended to benefit the people—meaning the people of the parish.

But what about Mass intentions for “the Brown family” or “John and Jane Smith”? Obviously, the Masses are intended for the benefit of the named individuals, but why do they rank? Why do they get Masses celebrated for their benefit?

The answer is that they asked. At some point, they spoke to the priest (or called the parish office), said that they’d like to have a Mass celebrated for their intentions, and got put on the schedule.

You can do the same thing!

But there’s something else that they likely did, which was to offer what’s known as a Mass offering or “stipend.” This is a sum of money that is given to the priest who celebrates the Mass.

At this point, your spider sense make go off. You may be wondering, “Money? For a Mass? Is this some clever device to extract money from the faithful? Is it a form of clerical abuse of the laity? And since the Mass is a sacred thing, is this the sin of simony?”

As we’ll see, the answer to these questions is no—at least, not unless a priest is breaking the law.

The Gospels record Jesus making statements that exist in tension with each other. For example, as Jesus is sending out the Twelve on a preaching mission, he tells them not to take a bunch of supplies with them, because “the laborer deserves his food” (Matt. 10:10). Luke’s parallel passage has “the laborer deserves his wages” (Luke 10:7).

Passages like this indicate that ministers of the Gospel have a right to earn their living from their ministry—a theme stressed in other passages in the New Testament (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:4-14; 1 Tim. 5:18), and St. Paul summarizes Jesus’ teaching by stating, “the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel” (1 Cor. 9:14).

On the other hand, just two verses before Jesus told the Twelve that the worker deserves his food, he told them, “You received without pay, give without pay” (Matt. 10:8).

That makes it sound like ministers shouldn’t charge for their work. As we often do in Christianity, we thus have two principles that at first seem opposed and need to be harmonized. They both reflect aspects of a deeper, more complex truth.

Light may be shed on the situation by the case of Simon Magus. In Acts 8, the magic practitioner Simon converts to Christianity through the ministry of Philip the Evangelist in Samaria, and then Peter and John arrive to confirm the Samaritan converts.

When the converts receive the Holy Spirit, Simon is impressed and offers them money, saying, “Give me also this power, that any one on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit” (Acts 8:19). Peter then rebukes him “because you thought you could obtain the gift of God with money” (Acts 8:20).

This led to Simon’s sin being named after him—simony—and today it is defined as “the buying and selling of spiritual things” (CCC 2121).

How can we harmonize the biblical data? On the one hand, ministers have a right to earn their living from the gospel, so they must be able to receive money—or goods and services—in connection with their work. That’s not the problem.

The problem must be something more specific—like how or under what conditions they receive the money.

One way of receiving money is accepting donations in a general way, without them being tied to any specific act of ministry. This is how most ministers today—Catholic and otherwise—earn their salaries.

However, you also could pay someone on a per act basis. This is the way non-salaried employees get paid—e.g., for each bushel of grain harvested, each chair put together, or each article written, they receive a certain amount of money. The same could be applied to ministers.

There’s nothing immoral about either a general salary or a per act payment, and the same applies to ministerial laborers as much as any others.

So what was wrong about Simon’s situation? For a start, he was essentially offering to buy ordination from the apostles. But ordination is not simply a commercial good. It is a gift of God and a calling to the service of others. That fits with the definition of simony as the buying of spiritual things.

But perhaps there’s something more to learn here. What would Simon have done with ordination if he had obtained it? Presumably, he would have used it to make money.

He’d previously amazed people with his magic—from which he no doubt earned income—and after ordination he would offer to give the Holy Spirit to people in exchange for money, which would fit with the other side of simony—the selling of spiritual things.

This also would have been wrong for Simon to do, but why is that the case if ministers have a right to earn their living from ministry?

Think about what happens in a store: There’s something you want to buy—maybe even something you desperately need—and the seller asks money for it. But what if you don’t have the money? What happens then is that you don’t get the wanted or needed item.

Now cast your mind back to the ancient world, when the overwhelming number of people were poor and barely scraping by, living hand-to-mouth.

Spiritual things are the most essential things in life, and if they are being sold—in the proper sense of the term—then the poor would just have to do without spiritual things!

You’re a poor person and can’t pay to get baptized to be forgiven and go to heaven? Too bad for you!

Yet God loves the poor, and so Christian ministry must not allow such situations to occur.

Christian ministers deserve to earn a living from their ministry, but the poor deserve to have the benefits of that ministry, even if they can’t pay. Any system of compensation for Christian ministers must incorporate these principles.

Therefore, ministers cannot act like shopkeepers and deny spiritual goods to those who can’t afford to pay for them. There’s nothing wrong with compensating ministers on a per act-of-ministry basis, but if they refuse to minister to those who cannot pay then they cross the line into selling spiritual goods and thus into simony.

What about Mass stipends? There have been abuses of Mass stipends in the past, but for centuries the Church has implemented strict policies to prevent abuses.

There’s nothing wrong with compensating a priest for saying a Mass for your intentions, but there need to be—and are—laws to keep this from becoming a money-making scheme, an abuse of the faithful, or outright simony.

The principal laws are found in canons 945-958 of the Code of Canon Law. That’s right, 14 canons devoted to just this topic! Counted other ways, the section amounts to 22 subsections and over 800 words—just devoted to regulating the kinds of stipends priests can accept and how they must handle them. That’s an indication of how seriously the Church takes this issue.

A fundamental protection is set up even earlier, when the Code says:

The minister is to seek nothing for the administration of the sacraments beyond the offerings defined by competent authority, always taking care that the needy are not deprived of the assistance of the sacraments because of poverty (can. 848).

So a priest can’t ask (or hint) that he’d like more than what the locally approved offering is. In the United States, this ranges between $5 and $20 for the celebration of Mass, with most dioceses setting it around $10.

And even those who are impoverished are not to be “deprived of the assistance of the sacraments.” Later, this theme is picked up again: “It is recommended earnestly to priests that they celebrate Mass for the intention of the Christian faithful, especially the needy, even if they have not received an offering” (can. 945 §2).

With the poor and others who have not made an offering taken care of, that prevents outright selling and thus simony.

It also keeps this from being a form of spiritual abuse of the faithful: The Church earnestly exhorts the priest to say Mass for the intentions of a member of the faithful even without an offering.

And about this being a money-making scheme? The Code provides, “No one is permitted to accept more offerings for Masses to be applied by himself than he can satisfy within a year” (can. 953).

Except for Christmas, priests are allowed to keep only one Mass offering for himself per day (can. 951 §1), so if you multiply $10 by 365 days, that would be an annual sum of just $3,650. Nobody is going to get rich on that.

The Code also provides numerous other protections for the faithful. For example, if the faithful give an offering and it isn’t clear how many Masses they want said, the priest is supposed to compute it from the offering.

Back when I entered the Church in 1992, the standard Mass stipend in Arkansas was $5, and one family in my parish made a $50 donation—wanting only one Mass—and they were surprised to find 10 Masses listed on the schedule for their intentions!

The Code also mandates a bookkeeping system to ensure that the Masses are said. Pastors of parishes are “to have a special book in which they note accurately the number of Masses to be celebrated, the intention, the offering given, and their celebration,” and the bishop or his representatives are required to audit this book every year (can. 958).

The Code even provides punishments for priests who traffic in Mass offerings (can. 1383).

There are additional provisions to ensure that the wishes of the faithful are strictly honored in this matter, and the Church is very serious about Mass offerings remaining modest, in keeping with the legitimate financial support of the Church and its ministers, and not turning into a crass money-making scheme.

5 Things to Know About the Pope, St. Vincent of Lérins and Doctrinal Development

In a recent interview, Pope Francis invoked St. Vincent of Lérins in relation to the concept of doctrinal development — especially as a remedy to what the Pope called indietrismo (an attitude of “being backward-looking”) among some Catholics. He has done so previously.

The linkage of doctrinal development to Vincent of Lérins may come as a surprise for two reasons. One is that the concept is commonly linked to St. John Henry Newman, and the other is that Vincent is most famous for a quotation that some might take as rejecting doctrinal development.

Here are five things to know and share.

1) Who was St. Vincent of Lérins?

Vincent of Lérins was a French monk who lived in the early 400s. He belonged to a monastery on the Island of St. Honorat, one of the Lérins Islands off the southern coast of France.

When Vincent was born is unknown. His death occurred sometime between A.D. 434 and 450.

One of the controversies of his time centered on questions of grace, free will, predestination and original sin. The two poles of this debate were the British monk Pelagius and the North African bishop St. Augustine. The former stressed free will and minimized the role of grace in the Christian life, while the latter did the reverse.

Many in this time were not fully satisfied with the positions proposed by either Pelagius or Augustine, and some advocated middle positions, some of which were later deemed heretical and referred to as “semi-Pelagianism.”

Like many in France at this time, Vincent has been regarded as a semi-Pelagian, but it is unclear what his exact position was. Further, since semi-Pelagianism had not been condemned in his day, he was not blocked from being regarded as a saint.

His feast day in the Roman Martyrology is May 24.

2) What is St. Vincent famous for writing?

We may have more than one work that Vincent penned, but the only one regarded as certainly by him is called the Commonitories (from a Latin term meaning “remembrances” or “warnings”).

He wrote it under the pen name Peregrinus (Latin, “the Pilgrim”), and he composed it about the year 434 — three years after the Council of Ephesus declared that the Blessed Virgin Mary can be referred to as the Theotokos (Greek, “God-Bearer” or “Mother of God”).

This title is not found in Scripture and arose from popular piety. As a result, some viewed it as an impermissible addition to Christian faith and practice.

Between the Theotokos controversy and the Pelagian-Augustinian controversy, the topic of whether developments of doctrine were legitimate or heretical was under discussion at the time.

It was in this context that Vincent wrote the Commonitories, and he set before himself the task of determining how to distinguish the true Catholic faith from heresies, writing:

With great zeal and full attention I often inquired from many men, outstanding in sanctity and doctrinal knowledge, how, in a concise and, so to speak, general and ordinary way, I might be able to discern the truth of the Catholic faith from the falsity of heretical corruption.

From almost all of them I always received the answer that if I or someone else wanted to expose the frauds of the heretics and escape their snares and remain sound in the integrity of faith, I had, with the help of the Lord, to fortify that faith in a twofold manner: first, by the authority of the divine Law; second, by the tradition of the Catholic Church.

Vincent thus appeals to both Scripture and Tradition, and the Commonitories has passages that have been cited both by those who are cautious about the idea of doctrinal development and by those who are enthusiastic about it.

3) What did Vincent write that those who are cautious about doctrinal development cite?

Vincent explains that, although Scripture is “more than sufficient in itself,” it is interpreted in different and heretical ways by some people, and so he explains that one must interpret it in light of how it has been read in the Church. He states:

In the Catholic Church itself, every care should be taken to hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always and by all [quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus].

This is truly and properly ‘Catholic,’ as indicated by the force and etymology of the name itself, which comprises everything truly universal.

This general rule will be truly applied if we follow the principles of universality, antiquity and consent.

This is the most famous passage in St. Vincent. It is an expression of what has become known as the “Vincentian Canon” and — taken on its own — it could be read as putting a firm break on any doctrinal development.

If we must “hold fast to what has been believed everywhere, always and by all,” then that could seem to leave no room for development in Catholic teaching over time.

The passage thus has been cited by those who wish to deemphasize the possibility of doctrinal development.

However, this is not the only thing that Vincent has to say on the subject.

4) What did Vincent write that those who are enthusiastic about doctrinal development cite?

Later in the Commonitories, Vincent makes it clear that he believes in the idea of doctrinal development, which he refers to as “progress [profectus] of religion.” He writes:

Teach precisely what you have learned; do not say new things even if you say them in a new manner.

At this point, the question may be asked: If this is right, then is no progress of religion possible within the Church of Christ?

To be sure, there has to be progress, even exceedingly great progress.

You’ll notice that one of the things Vincent mentions is the possibility of teaching things one has learned in the past but saying them “in a new manner.”

This refers to the controversies the Church had gone through in which new vocabulary was introduced to express ideas handed down from the apostles — such as saying that Christ is homoousios (Greek, “consubstantial”) with the Father or that Mary is Theotokos.

This teaching of ancient things “in a new manner” thus refers to a form of what is today called doctrinal development. He later refers to this as “presenting in new words the old interpretation of the faith.”

To explain his idea of progress or development, Vincent states that:

It must be progress in the proper sense of the word, and not a change in faith.

Progress means that each thing grows within itself, whereas change implies that one thing is transformed into another.

Hence, it must be that understanding, knowledge and wisdom grow and advance mightily and strongly in individuals as well as in the community, in a single person as well as in the Church as a whole, and this gradually according to age and history.

Vincent then offers an analogy:

The growth of religion in the soul should be like the growth of the body, which in the course of years develops and unfolds, yet remains the same as it was.

Much happens between the prime of childhood and the maturity of old age.

But the old men of today who were the adolescents of yesterday, although the figure and appearance of one and the same person have changed, are identical.

There remains one and the same nature and one and the same person.

The limbs of infants are small, those of young men large — yet they are the same.

By contrast, he states:

If, on the other hand, the human form were turned into a shape of another kind, or if the number of members of the body were increased or decreased, then the whole body would necessarily perish, or become a monstrosity, or be in some way disabled.

In the same way, the dogma of the Christian religion ought to follow these laws of progress, so that it may be consolidated in the course of years, developed in the sequence of time, and sublimated by age [ut annis scilicet consolidetur, dilatetur tempore, sublimetur aetate] — yet remain incorrupt and unimpaired, complete and perfect in all the proportions of its parts and in all its essentials.

Finally, he states:

It is right that those ancient dogmas of heavenly philosophy should in the course of time be thoroughly cared for, filed and polished; but it is sinful to change them, sinful to behead them or mutilate them.

They may take on more evidence, clarity and distinctness, but it is absolutely necessary that they retain their plenitude, integrity and basic character.

Vincent thus believes in a form of doctrinal development whereby what has been passed down from ancient times can be expressed in new words that provide greater clarity and distinctness but that leave its fundamental substance unaltered.

5) What should we make of St. Vincent’s discussion of these points?

It is clear that Vincent is aware the Catholic faith can be expressed (and has come to be expressed) in ways that were not used in the past, and thus that a form of doctrinal development occurs.

However, this is not a form of development without limits. For Vincent, something is only a genuine development if it preserves what was authoritatively handed down from the beginning — at least implicitly, similar to the way men may grow beards even though babies don’t have them.

Vincent thus seeks to strike a balance that acknowledges the necessity of doctrinal continuity with the past and the need for variability of expression with time in order to bring out ancient truths more clearly in the present.

This is essentially the form of doctrinal development endorsed by St. John Henry Newman and — more recently — by Benedict XVI.

In the Commonitories, Vincent has more to say about the application of the principles he describes — and applying the principles correctly is the real challenge.

However, it would be a mistake to focus on the Vincentian Canon to the exclusion of doctrinal development — as if all development is illegitimate — or to focus on his statements about doctrinal development to the exclusion of the Vincentian Canon — as if we could engage in a form of development untethered from the teaching of Christ and the apostles.

Vincent believed in both continuity and development.

Cleansing the Temple

One of the events recorded in all four Gospels is Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple. On this occasion, Mark tells us, Jesus “entered the Temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the Temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple” (Mark 11:15-16).

A question that occurs to almost everyone who reads this passage is: Why did Jesus do this?

However, a second question occurs to those who study the Gospels closely: When did Jesus do this? Matthew, Mark, and Luke present it as occurring at the end of Jesus’ ministry, but John presents it as occurring at the beginning of the ministry.

Here we’ll look at both questions.

On why Jesus did it, the Gospels provide clues. The fullest version is found in Mark, who records Jesus saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers” (Mark 11:17).

Here Jesus combines two quotations from the Old Testament. The first is from Isaiah 56:7, where the prophet describes a day when God will bring Gentiles to Jerusalem, where they will worship him, and he will accept their offerings. Thus the Temple is called “a house of prayer for all the nations.”

The Temple was structured as a series of four progressively more holy courtyards. From the outermost to the innermost, they were

- the court of the Gentiles, where Gentiles could (and did!) come to worship God;
- the court of women, where Jewish women could worship;
- the court of Israel, where Jewish men could worship; and
- the court of priests, where Jewish priests ministered.

Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple on the grounds that it was to be a house of prayer for all the nations may indicate that the money-changers and the sellers of sacrificial animals had set up shop in the court of the Gentiles and were misappropriating worship space for ordinary commerce.

That leads us to the second quotation, which is from Jeremiah 7:11, where the prophet excoriates the people of his day for performing immoral and pagan practices and—in God’s eyes—turning his Temple into “a den of robbers” (that is, a place where robbers feel safe in their immoral lifestyle).

The fact the money-changers and sellers felt safe in the Temple—and the fact they were engaged in commerce—make the reference to the den of robbers appropriate.

The other Gospels do not pick up on the detail about the Gentiles that Mark includes. Matthew and Luke omit “for all the nations” from the Isaiah quotation, and John has Jesus telling the sellers of pigeons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade” (John 2:16).

These accounts focus more on the use of the Temple to earn a living rather than for worship as what is objectionable, though this is consistent with Mark’s account.

On the question of when Jesus did it, there have been several proposals:

1. Jesus chronologically did it at the end of his ministry (per the Synoptic Gospels), and John presents it at the beginning for theological reasons.
2. Jesus chronologically did it at the beginning of his ministry (per John), and the Synoptics present it at the end for theological reasons.
3. Jesus did it twice—at both the beginning and the end of his ministry.

None of these options should be dismissed out of hand. It is demonstrable that the Evangelists do not always record events in chronological order. Instead, they sometimes put material in topical order—as when Matthew gathers together teachings of Jesus into major discourses (e.g., the Sermon on the Mount is a collection of Jesus’ ethical teachings that are scattered in different places in Luke).

There’s more to say about these three possibilities than we can explore here, but I’ll offer a few thoughts.

You might argue for proposal 1 by noting that the Synoptic Gospels link the cleansing of the Temple to Jesus’ death. Immediately after his remark concerning the den of robbers, Mark continues: “And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and sought a way to destroy him” (Mark 11:18).

Matthew and Luke put a little more space between the clearing of the Temple and the plot to kill Jesus, but all three have the cleansing as an initiating event in the conflict between Jesus and the Jerusalem authorities. Mark links them explicitly, and it’s understandable why—after a public outburst in the Temple—the authorities would act against Jesus. One might thus regard this as the chronological placement of the event.

However, you might argue for proposal 2 by pointing out that John is demonstrably concerned with chronology, so one could view his account as an attempt to clarify exactly when the incident happened.

Like the Synoptics, John notes that the incident happened when “the Passover of the Jews was at hand” (John 2:13). The question would be which Passover, and here John provides a clue. Jesus says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” after which “the Jews then said, ‘It has taken forty-six years to build this temple [Greek, naos], and will you raise it up in three days?’” (vv. 19-20).

Unfortunately, this common translation appears to be mistaken. John distinguishes between the Temple in general, including its courtyards—for which he uses the term hieron—and the inner part of the Temple that only the priests could enter—for which he uses the term naos. Here John uses naos, and the naos was completed in 18/17 B.C.

This reveals that the verse should be translated according to another grammatically possible reading, which would be “This temple [naos] has been built for forty-six years.”

The forty-sixth anniversary of the naos’s completion would be A.D. 30, so John is locating the clearing of the Temple at Passover in A.D. 30.

While some think Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30, this is mistaken. The evidence indicates he was born in 3/2 B.C., and Luke states that he “was about thirty years of age” when he began his ministry (Luke 3:23). That means Jesus began his ministry about A.D. 29, so John situates the clearing of the Temple toward the beginning of Jesus’ ministry—in A.D. 30—with Jesus not being crucified until A.D. 33.

We thus have an indication from the Synoptics that the clearing led directly to the death of Jesus and an indication from John that it happened at the beginning of the ministry.

This leads us to proposal 3—that Jesus cleared the Temple twice, once at the beginning and once at the end of his ministry, like bookends.

This proposal is rejected by many scholars, but it is the most straightforward reading of the evidence.

One author who defends the two-clearings hypothesis is Joel McDurmon, and he proposes a reason why Jesus would clear it twice.

Simply to bookend his ministry with the two actions would be reason enough to do this, but McDurmon proposes that Jesus was modeling his actions after an Old Testament ritual whereby a priest was required to inspect a house that had become infested with “leprosy” (Lev. 14:33-53).

Houses can’t get the disease we call leprosy, so this was most likely a form of mold or mildew. The priest was required to inspect the house more than once:

1. If he found “leprosy” in the house, he would order it closed for seven days.
2. If, when he came back, it appeared that the disease had spread, the priest would have the affected plaster and stones yanked out and replaced.
3. If the disease broke out again later, the priest would order the house destroyed.

McDurmon links the first and second clearings of the Temple to the second and third of these inspections. He concludes that after the initial clearing, Jesus rejected the Temple officials and replaced them with his disciples as “living stones,” and after the second clearing, he announced the destruction of the Temple.

This is interesting, but it is very speculative. The text does not mention or clearly imply a connection to Leviticus 14. Further, the priest is required to visit the house three times before ordering its destruction: (1) an initial inspection, (2) a second inspection seven days later, and (3) a third inspection at a later time if the disease breaks out again.

For the parallel to fit, Jesus would have needed to visit the Temple seven days before the first cleansing and see its corruption, but there is nothing like that in John or the Synoptics.

McDurmon tries to argue that the first visit is accomplished seven days before John’s cleansing by Jesus’ baptism and his constitution as the new Temple, but there are multiple problems with this: (i) Jesus was always the new temple; he didn’t become it upon baptism, (ii) he didn’t see corruption in himself when he was baptized, (iii) he didn’t visit the Jerusalem temple and see its corruption between his baptism and the first cleansing, and (iv) there are more than seven days between Jesus’ baptism and the first cleansing.

McDurmon tries to argue that this period is only seven days, but John does not say or imply this. In John, the length of time between the two is indeterminate. Further, we’ve already seen that Jesus’ ministry began in A.D. 29, but the first cleansing didn’t happen until Passover of 30—considerably more than seven days later.

The theory McDurmon proposes is thus interesting, but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Even apart from McDurmon’s proposals, there is reason to favor the two-cleansing hypothesis. John is clearly writing with supplemental intent—that is, he intends to supplement the material found in the Synoptic Gospels by principally relating stories not found in them.

In fact, the outline of John’s Gospel is designed to interlock with the Gospel of Mark, so John expects you to already know the Synoptic tradition, including the clearing of the Temple at Jesus’ final Passover in A.D. 33.

Why wouldn’t he mention both clearings, then? Because of economics. All four Evangelists keep their Gospels to the length of a single scroll because books were fantastically expensive at the time. A single copy of Matthew cost the equivalent of more than $2,200.

Because of his supplemental intent, John chose to include the clearing of the Temple at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, and because of economics, he chose to omit the one at the end so that he could keep his Gospel to a single scroll.

We also have other indications that John’s clearing of the Temple is designed to flesh out the Synoptics’ record. In Mark, Jesus’ accusers claim, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands’” (Mark 14:58; cf. 15:29).

Jesus doesn’t say anything like that in Mark, but John records that during the first clearing of the Temple, Jesus had said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). John thus appears to be supplementing Mark to indicate when the witnesses heard Jesus say something along these lines—it was during the first cleansing of the Temple, at the beginning of the ministry.

On that occasion, the Temple authorities didn’t act against Jesus. However, after he grew a reputation as the Messiah over the course of his ministry (cf. John 6:15), when he proved to be a repeat offender by clearing the Temple again, they did act against him.

More can be said about all this. In his book The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, Craig Blomberg offers additional considerations favoring the two-clearings hypothesis (see pp. 216-219). But for our purposes, it’s enough to say that the idea that Jesus cleansed the Temple two times should not be rejected out of hand.

The case may not be 100% conclusive, but the hypothesis should not be dismissed as a naive “harmonization” of the Gospels. John writes with supplemental intent and crafts the outline of his Gospel around that of Mark, so he clearly expects us to read his Gospel in light of the Synoptics.