Today people are fascinated by cryptids—hidden creatures—like Bigfoot and the Loch NessMonster. In the ancient world, the most famous cryptid was the dragon, so did early Christians believe in them?
The term dragon (Greek, drakôn) appears in the Greek Bible, but normally it is in a symbolic context—like when the devil appears in the form of a dragon in the book of Revelation (e.g., Rev. 12). So this doesn’t provide good evidence for belief in literal dragons.
However, the term also appears in other contexts. For example, in Daniel 14, the prophet Daniel kills a large drakôn that the Babylonians worshipped. However, in secular Greek, the term drakôn originally referred to a snake or serpent, and it did not always have monstrous connotations. This is clear in Wisdom 16:10, where the author refers back to the snakes that bit the Israelites in Numbers 21 and describes them as “venomous drakontôn.” The author of Daniel 14 may thus have expected readers to imagine a big snake, and some modern Bible translations like the Common English Bible use “snake” in the passage.
The Bible thus doesn’t provide a good basis for documenting belief in literal dragons. However, we do find some in the early Church who were open to the idea. St. Augustine writes:
“As for dragons, which lack feet, they are said to take their rest in caves, and to soar up into the air. While these are not too easy to come across, this kind of animated creature is for all that definitely mentioned not only in our literature but also in that of the Gentiles” (Literal Meaning of Genesis 3:9:13).
This passage may not mean what it suggests, however. You’ll note that Augustine says dragons have no feet—which would point to snakes—but he says that they fly. There were—indeed—references to flying snakes in ancient literature. Isaiah mentions them (14:29, 30:6), and so does the Greek historian Herodotus (Histories 2:75-76, 3:109). So Augustine is likely not referring to what we would think of as a dragon but to flying snakes. (Note: flying—or, technically, gliding—snakes do exist in some parts of Asia.)
The flying snakes that Herodotus referred to were small, but in another passage, Augustine envisions dragons that are very large:
“Now dragons favor watery habitats. They emerge from caves and take to the air. They create major atmospheric disturbance, for dragons are very large creatures, the largest of all on earth. This is probably why the psalm began its consideration of earthly creatures with them” (Expositions of the Psalms 148:9).
Augustine wasn’t alone in thinking about real, enormous dragons. Other Church Fathers did so also, and so did non-Christian thinkers.
The reason is obvious when you think about it. Although the term paleontology was only coined in 1822, humans have been running across fossils for as long as there have been humans. When they came across the bones of giant, monstrous animals, they correctly concluded that there used to be giant animals in the area.
In her book The First Fossil Hunters, historian Adrienne Mayor insightfully argues that it was the ancient discovery of fossils that formed the basis of the legends of dragons and similar creatures the world over.
St. Augustine himself reports finding a giant tooth on a beach, where the action of the waves presumably uncovered it:
“Once, on the beach at Utica, I saw with my own eyes—and there were others to bear me witness—a human molar tooth so big that it could have been cut up, I think, into a hundred pieces each as big as one of our modern teeth. That tooth, however, I can well believe, was the tooth of a giant” (City of God 15:9).
I’m not a Young Earth Creationist, but I have to agree with musician Buddy Davis’s fun children’s song D Is For Dinosaur:
“When dinosaurs first roamed the earth, many years ago
People called them dragons (and just thought you’d like to know)
So dinosaurs and dragons are both the same thing
The only thing that’s different is we changed the dragon’s name”
It depends on how you understand death. In the old days, it was relatively easy to determine whether someone was dead: They stopped breathing and their 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-laden 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 they might have only a faint pulse, but if they really stopped breathing and their heart really stopped, they were dead. End of story.
Things got more complex in the twentieth century. Techniques became available to keep someone breathing and to restart their 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 their organs—if they were an organ donor—including their 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 they 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.
Popular Mechanicshas discussed 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.
On Friday, May 17th, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (or DDF) released a document titled Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena.
Accompanying the document was a note by Card. Victor Fernandez—the head of the DDF—introducing it and explaining the reasons why it was written.
This document revised, replaced, and expanded a previous document issued by the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or CDF) from 1978.
Apart from matters of detail, there are several notable shifts in the approach that the new document takes.
These include (1) the scope of the document, (2) a procedure of greater transparency, and (3) a new classification system for apparitions and other supernatural phenomena.
When it comes to scope, the 1978 document dealt only with “presumed apparitions and revelations,”
while the new one expands its coverage to phenomena “such as alleged apparitions, visions, interior or exterior locutions, writings or messages, phenomena related to religious images, and psychophysical phenomena” (n. 6).
These also include reported Eucharistic miracles.
The greater transparency is illustrated in two ways.
First, when the 1978 document was released, it was distributed on a confidential basis and was meant only for bishops and their associates.
However, it leaked (including on my website, jimmyakin.com), and it was only published in 2011—thirty-three years after it was originally released.
By contrast, the new document was immediately placed on the Vatican website and a press conference introducing it was held.
Second, when the 1978 document was in force, local bishops were invited to submit their findings and conclusions about apparitions to the CDF for review and approval before announcing them (4:2).
However, when the Congregation approved the bishop’s planned announcement, it would ask that its name be kept out of the matter,
presumably to keep people from exaggerating what the CDF had done and announcing the apparition as “Vatican approved” or “Vatican condemned.”
Henceforth there will be more transparency.
Cardinal Fernandez explains, “Now, when the bishop makes his decision public, it will be stated as ‘in agreement with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.’”
At the core of the new document is a new way of classifying supernatural events.
The list presented is not exhaustive, but the Church’s conclusions will be “usually expressed” in terms of six categories:
Category 1 is Nihil obstat (which means, “Nothing obstructs”):
It is used for phenomena that are connected with “many signs of the action of the Holy Spirit” and so far “no aspects that are particularly critical or risky have been detected” (n. 17).
Category 2 is Prae oculis habeatur (which means, “It should be held before the eyes”):
It is used for phenomena that have “important positive signs” but also “some aspects of confusion or potential risks.”
Consequently, “doctrinal clarification might be necessary” (n. 18).
Category 3 is Curatur (which means, “It is to be attended to”):
It is used for phenomena that have “various or significant critical elements”—meaning negative ones
but have nevertheless “spread widely” and are connected with “verifiable spiritual fruits.”
In these cases, the bishop is not to encourage the phenomena
and to “seek out alternative expressions of devotion and possibly reorient its spiritual and pastoral aspects” (n. 19).
Category 4 is Sub mandato (which means, “Under mandate”):
It is used for phenomena that are “rich in positive elements”
but that are being misused in some way, such as by “a person, a family, or a group.”
Misuse might involve financial gain, immoral acts, or defiance of the diocesan bishop (n. 20).
Category 5 is Prohibetur et obstruatur (which means, “Hindered and to be blocked”):
It is used for phenomena that have “some positive elements” but have very serious “critical issues and risks.”
The bishop is to “declare publicly that adherence to this phenomenon is not allowed” (n. 21).
And Category 6 is Declaratio de non supernaturalitate (which means, “Declaration of non-supernaturality”):
It is used for phenomena that the bishop has “found to be not supernatural” based on “facts and evidence that are concrete and proven,”
such as a visionary admitting they lied, witnesses detecting fraud, or mythomania (that is, an excessive tendency for lying or exaggeration) (n. 22).
You’ll notice that what’s missing from that list is a firm declaration that the phenomenon is supernatural.
Not even the nihil obstat implies that this is the case.
Under the new norms, a phenomenon can still be declared supernatural,
but it will require a special act of the pope (n. 23).
This has to do with the reasons for the new norms.
In his accompanying note, Cardinal Fernandez explains that the previous tendency to conclude that phenomena were either supernatural or not supernatural had undesired side-effects.
If phenomena were declared to be supernatural it—in his words—“effectively oriented the faithful to think they had to believe in these phenomena, which sometimes were valued more than the Gospel itself.”
And I’m sure we’ve all met apparition enthusiasts who are more excited about new Marian statements than they are about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
Fernandez said that the lack of public clarity also contributed to confusion about the status of apparitions,
and he noted that the need to establish that an apparition is supernatural in order to give it some form of approval caused extensive delays.
Before committing the Church—or even a local diocese—to the idea that an event has been established as supernatural, special precautions were needed.
Fernandez notes: “The expectation of receiving a declaration about the supernatural nature of the event resulted in very few cases ever reaching a clear determination.
In fact, since 1950, no more than six cases have been officially resolved,
even though such phenomena have often increased without clear guidance and with the involvement of people from many dioceses.
Therefore, one can assume that many other cases were either handled differently or just not handled at all.”
Which is pretty bluntly honest of the Cardinal.
The new Nihil obstat classification is meant to allow a more expeditious way to provide a form of approval for an event and recognize the action of the Holy Spirit in things connected with it,
“without expressing any certainty about the supernatural authenticity of the phenomenon itself” (n. 17),
and thus without implying to the faithful that they are obliged to believe it.
Of course, the declaration that an event is not supernatural still exists,
and it is the sixth category of the ones for regular use.
In addition, the four new categories reflect the complexity of the evidence regarding an event and the effects it is having in the Church.
Category two (Prae oculis habeatur) is for events that are favored by good evidence but with some reasons for concern,
so a full Nihil obstat isn’t warranted.
The opposite is category five (Prohibetur et obstruatur), where there are very serious problems and only a few positive elements,
yet a full decree of non-supernaturalness isn’t warranted.
In the middle are two categories for events where there is a difference between the event itself and the impact it is having in the Church.
In category four (Sub mandato), the event itself has a lot of positive elements,
but some particular group is misusing it.
The reverse is category three (Curatur), where there are significant problems with the event
but—despite that fact—the event has become widely popular so that “a ban that could upset the people of God is not recommended” but some kind of healthy reorientation is desired.
In addition to the things Cardinal Fernandez names as the reasons for the revision of the norms, I strongly suspect that the creation of this category was one.
In 2010, Benedict XVI instituted a commission to examine the popular but controversial Medjugorje apparitions, and the commission reported its results to Pope Francis in 2014.
In 2017, Pope Francis stated that the initial Medjugorje apparitions deserved further study but was doubtful about the later ones.
This meant that it was hard to give a “supernatural” or “not supernatural” evaluation of Medjugorje, and the Vatican has not made an official announcement in all the years since.
It thus would make sense to review and revise the categories used to classify events like Medjugorje, and the Curatur category sounds like it was designed for the conclusions that the Vatican reached about it.
Consequently, I suspect that an announcement about Medjugorje may finally be on the horizon.
It is important to note that the new norms do not change any classifications of apparitions that currently exist.
Those declared supernatural or non-supernatural still have the same status, though it is possible they could be revised at some point.
Without naming it, Cardinal Fernandez mentions how the status of the Ida Peerdeman, “Our Lady of All Nations” apparitions went back and forth, with a negative judgment finally being reaffirmed in 2020.
Further, the criteria for Nihil obstat note that particularly critical or risky things have not been detected “at least so far”—
implying that the ruling is a provisional one that could be changed if such things do emerge.
I think that—on balance—this new set of norms is promising.
It has a more sophisticated approach to the complex nature of reported supernatural phenomena, how the evidence can be mixed and change over time, and what their impact on the Church can be.
It also strikes me that it may encourage the faithful to have a more healthy appreciation of such phenomena that is open but discerning,
without automatically assuming that an event is obligatory for belief in all of its details or to be completely and utterly rejected.
I enjoy fielding questions on Catholic Answers Live about humanity’s forays into outer space, such as this one: “How would the Church adapt its liturgical calendar if we colonized another planet or the moon?”
Well, it’s going to depend on where the planet or moon is and how fast it rotates. Humans are biologically designed to have a wake-sleep cycle that is synced with the day-night cycle on earth. If we’re in an environment where the day-night cycle is radically different from what we’re programmed to work with, we just ignore it.
For instance, the International Space Station goes around the earth in about forty-five minutes, meaning the astronauts on board get twenty-two minutes of light and twenty-two minutes of dark. There’s no way they want to fall asleep every twenty-two minutes and then wake up twenty-two minutes later for the duration of their mission.
Thus, astronauts on space stations ignore their environment’s peculiar day-night cycle. Instead, they keep a regular Earth-based day-night cycle for their sleeping and waking periods.
The same would be true of any other planet or moon that has a radically different rotation rate. And if humans are keeping a normal terrestrial day-night cycle and ignoring the rotation of the object they’re on, then they would likely keep a terrestrial calendar. They wouldn’t modify the calendar because they’re keeping the same day-night cycle.
Now, what about other planets like Mars, which has a rotational period close to that of earth? Its day is almost the same length as earth’s. It’s a little bit different, but humans there would probably adapt to a Martian day-night cycle, and that means their days and nights would get out of sync with the days and nights on earth.
However, I don’t think that on Mars there would be a need to change the liturgical calendar, because Mars is very close to earth. It’s only a few light-minutes away, and as a result it would be very easy to stay in contact with earth and continue to use the terrestrial liturgical calendar. Even if their Sunday slides a few hours from Sunday on earth (because of the difference in the day lengths), you can still approximate that. So, they would still have the same kind of Sunday cycle, they could still celebrate Christmas and Easter at the same times, and so on.
But what if you go further afield—like out of our solar system? In that case, there’s no easy way to communicate with earth because of the light-speed limit. If you were on a planet with a similar rotation period to earth, I could see the local church in this other solar system developing its own liturgical calendar based on the local planetary rotation period.
However, I suspect that even then—even if they came up with new holidays and new liturgical seasons—they would still keep Christmas and Easter at the same time that they’re being celebrated back on earth, because that’s something you could always calculate.
So, I think that there could, in another solar system, be a different liturgical calendar with some similarities to ours; but here in our solar system, we’re so close that I don’t think we would practically develop different liturgical calendars for other planets—at least not any time in the foreseeable future.
These days, there are numerous ghost hunting and paranormal TV shows. A few examples include Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Kindred Spirits, Paranormal Lockdown, and Help! My House Is Haunted.
Frankly, these shows are silly. Shows like this are not taken seriously by competent paranormal investigators.
However, what is a Catholic to make of the subject of paranormal investigations itself?
What Does Paranormal Mean?
The term paranormal is a new one. It was coined around 1905, and it indicates something that is beyond the normal. In Greek, para means things like “beyond,” “beside,” and “alongside,” so paranormal experiences are those that go beyond or are beside normal experiences.
This only raises another question: What counts as “normal”? The answer—for purposes of this term—is those experiences our modern, Western culture considers normal.
In many other cultures, experiences that we would consider paranormal (e.g., having a ghost show up) would be considered entirely normal. Indeed, in our own culture’s history, ghost appearances were considered quite normal, even if they weren’t as common as other experiences.
But today, Western culture has decided that a whole bunch of experiences aren’t normal—e.g., experiences of visions, apparitions, ghosts, angels, demons, psychic abilities, UFOs, Bigfoot, and so on—so they all get lumped together as “paranormal.”
Catholics & the Paranormal
What attitude have Catholics traditionally taken toward these? They’ve actually been quite open.
The historic Christian understanding of ghosts is that most of them are souls in purgatory who are allowed to manifest to the living to take care of unfinished business, serve as warnings, or ask for prayers.
UFOs are new, but the Church has been quite open to the idea of aliens existing. In 1999, St. John Paul II reportedly was asked if there are any aliens, and he replied, “Always remember: They are children of God as we are” (Paul Thigpen, Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Faith, p. 191).
Bigfoot is also new (at least to non-Native Americans), but we find Church Fathers open to the idea of strange, hairy, man-like creatures existing. St. Anthony and St. Jerome were both open to the idea of satyrs (in fact, St. Anthony reportedly met one; see Jerome, Life of Paul the Hermit 8).
When it comes to reported human abilities that today are classified as psychic—like precognition and psychokinesis—doctors of the Church including St. Augustine, Pope St. Gregory the Great, and St. Thomas Aquinas have weighed in on them. Augustine was open to precognition, and Gregory the Great and Aquinas positively believed in it, with Aquinas calling it “natural prophecy” to distinguish it from the supernatural prophecy that God gives.
Gregory also believed in psychokinesis (mind over matter) as a spiritual gift, and Aquinas held that it was a purely natural ability that could be used to injure another person (this was his explanation for the Evil Eye).
Beginning in the late 19th century, the modern science of parapsychology—which studies psychic functioning and life after death—was organized, and there have been respected Catholic parapsychologists like the English Jesuit Fr. Herbert Thurston (1856-1939) and the Austrian Cistercian abbot Fr. Alois Wiesinger (1885-1955).
Catholic Paranormal Investigations
When it comes to paranormal investigations themselves, a classic work dealing with the subject was written by Cardinal Prosper Lambertini (1675-1758), who reigned as Pope Benedict XIV from 1740 until his death.
The four-volume work, which is still used today, is titled Doctrina de servorum dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (Latin, “Teaching on the Beatification of Servants of God and the Canonization of Blesseds”). The first three volumes of it have been translated into English under the title Heroic Virtue.
Meant to be used in the process of canonization, the work deals with subjects including how to evaluate private revelations and miracles—and how to determine whether reports of them have natural, paranormal, supernatural, or demonic causes.
Partially based on the principles it contains, the Church today has official procedures for conducting several types of paranormal investigations.
Apparitions & Private Revelations
The first is the investigation of private revelations. In 1978, the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) published a set of guidelines for bishops on how to evaluate them. At first, this document was distributed only to bishops, but it leaked, and it was officially published by the CDF in 2011.
Summarizing the general thrust of the guidelines the Church uses, Benedict XVI stated, “The criterion for judging the truth of a private revelation is its orientation to Christ himself. If it leads us away from him, then it certainly does not come from the Holy Spirit, who guides us more deeply into the Gospel, and not away from it. Private revelation is an aid to this faith, and it demonstrates its credibility precisely because it refers back to the one public revelation” (Verbum Domini 14).
He also stated, “Ecclesiastical approval of a private revelation essentially means that its message contains nothing contrary to faith and morals; it is licit to make it public and the faithful are authorized to give to it their prudent adhesion. . . . It is a help which is proffered, but its use is not obligatory” (ibid.).
Miracle Investigations
A second type of paranormal investigation the Church conducts is miracle reports. This can happen—for example—when a Eucharistic miracle is reported in a parish, but it most normally happens in connection with causes for canonization.
The Dicastery for the Causes of Saints maintains a board of medical experts (not all of whom are Catholic)—known as the Consulta Medica—to examine healings that are proposed as miracles.
To conduct its work, the Consulta enlists physicians with expertise in particular medical conditions to determine if there is any scientific explanation for a healing.
“To ensure authenticity of medical miracles, the Consulta still follows the criteria established in 1734 by Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, the man who set down the foundational principles for judging modern sainthood causes. To begin with, the disease must be a serious one, considered difficult or impossible to cure. It must not be at a stage where it has run its course and spontaneous regression is possible. Pharmaceutical treatment should not have been used; if it has been, the medicine must be shown to have had no curative effect. The healing must be sudden and instantaneous. It must be complete, and not simply an improvement. It must not follow a physical crisis that could have precipitated a natural cure. Finally, there must be no relapse of the disease or associated infirmity” (John Thavis, The Vatican Prophecies, p. 189).
If these criteria are met and there is no scientific explanation for a healing, the matter is turned over to a panel of theological experts to consider its religious dimension and whether it can be confidently attributed to the intercession of a proposed saint.
Demonic Investigations
A third type of paranormal investigation the Church conducts involves reports of the demonic. There are a variety of ways that the demonic can manifest. Infestation occurs when one or more demons manifest in a specific location. Oppression occurs when they attack things in a person’s life. Vexation occurs when they attack his body. Obsession occurs when they attack his mind. And possession occurs when they take control of him.
As always, the Church applies critical thinking to these cases and does not just assume that a report actually involves the demonic.
Thus, for example, medical and psychological experts may be consulted to rule out the possibility of mental or physical illness being responsible for the report. There can be a variety of other natural causes, including imagination, misinterpretation, and hoax.
To exclude these as causes for a report of possession, something paranormal also needs to be happening. This might be displaying knowledge that the person should not have (e.g., speaking a language the person hasn’t studied or knowing that an object has been blessed) or performing a physical feat the person should not be capable of (e.g., superhuman strength or levitation).
However, just because something paranormal is happening doesn’t mean a demon is responsible. Speaking in tongues is a gift of the Holy Ghost, Samson was endowed with supernatural strength, and both St. Teresa of Avila and St. Joseph of Cupertino levitated.
Vatican exorcist Fr. Corrado Balducci (1923-2008) pointed out that cases of unusual knowledge could just be someone’s ESP (see his book The Devil), and Roman exorcist Fr. Gabriele Amorth (1925-2016) even used “sensitives” (what psychics are called in Italy) to help him investigate exorcism cases (see his book An Exorcist Explains the Demonic).
Therefore, something more is needed to show that an apparent possession is genuinely diabolical, and that something is if the possessing personality displays a marked aversion to the holy. If it can’t stand the name of Jesus or an icon of Mary or the recitation of prayers, then that provides evidence it is actually a demon.
Thus, if you (1) have an alternative personality manifesting through a person and (2) this personality is capable of doing preternatural things and (3) is markedly averse to the holy, you have a plausible case of demonic possession.
A Sophisticated Approach
We thus see that the Church has a sophisticated approach to the paranormal. Unlike the superstitious, it does not believe that all reported experiences are genuinely paranormal. Unlike hardcore skeptics, it does not simply dismiss them. And unlike some, it does not interpret them all as demonic.
It has an openminded but critical approach to them, and it even conducts its own paranormal investigations (albeit ones that are vastly better than what you see on TV ghost hunting shows).
In short, it seeks to apply to a variety of different experiences the basic principle that St. Paul applied to prophecy: “Test everything; hold fast what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21).
By the way, if you’re interested in subjects like this, you should check out my podcast Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. It’s in all the standard podcast apps/directories. You can also listen to the audio at Mysterious.fm, and you can watch the video version of the podcast (and my other videos) at YouTube.com/JimmyAkin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
