Category: Theology

We had a particularly interesting question the other day on Catholic Answers Live, so I thought I'd snip it and post it on the blog.

HERE 'TIS.

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The CDF, in conjunction with some other folks, has released a new and much-needed document.

For years, particular currents among theologians, priests, and society in general have eroded the basis for evangelization. I’ve seen appeals from allegedly missionary societies and felt compelled to go up to the priest representing them afterwards and say, "Father, did you know that you wouldn’t have had to change one word of your pitch if your organization changed its name to the Society for the Propagation of Decent Medical Care? We need to hear about more than people’s medical needs. We need to hear about their need for Jesus as well."

The new CDF document–which I haven’t had a chance to finish yet, but which is the #1 thing on my reading list–stresses the importance of evangelization and the fact that, just because people in other faiths can be saved that doesn’t mean that we should disobey Jesus and refuse to evangelize them.

The document also forms the third part of a CDF trifecta, starting with Dominus Iesus (stressing the uniqueness of Christ), the Q & A on the Church from last year (stressing the uniqueness of the Catholic Church), and now the new document (stressing the need for evangelization).

So, just to review . . . Jesus is the only-begotten Son of God and the unique Savior of mankind. He started the Catholic Church. And if you want to do Christ’s will, you need to become a Catholic.

Kewl.

GET THE STORY.

Recently I posted about Mother Theresa’s long dark night of the soul, in which she wrestled with spiritual dryness and doubt.

But the same thing happens at the other side of the faith spectrum, too.

HERE’S A STORY ABOUT ITALIAN ATHEIST AND INTELLECTUAL ORIANA FALLACI (WHO MET WITH POPE BENEDICT SHORTLY BEFORE HER DEATH) AND HER PERSISTENT TEMPTATIONS TO BELIEVE.

(WARNING: There is a bad word in the story.)

Spiritual writers often refer to "the dark night of the soul"–the experience of great souls of seemingly being abandoned by God, as (perhaps) when Solomon wrote the book of Ecclesiastes ("Vanity, vanity; all is vanity!"), or (even more perhaps) when Jesus cried, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Mother Theresa, it was revealed after her death, experienced this phenomenon as well, and recent evidence suggests that it lasted for a very long time–decades, in fact. Truly an antarctic dark night of the soul.

GET THE STORY.

YEAH, I COULD HAVE TOLD YOU THAT RELEASING A STATEMENT CHALLENGING THE TEACHING OF ORDINATIO SACERDOTALIS WAS A LOSER.

It’s amazing they had the hubris to release it in the first place.

Still, it’s something to see the head of the thing noting that they can’t afford to do that kind of thing any more.

Oh, and I loved this bit:

Finn made clear that he was not trying to stifle criticism, but said that in the future, such statements should come from individual theologians, perhaps with others signing on, but not in the name of the CTSA.

In other words, "If you want to mouth off to the Vaticsan, you take the hit. I’ve got to look out for the good for the organization."

Half the purpose of issuing joint statements on behalf of the society was to protect the individual signatories by making them look like they’re part of a big, impressive group (or by not having individual signatories at all, just a joint statement of the organization). Having to make such statements on your own, without the society backing you up, will–indeed–"stifle criticism."

(Oh, and the other half of the purpose is to make the statements have more punch by them being issued by a society and not just an individual or a few individuals.)

A reader writes:

I am sick and tired of hearing
(reading) carbon offsets compared to papal indulgences. I just got done
teaching my 7th graders (I homeschool) chapter 33 of the St. Joseph Balt.
Cat #2 on indulgences. And, while I am a fairly well read and
knowledgeable convert, I just don’t feel I am able to show the differences
as clearly and as eloquently as it should be done.

Could you devote an article to it that I could at least point others to?

Sure.

The comparison between carbon offsets and indulgences is something that one would expect given the gigantonormous amount of misinformation there is out there about indulgences.

Here’s a typically uninformed articulation of the comparison:

Carbon offset is the process of reducing the net carbon emissions of an individual or organization, either by their own actions, or through arrangements with a carbon-offset provider. . . .

George Monbiot, an English environmentalist and writer, has compared carbon offsets to the practice of purchasing Indulgences during the Middle Ages, whereby people with money could purchase forgiveness for their sins (instead of actually repenting and not sinning anymore). Monbiot also says that carbon offsets are an excuse for business as usual with regards to pollution [SOURCE].

The basic idea behind paying someone for cabon offsets is that you are hiring that person to do something to reduce the carbon emissions that otherwise would exist if you didn’t pay them to undertake the task. Thus, by paying them, you offset some of the carbon emissions that you yourself are generating.

For example, suppose that you are Al Gore and that you own a home that you run in such a way that it burns 221,000 kilowatt-hours in contrast to the 10,656 kilowatt-hours burned by a normal home. Such power consumption is inconsistent with maintaining one’s status as carbon emissions’ Scoldmaster General, and so what do you do?

Well, you could pay someone to go plant trees on the idea that the trees will grow and lock up (sequester) a bunch of carbon and thus reduce the amount of free-floating carbon in the environment–until such time as the tree dies and decays and it gets re-released anyway.

Or you could get even more creative.

In any event, the idea is that you pay someone else to reduce the carbon that would otherwise be emitted so that you don’t have to curb your own carbon-emitting lifestyle.

That’s why this is precisely how carbon offsets are different than indulgences.

For the record,

An indulgence is the remission before God of the temporal punishment due sins already forgiven as far as their guilt is concerned, which the follower of Christ with the proper dispositions and under certain determined conditions acquires through the intervention of the Church which, as minister of the Redemption, authoritatively dispenses and applies the treasury of the satisfaction won by Christ and the saints [SOURCE].

Carbon offsets are things that allow people to avoid altering their personal carbon lifestyle.

Indulgences are things available to people who have already altered their lifestyle by repenting of their sins and being forgiven of their guilt. They have to do with mitigating the temporal consequences that often accompany sins, even though the sins have been forgiven.

This is why indulgences are not a license to go on sinning. If you haven’t repented of the sin then forgiveness of its guilt is not available to you and thus indulgences, which come after forgiveness of guilt, are not available either.

Indulgences thus presuppose that you have already altered your personal lifestyle, which is precisely why they are not the same thing at all as carbon offsets.

Unfortunately, the anti-Catholicism of the last several centuries has so purvaded English-speaking culture that we constantly hear indulgences described as licenses to go on sinning (they’re not) and that they used to be sold by the Catholic Church (they weren’t).

This is simple misinformation.

MORE ON WHAT INDULGENCES ACTUALLY ARE.

AND THEIR THEOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS IN SCRIPTURE.

Oh, yeah, and there’s another difference between the two: Indulgences are based on biblical principles. Carbon offsets are based on junk science.

The document that the International Theological Commission has been working on concerning limbo has now been published.

AS ANTICIPATED, it casts doubt on the doctrine of limbo without claiming anything certain regarding the fate of infants dying without baptism, instead encouraging an attitude of hope regarding their salvation.

This is in line with the development of Catholic thought in the last few decades regarding the fate of such children, as well as the discussion of their fate in the Catechism.

That hasn’t stopped the MSM from portraying this in sensationalistic and inaccurate terms, speaking of the pope bucking Catholic tradition or changing Church teaching.

In fact, the International Theological Commission is not an organ of the magisterium but an advisory body. Its documents, even when their publication is approved by the pope, do not have magisterial force. What the pope did in this case was allow an advisory document to become public. That’s not the same thing as changing Church teaching.

Shame on the MSM for not being competent enough to get the basic facts of the story straight.

CATHOLIC NEWS SEVICE’S PIECE IS PRETTY GOOD, THOUGH.

BACKGROUND (LINK FIXED).

A reader writes:

Recent comments by the Pope on hell and other subsequent blogging comments have raised a minor question for me about hell. It seems that many will insist that there is no physical component to hell. This assertion seems logically in conflict with church teaching that in the resurrection we will have some kind of eternal physical body. A physical body implies the possibility of physical locality. If so, then heaven and hell could have corresponding physical attributes. So a more precise phrasing of the question is: "Does the assertion that hell has no physical reality indirectly conflict with church teaching on the resurrection and the state of our resurrected bodies?"

It strikes me that there is a tertium quid here. It isn’t just a choice between saying "Hell is spiritual, so there are no bodies there and thus it has no location" and saying "Hell must have a physical location because it contains bodies."

It would be contrary to Catholic teaching to deny that the damned–after the resurrection–will have bodies. They will indeed have them, and that raises the question of where or how these bodies will exist. It might be that they will exist in a spatially extended sense in some physical location, as they do here on earth in this life. However, it could also be that they will exist in some way that does not involve a physical location, which I suppose would mean that they would be real but not extended in spacetime.

The situation is analogous to that of heaven. I sometimes point out that heaven is at least capable of receiving bodies–we know that becaue that’s where Jesus’ and Mary’s bodies are right now–but that doesn’t mean that they are extended in the natural, physical manner that they were when they were here on earth. Heaven thus might or might not involve a physical location. What it does involve, for resurrected humans, is bodies, and the same will be true of hell.

I thus tend to accept union or disunion with God as the essential characteristic of these two states and leave the question of location open. To my mind, they might or might not involve a location, though for resurrected humans, both will be an embodied state.

A reader writes:

I am involved in our parish group and in one of the books we have to read was an extended article about Fr. Jon Sobrino, SJ. We though he was a hero until today.

In a Spanish newspaper I read the warning he has received from the Vatican for deny publicly Jesus divinity.

Can you clarify for me please?

I’ll do my best. The story you read is based on an actual event. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has published a warning about two books by Fr. Jon Sobrino, SJ. The warning, among other things, notes Fr. Sobrino’s failure to clearly affirm the divinity of Christ. That passages of the warning reads:

4. A number of Father Sobrino’s affirmations tend to diminish the breadth of the New Testament passages which affirm that Jesus is God: "[The New Testament] makes clear that he was intimately bound up with God, which meant that his reality had to be expressed in some way as a reality that is of God (cf. Jn 20:28)" (Christ the Liberator, 115). In reference to John 1:1, he affirms: "Strictly speaking, this logos is not yet said to be God (consubstantial with the Father), but something is claimed for him that will have great importance for reaching this conclusion: his preexistence. This does not signify something purely temporal but relates him to the creation and links the logos with action specific to the divinity" (Christ the Liberator, 257). According to the Author, the New Testament does not clearly affirm the divinity of Jesus, but merely establishes the presuppositions for it: "The New Testament…contains expressions that contain the seed of what will produce confession of the divinity of Christ in the strict sense" (Ibidem). "All this means that at the outset Jesus was not spoken of as God, nor was divinity a term applied to him; this happened only after a considerable interval of believing explication, almost certainly after the fall of Jerusalem" (Ibidem, 114).

To maintain that John 20:28 affirms that Jesus is "of God" is clearly erroneous, in as much as the passage itself refers to Jesus as "Lord" and "God." Similarly, John 1:1 says that the Word is God. Many other texts speak of Jesus as Son and as Lord.5 The divinity of Jesus has been the object of the Church’s faith from the beginning, long before his consubstantiality with the Father was proclaimed by the Council of Nicea. The fact that this term was not used does not mean that the divinity of Jesus was not affirmed in the strict sense, contrary to what the Author seems to imply.

Father Sobrino does not deny the divinity of Jesus when he proposes that it is found in the New Testament only "in seed" and was formulated dogmatically only after many years of believing reflection. Nevertheless he fails to affirm Jesus’ divinity with sufficient clarity. This reticence gives credence to the suspicion that the historical development of dogma, which Sobrino describes as ambiguous, has arrived at the formulation of Jesus’ divinity without a clear continuity with the New Testament.

But the divinity of Jesus is clearly attested to in the passages of the New Testament to which we have referred. The numerous Conciliar declarations in this regard6 are in continuity with that which the New Testament affirms explicitly and not only "in seed". The confession of the divinity of Jesus Christ has been an absolutely essential part of the faith of the Church since her origins. It is explicitly witnessed to since the New Testament.

HERE’S THE FULL TEXT OF THE WARNING.

AND AN EXPLANATORY NOTE ISSUED BY THE CDF.

AND SOME PERSPECTIVE BY JOHN ALLEN.

On a side note, I found it interesting that–though Sobrino has been active in Latin American liberation theology–he is of Basque origin.

Incidentally (sorry, but the linguist in me can’t resist), Basque is one of the few language isolates that exists in Europe (or anywhere else). That is, it is a language that is not clearly part of a larger language family, like the Indo-European family, to which virtually all of the European languages belong. Basque, apparently, is a survival of a language that was already in place before the expansion of Indo-European into Europe. Almost everywhere else got swallowed up by speakers of Indo-European langauges, but the Basques held on to theirs.

Consequently, I’d really like to study their language some time.

MORE.