Today is the tenth day of the tenth month of the tenth year of the century.
This is the last triple-digit day for a year, a month, and a day, when we'll have 11/11/11.
That will be the last triple-digit day for another year, another month, and another day, when we'll have 12/12/12.
And that will be the last triple-digit day for almost a century.
Enjoy them while they're available!
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The Catholic Church's practice of granting annulments is based on the idea that there are certain situations in which something prevents a valid marriage from coming into existence. The things doing the blocking are known as "impediments," and a variety of them are recognized in canon law.
When one or more impediments exists in a particular case and blocks a valid marriage from coming into existence, that union–upon due review by the Church–can be declared null or "annulled." An annulment, thus, is a finding of fact that there was some impediment that kept the marriage from coming into existence.
Annulments generally are not practiced in the Protestant community (though there are some civil-law annulments), and the concept of impediments is often unfamiliar to our Protestant brethren.
Recently I was asked how to respond to the claim that there are impediments to marriage is unbiblical.
It is true that the term "impediment" is not used in Scripture in regard to marriage. This is similar to the term "Trinity," which also is not used in Scripture. In both cases the term is a later way of making explicit something that is implicit in Scripture itself.
There is more than one type of marriage impediment, and they relate to Scripture in different ways. One type is the natural law impediment. Marriage corresponds to a certain natural law reality (a partnership between a man and a woman of the whole of life oriented to the good of the spouses and, if possible, the procreation and education of offspring). Marriage has certain properties (e.g., unity, indissolubility, the making licit of sexual love). These correspond to both the natural law and the biblical understanding of marriage. They are presupposed whenever Scripture talks about marriage.
It follows that if someone–in attempting a marriage–has fundamentally excluded one of these criteria then they are not agreeing to be married in the sense that God's law defines the institution.
This is also why homosexual marriages are impossible. Two men or two women cannot agree to have between them the same kind of union that is possible for a man and a woman. The fact that the parties are of the same sex creates an impediment to their ability to marry each other.
The idea of homosexual marriage was, of course, unthinkable to the biblical authors, and it was not an idea being entertained in their society. (Though homosexual behavior was common in Greek society, they at least understood that marriage was between a man and a woman). Consequently, this is impediment is not mentioned explicitly in Scripture, but it is surely implicit in the biblical vision of what marriage is.
Another impediment which is clearly implied in Scripture is the existence of a prior marriage bond. If you are already married to one person, you are not free to marry another. This is explicit in the teaching of both Jesus (Mark 10) and Paul (Romans 7), with both indicating that the attempt to marry someone when you are already married will result in adultery.
It is clear that, in the minds of Jesus and Paul, being married to one person creates an impediment (something that blocks or impedes) one from marrying another person. The term "impediment" may be more recent, but the concept is clearly there.
Similar examples of impediments could be given–what if you're too closely related to each other so that there would be incest (can you marry one of your parents?) or what if you were severely retarded or mentally ill and did not understand what you were doing?
It is hard to imagine the biblical authors, who certainly shared the biblical vision of marriage, saying that such marriages would be valid. If such marriages are not valid then the factors preventing them from being valid are, by definition, impediments.
The question then would not be whether impediments exist but what impediments are there.
As I point out in my booklet, Annulments: What You Need to Know, the Church has a pastoral responsibility created by the teaching of Jesus on the permanence of marriage not to simply rubber-stamp any union. To do so would be to downplay or deny what Jesus taught. It is out of a sense of duty to her Lord, and of pastoral responsibility to the faithful, that the Church undertakes the difficult work of examining particular marriage situations to protect the validity of marriages.
Catholic Answers has started a new video channel on YouTube, and I'll be posting items from it from time to time.
. . . the changes that I mentioned a week or so ago have now been implemented.
I had TypePad add a bunch of new features and do some redesigning, while still keeping much of the look and feel of the original design.
I still have some additional tweaking to do, which I should have accomplished in the next couple of days.
Hope folks like and take advantage of the new features.
Lemme know what you think!
Often times reading about the Church Fathers you run into strange place names. You run into them just in the names of the people who lived back then: Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyr, Epiphanius of Salamis. Whew!
Where were these places?
The matter is complicated by the fact that many of them don't even exist any more. They are just ruins (if that).
For The Fathers Know Best, I wanted to clarify all of this, and so part of the project was looking up where all the places mentioned in the book are (or were) and then composing a set of maps–a process in which I had the very able assistance of my colleague Jon Sorensen, who is a photoshop wiz!
Below is one of the maps used in the book (click to enlarge). It's the one that covers the modern territory of Turkey or–as it's sometimes called–"the Second Holy Land." (Look at the number of important Christian sites on the map! And that's not even all of them!)
You might spend a few moments with the map, seeing how many of the sites you can identify. Two of St. Paul's surviving epistles were written to the Christian communities of cities on this map (as well as one of his lost epistles). The island where St. John saw the Revelation is here, as are the famed "seven churches of Asia." Several ecumenical councils occurred on this map, and many saints came from these different cities.
How many can you identify?
At last!
I’ve had a lot of people ask when the book would be available for pre-order, and now it is!
In fact, I’m pleased to tell you how to get your very own, autographed copy of the book–together with an exclusive audio interview that will not be available anywhere else.
Catholic Answers is doing a fundraising appeal based on the book because printing and properly promoting a book is expensive–particularly in the orthodox Catholic, non-profit world of niche publishing.
As Karl Keating explains in a recent letter,
The book is ready for the printer. The text has been finished, proofed, and typeset. But this is a big book—about 400 pages—and to print it in a large enough quantity to get a good per-copy rate from the printer and to give it the initial public promotion it deserves . . . well, that takes cash that we just don’t have.
But—ahem!—you and our other friends do, and so I’m asking you to give us a hand in getting The Fathers Know Best printed and publicized.
I’ve been involved in writing and publishing for a long time, so I know that bringing a book to fruition and getting it noticed (and sold!) is no easy thing.
Each year more than 40,000 titles are published in the U.S., and it takes savvy and, alas, cash to get a worthwhile book “noticed” and reviewed and (as I think this one will be) praised, but that’s what needs to be done if The Fathers Know Best is to have the influence I think it ought to have.
In publishing, as in other areas, there’s a “window of opportunity.”
If a publisher can make a big splash right from the start, then a book has a chance to carry itself, so to speak, and to go from success to success.
But if a publisher isn’t in a position to print many copies or to give the book the marketing oomph it needs, even the best book will languish.
And The Fathers Know Best mustn’t languish, because it’s a book that can do an immense amount of good—both spiritual and intellectual—for countless thousands of people, both Catholic and non-Catholic.
That’s why I want to have a large first-run printing and an extensive right-out-of-the-gate marketing campaign.
To use a term common on the Internet, I want this book to “go viral,” which means to have publicity about it be self-sustaining so that more and more people can learn about—and learn from—this important book.
I hope you can help us pull this off.
As I said, we need money to print a large number of copies of The Fathers Know Best—the more copies we order, the cheaper the unit cost and thus the lower we can set the retail price—and to undertake an extensive promotional campaign.
I hope you might be one of those willing to help with a gift of $500 or $1,000 or even more. Or maybe you can afford to send us $100 or $200 toward this effort. Whatever you give, you have our thanks.
If you’re able to help us with a donation of at least $50, as a thank-you, we’ll send you in return two things:
1. A copy of the book itself, of course, autographed by Jimmy Akin.
2. An exclusive audio interview with Jimmy about the book and its background. This interview will not be made available in the future and is available only as a thank-you to those who help with this project.
Perhaps you can tell from this letter that I’m excited about this project. I think Jimmy’s new book will do a lot of good for a lot of people.
Over the years, I’ve learned of many people who, having stumbled across the Fathers, found themselves compelled to go where they didn’t want to go—into the Catholic Church.
They saw that the Catholic Church and Catholic beliefs go back beyond the Council of Trent, beyond the medieval councils, all the way to the earliest councils—and further back still, all the way to Christ.
Won’t you help us help thousands come to see this truth?
You and I are witnesses to the truth of the Catholic faith—and I think we’ve had some success in that—but the most powerful witnesses I know, outside the Bible itself, are the Fathers of the Church.
Please help us introduce them to today’s readers, both Catholic and non-Catholic.
I’m excited about the book finally being available for pre-order, and I hope you will consider supporting it–and Catholic Answers as a whole–through a generous donation.
Of course, you could simply wait a little longer and purchase the book, but I hope that you will offer your support in this way because it helps the ministry continue its work and it helps us do a decent print run and proper promotion for the book–maximizing the apostolic good that is done and helping Catholic Answers undertake more publishing projects like this in the future.
To give those who support this appeal added value, I’m going to be sitting down and autographing all the copies that are sent to those who donate.
I’m also–and I haven’t talked about this elsewhere–going to be personalizing the autographs by adding a citation to a relevant Bible verse to each one. That’s something I always do when I autograph things as a lagniappe–“a little bit extra.” Years ago when I was given a book by a Christian author, he wrote a Bible verse under his signature. I went home and looked it up, and I decided I liked the custom, so I always do that when I autograph.
And I don’t give the same verse to everybody. I’m going to be picking out a selection of Fathers-related Bible verses and using them for the autographs.
I wonder what your verse will be?
To add even more value for the donor, I recently sat down to record an exclusive interview with Patrick Coffin about the Church Fathers and the making of the book. We will be sending a copy of this on CD to those who generously respond to the appeal. It will not be aired on Catholic Answers live, will not be posted online, and will not be available in any other way in the future. It is exclusively a thank-you for those who are able to help the ministry through their generosity.
So I look forward to autographing a book for you, and I hope you can give to this appeal and help Catholic Answers maximize the apostolic good it can do though The Fathers Know Best.
