Today, August 22, is the Queenship of Mary in the Latin rite of the Church.
By divine providence, today is also the day that I was received into the Catholic Church, back in 1992.
(And bring a box of Kleenex.)
A Surprisingly Positive Article
Son Planning Invalid Marriage
A reader writes:
My wife and I are lifelong Catholics and have brought our children up in the Church. My son has just informed us that he is engaged to be married to a Protestant girl he has known for only 3 months. We have discussed the local Catholic information course and suggested that they both attend this together so she can have a better understanding of his Faith. We also requested they be married in the Church. They have decided against this and have decided to get married in one month by her grandfather who is a minister. I have discussed the importance of his decision and asked him to delay the marriage a few months. I have made him aware that they need to consult with our Priest to find out what the Church requires (a dispensation). He is not willing to wait and is determined to proceed with the wedding next month.
First, let me say that I really feel for your tragic and painful situation and will be praying for your family. What your son is doing is incredibly reckless by any standard. It is extraordinarily foolhardy, particularly in our culture today, to marry someone that you have known for a total of four months.
A few questions:
1. This marriage will not be valid which means he will in effect be "living in sin" and can no longer receive the Eucharist. Will he still be able to attend Mass?
Yes. People in states of sin can attend Mass. In fact, Catholics in a state of sin are still obligated to attend Mass.
What would be the point of going to Confession if he has every intent of continuing in the relationship?
None, as long as he’s unwilling to either live chastely or rectify his marital status.
2. Is this a more serious sin because it is done with the full knowledge and intent to sin?
Increasing knowledge of the moral character of a sinful act does make it more sinful, though I don’t know enough to assess your son’s personal culpability. Only God sees the heart. Your son may be acting under passions so strong that diminish his culpability.
3. Is it as simple to fix as having it later validated in The Church (after a good Confession)?
It is relatively simple to have a convalidation later, though there may be marriage preparation and other formalties that will be necessary first.
4. What are our responsibilities as parents. I know that we cannot "celebrate" the wedding in any way so as not to lend our presence to the ceremony and thereby indicate that it is "OK", but surely if we visit the couple at any time during their invalid marriage we would be implying that it is ok? Does this mean we must no longer see our son?
The question of how to navigate social relationships without endorsing an invalid union is a very difficult question that many find themselves in. It is particularly painful and complex and depends in significant measures on how the parties are related to each other and how they would "read" different actions as messages saying things about the union.
Attending the wedding, celebrating anniversaries, letting two people share the same bed under your roof, etc., would all be actions that in our culture would be taken as an endorsement of the union. (And it is hard to see how they might be anything other than that, even in other cultures.)
However, social interactions not directly related to marriage may not be taken this way. For example, inviting people (who know that you don’t think that they are married) over to your house or going over to their house is often not read as an endorsement of a union in our culture. The act is remote enough from the marriage itself that in the opinion of many it is not necessary to refrain from these social interactions.
It most definitely is not necessary that you cut off all contact with your son. Indeed, maintaining contact with him may be essential to the future rectification of his situation. The difficult and painful thing is figuring out how to maintain contact in a way that does not send him false messages. Ultimately, one just has to do the best one can to muddle through that.
5. If he rejects The Catholic Church and becomes a Protestant before the wedding, does this make it valid?
If he formally defects from the Church then yes, it would result in the marriage being valid. I would not his about this or even mention it to him, though, as formal defection from the Church is an intrinsically evil act. One cannot recommend an intrinsically evil act (defection from the true Church of Christ) in order that good may com of it (a valid marriage).
If, however, he learns of this on his own and asks about it then one would be at liberty to answer his questions honestly, pointing out that defecting from the Church is intrinsically evil and must not be done.
6. If after the wedding he rejects The Church and becomes a Protestant would the wedding then be valid?
No, this has no bearing on whether the union was valid at the time it was contracted.
7. If he continues in the invalid marriage with full knowledge, later gets divorced, returns to The Church, can the marriage be annulled?
Yes. In fact, it would be quite easy to annul it due to the facts of the case as outlined above. The Church has a special process for cases of this nature since invalidity is so easy to prove.
8. With the limited information I have given you, what would you do if it was your son?
If it were me? I’d do the following:
- Pray really hard.
- Perform penitential acts on behalf of my son and his fiancee. (NOTE! It is important that any pentiential acts of a significant nature be undertaken under the guidance of a spiritual director in order to keep you from biting off more than you can chew or that might pose long-term harm to you.)
- Stress to my son that the course he is undertaking involves sin.
- Stress to him that it will complicate his future and make things harder for him in the long term.
- Point out to him that marrying someone you have known for only four months at the time of the weddig is incredibly foolhardy and that the success rates for such marriages is extraordinarily low. The odds are that he will go through a lot of pain and end up divorced, with all the complications that entails (including possibly having a kid or kids whose mother you are no longer married to).
- Point out to him that if he really loves this girl and that if the two of them really can make a go of it as husband and wife then the most loving thing he can do for the two of them is SLOW DOWN and give them a chance to get to know each other better and let their relationship mature. The breakneck speed he’s doing this at has far more likelihood of HARMING their marriage than helping it. There are issues they need to work out BEFORE they get married. Trying to work them out afterwards will only harm the two.
- Ask him to contemplate the magnitude of the decision he is making. Does he really understand what it means to make a LIFE-LONG commitment to this person based on having known her for this short space of time.
- I’d also go to the girl’s family and talk to them about the situation. The idea that her grandfather is willing to marry them in this circumstances is incredible, and her family may be able to be enlisted in talking some sense into these young people.
- I’d also try to live in hope. Something like a third of all marriage licenses that are taken out are never used. There is a significant chance that one or the other of these two young people will have a change of heart before the ceremony.
God bless, and I invite all blog readers to be praying for y’all!
20
Sold! …To Mom, For Chores
Two teens who sold a week of their time on eBay learned, to their evident disappointment, that the winner of the auction was the mother of one of the amateur entrepreneurs. Determined to save the kids from more than they may have bargained for, and seeing possibilities in buying their time, Mom has worked with the other teen’s mother to draft plans for this duo:
"[C]ollege-bound students Chip Davis and Chris Pullen learned the identity of their eBay ‘buyer’: Davis’ mother, Mary.
"’Like I’m going to let some pedophile or whatever win? I don’t think so,’ she said Friday. ‘I would have paid $5,000 for the safety of those two — no question.’
"The auction concluded Monday. Davis, 18, and Pullen, 19, found out Mary Davis’ secret on Thursday, dashing any hopes that they would at least get to travel because of the auction.
"’After finding out the winner was from St. Joseph, I was disappointed,’ Chip Davis said. ‘But now I’m even more disappointed to find out it was my mom.’
"Mary Davis used a screen name the two would not recognize, and checked the family’s computer in secret to make sure she had the winning bid.
"She said she planned to get her money’s worth out of the two, who will start classes later this month at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
"’It’s a legal contract,’ she said, ‘so the longer they put it off, the longer the list of work will get.’
"The list, compiled with Pullen’s mother, Janet, already includes lawnmowing and room-cleaning duties."
I hope the two mothers save clippings of the newspaper article. Sounds like a good story with which to embarrass these two to their own teenagers fifteen or twenty years from now.
Vampire Squid From Hell!
That’s what this here critter is called.
No kidding! It’s Latin name is Vampyroteuthis infernalis.
And it really exists! Here on Earth and all!
It lives (as you might guess) deep in the ocean. In fact, it lives really deep, down at a level where the oxygen content in the water is so low that most creatures can’t survive there.
We’ve only known about them for about a century. There’s still a lot about them that we don’t know, but here are some interesting facts about the vampire squid from hell:
- Unlike other squids, it can’t expel ink in order to create a distraction while it jets away.
- Instead (this is sooooo cool) it expels glowing snot filled with blue balls of light in order to distract its opponent!
- It only grows to a foot long, but it has the biggest eyes of any creature proportionate to the size of its body (it needs big eyes, living at the depths it does).
- Unlike other squids, it normally doesn’t move by jet action but by flapping the two fins on its head.
- During a certain stage of its growth from infant to adult, it has four fins on its head, which led people to think that the different body forms represented more than one species.
- It’s covered with little dots that it can cause to glow and flash in order to confuse opponents.
- It uses its light-generating ability to obscure its outline so predators can’t spot it.
- It can’t change color as well as similar critters, but its skin and eyes look different colors depending on the circumstances.
- It has blue blood!
- (We think that) the females guard their eggs for like 400 days before they hatch.
- They have a defensive move they do called "pumpkin posture" in which they turn themselves inside out (sort of) so that their head is down inside the bell-shaped part of their body. When they assume this position they stick their legs way up away from their heads and make the ends glow to distract the opponent from where their vital organs (their head) are. If a predator bites one of the ends of their legs off, they regenerate it!
Cool!
If only we could tell H. P. Lovecraft about these things!
Blessed Vs. Blessed
A reader writes:
Is there a difference between using Blessed (Bless-Ed), or Blessed (Bles-t) outside of a grammatical preference or usage?
If I understand you correctly, the answer is that the adjective "blessed" originally had a single meaning but that it has come to be pronounced differently in different situations. It also has related noun and verb forms. There isn’t much of a difference in meaning much of the time (besides the obvious shifts caused by using the word as a verb or a noun), but there are rules on how it is pronounced.
We say /bless-ed/ when:
- We use it as a title (not an adjective), as in "Blessed John of Wherever."
- We are using it as an adjective in front of a noun, as in "What a
blessed fool you are!" - It comes immediately
before the verb, as in "Blessed be the beasts and the children" or "Blessed are the peacemakers."
On the other hand, we say /blest/ when:
- We use it as a past tense
verb ("The pope blessed the people"), and - We use it
as an adjective following the verb ("He felt very blessed").
At least that’s how it sounds to my English-speaking American Catholic ear.
Your mileage may vary.
And it may vary in particular if you are a member of a different religious community. The above are the way Catholics do it, I’ve heard converts who haven’t absorbed these usages yet do it differently.
Male Angel Names?
A reader writes:
Listening to one of the Catholic Answers Q&A sessions, you mention no gender in angels. Would the fact that Angels are named, Michael, Raphael, Gabriel be named for our sake to show male strength in earlier times?
Okay, I’m not sure I understand the question, but if I read you correctly, you are wondering whether the fact that angels in the Bible have masculine names means that God is accomodating their names to ancient Hebrew culture, which identified strength with masculinity (angels being stronger than us).
Maybe.
To tell you the truth, I’ve never dug into Hebrew naming practices thoroughly enough to know whether the angels in question have names that sound distinctly male in Hebrew. Hypothetically, they could be bi-gendered names, like "Chris" or "Terry" or "Kelly" are in English, which can be either male or female. My suspicion, though, is that you’re correct and that these are male-sounding names in Hebrew.
However that may be, the angels are certainly pictured as males, and this is no doubt an accomodation to Hebrew culture in some way. It could be the strength of the angels that is the determining factor (Michael and Gabriel are depicted as engaging in heavenly warfare–a male occupation), or it could be something else. Raphael serves as a travelling companion for Tobias, and a woman would not be a fit travelling companion for an unmarried male in their day.
On the other hand, it seems that whenever angels are mentioned they are depicted (if they are depicted as humans) as male, even when they aren’t named. It may be that strength is the cause, or it might be the role they play: They’re God’s messengers. That’s what the word "angel" means in the biblical languages: messenger. Since kings used male messengers in that day, this could be why.
It also could be that they are in some way priestly, serving in the heavenly Temple, and in ancient Israel only males served as officials in the Temple.
So . . . it’s kinda hard to say for sure. My guess would be the messenger idea, though.
"No One Has Ascended To Heaven"
A reader writes:
On the Old testament i read that Elijah was ascend unto Heaven and on the Epistle of Jude 1:9 indicates that Moses was ascend too.
But Jesus said that he no one was came into heaven except himself which came from Heaven…
I’m confused enough with that, could you explain.
Off the top of my head, I can see three possibilities here:
- Elijah and others didn’t ascend to the same heaven that Jesus came from but to somewhere else.
- Jesus doesn’t mean for his comment to apply to all humans of all periods, so it allows for at least a handful of exceptions like Enoch and Elijah.
- Jesus is talking about his own particular kind of ascension, which is different than those of others. For example, he ascends under his own power (in cooperation with the Father and the Spirit), but others could not ascend under their own power. They had to be carried up to heaven by divine power, so they were "assumed" rather than "ascended."
- Jesus is talking about people who would be in a position to tell Nicodemus (who he is talking to) about heavenly things. He thus is thinking of people who are now on earth that could tell Nicodemus about heavenly things. Since Enoch, Elijah, and Moses were not at that moment on earth, they could not tell Nicodemus about heaven.
Option #1 does not seem that likely to me because Scripture says they went to heaven (Hebrew, shmayim) and because prior to the Incarnation Jesus did not have a physical form and so, as the Second Person of the Trinity, it would be equally present in all heavenly realms since he is everywhere. He is still everywhere in his divinity, of course, but at least today he has a body, so if he is in "third heaven" (let’s say) then we could say that he’s present everywhere but also present in third heaven in a special way since he is present there both in his divinity and his humanity. But before the Incarnation he had no humanity and so it would not be as easy to say he was specially in one heaven rather than another.
Option #2 is possible since Jesus may have been speaking of a restricted group of people, such as those of his current day. Of those living in the third century when Jesus said this (John 3:13), none of them had ascended to heaven. Jesus thus might have meant, "Of everyone you have ever met and of everyone alive today, none of them has ascended to heaven."
Option #3 is also possible, though I think it’s less likely than #2 or #4.
Option #4 seems more probable to me. If you look at verse 12, Jesus sets up his statement by saying:
12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
13: No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.
That question "how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?" sets up "No one has ascended to heaven." If we try to relate these two, the logic might be: "How could you believe if I told you about heavenly things? Nobody here on earth right now has ascended to heaven, therefore you’d have no way of knowing about heaven and whether what I was saying was true. If you don’t trust me when I tell you about earthly things, therefore, why would you believe if I told you about heavenly things? It’s not like you could consult Shlomo down the street and ask him what he saw last time he was in heaven and thus confirm what I said. So far, I’m the only one who’s come from there and only I can tell you about it. You’ll either have to trust me or not."
The fact that Elijah and some others had gone there wouldn’t affect this logic since they didn’t come back to tell people what they saw.
It is understandable that you’d be confused, though. This is a confusing passage. Taken on its face, it makes it sound like Jesus has already ascended to heaven, when we know from elsewhere in the New Testament that he hasn’t.
Hope this helps!
“No One Has Ascended To Heaven”
A reader writes:
On the Old testament i read that Elijah was ascend unto Heaven and on the Epistle of Jude 1:9 indicates that Moses was ascend too.
But Jesus said that he no one was came into heaven except himself which came from Heaven…I’m confused enough with that, could you explain.
Off the top of my head, I can see three possibilities here:
- Elijah and others didn’t ascend to the same heaven that Jesus came from but to somewhere else.
- Jesus doesn’t mean for his comment to apply to all humans of all periods, so it allows for at least a handful of exceptions like Enoch and Elijah.
- Jesus is talking about his own particular kind of ascension, which is different than those of others. For example, he ascends under his own power (in cooperation with the Father and the Spirit), but others could not ascend under their own power. They had to be carried up to heaven by divine power, so they were "assumed" rather than "ascended."
- Jesus is talking about people who would be in a position to tell Nicodemus (who he is talking to) about heavenly things. He thus is thinking of people who are now on earth that could tell Nicodemus about heavenly things. Since Enoch, Elijah, and Moses were not at that moment on earth, they could not tell Nicodemus about heaven.
Option #1 does not seem that likely to me because Scripture says they went to heaven (Hebrew, shmayim) and because prior to the Incarnation Jesus did not have a physical form and so, as the Second Person of the Trinity, it would be equally present in all heavenly realms since he is everywhere. He is still everywhere in his divinity, of course, but at least today he has a body, so if he is in "third heaven" (let’s say) then we could say that he’s present everywhere but also present in third heaven in a special way since he is present there both in his divinity and his humanity. But before the Incarnation he had no humanity and so it would not be as easy to say he was specially in one heaven rather than another.
Option #2 is possible since Jesus may have been speaking of a restricted group of people, such as those of his current day. Of those living in the third century when Jesus said this (John 3:13), none of them had ascended to heaven. Jesus thus might have meant, "Of everyone you have ever met and of everyone alive today, none of them has ascended to heaven."
Option #3 is also possible, though I think it’s less likely than #2 or #4.
Option #4 seems more probable to me. If you look at verse 12, Jesus sets up his statement by saying:
12 If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
13: No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of man.
That question "how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?" sets up "No one has ascended to heaven." If we try to relate these two, the logic might be: "How could you believe if I told you about heavenly things? Nobody here on earth right now has ascended to heaven, therefore you’d have no way of knowing about heaven and whether what I was saying was true. If you don’t trust me when I tell you about earthly things, therefore, why would you believe if I told you about heavenly things? It’s not like you could consult Shlomo down the street and ask him what he saw last time he was in heaven and thus confirm what I said. So far, I’m the only one who’s come from there and only I can tell you about it. You’ll either have to trust me or not."
The fact that Elijah and some others had gone there wouldn’t affect this logic since they didn’t come back to tell people what they saw.
It is understandable that you’d be confused, though. This is a confusing passage. Taken on its face, it makes it sound like Jesus has already ascended to heaven, when we know from elsewhere in the New Testament that he hasn’t.
Hope this helps!
The Real United Nations
It struck me while watching coverage of World Youth Day in Cologne that, as you look out over the vast crowd with flags flying from virtually every country on Earth, you are seeing the real United Nations. The Catholic church is truly catholic.
For the most part the United Nations that we all know from the newspapers is a group of mutually suspicious, grudging, scheming members united mainly in their desire to get a larger piece of the pie. They are united in the same way that hyenas are united around a carcass.
By contrast World Youth Day shows us a gathering of people who come together spontaneously, joyfully, with no greater desire than to demonstrate their love for Christ by showing love for one another. It is easy to sense, even through the satellite feed, that they are united in their love for their Papa and the One he represents.
I’m sure there are large numbers of people around the globe that find the scene somewhat alarming. Some of them call themselves Catholics. A Lifesite article relates that
Hans Kung has complained that World Youth Day is “triumphalistic”. To such people WYD is mysterious, and therefore dangerous.
“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (Jn. 3:8).
God bless everyone at World Youth Day, and long live Papa Ratzi!