Tag: Christianity

Questions and Answers on the “Coptic Martyrs”

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Eamonn Clark, STL

It is in the news that Pope Francis is enrolling 21 men who were killed by ISIS some years ago into the Roman Martyrology.

Here are some questions and my own (quick but hopefully not sloppy) answers, and there are also some “arrows” for more reading.

What happened?

The basic story is that 21 Christian men were executed by ISIS on a beach in Libya in February of 2015. Some of them were calling on Christ as they were put to death. 20 of them were known to be Coptic Orthodox, one man, from Ghana, is less clearly identifiable as Coptic. It is not actually totally clear that the executions were strictly motivated by the religion of the men, nor is it so clear that each of the men went to their deaths voluntarily – these are two of the normal requirements for being recognized as a martyr. If anyone can help me with more details on this, I would be thankful.

Who are the Coptic Orthodox?

The story is very long. In short, the Coptic Orthodox Church is a schismatic group that split from Rome in the wake of the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451) over the doctrine of Dyophysitism, which is the teaching that Christ is “in” or “has” two natures, a human nature and a Divine Nature, rather than being “of” these same two natures. This may seem unimportant, until you realize that we are talking about the fundamental character of Who and what exactly it is that we are worshipping – which is automatically a big deal. There were 13 Egyptian bishops who refused to accept the Chalcedonian formulation, protesting that the recently deceased bishop St. Cyril of Alexandria (Egyptian), had condemned those who held to this position in his 3rd anathema. (The issue here comes down to the precise meaning of the word “physis.”) In the end, the Egyptians were not persuaded by the other Fathers of the Council that Cyril was not a “Miaphysite” but was actually a Dyophysite using vague language. You will have to do the hard work of reading the history in detail to get more of the story, sorry.

Have there been attempts to reconcile with the Copts?

Yes, many. The issue of the Coptic schism was an agenda item of the Ecumenical Council of Florence (1431-1449). The Copts ultimately did not want to come back on board, despite their representatives at the Council wanting to do so. Pope Eugene IV wrote a “Bull of Union with the Copts” called “Cantate Domino,” which it turns out is very relevant for our consideration and which we will look at later. There is also a group of Coptic Catholics, who have reunited with Rome, and there were several joint declarations between the Holy See and the Coptic Orthodox some decades ago on Christology – and though they are significant steps toward unity, they did not use the magic words, “in two natures.”

What is the Roman Martyrology?

This is the Catholic Church’s official list of martyrs. It is not a list of all Catholic saints. However, one who is in the Martyrology is usually also revered liturgically as a Blessed or a Saint.

Have there been non-Catholics treated as saints before?

Yes. I know of a few, thanks to this article by Fr. Ed McNamara: St. Stephen of Perm (1340-1396), St. Anthony of Kiev (983-1073), St. Theodosius of Kiev (1029-1074), St. Sergius of Radonezh (1314-1392), and St. Gregory of Narek (950-1003). The latter has also been named as a Doctor of the Church. In these cases, as Fr. McNamara explains, given the complex historical circumstances and the time in which these men lived, union with Rome was not necessarily as clear-cut an issue as it is today. So maybe the better answer is, “No, but sort of.”

Are canonizations infallible?

This is a deeply disputed question. There is a whole book of essays recently published on this matter, which I have not read myself but can nevertheless recommend based on what I have read about it, here. The opinion which I take myself is, “No.” However, nobody will sin by venerating someone held up by Rome as a saint, including in the liturgy.

What about Eugene IV?

The Bull “Cantate Domino” does not mince words on the issue of non-Catholic martyrs. It says they don’t exist. Again, without getting into the settled debate over Feeneyism (yes, it is possible to be “in the Catholic Church” without necessarily manifesting this explicitly by outward signs), here is the relevant part of the text: “The most Holy Roman Church firmly believes, professes and preaches that none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal; but that they will go into the eternal fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels, unless before death they are joined with Her; and that so important is the unity of this ecclesiastical body that only those remaining within this unity can profit by the sacraments of the Church unto salvation, and they alone can receive an eternal recompense for their fasts, their almsgivings, their other works of Christian piety and the duties of a Christian soldier. No one, let his almsgiving be as great as it may, no one, even if he pour out his blood for the Name of Christ, can be saved, unless he remain within the bosom and the unity of the Catholic Church.” This echoes St. Augustine’s teaching on the same question, along with a host of other Fathers.

What about Feeneyism?

Feeneyism is indeed wrong, that’s settled. But the entire point of canonizations is to hold up individuals as extraordinary examples of heroic Christian virtue. It strains credulity to think that this would be appropriate of anyone who has at least dubious Christology, and openly rejects the primacy of the See of Peter (the Pope of Rome).

Is this the only strange thing going on at the moment relating to canonizations in Rome?

No. But we will cross that bridge if and when we get there.

Aren’t you just being mean and nasty?

Maybe, but I am concerned with the integrity and meaning of canonizations and ultimately of their purpose, which is the proposal for the imitation of the lives of those who are canonized. To drive the point home: nobody should be Coptic Orthodox. And sure, it is possible that God could have worked an extraordinary grace in the souls of these individuals and brought them to Himself with a high amount of merit (awesome!), but that does not mean that they are fit for public veneration as saints in the Catholic Church. If you think I’m being mean and nasty, go read the link above on the Fathers and this question. I’ll stick with those guys.

End of Q and A.

There’s more to the story, and I hope the readership will point out if I am getting any details wrong. But this at least gets the discussion moving in the right way. There is plenty of good ecumenism going on, but I fear that this is not an example of it. The lines need to be very clear. This will mostly just confuse people in the long-term, it seems.

My own question is rhetorical, and I hope it’s not too biting… How is it that people who like the 1962 Roman Missal are “too divisive,” but people who openly reject the entire idea of Petrine primacy can be put into the Roman Martyrology?

St. Josaphat, Thief of Souls, pray for us! St. Mark the Evangelist, pray for us!

Jung Goes to Chalcedon: A Christology of Archetypes?

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Below is a talk I gave at the Angelicum’s annual student theology conference last week. Enjoy!

Eamonn Clark, STL

A fallen away Lutheran’s Kantian appropriation of Platonic forms hardly seems like the place to look for shocking insight into Christology, but today I will make the case that it is.

In this paper I will argue that psychologist Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes gives us tools for deepening our understanding of Christ as a Person within the narrative given to us in Sacred Scripture, in particular by examining two archetypes which have been well-treated in mythological and psychological literature: the hero and the trickster. I take all of the classical definitions of the Councils for granted – Jesus Christ is truly God the Son, and fully a man born in Bethlehem. There is much to talk about within the paradigm of Chalcedon and the Alexandrian-Antiochene controversies which occasioned the advent of our cherished credal formulas – but since we do indeed possess revealed data, we have solid ground from which to jump into areas yet unexplored. We can be like Theseus – not running into the labyrinth and becoming lost, food for the minotaur, but not simply staying safe and sound outside either. We can take hold of the cord of tradition and bring it with us to keep ourselves oriented – we can slay the minotaur.

An archetype for Jung is a kind of impression of deeply meaningful symbols upon the collective unconscious – a sort of echo of Averroist anthropology that has somehow taken in data and leaves its mark within us. Jung rejects entirely the “tabula rasa” of St. Thomas and Aristotle. We are born with these ideas already deep within our psyche, and their use in stories or encountering them in our life moves us in particular ways. We expect certain things from certain kinds of characters – a witch-queen is altogether different from a wizard-king, whether they are good or evil. Most people automatically perceive this, even if they can’t articulate it, which is normally the case.

While I am not an Averroist, there is something to be said for the observation that so many peoples across time and space seem to use extremely similar kinds of characters and tropes in their great myths – everything from wise old men to floods to heroes who go on quests.

One might be inclined to dismiss the Jungian thesis outright by saying, “It’s just the way that stories work.” But why is it that we want these kinds of characters and these kinds of stories? We can’t say it’s coincidence. We could try to chalk it up to cultural conditioning, but again, this elides Jung’s main premise: we see these patterns in practically every story-telling culture across time and space, and it is unlikely that all of our common ancestors were telling stories which were sufficiently advanced and powerful to populate our minds with this amount of similar ideas so profoundly. One might also posit that we experience life, and life has its rhythms and structures which our emotions and imagination correspond to in such a way that we are attracted to particular sorts of narratives. This is not wrong, but it still doesn’t get to the heart of the problem, as our emotions and imagination receive the world and process it in a particular way with identifiable patterns which do not explain themselves. We simply return to the same question with different terms: why these kinds of emotional responses, and these imaginative structures? There must be something deeper.

I would suggest the following limited analogy: Christ is to our perception of Him as mathematics is to music. Music has certain rules, which, if violated, create a kind of dissonance which we find jarring; these rules can be laid out in mathematical formulas. The classical liberal arts proceeded from mathematics to music, just as it proceeded from geometry to astronomy and from grammar to rhetoric: the latter studies are of the object of the former studies put into motion, that is, music is mathematics in motion, astronomy is geometry in motion. Christ is the Word, the eternal Logos, the Wisdom of God, through Whom all things are made. Our encounter with Him flows from the “rules” found within Him, the natural law and law of grace finding their origin in Him, the Eternal Law, and thus our encounter with Him is the Logos “in motion,” just like music. However, musical taste is much more deeply informed by culture than is our relationship with Christ – this is where the analogy begins to break down. For example, Westerners intuitively find minor chords “dark,” but this is not the case for others. The rules for our encounter with Christ, where not totally individual, are totally universal, that is to say, a culture does not get to tell us Who Christ is or what He wants, despite shaping the style and circumstances in which we approach Him to some degree; and yet, of course, because charity is a personal friendship with God, its pursuit and activity will also have a dynamic unique to each person.

Because our journey with the Lord is the Word “set in motion,” we can easily see how this puts us into a narrative, a story, which is more literally “words in motion,” so to speak – as from grammar to rhetoric. The fact is that the sacred story of which we are a part has rules. This means that good attempts to reach out to the sacred narrative which imbues the world with its ultimate meaning will track these rules, using particular symbols in the form of characters, tropes, and events. And indeed, we see in the narrative of Sacred Scripture the same threefold operation upon profane myth which grace has on nature: healing, elevating, and perfecting. As a result, it should not be surprising that we are somehow ourselves marked with an intuitive sense of the symbols which fill the great myths, and which even fill normal kinds of good literature. We want to tell certain kinds of stories because we are part of a story whose Divine Author is telling us to do so, whether in our nature somehow, or through the promptings of universal sufficient grace, or some combination of both. Here is not the place to explore how such a theory might respond to the theses of someone like Dupuis, but I simply note that this is a possible way to understand the “logos spermatikos,” the seeds of the Word, among the nations. The conclusion is that our mind is shaped in such a way as to recognize the hints of Christ’s truth, beauty, and goodness as hints – a point I am taking and appropriating from Fr. Pierre Rousselot.

I am concerned here with Christology – the entrance of the Author of the story into the story itself. I will focus exclusively on two great archetypes, which I think give us the beginnings of a psychological Christology: the hero and the trickster. I propose that we can understand Christ as a hylomorphic unity of these two opposing archetypes, with the hero as form and the trickster as matter. I will begin with the trickster archetype.

Claude Levy-Strauss posits that tricksters in mythology are frequently animals which eat carrion, that is, meat which is already dead. They are therefore not hunters, but they are not herbivores – they are something in-between, neither this nor that. We are inclined to be uncomfortable with figures like ravens or coyotes or vultures or snakes (and many snakes do in fact eat carrion) – we’d prefer things that we know do this or that, peaceful plant eaters or vicious hunter-killers. In fact, it is the object which they approach that unsettles us first: the corpse, the dead thing which was living. The trickster is one who cannot be trusted: he is the one who lies, who has petty motives, who will harm others for his own selfish gain, who wants to attain power over us, often by leading us into taking his own unfortunate place, such as by trapping us in a hole while climbing out of it himself. Certainly, this is not how Christ is, but we will return to this description momentarily.

Non-dietary ritual purity laws in Israel related to the state between life and non-life, or death. Thus anytime something seems to be related to crossing the divide between the two “worlds,” it is considered impure – neither this, nor that, something in between, something different. Things which cannot be categorized easily into the world of the living or the world of the “non-living” are to be rendered clearly one thing or the other. If a person becomes impure, such as through contact with a corpse, he or she must go through the symbolic stages of re-entering the world of the living. There is more to be said, but this will have to suffice – I simply point one to the thought that such a lens for studying the Passion and Resurrection could be quite illuminating.

Here are some actions of Christ which correspond to the trickster type: Shapeshifting (the Incarnation as the invisible taking a shape, the Eucharist as the visible becoming hidden in a new shape, the Resurrected Christ’s body changing into a glorified shape); Riddle-telling (parables, rhetorical responses); Gatekeeping (“I am the narrow gate,” etc.); Dwelling on the outskirts and going to the “in-between places,” which Levy-Strauss points out of coyotes, ravens, etc. (Christ does this during much of the public ministry, and especially in Bethany, just before and during Holy Week, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Mount of Olives, Golgotha, all just outside of Jerusalem; in-betweenness is found especially in the Baptismal site, which is in between “life and death”: Israel and the nations, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, in the jungle surrounded by desert, and then going down into water which gives and takes life, in the place which is in fact the lowest point on the planet by several hundred meters); Physical evasiveness (“He passed through the crowds,” etc.; tricksters are slippery and quick, like serpents); Touching impure things (i.e. the lepers, the woman with the hemorrhage, the dead girl – “Talitha koum” – just like eating carrion, but it is a spiritual eating); Working through chaos and shadow (in particular the miracles, which are always somehow hidden, whether by the confusion of a crowd as in the multiplications of loaves, or by the weather, as in the walking on the water, or by a wall, such as in the raising of Lazarus, and so on – it is not like jumping off the parapet of the Temple and being protected by the angels, there is room left for both doubt and for a  deeper encounter with the mystery being revealed on account of the need for faith to understand its proper meaning).

All of this symbolizes Christ’s space in our psychological weak spot – the uncanny valley, which is of course maxed out in the Resurrection, as exemplified by the fear which the Apostles experienced when they first saw Him in the Upper Room, thinking they were seeing a ghost. (Luke 24:37) He is the apex, the climax of the story, the way to the happy ending through an unsettling doorway called death. We are unsettled because we do not know what is there – we must ask, “What is it?” “Manna?” We learn in John 6 that Christ is in fact the true Manna, the true “what-is-it,” the real Mystery which provides the bridge between our deathward bios and the zoe of Heaven which shocks our psychology on account of the space whence He comes to us – but this fear is replaced by Paschal joy, when we see that He is not a ghost, or some kind of zombie, but Life itself come to us as a Friend Who will carry us safely across the divide, as our Viaticum.

But Christ is not a trickster, except in a material sense. By this I mean that it is how He works out His program among us, in particular among His contemporaries – our experience is quite different in that we have nice Chalcedonian definitions by which to understand Him. Not so for the Eleven gathered in the Upper Room, and yet in some way they understood Him much more. Christ uses these uncomfortable techniques to shake us out of the comfort of our present modus vivendi and drag us across the divide between bios and zoe – life here, and life in Heaven. He is the way there, and He is the life, zoe.  But He is also the Truth, so that leaves us wondering about the significance of Him qua trickster. In fact, the hero archetype, the formal part, gives us an entirely different lens by which to understand His trickster part. The heroic element inverts the entirety of the meaning of the trickster in Christ: instead of lying to gain power over us out of petty and selfish motives at our expense, He makes Himself weak, giving us power over Him, even to harm Him unto death, and His motive is grave, namely, to help us, especially freeing us by taking on our sorry lot Himself and revealing to us the truth. That’s a complete inversion.

Yet Christ still has and always had power over us. This is because He is God, but, in the narrative sense, He is first and foremost a hero. Heroes are powerful. This is his formal part. Christ qua hero is a theme much more explored than the trickster element, so I will only briefly examine it before returning to a consideration of the question of power.

I pass over Raglan’s 22 points of the heroic “mythotype,” though this is worth its own investigation, and I go instead directly to the “hero’s journey.” This “monomythic” narrative structure has been described by several authors, including most famously Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces, where it was pioneered, but also by other more recent authors. The hero’s journey essentially consists in a departure from the home, where one is born and raised, to go on a quest of some sort; next, there is some kind of initiation or trial; finally, there is a return home. The quest is always successful – the enemies are thwarted, the magic sword or golden fleece is obtained, or some object which is too powerful is destroyed, like a ring or a sorcerer’s stone. Then the hero returns home triumphant. The parallels with Christ are almost too obvious to point out: it is the entire story of the Incarnation, the Public Ministry, the Cross, the Resurrection, and the Ascension.

It is important for Campbell, at least, that the hero begins in the ordinary world, and is then called to adventure, in a world of mysterious forces and challenges, only to return home to normalcy. Odysseus is a great example. But Christ is very unlike Odysseus – and I speak here just of the “call to adventure” which the Lord receives. His real call to adventure is summed up by St. Paul: “Not deeming equality with God something to be grasped at, He emptied Himself, taking on the form of a slave.” The visible mission of the Son in the Incarnation is the call to adventure. The world of men, unlike the normal hero stories, is not full of mysterious forces, it is full of mundane forces which are perfectly comprehended by the hero and are completely under His control. Then the Lord ascends into Heaven – Nazareth is not really His home.

The journey continues after the call to adventure, with its various stages, which Christ fulfills par excellence, and which for the sake of time I will pass over. The point is that the “hero” is His formal part – He is the one who can rescue us and bring us home with Him safely.

I wish to return to a consideration of power, specifically the power of Christ over our minds as a narrative figure. I note that Christ as a narrative figure has three modes – a mode which is inaccessible to us, another which is partially accessible to us, and another which is totally accessible to us. The first mode is as a flesh-and-blood historical figure during His earthly life and ministry. The second is as a figure who is spoken of by those who had encounters in the first mode, and of course for us this comes especially in the form of the Gospels and Acts. The third is as one with whom we live out our own lives now, and to whom we pray and make sacrifice. In each of these three modes, Christ exercises a unique kind of psychological power.

The first kind of power over humanity is as an uncategorizable figure. In the Public Ministry He was somehow “not this and not that” – again, “manna,” “What is it?” This ambiguity gave Him a power over His interlocutors, both the friendly ones and the unfriendly ones. We are threatened by what is ambiguous, what is “impure,” because we do not know how to treat it… We don’t know what to expect; everything is surprising. This is the trickster element coming to the fore.

The second kind of power is as the Hero which emerges as intellectual and spiritual keystone of human history. The story itself of the Gospels is compelling because it is the story our minds were built to receive and recognize as the “right narrative.” Here we see the hero most on display.

The third kind of power is as the Lord, our God, Who has ascended into Heaven, body and soul, and Who wants now to save us if we let Him. By encountering through prayer and the sacraments the One described in our creeds and in our liturgy, prescinding from the reading of the Scriptures, we get the doctrine of His salvific power. We are utterly helpless before the gaping maw of the abyss which stands beyond death. Only He can help us. To do this, those who are capable of human acts must in fact make the choice to invite Him into their lives. They must walk with Him, in a strange and sometimes very confusing way. He is here, there, everywhere, hiding… He plays a kind of game with us, a game which is ultimately ordered to our salvation if we “play along” and follow the rules. The hero and the trickster reveal themselves here together as a unity most forcefully. He is in hiding, changing shape, touching the impurities of our souls – but he is mighty to save, using that very hiddenness and ambiguity to our advantage and the ultimate advantage of all Creation and God’s own glory.

More research is called for into the Jungian psychological paradigm as a tool to sift through the Scriptures, taking the revealed data as “the story which God wants told,” the narrative which heals, elevates, and perfects pagan narratives – including, of course, the actual historical fulfillment of those stories and their figures. This kind of approach to Scripture is becoming more popular, but this seems to be primarily the case among non-Catholics, and non-theologians; we ought to take our cue from the popularity and power of these kinds of analyses as an opportunity for evangelization, in addition to an opportunity for deepening our own speculative understanding of Christ and our relationship with Him.

I’ve started a business…

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Dear Readers,

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We also sell some “swag” to help power our mission. There is a large philanthropic element which is connected to these sales in particular – we are in the process of partnering with clergy in some very poor areas around the world who will get a percentage of our profits to use as alms in their own region.

There is a 10% discount code available for academic products – profidelaunch2023! – but it expires in the next few days, so use it while it lasts! Be sure to subscribe to our company’s mailing list to receive other special offers and all our news.

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Where is Christ?

Christian Renaissance Movement

This blog was originally started with the goal of exploring the arts and sciences in relation to the Catholic Faith. This post is a return to that original mission. Below is a talk I gave today at the Angelicum Thomistic Institute’s currently ongoing conference – New Heavens and a New Earth: Scientific and Theological Eschatology. Enjoy!

-Eamonn Clark, STL

We are sometimes confronted by potential converts, by catechumens, and even by curious believers about the whereabouts of the Lord. He is in Heaven, of course, but where is that? Is it somewhere out among the stars? Is it in some “parallel universe”? Or is there some other option? It is an uncomfortable experience for the apologist, the catechist, the evangelist, and the theologian not to have a simple answer for this rather reasonable question.

Today I will posit that there is a third option, though close to the “parallel universe” theory, and that its existence and mode of access, if true, reveals something profound about the gifts of the resurrection and about Christ as the Incarnate Logos in relation to modern physics. I depart a bit from St. Thomas in his treatment of the gifts of the resurrection, precisely on account of our enhanced understanding of the physical world, which presents us with new options to consider.

St. Thomas assumes that Christ is in a place – a real body demands physical space – and Christ’s Ascension is caused efficiently in a twofold manner: first, by His glorified soul, and secondly, by His unique Divine Power. (ST III-57-3)

The gifts of the resurrection are similarly explained by St. Thomas in the Commentary on the Sentences, as powers flowing from the soul on account of its glorification. I will not contest this so much as I will attempt to give some possible articulations of the effect and mode of the gifts’ interaction with the world.

St. Thomas does not seem to like the idea of multiple universes – he tells us this in Question 47, Article 3 of the Prima Pars. So, we abandon that idea.

As a scientific springboard, I want to consider two possible or even probable physical remnants we have of the Resurrection of Christ.

The first remnant is the Shroud of Turin. Here I take it for granted, of course, that the Shroud is in fact the linen cloth which laid over the dead Christ, and which has received the image of his Body. A very long description would be required to explain adequately exactly what we find on the Shroud, but we are more concerned with how the image was produced. Of course, we do not possess any technology today which is capable of giving anything close to a plausible imitation of what we find in the image. The best estimation is that the image was produced by a sort of radiation of light from the body of the dead Christ. We will return to this momentarily.

The second remnant is an electromagnetic field – or something like a field – which was discovered by scientists during the 2016 excavations in the Holy Sepulcher. The electromagnetic field underneath the Edicule, in the cave in which Christ was buried, is a much lesser-known reality but is just as puzzling if not more so than the Shroud. As Aleteia reported, “As soon as [the measuring instruments] were placed vertically on the stone in which Christ’s body rested, the devices either malfunctioned or ceased to work at all.” This electromagnetic field apparently also had ruined previous attempts at measuring the depth of the shaft which leads from the Edicule down to the cave. There is no known natural explanation for why there would be such an electromagnetic field in that location.

The musing of there being a possible connection between the electromagnetic field and the Shroud has been made before. Here is my own elaboration, synthesizing my own take on the Shroud itself, coupled with the fact of the electromagnetic field. I propose, with many others, that the Shroud is the result of a hyper-energetic burst of radiation from the Body of the Lord at the moment of His Resurrection. I propose uniquely that this burst was a mixture of various types of radiation – everything from alpha particles to gamma rays – which were controlled by a kind of infused habit of an electromagnetism emanating from the Lord which was under His control, or something very similar. It is because of this unique situation that the Shroud is not replicable by natural means, nor is there even a plausible explanation given the natural forces which we know of unless they are warped somehow and brought together in a way not seen in nature – which is precisely what I am proposing. It is experimentally verified that electromagnetic fields can warp radiation, and if this could somehow be done with a sort of immediate voluntary power over the character of the field itself in every part of the field, one could control the radiation at a whim, thus explaining the image. This even explains the lack of slight warping we would expect from a sheet laid over a face – the Shroud is a flat image, like a photograph or a mirror, without stretching, which we would expect from vertically collimated burst of information on a slightly curved surface. Instead, it is designed to be fitting for devotion. The alternative would be that the linen cloth itself was elevated above the dead or resurrecting Christ and stretched out flat, which seems strange and unnecessary.

In the case of a habit of this sort of elemental control, one might not only be able to warp radiation emanating from one’s own body, but could warp other things around oneself as well, such as folding linen cloths without touching them, or creating electromagnetic fields in one’s surroundings. The linen cloths being folded can be explained several other ways, but it seems certain that this latter phenomenon really happened. The Lord left a trace of Himself in the place He rose from, just as He did in the Shroud. I propose, then, very cautiously, that anywhere that the Risen Lord appeared or disappeared during the 50 days before the Ascension, we would find electromagnetic aberrations similar to those found in the Holy Sepulcher. To drive it home: empirical tests could actually be carried out in what is most commonly thought to be the Upper Room, despite its having been rebuilt, and along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. These would be the obvious contenders for such tests, and perhaps also the site of the Ascension itself on the Mount of Olives and the probable route to Emmaus.

Next, I note two abnormal manipulations of spacetime as relevant for our consideration – the normal sort of manipulations being gravity, electromagnetism, and, in a way, mere motion.

The first is wormholes, specifically electromagnetically induced wormholes – a wormhole being a kind of bending of spacetime to take a “short cut.” There has been some experimental verification of creating miniature wormholes for electromagnetic fields themselves, such as by Prat-Camps, Navau, and Sanchez (2015), and there is increasing clarity that electromagnetic fields, taking for granted Penrose’s Weyl curvature hypothesis, as proposed by Lindgren and Liukkonen in 2021, are a feature of spacetime itself. Just as gravity manipulates spacetime within a vacuum, so too does electromagnetism, implying that the field is somehow already “there,” which perhaps makes the proposal of harnessing electromagnetism itself to create wormholes more plausible. Would a sufficient control over these forces allow one to open a wormhole and be “carried through it” by electromagnetism? Maybe.  

The next element of abnormal manipulation is less about manipulation itself but more about its mode. I speak now of the apparent relationship between superpositions of particles and knowledge of those same particles. In brief, wave functions, of light for example, seem to collapse into particles – if we measure them. We should be bewildered by such a finding, “And yet it turns,” to quote Galileo. Erwin Schrodinger, who pioneered the mathematics of wave functions, famously pointed out the seemingly absurd conclusions of superpositions and by extension quantum mechanics in general with his famous thought experiment. There is a cat in a box which has a mechanism triggered by a particle emitting radiation, with a likelihood of 50% of the radiation occurring, and the mechanism will then release a deadly poison, thus leaving us with the ridiculous conclusion that the cat is “just as alive as it is dead” until we know it is in the one state or the other by opening the box. Dr. Wolfgang Smith offers an elegant way out of the conundrum. He draws a distinction between “physical” and “corporeal.” This means, in short, that he advises us to see substances (the corporeal) as being more than a collection of matter (the physical) – the atomic and subatomic world is real but is not of itself substantial, being rather a bundle of potentialities. This possibly gives us a very fine Thomistic solution to the problem of entanglement with substances. Nevertheless, we are left not only with the fact that wave functions do indeed collapse when observed, as with photons in the double-slit experiment – and they must be observed by a mind to collapse fully, or else the non-conscious measuring instrument simply becomes entangled with the cat-poison-radiation – we are also left with the oddity of the gift of agility, which St. Thomas discusses at abnormal length in the Commentary on the Sentences trying to deal with the problem of “instant motion.” And here we must ask if “spooky action at a distance,” as Einstein derisively referred to it, between entangled particles at large distances from each other wherein these particles somehow control each other seemingly instantaneously is a clue to how agility qua instantaneous does not violate classical Aristotelian physics the way St. Thomas assumes. Clearly, instant or at least faster-than-light motion or control, of a kind exists between entangled particles. The question occurs to us then whether in the resurrection we are somehow able to entangle ourselves with the entire universe.

And how would the motion work? Could it be the case that Christ, the Logos, the One begotten by the interior procession of Divine Self-knowledge, knows into being the manipulations of the world which we see in the Resurrection narratives, by doing something like resolving a wave function – namely, “resolving” His own self, thus causing near-immediate motion through an electromagnetic wormhole? This would be in line with, and an elevation of, the very controversial but in my view promising Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics, which posits the demarcation line of wave function collapse to be the mind, not instruments which the mind can make use of, as noted already, which would, it seems, be even more bizarre. This theory is unacceptable to most who work on quantum mechanics because it is at odds with a rather central dogmatic assumption: materialism.

Perhaps there is also an analogy for agile motion, even if dim, with angelic movement and manipulation. St. Thomas explicitly rejects this in his discussion of agility in the Commentary on the Sentences, but we know about entangled particles and wormholes, whereas St. Thomas did not. In his famous text, The Intellectualism of St. Thomas, Fr. Pierre Rousselot, SJ posited that human nature has “the drive to become an angel.” He means this in regard to our inclination to know things through their essence, which the angels do naturally. But here I mean to apply this same principle to motion. Perhaps we approximate the angelic nature in the resurrection in the way that we move and manipulate the physical world, by somehow containing space in our intellect and then applying the power of the will to it directly, thus having a movement somewhat like the angels (see ST I-53; 54-2). Afterall, we already know, “In the resurrection they do not marry and are not given in marriage, for they are like the angels in Heaven.” (Matthew 22:30) I simply note the possibility. Could it further be the case that the gifts of the resurrection elevate a natural power which we already seem to possess, namely, observing-into-being certain facts – such as seen by observing the photons in the double-slit experiment, causing them to behave differently than if they were unobserved, or unknown? Again, perhaps. But perhaps also, in 100 years, that generation of scientists will speak about photons as we speak about flogiston or the ether.

Just as the heart and mind are freed in the Beatific Vision, so too is the body freed in the resurrection on account of the gifts, and the mode of those gifts does in fact seem to be in a curious relationship with the four fundamental forces of the universe, which are: gravity, the weak nuclear force (radiation), the strong nuclear force (which binds the components of an atom together), and electromagnetism.

The gifts of the resurrection are agility (the ability to move rapidly from one place to another, for example, after the breaking of the bread on the way to Emmaus), subtlety (the ability to penetrate through solid substances, as the Lord did in the Upper Room), clarity (a kind of luminosity), and immortality or impassibility.

By His actions during the Resurrection appearances, the Lord shows Himself to be master over the fundamental forces. In the Ascension, we see control over gravity. In the moment of His Resurrection, as indicated by the electromagnetic and radiative leftovers, we see the control over the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force, and we perhaps can posit the same of all the appearances and disappearances. The luminosity of His body, not experienced directly in His Resurrection appearances but experienced elsewhere, viz., in the Transfiguration and in the visions in Revelation, is also indicative of a kind of mastery over the weak nuclear force. In walking through the walls, we see control over the strong nuclear force – we do not need to say with St. Thomas that the Lord was strictly in the same physical place as the wall, we can say that His control over the sub-atomic world allowed Him to pass through without contact. Could the Lord be harnessing the fact that even macroscopic objects like human bodies are in fact, like the light which emanates from glorified bodies, both particle and wave? In other words, is the Lord somehow causing a diffraction with Himself to “scatter” and then reassemble? Or is He swinging from particle to wave and back again? Or some combination of all this, with “wave collapse” occurring through an act of the understanding caused by the will? Perhaps.

The four fundamental forces do not seem to track the gifts one-to-one. But there is certainly an intricate connection between the forces and the gifts of the resurrection, not entirely unlike the complex relationship between the virtues, the spiritual gifts, the fruits, and the beatitudes. Immortality, or impassibility, seems to be the trickier one to nail down, as it does not easily lend itself to a four-force analysis, despite some promising recent leads in medicine involving the use of electromagnetism and obviously radiation – and yet we know that whatever biological process causes one’s death, it is caused by the four forces, so controlling them within oneself obviously allows one to resist bodily corruption.

The conclusion is that a miraculous habit imposed by God in the resurrection bestows the power to control the four forces by a kind of immediate power, which includes the ability to manipulate space-time by the special harnessing of the same forces. This is the natural medium by which we live the life we are most meant to live. By the gifts, seemingly especially agility and perhaps also subtlety, we access Heaven by the manipulation of natural space-time. We are empowered by these gifts to enter into a physical but hidden world, which could be, in a word, right next to us, but which is “guarded,” like Eden.

I posit that the increasingly deep study of the four fundamental forces, and the spaces in between, like dark matter and energy, virtual particles, and so on, will only serve to show how elegant the mastery is over those same forces by Christ in the Resurrection.

Before offering my final and concluding hypothesis, I pause to note two objections, one Scriptural and one based on parsimony.

The first objection is a statement of the Lord Himself. The Lord says to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17, “I have not yet ascended…” Doesn’t this counter the claim that the appearances and disappearances of Christ do not make sense on my account, because of the time in between appearances? If Christ were “hiding” in Heaven in the time in between His resurrection appearances, He would have ascended, thus making His statement to Mary Magdalene untrue.

There are a few ways to reply. First, we could say that the action of the Ascension itself contains some special significance or power that is unlike merely going back and forth – each time only for a short while, when in the Ascension the departure is definitive until the Parousia. This is a weak argument, but it is plausible. It would be better to suppose that Christ was merely walking upon the Earth in a far away place, or, most likely, that He was neither in Heaven nor in the normal places of the universe but was instead in a third place which is also only accessible through the gifts of the resurrection and which is now obsolete.

The second objection is based on parsimony, and it has probably been arising in some of your minds: “Why not just give a purely miraculous explanation? Why all the need for these intermediary natural forces?”

In response, I say that we could just as easily ask why we will have bodies in the eschaton in the first place. As embodied creatures, we live in the physical world, which has its own rules and forces and logic. There is a fittingness to retaining the use of the natural forces by which we interact with the world around us as the means for the very same thing; but it is, of course, also appropriate that our relationship to those forces changes to be more immediate, with more direct control over them. And I recall your attention to the empirical starting point for this investigation, namely, the Shroud and the electromagnetic field under the Edicule. Those are there for a reason. They mean something. The imposition of the gifts is undoubtedly miraculous, but why should their mode of operation be miraculous? Why would it not be the case that they have simply become fully empowered to use the natural world for all it is capable of?

The limitations of this brief study are obvious. I have shown some possible steppingstones to interesting conclusions, but there is much in between. To borrow an image from Von Balthasar in the Prolegomena to his Theo-Drama, I have constructed a gymnasium, which athletes can now use.

In the end, I conclude and propose the following. Christ is the Master of the four fundamental forces, and we shall be masters with Him in the resurrection – the ultimate anti-entropic event. Given that Christ is not merely resurrected but is the Resurrection, we can rightly suppose that He, the Logos, the One through Whom all things were made, visible and invisible, is in fact the final frontier for theoretical physics. Any attempt to “get fully underneath” the four forces has been and inevitably will be frustrated so long as one limits oneself to considerations of the created world; in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. There is no getting “behind” the Word. The Logos, God the Son, incarnate in Christ, is the unified theory of physics.

Thoughts on the “Marital Debt”

Christian Renaissance Movement4 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

In the past year, I’ve become immersed in the world of Catholic doctrine and discussion on marriage and sexuality. This adventure has undoubtedly just begun, but I have already reached a few conclusions. Let me share some of them.

  1. There is no excellent book available on marriage and sexual ethics that is readable for the average Catholic adult which is not simply a moral theology text. (Let me know if you know of one.) As close as it gets is Christopher West’s “Good News About Sex and Marriage,” revised edition, which does a pretty good job overall.
  2. There are few excellent moral theology texts focused on marriage which have been published in the past several decades. Dr. Fastiggi’s book “Catholic Sexual Morality” is on that short list (though it is not perfect).
  3. There are puzzles in sexual ethics which have not been satisfyingly solved.
  4. There is a strong but completely unjustified movement to change the understanding of the marriage goods to having a reformed version of “fidelity” (now “mutual help”) on par with the good of children, with Gaudium et Spes #50 serving as the alleged prooftext. (They appeal to the section, “while not making the other purposes of matrimony of less account,” etc., which presumes that “not making of less account” means “is not superior,” which is an invalid inferential conclusion – rather, it should be inferred that the mere reality of the superiority of the good of children does not affect the intrinsic goodness of fidelity/mutual help, just as the superiority of Christ does not “make of less account” the goodness of, say, Mary the Mother of God… They are not “competing” goods, despite being hierarchical – they have their own intrinsic worth which is not affected by the other good. This comes out in the surrounding text in the same document.)
  5. NFP/periodic continence is a deeply misunderstood topic which is almost universally given a lax treatment by the authors.
  6. The “marital debt” is also a deeply misunderstood topic, and there is an astonishingly minimal awareness of what this even is, let alone how it works.

It’s the 6th one I’m talking about here. The marital debt has a long juridical-moral tradition, reaching a kind of crescendo in Gratian, then being filtered through Peter Lombard into St. Thomas, then expounded on by the manualists (like Sanchez – it’s Book 9 in the 1st volume, which is linked to) and synthesizers up until quite recently. There are many points we could talk about, but in this post we’ll go through the basics and discuss why this topic so often gets butchered by both those eager to present the classical (and correct) doctrine on the matter and those who balk at it.

A lot of people want to appeal to St. Thomas on this, and they are right to do so. However, there is an issue with that – St. Thomas, in line with St. Augustine, presumes that requesting the debt, absent at least a habitual intention to have children, is always at least a venial sin. That’s not the doctrine of St. Alphonsus, modern popes, and other authorities – but we’ll just leave that question aside for right now.

First, let’s present the foundational text: 1 Corinthians 7:1-9.

“Now for the matters you wrote about: ‘It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.’ But since sexual immorality is occurring, each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. I say this as a concession, not as a command. I wish that all of you were as I am. But each of you has your own gift from God; one has this gift, another has that. Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.”

So, St. Paul is saying that, if you are getting married, you are giving over your body to your spouse for his/her access at his/her will, and vice-versa. Otherwise, why would you get married? If you don’t need to have relations, stay celibate! And that’s precisely what he talks about later in the chapter.

“Are you saying marriage exists just to use and be used by someone to prevent sin?” No. But this is an understandable reaction given two points. First, most who present the doctrine of the marital debt do not give it the nuance required and/or are generally pastorally insensitive. Second, the world does not see marriage rightly anymore, which subconsciously warps our attitudes towards it even when we make the attempt to be pious and right-thinking. Marriage is primarily about multiplying the glorification of God by having children who will worship Him in spirit and truth – in other words, marriage is primarily about making saints, especially of your children, while working on yourself and your spouse as well. The spouse’s vocation is to be a domestic missionary. Marriage is not primarily about satisfying one’s personal hopes and dreams, even though that’s important. It’s also not primarily about slaking lust, but this is an important function of marriage. One has a more direct path to union with God as a celibate, and celibacy also enables one to make saints more easily on account of availability for ministry in addition to the interior spiritual goods it offers, so it is preferrable – unless one will struggle with concupiscence too much without relations, or unless there is some other special reason, as Paul indicates later in the chapter.

While Paul’s precept is in one place framed as a negative statement (“do not deny each other”) it is really better seen as a positive precept – “do this” – as he gives first (“should fulfill his marital duty” etc.). Positive moral precepts of the “do this” variety (i.e., “give alms to the poor”) admit of exceptions, unlike negative moral precepts (“do not blaspheme”). This is for two reasons. First, because positive obligations can interfere with each other. Suppose a church is on fire and one’s child is trapped inside. One has the duty to reverence Christ in the Eucharist by bodily signs, especially by genuflection – but one has a higher duty in this moment to save one’s child from being killed in the fire. God wants “mercy, not sacrifice” in this case – run to the place where your child is, don’t bother to genuflect, and get him out of the fire! Second, because positive obligations are sometimes impossible. A man who witnessed a murder has the obligation to testify in court to act as a key witness, but if he is in a coma he is excused.

Given this, there are several cases when the marital debt need not be fulfilled. While authors will disagree about some particular points, we’ll take an obvious case. A woman has a heart condition which is aggravated by sexual intimacy such that a single conjugal act could be fatal. She would not only be not obliged to acquiesce to a request for the debt from her husband, she is obliged to refuse.

St. Thomas discusses another kind of case, where the woman requests the debt after having just received it. There is no obligation to pay it, because biologically it cannot be paid by the man, and the woman in this case is acting like a harlot, not a spouse – which she shouldn’t do.

So there we have two kinds of obvious cases of being able to say, “No.” These are not controversial. But what about… “I have a headache.” “I’m tired.” “I’m not in the mood.”

Here we have to pause and clarify something, as this is the space where the zealous go awry, and the anti-zealous rightly pounce. Simply proposing the idea of relations, or even asking for them, does not constitute a strict appeal to one’s marital right. Consider the following exchange between husband and wife at 10:30 P.M.

Husband: “Can we go to bed? You know…”

Wife: “Oh… I’m sorry, I’m trying to get the checkbook to balance before calling it a night and have a bad headache. Can we wait until tomorrow night?”

Husband: “I know, and I can appreciate that and I’m sorry about the circumstances. It’s just that I’ve been having such a hard time at work, it’s been so stressful and we haven’t slept together in a month because I’ve been coming home so late, and you’ve been up so early with the baby. Are you sure you can’t?”

Wife: “I just don’t the energy right now. I’m totally exhausted and feel a cold coming on.”

Husband: “Please, I really, really need this tonight.”

Wife: “No, not tonight, sorry.”

Husband: “I’m telling you I need you to sleep with me tonight. Please.”

Wife: “No. Goodnight.”

So… at what point in the conversation was the debt refused? Certainly not in the first response of the wife. If the husband had taken that and gone off, she could reasonably assume that his request was not really that serious, at least not as serious as her reason for declining. With the second exchange we are getting a little closer, but it’s still reasonable to see the request not as a strict appeal to his right as a husband, especially given that in her response she is still leaving things open for him to make a decision of whether to continue to ask or to decide to let it go. With the third exchange, we are now toeing the line, if not crossing it. With the fourth and final exchange, the line has clearly been crossed – at this point, there can be no lack of clarity about the appeal to his right, which would indeed overcome the appeal to the mild physical discomfort of the wife. On St. Thomas’ view, if the husband tomorrow takes an impure glance at that pretty secretary at work he’s been trying to avoid getting close with, while it is his sin, his wife is partially to blame due to having illegitimately increased the occasion of sin, as it’s her responsibility to help her husband with this precise kind of thing… Remember, nobody else can. But the refusal itself is grave matter – one signs away one’s body when getting married. Actually, all things being equal, strictly refusing a perfectly legitimate request for the debt for a completely frivolous reason is worse than adultery. In the exchange of marriage vows, one implicitly makes a negative promise (“I will not sleep with others”) and a positive promise (“I will sleep with you”). To violate the positive promise is in itself a worse offense than to violate the negative one – one isn’t simply giving too much to someone else, one is denying what one promised to give to one’s spouse. “This is mine, and it is only mine.” It’s the “is mine” part that is the most important, our psychological and social dispositions to think otherwise notwithstanding. That’s not to say that adultery isn’t a terrible sin – it is – it’s to say that the completely unjustified refusal of a reasonable request for the debt is even worse. (As an aside, today we might struggle to explain why adultery is really all that immoral – I won’t descend into that discussion here, I just want to note in passing that the mistaken appeal to Gaudium et Spes about the equality of marriage goods which I noted in the introduction is perhaps more significant than it might at first seem.)

There are some competing principles here, and it is important to appreciate them to have a not-totally-crazy understanding of the marital debt. Spouses should in fact be eager to serve each other. That of course includes the desire to have relations when requested. It also includes the desire to be considerate of one’s spouse’s condition. Because of this, a healthy sexual dynamic between spouses includes communicating about oneself – like being sick, having work to do, etc. The appeal to one’s right should only come as a last resort – and can itself be excessive and thus sinful. Suppose, for example, that the husband in the conversation above is simply an intemperate man, and it’s not stress from work or lack of intimacy that is occasioning the request but just his out-of-control libido which he makes no effort to reform. If mixed with a lack of care for the welfare of his wife, the situation becomes very bad very quickly. And yet, except in the limited cases where it is acceptable to refuse the debt flatly, or in cases where the holistic reality of the marriage is abusive (a more complex topic), she will have to give in to the requests.

This goes both ways. Oddly, St. Thomas primarily talks about the woman having excessive requests for the debt, and we usually only talk about the man having such a problem. Anyway, husbands too must respect legitimate requests from their wives, even when inconvenient or uncomfortable.

Initiating a conversation about a request for relations does not amount to refusing the debt, which is the sense one gets from some presentations of the issue. However, at the “bottom” of such conversations there is the possibility of appealing to the debt, and in such a case it must be accepted, unless a very serious reason exists. And there is often sin in such requests for the debt.

To know whether refusing a request is sin or not can sometimes be difficult. (For the nerds, what we are talking about is the quasi-potential part of prudence called “gnome.”) But the larger point is this: don’t be selfish, and don’t marry someone selfish.

In the end, navigating the marital debt is actually not that hard to figure out in general. It’s only the very special cases of when flat refusal is justified which can get complicated (and which we won’t explore here). As a good husband or wife, you want to help your spouse – either by giving over your body to your spouse at his or her request, or by holding your body back so you can respect the reality of the presently unsuitable condition of your spouse, even when you could legitimately insist on your right. Good spouses are eager to help each other. St. Paul gives this principle, albeit in a different context but which nevertheless applies here: “Outdo one another in showing honor.” (Romans 12:10) And when in doubt about the legitimacy of a reason to refuse the debt strictly speaking, lean towards paying it. That’s pretty much the whole rule summed up.

Much more can (and ought to be) said. But this will suffice for now. I leave you with two recent sources which give decent formulations of the principle:

Fr. McHugh and Fr. Callan (#2614-#2616)

Fr. Dominic Prümmer (#860-#861)

For the nerds, there are many older manuals on this website in the Research tab which will go through this kind of stuff and more in all the deliciously casuistic nauseating detail which you and I so crave.

St. Joseph, pray for us.

Sola Scriptura: An Epilogue

Christian Renaissance Movement2 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

I appreciate the reply to my latest post on Sola Scriptura from Nemo. This long-delayed post will be my last public response – and I will do so via the method called “fisking,” my comments in bold, with a little outro to close. Go here to see the whole post (some introduction and endnotes). See my previous posts here, here, and here.

START

Clark made an objection to sola scriptura, which is commonly raised by Roman Catholics, as I found out just recently. It goes like this, if I understand correctly: a) the Scripture started out as individual books written by different authors centuries apart, b) there is no way of knowing which books belong in the Scripture c) unless there is an authority outside the Scripture that can infallibly determine what constitutes Scripture, d) ergo the infallible authority of the Catholic Church.

Yes, that is more or less the way the argument goes, as what else would determine the canon? In my last post, I showed that the only alternatives are that we are left with our own judgment, that some totally arbitrary measure exists (sola Luther?), or the even worse and much weirder hypothesis of a “fallible collection of infallible texts.” Another option would be that history didn’t happen – as we will see, the historical reality of the formation of the canon is relevant here.

For starters, regarding (d), even if we grant that an authority outside the Scripture is necessary to determine what constitutes Scripture, it doesn’t follow that the magisterium of the Catholic Church is such an authority. I get the impression, rightly or wrongly, that Roman Catholics are attacking sola scriptura as if it were a zero-sum game, and they would establish the authority of the Church simply by knocking down the authority of the Scripture.

Not quite – one needs to recognize the Voice of the Shepherd behind all of it. One is simply bound, by the operation of the kind of sufficient grace which touches all rationally active minds, to know that the Christ’s truth and authority subsists in the Catholic Church. One way to see this is through the history of the Scriptural canon – it did not fall from the sky. If I think that the old woman at the supermarket infallibly determines the canon, then I have a problem. Why would it be any different for, say, some disgruntled Augustinian friar named Martin Luther? (Then there are other claims too, such as with the Ethiopian tradition, but we leave that aside.) So history is the key here. There are PLENTY of ways to see that the Catholic Church has the authority which She claims – the plethora of miracles, the favors of the many major Marian apparitions (especially Fatima, given its enormous audience and recent occurrence), the coherence and stability of doctrine, the proliferation of that doctrine across the Earth… But the canon is its own argument, based in the facts of history (but not thereby exhausted, as one must still see with the eyes of faith).

But that is far, far from the case. From the epistemic perspective, the same questions would remain: How do we know that (the magisterium of) the Church is infallible? What constitutes the magisterium and who decides that infallibly? Does it speak with one voice or many? How do we know that the teachings of the magisterium are interpreted correctly? The list goes on.

These are presented as very challenging questions, but they are relatively straightforward to answer. We know the Church is infallible by faith, evidence of which is contained in all the things I just mentioned. One ought to be inclined toward trusting the Church as God’s infallible mouthpiece just as one is inclined toward Christ – flesh and blood does not reveal, and yet it also does prepare one to make the jump. St. John Henry Newman called this sense of the convergence of evidence which doesn’t quite demonstrate the truth of the Catholic Faith the “illative sense.”

What constitutes the magisterium, in the relevant sense here, is: the Pope, or the whole college of bishops teaching together with the Pope. Who decides that infallibly is and could not be other than God. We can see here that Nemo is struggling with the relationship between evidence, faith, and authority. In the end, it is up to one’s own mind to see, and that’s that, and yet we also are not entirely alone in our responsibility for knowing – we have help through others. What is really of faith cannot be demonstrated by “flesh and blood,” it must be revealed from above, but often using “flesh and blood,” as with the Incarnation itself, but also through the visible hierarchical structure of the Church. The Pope is, in a sense, the Church’s babysitter – like Aaron was for the Hebrews while Moses was up on Sinai. Regardless of how well he does, he has the authority (cf. Saul’s reign over Israel, the Pharisees and Jerusalem, etc.).

The magisterium, in this sense, speaks with one voice, and could not speak otherwise. (I have written more about the different senses/uses of the word “magisterium” elsewhere on these pages.)

Nemo’s final objection once again shows that he is trying to grapple with the reality that, at the end of the day, one cannot actually have another take the place of one’s own mind in the relationship between evidence, faith, and authority, but one also isn’t responsible for everything by himself – we have a visible, exterior structure which disposes us to the operation of interior invisible grace. We can have intelligent people help us to understand the teaching of the Church, and we have the exterior authority of the Church itself as expressed in Her definitive doctrines, but one must still see with the eyes of faith for themselves after encountering the reality of dispositive visible effects of God’s grace with the senses. To drive this home, I could take many of these same objections and apply them to Christ. How do we know He speaks infallibly? Who decided that? How do we know we are understanding what He is saying? Actually, this last one is the whole theme here – He evidently wanted us to have a very serious kind of help. He did not leave us orphans. Nor do we need to be able to read in order to have faith – something which Sola Scriptura indirectly implies. The peasant girl in 9th century Gaul simply knows, “The old man in the funny hat has learned the true Faith and is responsible for instructing me so that I can save my soul,” and that’s about all she needs.

Second, regarding (c) the canon. If we define canon as a definitive collection of books that are recognized by believers as Scripture, then what constitutes the canon changes over time, at least from a historical perspective. For example, in the Gospels, Jesus constantly refers to (what we now call) Old Testament books, namely, the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms (Luke 24:44-45), which the Gospel authors designate collectively as “the Scriptures”, or simply “the Scripture”, emphasizing its unity. The canon then did not include the New Testament books which were written later. By the fourth century, the majority of the 27 books of the New Testament have been recognized as Scripture, as evidenced by extant New Testament manuscripts and the writings of the Church Fathers. There is no evidence that such recognition resulted from a Church Council. It is likely that the canon emerged organically through a grass-roots networking process, independent of any central authority.

I’m a little shocked that Nemo would make the objection that the existence of Scriptures before Christ and the apostolic age would somehow undermine the possibility of more Scripture. Since the fullness of God’s revelation is the Incarnation of His Son, there will be a clear division among the texts wherein God foretells the coming of Christ and the texts wherein God teaches about what happened during Christ’s earthly life and ministry. Turns out that the 430 year gap between Malachi (the last prophet of the Old Testament) and Christ’s public ministry maps onto the 430 years of Israel’s enslavement in Egypt. It was time for God to speak again.

Nemo then jumps to the 4th century. He’s right to point out that the canon had basically been settled by then. He neglects to say HOW. It was, of course, the project of Pope St. Damasus I, whose old house I coincidentally have been doing some of my research in (it is here) as there are some curial offices there in the palazzo surrounding the church. This was partially in response to confusion over what belonged in the canon which occurred at the end of the 2nd century, because of the heresiarch Marcion. But without going into details, there was still some slight lack of clarity over the so-called “Deuterocanon” throughout the medieval period and into the 15th century. However, there was no problem significant enough to warrant any action more forceful than the council which Damasus held in Rome in 382, where he published his list. This mild anxiety (but no “crisis”) was evidently on account of the prologue to the the Liber Regus (the “Kingdom Books” – 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2Kings), written by Damasus’ private secretary, St. Jerome. (Jerome evidently held reservations about Damasus’ list and let people know it. Maybe Damasus was fine with it – who knows… It was 9-10 years after the Council of Rome in 382 under Damasus I.) It was the Council of Trent (an ecumenical council, the highest kind of teaching authority on account of the sort of papal sanctioning involved) which “canonized” the list which we have today – although the same list had been put forward by Damasus some 1,200 years earlier, and also just the century before at the Council of Florence (another ecumenical council), but only using the word “inspired” and not “canon”/”canonical.” This was in response to the activity of Luther, who threw out some books which were especially inconvenient for his ”theology.” This, together with the invention of the printing press, heightened the urgency for a stronger position on the canon than did the shift from baskets and scrolls to the codex in the 1st century. The Jews and first Christians didn’t have books at all, they had scrolls which could be put into one basket and then another. The codex forced the question of what would be included and what excluded. The printing press meant that not just the clergy and scholars but everyone in the world could soon have a “Bible” – so it became absolutely imperative to know what that meant. In fact, we see here a stroke of God’s Providence. Had Luther not tampered with the list given by Florence, then we may still be left without the list of inspired texts which Trent gave us, and the problem would perhaps have grown deeper and thornier than it already is.

Third, a few more words regarding the self-authentication of the Scripture (b). Jesus says, “It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me” (John 6:45). And “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (John 10:27) It is interesting that, with the advance of technology, voice recognition software can uniquely identify the speaker from a voice recording, as the voice of each person has a unique digital signature. If I may use another analogy, the Scriptures bear the seal of the Lord, just as signet rings are used by ancient kings to authenticate their royal decrees. All believers, without exception, have been and will continue to be taught by the Lord, and have the right and obligation to hear His voice and follow Him.

Once again, we see Nemo wrestling with the evidence-faith-authority paradigm. Yes, we do need to recognize the Voice of the Shepherd, but to what degree? As I said in an earlier post, St. Mary of Egypt was taught by God without study. Are we held to that standard? Are we all bound to know what is Scripture simply by being sufficiently holy, or intelligent, or both? No – rather, we ought to see the all the other things which point towards the Divine origin and thus the veracity of the Catholic Faith and go from there. God wants us to see the greatest effect of His Incarnation – the Church, His Bride – and then read about Him in the light of what the Church offers to us for our instruction. He does not want us arguing whether 1 Clement or The Shepherd of Hermas or the various silly Gnostic “gospels” are inspired documents, OR THE DEUTEROCANON.

Lastly, if we define the Canon as a complete collection of books inspired by God for the salvation of His people, then the Canon is fixed from the foundation of the world. But, one might ask, is what we have today the whole Canon? It is possible that some inspired books have become extinct, e.g., Paul’s letter to Laodicea (Colossians 4:16), just as some species God created has become extinct through the long lapse of time, and just as His prophets died after they had served the purpose of God in their own generations. We can only answer (in faith) that God has preserved the canon through history to accomplish His purpose, so that the canon we have is sufficient and necessary for salvation, and the lost books, if any, do not subtract from the integrity of the canon, nor their inclusion make the canon redundant in any part.

Here we have to say that God knows what He wants included and certainly made sure that it was in fact included. That’s it. Those, and those alone, would then carry the character of “inspiration,” as inspiration is only really a useful term in theology when it refers to “those books contained in Scripture.” Other kinds of authority and prophecy surely exist, but the special thing about being inspired is precisely that it is part of Scripture.

END

Well, thus endeth the discourse. From here, we would no doubt continue to explore what “the Church” is, how the virtue of faith works, what the process of inspiration involves, or drill into what exactly the status of the Deuterocanon was in the middle ages, and so on, but this takes us quite far afield of the question. I do other posts on some of that stuff. But for any curious Protestants reading, you might start with this good article on apostolic succession and go from there.

Why Women Can’t be Priests

Christian Renaissance Movement3 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

I recently had a lengthy exchange with a self-styled “feminist theologian.” We talked about a number of things, but of course we spoke about the perennially misunderstood issue of women’s ordination. Obviously, she was in favor. I was not.

I’ve ordered the famous text on women’s ordination by Fr. Manfred Hauke – as I don’t think this topic is going to be going away for another 20-30 years, and I want to understand it better. I look forward to reading it. In the meantime, here is the argument as I make it, in three parts. The definitive part is the revealed fact of the impossibility of ordaining women to the priesthood. (I will leave aside the question of women deacons, as it is actually slightly more complex; however, I would also argue that it is revealed that the entire sacrament of Holy Orders is reserved for men alone and that many of the arguments against women’s priesthood are operant in the solution to the question of women deacons – it’s just that the argument about the spousal relationship between the priest and the Church does not apply as strongly to the diaconate.) The theoretical part is the underlying theological and anthropological realities which order men toward this office and not women. The practical part is the circumstances of history which teach us about the will of God.

Definition

The universal ordinary magisterium (UOM) delivers us infallible teachings on faith and morals. This is a function of Christ’s promise to the Church, in the apostles, that the Holy Spirit would guide them “into all truth.” (John 16:13) What good is the Church as a teacher if She cannot guarantee that Her consistent and longstanding teaching and use are free from error in faith and morals? Since right belief is necessary for right love (“you can’t love what you don’t know,” etc.), a guarantee that the Church will be preserved from error in teaching is quite important. There are some borderline cases, but when the Church very consistently teaches and/or “uses” something over many centuries, the presumption must be that it is in fact part of UOM teaching and is thus infallible. (This differs from the ordinary magisterium of individual bishops, or of an individual pope, as I have explained elsewhere.) The fact that the Church has for so long and so consistently both taught that women cannot be ordained priests and has in fact not attempted this, since this has only been a practice among tiny groups cut off from mainstream ecclesiastical life and administration, indicates that this is a firm part of the UOM. This was forcefully explained by St. John Paul II in his text Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

One can even make the argument, as one prominent American canonist does, that St. John Paul II actually used his extraordinary magisterium – the “papal infallibility” sort – when issuing that document, despite any statements to the contrary after the fact. It is an interesting argument, and it is possibly correct. However, we can at least state that it is a clear explanation of the UOM in a definitive way.

Theory

Men hunt, women gather. This is the basic dynamic between men and women from the dawn of civilization. It may mean something for understanding our diverse roles in ecclesiastical life.

In Eden, the man is created first. The woman comes from him, and this is a measure for how the order between men and women ought to be. St. Paul explains this very bluntly in two different sections of 1 Corinthians, with words that make the 21st century westerner bristle from the lack of political correctness. “A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.” (1 Corinthians 11:7-12) He continues on in chapter 14: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.” (1 Corinthians 14:34-35)

Almost predicting the present-day near-complete irrelevance of so-called “feminist theology,” Paul says in the conclusion of this section: “But if anyone ignores this, they will themselves be ignored.” (1 Corinthians 14:38)

Likewise, in 1 Timothy, we read: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.” (1 Timothy 2:11-14) Obviously, Paul attributes original sin primarily to Adam (1 Corinthians 15:22), but the fact that it was the woman who was deceived by the Devil leaves the progeny of Eve who are of her sex to be without a claim over official public teaching about God and righteousness (faith and morals). Adam was not deceived – he knew better but was just plain evil in his disobedience and pride.

St. Paul also gives us an order between men and women in the domestic sphere: “Wives be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. Because the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church.” (Ephesians 5:22-23a) The corollary, explained immediately, is of course that men must love their wives as Christ loves the Church (which means immense self-denial, even unto laying down one’s life). It’s better seen as the relief of a burden for women, and a challenge for men.

All of this is to say that St. Paul does not believe in “women’s equality” in practical, temporal affairs. Thus, neither does the Church nor Her faithful children. However, temporal affairs are only the means to the end. When Paul says there is “no longer male nor female” in Galatians 3:28, he speaks of the reality that God is not a “respecter of persons.” (Cf. Acts 10:34, Romans 2:11) One’s love of God, and subsequent merit with Him, is completely independent of what station one has in this life. The greatest saint, the holiest human person ever to walk the earth, was a woman – Mary, the Mother of God. She was not complaining about “not being equal,” and now she is Queen of Heaven and Earth.

If women are not permitted to teach in the Church on account of Eve, what is the implication for men? By inversion, we see that Adam’s sin provides the paradigm for the debt which men owe to God. Instead of defending his bride from the serpent (the text of Genesis implies he was standing right next to her when she was deceived), Adam was negligent and subsequently proud by direct disobedience. As part of the curse which Adam is put under, he must toil for his food. Additionally, Adam owes an infinite debt, and all humanity with him, on account of his enormous and special sin. This can only be done by offering something infinitely good back to God. We can certainly offer our own lives, as baptized Christians (the “priesthood of the baptized”), but we are of finite goodness. No number of finite sacrifices equals an infinite sacrifice.

From these points alone we can derive a strong argument for the reservation of the priesthood to men. It is the man’s special burden to make up for what Adam consciously failed to do – to offer himself as a sacrifice for his bride, putting himself between her and the Devil. This is the Mass, where the priest acts in the very person of Christ, offering the perfect sacrifice of Christ Himself on the Cross, by which work (“liturgy” literally means “work”) he procures the spiritual food of the Eucharist for him and his spiritual children. The progeny of Adam who share his sex are responsible for offering the infinite Sacrifice of Christ to atone for their first father’s sin, and for those of himself and the whole Church militant (Earth) and suffering (Purgatory), and to keep Christ’s Bride, the Church, in the souls of Her children, from succumbing to the forces of evil by begging God’s help through succoring Him through the means of this same sacrifice, in addition to offering their very selves in service for the People of God. It is this particular kind of imaging of Christ, precisely as the New Adam, which requires a man, rather than a woman.

There are other theoretical considerations. They are at least twofold: first, that men have a more positive religious inertia than women; second, men are more ordered toward public life than women.

We can notice a few facts, confirmed by empirical study. Women who are pious are generally unable to be pulled downward by their impious husbands, but nor can they pull their impious husbands upward. Women who are impious are generally easily able to pull down weakly pious men. (Thus the Torah’s stronger insistence on men not marrying foreign wives than women not marrying foreign husbands.) On the other hand, impious women are usually easily pulled upward by pious men. This teaches us something about the role of the male in religion: he is by nature meant to lead. It perfects him as a man. Leadership in religion does not correspond to perfecting the woman nearly to the same degree. This is intuitively sensed by children especially, who are far more likely to go to church their whole lives if dad goes than if just mom goes. The example is more psychologically moving, for whatever reason. Therefore, while there are plenty of screw-ups in the priesthood, at least they are male screw-ups. The bad men do less damage than bad women would, and the good men do more good than good women would.

This corresponds with the reality that men are generally more ordered to public life in general. This is for three kinds of reasons: biological, physiological, and psychological. First, the biological. Men do not need to be at home when having a child – the woman does, out of physical necessity. This limits the amount of public engagement that women can have over the course of their life. They cannot make long commitments to delicate, serious, long-term, time-intensive, and physically taxing work that men can. Next, the physiological. Men are bigger, faster, and stronger than women. Once again, men hunt, women gather. The demands of public life at the higher levels are extremely difficult for men to meet well, even though they have the propensity to endure more laborious conditions and be more intimidating to competitors. It is nearly impossible for women, except in special circumstances. This bread-winning gives men a kind of presumptive right to make more decisions about the common welfare of the society in which they live, as they are more effective in managing its affairs, will be called on to do so more often as a result, and are more familiar with what the public sphere is really like. Finally, the psychological. Men are by nature more aggressive and focused than women. They are also more drawn to dealing with problems and tasks related to “things” which they can “fix.” Women excel more with “people problems” which require empathy and high emotional intelligence. The male psychology is therefore much better suited to handling high-pressure situations which call for focus, aggression, and problem-solving ability. (Women, however, can perhaps more easily excel in those public affairs which are purely diplomatic in nature.)

This is not to say that women can’t be good leaders. But it is much harder for them to be effective administrators of public affairs at a high level, especially if they are bearing children. The priesthood is a public office of the Church which intrinsically involves administration, even if the priest is not actually an administrator of anything. (To drive home this point, a priest ordained on his death bed would still be conformed to Christ in view of sanctification and teaching, even if he never actually celebrates the sacraments or teaches anything.) Since the priesthood is a public administrative function in the Church, it is much more fitting that only men occupy the office. While there are some women who would be competent, the point is that the general higher competence of men for public affairs indicates the appropriateness of men alone being able to occupy the office.

Practice

I was informed in my discussion with my feminist friend that actually the reason why there weren’t women priests in the early Church was because of a rigid patriarchal culture in the Roman world, such that it was too difficult to have such women priests in practice. They wouldn’t have been accepted by all those sexist males who wanted to dominate the women because of their evolution-driven urge to do so. But now, she argued, women are socially equal and so should be free to be ordained.

There are two huge problems with this argument from a purely practical point of view, leaving aside the Eurocentrism (or Western-centrism) which animates the thought that women are now socially equal to men, as in most of the world that thought is laughable.

First of all, one must assume that the apostles and their immediate disciples had a serious lack of courage to proclaim the Gospel in its entirety, which would naturally include the right ordering of liturgical worship. Given that these men and women usually knew that the lions likely awaited them in the arena if they were found out by the unfriendly emperor (etc.), this argument is laughable. If one is refusing to worship the local deities, such as in Rome, one becomes an enemy of the state. (The classical pagan pantheons were often seen as being integral to the flourishing of civil society – so appeasing them was important enough to legally enforce the practice of offering sacrifice to them. To refuse to do so was like fomenting insurrection.) One would have to state that St. Peter or St. Andrew, for example, were fine with being martyred for preaching unique salvation in Christ, but it was just a step too far for them to have a woman presiding at the altar. It does not make sense psychologically, and it is even mildly blasphemous.

The second problem is even more fatal. The fact is that presiding at liturgies was one of the only major public functions which women held in the ancient Mediterranean world. Rome, Greece, Persia, Egypt… They all had priestesses in their various cultic paradigms. If Christians had priestesses, this would have been utterly uncontroversial. So the fact that the early local churches did not produce priestesses, as evidenced by the complete absence of any documentation of such a practice, especially the non-existence of a tradition of priestesses enduring after the apostolic age, indicates that it was a conscious choice (or a complete non-choice which merely recognized the right practice and implicitly rejected the wrong practice) that came from something intrinsic to Christianity rather than a decision made from external coercion.

The synthesis of the feminist argument about rigid patriarchy and the early Church: the apostles and their first disciples were so cowardly that they were ready to face martyrdom over preaching Christ, except for allowing for a practice which was totally uncontroversial in the surrounding culture. This is about as good as a reductio ad absurdum can get.

The problem gets even worse when applied to Christ. If it is mildly blasphemous to suggest that the apostle St. Bartholomew was fine being skinned alive but just not for taking the risk of putting women in their God-given place at the altar (despite that being the norm in the pagan world), then it comes close to serious blasphemy to suggest that the Lord was constrained by cultural paradigms in commissioning the first priests in the Upper Room at the Last Supper. If the incarnate Son of God is so beholden to cultural norms of patriarchy that He just can’t find a way around it, then He’s not God. As St. John Paul II explains in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, the Lord acted with total freedom in choosing only men to be conformed to Him as priests. In fact, the more natural choice would have been to choose all the women who were much more faithful to Him. Instead, He consciously chose a bunch of men, most of whom would abandon Him – with one selling Him in an act of betrayal, and the leader of them all denying Him three times within earshot. So clearly the Lord is unconcerned with the “natural choice.” Had He chosen the women, they would have been easily accepted by the ancient world as cultic leaders. True, as teachers it would have been more of a struggle, but as soon they had started healing the blind and raising the dead, people would have listened. God can teach and preach through whomever He wants – through rough, uneducated fishermen, or through women. They were both naturally unfit for the task of conquering the Mediterranean world. And yet conquer it they did.

Conclusion

Women’s ordination is likely to be a peripheral pastoral concern for the next generation, but it seems to be reducing in popularity. This is because those younger women who are attracted to serious Catholic life are not swept up with the cultural revolutionary sentiments of the 1960’s and 70’s. They may even perceive that the idea of “women in the workplace” as it’s been tried over the past 50 years has not been the liberating blessing that women were told it would be. And vanishingly few men are concerned with this perceived “inequality problem.”

The most attractive daughters of Christ are those who fully embrace their femininity – to be happy to love the Lord and their husband (perhaps one and the same) and embrace that most fundamental of virtues, obedience, in a special way. They realize they are off the hook, by and large, for worrying about the affairs of the world and of the Church. They focus on their own sons and daughters, their own neighbors, and their own selves, to make saints. While men must usually hunt in order to realize their full potential as men, normally women need only to gather.

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.

Why is Sunday Mass attendance obligatory?

Christian Renaissance Movement5 Comments

Eamonn Clark, STL

For reasons I won’t yet share on these pages, I have been studying the situation of the Church in Ireland with intense interest in the past few weeks. It is not too healthy.

One of the deeper challenges seems to be Sunday Mass attendance. In Dublin, the rate of faithful weekly attendance is, I have heard, at about 1% of nominal Catholics – so about 10,000 out of Dublin’s 1 million. It is better elsewhere, but the numbers are overall pretty grim.

In days past, one was a social outcast for NOT going to church on Sundays. Now, it is almost reversed. What happened?

While each individual soul has its own complex story to tell, the phenomenon as a whole is actually relatively simple. There was exterior cultural pressure to act in such-and-such a way, with little to no rationale given as to why it is actually good to act thusly, and subsequently there was no understanding of the character of the obligation. Then, when the scandals began to break in the 1990’s, enough people found a suitable excuse to stay home; the cultural pressure was gone, and so the pews were emptied.

But even among those who remain, there is not necessarily much of an understanding as to why they are showing up – or at least, why it is their duty to show up. I read about an elderly couple who had been faithfully attending Sunday Mass for their whole lives suddenly decided to stop going. Why? Because the mass schedule changed, and it conflicted with their preferred lunch time.

No doubt anyone in the Western world can identify a similar phenomenon on Christmas and Easter when suddenly people show up for sentimental reasons. “It’s our family tradition.” Well, okay, but just like the Pharisees, one is not saved by their traditions, however nice they may be. One is saved by fidelity to the Lord.

Mass attendance is one of the five precepts of the Church – Sundays and other particular days of obligation (i.e. Assumption, Christmas, etc.). These precepts are mere “ecclesiastical law,” or “Church law,” but they rest immediately on Divine law. The precept to attend Mass corresponds to the Third Commandment – to keep holy the Lord’s Day. The precepts are grave obligations. To neglect them without a serious reason constitutes a mortal sin.

The virtue to which the Mass precept corresponds is religion – the habit of offering to God what is His due (in proportion to what we can give, as of course God’s due is infinite). Religion is a part of the broader cardinal virtue of justice, which is about rendering to others what they are owed.

The principal thing done at a mass is not singing, or gathering, or being preached to, or normal individual or communal prayer. It is not even the reception of the Eucharist, which can be done outside of mass, just as all these other actions can be. The principal thing done at a mass is an act of sacrifice, an offering to God made by the priest who celebrates the liturgy. (This was made clearer by the offertory prayer in the old rite – now the offertory does not mention sacrifice as explicitly… “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer You,” etc.) There are secondary purposes of the Mass, but this is the primary one: the sacrifice Christ made on the Cross is re-presented by the consecration of the Eucharist and its consumption by the priest.

God demands our presence at this sacrifice of His Son so that we can participate in its offering, in a moral sense. While we do not directly offer the sacrifice as the priest-celebrant does, we do so indirectly, not only by presenting the offerings of bread and wine (things which laity, not priests, would normally work to produce), but also by merely being intentionally present at the sacred action; our intentional presence (“being there because of the thing which is happening”) indicates our consent to and affirmation of the sacrifice being made. It is the highest act of justice which is available to us – there is nothing greater we can offer than Christ, and nobody greater to offer to than God.

Thus, God demands that we participate in this supreme act of justice, at least on Sunday, the day specially commemorating the Lord’s victory over death (or at least on the evening before), and on other particular days as determined by the Church, unless there is some sufficiently grave excuse. (Positive commandments bind conditionally, negative commandments bind absolutely.) A good general rule of thumb is that to miss Sunday Mass for a reason which one would also miss the work that is regularly necessary to provide adequately for one’s family (i.e. a serious illness, attending to some family emergency, an extremely inconvenient distance, etc.) is without sin. The less serious one’s reason, the more serious will be the sin.

It is also possible to obtain a dispensation from Sunday Mass. Bishops or even pastors can dispense all the faithful from the obligation to attend Mass, as we saw en masse during Covid, but it is also possible to obtain and individual dispensation for a particular situation. For instance, a family is taking a vacation where it would be mildly inconvenient to attend Sunday Mass. Their pastor can dispense them entirely or commute the obligation to some other pious action – perhaps attending mass on the day before they leave, or the day after they return, or praying a rosary on Sunday. (People should make more use of this right – and perhaps pastors ought to teach more about its existence.)

A challenge to readers: invite someone back to Mass. Now you can probably explain the obligation better if asked.

What are motivations you have heard for missing mass? Did the person seem aware of the sacrificial element of the Mass? Comment below, and be sure to subscribe!