St. Jude vs. the Funhouse Mirror

El Greco St. Jude

Let us imagine ourselves to be Jewish converts to Christianity, living at the time of the Apostles. We find ourselves confronted with a difficult question.

The ancient law of our forefathers demanded a life of rigorous honesty, piety, justice, and self-discipline.

In fact, the Law of Moses demanded such intense religion and morality that generation after generation of Jews found it impossible to comply with the Law.

Then the long-expected Messiah came–and it was the God of Moses Himself, made man. He offered the perfect sacrifice which atones for all the countless sins of the past, and He mercifully reconciles us with the Creator—in spite of our hopeless unworthiness. Our religion now follows Christ Himself; He has established the definitive covenant.

But: Christ does not immediately transport us to heaven and eternal life. His Church baptizes us into His mystery, but we still live here on earth, confronted with the same temptations and evil that we faced before Christ came.

Here, then, we find the difficult question: What kind of behavior does God expect of us now?

He came to save those who were not able to follow the moral law which He had previously laid down. His Precious Blood washes away all sin. No human being could ever commit a sin which God will not forgive. This is gospel truth.

Does this mean we can do whatever we want? Can I now have my cake and eat it, too? Can I act immorally, indulge myself, play fast and loose? God will forgive, so does it matter?

This would be the distorted, funhouse-mirror image of the Gospel. Can we be surprised that, in certain corners of the ancient world, a lot of new Christians went ahead and embraced it?

St. Jude dedicated his apostolate to combating this error. Being redeemed by Christ and having our sins forgiven calls us to a higher moral standard than the Ten Commandments, not a lower one.

Christ did not reveal an indulgent God Who doesn’t care about our sins. Rather, He revealed God’s zealous love. We meet this love not with selfishness, but with selfless love in return. God patiently forgives. We love Him back not by continuing to try His patience, but by being patient and forgiving ourselves.

The heretics taught that Christ’s cross meant that we could forget about the Law. Christ’s cross does mean that we can forget about the Law, like someone walking on the sidewalk can forget about the speed limit.

Going 85 miles an hour doesn’t stop being dangerous and illegal. Neither does impiety, profanity, malice, lust, greed, sloth, vengeful anger, or envy. They all still violate God’s law, and are punishable with a kind of justice that we definitely do not want to have to face.

But if we live for God, we may find ourselves distracted from deadly sins by things like praying and taking care of our neighbors.

Sixteen Years of Splendor

Dear reader, you will have to forgive me for being almost a fortnight late.

On August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ, we marked the sixteenth anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

Veritatis Splendor considered the basics of Christian morals. The encyclical affirms that some acts are prohibited by God; there can never be a good reason to do them.

(If you have to ask what these things are, let me answer by saying: “They are exactly what your grandmother would have said they are.”)

The Pope explained Veritatis Splendor with these words:

The good of the person lies in being in the Truth and in doing the Truth.

This essential bond of Truth-Good-Liberty is largely lost in contemporary culture.

Therefore today it is one of the proper tasks of the mission of the Church to lead people back to seeing this union.

The Law of God is not our enemy. We cannot do whatever we want, but we can and must do whatever is good for us. We are truly free when we obey God.

The encyclical is based on the following event, narrated in the Gospel:

A rich young man came to the Lord Jesus and asked Him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

The Lord told him to keep the Ten Commandments. Then He invited the pious young man to follow Him.

Christ and the Rich Young Ruler by Heinrich Hofmann

Jesus Christ IS the Law of God. Through the sacraments of the Church, He gives us the grace to obey Him–and to be truly free.

Parables and Parables

I speak to them in parables, because they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or understand. (Matthew 13:13)

There are a lot of great stories. Some of them teach important lessons. Like “If you build it, they will come.”

But the parables of Christ are not like these. The parables of Christ are in a class by themselves.

If we think Christ’s parables are moral lessons, we will not understand them. What is the moral lesson of the Parable of the Dishonest Steward?

The parables of Christ are about Christ Himself. They are about the salvation which God won for us by becoming man, suffering, dying, and rising again. The parables of Christ make sense only by the light of faith. They are not interchangeable with other morality tales.

There is a key to entering into Christ’s parables. Without the key, they are impossible to understand. With the key, Christ’s parables explain all of life, all of reality.

The key is the Nicene Creed, the truth about Who Christ is.

Is There a Choice?

I think that everybody knows that I vote pro-life. No issue could be more grave than the protection by law of the innocent, defenseless unborn. I will vote pro-life until Roe v. Wade is overturned, until the day when, as the director of Vitae Caring Foundation Carl Landwehr put it in a speech I heard him give the other night, “abortion becomes unthinkable.”

As someone who shares in the shepherding ministry which the Lord entrusted to the Bishops of the Church, I hold myself responsible for clearly teaching not only that abortion is an evil of enormous gravity, but also that the right to life of the innocent unborn must be a part of the fundamental plan of any truly just society.

Bishop Kevin Farrell of Dallas, formerly of Washington

Considering all this, you would think that I would applaud the recent letter of our former Auxiliary Bishop Kevin Farrell, now Bishop of Dallas, and his brother Bishop Kevin Vann of Ft. Worth. These bishops spell out the morality of voting with admirable clarity.

They assert something, however, that I am afraid to say I do not think is true.

The Bishops carefully explain that the right to life of the innocent unborn is not a matter of prudential judgement, not something that can be weighed against other considerations. It MUST be decisive. Yes. I applaud the making of this crucial point. Thank God. This takes courage.

Then the Bishops go on to write that: “To vote for a candidate who supports the intrinsic evil of abortion or ‘abortion rights’ when there is a morally acceptable alternative would be to cooperate in the evil—and, therefore, morally impermissible.”

Bishop Kevin Vann of Ft. Worth

Now, morally impermissible means what it says it means. We cannot do morally impermissible things. If we do morally impermissible things knowingly and freely, our souls are in danger of damnation.

One can cooperate in evil in one of two ways, either materially or formally. Someone who vacuums the carpets in a medical office building where a doctor performs abortions participates materially in those abortions. But unless he intends to support the work of doing abortions by vacuuming the carpet, he does not formally cooperate. He might just be trying to earn a living, and this is the only job he could find. It is not a good situation, but at the same time it is not ipso facto a sin on his part.

If someone’s material cooperation in evil is “remote,” that is, not closely connected to the evil, then they do not bear moral responsibility for the evil.

Remote participation is permissible provided the person does not intend to be a part of the evil business. I could sin by intending to cooperate with something evil even if had practically nothing to do with it. An absurd example: If I planned to take a trip to a particular city BECAUSE they allowed same-sex “marriage” in that city, that would be a sin. But it is not a sin to go to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge.

Anyone who votes for a pro-“abortion rights” candidate participates materially in the evil. But if the voter does not vote for the candidate for this reason, but rather votes for the candidate for another reason, he or she does not formally co-operate with abortion. I would think that the material cooperation of a voter in an election for the President of the United States is certainly far enough removed from actual abortions themselves to qualify as “remote.”

Therefore, it is morally impermissible to vote for a pro-abortion candidate BECAUSE he is pro-abortion. Likewise, it is negligent to vote without considering the gravity of the right to life of the innocent, defenseless unborn. But I think that it is incorrect to say that anyone who votes for Obama commits a sin.

It is clearly a sin to vote for him because he supports legal abortion. But there are other reasons why people might choose to vote for him. I do not claim to sympathize with those reasons; I would be delighted to argue them calmly.

I think people ought to vote for the more pro-life candidate.

But I am NOT telling anyone how to vote. My point is exactly the opposite. We HAVE to avoid committing serious sins. But we do not HAVE TO vote for one candidate or the other. What we have to do is to stand before God and do what we believe is right.