Exodus 90 and Catholic Lay Ministry's Marriage Problem

 

Note: In this post I focus very heavily on Exodus 90, only briefly mentioning the broader problem. Nevertheless, I hope you'll take my thoughts here as a more general commentary on the state of Catholic lay ministry in general, as much of what I highlight about Exodus 90 can apply to a far broader range of lay ministry for spouses!

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Today, New Years’ Day 2023, marks the opening date for this year’s Exodus 90. For those who have somehow never heard of the program – quite a feat as Exodus 90 really has been remarkably successful and widely spoken of over the past few years – it is a 90 day Catholic spiritual exercise for men which aims to help them to grow stronger in their faith and religious practice. Described by its creators as well as just about everyone else as “intense,” Exodus 90 is built on the three pillars of prayer, asceticism, and fraternity. It wouldn’t be wrong to describe this as a sort of “super-Lent” which lasts more than twice as long and calls for even more extraordinary and wide-ranging sacrifices, but in truth it’s a lot more than that. In spite of the very much old-school self-denial and sacrifices involved, Exodus 90 really has enjoyed tremendous and growing popularity among both single and married men since it first came on the scene in the 2010s – and it’s also totally contrary to the Catholic theology and spirituality of marriage.

Central to the Catholic understanding of marriage is a total union of man and woman in which nothing is held back. The Catechism of the Catholic Church introduces the Sacrament of Matrimony by saying, “The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life…” (CCC 1601) In the Scriptures Jesus, quoting Genesis, describes marriage in particularly striking terms, speaking of it as a union of such intimacy that, “a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Gen. 2:24, Matt. 19:5)  Pope St. John Paul II, commenting on this passage (something he did extensively) notes that in speaking of a one-flesh union the Lord didn’t intend to refer only to the physical union of the conjugal act, but rather that the message here was of a total and complete union of two people, who, moving from the original solitude which characterized their lives up to that point, were now in marriage united so intimately and so totally in every way that they could be described as being of one flesh. “They are no longer two,” Jesus says (Matt. 19:6) While I think that there is a lot of good in Exodus 90 for single men, there are at least three ways in which it contradicts the theoretical (i.e., theological) and practical (i.e., spirituality) aspects of Catholic marriage.

First, Exodus 90 tries to establish an area of a man’s life which his spouse is separate from but which contains some of his most important, most vulnerable, and most intimate thoughts and practices. It calls men to make a wide range of sacrifices, including fasting, abstinence from meat, alcohol, sweets, snacking, television, sports, listening to most music, and (apart from what is necessary for work, paying bills, etc.) all technology use. These sacrifices are aimed at deepening a man’s relationship with Jesus Christ; alongside these, men are supposed to participate in daily prayer including making a holy hour (at a church) every day, but since even with a prayerful attitude it would be extremely difficult to go at this sort of stuff alone they are meant to be undertaken in a fraternal community of other men who are also participating in Exodus 90. One might naturally think that a man’s one-flesh partner, his bride with whom he has the most intimate earthly relationship, would also be a part of all of this – except that Exodus 90 actively discourages wives from being so.

For example, on the Exodus 90 landing page for wives are three main points, one of which is “It’s His Exodus, Not Yours.” This is a message that is found over and over throughout the materials related to wives that the Exodus 90 creators have produced. The idea is, on the surface, a good one: Exodus 90 calls men to a lot of sacrifices, but these sacrifices shouldn’t be impositions on a wife.

What does this mean for wives? Ultimately one of two things: either live different lives from their husbands – something that is obviously contrary to the one-flesh union – or try to join in with their husbands. The problem is that Exodus 90 sends what can only be described as mixed messages on the latter. While some materials encourage wives to try to join with their husbands in their sacrifices, others encourage them not to or even outright warn against this. The reason? After the success of Exodus 90 prompted many calls for a version geared towards women, the creators commissioned an order of women religious to create just that — only to hear back after several months that the sisters had prayerfully discerned that the model is not one which supports a woman’s spirituality.

Thus, having read through as many of their materials which I can without getting out my credit card (the 2023 version has really stepped up the level of paywalling behind a subscription compared to past years) I would say that on balance Exodus 90 actively discourages wives from trying to participate. Husbands are therefore being encouraged to deepen their spiritual lives by establishing whole patterns of life which they are encouraged to keep separate from their families and to share mostly with other men in their fraternities.  I want to be sure that I’m being fair here to Exodus 90 and its creators, because I think they’d respond here by saying that men are encouraged to try to incorporate their families into their new ways of life – for instance, by finding things to replace their TV time with which can incorporate the entire family. The problem is that there is, again, some pretty conflicting messaging here which makes this sort of suggestion feel more like an afterthought because the strongest emphasis, which repeats over and over throughout their materials, is absolutely on the idea that a man’s family shouldn’t have to participate in his sacrifices or have their lives significantly impacted by his participation in Exodus 90 – and because of another, even more important point that I’ll get to shortly.  

The second problem is that Exodus 90 introduces significant friction points into marriages and asks men to do things which make them less present to their families. This might be one of the more controversial points I raise, because I can imagine people jumping up here to shout out that Exodus 90 is very clear that it should make men more present to their families, not less. These are nice sentiments, but I just don’t think they are going to hold true in practice. First, the sacrifices that men are called to in this exercise are so wide-ranging that they can’t help but impact a wife and family – and this is something that in 2023 the Exodus 90 website and other materials acknowledge and emphasize.  Having followed this program for several years, it’s been interesting to see how their messaging has evolved and developed. I say this largely in praise of the people behind Exodus 90: it’s clear that rather than resting on their laurels and insisting that what they had was fine the way it was that they’ve put in efforts to improve things and try to address shortcomings, the most glaring of which has always been with married men (this makes sense because the exercise was originally developed for seminarians).  In past years their materials didn’t go as far in acknowledging that sacrificing meat, television, and many other things were inevitably going to impact a man’s family. This year they actually do get pretty explicit about this. I don’t know what’s been going on behind the scenes, but interestingly enough this is the first year when they have explicitly had wives of past participants working to try to improve the program and I wonder if this is a consequence. In any event, even if they’re to be lauded for doing a better job here it doesn’t change the reality: Exodus 90 is by its nature going to make things a lot more challenging in many homes.

The problem runs deeper than this, though, because Exodus 90 doesn’t only call men to eliminate things from their lives, but also to add things. In particular, they are called to add time for a daily holy hour and for fraternity. Now to be clear, these things are not bad – on the contrary, they’re laudable! - but they certainly take a husband out of the home, and for men who are fathers (especially fathers of young children) this is a big deal. Already one of the most common blind spots for fathers is recognizing how much their physical presence matters to their wives, even at the expense of doing other work that matters, including other work for the family. I was recently watching a video of a woman trying to explain how she feels abandoned when her husband comes home and starts doing work around the house like mowing the lawn. Even though in his mind he is doing something for his family, she has been alone taking care of three or four young kids all day long, without help or even just the opportunity to socialize with an adult, and so when her husband walks in the door and immediately leaves again even to do something important it hurts. An Exodus 90 man leaving his wife at home with the kids to go spend time with the guys is for Christian fraternity rather than to watch the game might make it technically better, but it isn’t going to change the way it impacts his wife – and there are still other problems. For instance, in my research into this topic I’ve read criticisms from wives of participants and one of the most common sore spots is that Exodus 90 encourages men to make all major purchases subject to “approval” from his fraternity. “I’m not going to ask permission to replace our oven if I need to,” one woman wrote. Again, ask yourself: does a norm like this help to foster unity in a marriage?

New to 2023, Exodus 90 has tried to address these sorts of issues by producing a companion book written by wives for wives and intended to help “with the spiritual challenges of this journey” (p. vi), and the very first section is about “Family Unity.” On the one hand this is good and demonstrates that the people behind the Exodus 90 have recognized some of the potential pitfalls of the exercise and have made efforts to address them. On the other hand, much of the advice in the book amounts to telling wives to suck it up because trust them, all of these hardships will be worth it in the end. If that sounds like it might not be a fair characterization, consider a few quotes from the book:

“Although the disciplines of the journey are just for men, the actions of our husbands and fathers do affect the whole family and will be an adjustment for everyone.” (p.vi)

“While it does cost the whole family something, it also pays back in much greater returns.” (p. vii)

 “You may soon begin to wonder—is this all really worth it? Whatever your husband’s goal for this journey is, it ultimately boils down to overcoming the chains of sin. Whatever his particular struggle, rooting out attachments will be good for your family. You need to believe in this truth.” (p. 1)

“Accept that this is hard, and annoying, and frustrating all at the same time. Realize that no matter how annoying this may be for you, this is the good work of rooting out sin and cultivating virtue. It’s the hard work of change, but it is so worth it.” (p.7)

It’s important to be clear about something here: sometimes some act of suffering or some hardship is helpful or important and worth it in the end. Taken on their own, the statements above (and the many others like it throughout the booklet) are true. The problem is, remember, that these are being offered as reassurances to wives whose husbands are being asked to undergo extraordinary spiritual exercises without them and which will nevertheless impact them significantly. These are generally speaking good exercises in a vacuum and for a single man, but for a married man this is all being handled in a way that is not in keeping with the one-flesh union of marriage, and that is the problem here.

The third, and probably the most significant problem, is that Exodus 90 specifically excludes wives from participating in some aspects of their husbands’ deepening spiritual lives. Reiterating a point that has appeared in past years, the wives write in their companion booklet, “both husbands and wives need to realize that you cannot be his accountability partner. You are a support, but you are not in charge. He needs his team of other men—on the same journey—to keep him accountable. Also, he is an adult. Allow yourself to trust both your husband and the group, and don’t nag or criticize.” (p. viii) As their husbands get closer to Christ, Exodus 90 tells their wives to… butt out. That’s harsh, and taken as a whole it’s not entirely accurate because there are ways in which Exodus 90 encourages spouses to develop their spirituality together. The problem – the significant problem – is that there are also ways in which they’re told that the men need to do things without (not merely separately from, as in point one above) their wives. The booklet reiterates this:

“During your husband’s journey through Exodus, this humble though courageous and actively supportive role modeled for you here, is the very role you are called to play. Though it can be tempting to try to either participate in his journey in the same way, or in a parallel way (i.e., a women’s version of Exodus 90), your role during this time is much simpler. You are there to support, to enable, and to help.” (p. 14)

What’s more, this model of spirituality as Exodus 90 envisions it doesn’t stop with the conclusion of the exercises on Easter, but continues beyond: “Does this mean that the role of one who supports, enables, and helps is always your role in your relationship? The answer is complicated—in some ways yes, and in some ways no.” (p. 15) Reading through more of the text, it seems that the people behind Exodus 90 see this through the lens of traditional gender roles, as though this idea flows from embracing a more traditional view of marriage – but while I’d laud that attitude, the reality of things seems a lot more like an embrace of more traditional secular views of gender roles than of traditional Christian views of gender roles. Sure, the 1950s man who spends his evenings at the corner bar and his Saturday mornings on the golf course with his buddies might not respond well to his wife trying to hold him accountable and live a more moral life – but far from being something a spouse can’t do, in the theology of marriage of St. John Paul II this is one of the primary roles of a wife (or husband).

I realize that this is already a very long post, but I want to dig into this just a little bit more because the fact that Exodus 90 says that women cannot be their husband’s “accountability partners” is not only incredible in light of Pope St. John Paul II’s teaching, but also reveals in a particular way the fundamental problem with the whole thing. One must ask: why can’t wives act as their husbands’ accountability partners? I can think of at least three responses. First is that some of the things a man needs to be held accountable for include the way he treats his wife, and so she can’t hold him accountable for these things. This is true, but it’s of course going to apply to everyone as far as their own treatment is concerned, and in any case it’s no reason that a wife can’t help a husband be accountable for things other than the way he treats her. Second is that there may be something related to the proper gender role of a wife which would make it unfitting or improper for her to correct her husband. This seems to be closest to what the Exodus 90 materials suggest, but I’ll simply say that I will take St. John Paul II’s theology as definitive here. Third would be that a man would not be very responsive to his wife’s efforts to hold him accountable – that he wouldn’t take it well.

Of the three, this third is the only one that holds up to any kind of scrutiny, but it is also the most contrary to the concept of the one-flesh union. In marriage, husband and wife form a union that is so close and so intimate that they are no longer two but are one flesh. A man who can’t take feedback from his wife well is living, not the Catholic concept of marriage and the one-flesh union, but a secular vision of manhood which in its pride can’t admit to a wife having anything over oneself.  Certainly we are not all perfect and we do not always live out the reality of this perfect matrimonial union as we ought, but when the spiritual exercise which is calling us and helping us to live out Christ’s call to a greater degree seems to embrace that fallen attitude, there’s a problem. For all of its talk about promoting better marriages and helping men to grow to be better husbands and better fathers, is at the core of Exodus 90’s understanding of marriage an erroneous, secular concept of marriage as an adversarial relationship? Often reading through the companion guidebook and other materials I very much get the impression that there is this view of marriage that really does not fully grasp the depth of union which it consists of.  

In fact, there is an important statement near the beginning of the companion booklet which further hints at this problem. That statement comes as part of the introduction which tells wives why this companion booklet exists at all:

“While some men are great at communicating with their wives about what they are doing and why, we have found that many men and their wives have struggled to communicate details and expectations for the journey they are both about to begin. In order to help with this problem…”

Notice that the creators see the problem they are addressing not as the way the Exodus 90 exercise itself engages with married life, but rather with the way men have communicated with their wives about Exodus 90. They don’t see the problem as having anything to do with Exodus 90 itself, but with the fact that wives don’t understand it. The creators do ultimately blame this on men rather than their wives, but nevertheless I hope it isn’t putting too fine a point on it to say that this all feels very familiar when thinking about the way that Adam and Eve try to pass the blame around when confronted with their first sin in Genesis, a sin that was also a consequence of the spouses’ failure to act in union with one another. It’s not that the dynamics are all exactly the same, but nevertheless we do see one key similarity in that rather than leaning into the unity of the spouses, what we see here is a case of the individuality of the spouses being cited to try to dismiss a problem which at its core concerns a question of a lack of union. 

While the Exodus 90 organization has apparently and mercifully thought better of it this year, some of their promotional and "how to talk to your wife" content of years past really reinforced this for me. One series of graphics depicted a grown man, hands clasped together and eyes looking up in petition reminiscent of a child asking a parent if they can please go to that party/trip/sleepover/whatever that they really, really, really want to. I wish I could provide an image, but somehow these seems to have been entirely removed from the internet. Suffice it to say that they did not engender the idea of a mature man in a mature relationship with a woman having a mature discussion about a spiritual exercise he would like to do. In fact it very much came across as an example of that same paradigm of an adversarial relationship between husband and wife - or at least of one where the two spouses are not of one mind. Again, I really do wonder how much influence the women who have come on board to help have had on refining the image that is put forward. In past years much of what could be found about Exodus 90 had a "by single men for single men" vibe to it, whereas anything I can find now has much more of a sense of maturity and professionalism to it. 

To be fair, Exodus 90 is not the only example of Catholic lay ministry that has had this problem. For most of its long history even as venerable an organization as the Knights of Columbus required men to take an oath not to tell anybody what takes place at some of its ceremonies – including, explicitly, spouses. I’ve heard all of the justifications before: nothing that is covered by the oath is contrary to the Catholic faith, or anything that would ever concern a spouse or anything that would cause any kind of problem. The only reason for this oath, people would insist, was to avoid spoiling things for men who might join the organization in the future. Forgive me if I find all of these arguments to miss the point, which is that the one-flesh Union of man and woman in marriage is complete and radical. Man and wife are “no longer two,” as Christ says, but “one flesh.” It is a total self-giving, holding nothing back. As I’ve noted – to very positive reactions – to Confirmation classes, one doesn’t append a “but” or an “except” to the marriage vows. No great story ends with the hero saying to his beloved, “You are mine and I am yours, but…”

Nevertheless and to their credit Exodus 90 and the Knights of Columbus do attempt to fulfill a role which is sorely lacking in the Church: ministry to and for the married, family demographic. There are all sorts of things for children, teens, young adults, and the elderly. There are even an increasing number of options for young married couples – but for those who have been married for a few years, especially if they have children? There’s almost nothing. Unfortunately, I think that in practice, Exodus 90 also fits into the standard paradigm of lay ministry: it’s great for young singles, but for middle aged men with families, it is just too compromised. To their credit, its creators do at least seem to be trying to improve matters, and it would be altogether wrong to fail to acknowledge that there has been a lot of good fruit from Exodus 90. For all of the wives who have had bad experiences with their husbands participating, there are also many who have seen very positive changes in their spouses. We do need to acknowledge that, even as we recognize what issues there may be.  We should certainly pray for their success as they try to make their exercises better – just as we should work to establish stronger lay ministries for this neglected married/family demographic. We should also work hard to promote a better understanding of the true depth of the union of, well, everything that matrimony calls us to. This is, after all, a big part of the problem:  far too many people, even those faithfully dedicated to serving married couples, simply don’t see the radical nature of marriage for all that it is.

Did Thomas Aquinas teach that women were just defective men created solely for reproduction?

A question came to me recently from some friends who were reading Women, Sex, and the Church, a collection of essays treating various Catholic teachings on sex and marriage as they relate to women.  In one of the essays, a woman categorized as a "dissident theologian" is quoted, wherein she asserts that St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Universal Doctor of the Church, taught that women A) are merely "defective" and "misbegotten" men who B) God only created so that there would be someone to carry babies during their 9 months of gestation.  The question, of course, is just what St. Thomas taught on this subject?

The first step in considering this question is to locate the reference to which this theologian is referring.  This does not prove difficult, the passage in question being located right where one would expect it to be in the first part of Aquinas' monumental Summa Theologica in his treatise on man.  Specifically, the issue comes up in article 1 of question 92 of the first part.  Here, Aquinas is answering the question of whether or not woman should have been created in the beginning at the same time as man.  He responds that yes, she should have been.  Let us look at the particular texts in question.  

The first comes from the article's first objection and it's response:

Objection 1. It would seem that the woman should not have been made in the first production of things. For the Philosopher says (De Gener. ii, 3), that "the female is a misbegotten male." But nothing misbegotten or defective should have been in the first production of things. Therefore woman should not have been made at that first production.  

Reply to Objection 1. As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher observes (De Gener. Animal. iv, 2). On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature's intentionas directed to the work of generation. Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of nature. Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.

We do see the "defective and misbegotten" text in question here.  It is first introduced as a quote from Aristotle to support the idea that woman should not have been created.  Aristotle, the objection asserts, declared that woman is simply a misbegotten man, and so she should not have been created in the first place, since nothing that is defective ought to have been created in the beginning, when all was perfect.  In brief, Aquinas' reply is that woman is only misbegotten in her individual nature but not in her universal nature, and so it would have been fine for her to have been created at the beginning by virtue of her universal nature.

However, the soundness of Aquinas' reply is not at issue here.  Rather, it is the question of woman being "misbegotten."  Specifically, we now see, it is the issue of her being misbegotten in her individual nature.  What exactly does this mean?  Fortunately, St. Thomas provides an explanation of why a woman is said to be misbegotten.  The male seed, he says, produces a perfect male likeness, and therefore he reasons that the production of a woman entails some kind of defect.  Aquinas then bases the rest of his response on this fact.  This is important because the "fact" is in error: the male seed does not produce a perfect male likeness.  It can produce either a male or a female, because sperm can contain either an X chromosome - leading to a female child - or a Y chromosome - leading to a male.  Of course we know this now, but in Aquinas' day (and Aristotle's, for that matter) this was not understood.  

It helps to try to look at things from the perspective of people of Aquinas' day.  They knew a little bit about the biology of reproduction, but not very much.  The microscope had not even been invented, and the theory of chromosomes was still nearly 700 years away.  What these people did know was that children developed in women after men deposited their "seed" during intercourse.  Women were thus understood as being responsible for giving a child it's body (as it grew and developed, taking what material it needed from her own) while the role of males was to give the initial seed.  What this seed was, exactly, nobody really knew.  The philosophers considered that it was the form of the child - the "plan" that directed how the material from the mother should be organized.  Whereas a blueprint indicates how girders, wood, and so forth are to be arranged to create the intended building, the man's seed would indicate how the the woman's biological material was to be arranged to form a child.

In any case, one element of their reasoning was a fairly fundamental principle which we follow even today: you can't give what you don't have.  To us, it means that a person who wants to teach must first learn, that a person who wants to bring peace to friends must first gain personal peace, and other similar platitudes along with more basic things like the simple fact that I can't give you $100 when I only have $50 in my pocket.  To the people of Aquinas' time, it made sense that a male could only give maleness.  Therefore, a father's seed could only give the "blueprint" to make another male.  Think about it.  It has been obvious even since the first human beings that we get our "form" from our parents: we look like them!  It's easy to see, then, how people could reason that when a father gives his seed he is giving that "blueprint" that made him.  

What all of this means for the "biology" behind Aquinas' reasoning is that men didn't have the capability of giving the form of a woman in their seed.  Therefore, a woman would have to come about by some defect in the form that a mother did receive.  Further helping us see just how strongly an erroneous understanding of biology influenced Aquinas, he goes on to list what were at the time considered some possible causes of this defect, even including a 'moist wind!'  The individual nature of a woman, he therefore says, is misbegotten.  In other words, in and of herself (individually), a woman is not the result of the perfect transmission of a father's seed.  

Now, we could simply end matters here recognizing that working with a more accurate concept of reproductive biology, Aquinas would have had an entirely different answer.  Were we do to so, however, we would miss something very important about Aquinas' point.  To see exactly what, we need to follow his reasoning through even from his faulty foundation, for next he goes on to address how woman, in her general human nature, is not misbegotten.  Nature, he points out, requires both men and women.  In other words, humanity by its very nature is made up of men and women.  There must be both, or there would be neither - for nobody would ever be conceived.  Now this is from a purely natural standpoint, even apart from considering God's role in things.  It is only at the very end that Aquinas brings God into things, pointing out that God directs nature and so God of course determined that humanity would consist of men and women.  In no uncertain terms, he says that God always intended that there be women.  

Further, we can see from other places in his writings that St. Thomas did not consider women to be of lower value, worth, or dignity than men.  For example, he teaches that the highest act a creature can perform is the intellective contemplation of God (in layman's terms, a way of defining Heaven) which women can of course also participate in.  In his reply to objection 1 in the 4th article of question 93, he rejects the idea that the image of God is not found in women and teaches that both men and women possess and intellectual nature, which he says is the image of God.  Other examples could be cited.  

It is important then to consider just how St. Thomas understands women to be defective or misbegotten men.  He does not mean it as we might use the terms to describe a defective CD player, for example.  Should I go to the store and purchase a CD player with as a broken motor, it would be defective in and of itself insofar as it would not work.  Understood in this way, a defective male would be an impotent man, or a man who had some other problem, but a male who, like the CD player, did not "work."  On the other hand, consider the chocolate chip cookie.  As the story goes, Ruth Wakefield was one day baking chocolate cookies only to discover she did not have the proper ingredients.  Substituting semi-sweet chocolate chips, she unexpectedly created what is today the most popular cookie of them all.  The chocolate cookie, while having a value and worth all its own, was a defective or "misbegotten" chocolate cookie.

The key point this analogy seeks to illustrate is that the "defect" of the woman is not a defect in the sense of a valuelessness, a badness, a brokenness, or even necessarily an inferiority.  Rather, it is a difference from what was originally intended (by the seed): a defect from the male seed's expected ultimate end.  Ironically, we can see a parallel in the way prenatal development really does function: it is generally accepted that everybody begins as a female until the Y chromosome starts to trigger the proper physiological changes to produce a male, and so in a similar sense to Aquinas' ancient one, all men are in a sense "misbegotten" women.  God, of course, intends that souls He intends to be women be women and those He intends to be men be men, and this is an even more important point.  Aquinas' conception of the defect here is purely a material, biological one (and, of course, one based on faulty biology in the first place).  However, he firmly insists (over and over in the course of other questions, in fact) that God's intent is that women be conceived.  In St. Thomas' eyes, then, God does something akin to altering nature itself so as to bring women about.

The second issue - whether or not Aquinas taught that women were made only for the purposes of bearing children - is an easier one to tackle.  The theologian is referring to the main portion of Aquinas answer in the question we have been considering.  He writes:

It was necessary for woman to be made, as the Scripture says, as a "helper" to man; not, indeed, as a helpmate in otherworks, as some say, since man can be more efficiently helped by another man in other works; but as a helper in the work of generation.

It is only necessary to note three brief points.  

First, Aquinas' primary meaning here is, again, natural and not supernatural.  Just as in discussing misbegotten and defectiveness he was thinking in terms of the natural order of things (that is, as regards how women come about according to nature rather than to God), here he is also speaking primarily about women's natural purpose.  He goes on to illustrate his point by considering the ways that plants and animals reproduce.  Some plants, he says, reproduce on their own without the need for others.  Plants, however, are not very high creatures and their sole purpose for existence is to make more plants, and so always have the entirety of their reproductive abilities contained within themselves.  Animals, however, have other purposes, and humans above all have that highest of purposes: contemplating God.  Given this, he says that man should be separated from reproduction so as that he only exists as a reproductive entity during certain times - namely, intercourse  In other words, it's important that human beings aren't in a constant state of reproduction (like some plants) so as to most befit creatures whose ultimate purpose is in the spiritual.  Given this,  mankind's reproductive function is split up amongst different people, and so, he says, nature demands that women exist to take on part of the reproductive function.  For this reason, when considering how woman is a helper for man, he ties it very particularly to reproduction. 

Second, in other places he explicitly states that women have purposes apart from reproduction.  For example, in the very next article he writes, "Thirdly, because, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii, 12), the human male and female are united, not only for generation, as with other animals, but also for the purpose of domestic life, in which each has his or her particular duty..."

Third, as has been pointed out already, St. Thomas teaches how God made humanity, in His image and likeness, as man and woman.  Women, he says, have the image of God in them just as do men, and they are able to practice that highest intellective contemplation of God just as are men.  This is a particularly important point, for it is discussed in his treatment of the end of man's origin.  In other words, he teaches these matters as part of a discussion about why God made man in the first place.  Thus, it is very clear that Aquinas considered women to have been created in the Image of God to receive His happiness just as were men.   

St. Thomas was not perfect - though he was close.  On some issues (perhaps most famously the Immaculate Conception) he came to erroneous conclusions because of limitations in the understanding of scientific issues in his day.  The case we have examined here is one such instance.  One ought always to turn to the official teaching of the Church when seeking certainty on a given matter, for it is that teaching which is Divinely guarded and protected from error by Lord.  However, when seeking to understand this teaching better, the reasons for this teaching, or its deeper working, St. Thomas is the first source to which to turn.  Not only did he write about virtually everything, but his is the official theology of the Church - the official "way of understanding" things, as set forth by the popes.  His Summa Theologica was even placed on the altar at the council of Trent alongside the Bible!  A valuable source indeed!

The Meaning of Christian Priesthood

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and God created man in His own image, and God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good.  Yet in spite of such glorious and auspicious beginnings, man could not carry on more than a brief moment before the terrible ignominy of sin had torn asunder his relationship with the loving Creator to whom he owed his very being.  Since that time, the life of every human being has been driven by the great, often misunderstood longing to cross the threshold that sin has wrought and return to the loving embrace of Our Father.  The means to this reconciliation, somehow revealed by God to those first transgressors, has been handed down since the time of Cain and Abel, and so all men everywhere have always known that without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. Thus has the priest always been the constant fixture in all cultures, punctuating every period of human history.  He – or in those places where men had exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images, she – has, in every place stood daily at service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins, until, in the fullness of time, God sent forth His Son to become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.

Therein lies the distinctiveness, the dignity, and the importance of the priesthood of Christ, which is the priesthood of the Church of God.  Men have sought since time immemorial to turn to God, and have employed the services of the priest for just as long.  However, only when God Himself became a priest in the person of Jesus Christ could such a ministry achieve its intended end.  Jesus Christ is our high priest, and He now continues His ministry through the hands of those men whom He calls to serve in His person at His Altar.  While Christ serves in the Holy of Holies of Heaven, the men of the ordained priesthood perpetuate His ministry on earth, making present to the people of God His one, eternal offering to the Father.  They serve not as priests in their own right, but by participating mystically in His one eternal priesthood, and as such, a true appreciation, and any real understanding at all, of the ordained priesthood can only be found in an appreciation and understanding of Christ Himself.

Why Have Faith in a God We Cannot See?

In a recent conversation, the following question was posed:

"Why are we called to be *faithful*?

....

Faith in the unseen is central to Christianity.

In a sense, it is also central to science, as we scientists proceed by believing that
the world is rational and, by experimentation, we will find the hidden laws that
govern this universe.

Yet, what I don't comprehend is:

Why are we asked to believe in a Person, with whom we cannot have an explicit, clear, obvious conversation. Any relationship - professional, friendship, love - starts by establishing a clear line of communication. I can trust my best friend because I know him; I have talked to him, listened to his opinion and had lunch with him many times.

Unfortunately I do not hear the voice of God in an unambiguous manner.
I can possibly attribute some of my feelings to His voice, but can never be 100% sure. This is an almost insurmountable obstacle to my journey.

In other words, things would be immensely simpler if God's voice were audible
by all in a clear, unambiguous fashion.

What do you think? I am curious to hear your thoughts!"

My response is as follows:


Davide, thanks for starting the discussion.

I like the fact that you began by pointing out that faith is necessary for science in a certain sense. I think this is a very important, and often overlooked point. It is also a point which can lead us into a greater understanding of the question that you posed. Let us consider this notion of faith in science for a moment.

As you said, the scientists must began with the assumption that the world is rational and can be understood. To this, I would add that the scientist must believe that his senses, and indeed the senses of all other scientists, accurately depict this rational world. In other words, when the scientist's eyes report to him that a frog is green, he must believe that the frog actually *is* green. Considering this, we see that there are actually a number of beliefs at play here: the belief that the scientist's eyes accurately capture the frog, the belief that the scientist's nerves accurately transmit the information captured by the eyes, and the belief that the scientist's brain accurately processes and interprets the information received by the nerves. The scientist must also believe that this is true of all other scientists, for his work is based upon theirs, and so if there is any problem in how any of these other scientists gather and process information, then the information that he receives from them would be inaccurate. Thus, I suppose we could add to our list the need to believe that those processes which package and transmit information *out* of the scientist are just as accurate as those which gather and process the information.

Now when we think about this, we can even extend these concerns to the everyday. Whether one is a scientist or not, each person must believe that the world is rational and that the human processes of interacting with the world are rational and are accurate. We see then that we all believe in a great many things, and indeed we all accept these things on nothing more than faith, for they are not verifiable because of the fact that any attempt to verify them would rely upon the very system that we are seeking to verify.

If, then, we are to have any real basis for science, or for anything else for that matter, it is necessary that we rely upon something outside of the system. However, in this case the system is the world itself; it is not possible to examine the system from the outside. If only it were possible to approach the system from the outside, then we could have greater confidence in a great many things, but it is not.

Given the dead end that we have arrived at, let us now turn from this consideration of science to consider the other side of the issue, religion. Whereas science is that endeavor in which man observes the world around him so as to understand it, religion is that endeavor in which man seeks to interact with that which is beyond the world around him. That is, science is concerned with the natural, religion with the supernatural. While there are many differences between the two, perhaps the biggest, or most obvious, pertains to how one knows anything in each. The scientist seeks out knowledge, observing, experimenting, and analyzing. In religion, there is none of this, because religion is not concerned with anything which *can* be observed or analyzed. As has already been stated, science concerns itself with nature - the world around us - while religion concerns itself with the *supernatural* - that which is beyond the world. In religion, man does not observe, but rather, he receives revelation: the supernatural is revealed to humanity.

CS Lewis addresses this point in a helpful way. He says to consider a man who is studying a rock. That rock can do nothing to reveal itself to the man, and the man must do all of the work in coming to understand the rock. Moving up the chain, Mr. Lewis says, we come to something like a bacterium. Still, the man must do almost all of the work in understanding the bacterium, which can do hardly much more than the rock to explain itself. Now if the man were to study something greater than a bacterium, such as an insect, the insect could do perhaps slightly more than the bacterium, but still most of the work is on the man's part. As we move up the chain, the ability of the studied to reveal itself to the studier increases, and the amount of work the man needs to do decreases. In fact, the amount of work the man *is able to do* also decreases. So, when the man studies a dog, there is some degree to which the dog must cooperate if the man is to understand it. If the dog does not wish to be examined, the he may bite the man. When we get to another human being, we find that nearly equal work must be done on the part of the student and the studied. If I wish to get to know you, Davide, you must cooperate to a large degree. I cannot know all but some of the most superficial details of your life if you do not wish to cooperate, and if you do not reveal things about yourself to me. Now, what if the man wished to learn about something *greater* than himself, such as an angel? Now we find that the angel must do a great deal of the work, and the man's capabilities for actively studying have diminished a great deal. Ultimately, this chain ends with God, and when it comes to God, the man can do *nothing* to know God, just as he had to do *everything* to understand the rock. God must do everything, and here we find revelation: God reveals Himself to man so that man may know him.

When we approach things this way, we see that the whole concept of revelation makes a fair bit of sense. If God is a higher form of life than me, then of course He will need to reveal Himself to me, rather than my observing and studying Him, and this thought is all the more profound when we realize that the difference between a human being and God is infinitely more than the difference between a human being and an insect or a rock. Revelation is, by all logic, necessary if we are to know anything about a being that is greater than us, like God. Of course, God has revealed Himself to us, and so we do have some knowledge of Him.

Given this, let us return to the questions of understanding the world, for something has changed. We are no longer at a dead end in our thinking, for indeed we now have something which we did not before: input from outside of the system. In God's revelation to us, we have knowledge which is *not* within the system of the world, and we can use this knowledge to help overcome our previous problem. God has revealed that He is rational, and He has further revealed that He created us with rationality. Further, God does not reveal Himself, per se, through those things which must be observed and so catch us in a cycle of circular reasoning. Rather, He reveals Himself to us, by Grace, in our inner being. In other words, He does not reveal Himself through obtained knowledge, but through infused knowledge. Certainly, we do find God revealing us in ways we can observe - through the Scriptures, for example - but ultimately, each individual's knowledge of Him is not based upon any of these things, but upon His own personal work in the soul of the individual. Many read the Bible, while only some believe. Many study the historical reliability of the story of Christ, while only some come to faith. The difference is in God's interaction with the inner soul of the individual. These external things are only ancillary to that. We now have reason to trust our eyes and our lobes, and a basis on which to believe that the frog is green - so long as we believe in God.

But alas! So fast as our problem seems to have been solved, we are confronted with another which is even greater than the first! Before, we could not be certain of our observations of the world, and then we came to see that thanks to God's self-revelation to us, these observations had been given a foundation. Now, we find that that foundation relies again on belief - this time, not a belief in our nerves or the fundamental rationality of the world, but in God. This problem is worse because we realize that even if there were in fact something outside of the system containing God which could give us foundation to believe in Him, then we would have to believe in *that,* and so on and so on, ad infinitum.

We see that belief is necessary. We cannot function without it. Ultimately, we will have to believe in *something.* The question is about what we choose to believe in. Given this, let us consider St. Thomas' Aquinas' treatment of belief. The question is posed, 'Can the object of faith be something seen?' That is, is it possible to have faith in something which one can observe? Thomas replies:

"I answer that, Faith implies assent of the intellect to that which is believed. Now the intellect assents to a thing in two ways. First, through being moved to assent by its very object, which is known either by itself(as in the case of first principles, which are held by the habit of understanding), or through something else already known (as in the case of conclusions which are held by the habit of science. Secondly the intellect assents to something, not through being sufficiently moved to this assent by its proper object, but through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side rather than to the other: and if this be accompanied by doubt or fear of the opposite side, there will be opinion, while, if there be certainty and no fear of the other side, there will be faith.

Now those things are said to be seen which, of themselves, move the intellect or the senses to knowledge of them. Wherefore it is evident that neither faith nor opinion can be of things seen either by the senses or by the intellect."

Here we see that St. Thomas confirms our suggestion that faith is a choice. If we submit our minds to something because we see it in itself (what Thomas calls the first principles), then certainly we do not have *faith* in it. I do not have faith in the computer I am using to type this, but I have strict knowledge of it. In this case, if we *do not* submit our minds to it we are delusional. Similarly, if our intellect assents to something which we do not see itself, but which follows from what we have seen (what Thomas calls the second principles), that is not faith either. For example, we can come to the conclusion that the sun is made of helium and hydrogen based upon a large mass of specifically observed information, including the spectrographies of various elements, the way that light diffracts though various gases, through glass, and so on and so on. This conclusion is not faith, for it is based entirely upon the interaction of various pieces of knowledge.

Thus, we arrive at a second important conclusion. First, we realize that we must believe in *something* and cannot function if we rely only on strict knowledge, for without belief we can in fact have no strict knowledge at all. Now we realize that faith must be a choice, and further that this choice must by its very definition be different from knowledge.

Given all of this, let us turn to the question(s) that you posed: "Why are we asked to believe in a Person, with whom we cannot have an explicit, clear, obvious conversation?" The answer might be obvious by now: we cannot interact with God *other* than by belief, at least not right now (more on this below). Any interaction we have with God must be based upon a belief in Him and in that presence He has used to bring us to belief in the inner-persons of our souls. This is, of course, a key point: we believe because He has given us to believe; it is by His Grace that we believe. Thus, the question is not *as* difficult as it may be otherwise. After all, our belief is not simply something we have, of ourselves, chosen to have. It has been given to us by the One whom we believe in. In other words, we could choose to believe because God, in the depths of our souls, presented us with the choice to believe.

It is also for this reason that faith is more certain than knowledge. Knowledge is based upon the belief that everything works as we believe it does: the world is rational, our faculties accurately capture and interpret this rational world, etc. Our faith is not based upon these sorts of things, which themselves depend upon faith (so that we may have an extra-systemic foundation), but upon God's touching our souls in a personal way: knowledge of the world flows from the relationship that we have with God. Because the Holy Spirit has personally touched us and given us faith, we can move forward and view the world in a rational way.

Thus, Christ tells us that it is *better* that the Holy Spirit - which we cannot see - be given us than that He Himself be physically with us: "Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you." (John 16:7). So long is present to us physically, uttering words, performing physical actions, etc., our relationship with Him depends upon our senses. Not only does this pose the problems with which I began this discussion, but it relegates our relationship with God to the purely "physical." That greater, more perfect relationship with Him - the relationship of the soul - cannot come from talking to the man Jesus, or from walking around with Him. Yet when He left the earth, it made way for this greater relationship, the spiritual relationship.

Consider the difference this makes. The apostles spent 3 years with Jesus Christ the man, talking to Him, getting to know Him as we do our friends, eating with Him, observing Him, listening to His clear and unambiguous words, and so forth. Yet when things became difficult, they abandoned Him. Even the sight of Christ glorified in the Transfiguration was not enough to preserve their love of Him, for of the three who went up the mount to see that sight, only John remained with Him through the Crucifixion. James abandoned Him. Peter denied Him! These men had true *knowledge* of Christ - they observed Him and interacted with Him just as we do with one another, and yet they still abandoned Him, just as we so often turn upon, abandon, and hurt one another though we see how real we all are and how real is the suffering that our offenses cause to our loved ones.

Even after these men had seen Christ *rise from the dead,* they still were not swayed enough. When He had commanded them to preach the Gospel to all nations and ascended to Heaven before their eyes, they returned to the upper room. They did not get to the task He had given them. It was only at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon them and moved their souls, that the apostles got about to the work Christ had called them to. It was the Spirit which made all the difference. They had seen everything, observed everything, physically been at Christ's side and experienced everything from His miracles to His Transfiguration into Glory to His Resurrection and Ascension, all to little effect. When the *Spirit* came, this changed. The relationship *then* became solid, the Love *then* unwavering.

None of this, of course, is to the detriment of observations and evidences. Indeed, this is what makes Christ different from other purported gods. Christ entered into history, and, so far as we believe that our world is rational and our senses can apprehend it, we can examine the evidence for His life, death, and resurrection. Yet, as St. Thomas explains (see Summa Theologica II-II, 2, 10), and as I mentioned above, this is ancillary to the choice of the individual, moved by Holy Spirit, to believe. These things support faith, but they do not cause it. The cause is nothing more than God's Grace moving the soul to believe, and the soul freely choosing to consent to this movement.

Therein lies a critical point which I have alluded to above but which deserves far more explicit treatment. To quote Thérèse of Lisiuex, "everything is grace." Everything is Grace. Everything is Grace. I repeat it due to the utter importance, above all, of this statement. We believe *only* by Grace. God does not ask us to believe in anything; He moves us to. He does not ask us to trust Him though we have never heard His words aubily; He brings us to. He does not tell us to obey Him; He draws us to. Our part is only that we consent to His Grace, or that we do not consent. At one point, a person does not believe, and then God moves the person's soul. He poses a question to the soul in some way that is indescribable and yet is understood perfectly by the soul, even if in our explicit conscious thought we do not realize it. Then, He waits for our response. That response is either to answer yes, or to answer no. Either way, we do nothing. If we answer no, we continue about our life as we had. If we answer yes, we simply allow God to continue to move our soul, to continue to put belief into our soul, and so on. Our continued belief is the same: our soul is constantly touched by God in a very real way, and we continue to permit Him to work in us, or we do not.

The profound point here is that it is not that we believe or that we do not believe. It is not that we examine evidence, reasoning, or otherwise and make a decision from there. It is that in some way that we cannot now understand, God touches us, and we know it is Him, and we either accept Him or reject Him. Consider the five senses. Each receives the world in a different way. Now consider the person born blind. Because of the defect of body, such a person is not only unable to see, but were he not told about sight by others, he would not even know that such a faculty as sight exists. In the same way, our souls have senses, senses which perceive not the physical world, as do the senses of our bodies, but the supernatural world. It is the senses of the soul which can "see" God, which can "hear" Him, and so on. Yet just like the person born blind, we are completely unaware of these unless we are told by others who have them, and indeed, even once told, we cannot use them any more than the blind man can see once he is told that sight exists.

To the *soul,* not the ear, does God call, by His Grace enabling the soul to hear Him. While we may not be explicitly aware of this call, in the greatest depths of who we are, in our very souls, we do hear, and we either respond or we do not. God's first request is simply that He open the ears of the soul, and should we permit that, He begins to work in the soul more and more. When you think, Davide, that God is speaking, it is certainly difficult to be sure, for that connection between our explicit thoughts and the soul is so heavily damaged by our fallen nature. Yet the soul can hear, and we do respond in the affirmative or the negative. As we consent to God more and more, that connection is strengthened, and we come to know God's voice more and more. We see in the examples of the saints some of those who came to hear God's voice more and more clearly.

Finally, when we pass from this world, the sight of the soul can be opened to see God. Here, and only here, can we have knowledge of Him. I said above that we cannot have more than belief *now.* Now, the eyes of our souls are closed, and only by consenting to His call, only by letting Him open those eyes, can we come to *see* Him, for God is Spirit. He cannot be seen by the eyes of the body, but only of the soul. Thus, as we allow God more and more to heal us, we can come closer and closer to being able to actually see Him. Then, we can have knowledge. Now, we must have faith, for now, we have not the capability of seeing God. In a sense, then, we could say that the reason we must have faith, rather than knowledge, is because of sin. Sin blinds the soul. It is by our own choice that we are "relegated" more and more to belief. Christ's healing of the blind man meant far more than just the giving of His physical sight. Just as the blind man was given to see Christ's body because He permitted the Lord to touch his eyes, he - as can we - came to see Christ's *Spirit* by letting the Lord touch the eyes of His soul.

The journey we are on is one, not of getting to know God, but of permitting God to reveal Himself to us. We must at every moment worry, not about how to believe in what we cannot see, but simply of opening ourselves to God's voice - whether we can hear it or understand it or not! God's Grace will give to us all that we need. What we need do, simply, is not get in the way. Our struggle is not a struggle of believing. Rather, it is a struggle to be certain that we are open to God. The pharisees were given to *see* God's miracles, and to hear His voice, yet they did not believe, because they were not open to hearing Him. Those of them who *were* open to hearing God, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, came to Christ. *That* is our effort. *That* is our struggle. We must fight not to put up obstacles to the Lord. If we do that, He will give to us belief, and He will lead us with His voice, and He will bring us to Himself.

God bless,

Shane

How are Prayers to the Saints really Prayers to God?

I haven't posted in a while - I hope to return to it soon.

This particular piece is the response to a question about why several Catholic events that a woman attended did not involve any prayers to Jesus Himself, but only to saints. The events were things like Bible studies, so that's why I'd say it's ok to just have a few Hail Marys or something. Typically, even in spite of what I said to her, one ought to pray directly to Our Lord during a faith based event, just because of the nature of how we as human beings perceive things. Even though a reality might exist that is different from how things are perceived, nevertheless we God has programmed us to operate according to that perception.

In any case, some others had suggested to this woman that prayer to the saints really is prayer to God. Here is my response:

_____________________________________________________________________________________


You've got the right idea that prayers to saints are really prayers to the Lord in some way. And you've probably also got the right idea that you don't get it. I say this because its the sort of thing that, in my experience, people don't "get" until they've been Catholic for a while, or for cradle Catholics, until they really end up considering the issue for a while. This was true of me as well. I came into the Church in 2005, and I, like you, accepted prayers to the saints and Mary, accepted all the Marian stuff, but still in practice there was a certain degree of Marian piety that I was still uncomfortable with.

The reason for this is, I think, that it's based on some very advanced theological concepts. The thing is, unlike in [much of] Protestantism, Catholicism is so organic a faith that literally everything is deeply tied to everything else. You can't seperate this from that, as Protestants often do. My point is that theology in Catholicism is not merely theoretical - that is, not merely about God academically, but it truly is and stems from and leads to (all at once) the actual practice of the faith. Talk to anyone that's been studying the Summa Theologiae for a while and they'll tell you that they don't just get knowledge from it, but in some way - as cold and technical as it is - they get some sort of increase in their spiritual life as well. It's amazing.

Another way of putting this is to say that the Catholic faith is true, which means that the theological truths it teaches are a part of the fabric of reality, a part of the fabric of who we all really are as human beings and creatures of God, and so the more one prays and leads a spiritual life focused, the more one begins to recognize all the truths of the world and of themselves that underly every moment and aspect of existence. It's sortof like those movies where they show you all the stuff that's really going on in nature at every moment all around you but you never notice, except a lot less gross.

Now, so far as your specific question, that underlying reality that really matters is that everything that we have - even our mere existence - is just some way in which we are sharing in God. It is really God's own existence that in a certain way we participate in, as theologians say. That's why we have existence. It's ours, but it's also God's. Yet it's not in a pantheistic way, as if everything in existence isGod, either.

I'm sure you're familiar with 2 Peter 1:4, where it says that through Christ we are made partakers of the Divine Nature. What he's talking about is the concept of Divination, or Theosis as they call it in the east, which means that through Christ, we in some way share in what it is to be God. Athanasius, for instance, said in one of my favorite quotes, "By the participation of the Spirit, we are knit into the Godhead." This was the center of the faith in the early Church. It was everywhere, and every doctrine - even ones that seem so completely unrelated - were understood around the framework of it.

Now basically, Heaven is to participate in God's existence to the fullest extent that a creature can. That's what 2 Peter 1:4 is talking about. Hell, on the other hand, is to participate in God's existence to the least degree a creature can - to participate in existence alone, and have nothing else at all. Those in Hell suffer so much because they exist, but that's all. Everyone's experienced a moment in their life where they feel like they're just existing and that's all, and it's absolutely miserable. Hell is like that, except people who feel that way aren't even close to just existing and really have so much more - so imagine how terrible Hell is!

But Heaven is to participate more and more and more and more in God. It is to have more and more of what He has. We can never, ever become God, because we can never have existence in and of ourselves - that's what God has. But we can have nearly everything else that God has, not because we deserve it, but because He gives it to us. The first time I heard this it sounded crazy, but the thing is, we only exist by literally sharing that which is God's, His existence. For God to share with us any other part of Himself is no different. It's all just God giving to us that which is His, whether its existence, which we all have, or something more. So those who object to concepts of the saints having different "powers" or whatnot really have no ground to stand on. For a saint to have the "power" to bilocate, for instance, isn't any different from me having the "power" to exist and sit on my couch! The only difference is that that saint has become more open to God and shares more in God than I do.

The key to remember in all of this, though, is that that which we share in of God is not something that God creates, that is, something that He makes to give us that is like what He has. That's not possible, because He is all that really is at all. While those who do object to the saints "powers" are wrong in the way I mentioned above, they're actually correct at the same time because their reason for it is that only God has these things. And it's true! When I exist, or when a person speaks in tongues, or when Padre Pio bilocated, it is literally God doing that in us. It's not some power that is like God, but it is God. If it were something else, that would mean something existed on its own apart from God.

So when I am talking to you, I am talking to God in a certain sense, because you exist by virtue of sharing God's existence. Now when I talk to a baptized Christian, I am talking to God in an even fuller sense, because that person by virtue of baptism shares in more of God. This is why Christ said that what we do to the least of his brother's, we do to Him. It's true! It's why St. Paul said that it was no longer him living, but Christ who lives in him. To become more and more holy is simply to become more and more a partaker in God Himself.

So Mary up in Heaven, who partook of God more than anyone, was so emptied of "Mary" and so full of God that when we talk to her, we really are talking so directly to God, even though we're also talking to the human being Mary. Same goes for any other saint, just to a lesser degree as they were not as holy as she and participated in God to different degrees.

It's the same as with good works. The Council of Trent taught that the good works of a Christian are really the good works of the Holy Spirit living in the Christian, but in some mysterious sense that they are also the good works of the Christian at the same time. It's that Catholic "both/and" that everyone talks about. And it hints at that tremendous underlying reality to everything, namely, that everything that exists really is all at once both itself and God. It is itself, but it is God's own existence that it shares. This is one of those things we're never going to come close to grasping until we see God face to face.

So when we pray to Mary or to any saint, we're talking to them, but we're also talking to God, in the same way as when I talk to you or as when I feed my homeless brother. Yet we're also talking to God through them in an even deeper sense, because they share in God so, so deeply. They are so emptied of self and so full of God - so participating in God. Furthermore, you're praying - you're asking for Divine favors. That's what God does, and in asking them to grant these through their intercession, you're appealing to the Divine in them that they have become partakers of. So you're speaking to God, even though you're speaking to a human being, just like when I feed a human being I'm feeding Christ, but in a greater sense.

Now, I don't imagine that the people at these events considered all this. It's possible that just living the Catholic life led them, as it so often does, to an unconscious grasp of this aspect of reality such that what they did seemed perfectly great to them. It's also possible they just weren't very good Catholics and didn't care too much about Jesus. You'd be a better judge of that than I would, since you were there. But I bet they cared plenty about Him .

I know this is a ton to take at once, but I wanted to try to answer your question as best I could. I also prayed first, so I hope the Holy Spirit worked a little bit here. In any case, God bless.

Women's Ordination

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Why did Christ set up the Church?

The Church is set up in the way it is for a very specific reason. Did you ever wonder why we have Sacraments and all that? I mean, in some ways, the Protestant system actually makes more sense. As Catholics we believe in a God who essentially has invited us to become His children; we believe in a God who wants Love, not adherence to some checklist like a strict boss or professor. Even though the Scriptures never use the terminology, we agree with the Protestants that what God desires is a personal relationship with us. He wants us to know Him and Love Him. So if what God wants is Love and Faith - a relationship - well then Sacraments seem to be completely unnecessary.

Our conception of the Church as an authority to speak on matters of truth would still be important; having a personal relationship with someone requires that one know the truth about them. Imagine trying to have a relationship with your earthly father without any certainty concerning the facts about him. Do you get him golf clubs for his birthday, or a violin? Does he like it when you make lawyer jokes, or should you refrain. Is he a lawyer? In fact, when is his birthday, anyways? It wouldn't work. The situation is even more difficult with our Heavenly Father, whom is present not only when we are in the same room as Him but always. Is X a sin - does it offend Him - or not? When the Scripture says we should fast in one place but says we shouldn't in another, what does God really want? When half the Christians interpret a verse one way and the other half another, what's correct? What did God really intend to say?

But not Sacraments. For a God who simply wants a relationship they don't seem to fit. Once we know the truth about Him, what is the purpose of having to go through these rituals? Going back to fathers, if I offend my earthly father, the way to repair that relationship is to ask Him for forgiveness - not to go to someone else, like mom, and ask her to offer his forgiveness, as Catholics do in confession. So the Sacraments seem sortof, well, superfluous at best.

But the reality is that by Christ's own choice He set it up that way. The Sacraments aren't some superfluous thing that the Church came up with for some reason - Christ Himself instituted them Himself. Why? Why, if what He really wants is a relationship?

The reason is that Christ is compassionate. God loves us even if we don't always love Him. He wants those who aren't going to have a relationship with Him to have a chance. He wants as few people as possible to reject Him. He wants us in Heaven, so He didn't simply give us some authority to tell us what is true and then leave us to, if we can get ourselves to, have a relationship on our own. Different Christian groups, and even different schools among Catholics, have many different ideas of how Grace works exactly, so it's impossible to give some blanket statement about the technicalities of it, but suffice it to say that basic human experience shows that however Grace works, the vast majority of people in the world don't seem motivated to have a relationship with God even with the help and promptings of Grace. The truth is that left to out own, most people simply don't take advantage of the Grace God has for them and have a relationship with Him. Few Christians from any group ever really do. So Christ gave us Sacraments - things that work ex opera operandi, as that Latin calls it: "in and of themselves."

The Sacrament of Reconcilliation really does reconcile usto God. If someone is an absolutely miserable Christian and the very most they can muster is being sorry because they are afraid of hell, then the Sacrament will save them from it and - even as what may be a completely unintended side effect from their perspective - reunite them to God.

Christ made the Church in the exact way He did specifically so that poor Christians can make it to Heaven. He gave us last rights so that even the greatest sinner can, on his deathbed, at least say he's afraid of Hell and make it to Heaven, even if that person can't bring Himself to actually Love God or to be sorry for His sins in any real way. He wants us there, and so He gave us a Church with Sacraments exactly as He did so that those with the bare minimum can make it. He'll Give us Love when we get to Him.

Of course, He wants so much more, and so we have the fantastic saints who actually gave all they possibly could, and then people like you and me who hopefully do our best even if we're not quite ready for canonization. But He wants those folks who are just sitting in the pews each week and that's really all they're doing in Heaven, too. And that's at least one of the reasons that He did it they way He did.

Salvation and the Theological Virtues

One of the big differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, theologically speaking, is the emphasis on the theological virtues: faith, hope, and love. In Catholic theology, all three of these are required for salvation. If a person is lacking any one of them, he or she will not inherit the kingdom of Heaven, as St. Paul would say. The virtues are called theological because they pertain to God, as opposed to something else. The theological virtue of Faith, for example, is faith in God. The theological virtue of Hope is hope in God, as opposed to hope in something else. Hope in some other thing would be called the natural virtue of hope, for it is hope in something natural.. In Protestantism, faith is regarded as necessary - and faith alone.

This difference naturally leads to quite a bit of confusion on the part of Protestants when coming across the Catholic teaching. "Hope and love," they might ask? "The Bible says we're saved by faith, not hope and love." The biggest question, however, is not one that is particular to Protestants, but one that might be on the mind of anyone considering the idea. Namely, why faith, hope, and love? Why does a person need these three particular things for salvation?

To understand this actually isn't all that difficult if one has a Catholic understanding of God Himself. I oughtn't generalize, as there are certainly many Protestants who have this understanding of God as well, but it's much easier to explain the Catholic viewpoint when contrasting it with another view, one not uncommon in Protestantism. This understanding is what I call the "bouncer" God. In this non-Catholic thinking, God is essentially like a bouncer who guards the entrance into the club of Heaven. Unfortunately, thanks to our sins, nobody is good enough to enter except for Jesus Christ. However, anyone who is with Jesus is allowed to enter by virtue of being associated with Him.

As opposed to this, the Catholic understanding of God is familial. God is understood as not only wanting to be like, but as wanting to be the true and literal Father of us all. He wishes only to adopt us as His children and bring us into His home to receive the true inheritance that we have as His children, but He won't force us to. In life, He offers this invitation. We can either choose Him and enter our home - Heaven - to receive our inheritance, or we can choose other things that we would rather have. When we choose something besides God, this is sin. Of course, there is a true justice to this all. The idea of punishment due sin is not lost, because sin is also understood as real, true moral choices; it does deserve punishment. For those adopted as children of God, He forgives as Father. For those remaining children of the devil, He condemns as judge.

In the Catholic understanding, then, salvation is not simply a matter of escaping hell. Rather, it is a matter of choosing Heaven - or more properly, of choosing God. To penetrate more deeply into this question, then, let us consider what is required to choose anything.

If I were to hold a ball out to you, what would be required for you to choose it? First, and most obviously, you would need to believe that the ball was existed, and beyond that, that it was in fact really being offered. Second, you would need to want the ball. I could offer you the ball all day long, but if you did not want it, you would not choose it. Now, believing that it is available to you and desiring it, you would be required finally to do something to claim the ball. You would need to reach out and take it, or perhaps speak up and tell me that you did in fact want it.

Our example here is of a ball, but it may as well have been anything else in existence. To choose anything at all, then, three things are required: one must believe both that the thing exists and that it can be chosen, one must want the thing, and one must make some action to claim it. These three things are referred to in Catholic theology as faith, hope, and love.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the theological virtue of Faith as "the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself" (1814). This is very similar to a description that the book of Hebrews gives for faith: "Without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (11:6). This is exactly the conclusion that we arrived at above in regards to choosing things.; one must believe both that a thing exists and that the thing is available to be chosen. Faith requires that one believe in God and in what He says, namely, that He rewards those who seek Him - He can be chosen.

The definition of Hope that the Catechism provides is also consistent with what we have discovered about choosing things. "Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ's promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit" (1817). If faith is the virtue by which we believe in God and His rewards, then Hope is that virtue by which we desire God.

Finally we come to Love. The Catechism says, "Charity [Love] is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God" (1822). This requires a bit more unpacking. In Catholic Theology, it is understood that when a person is made just before God, God's Love is poured into his heart (see Romans 5:5). When one is just before God, and thus in the state of salvation, the Holy Spirit is present in his or her soul (no Christian would disagree with this idea,so far as I know). The Holy Spirit is that which internally causes us to Love God, and so by accepting the Holy Spirit into his heart, one Loves God. In the understanding of choosing things that we established, one must, upon believing in and desiring a thing, make an act of claim on that thing. One must "reach out and grab" the thing, as it were. The same is true of God. In the case of God, it is Love by which one "grabs" God, because it is by accepting Love into one's heart that one accepts the Holy Spirit. This idea could be embellished upon greatly by analyzing St. John's exhortations that "God is Love" from his first epistle.

In the Catholic understanding, God, through the merits of Jesus Christ, offers us Himself. Our life is a prolonged opportunity to choose, either to choose Him or to choose something else. He will not force Himself upon us, and so if we choose something else, He will respect that choice rather than dragging us into His presence anyways. It is by Faith that we believe in God and that we believe He is choosable. It is by Hope that we desire God, and it is by Love that we actually make our claim on Him (for lack of a better term). It makes sense, then, that no person can be saved if lacking any one of these three virtues. Without Faith, of course, one would not even recognize anything to choose. If one did not have Hope, then one would not want God, and clearly no choice is made in which a person does not want the item chosen. Finally, without Love, a person has not made any claim that He in fact does want God. If you believe I am offering you a ball and want it, it will do you no good if you do not actually do anything and simply stand in place believing and wanting it.

And so we come back to the Protestant belief that faith alone is required for salvation. Part of this is simply a matter of terminology. Most Protestants who believe that faith alone is required define faith differently from Catholics. To them, Faith includes in it the idea of Hope, and generally a sense of Love as well, although in many cases this sense of Love may be rather incomplete. This topic itself could fill up and entire post, or book for that matter, and will not be expounded upon further. It will suffice for now to read the words of Saint Paul from 1 Corinthians:

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy
gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all
mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up
my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing... So now faith,
hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." (13:1-3;
13)

Thus we see that Faith, apart from Love, profits nothing. Even dying for Christ will "gain nothing" apart from Love. Love is far more important than most people realize, or at least than most people act as though they realize, and is the greatest of these three crucial theological virtues.