MARRIAGE IN CRISIS--IN A DIFFERENT SENSE
A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF MORTAL SIN
BETTER THE RELIGION SECTION THAN THE SPORTS SECTION
Dear Subscriber:
In the last issue I wrote against a sentimentalized view of love. After sending off that E-Letter I read a letter written by Samuel Johnson to James Boswell in 1769. Boswell had just informed Johnson that he had become engaged, and Johnson wrote to congratulate him. Here is one line from his letter:
"I am glad that you are going to be married and as I wish you well in things of less importance wish you well with proportionate ardour in this crisis of your life."
I had to smile as I wondered how modern Americans might understand that sentence. In 1769 the word "crisis" meant "turning point" and carried a neutral sense, and today any married person can attest that getting married is about the largest turning point one ever faces.
But nowadays the word "crisis" usually suggests something negative--as Webster's puts it, a crisis is "an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending, especially one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome."
Perhaps an unhappily married reader of this E-Letter may credit Johnson with implying more than he meant to, but I assure you that he was sending Boswell his congratulations and not a warning. Still, it makes you wonder.
UNBIASED AND UNINFORMED
The Religion News Service describes itself as "the only secular news and photo service devoted to unbiased coverage of religion and ethics--exclusively." These words imply that RNS gets the facts right, whereas competing services (which are not secular and thus are hampered by denominational affiliations) are biased.
Well, maybe such services do have a bias, but I suppose it depends on what you think is the greater failing, toeing a denominational party line or not knowing what you're writing about.
Consider an RNS story written by Daniel Burke in September of last year. The headline was "Archbishop Heats Up 'Wafer' Wars." The Archbishop in question was Raymond Burke of St. Louis.
The story began this way:
"A hard-line U.S. Roman Catholic archbishop is urging ministers to deny Holy Communion to politicians who support abortion rights, arguing that it's a 'mortal sin' to offer the sacrament to 'the unworthy.'"
Right off, I see bias in the unbiased RNS report: "hard-line." Would the story have lost anything, other than a tilt, if that term had been absent?
But let's go on. The third paragraph is the one I'm interested it. It read this way:
"Now, the conservative cleric is invoking the church's highest punishment--mortal sin--to convince the lay and ordained Catholics who distribute Holy Communion at Mass to safeguard the sacrament."
Daniel Burke tried to explain the instructions that Archbishop Burke issued to those under his authority:
"Drawing on the works of the late Italian Jesuit scholar Felice Cappello, Burke says those ministers are 'held, under pain of mortal sin, to deny the sacraments to the unworthy.'"
To me, this means that if those ministers disobey the Archbishop and knowingly give Communion to "the unworthy," the ministers themselves commit a mortal sin. But that’s not quite how Daniel Burke understood things. Let's go back to that third paragraph, where he referred to "the church's highest punishment--mortal sin."
Have you ever read it explained that way? I had been under the impression that the Church's highest punishment was excommunication--or maybe interdict, if the Church wanted to levy a widespread punishment. I never read about mortal sin being something the Church slapped on you for being disobedient.
Mortal sin is something you bring on yourself. It's something you do, not something the Church does to you. Mortal sin is not itself a punishment or some kind of judicial decree, but there are punishments associated with it, the chief being going to hell if you die unrepentant (a fairly stiff penalty, I'd say).
Daniel Burke doesn't know what he's talking about. To call mortal sin "the church's highest punishment" is to say, at least to knowledgeable Catholics, "I don't understand the basics of your religion."
If that is the case, why is he writing about our religion at all?
THE DECLINE AND FALL OF A NEWSPAPER
A few days ago I was interviewed by the religion editor of the "San Diego Union-Tribune." That paper, like many others, has fallen on hard times. A sharp decline in advertising has resulted in many fewer pages of news and features. Newspapers get part of their income from subscriptions and newsstand sales but the greater part from ads. When the ads go, the pages go too. And when the pages go, departments of the paper are eliminated.
One reader, angered at the cutbacks, informed the editors that "the interest of your paper should lie in supplying the public with the information it wants." If I stopped reading right there, I could say, "I agree with that. If some departments have to go, let the paper drop the society column, the daily prime-time TV grid, fashion news," and so on.
Wouldn't you know, but the complainer had her own ideas. The departments that should be retained, she insisted, are "the society column, the daily prime-time TV grid, fashion news," and so on.
A servant can't serve two masters, and a newspaper, if it is going to eviscerate itself, can't serve two sets of readers. It must choose one over the other. I hope our local paper chooses my kind of reader, the one who wants the religion section to be retained to the bitter end, even if it means giving up advice columns, horoscopes, and even the sports section.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
http://forums.catholic.com
where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
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