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Q u i c k Q u e s t i o n s
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This Rock
Volume 1, Number 3
 March 1990 
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"Why Do You Lump Christians With Non-Christians?"
Q: Why do you lump Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and Pentecostals with non-Christian groups such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons?
A: We don't. We know the difference. You don't find us saying, for example, that Mormons are Protestants (or, for that matter, Christians). But when the groups you mention use the same arguments against the Catholic Church or share common methods of proselytizing, it's fair to discuss them together.
Q: My Baptist friend says 2 Corinthians 5:8 ("To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord") disproves the doctrine of purgatory. What should I say?
A: You should ask your friend to reread the verse. It says, "We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord" (King James Version). "We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body, and at home with the Lord" (Revised Standard Version). "We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord" (New International Version).
Notice what these translations don't say. They don't say that to be absent from the body is the same thing as being at home with the Lord.
If they did, they'd refute not only purgatory, but hell. You can be absent from the body and be present in hell, you know--and that isn't being at home with the Lord.
What Paul is saying is that he'd like to leave this world and be with Christ in heaven. He doesn't say anything, either way, about passing through purgatory on the way to being with the Lord. Someone can say "I want to be out of California and back in Missouri" without denying you have to pass through intervening states to accomplish that.
The way you quote 2 Corinthians 5:8 leaves the impression that being absent from the body is exactly the same as being in heaven with the Lord. But your quotation is really a paraphrase, and sometimes paraphrases can mislead. The verse as Paul wrote it says nothing about purgatory, one way or the other.
Q: What does the Church teach about Catholics receiving Communion in an Eastern Orthodox Church and participating in its liturgy?
A: The Directory Concerning Ecumenical Matters: Part One explains when a Catholic may receive the Eucharist in an Eastern Orthodox church. Catholics may receive Communion there when "special circumstances make it materially or morally impossible over a long period for one of the faithful to receive the sacraments in his own Church, so that in effect he would be deprived without legitimate reason of the spiritual fruit of the sacraments."
This provision doesn't apply to those who have normal recourse to the sacraments in the Catholic Church.
The same document also emphasizes that attendance at Orthodox liturgies by Catholics is permitted "if they have reasonable grounds, e.g. arising out of a public office or function, blood relationships, friendships, desire to be better informed, etc. In such cases there in nothing against their taking part in the common responses, hymns, and actions of the Church in which they are guests."
Q: Why did Christ visit hell after his death?
A: He didn't, if you mean by hell the place of the damned. There would have been no purpose in his going there.
The Apostles' Creed contains this line in Latin: descendit ad inferos. In older English the word inferos was rendered as "hell," but it was understood not to mean the place of the damned. It meant the temporary state where the just who died in pre-Christian times were kept, waiting for heaven to be opened to them. This place is commonly called the Limbo of the Fathers.
Jesus referred to this place when he said, "As Jonah was in the whale's belly for three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be in the heart of the Earth three days and three nights" (Matt. 12:40). The expression "heart of the Earth" doesn't mean the grave, but the underworld, what the Jews called Sheol, which was thought to be located at the center of the Earth. Sheol wasn't a place of the damned, but a place where departed souls wandered.
Peter also refers to the Limbo of the Fathers: "It was in his spirit that he went and preached to the spirits who lay in prison" (1 Pet. 3:19).
Q: If the Catholic Church is the true Church, why is it that Evangelical Protestants are more successful in making converts?
A: Success in making converts doesn't necessarily prove the truth of a religion. If it did, then Mormonism and the faith of the Jehovah's Witnesses would have to be the truest forms of Christianity since they're growing even faster than Evangelical Protestantism.
Failure to make converts doesn't disprove a religion's claim to truth either. Only a small minority of Jesus' contemporaries accepted his message, yet this didn't refute Christ's messianic claims.
Why have Evangelicals been so successful lately in making converts? Because they're making better use of their partial truth than Catholics are making of their complete truth.
It's like the Jews and the Samaritans. God revealed himself to Israel and entrusted to it his commandments. Yet in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), it was a Samaritan, someone regarded as defiled, who actually carried out God's commandments.
God worked through an obedient Samaritan, a man outside the salvific covenant community, rather than through a negligent priest or Levite.
Similarly, Evangelicals are doing more with less, and Catholics are doing less with more. When Catholics wake up to this reality, we'll also make converts. It's time we had, as Chesterton put it, not a Church which will move with the world, but a Church which will move the world.
Q: Does the Catholic Church approve of forced conversions?
A: No. In his encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, Pope Pius XII stated, "It is absolutely necessary that conversion should come about by free choice, since no man can believe unless he be willing....That faith without which it is impossible to please God must be the perfectly free homage of intellect and will.
"Should it therefore at any time happen that, contrary to the unvarying teaching of this Apostolic See, a person is compelled against his will to embrace the Catholic faith, we cannot in conscience withhold our censure."
Vatican II's decree on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, reaffirmed this:
"Although in the life of the people of God in its pilgrimage through the vicissitudes of human history there has at times appeared a form of behavior which was hardly in keeping with the spirit of the gospel and was even opposed to it, it has always remained the teaching of the Church that no one is to be coerced into believing."
Have Catholics always practiced what they've preached in this regard? No. There have been over-zealous Catholics who've tried making converts using not just the carrot, but the stick.
But Protestants, too, have been guilty of not always respecting the freedom of conscience. (One example: John Calvin had Michael Servetus burned at the stake in Geneva.) Even atheists and secularists have used force to make converts to their positions. Consider the millions of people who've been killed by or suffered at the hands of communism in this century.
Christianity has always affirmed freedom of conscience, even if Christians haven't always lived up to this teaching. Atheism and secularism, by denying the existence of God, claim there's no one to answer to and, therefore, nothing to answer for.
Q: Since a child's body comes from both the father and the mother, does its soul come from them?
A: A child's soul comes from neither the father nor the mother. Each soul is created directly by God from nothing at the moment of conception. There is no pre-existence of the soul as Mormons and others believe.
The theory that the child's soul is an offshoot of the father's was held by some early Christian theologians. Augustine himself wavered between this position, known as generationism, and direct creation of the soul from nothing.
As theologians contemplated the teaching of Scripture and of the Tradition of the Church, they realized that generationism is incompatible with it. Thomas Aquinas went so far as to condemn generationism as heretical (Summa Theologiae I, 118, 2).
Q: What's the Catholic position on the existence extra-terrestrial life?
A: There isn't one, as such. Whether life exists on other planets is a scientific, not a theological, question. If life on other planets is ever discovered, there are theological questions which can be considered.
In Perelandra C. S. Lewis speculated about the possibility of a fallen race (such as ours) influencing unfallen extra- terrestrials. We were affected by the fallen angel Satan. There's nothing in the Bible to say humanity couldn't have a similar effect on another race.
On the other hand, we might also play a part in the redemption of another race--a role in their salvation history. The good angels played an important part in ours (Matt. 28:2-5; Acts 7:38, 53).
It's possible God has set up multiple worlds, some fallen, some not, but there's not the slightest scientific evidence he has. A few scientists, pandering to the tabloids, claim extra-terrestrials must exist, based on the mathematical likelihood of other stars having planets, but their theories are scoffed at by nearly the entire scientific community.
The argument runs like this: If some of those planets have atmospheres like Earth's, and if some of those Earth-like planets spontaneously generate amino acids, and if some of those amino acids result in higher life-forms, then intelligent life exists on other worlds. You'll note a lot of "ifs" there.
To insist there must be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is to overstate the case. It's also theologically irrelevant because the central tenets of Christianity remain intact with or without little green men.
Q: How can you say one of the marks of the Church is unity when, at one time in the fourteenth century, there were three popes?
A: Your facts are wrong. There never were three popes at once--and never two at once either. But there were times when there were two claimants to the office, and once, in the fourteenth century, there were three claimants.
The question then is: Who was the real pope? No one at the time thought there could be more than one.
Consider an analogy from American politics. In a close election, one might ask: Who is the real president? Even if the answer remained unclear for a while, we'd all know there can be only one president at a time.
Q: A Fundamentalist friend of mine attacks Catholic priests because they wear vestments. He say this violates the Bible.
A: There's nothing unscriptural about vestments. God commanded that they be used in the Old Testament. Look at Exodus 28:2:
"For your brother Aaron you will make sacred vestments to give dignity and magnificence. You will instruct all the skilled men, whom I have endowed with skill, to make Aaron's vestments for his consecration to my priesthood. These are the vestments which they must make: a pectoral, an ephod, a robe, an embroidered tunic, a turban, and a belt. They must make sacred vestments for your brother Aaron and his sons, for them to be priests in my service. They will use gold and violet material, red-purple and crimson, and finely woven linen." The rest of the chapter gives details on each garment.
Nothing in the New Testament requires abolition of priestly vestments. Our Lord attacked the Jewish leaders for a number of sins, but he never condemned their priestly garb. It's true the early Church didn't use the Old Testament vestments, but this is because Christians didn't want to identify their leaders with the Jewish priesthood.
Part of the problem for Fundamentalists is that vestments set priests apart from the laity. Fundamentalists object to a ministerial priesthood in the Church. They see vestments as a way of expressing a distinction between clergy and laity.
On this they're right, but there's nothing wrong with such hierarchical distinctions. The New Testament is full of them (Acts 20:28; Eph. 2:20, 4:11; Phil. 1:1; 1 Tim. 3:1-13; Tit. 1:5).
Within Fundamentalism there's also an unhealthy opposition set up between the spiritual and the material realms. There is an anti-incarnational attitude which views the use of anything material as superstitious. The distaste for vestments is but one example of this.
Fundamentalists who say Catholic priests adopted distinctive dress in the fifth century to put themselves above the laity have got it backwards. Actually, it was the laity who changed their attire, not to distinguish themselves from priests, but to keep up with fashions.
Catholic priests simply retained their manner of liturgical dress. Priestly vestments are no more than stylized secular Roman garments which have accrued symbolic, liturgical significance over the centuries.
Q: A nun told me that Vatican II did away with all the stress on the pope as an infallible teacher. Which Vatican II writings say this?
A: There is no Vatican II document which "did away with" papal infallibility. Vatican II actually reaffirmed, in no uncertain terms, the teaching of Vatican I on papal authority.
The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium) says this:
"This teaching concerning the institution, the permanence, the nature and import of the sacred primacy of the Roman Pontiff and his infallible teaching office, the sacred synod proposes anew to be firmly believed by all the faithful" (no. 18).
The nun to whom you refer may have meant that Vatican II tried to finish what Vatican I began. Vatican I defined the role of the papacy in the Church, but didn't get around to the episcopacy. As a result of the Italian invasion of the Papal states and the Franco- Prussian war, Vatican I was unable to consider the place of the episcopacy in relation to the pope.
Vatican II restated Vatican I's teaching on the papacy, but also sketched out the role of bishops in the Church. Bishops as teachers and pastors acting in union with the pope are said to be acting according to the principle of collegiality.
There is a renewed stress on the pope as head of a college of bishops, but there is nothing which subordinates the pope to this college. In no sense can Vatican II be taken as "doing away with" papal authority as previously defined.
Q: Do animals have souls like human beings?
A: Animals have souls--and so do plants. Does this answer sound like something out of the New Age movement? Don't worry--it isn't. Rest assured we're not saying animals and plants have souls like ours.
The soul is the principle of life. Since animals and plants are living things, they have souls, but not in the sense in which human beings have souls. Our souls are rational--theirs aren't--and ours are rational because they're spiritual, not material.
Animals and plants can't do anything which transcends the limitations of matter. Although some animals seem clever, they don't actually possess conceptional intelligence. They can't, for instance, conceive of the abstract notion of justice.
Animals and plants also lack a moral sense. When you scold Spot for chewing the carpet and tell him what he did was "wrong," you aren't assigning guilt of sin to him, since he can't commit a sin.
Animal and vegetable souls are dependent entirely on matter for their operation and being. They cease to exist at death. (There's no "doggie heaven.")
Human souls, by contrast, aren't material. They're spiritual. Only a spirit can know and love, a spirit's two chief faculties being the intellect (which knows) and the will (which loves). We know human souls are spiritual since humans can know and love.
We also know human souls are immortal because spirits can't decompose. They have no parts: Only a thing with parts can fall apart. A spirit is a unit. It has no top or bottom, no left or right, no inside or outside.
Every bit of matter, even the smallest, has parts. The human body can decompose--it's made of matter, after all--but the human soul can't. That's why we say it's immortal.
A good discussion of the differences between human beings and animals is available in Mortimer Adler's The Difference of Man and the Difference it Makes.
Q: Your pope doesn't perform miracles the way Peter did, does he? So how can you claim he's Peter's successor?
A: We don't claim he succeeds to the power to perform miracles. That power wasn't passed on to Peter's successors because there wasn't any need for it to be passed on. Only those powers absolutely necessary for the preservation of the Church have been given to the popes.
Q: I don't care if you're Catholic or Protestant. You shouldn't impose your religion on people. Missionaries have no right to tell other people about religion. My philosophy is live and let live.
A: That may be your philosophy, but it's not what Jesus said. He told his disciples to take the gospel to all men: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:18-19).
This is known as the Great Commission, not the Great Imposition.
Jesus commanded his followers to make others Christians through preaching and baptism. We must all, in one capacity or another, be evangelists and present the truth of Christ to those who don't yet accept it. In so doing, we aren't imposing anything on them. Christ wants a free acceptance of himself and his message.
Evangelization is not an imposition but an act of charity. Through it the whole truth about God and man is made known to people in need. Those outside the Church hear the message of Christ the Savior and become united with him in his Church, his Mystical Body.
"Live and let live" is a false philosophy. It reduces to Cain's question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" In things spiritual as well as things material, we are indeed our brother's keeper.
Q: A friend insists the Catholic Church burned the first printed Bibles and punished people who had them. Is there any truth to the story?
A: Nope. Printing with movable type was first used (say most historians, but not all) by Johann Gutenberg, a German Catholic. The first book he printed was the Mazarin Bible, so called because a copy was discovered in Cardinal Jules Mazarin's library. More commonly known as the Gutenberg Bible, the book was printed more than sixty years before the Reformation began.
Q: Don't all Christian churches believe the same thing about Christ?
A: In a sense, they do. To the extent one can describe an ecclesial body as Christian at all, it follows that it must hold to the basics about Christ. (This doesn't mean such a group is entirely orthodox, only that it isn't so heretical as to forfeit entirely the name Christian.)
Both Catholics and Protestants believe Christ to be true God and true man. Both believe Jesus to be the Second Person of the Trinity. And both believe in the Virgin Birth and bodily Resurrection of Christ. So both Catholics and Protestants can rightly be called Christians, though from the Catholic perspective Protestants are heterodox on a number of key points.
At the same time, there are many groups which style themselves Christian while denying basic Christological tenets.
Jehovah's Witnesses, for instance, claim Jesus isn't Almighty God, Jehovah, but Michael the Archangel.
Mormons deny Jesus and the Father are the same God in two different Persons.
Christian Scientists, by rejecting the objective reality of the material world, repudiate the Incarnation as Christians traditionally have understood this doctrine.
There are also "liberal" theologians in the Catholic Church and within Protestant denominations who deny the divinity of Christ, his Virgin Birth, and his bodily Resurrection. As the late Hans Urs von Balthasar observed about a certain "liberal" Catholic theologian, when such basic Christological beliefs are abandoned, it's theologically incorrect to describe the one rejecting them as a Christian.
Obviously we Catholics can't forbid heterodox people from describing themselves as Christians, but we can make it clear they don't believe what Scripture and Tradition tell us about Christ.
Q: My sons, who have left the Church, say there were more than three people crucified when Jesus was killed. Why are the others not mentioned?
A: Because there weren't any. The Bible, in the accounts of the Crucifixion, mentions only Jesus and the two thieves (Matt. 27:37; Mark 15:27; Luke 23:33; John 19:18). It says nothing about any other victims. Ask your sons how they know, apart from the biblical evidence, how many people were crucified along with Christ.
Q: Where can I find what the Catholic Church officially teaches about the Bible and Tradition?
A: There are a number of places you can go. First, look at Vatican II's Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation. You can find this document in the front of many Catholic translations of the Bible. You will also want to read Pius XII's encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. Examine also the Council of Trent's Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures.
Q: Is there any validity to the Fundamentalists' claim that Jesus turned water into grape juice?
A: None at all. They argue that "the fruit of the vine" (Matt. 26:29) is to be understood as grape juice, but there are three main problems with that notion.
First, the two common drinks in Palestine were water and wine. The phrase "fruit of the vine" meant "product of the vine." Grape vines were grown not for grapes, but for wine.
Second, grape juice spoils quickly without refrigeration. There were very few refrigerators in Palestine at the time of Christ.
Third, at the wedding in Cana, after Christ changed water to wine, the headwaiter who tasted it said to the bridegroom, "Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now" (John 2:10).
Translation: Normally a host will put the good wine out first so, when people get tipsy (which you can't do with grape juice), they won't notice the cheap stuff later on. You, on the other hand, have saved the good stuff for last.
Q: What are patriarchs?
A: The term means the father and ruler of a family or tribe--literally, "rule of the father." It's used in two senses.
When we're speaking about the Old Testament, it refers to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, since they were the fathers of the Jewish people.
When we're speaking about Christian times, patriarch refers to a prelate who holds precedence over primates, metropolitans, and bishops. In order of dignity there are the patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.
There are also patriarchs of the Armenian, Maronite, Melkite, and Chaldean rites (all Catholics), and there are "minor" patriarchs in Venice, Lisbon, and in the West and East Indies.
Aside from the patriarch of Rome, who is the pope, the patriarchs have no power greater than that held by other bishops, but they have greater honor because of the history of their sees.
Q: If Christ died on a Friday and was raised on a Sunday, how come the Bible speaks of his being in the tomb for three days and three nights before his Resurrection (Matt. 12:40; Mark 8:31)?
A: Christ died around three in the afternoon on Friday and was entombed shortly thereafter. The Resurrection occurred by dawn on Sunday. Thus he was in the tomb less than nine hours Friday (by the modern reckoning), twenty-four hours Saturday, and less than six hours Sunday--at any rate, far less than the seventy-two hours that comprise three full days and nights.
Is there a contradiction here? No, because the ancient Jews counted as a whole day any part of a day, so "three days and three nights" (which means the same as "three days" in modern usage) could be as little as twenty-four hours plus a few seconds on either side--if there had been, back then, clocks that could register seconds.
In our way of reckoning things, from lunch time today to lunch time tomorrow is one day. Ancient Jews would have counted it as two days because it includes parts of two distinct days.
Q: What does "binding and loosing," as mentioned in Matthew 16:19 and Matthew 18:18, refer to?
A: "Binding and loosing" is a phrase which comes from the rabbis. It refers to the authority to make decisions binding on the people of God.
This authority includes interpreting and applying the Word of God and admitting people to and excommunicating them from the community of faith. For the Jews this meant the community of Israel. For Christians this means the Church.
In Matthew 16:19 Jesus gives this authority over his Church to Peter: "Whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in heaven."
In Matthew 18:18, he gives the power to all the apostles: "Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on Earth shall be loosed in heaven."
This singling out of Peter to bestow on him an authority which is later to be given to all the apostles shows Peter's preeminence within the apostolic college. What the apostles as a whole possessed as leaders of the Church, Peter possessed as an individual.
Of course, he, as the earthly head of the Church, also possessed powers which all the other apostles, even collectively, didn't possess: "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 16:19).
Q: Why do you Catholics call Mary "the Mother of God?" That's blasphemy, not to mention logical suicide! If Mary were really God's mother then her mother would be the "Grandmother of God."
A: We call Mary the "Mother of God" because that's exactly what she is. To understand why this is true let's back up a step and consider who and what her son, Jesus Christ, is.
Since his Incarnation Jesus has had two natures, divine and human. These natures are completely united (meaning he is completely God and completely human). The technical word for this is the hypostatic union.
Although Jesus has two natures, he is only one Person--God--the Second Person of the Trinity. For this reason Jesus is properly called the "God-Man." (By the term nature we mean what Jesus is; by the term Person we mean who he is.)
Since the Son born to Mary is a single Person (and that Person is God) with two natures, Mary can rightly be called the Mother of God. The Person she's the mother of is God--he's not, strictly and philosophically speaking, a human person, as we are.
This doesn't mean that Mary existed before God (which is an impossibility). She is a human person with a human nature. She existed before Jesus' human nature was created.
Here's another way to look at it. A woman can't be the mother merely of a nature. She can only be the mother of a person who possesses a nature. When a child is conceived he is a person, not just a nature.
The same is true of Jesus, or else he would be two persons in addition to having two natures. Since Mary is the mother not of Jesus' human nature but of Jesus the God-Man, a divine Person, she is rightly called the Mother of God.
Q: A pack of Jehovah's Witnesses visited my home last week and the conversation revolved around the Catholic doctrine of hell. As a cradle Catholic I thought I was prepared for their arguments, but I wasn't. They stumped me when the topic was hell. Where is hell mentioned in the Bible?
A: Jesus talked about hell more often than he talked about heaven. Here are some verses.
"The children of the kingdom will be driven out into the darkness where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth" (Matt. 8:12).
"Depart from me, you accursed, into that eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels" (Matt. 25:41).
"These will pay the penalty of eternal ruin, separated from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power" (2 Thess. 1:9).
"God did not spare the angels who fell into sin; he thrust them down to hell, chained them there in the abyss, to await their sentence in torment" (2 Pet. 2:4).
"The smoke of the fire that torments them will rise forever and ever, and there will be no relief day or night for those who worship the beast or its image or accept the mark of its name" (Rev. 14:11).
Q: A Southern Baptist co-worker recently gave me a hard time because we "Romanists" kneel when we pray. He said that in "Bible times" the Jews didn't kneel but stood or sat when they prayed and that Catholics are "unbiblical" in their prayer posture. He said we "invented" kneeling and that real Christians don't kneel. What can I tell him?
A: Begin by asking what he thinks kneeling in prayer proves. That the Catholic religion is wrong? What if a Catholic never knelt in prayer or at Mass--would that somehow vindicate Catholicism?
If that line of reasoning doesn't show him how silly his quibble is, then try a few Bible verses.
"After withdrawing about a stone's throw from them and kneeling, he [Jesus] prayed" (Luke 22:41).
"Peter sent them all out and knelt down and prayed" (Acts 9:40).
"When he had finished speaking he [Paul] knelt down and prayed with them all" (Acts 20:36).
"All of them, women and children included, escorted us out of the city, and after kneeling on the beach to pray, we bade farewell to one another" (Acts 21:5).
Jesus, Peter, and Paul all lived "in Bible times," and they knelt when they prayed. Were they "unbiblical"?
Q: Is there any biblical evidence for the Catholic doctrine of original sin?
A: Sure. God told Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:1-24 that because of their sin they would have to work for a living, be at war with nature, suffer pain and sickness, and eventually die. Paul explains original sin in great detail in Romans 5:12-19 and in 1 Corinthians 15:21-22.
Q: Since Jesus rose from the dead and now lives in glory, why do you Catholics dwell morbidly on his death by keeping his body on the cross? Why not display an empty cross, as we do?
A: We like to follow Paul's example and counsel. Remember that it was he who wrote, "We, for our part, preach a crucified Christ; to the Jews indeed a stumbling block and to the Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Cor. 1:23-25).
Here's another verse to remember: "And I, brethren, when I came to you, did not come with pretentious speech or wisdom, announcing unto you the witness to Christ. For I determined not to know anything among you, except Jesus Christ, and him crucified" (1 Cor. 2:1-2).
You seem to forget the many examples of Catholic art in which Jesus is depicted as a lamb, an infant in his mother's arms, a vibrant man engaged in his public ministry, a shepherd, and as the triumphant risen Lord. All of the aspects of Christ's life are represented in Catholic art, but none more than the Crucifixion. Why? Because that was the goal, the focal point, of Jesus' Incarnation.
Q: Does the Bible teach the sacrament of Extreme Unction?
A: Yes. Extreme Unction, which is more commonly known today as the Anointing of the Sick, has its biblical foundation in James 5:14-16: "Is anyone among you sick? He should summon the presbyters of the church, and they should pray over him and anoint [him] with oil in the name of the Lord, and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, and the Lord will raise him up. If he has committed any sins he will be forgiven."
This sacrament, in addition to remitting sin and strengthening the soul (and often the body) through an infusion of sanctifying grace, helps us unite our physical sufferings with those of Jesus. For additional insight you might read Matthew 10:1, Mark 6:13, Romans 8:17, and Colossians 1:24.
Q: I get frustrated easily when asked about my faith. I don't seem to know what to say. Any suggestions?
A: Yes. Find out what to say and then say it. You don't need to go back to school for a degree in theology. But you do need to devote some of your time to hitting the books. If you set aside one hour a night, and if you read the kinds of books we recommend in This Rock, in six months you'll be able to handle just about any question.
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