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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 3, Number 10
 October 1992 
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Keeping Up With the Jameses?
Q: A speaker on the "Bible Answer Man" radio program denied Mary's perpetual virginity. He claimed that James, called one of the brothers of the Lord in Matthew 13:55, was one of Mary's "other" sons. He insisted that it was a different James who was the son of Mary the wife of Cleophas--this Mary stood at the foot of the cross (John 19:25).
A: The New Testament speaks of two men called James who were close followers of the Lord. One is James the Greater, the son of Zebedee (see Matt. 4:21, 10:2, 26:37, Mark 1:19-20, 3:17, 10:35, Luke 5:10, John 21:2). This James and his brother, John, were nicknamed Boanerges by Jesus; the nickname means "sons of thunder."
The second James, known as the Less because of his short stature, was the son of Mary, the wife of Cleophas (a man whose name is also rendered as Clopas and Alphaeus). He is the one mentioned in Matthew 13:55 (see also Matt. 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:5, Acts 1:13). The problem for those who insist that James the Less was Jesus' literal brother is that both of these Jameses are identified as sons of other men and women, not sons of Mary and Joseph. Some biblical concordances give the impression that there were three different men named James in the New Testament: James, son of Zebedee; James, son of Cleophas; and James, the "brother of the Lord." This distinction is not accurate because the James who is called the "brother of the Lord" in Matthew 13:55 is identified in Matthew 27:56 as the son of Mary, the wife of Cleophas.
Q: Were Hitler and Stalin really Catholics, or is that just a myth that some anti-Catholics use to discredit the Church?
A: Adolf Hitler was baptized a Catholic shortly after his birth in 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria. His mother, Klara, was a devout Catholic who did her best to raise Adolf in the faith. In 1904, at the age of 15, he was confirmed, but quickly lost all interest in religion and stopped attending Mass. Although he received a few years of Catholic education at the hands of the Benedictines at their monastery school in Laubach, Hitler completely abandoned the Catholic faith as a teenager and never considered himself a Catholic thereafter.
Josef Stalin, the Russian dictator responsible for ordering the extermination of millions of Ukrainians and Russians, was born Iosif Visarionovich Dzhugashvili at Gori, Georgia in 1879. As an adult he adopted "Stalin" (which meant "Man of Steel") as his moniker. Stalin was never Catholic but was baptized into the Orthodox Church and even studied for the priesthood for five years at the Orthodox seminary in Tiflis, Georgia. It seems that any religious convictions he may have had evaporated entirely by 1899, when he was dismissed from the seminary due to his outspoken Communist politics. From that point forward Stalin was an avowed atheist and enemy of Christianity.
Q: What's the difference between heresy, apostasy, and schism?
A: Thomas Aquinas defines heresy as "a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas. . . . The right Christian faith consists in giving one's voluntary assent to Christ in all that truly belongs to his teaching. There are, therefore, two ways of deviating from the Christianity: the one by refusing to believe in Christ himself, . . . the other by restricting belief to certain points of Christ's doctrine selected and fashioned at pleasure, which is the way of heretics.
"The subject matter of both faith and heresy is, therefore, the deposit of the faith, that is, the sum total of truths revealed in Scripture and Tradition as proposed to our belief by the Church. The believer accepts the whole deposit as proposed by the Church; the heretic accepts only parts of it as commend themselves to his own approval.
"The heretical tenets may be adhered to from involuntary causes: inculpable ignorance of the true creed, erroneous judgment, imperfect apprehension and comprehension of dogmas. In none of these does the will play an appreciable part, wherefore, one of the necessary conditions of sinfulness--free choice--is wanting and such heresy is merely subjective or material. On the other hand, the will may freely incline the intellect to adhere to tenets declared false by the divine teaching authority of the Church.
"The impelling motives are many: intellectual pride or exaggerated reliance on one's own insight, the illusions of religious zeal, the allurements of political or ecclesiastical power, the ties of material interests and personal status, and perhaps others more dishonorable. Heresy thus willed is imputable to the subject and carries with it a varying degree of guilt. It is called formal because to the material error it adds the informative element of [being] freely chosen." (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.11, a.1).
Unlike heresy, which is a partial retention of the Christian faith, apostasy is the complete rejection of Christ and his teachings. An apostate is one who turns his back on Jesus and embraces a non-Christian religion such as Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism or who sinks into mere naturalism or, worse yet, unchecked hedonism.
The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910 ed.) defines schismatics as "They, who of their own free will and intention, separate themselves from the the unity of the Church. The unity of the Church consists in the connection of its members with each other and of all the members with the head. Now this head is Christ whose representative in the Church is the supreme pontiff. And therefore, the name schismatic is given to those who will not submit to the supreme pontiff nor communicate with the members of the Church subject to him. Since the definition of papal infallibility [at the first Vatican Council, 1870], schism usually implies the heresy of denying this dogma.
"Heresy is opposed to faith, schism to charity, so that all heretics are schismatics because loss of faith involves separation from the Church, [but] not all schismatics are necessarily heretics, since a man may, from anger, pride, ambition, or the like, sever himself from the communion of the Church and yet believe all the Church proposes for our belief. Such a one would more properly be called rebellious than heretical."
Q: When I read John 6 it seems obvious to me that Jesus was speaking of "eating his flesh and drinking his blood" in a purely symbolic way.
A: You are wrong. Jesus said, "I solemnly assure you that unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him" (John 6:53-55).
John 6 is the classic Eucharistic passage which, along with Jesus' words of consecration at the Last Supper (Matt. 26:26-28, Mark 14:22-24, Luke 22:19-20), Catholics point to to demonstrate the Eucharist in Scripture.
There are several facts which demonstrate that Jesus was speaking literally, not figuratively, in John 6.
First, his hearers understood him to be speaking literally. They asked themselves, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" (v. 52). After Jesus explained himself further, they still understood him to be speaking literally, and some of his disciples said, "This is a hard saying. Who can accept it?" (v. 60). Jesus replied, "Does this shock you?" (v. 61), and he allowed those who couldn't accept his teaching to leave him. He didn't call them back and tell them they had misunderstood him (which was his custom to do when his listeners didn't grasp his true meaning [e.g. Matt. 13:36-43, Matt. 16:5- 12, Mark 8:14-21]). By the way, John 6 is the only example in the Bible of disciples abandoning the Lord over a doctrinal issue.
Second, we know that Jesus was speaking literally, not figuratively, because to the Jews of his day "eating someone's flesh and drinking his blood" was the idiomatic phrase synonymous with persecution, violence, betrayal, and murder. This is clear from such passages as Micah 3:3, Psalm 27:2, Isaiah 9:20, and Isaiah 49:26.
That's why, if Jesus had been speaking figuratively, his words would have made no sense at all. He would have been saying, "I solemnly assure you that unless you persecute and betray me you have no life within you. He who does violence to me has eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day." That makes no sense at all, but that's exactly what he would have been saying if his words were symbolic.
The third way we can know that Jesus was speaking literally is that the apostles believed and taught that he spoke literally (see 1 Cor. 10:16, 11:29). The same is true of the Christians of the first, second, third, and fourth centuries. Their writings show them to have understood and taught that Jesus' words in John 6 were not symbolic.
Q: An Anglican priest tells me that his holy orders are valid and that he can consecrate the Eucharist and grant absolution. I've heard the opposite is true. What is the Catholic position?
A: Although Catholics and many traditional Anglicans are now enjoying an era of unprecedented friendliness and increased mutual cooperation, there still remains the touchy subject of whether Anglican holy orders are valid. The Catholic Church continues to regard them as invalid.
In 1896 Pope Leo XIII issued his apostolic letter Apostolicae Curae, in which he upheld the Church's position that Anglican orders are "absolutely null and void." When the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, came to power under King Henry VIII, he drastically modified the rite of ordination, eliminating all references to a sacrificial priesthood.
Since to be valid the sacraments must have the proper form and matter, grave questions immediately arose as to the validity of Anglicanism's new form of holy orders. Upon further study, the Catholic Church determined that, although an ordination might be attempted by a valid though heretical Catholic bishop, because the Anglican rite of ordination had been so distorted it could no longer effect a valid ordination.
Thus, within a generation or two after the inception of the Anglican Church there were no validly consecrated Anglican bishops (the original Catholic bishops who had gone into heresy having since died). Therefore the Anglican bishops (who technically weren't bishops at all nor even priests) couldn't validly ordain men to the priesthood.
There is, though, a further complication. Some candidates for the Anglican priesthood, recognizing the sterile nature of their church's holy orders, have received ordination at the hands of validly ordained schismatic bishops (such as the Old Catholics, who broke from Rome in the nineteenth century). Assuming these bishops used the proper rite and had the necessary intention, those ordinations would be valid, though illicit. The problem is that it's extraordinarily difficult to ascertain whether an individual Anglican priest's orders are valid or not.
That's why Anglican priests who wish to become Catholic and function as priests must be ordained anew in the Catholic Church. They are always ordained "absolutely," not "conditionally"--that is, the working presumption for all of them is that they were not validly ordained while in the Anglican Church, no matter who their ordaining bishops were.
Q: In a recent homily our parish priest said, "No matter what anyone tells you, the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was a sin against hospitality." He said that Genesis 19, where the incident of Sodom's destruction is recounted, is one of the most misinterpreted sections of the Bible. He claims the inhabitants of those cities were destroyed by God for not being hospitable to strangers. What is the official Catholic teaching on the nature of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah? I'm worried that modern interpretations like this priest's are used to downplay the sin of homosexuality.
A: If there's any misrepresenting going on, it's being perpetrated by your parish priest. There is nothing in Genesis 18 or 19 which could support his theory that a lack of hospitality was the crime that caused God to annihilate Sodom and Gomorrah. In Genesis 18 God said, "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin [singular] is so grave..." (v.20). What was the sin which "cried out" for punishment?
Genesis 19 recounts the story of how Abraham's nephew, Lot, entertained two angels at his home in Sodom. Word got around that Lot had some visiting men in his home, and "the townsmen of Sodom, both young and old," gathered outside his home, clamoring for the two visitors to be turned over so that they could be homosexually raped: "Where are the men who came to your house tonight? Bring them out to us that we might have intimacies with them."
Notice what's going on here. The strangers had been shown hospitality by Lot and his family (vv. 1-3). The townsmen didn't cry out to Lot that they wanted to be "inhospitable" to the visitors, but that they wanted to have intercourse with them, which is something markedly different. Lot attempts to quell the mob by offering them his two virgin daughters, suspecting that because these men were homosexuals they would refuse. The entire account revolves around a single sin: homosexuality.
While it's true that later Old Testament prophets pointed out other sins the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were guilty of (Is. 1:9-20, 3:9, Ezek. 16:46-51, Jer. 23:14), it's clear that the primary sin, the sin which provoked God's wrath, was homosexuality.
If you examine the Old Testament passages in which God outlines the sins which would merit the death penalty under the Mosaic Law (Lev. 20:27, 24:10-23; Deut. 13:5-10, 21:18- 21, 22:21-24), you'll see that homo-sexuality was condemned alongside crimes such as murder, idolatry, and blasphemy (Lev. 20:13). Search as you might, you won't find the Lord meting out the death penalty to persons guilty of inhospitality.
Q: The December 1991 issue of This Rock featured the article "Mary, Ark of the New Covenant," in which the writer attempted to convince his readers that Mary should be venerated. I'd like to draw your attention to 1 Samuel 4, where we see that the nation of Israel put their faith in the ark of the covenant (like Catholics do in Mary), instead of in the true and living God. This was the reason for their destruction. They had turned from God to idols. I believe that millions of Catholics worship Mary in the same way Israel worshiped the ark of the covenant. If, as you claim, Mary is the "ark of the new covenant," I'm not sure that's something you should be proud of.
A: It's surprising how many biblical errors and false assumptions are present in your question. For starters, read 1 Samuel 4 again. It nowhere says that the people of Israel "placed their faith" in the ark instead of in God. Nor does it say they worshiped the ark as an idol, as you imply. In reality, the Israelites knew that when they went into battle with the ark they always won. This was due to God's protection. The ark became a strategic weapon for them.
The Catholic Church doesn't teach "Mary worship," nor do Catholics place their faith in Mary instead of God. To say they do advertises your ignorance of Catholic teaching (or, if you know better, your willingness to propagate a lie).
Then there's your attempt to hijack 1 Samuel 4 as a way to refute the thesis that the ark of the covenant imagery parallels Mary's role in salvation history. Surely you don't mean to imply that, because the people of Israel abused their God-given gift of the ark, somehow the ark itself is to blame or that it should be discarded because of such abuse? That's poor logic and bad theology.
Would you be willing to apply that principle in other biblical situations? Probably not. After all, the apostle John was (however mildly) guilty of idolatry when he fell prostrate and worshipped an angel (Rev. 19:9-11). Should we then shun angels? Should we discount John's authority as an apostle? Should we disregard Revelation because it was written by a self-accused idolater? Of course not.
The fact that some people abuse God's gifts is no reason to reject God's gifts. If an individual Catholic is guilty of worshiping Mary, that's his sin, not her fault.
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