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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 12, Number 2
 February 2001 
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Pope or President, There Can Be Only One
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 recent 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, even if more than one proclaimed himself the victor.
Incidentally, these days the college of cardinals stays locked up together until any ballot disputes are resolved. Not a bad idea, that.
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 28:2–4:
"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." The rest of the chapter gives details on each garment.
Nothing in the New Testament requires abolition of ministerial vestments. Our Lord criticized the Jewish leaders for their sins, but he never condemned their priestly garb.
Q: How do you answer the charge that apologetics is divisive?
A: By acknowledging that in certain ways it is, in certain ways it isn’t, and that in any case we must keep in mind that divisiveness isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Look at the ministry of Jesus. It was he who said, "Do you think that I have come to establish peace on Earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three; a father will be divided against his son and a son against his father, a mother against her daughter and a daughter against her mother, a mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law" (Luke 12:51–53).
Christ also taught the need for people to heed his appointed messengers in the Church when he said, "Whoever listens to you listens to me. Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me" (Luke 10:16).
Although Paul told Timothy to avoid foolish quarrels, he still instructed him to correct opponents with kindness, not just ignore their errors. To Titus Paul wrote, "Avoid foolish arguments, genealogies, rivalries, and quarrels about the law, for they are useless and futile. After a first and second warning, break off contact with a heretic, realizing that such a person is perverted and sinful and stands self-condemned" (Tit. 3:9–11).
These passages indicate the importance of proper belief without minimizing the need for charity. Truth divides, although it need not involve acrimony.
Apologetics is the business of contending for the faith (Jude 3) without necessarily being contentious. In fact, when properly applied, apologetics can bring us closer to non-Catholics (and non-Christians) through better understanding of one another’s beliefs.
Q: Your articles on Mormonism frequently mention the book Doctrine and Covenants. What is it?
A: Doctrine and Covenants, to quote its explanatory introduction, purports to be "a collection of divine revelations and inspired declarations given for the establishment and regulation of the kingdom of God on earth in the last days."
The introduction goes on to say, "Although most of the sections are directed to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the messages, warnings, and exhortations are for the benefit of all mankind, and contain an invitation to all people everywhere to hear the voice of the Lord . . . speaking to them for their temporal well-being and their everlasting salvation. The book of Doctrine and Covenants is one of the standard works of the Church in company with the Holy Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Pearl of Great Price."
That’s what the Mormon Church claims it is. In reality, Doctrine and Covenants is a compilation of messages from Joseph Smith designed to bolster his image as a prophet. Although he claimed to be receiving direct revelations from God, these "revelations" often contradicted others given in the Book of Mormon and elsewhere. They were simply a convenient way for Smith to get the things he wanted (such as many wives—see Doctrine and Covenants section 132:1–62) without argument or interference. After all, who would want to argue with God?
Q: I’ve been told the only thing necessary for a Catholic to live a moral life is for him to follow his conscience. Is that right?
A: There’s more to it than that. Conscience involves a judgment about what’s right or wrong, but it doesn’t work by magic. You first have to form your conscience. This means learning about good and evil, and that’s a job for the intellect.
Many people think conscience is the faculty that tells us what’s right and wrong. That’s a mistake. Conscience is better thought of as an alarm. With your intellect, your mind, you learn what’s right and wrong, and then conscience "sounds off" when you’re about to violate the standards your intellect has learned. If you have no standards, you’ll never hear the alarm because it won’t sound.
But not neglecting the formation of your conscience isn’t enough. You need to make sure not just that your conscience if formed, but that it’s formed correctly. If it is, the moral judgments you make will be reliable. If it is not, your moral judgments won’t be trustworthy.
For example, if you’ve been taught that stealing isn’t wrong and if you really believe that, you won’t have any inhibitions against stealing. Your conscience won’t bother you when you steal because it isn’t reliable when it comes to right and wrong. It’s been formed, but not formed correctly.
It’s true we have an obligation to follow our conscience, even a poorly formed or "erroneous" one, but we also have an obligation to form our consciences properly. For Catholics this means following what is taught in Scripture and Tradition as interpreted through the Magisterium of the Church.
Q: Why does the Catholic Church send people to hell by excommunicating them?
A: It doesn’t. The Church doesn’t have the power to send anyone to hell. Only God can do that. More properly, people who go to hell send themselves there because they choose hell over heaven, themselves over God.
Excommunication is the Church’s top judicial sanction and involves excluding a notorious sinner from communion with the faithful. It is intended as a warning to the sinner that he needs to repent. It isn’t a condemnation to hell.
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 translations the word inferos was rendered as "hell," but it was understood not to mean the place of the damned. The term actually refers to "those below"—that is, to the dead. It thus signified that he descended to visit the just who died in pre-Christian times and were 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 of departed souls both good and bad. It appears from the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19–31) that there was a place within sheol where the wicked were punished and another place where the righteous awaiting heaven were comforted. Jesus went to the latter.
Q: Does the Catholic Church approve of forced conversions?
A: No. In his encyclical Mystici Corporis, 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 overzealous 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 were been killed by or suffered at the hands of Communism in the twentieth 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.
Some early Christian theologians held the theory that the child’s soul is an offshoot of the father’s. Augustine, for example, regarded this position, known as generationism or traducianism, as possible, though he did not exclude the 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: A Baptist friend says 2 Corinthinans 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: Your quotation is really a paraphrase and a misleading one at that.
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 don’t say: that to be absent from the body is the same thing as being with the Lord. If they did, they’d refute not only purgatory but also hell. 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 Kansas" without denying you have to pass through the intervening states to accomplish that.
Q: During one of the prayers said at Mass, the priest says to pray that we may "come to chare in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity." This sounds suspiciously like the New Age teaching that we are all God.
A: The prayer you refer to is taken from the Eucharistic liturgy and is said by the priest as he pours water and wine into the chalice. It doesn’t mean the Church teaches we are or shall become God himself.
Sometimes Catholic theologians refer to the "divinization of man," but this is nothing like New Age teaching. When Scripture says that Christians are "partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4) it means we begin to share in God’s divine life of grace in this world. We become divinized when God dwells within us.
This sharing in the divine nature, though real, is a created participation in God’s life. As creatures we can never become the uncreated God.
Q: Does the Church still teach you have to go to confession before receiving Communion? My pastor says you don’t.
A: Your pastor may say you don’t, but canon law says you do—at least if you know you’re guilty of any unconfessed mortal sin. According to canon 916, "A person who is conscious of a grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or to receive the body of Christ without prior sacramental confession unless a grave reason is present and there is no opportunity for confessing; in this case the person is to be mindful of the obligation to make a perfect act of contrition, including the intention of confessing as soon as possible."
Q: What are the "capital sins"? Are these the worst sins you can commit?
A: The capital sins—sometimes called the seven deadly sins—are pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth. They’re referred to as capital sins not because they’re necessarily worse than other sins but because they are the bases of other sins.
Q: What’s the difference between contrition and attrition?
A: Contrition is sorrow for one’s sins based on the selfless motive of love for God and sorrow for having offended him. Attrition is sorrow for one’s sins based on the fear of punishment. For someone in the state of mortal sin (1 John 5:16–17), perfect contrition is required in order to reconcile with God.
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