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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 13, Number 6
 July-August 2002 
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What Are Roman Catholics?
Q: What is the difference between the Roman Catholic and the Catholic religion? I was brought up to believe that Roman Catholic was the stricter of the two.
A: The Catholic religion is the religion of the Catholic Church—i.e., that group of churches in communion with the pope. If a group isn’t in communion with the pope, it isn’t part of the Catholic Church.
Within the Catholic Church there are a number of individual churches, sometimes called rites. One of these is the Roman rite or Roman church. It includes most of the Catholics in the Western world. A Roman Catholic is a Catholic who is a member of the Roman rite.
There are many Catholics in the East who are not Roman Catholics, such as Maronite Catholics, Ukrainian Catholics, and Chaldean Catholics. These are all in communion with the pope, but they are not members of the Roman rite, so they are not Roman Catholics.
The Roman rite is not stricter than these other rights. They are equal. They all teach the same faith; it is only local customs that are different among them.
Q: Please give me a brief Catholic explanation of the story of The Lord Of the Rings. I understand that the writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, was a sound Catholic and that he wrote the story with a religious meaning. Can you please provide me the Catholic synopsis of the religious meaning behind the story?
A: The Lord of the Rings draws on Christian imagery but is not an allegory. In other words, it is Christian in spirit rather than an elaborate story in which different characters and things correspond to different spiritual ideas. (Tolkien, in fact, disliked allegory, and thought it the chief weakness of his friend C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.)
The plot concerns the destruction of a magic Ring that makes the person who wields it powerful but corrupts him utterly. The quest of the hero of the story is to destroy the Ring against all temptations to use it. In a broad sense the Ring is a symbol of sin: It appears to make you stronger, but in the end its corrupts you. So The Lord of the Rings may be seen as a metaphor for the quest to destroy sin. But the details of the story cannot be pressed into representing specific aspects of the gospels or the process of sanctification in the real world.
Q: I recently read a book claiming that we are close to the kingdom of God while receiving the Eucharist. What does this mean, and how close are we?
A: The question is complicated to answer because the phrase kingdom of God can be used in more than one sense.
In the most general sense, the kingdom of God would seem to be everything under God’s sovereignty, which is all of reality. However, you can’t get away from the kingdom of God in this sense, so most folks mean something more particular when they use the phrase.
In a more restricted sense, one might say that the kingdom of God comprises those things in which God is specially active—i.e., is asserting his sovereignty. In this case, since it requires a miracle every time the Eucharist is celebrated, one would say that the Mass involves the kingdom of God in a special way.
Scripture speaks of the kingdom of God as if it is present in the Person of Christ, and since Christ is present in the Eucharist, the kingdom of God is present in the Mass in that way.
Scripture also speaks of the kingdom of God as if it is an age of history that is inaugurated with Christ. We are living in that age now, the Mass being one of its characteristic features.
Scripture also speaks of the kingdom of God as if it is a future age that begins with the Second Coming of Christ. In this case, since the Eucharist involves a making-present of Christ in anticipation of the Second Coming, it would seem that there is a sense in which the future kingdom of God is made present in the Eucharist.
Q: In the Old Testament we see Elijah being taken (presumably) body and soul into heaven. I understood that according to Catholic teaching, only Mary has been assumed body and soul into heaven. Obviously, just men like Moses and Elijah could not get into heaven itself until Jesus’ time. But I’m still left with the quandary of Elijah: Was his body there ahead of Mary’s?
A: According to Scripture, Enoch and Elijah may have been assumed into heaven before the time of Christ. This is less clear in Enoch's case, since Genesis 5:24 says only that God "took" him, but doesn't say where. Sirach 44:16 and 49:14 make it clear that he was taken up from the earth, and Hebrews 11:5 adds "so that he should not see death."
In Elijah's case, 2 Kings 2:11 states that "Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven." 1 Maccabees 2:58 adds, "Elijah because of great zeal for the Law was taken up into heaven. " Taken at face value, these would seem to indicate that both Enoch and Elijah were assumed into heaven. But the Church teaches that heaven was not yet opened to the saints because Christ had not yet come. How can this be explained?
One possible explanation is to say that they didn't really go to heaven but to the abode of the dead where the souls of the righteous were waiting for the Messiah to open heaven. A difficulty is that the abode of the dead, or she'ol, is pictured in the Old Testament as being down (e.g., Num. 16:33 speaks of Korah and his followers going "down alive into she'ol"), yet Enoch and Elijah are depicted as being taken up.
Another possibility would be to say they were taken up but to a different kind of heaven than the one Christ opened. Or it is possible to say simply that they received entrance to heaven as a grace which came from the redemption Christ wrought – only they received it early, as did Mary when she was immaculately conceived. Like Mary, Enoch and Elijah may have been foretastes of the good things to come. In such a case, they would be exceptions to the rule. But God can do what he wants.
Q: One of my teachers used to be Christian but converted to Judaism for a fiancée whom he eventually broke up with. Recently he approached me and said that he was looking to convert back to Christianity, but he seriously disagrees with "the divinity of the birth of Christ." How should I respond?
A: It is a little difficult to assess what he means, because he isn’t using standard language. He may mean that he disagrees with the fact that Christ is God, disagrees with the fact that Christ was born of a Virgin, or both.
A first step would be to ask what he means—which of these three he has in mind (or whether he has a fourth in mind).
If he disagrees with the fact that Christ is God, one could point him to passages in the New Testament, like John 8:58, that indicate that Christ is God. Once he sees that the New Testament teaches that Christ is God he can then go on to read books supporting the reliability of the New Testament; in particular, books showing the truth of the Resurrection of Christ. If Christ rose from the dead then he is qualified to tell us who he is, and if he tells us he’s God, we should believe him.
If he has trouble believing in the Virgin Birth of Christ, one could point out that God created the entire universe, and so if he wants to he can create the single cell needed to cause a virgin to conceive. God is infinitely powerful, so coming up with a single cell to cause a virgin to conceive is infinitely easy for him, just like creating the universe was.
Once a conceptual difficulty like this is cleared away, it is a simple matter to show that the New Testament teaches that Christ was born of a virgin, and again we’re back to the subject of the reliability of the New Testament.
He may also have other conceptual difficulties that need to be cleared away, either pertaining to the divinity of Christ or the Virgin Birth, but these difficulties can only be surfaced and dealt with by talking to him. In particular, ask what difficulties he feels with the doctrine.
One also could consider giving him a copy of Mere Christianity and possibly Miracles by C. S. Lewis. Even though these are not (entirely) focused on the topics he may be having a problem with, they can provide a useful role in helping reintroduce him to the Christian mindset and the fact that God can work whatever miracles he wants.
Q: I was reading a pamphlet on confession that says if a sin is doubtfully mortal then it is best to confess it for the sake of peace of conscience. But wouldn’t the fact that one is doubtful about the nature of a sin indicate that the sin wasn’t mortal, for which one must have full knowledge and full consent?
A: Saying that mortal sin requires "full" knowledge and consent is a handy memory cue that may useful in catechesis, but it not a precise formulation of the kind one would get in a moral theology manual.
The kind of consent needed, more technically, is the degree of consent needed to make a fully human act. This does not mean saying, "Yes! I want to do something really evil!" and having no reticence about it. One can have misgivings, regrets, mixed feelings, et cetera and still give deliberate consent to an action.
Similarly, one does not have to know with metaphysical certitude that a given act is gravely sinful. Lesser degrees of knowledge will also count—again, the degree of knowledge needed for an authentically human act is the key. Indeed, someone might even be feigning ignorance or being hardhearted toward the evidence in such a way that he is responsible for knowing something even though he professes not to know it.
These facts mean that it is possible to have some doubt—especially after the fact, when one can’t remember one’s precise state of mind—as to whether a given act was mortally sinful. The rule of thumb is, "If you didn’t think it was a mortal sin at the time, it probably wasn’t." But this is not an invariable rule. There are gray cases.
When presented with a gray case, the received rule of thumb is for persons of normal or lax conscience to go ahead and confess it anyway, to be safe and to have peace of mind.
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