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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 10
 December 2002 
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Judge and Judge Again
Q: In the Apostles Creed, why do we say of Christ "he will come to judge the living and the dead"? I thought that the dead were judged at their moment of death. How can the saints be in heaven if they have not been judged?
A: There are two judgments. The first, known as the particular judgment, occurs at death. The second, known as the general judgment, occurs when Jesus returns. A difference between the two is that after the particular judgment we go to our reward (good or bad) in spirit only, whereas after the general judgment we will experience our reward in both body and soul.
Q: I have a non-Catholic friend who’s a good person and lives by the commandments but has a very hard life. He doesn’t see God as loving, only demanding, and doesn’t understand why Catholics do so much bowing and kneeling and showing God reverence. What can I tell him?
A: We give glory God because he deserves it—because of who he is and because of all he gives us.
We must begin by remembering that God is not simply a loving God, God is love. Within himself, within the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, God is infinitely blessed and happy; he is entirely perfect and complete in every possible way; he has no needs of any kind; he is capable neither of being anything less or more than what he is.
In complete freedom and lack of self-interest God chose to create us, not for his sake but entirely for our sake, so that we could experience the gift of life, of existence, of the rest of creation, and ultimately of his own eternal love and joy.
Seen from this perspective, it is literally meaningless to think of God as "demanding" and "not loving." What could God possibly demand of us that is not his own gift to us in the first place? Even in choosing to see God as demanding, your friend is making use—though not good use—of God’s gifts to him of free will and consciousness and intelligence.
You say your friend is a good person who lives by the commandments, but the first and greatest commandment is our first and most necessary duty: We must love the Lord our God with our whole being. Even if your friend has a hard life, everything that is good in his life is also God’s gift, for it is God’s essential goodness that makes anything else good, just as it is the essential wetness of water that makes other things wet.
Nor does it stop there. After man failed in his duty to serve God with his whole being God freely chose to take on our human limitations and join us in our humanity by becoming incarnate and offering us a way of salvation. Whatever hardships your friend may have to bear pale in comparison to the hardships God himself freely chose to bear for our sake, though he had no obligation to do so and nothing to gain for himself by doing it. Anyone who dares to think that God isn’t loving had better look at a crucifix and ask himself what else could possibly motivate him to go through that.
And so we bow and kneel—and count it joy to do so. We make the sign of the cross, we strike our breasts over our sins, because we know we are loved beyond our ability to imagine. And if he wants to give us a share in his cross, to endure hardship for his sake, then we pray for the strength to share in his generosity.
Q: According to the teaching of the Catholic Church, when are we given our guardian angels?
A: Although some have maintained that only baptized people have guardian angels and that we therefore get them at the time of baptism, the almost universal teaching is that all human beings have guardian angels. Since human beings exist from the time of conception, this would seem to imply that we have guardian angels from the time of conception onward.
Q: Can I get my marriage to a non-Christian blessed by the Catholic Church?
A: If there are no other impediments to the marriage, you can—and indeed are obliged to—have your marriage convalidated by the Church. As a Catholic, you are under Church law and your marriage must be recognized by the Church in order to be valid. Once your marriage is convalidated, you will have a valid union (though not a sacramental one, since those who are not baptized cannot participate in the other sacraments). See your local priest about having your marriage convalidated. It should be a fairly simple thing to do.
Q: When Jesus refers to himself as the "Son of Man," does this refer to his humanity or his divinity? It is said that this refers to Daniel 7, where it describes an eternal king. If so, why does Ezekiel refer to himself as "son of man"?
A: The phrase son of man is used in more than one way in Scripture. In Hebrew ben-adham would have been taken originally as a roundabout or poetic reference to a human being. The same is true in Aramaic. In fact, the Aramaic equivalent of the term (bar-nasha) still means man or human being in modern Aramaic.
Thus Ezekiel is referred to as son of man without it indicating that he was anything more than human. (Notice that Ezekiel doesn’t call himself Son of Man as if using a title; rather, the angel addresses him as son of man, as if speaking generically as a non-human to a human being.) Over time a secondary usage of the phrase as a messianic term developed under the influence of prophetic literature such as the vision of Daniel 7.
The fact that son of man originally was a way of saying human being suggests that even when the title acquired the use of being a reference to the Messiah that it still retained the connotation of pointing to a man. Thus it is fair to say that the title calls attention to Jesus’ humanity while—in light of Daniel 7—it also suggests his eternal kingship and messianic mission.
Q: If there is a contradiction between the Bible and the Church’s teachings, which one gets greater value, or how is it resolved?
A: There cannot be any contradiction between the Bible and those teachings that the Church has infallibly defined or taught, any more than there can be a contradiction between one scriptural teaching and another. All that is infallibly taught by the Church, like all that is taught by Scripture, is guaranteed by God to be true if interpreted correctly.
Therefore, if it seems to someone that there is a contradiction either between two passages of Scripture, two infallible Church teachings, or a Scripture passage and an infallible Church teaching, both teachings must be studied more closely to determine the way in which they fit together.
While both the Bible and the Church’s infallible teachings are guaranteed free from error, this does not mean that Church documents are equal to the Bible. The Bible alone is divinely inspired, meaning that it has God as its author and that God himself puts into it the truth that he wants to convey.
Church documents, even those written under protection of infallibility, are purely human documents; God does not divinely inspire the human writers to put in truth, but merely prevents them from infallibly defining errors. In other words, God is the author of the Bible; of Church documents he is only the editor.
Q: The American Bible Society publishes a Catholic edition Bible that says in the introduction that 1 Esdras (not Ezra) and the Prayer of Manasseh are not accepted as canonical by Catholics even though they were part of the Septuagint Greek text of the Old Testament. Is this correct?
A: Certain books including 1–2 (3–4) Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh are found in some editions of the Septuagint, but not all. All editions of the Septuagint contained more works than the Masoretic canon, but there was some variation as to which books were found in any particular copy of the Septuagint. Since the Septuagint did not have a fixed list of its contents, the Church had to make decisions as to which books would be counted as canonical and which wouldn’t. Those books didn’t make the cut.
Q: As a Protestant who is interested in the Catholic Church, I’m curious about why the Church has RCIA. In my church, a person who comes forward in church and professes faith in God is immediately accepted as a member. Can you tell me when RCIA started, and is it necessary in order to become Catholic?
A: RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults) was developed after Vatican II (1962–1965) as a revival of the kind of initiation methods that were in use in the early centuries when the Church was extensively persecuted.
Although in the New Testament we see people joining the Church quickly after coming to faith, this reflected the pastoral situation of the first century, which was different from later ages in significant respects. For example, the majority of the Church’s first converts were Jews or Gentile "God-fearers" who already had knowledge of the true God.
In later centuries many pagans were becoming Christians, so a longer period of time was needed to help them "unlearn" their pagan beliefs and come to faith in God and in Christ. Also, as the persecutions heated up it was judged prudent to have a longer period for people to commit to Christ, as the chances of their experiencing persecution on his account were greater.
Today the pastoral situation changed again, with many people becoming Catholic who have not been raised Christian (or only nominally Christian) in the developed world, and many coming from a completely non-Christian culture in other areas (such as Africa). In some parts of the world there is even a high danger once again of Christians being persecuted for their faith.
Although this process is designed principally for those who have never been baptized, there are exceptions made for those who are baptized and catechized Christians. At the same time, in the United States the National Statutes for the Catechumenate call for a shorter period of instruction for those who already lead active Christian lives and thus do not need a full course of instruction.
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