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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 14, Number 4
 April 2003 
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All Aboard for the Nine O’clock Mass
Q: Lately it has become impossible to worship at our small community church due to a complete breakdown in decorum. Children play electronic games and throw tantrums, altar servers laugh and joke while preparing, and trying to hear the homily is like trying to hear an announcement in a train station.
A: You need to relate all this to your pastor. He is the one who is responsible for the liturgy in your parish. If this proves futile, then contact your bishop. He is responsible for the liturgy for the entire diocese. By your baptism you are obliged to share your faith to all who will hear—even to your pastor if he’s in need of it. He needs to recognize how important your concerns are. The worship of God is the most important responsibility we all have. Don’t give up.
Q: Why has the Church approved the use of images when the Church Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 753) condemned them as being "idolatrous and heretical, a temptation to the faith that originated with the devil"; and when Popes Gregory III and Constantine V (in 740) also condemned them?
A: You have been misled about basic historical facts by anti-Catholic propaganda. Some clarifications:
The Council of Chalcedon was held in the fifth century, not the eighth, and did not deal with sacred images at all. There was a synod around 753 that did deal with images, but in the first place, it was held in Constantinople, not Chalcedon. In the second place, while this synod was convened by a Constantine V, and while this Constantine V did oppose sacred images, he wasn’t a pope, or even a clergyman—he was the Byzantine emperor. There has never been a Pope Constantine V; only one pope has been named Constantine, and he died in 715.
The pope in 740 was St. Gregory III. It is emphatically not true that he condemned sacred images—on the contrary, he vigorously defended them. In 731 Gregory III held a synod in Rome which condemned the image-breaking heresy of Iconoclasm. In fact, Gregory III made a special point of honoring images and relics as a way of protesting Emperor Constantine V’s iconoclast efforts and persecution of those who honored sacred images. (Many devout Christians were put to death for refusing to desecrate sacred images.)
As for the so-called synod of Constantinople convened by Emperor Constantine, even before it was held it had already been rejected by the reigning pope as well as the Eastern patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. These patriarchs, together with the pope, refused to attend the emperor’s synod or to send legates in their places, since it was clear that the synod was merely a tool of the emperor and that the bishops were expected to simply endorse his iconoclast agenda.
Less than 50 years later, the seventh ecumenical council, Nicea II, which upheld the use of sacred images, rebutted this "mock synod" or "pseudo-synod."
The erroneous "facts" you mention can easily be "documented" from numerous anti-Catholic websites, all of which are merely repeating claims they’ve read from other anti-Catholics without having verified them first. In their zealous hostility against the Church, anti-Catholics often ride roughshod over the most basic historical and theological points, and constant vigilance is necessary to straighten out the facts before you can even begin to address underlying theological errors.
If you’re reading arguments from someone who thinks that Constantine V was a pope rather than an emperor, or that Gregory condemned sacred images rather than defending them, don’t rely on anything that individual says. Do some homework, and don’t just take claims like this at face value.
Q: text My Southern Baptist friend says that her church teaches that baptism does not confer grace and is not necessary for salvation. Since her pastor does not intend to administer a sacrament that confers grace, doesn’t that mean that he doesn’t have the right intention and so the Baptist baptism is not valid?
A: The validity of the sacrament does depend on the right intention of the minister. But the right intention necessary to administer the sacrament of baptism is not dependent upon a complete or accurate understanding of the effects of baptism. It entails only the will to do what Christ willed and what the Church does.
Many Protestants view baptism as a symbol rather than a life-giving sacrament, but as long as there is the intention to do what Christ willed—and as long as the baptism is done in the name of the Holy Trinity—the baptism will accomplish what Christ intended, however imperfectly that may be understood or believed by the participants.
Q: A nun is currently the administrator of my parish, as is the case in numerous parishes around the country. What does this phenomenon of women acting as shepherds for a parish flock bode for the role of women in the Church?
A: An administrator takes care of the temporal needs of the parish, not the spiritual. The latter is primarily the duty of the ordained. The ordained are more appropriately referred to as shepherds, not the administrator.
Q: I was recently reading about a Protestant organization that sends out missionaries to teach the faith to illiterate populations, making Bible translations for them and teaching them to read them. Do we have any programs like this in the Catholic Church?
A: Catholic missionaries have been traveling the globe for centuries educating other cultures about the Christian faith as well as all the other things needed for the improvement of people’s spiritual and physical lives. And they have, in fact, also provided Bibles when they can in the people’s own languages. But since we know that the word of God is also spoken, missionaries tell people about Christ first in word and action.
A logical outcome of the "Bible alone" theology is that everyone in the world must be able to read and have a Bible. But as Catholics we know that we can immediately begin to tell anyone who will listen about Jesus and invite them to repentance and baptism. They can lead a full Christian life in the Church even though they are illiterate. This is not to say that we should not strive to encourage literate societies, but being literate is not necessary for salvation, nor is owning a Bible.
Q: If a couple is on contraception on their wedding day and are using it for years, could that be grounds for an annulment?
A: Use of contraception from the beginning of a marriage is not in and of itself grounds for finding the marriage to be null. But if from the outset either party has the explicit or implicit intention never to bring children into the world at all, or to deny the other’s right to sexual acts open to procreation, this could make it possible to declare the marriage null and void.
Q: How could a perfect God create man who is by nature sinful? I know we all have free will, but why would not God create beings that are for the most part holy and not sinful?
A: Man was not created sinful by nature. God created man entirely holy and sinless. Our sinful condition is not the result of God’s creative work, but is a historical consequence of our abuse of free will. To say that God should have created us "for the most part holy and not sinful" fails to do justice to the true freedom and consequences of free will.
Free will means that even though our first parents were entirely sinless and enjoyed the life of original grace, they were still capable of choosing to be otherwise and forfeiting of the life of grace—and that’s just what they did. We, their offspring, are conceived and born bereft of this life, spiritually dead, in original sin. Even when we are spiritually reborn in baptism, we remain affected by concupiscence or tendencies toward sin as a result of having been conceived in original sin.
However, all of this is the result not of some defect in God’s creative work, but of the self-chosen circumstances into which our race fell in the very beginning.
Q: How do I answer my Christian brethren not in full communion with the Church when they point out that our Church is becoming a hypocritical joke with all the scandals and abuses?
A: This is not the first time that the Church has had to deal with scandal and sin within its ranks; nor is the Church unique in this regard. Every church, every school, every human organization of any size faces similar issues. Moreover, we must always remember that the vast majority of bishops and priests are in no way involved in these scandals. There will always be saints and heroes as well as offenders and cowards in the Church, and a Church that has saints and heroes can never be dismissed as "a hypocritical joke."
There are a number of reasons why the Catholic Church is a prime target for abuse: It is large and unified; it keeps detailed records, whereas recurring problems are much harder to track in other churches; and it takes such an exalted moral stance on so many issues in a way that is threatening to many people who don’t want to look at the morality of their actions.
Even in the Old Testament, Israel, God’s chosen people, was often compared by the prophets to Sodom, Babylon, and other pagan nations. In fact, the prophets sometimes said that Israel was more wicked than these other nations. Yet they were still the chosen people, and their institutions, the Jerusalem Temple, the Levitical priesthood, the Davidic monarchy, the Law of Moses, were still divinely ordained.
Likewise, abuses and scandals within the Church can never undo Christ’s institution of the seven sacraments or his giving of the keys to Peter, the rock on which the Church was built.
That’s not to say we should be complacent. Scandals are a grave offense against God and an obstacle to the conversion of the world. But we shouldn’t allow scandals, however serious, to be used to intimidate us or prevent us from doing our duty to proclaim the truth of our faith.
Q: How could Enoch have been taken up into heaven before Jesus died on the cross and brought every soul who ever lived from limbo to heaven?
A: First of all, Jesus didn’t take every soul who ever lived into heaven, only those who had died in God’s friendship, in the state of grace. Secondly, while it’s true that the Old Testament indicates that Enoch as well as Elijah were taken into heaven prior to the atonement and the harrowing of hell, it was still through the merits of Christ’s future passion and death that they were able to go there. Just as the Blessed Virgin was preserved from all stain of sin by the merits of Christ’s future passion applied to her at the time of her conception, in the same way God could bring Enoch and Elijah into heaven by the same future merits of Christ.
Q: A Lutheran friend said that the Catholic Church recently agreed with Lutherans that salvation is by faith, not works. Can you tell me about this?
A: In October of 1999, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed a document known as the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JD).
Neither Catholics nor Lutherans retracted their positions on justification. The document that both signed clarified one.aspect of justification that both sides could agree to, with the hope that more dialogue and agreements will follow in years to come.
Lutherans have been suspicious for a long time that the Church’s discussion of good works means that one must do good works in order to enter a state of justification. But the Catholic Church has never taught this. In Catholic teaching, one is not capable of doing supernaturally good works outside of a state of justification because one does not have the virtue of charity in one’s soul-the thing that makes good works good. Consequently, the Council of Trent taught "none of those things that precede justification, whether faith or works, merit the grace of justification" (JD 8).
The Joint Declaration stressed that good works are a consequence of entering a state of justification and can never be the cause of entering it: "We confess together that good works—a Christian life lived in faith, hope, and love—follow justification and are its fruits. When the justified live in Christ and act in the grace they receive, they bring forth, in biblical terms, good fruit. . . .
"When Catholics affirm the ‘meritorious’ character of good works, they wish to say that, according to the biblical witness, a reward in heaven is promised to these works. Their intention is to emphasize the responsibility of persons for their actions, not to contest the character of those works as gifts, or far less to deny that justification always remains the unmerited gift of grace" (JD 37–38).
The document points out that, "It does not cover all that either church teaches about justification; it does encompass a consensus on basic truths of the doctrine of justification and shows that the remaining differences in its explication are no longer the occasion for doctrinal condemnations" (JD 5).
Q: I’ve been told the only thing necessary for a Catholic to live a moral life is for him to follow his conscience. But what is your conscience tells you something that’s wrong is okay?
A: In determining what is right and wrong, conscience doesn’t work by magic. You first have to form your conscience. This means learning about good and evil, and that’s the job for the intellect.
Many people mistakenly think that conscience is the faculty that tells us what is right and what is wrong. Conscience is better thought of as an alarm. With your intellect you learn what’s right and wrong, and then conscience "sounds off" when you are about to violate the standards your intellect has learned. If you have no standards, you’ll never hear the alarm.
But you need to make sure not just that your conscience is formed but that it is formed correctly. If it is, the moral judgments you make will be reliable. If your conscience is formed poorly, then your moral judgments won’t be trustworthy.
For example, if you’ve been taught that there’s nothing wrong with stealing—or if you’ve never been taught that stealing is wrong—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 the immorality of stealing. In other words, it’s been formed—but formed incorrectly.
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 Jesus teaches in Scripture and Tradition through the magisterium of the Church.
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