Audio only:
Joe responds to the claims online that the Fatima children and apparitions promote self-harm.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I want to talk about something that has been nettling me lately. After Ethan Muse converted from atheism to Catholicism, a conversion due in no small part due to the evidence of Catholic miracles, he got into a debate with Sean Luke on the Channel Capturing Christianity about whether Our Lady of Fatima really was Mary miraculously appearing or whether it was, as Sean claimed, actually a demon. Now I’m going to link to my full debate review that I did a while back at the end of the episode, but there’s one part of the debate that Protestants and now Mormons are latching onto, and it’s just a wildly misleading claim. Two weeks ago, we saw it from the Protestant Channel and Philosopher’s Garb where James Agnew made a video repeating many of these same arguments and he called it Catholic apologists defend self-harm for kids.
Now that’s a particularly gross slander against both Ethan Muse and really anyone who believes that Mary really did appear at Fatima. And I’m grateful that James has since taken the video down, although he’s promising to revisit the topic in the future. But what is it that is leading Protestants and Mormons to make these outrageous claims alleging Catholic apologists are supporting self-harm? Well, it’s rooted in this claim by Sean Luke.
CLIP:
The Roman Catholic who defends Fatima must say then that God is pleased when children tie ropes so tightly they hurt or strike their legs with nettles so long as those children intend to make reparation for sin and sacrifice to God. And if it would be wicked for a father to tell his children that it is a good thing to strike their legs with nettles to make reparation for sins offered for the sins of the world, then one has to offer an explanation for why it would be wicked for a father to tell his children that and not for the apparition to tell these children the very same thing.
Joe:
So it’s this idea that because Mary doesn’t stop the sears of Fatima from striking their legs with nettles as a form of mortification, that therefore she must want this mortification and therefore she must be encouraging self-harm. Now, I’m married to a therapist and one of my own pet peeves is when people use the language of therapy or claim trauma or self-harm or these kind of things in these wildly inappropriate and exaggerated contexts. So I want to set the record straight. The first clue that nettles as self-harm might be a bit exaggerated is that the term nettles itself as a verb means to make someone annoyed or slightly angry or to arouse a sharp but transitory annoyance or anger. In other words, the English language itself reflects the idea that being hit by a nettle is something that is annoying, but not in a way that’s going to cause grave or lasting injury.
After all, these are stinging nettles. And there’s actually a fascinating history here. Deliberately stinging yourself with nettles is a practice called ertication. And that practice has a long and fascinating history in the West. Roman soldiers used to do it as a way of keeping the circulation going, particularly in cold climates, but it also was used for a wide variety of therapeutic reasons. The medical use of nettle stings is mentioned in Thomas Green’s 1824 Universal Herbal, Botanical, Medicinal and Agricultural Dictionary. And we actually find plenty of other older medical works that talk about it. Now there’s a great anecdotal account by Jade Alessandro Mace on her blog Herb Stalk. She talks about looking forward to harvesting nettles. She acknowledges that nettles do sting, but she says you’d be hard pressed to find an herbalist who wears gloves and harvesting nettles because the stings are regarded as medicinal.
CLIP:
It’s known as Dr. Ertica by many herbalists. Why? Because this is one of those herbs that has a panacea effect on so many health conditions. What is it? It’s sting and nettle, of course. Before we start harvesting and look at the benefits, we got to make sure we got the right stuff. So you want to have a pair of scissors or a knife or something, but you can also snip them with your fingers if you’re gentle. When I go around and harvest nettles, I tend to gather enough for the season. I’ll put a lot in my freezer and I’ll make a lot in a dried herb for tea, get a little fluffy with it. Let it grace me. Thank you, nettles. One of my favorite things to do too is take a little tip of nettles, squish it in my fingers, get all the juices going, pop it in my mouth.
Joe:
And that’s not just some wild idea of modern day herbalists or people way back in the old days who didn’t know better. A 2019 article in the journal Spinal Cord Series and Cases says that ertication is a traditional remedy for lower back pain, chronic tendonitis and sprain, as well as rheumatism and rheumatoid arthritis. Now, the authors of this note that there’s not currently much in the way of scientific evidence as to why ertication seems to work. I suppose if you wanted to be a little cynical, you could say, “Well, there’s no big nettle incorporated that’s going to go out there and pay for all the clinical trials.” And I also imagine it’s a little bit difficult to design a double-blind trial where people don’t know whether or not they’re being hit with nettles. But the thing is we actually do have a little bit of clinical data and it does seem to back up the traditional view that ertication, at least sometimes, can be medically beneficial.
In a double-blind crossover trial in which 27 patients were treated with stinging nettles, 17 of them said that they would use it in the future for their musculoskeletal pain. More recently, a 2020 randomized clinical trial found that it was significantly more effective than a placebo in treating arthritic pain in the base of the hand. Now, there are theories that because there’s a small amount of histamine in the nettle, that this triggers an antihistamine response in a way that works kind of like how a vaccine works. And I don’t know if that’s right. I don’t want to speculate on why stinging nettles seem to produce medical benefits. My point is simply this. I’ve seen no evidence anywhere that nettles are ever used as a means of self-harming, and I’ve never seen any qualified medical or mental health experts speak in that way, only Protestant and Mormon apologists online.
And the fact that Sean presents his argument against nettles with a picture of a whip called the flagellum shows he either doesn’t understand what a nettle is or he’s being dishonest. It would be like critiquing the Christian practice of fasting by calling it anorexia while showing pictures of kids dying of starvation. Now, in fairness to Sean and to the people who agree with him or might be reheating his argument these days online, I suspect many modern people just don’t really know what a nettle sting feels like or how seriously to take nettle stings. So think about something like acupuncture. I imagine it sounds pretty scary the first time you hear that people go to acupuncturists who stick them with a bunch of needles and you might be envisioning something like torture, but those who are familiar with acupuncture know it’s rather it’s a mildly painful practice that’s a traditional remedy used for a variety of maladies, not unlike stinging nettles.
So okay, hopefully you see why I think it’s a bit hysteronic to refer to urtication as self-harm or to compare it to kids hitting themselves with whips. But I can anticipate another objection here. The seers at Fatima were not slapping their legs with nettles because they were trying to alleviate their arthritis. They were doing so in their own words to offer a sacrifice to God. So let’s talk about that idea. Why do we Catholics believe in mortifying the body? Because I know many people out there are mortified at the very idea. For starters, the catechism puts it very well in paragraph 2015, “The way of perfection passes by way of the cross. There is no holiness without renunciation and spiritual battle. Spiritual progress entails the aces like asceticism and mortification that gradually lead to living in the peace and joy of the beatitude.” That’s the idea.
If you want to enter into the kind of life Christ calls us to in the beatitudes, you have to engage in a practice of self-denial. And Jesus says so himself. In Matthew 16, he says, “If any man would come after me, let him, one, deny himself and two, take up his cross and three, follow me.” So there has to be this self-denial and there also has to be a voluntary taking up of the cross. This is what we mean by mortification, these two things which are key to following Jesus according to Jesus. Now there’s a good reflection on what healthy and unhealthy penance looks like and how to understand it that’s given by St. Paul VI. And he talks about how first of all, true penance is an interior movement, but because we’re body and soul, true penitence doesn’t divorce the interior movement of turning away from sin from the external physical aestheticism.
Because we’re body and soul, we must participate actively in this religious act whereby we recognize divine holiness and majesty. In other words, when you engage in something like fasting or any other kind of mortification, your body as well as your soul is acknowledging God as God. Your body as well as your soul is engaging in an act of worship, of giving something to God, of self-sacrifice, that you’re not just engaging in a spiritual act of self-sacrifice, but in a bodily one as well, which is good because you’re not just a soul, you’re the union of soul and body. Paul the six goes on to say that the necessity of the mortification of the flesh is also clearly revealed when we realize our own fragile nature in which since Adam sinned, flesh and spirit have contrasting desires. The exercise of bodily mortification isn’t, he says, something like stoicism.
And it’s not something like a condemnation of the flesh because after all, Jesus himself becomes flesh. And we as sons and daughters of God now are fleshly creatures according to the glorious plan of God. Rather, mortification aims, he says at the liberation of man who often finds himself because of concupescence, that’s the effect of original sin where you have this inclination towards wanting things that aren’t actually good for you, wanting things that are evil, having the weakness of the will, the darkness of the intellect, that’s concupescence. “We are almost chained, “he said, by our own senses. Through bodily fasting, man regains strength and the wound inflicted on the dignity of our nature by intemperance is cured by the medicine of a solitary abstinence. To put it in layman’s terms, because of sin, both original sin and all of the sins we get into, you can easily become a slave to your body.
And so biblically, how do we respond to that? Well, one of the tools Jesus gives us is fasting. This is the most obvious form of mortification in scripture and is going to be the foundation for how we think about any other kind of mortification. Jesus is very clear, this isn’t an optional part of the Christian life. He doesn’t say if you fast, he says instead when you fast. And then he tells us how to do it. And then he promises that your father who sees in secret will reward you for fasting. So this is a good spiritual practice to be in the habit of. It’s also spiritually powerful. For example, when the apostles are unable to cast out a demon, Jesus says to them this kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting. And we find in Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas appointing elders in the church, but doing so with prayer and fasting, that we have long recognized from the pages of the Bible itself that prayer and fasting are a powerful spiritual combination.
And we see that this was an important spiritual practice within the early church in the dedicate, which probably first century. The opening paragraph says, and of these sayings, the teaching is this. Bless those who curse you, pray for your enemies and fast for those who persecute you. That in an era of Christians being persecuted, even tortured and martyred, the spiritual practice that they engaged in was to offer it up for those who are persecuting them, to fast for them, to engage in voluntary self-sacrifice for the good of these others, that there is something spiritually powerful about this. St. Basil the Great in one of his homilies on fasting says that our life wouldn’t be as lamentable and sorrowful if fasting were to preside over it. He says it is clear. It would have taught all people not only to control themselves with regard to food, but also to completely avoid and be utterly estranged from avarice greed and every kind of vice.
When these are extricated, nothing can prevent us from passing our life in profound peace and tranquility of soul. But if you think about it, a world free from excess and greed and enslavement to the body would just be a much more peaceful world in which to live. I mean, imagine if everyone in your parish, everyone in your church, everyone in your city took very seriously the idea of disciplined Christian fasting. Imagine how that would impact us culturally. That’s the idea. I think that’s a profound thing to meditate on and to think about it. But there’s an obvious question here. Okay. How far is too far? Because even though this is actually good and even though we don’t want to immediately freak out at the idea that somebody’s engaging in fasting or some kind of mortification, what’s the limit here? And fortunately, there’s a couple of early church fathers from the early 400s that talk about those limits, at least a little bit.
So for example, St. Augustine, I’m looking specifically here at fasting, but you can apply this as a general principle. St. Augustine in a letter to, these are the nuns that were at the monastery that his sister used to be in charge of, writes them and says, “Keep the flesh under,” meaning under control, “by fasting and by abstinence from meat and drink so far as health allows.” So there’s already built in a health exception. If you are, for example, pregnant or nursing or something like that, don’t be engaging in extreme fasts. If you do anything, do something really mild, your body is already being given in a self-sacrificial way. But there’s another limitation as well, which isn’t a bodily one, but a spiritual one, because there’s a danger with fasting when we forget the places to have. Think about the Pharisees. They fast for the wrong reason, they fast in the wrong way, and it does them no good.
And so St. John Cashion talks about this and he talks about how fasting is a means to perfection. It’s not perfection itself. And he says, “We ought not to practice pity, patience and love and the precepts of the virtues mentioned above those were justice, prudence, fortitude and temperance, wherein there is what is good in its own nature for the sake of fasting, but rather fasting for the sake of them.” So just to make sure that part is clear, think about the role of virtues in your life. Think about how you’re living the life of temperance, fortitude, prudence, justice, but also how you’re living compassion, patience, love. And if you find that you’re engaging in a fast that is making you holier in all those ways, is making you more virtuous, that’s a good fast. On the other hand, if you find that it’s getting in the way of those things, if you become a worse person because you’ve engaged in a really extreme fast and your low blood sugar, your lack of calories is making you a jerk to everyone around you, and not just in a short term way, but a long term, like this is making your personality worse, then you know you’re fasting in the wrong way.
I think that’s a very helpful kind of way to think about it. And then of course, whenever we’re doing any kind of penance, any kind of mortification, any kind of self-sacrifice, we should always remember as the catechism tells us in paragraph 1430, that the highest form of this is the conversion of heart. Interior conversion is the ultimate call to penance that Jesus is calling for. The sackcloth and ashes, the fasting and mortification, all of those things are worthless if they’re not rooted in interior penance, interior conversion of heart, metanoia turning away from sin, turning to Christ. But if you have that authentic conversion, if you have that authentic turning towards God, then interior conversion urges expression and visible signs. That is, the person who is living a life, a good example would be Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus was ripping people off. He was living in a way where he’s pursuing worldly wealth and he has an authentic conversion.
And because of that, he realizes he has to make reparations. He has to give back the money that he got in unjust ways and then even give back more than he’s taken. Now, he wouldn’t have had any merit if he decided to do that without converting. If he though he could just buy his way to heaven by giving his money away, that wouldn’t have worked. He needs to actually convert from the sinful life that he’d been living. But once he converts, that conversion should bear visible fruit. And one of the visible fruits it should bear is him having a new relationship with money where he’s giving away money he had been amassing, right? That’s the idea. So the interior conversion is higher than the external acts of conversion or the external acts of penance. But if those external signs aren’t there, something is wrong at the interior level.
Now, as I said, I was looking particularly here at fasting, but this point goes beyond fasting. So I want to actually turn back to that homily by St. Basil the Great. He says this, he says, “As trainers and coaches escort their athletes to contests and stadiums, they exhort them veniently about the necessity of toiling for the crowns, such that many of them are convinced to disdain their bodies out of ambition for victory.” I want to pause on that because I think this highlights something perverse about the modern critics of mortification, the modern critics of things like nutrification or any kind of self-denial or any kind of bodily mortification. The same people who are going to be horrified that Catholics are okay with mild forms of bodily mortification are completely comfortable with mortification to prepare for a race, to prepare for a movie role, for example.
There’s pretty extreme workout regimes that happen for all those things. You can hit your legs if it’s to help your arthritis, but not to help your soul. Something is broken there if we value the good of the soul less than we value all of those worldly kind of pleasures. And so Basil says indeed, “Though it falls on me to array the soldiers of Christ for the war against invisible enemies and to prepare the athletes of piety for the crowns of righteousness through self-control, even I need a word of encouragement.” It’s a hard thing to realize and to learn. But if you think about what Basil is saying there, he seems to be drawing pretty obviously upon St. Paul’s own words, one Corinthians nine, when he makes the same kind of comparison. He says, “Do not know that in a race, all the runners compete, but only one receives surprise.
So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wealth, but we an imperishable.” And then Paul says this, “Well, I do not run aimlessly. I do not box as one beating the air, but I pummel my body and subdue it. Less after preaching to others, I myself should be disqualified.” And hopefully nobody hears that and accuses him of encouraging self-harm. He’s rather encouraging us to be masters rather than slaves of the body. The last point I want to make here, and this is just a quotation I find myself going back to that I find is a beautiful meditation. It’s quoted in paragraph 908 of the catechism, but it’s from one of the commentaries by Saint Ambrose of Milan, the great preacher of Milan who is the major figure that converted St. Augustine to Christianity.
And if you think about why we’re called Christian, we share in Christ’s threefold offices, priest, prophet and king. You might be saying, well, how am I king? I don’t run my company. Maybe I’m not the head of my family. Maybe whatever it is. How am I to be king? Well, Ambrose tells us that man is rightly called a king who makes his own body an obedient subject and by governing himself with suitable rigor, refuses to let his passions breed rebellion in his soul, for he exercises a kind of royal power over himself. And because he knows how to rule his own person as king, so too does he sit as its judge. He will not let himself be imprisoned by sin or thrown headlong into wickedness. So let’s unpack that.
There are countless people being pulled towards eternal damnation, including Christians, because of sins of the flesh, because of all the sexual sins, but also things like drunkenness, drug use, gluttony, and so on. And we find all sorts of people, even if they’re not damned for it, at least don’t become the kind of Christians they’re meant to be because they’ve allowed themselves to embrace too much of a spirit of slot. They’ve allowed themselves to settle for mediocrity. Maybe that’s you, I don’t know. And if it is, fasting is traditionally one of the remedies to that because in fasting, you learn to say no to your body. And here’s the beautiful thing. The more you get used to saying no to your body, the easier it is to say no to your body when it wants to do something wrong. And that’s the same logic behind every other healthy form of mortification.
So say Therese of Lizu, for example, when she was sitting in the chair, she wouldn’t sit back in the chair, she would sit upright. It’s more of an effort, feels pretty uncomfortable, sounds easy to do until you try to actually do it. Those kind of things, that’s not self-harm. That’s not any sort of hatred of the body. That is having a healthy sense of constantly keeping your body in tuned and disciplined. And if you do that, then it’s much easier to win those other fights against temptations, either to sin or just to laziness and complacency, and even things that maybe fall short of being grave sins, that you get to be the king and master of your own body. That’s a beautiful thing. That is part of the freedom of the sons of God. And I think it’s wonderful that the seers of Fatima were able to make sacrifices in their body to God.
This is part of, remember, priest, prophet and king, the priestly role is we make offerings. And so someone saying, “I’m going to voluntarily be inconvenienced, be put out, experience even a mild pain for God. I’ll make up what’s lacking in the sufferings of Christ in my own body,” as St. Paul says. That spirit engaged in the proper way with the kind of limitations I described there is a healthy Christian one. That’s not self-harm. That’s not stoicism. That’s not a hatred of the body as a gift from God. That is a healthy understanding of the relationship of body and soul in an era where we’re fallen and our bodies don’t always give us good advice. So I hope that helps. If you’re someone who found yourself uneasy by the sears at Fatima or believing this idea that this was somehow self-harm, I hope learning the truth both about what nettles actually are and the spirituality of mortification that 2,000 years of Christians have practiced successfully will give you a new perspective on it.
Finally, as I said, if you want my fuller debate review about why I though Ethan Muse did a fantastic job, both answering the objections that Sean Luke laid out, but also showing why we should trust a miracle at Fatima, check out this video that I linked to right here. Shamus Popri, I’m Joe Heschmeier. God bless you.