Ashamed
I love This Rock, but I was ashamed of your response to a reader’s question in your March 2002 “Quick Questions” section. The answer that I am afraid hurt your credibility with many readers was the response to the question from a grandparent about attending a grandchild’s first communion in a Lutheran church. You are correct in stating it is not a valid sacrament. And, yes, it would be best that the child receive the valid sacrament in a Catholic Church, like it would be for everyone.
However, to tell the grandparents not to attend does no good for anyone. We are all called to evangelize. This is the opposite of evangelization. This causes wounds and closes doors on a family that will never want to look at that skewed idea of a church that would divide rather than heal. A Catholic who faithfully attends Mass and lives in accordance with the teachings of the Church is not condoning an act by attending a service of another denomination.
Every issue of your magazine (including your March issue) offers too much wonderful spiritual nourishment to let this stand.
David Wells
Lexington, Kentucky
Editor’s reply: You are correct that we must evangelize, and this means being honest with people even about facts such as the reality of sin, the need for redemption, and that fact that a particular sacrament is not valid.
People’s actions have consequences, and showing up at an invalid sacrament will likely send the message either that the sacrament is valid or that it does not matter whether it is valid. Both messages are false and opposed to the true spirit of evangelization.
Showing love to family members sometimes means being honest and direct about painful facts. It does not mean sending them false messages of reassurance regarding what they are doing.
Amen, Brother
In the March 2002 issue you answered a question on the meaning of amen (“Quick Questions”). It comes from the Hebrew Emunah, which means faith. Amenmeans literally, “I have faith,” or, more colloquially, “I have faith that it’s true.”
At the time we receive Holy Communion, we affirm our faith that it is the body of Christ. When we use it to end a prayer, we affirm our faith in God, or in God’s love and mercy, according to the prayer.
Marty Barrack
Hardy, Arkansas
Editor’s reply: The word amen does not “come from” the word emunah (whose meaning is closer to firmness, fidelity, or steadiness rather than simply faith). Our answer explained that amen appears related to the verb aman (which means he confirmed, or he supported, or he upheld) and a related word, ’emet (firmness, truth). Amen is a cognate of emunah, but that is because emunah is also a cognate of aman and ’emet.
While amen is a member of this word family, one cannot show it to come from any of the others. Basically, it is an uninflected word used as a particle of affirmation. It does not mean literally “I have faith” any more than a parallel English word like yes would mean literally “I have faith”—or anything else. Particles cannot be unpacked into entire sentences in this way. That’s why it got transliterated into Greek, Latin, and English rather than translated.
Why Target Feelings?
The insightful remarks that Peter Kreeft makes on the mystery of suffering show beautifully how Christ’s death on the cross has unveiled not only the meaning of suffering but also the treasures open to those who embrace it lovingly (“The Meaning of Suffering Reconsidered,” March 2002).
The end of the article, however, is baffling. The author asserts that “our feelings are our tyrants.” He says the saints have warned us “not to rest our faith, our hope, our love, or our deeds on them.” He adds, “Our sufferings are, or can be, holy. Our feelings are not. Our choices to love and our deeds of love are holy. Our feelings are not. Feelings are indifferent to holiness. . . . Suffering is essential to holiness.”
These assertions raise a few questions. What is the meaning Professor Kreeft has in mind for the word feeling? Bodily feelings like hunger? Psychic feelings like jolliness because one is slightly tipsy? Or spiritual feelings—like knowing and willing—that can arise in us only as conscious responses to persons or objects?
It is true that there are evil feelings such as envy, revenge, and vanity (to mention but a few—their names are legion). It is true there are illegitimate and irrational feelings. It is true that there are people who feel chronically offended because of their sickly self-centeredness. If such feelings are not disavowed by our will, they stain our soul. It is understandable that spiritual guides warn us against this danger. The same spiritual guides also caution us against the dangers harbored in our intellect and our will.
How many talented individuals have strayed from the path of truth: heretics, skeptics, relativists, subjectivists, et cetera. In The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton calls these “educated criminals” worse than bigamists and thieves. Many of them had great minds, and yet, animated by intellectual pride, they have done an incommensurable amount of harm. To quote Plato, “They preferred themselves to truth.”
The will fares no better. Starting with the words of Lucifer—” Non serviam” (“I shall not serve”)—the will of the created being is constantly tempted to have its own way. In his Holy Rule, Benedict writes that the monk should not only do God’s will but hate his own will (chapter four). Thérèse of Lisieux writes that before entering the Carmel she practiced few mortifications except to break her own will (The Story of a Soul, end of part one).
It is difficult to understand why Professor Kreeft targets only feelings. When they are baptized (our intellect and will too are badly in need of purification) holy feelings are the reward of those whose heart is given totally to the Beloved.
Finally, it is difficult to understand how Professor Kreeft can divorce feelings from suffering. Who would mind suffering that is not felt?
Alice von Hildebrand
New Rochelle, New York
DR & KJV Q&A
I was glad to read the article about the Douay-Rheims Bible (“Uncomfortable Facts about the Douay-Rheims,” “Brass Tacks,” February 2002). After twelve years of Catholic education—including two years in a high-school level seminary—I did not know it came chronologically before the King James Version. If we are to argue from that fact, several questions are left open.
The article states the Douay-Rheims “was prepared and released.” Does that mean printed in sufficient numbers as to be generally available? Or was it in manuscript only for scholars and the wealthy? If we are to compare it with the KJV, we should know how it was reproduced and in what numbers.
The article also refers to the Douay-Rheims New Testament having been published thirty years before the KJV New Testament. Was the KJV published as one unit (Old Testament and New Testament) or separately as was the Douay-Rheims? The Douay-Rheims was revised soon (1752) by Challoner; how long did the KJV stand without revision? Do we know how many copies of the Challoner text were printed, and how widely distributed?
Akin states biblical (Koine) Greek had already passed into another dialect by the time of Jerome’s Vulgate. Could we know what that dialect was and how long it lasted? In seminary, for some reason unknown to me, our Greek text was for the “Attic” dialect. If intervening students of the Greek text learned some other dialect, as I did, how would that have affected their understanding of the Koinedialect writings?
Philip Van Camp
Murrieta, California
James Akin replies: I don’t have the numbers of Bibles printed in varying translations, but I don’t think that these figures would be useful apologetically. Comparing them would be comparing apples to oranges. The KJV became the official Bible of the English-speaking Protestant community, meaning that it was legal, sanctioned by the crown, and supported by the network of parishes that Henry VIII had seized from the Church. The Douay-Rheims, on the other hand, became the official Bible of the English-speaking Catholic community, which was smaller, persecuted, and did not have the infrastructure the Protestant community did. What’s important is not the comparison of how many Bibles were printed but the apples-to-apples comparison of the dominant translation of the group to the dominant translation of the other.
Unlike the DR, the KJV did come out in a single printing containing both Old and New Testaments, and it was revised in 1629 and 1638 as well as in subsequent years. When the Challoner revision of the DR came out, it became the standard English Catholic edition until the Confraternity Version was prepared in the first half of the twentieth century.
I don’t know why you would have learned Attic Greek in seminary, as that’s a pre-Koine dialect (though it is the one that Koine developed from). Most of the New Testament should still be intelligible to an Attic speaker, though it is less literary.
Scales Fell from My Eyes
I recently subscribed to This Rock and couldn’t be more pleased. I converted several years ago from a lifetime of Protestant searching. During the course of that search, I spoke with numerous priests and lay Catholics, but none of it “took.” I would be the first to state that my eyes and ears were closed. Then I read Catholicism and Fundamentalism by Karl Keating. The scales fell from my eyes, and my life has not been and never will be the same. The faith that had eluded me all those years was right in front of me.
Since then I’ve discovered the writings of numerous apologists, not to mention the early Church Fathers themselves, and, of course, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (The Bible was already a regular staple, although my reading was very selective and narrowly focused). So thank you for all that you have done to bring me and thousands of others home to Holy Mother Church.
By the way, while we have come through an era when many Catholics have been insufficiently cathechized, there is no need to worry. I derive great inspiration and confidence in the future of the Church from the younger generation of Catholics.
Craig Martin
Richland, Michigan