Guilt Ridden
I have long been a fan of your magazine and find it very helpful most of the time, but the article by Rachel Fay [“That Celibate Bachelor Was Right!”, April 1998] disturbed me. I have long struggled with the issue of artificial contraception in the Church. My wife and I do not follow the approved method of natural family planning. I am in favor of it but my wife is not. Despite my efforts to approach the subject or have her become more informed on the method, she refuses and says those who lead the Church should have a few kids of their own before they come down so hard on the trench soldiers of the faith. I can’t point to any good examples within my Catholic community who have had great success. The one model that I know uses the method prescribed by the Church and has seven children, with the last three not planned. It has caused great stress on the woman, and she has had to seek counseling.
I my own situation, my desires to follow the teachings of the Church are frustrated in this matter. I am guilt ridden when I read articles such as Mrs. Fay’s because they tell me I am sinning every time I have sexual relations with my wife. Yet when I go to confession, the priests (and there have been many) tell me that I am not sinning by our use of contraceptives if there are just reasons. So who is right in this situation? The priests have all but scolded me for continuing to feel guilty and confess this matter as sin. My wife continues to refuse any other means of birth regulation, and magazine articles such as Mrs. Fay’s heap mounds of guilt upon me. I don’t want to sin. So what outs do you offer?
Name Withheld
Editor’s reply: You find yourself in a situation that others have struggled with. In such cases my suggestions are two. First of all, immediate contact the Couple to Couple League, P.O. Box 111184, Cincinnati, OH 45211, (513) 471-2000. Recently I spoke at its annual convention, held this year in Colorado Springs, and met many couples who had gone through problems not unlike yours. There are solutions, even when a spouse is recalcitrant. Contact CCL and ask for literature and a catalogue. Secondly, if I were you I’d search far and wide for a faithful priest. Any priest who tells penitents that contraception is not sinful doesn’t have the qualifications to be giving spiritual advice to anyone. You may even have to travel to a neighboring diocese to find a well-informed confessor. If that’s what it takes, do so. Your heart seems to be in the right place. You just need to learn how to have your actions (and your wife’s) match what you know to be the right course of action. It won’t be easy, but it probably won’t be any harder than the turmoil you’re going through now.
Preparing for the Final Step
I am a Presbyterian who has recently graduated from Luther Seminary in St. Paul with an M.Div. degree. Two years ago I bought my first rosary and cried like a child when I brought it home and pressed it against my heart. I began reading about the blessed appearances of the Mother of our Lord to simple believers throughout the world, and then I began preaching (just a bit) about Mary in Protestant churches. This past year at seminary I began to see how incomplete the Protestant doctrine on justification is—and how dangerous Protestantism has become.
On Father’s Day, at the church where I was installed, that day, as an evangelist and mission developer, the female preacher invoked Wisdom (Sophia) in the call to worship, and in the prayer of confession she had the congregation pray to “Mother God, Daughter God, and Holy Spirit.” I cannot begin to tell you how saddened I was to see how far my church has fallen away from the blessed truth of the ancient Christian Church.
My heart has entered the Catholic Church, but I have not yet had the courage to take the final, public step. Please pray for me.
Name Withheld
Easy Pickings
My wife and I had been debating how much money to send your Catholic radio ministry. Yesterday, while riding in the car, I was listening to a Christian radio station since we don’t have Catholic programming around Cleveland or Akron. There was a minister who was telling how he brings in 100,000 Catholics a year into his Protestant ministry—what easy pickings they were! He kept saying how Catholics rely on works and not faith. Anyway, less than an hour later my wife showed me an appeal letter from you, asking for money to support Catholic radio. We sat down and are sending you a check for this cause.
Paul Mungo
Akron, Ohio
Priests Are “In The Know”
Never having written to your esteemed periodical, I’m somewhat cautious about appearing to be too exacting in a criticism of an otherwise very good essay on contraception. Rachel Fay confuses the fact that experience doesn’t necessarily translate into knowledge. Conversely, lack of personal experience may not deprive one of wisdom, not to mention divine assistance in the form of sacramental grace (holy orders), on a given subject. She wrote, “Priests are not in a position to address from their own experience the question of how contraception affects a couple’s sex life.” This statement reflects the fact that she has not been privy to lengthy confessions nor countless office hours talking to married couples about the spiritual welfare of their marriage bond.
There are several coaches of professional sports teams who never played their respective games. They are students of the game, able to relate the intricacies and subtleties of the game to their players without having actually done it themselves.
I have known mothers with a single baby who are better mothers than some who have several children. Guess what? The new mother has no personal experience of being a mother, but she has a better understanding of it already than others who have been mothers for several years.
I would like to underline the fact that priests are spiritual fathers. For priests with a solid prayer life, there can be no better guide to family life in all of its aspects. Addressing a priest as “Father” is no accident or irony! His fatherhood is imaged in the First Person of the Holy Trinity. Priests do have every right to speak about the various issues of the family precisely because they are the spiritual leaders of the household of the faith.
Rev. Donald L. Kloster
Bridgeport, Connecticut
What Did God Have to “Prove”?
After reading “Why Bad Things Happen to a Good God” [May 1998], I was forced to conclude that some of the author’s points were either overstated or incorrect. The author concludes, for example, that unless God allowed Christ to suffer, once we get to heaven we would have never known whether he really loved us. He remarks that God had to “prove” his love to us, that his love had to “cost” him something to be validly expressed. If not, he says, we would “doubt” whether he really loved us. He then concludes that “anything short of death itself would fail to reveal the depth of God’s love.”
Although there are shades of truth to the author’s contentions, the ends to not justify the means. God does not have to “prove” his love to us, nor does he owe us anything in “cost.” Only humans need to prove their character by virtuous acts, since human integrity, because of sin, is often in doubt. But God is perfectly pure, just, and righteous. The marvel about redemption is that even though God didn’t have to prove anything and didn’t owe us anything, he gave himself anyway. He did it because he is live, not because he had to prove his love to gain our affections. Moreover, the three Persons of the Trinity loved and communicated with each other before the creation. This is the most perfect love existing, but it didn’t have to be “proved” or “cost” in order to make it validly “expressed” and without “doubt.” They didn’t need “death” in order to reveal the “depths” of God’s Trinitarian love. Death came because of sin, not because of some intrinsic attribute of God that needed to be expressed.
The more probably answer as to why God created even though he knew there would be sin and suffering was that he, who was constrained by his own justice that would not allow him to impinge on the free will of man to sin, nevertheless decided that it was worth a temporal time of pain on earth in order to give us an eternity of bliss in heaven. God did not desire us or Christ to suffer; rather, his justice, in the face of Adam’s rebellion, required that men suffer with the curse of sin and death and that Christ suffer to alleviate sin and death. Our course, through this suffering God will mold us to the image of his Son, but that is the final effect of suffering, not the original cause of suffering.
Other than these points, the article was good.
Robert Sungenis
Catholic Apologetics International
Alexandria, Virginia
Editor’s reply: As I understood his piece, Fr. John Dowling was bringing up an epistemological issue with respect to human knowing and understanding. His argument was not that God’s love could not be expressed unless our Lord died, but that men would not appreciate and comprehend that love unless he paid the greatest price imaginable to them. Abstractly, there is no need for God to demonstrate his love that way, but the frailties of human nature might require such a thing. That, I think, was the author’s point.
Who Wrote Walden?
“The Florida Event” [may 1998] is a fine analogy, but may I offer another one?
When I read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden for the first time, I was surprised to discover how “New Age” it was. (The term historians use is “Transcendental.”) What would people say if a group of English professors were to gather at Bob Jones University to vote on which parts of Walden were actually written by Thoreau (who, since he was a nineteenth-century American farmer, had to be a Fundamentalist) and which parts were inserted by late-twentieth-century New Agers (such as his endorsement of the Bhagavad Gita)? You could just imagine the scorn that would be heaped upon those professors. I don’t know how many copies of the original 1854 edition of Walden exist, but most of us trust that our modern editions represent an accurate copy of the original. We trust that any attempt to publish a false copy would have been discovered by people who remembered the original work.
The Jesus Seminar makes about as much sense as that Walden seminar would have. Bismarck’s Kulturkampf gave us the theory of “Markan priority,” that Mark, being the shortest Gospel and also the one that mentions Peter’s leadership the least, was the original Gospel and the others are further removed from Jesus. (The professors who came up with this actually were paid by the government.)
Then in 1979 we got The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels, which pointed out that there were other gospels than the ones that the “catholic Christians” (as she calls them) put into the New Testament and that these express modern, liberal Protestantism better than the Catholic Gospels. After all, she points out, the New Testament was put together to promote what the “catholic Christians” believed. She didn’t write the book to urge Protestants to abandon the New Testament; she claims she’s just describing the facts (except in chapter three, where she tries to make the Gnostics feminists by claiming that St. Clement of Alexandria was really a Gnostic and that the misogynist remarks in the Gnostic gospels really represent the Catholic view).
So now we have the Jesus Seminar, in which a group of liberal professors get together to vote on which parts of both the Catholic and Gnostic gospels are authentic—in other words, they’re putting together their own gospel. One participant, Marcus J. Borg, claims that he can determine which parts reveal the true Jesus by remembering that Jesus was “a Jewish peasant form the first century.” But, for starters, Jesus wasn’t a Jewish peasant (he was neither Judaean nor a farmer) but a Galilean carpenter. As such he probably did work for the trade caravans that passed through the region, a nexus between Europe, Asia, and Africa, and learned something of the religions of the world. And so to learn what Jesus really said we have to settle for taking the Gospels as written—just as we do with Thoreau and Walden.
Don Schenk
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Incorruptibles vs. Darwin
I think Jack Taylor did a find job in his article “The Evolutionary Mind-Set” [April 1998], but I don’t believe he really hit at the Achilles’ heel of Darwinism. Kenneth Howell mentioned the best method of attacking Darwinism in his article “How Augustine Reined in Science” [March 1998] and also mentioned the author that I believe has done the best job of using this method to date, Philip Johnson.
Johnson wrote an article in the November 1997 issue of First Things titled “The Unraveling of Scientific Materialism.” It gets right to the heart of the matter. The basis of Johnson’s argument is that Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection is dependent upon scientific materialism. In other words, this theory requires that all phenomena existing in the natural world, including the origin of species, must be explainable by natural means without ever resorting to supernatural explanations. Darwin’s theory must then be, by definition, atheistic.
Some evolutionists, Stephen Jay Gould among them, have stated that they don’t believe Darwin’s theory necessarily rules out the existence of God. I think I would buy tickets to see someone ask Gould, “If that is true, what part of Darwinian evolution is due to natural selection and what part is due to supernatural selection?” The key problem here for Darwin’s theory is one of simple logic. Any logician will tell us that if B depend upon A and A can be proven, then B is at least possible, but, if A can be disproved, then B is impossible.
Johnson devotes much of his article to discussing the a priori commitment to materialism of Richard Lowontin and other prominent evolutionists. Johnson also makes one small but very telling statement, that the Darwinian establishment knows that this a priori commitment to materialism cannot be exposed to the general public as nothing more than a philosophical assumption. This would be a staggering admission of the weakness of their argument, equivalent to having a tobacco company executive admitting that smoking cigarettes causes cancer. The only issue remaining is proof of the supernatural world, which is proof that materialism is nothing more than an unfounded philosophical assumption.
This is where the incorruptibles come in. Look at St. Catherine Labouré, for example. She died in 1876, and her body has remained entirely incorrupt for the last 122 years. St. Bernadette Soubirous is a similar case. She died in 1879, and her body has remained incorrupt for the last 119 years.
Ask any materialist for a purely natural, material explanation of these phenomena, then stand back and watch him stuttering because of a loss of words.
Any materialist who believes that a natural explanation is even possible should be asked if he thinks he would be able to keep a steak fresh in his refrigerator for even a single year. The only explanation is supernatural. If this argument and knowledge of the incorruptibles were more widely known, the folly of Darwinian evolution could finally be put to rest.
Michael Dietsch
South Berwick, Maine
Jumping Ship
A buddy of mine gave me four back issues of your magazine to read. As a Catholic for 34 years and a man who spent nine years in the seminary, I read them from cover to cover. I am grateful that he did this because it reaffirmed by decision to leave the priesthood and the Church in order to serve Jesus and walk in truth.
Marc Bobish
Valrico, Florida
Actually, It Was the Pique of His Career
In your April 1998 issue, on page 4, in your reply to a letter concerning Origen, you refer to Tertullian as having “ended his life as a Mountainist heretic” (my italics). Was this because he disagreed with the biblical teaching that “every mountain and hill shall be laid low” (Isa. 40:4)? Or was it because he defected at the “peak” of his career? (It reminds me of the fellow who believed that the Montanist heresy was false teaching propagated by the Church in Montana – but that’s another story…)
Rev. Peter J. Grant
Winnfield, Louisiana
Editor’s reply: There you go, making a Montanist out of a Molehill. You do know about the Molehill heresy, don’t you? If you don’t, reach for your copy of Ronald Knox’s Calendar of Heresies. Look under the listing for June 31.