Is original sin on the way out–again? In Why Baptize Our Baby?, published by Community Ministry Publications of San Jose, California, the reader is informed that “with the help of modern biblical scholarship, we have arrived at a much more mature understanding of original sin. . . . Sin has been present in our world ever since [Adam and Eve], and every person is born into this sinful and imperfect world. . . . Being conceived and born into such a world–a community of sin–is what we mean by original sin.”
It may be what you mean, buster, but it isn’t what the Church means. Yes, since we are all sinners, and since we form a community, there is a sense in which we can speak of a “community of sin,” but sin is first of all an individual thing. Communities as such don’t sin. Only individual persons sin. Vague talk about a “community of sin” leaves the impression that our daily faults aren’t our own, but “society’s.”
No, it isn’t enough to say that the fact of original sin implies chiefly that we are born into a sinful world. The doctrine implies something about the individual soul. It says that we have inherited from our first parents a propensity toward sinful acts, and because of their folly we had forfeited for us the preternatural gifts with which God endowed Adam and Eve. Our reasoning is imperfect, our passions are not easily controlled, and we are fated to die.
This is the legacy, the stain on our souls, that stems from the origin of our race (hence original sin). Shakespeare remains a better theologian than many of today’s Catholic writers: The fault lies not in our stars (or our communities), but in ourselves.
The new Catechism of the Catholic Church will be the focus of the “Consecrate Them in Truth” Conference to be held October 22-24 in Pittsburgh. The conference is intended to “ignite a new evangelization campaign for neighborhoods and families” using the new catechism.
Sponsored by the Apostolate for Family Consecration, the event will feature Cardinal Francis Arinze, President of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue; Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, Papal Ambassador to the United States; Gilbert Sheldon, Bishop of Steubenville, Ohio; Scott Hahn, well-known Catholic theologian and apologist; Mark Miravalle, whose expertise is in Marian doctrines; and, if her schedule permits, Mother Teresa.
Further information can be obtained by calling (800) 367-6279.
Of course, not everyone is pleased there is a new catechism. Andre Bercoff has written The New Catechism: Will It Destroy the Catholic Church? To be published by Dimension Books in the autumn in a translation from the French, the book is marketed with a blurb that says many Catholics “question the attitude, the style, the formulation, the timing of the so-called New Catholic Catechism. They see this work as a backward movement on the part of fearful authority seeking to recover the imagined accomplishments of the past, offering numerous `forbiddens,’ or to paper over the difficulties of living a Christian life today. It is not without significance, for example, that this 660-page work has no entry on the subject of tolerance.” Horrors! Maybe we should burn all copies of the new catechism?
No need to do that, says Msgr. Michael J. Wrenn, who has critiqued the French edition of Bercoff’s book. He notes that Bercoff is a self-confessed agnostic who “has written a book that can only be described as flamboyant in style, inaccurate in facts concerning Roman Catholic teaching and practice, and certainly contemptuous of the Catholic faith itself.” Wrenn lets Bercoff condemn himself. Here are some of the Frenchman’s opinions:
“The child conceived by inadvertence cannot be a child of love. And if it isn’t a child of love, if it is resented as an evil, a suffering, a repulsion, doesn’t it follow that abortion, as in the case of rape, constraint, or incest, constitutes a necessary evil?” Wrenn notes this is the Manichaean heresy: new life as an evil.
Bercoff again: “We believe, and we are not alone in this opinion, that in condemning the use of condoms you are committing a crime. . . . In school, instructors explain to young boys and girls at what point it is indispensable to use a condom. And you, you step forward with a prohibition which is a real incitement to suicide and murder. . . . A continent adolescent in the midst of an all-pervasive sexually-saturated society is not a saint, but very simply a neurotic.” Whew!
Bercoff complains that in the catechism “the Church portrays [evil] as Satan, the demon. This is an image, a manner of speaking, and it is also common to represent it in the form of a he-goat or a grimacing creature, in the same way as to imagine God as an old man with a white beard. Religion must emerge from tales and legendary imaginings which exploit only too readily superstition and the propensity for magic and sorceries which enrich the charlatans who profit from popular credulity.” In other words, Christ erred when he reported that he conversed with Satan.
An especially annoying deficiency in the catechism, apparently, is the absence of any remarks about cloning: “Life after death has become the object of serious scientific research. And what can be said about the resurrection of the body, for which the theory of clones offers the hope of a future probability?”
Bercoff tells us we must remember our brothers in Christ: “We know that God is in everything and in every being and that the respect which we all are engaged in according to our environment, to our fellow man, to our inferior brothers the animals . . .” Wrenn catches the politically incorrect error: “Wait a minute! Brothers by definition are equals. How insensitive of Bercoff to relapse into human species chauvinism” by calling animals “inferior brothers.”
If such chauvinism is out, so is original sin: “The notion,” says Bercoff, “is neither in the Old nor in the New Testaments. It is a doctrine of the fourth century, coming from St. Augustine, who produced it to combat the heresy of Pelagius.” Wrenn points out that Bercoff is “now trying to rewrite both history and dogma. His rejection of original sin explains much about his overall approach.”
Most redundantly of all, Bercoff insists that “the admission of women into the ordained ministry is more than a wish; it is the condition for survival of a Church in the midst of which they would bring their great qualities of listening and perseverance”–as though, presumably, women have been withholding those talents all these centuries. Tell that, Monsieur, to Augustine’s mother, Monica, to Teresa of Avila, and to Catherine of Siena, some of the most persevering women in history.
Which reminds us: The Women’s Ordination Conference is raising money to publish a full-page advertisement in the Denver Post on August 12, the day John Paul II will address young Catholics in Mile High Stadium. The ad “lays out many reasons–biblical, theological, and pastoral–why women ought to be ordained,” says Ruth McDonough Fitzpatrick, WOC’s National Coordinator, in a fundraising letter. The text of the ad, in the form of an open letter to the Pope, begins, “Grace and peace to you from God who is our Mother and our Father.”
The quarterly newsletter of Bill Jackson’s Christians Evangelizing Catholics devotes a full page to reproductions of headlines from newspaper articles about World Youth Day. Right in the middle is a copy of the headline used on the letter Catholic Answers has been mailing out to raise funds for the printing of the booklet it will distribute in Denver: “This summer 300,000 young Catholics will meet the Pope in Denver. What if a few thousand of them returned home as Fundamentalists?” Immediately beneath, in small type, CEC has added this question: “What if Karl were one of them?” (Don’t count on it, Bill.)
A Denver-area church has been getting irate phone calls from people who don’t like a booklet it’s passing out. Reiner Kremer, a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Reform Movement Church, says members of his denomination intend to hand out 90,000 copies of Coming Soon before World Youth Day. The booklet claims the Pope is plotting a New World Order and oppression of non-Catholics.
The 80-page booklet is a distillation of a nineteenth-century book by Ellen Gould White, the founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Her book appeared originally as The Great Controversyand recently has been republished as Will America Survive? Under one title or the other the entire text has been reprinted frequently by organizations more or less loosely affiliated with Adventism.
Coming Soon has been disavowed by Gary Patterson, national spokesman for the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He says, “The Seventh-day Adventist Church believes these anti-Catholic advertising efforts are misguided,” and he notes the Reform Movement Church is a breakaway group from the main Seventh-day Adventist Church. (Although officials of the Seventh-day Adventist Church today disavow anti-Catholic sentiments, their denomination has been, historically, one of the most anti-Catholic in American history. Many of its members remain sympathetic with the positions espoused by the Reform Movement Church.)
The booklet is a compendium of all the standard and extreme charges against the Catholic Church, from its alleged origins in paganism to its “invention” of new doctrines. Even the charge that the pope is the beast of Revelation 13:18 is “proved” by calculating the numerical value of a non-existent papal title, Vicarius Filii Dei. (The correct title is Vicarius Christi, but it doesn’t add up to 666.) Mrs. White, or whoever really wrote the original version of her book, had to engage in subterfuge to make the biblical description “work.” The irony is that her own name, Ellen Gould White, adds up to 666 (L = 50, L = 50, U = 5, L = 50, D = 500, W = UU = 10, I = 1)! But don’t snicker. Lots of names add up to 666 in one language or another–perhaps even your name.
As mentioned in this issue’s cover story, Christianity Today still has not shrugged off all its old anti-Catholic sentiment. It recently published a classified ad that the editors could have declined to run: “BIBLICAL TRUTH exposes Catholic teachings–`Why I Converted from Catholicism to True Christianity.’ Send $5.00 to Louis Taylor, Box . . .” Oh, well.
“There is no such thing as a bad priest,” said St. John Vianney, patron of parish priests, “only priests whose people have not prayed enough for them.” Given the headlines, you might conclude lots of people have been neglecting to pray for priests. Not ones to fall into discouragement, some people are trying to revive such prayer. They call themselves Prayer Partners for Priests.
Fr. Robert C. Pasley, the spiritual director of the organization, says, “The best support people can give priests is to pray for them. You read in the newspapers about scandals involving priests. There is a general sense that priests are overworked and their morale is low. Even priests sometimes feel their duties are beyond them. This is a prompting of the Holy Spirit that priests need prayers because they are human and have weaknesses.”
Prayer Partners for Priests is a lay apostolate founded in 1987 by four Catholic women in Minnesota. Through the apostolate people offer daily prayer for individual priests of their choice. Materials in English or Spanish are sent to each person or school class that adopts a priest or priests with the commitment to pray daily. Each priest is notified by his Prayer Partner of this intention by a special greeting card.
To obtain an explanatory booklet about Prayer Partners for Priests, write to 35 Summit Court, Marlton, New Jersey 08053.
Catholic Outreach of Louisiana, which has a radio program so obtuse that a Louisiana bishop called for a boycott of the program’s advertisers, is merging with another anti-Catholic ministry, Grace Bible Mission.
The founder of Catholic Outreach of Louisiana and the host of the radio program is Greg Durel, the pastor of Heritage Bible Church in Greta, Louisiana. He has a penchant for misstating Catholic beliefs. Radio waves carry his voice throughout the southern part of his state, a predominantly Catholic area.
Grace Bible Mission, which is headquartered in Kansas City, is primarily a door-to-door evangelization and direct-mail effort. It is run by Lyle P. Murphy, who plans to expand Durel’s radio show into 23 metropolitan areas with a high proportion of Catholics.
Poking fun at Catholics who think Mary appeared recently in a Chicago cemetery, where her tears were said to have fallen to the ground, Murphy writes to his supporters, “We believe that Greg should continue to produce hard-hitting radio tapes on purgatory, the priesthood, the Mass, etc., while I endeavor to build a constituency to get the Word of God to people who may be trying to dig up Mary’s tears!”