END OF THE WORLD, END OF MARRIAGE?

The End of the World, the End of Marriage?

Contemplation of “the last things” suggests that the friendship of marriage remains in heaven.

As the liturgical year draws to a close, the gospels offer one insight after another into what to expect at the end of time. Mostly, they suggest that it is not something that can be expected: that whatever we imagine will be grossly insufficient preparation for what is to come. Nonetheless, we are encouraged to try to envision it as best we can (or else, surely, the Church would have selected a different set of readings!). It’s a bit like telling a one-year-old you’re moving house: the vastness of the change is so great that any words used to convey it will surely be beyond comprehension; yet it is better to give some notion of the coming upheaval, however inadequate such preparation will prove. So it is with us, and the end of (our) time.

One of the things that boggles the adult mind when it sets to contemplating mansions is the abolition of marriage in heaven. Marriage on the natural level is so much a part of life—if not a part of yours, at least a part of most lives around you—that a life without marriage is for many people well-nigh inconceivable. No doubt there are some for whom this inconceivable appears in the light of a blessing. But for most, to the extent that we can conceive of life without marriage, many of our attempts paint a sad, dull picture. Marriage is a sacrament (Ephesians 5:32); a spouse is (in the words Milton puts in Adam’s mouth about Eve), “Heaven’s last best gift, my ever-new delight.” Yet Christ assures us that heaven has no marriages.

Jesus said to them, “The children of this age marry and remarry; but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels; and they are the children of God because they are the ones who will rise.” (From the Gospel of Friday, November 24.)

The story (invented by the Sadducees) to which Jesus replies is designed to make the idea of heaven sound ridiculous; Jesus suggests that their mistake is to conceive of heaven as a glorified earth. Heaven is not ridiculous, but it is radically different.

Given the radical difference of heaven, and the error of imagining earthly marriages in heaven, what ought we to imagine will be the relationship there between those who were married on earth? Will formerly fond couples be indifferent to one another, either because the Beatific Vision is so consuming, or because they have equal charity for all the Blessed?

While such a situation is possible, the very little we know about human relationships and heaven suggests that it is unlikely. Aquinas proposes that the fellowship of friends, while it has not that preeminent place in heaven which it does on earth, may continue in heaven because it “conduces to the well-being of Happiness,” the Blessed “‘see[ing] one another and rejoic[ing] in God, at their fellowship”” (Summa Theologica 2.1.4.8, quoting Augustine Gen. ad lit. viii, 25). (This reasoning is consonant with his argument elsewhere that charity is identical with friendship, Summa Theologica 2.2.23.1.)

If friendship continues in heaven, it may be too that in heaven as on earth certain friendships are greater than others. One would expect, moreover, that the friendships of heaven are ranked in heavenly terms; that is, in terms of how those friendships pointed the friends mutually closer to God during the time when the friends were still on earth. And of course, on earth the friendship that exists within marriage is—if all goes well—that which draws each spouse closer to God. To put the matter in more familiar words, in a Christian marriage the spouses are each other’s way to heaven.

Now it is possible, of course, that such “ways to heaven” can be via very much negativa. Sometimes it is by putting up with a poor spouse, as St. Monica did with her temperamental husband Patricius, that one becomes a saint. Certainly even in the best of marriages the differences of temperament and upbringing can become abrasive, and those abrasions serve to sanctify. But the primary way in which marriage is supposed to sanctify is through offering what the Book of Common Prayer calls mutual society, help, and comfort; or, as the Roman nuptial blessing puts it, “the companionship they had in the beginning … the one blessing not forfeited by original sin nor washed away by the flood.” And the hoped-for effect of that companionship, for which the nuptial blessing prays, is that

these your servants [may] hold fast to the faith and keep your commandments; made one in the flesh, may they be blameless in all they do; and with the strength that comes from the Gospel, may they bear true witness to Christ before all … And grant that, reaching at last together the fullness of years for which they hope, they may come to the life of the blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Yet how strange if those who were of the most help in getting each other to heaven should be utter strangers once they arrived there! Perhaps, then, death does what divorce only purports to do, and separates those spouses whose attachment was faulty or fractured, while confirming and elevating those attachments that were causes of joy.

The last words below to St. Francis de Sales, who on this as on so many other topics addressed the divine humanely.

… if the bond of your mutual liking be charity, devotion and Christian perfection, God knows how very precious a friendship it is! Precious because it comes from God, because it tends to God, because God is the link that binds you, because it will last for ever in Him. Truly it is a blessed thing to love on earth as we hope to love in Heaven, and to begin that friendship here which is to endure for ever there. I am not now speaking of simple charity, a love due to all mankind, but of that spiritual friendship which binds souls together, leading them to share devotions and spiritual interests, so as to have but one mind between them. Such as these may well cry out, “Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, brethren, to dwell together in unity!” Even so, for the “precious ointment” of devotion trickles continually from one heart to the other, so that truly we may say that to such friendship the Lord promises His Blessing and life for evermore.

PHILOSOPHY

The Missing Key Piece from Youth Catechesis? It’s Philosophy

“Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” —Pope St. John Paul II

“Where the right education of youth is concerned, no amount of trouble or labour can be undertaken, how great soever, but that even greater still may not be called for” (Pope Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, 42).

And according to the recent synod of bishops, there is indeed a great deal of trouble and labour to be called for when it comes to the catechesis of the Church’s youth. Bishop Robert Barron is reported to have commented on the increasing need for catechesis and apologetics since so many young people who leave the faith cite intellectual reasons for their departure.

For me, it was intellectual reasons that initially pulled me back to the Church. Despite my Bible study training in a Protestant setting, my education in physics, and the classes I was taking in philosophy at a secular university, I couldn’t deny the truth of Catholicism. Whenever I was tempted to doubt, my reason got in the way. So it breaks my heart to hear that so many people walk away from the faith for intellectual reasons.

What was the foundation of the reason that got in the way of my doubt? A basis in Ancient and Medieval philosophy in conjunction with my study of Catholic doctrine. As I continued this course of study, I found that all of my “intellectual objections” were no more than misunderstandings or logical fallacies. As I continue to learn and dialogue with others, I have found all other intellectual objections to be the same.

The famous first line of John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio begins, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Both wings are necessary. Later in the same encyclical, John Paul II writes, “Reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way” (16).

In order for catechesis to have a firm foundation in reason, philosophy is a necessary component. For example, one of the most important starting points of any process of rational thought on a subject is clear understanding of the terms. How can a youth understand the beauty of virtue if all that comes to mind when he hears “virtue” is “not-having-sex”? How can anyone make sense of the immortality of the soul when he imagines the soul to be merely a ghostly, airy copy of the body? How can a questioning teenager realize that the nature of human sexuality is based on the nature of the human being when he has been implicitly spoon-fed for his whole life the idea that nothing has a nature but is only whatever he wants it to be, including his very self?

Much of the terminology that theology uses comes from philosophy, and a poor foundation in philosophy can lead to a lot of misunderstandings in theology, both dogmatic and moral. I have heard many objections to the existence of God, but all of them are based on straw men versions of God.

Pope Leo XIII wrote, “Philosophy seeks not the overthrow of divine revelation, but delights rather to prepare its way, and defend it against assailants” (Inscrutabili Dei Consilio, 13). Philosophy prepares the mind to be able to handle ideas like the eternity of God, the nature of the human person as a body-soul unity, and the basis of ethics. In learning how to reason correctly about these abstract truths, we also learn to recognize faulty reasoning. It is philosophy that trains the mind to think logically about difficult and seemingly abstract subjects like the nature of existence, the meaning of life, justice, the good, the true, the beautiful, the nature of God, virtue and vice, rights and values, and the relationship between body and soul.

I find that many of my students are shocked to find out that there are rational ways of thinking about these topics, let alone that there may be truth with respect to them. If nothing else, working with philosophy can open the mind of a young person to the point where they realize that these concepts might not be as clear-cut and simple as the culture often presents them.

In fact, the type of clear thinking that good philosophy promotes is a necessary guard at the door of the mind. There is little better training in recognizing logical fallacies and analysing arguments than philosophy. The claims that there is no truth and that you can have your truth and I can have my truth sound sane and open-minded until one realizes that those claims are irrational. If there is no truth, then the statement “there is no truth” is not true. But it takes practice in philosophy to be able to articulate the claim clearly and then recognize the fallacy involved.

As another example, one of the most common objections to faith is science, so-called. Apart from the fact that the “conflict” between faith and science can be traced by historians to two books by Draper and White, which are two of the worst history texts ever written, from the end of the 19th century, it is philosophy that draws the boundary lines around each of the domains.

When someone is arguing that the scientific method is the proper method for science, he is not doing science per se; he is doing philosophy. A youth without any philosophical training can easily be fooled into thinking that there is a significant overlap and disagreement between the teaching of the Church and science; but a youth with some understanding of the philosophy of science and the philosophy of religion will easily see through any claims of conflict between the two arenas. The expert in science is not necessarily wise.

But philosophy doesn’t just defend theology and pave the way for understanding it. Pope John Paul II wrote, “With its enduring appeal to the search for truth, philosophy has the great responsibility of forming thought and culture; and now it must strive resolutely to recover its original vocation” (Fides et Ratio, 7).

Philosophy sets the tone for society. It is through our philosophy that we see the rest of the world. It is a culture’s philosophy that is handed on to its children without conscious instruction. Philosophy defines a culture’s values and moral assumptions. This, of course, is true for both true and false philosophies, and it takes philosophical training to be able to identify and evaluate these intellectual starting points of culture. Teenagers and young adults who are not consciously aware of their worldview are most likely viewing the world through the prevailing lenses of contemporary society.

I find, also, that philosophical inquiry awakens wonder in a way that theology often does not. Young people are sometimes turned off when a discussion begins with the Bible, which they have not read, or questions about God, the Sacraments, or the Church, which they consider to be subject to interpretation and personal preference. But discussions that begin with a moral dilemma, the nature of true happiness, or the meaning of life tend to pull young people in a little faster. Those questions, in the end, lead to theological reflection, but philosophy can help build the bridge that leads to questions that can be authoritatively answered by the Church.

Pope Leo XIII wrote, “Philosophy, if rightly made use of by the wise, in a certain way tends to smooth and fortify the road to true faith, and to prepare the souls of its disciples for the fit reception of revelation; for which reason it is well called by ancient writers sometimes a steppingstone to the Christian faith, sometimes the prelude and help of Christianity, sometimes the Gospel teacher” (Aeterni Patris, 4). Besides forming proper critical thinking skills, good philosophy creates awe and wonder.

Again, in Fides et Ratio, St. John Paul II wrote, “On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason's drive to attain goals which render people's lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life. At the same time, the Church considers philosophy an indispensable help for a deeper understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it” (5).

The only reason to believe something is that we believe that it is true. “Truth alone should imbue the minds of men” (Pope Leo XIII, Libertas, 24). If our young people want intellectual clarity and rigor, there is no greater philosophical tradition than that of Catholicism; most people, let alone youths, don’t even know that the Church highly values clear, rational thought. We should be the ones who provoke our young people to think deeper in the first place, giving them the tools to think well about the foundational questions of human existence, and then giving them the roadmap, set down by the great Catholic thinkers, that leads to the very Source of Truth and Goodness and Beauty.

ASKING FOR GOD'S HELP

ASKING FOR GOD'S HELP

Mark 1:40-42

A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees, 'If you are willing, you can make me clean.' Jesus was indignant. He reached out his hand and touched the man. 'I am willing,' he said. 'Be clean!' Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cleansed. (NIVUK)

Most people might agree that God probably could do anything.  However, the majority never ask Him.  Either they see their need as irrelevant to Him or that He is remote and therefore inaccessible.  Few believe that Jesus might be asked, or begged, to meet their need.  They simply do not believe that He would be willing to help them.  But the leper in this narrative had no such qualms.  Instead of keeping his distance and calling out 'Unclean, unclean!', to keep other people from coming close and being infected, the man came right up to Jesus, falling on both knees as a sign of reverence and submission before the Lord.  This outcast from society, barred from the temple and synagogue, friends and family, was desperate to be healed.  He broke through the religious and social boundaries to come straight to Jesus. The leprous man had no doubt that Jesus could heal him but doubted whether the Lord would want to.  The religious establishment, who were supposed to represent God, did not want to know him.  Perhaps his problem was too offensive to Jesus.  So the man begged for Jesus to respond differently to the priests and theologians.  The next sentence poses a translation difficulty.  Most later copies of this gospel use the Greek for 'Jesus was moved with compassion', but the earliest texts say 'Jesus was indignant' or '… angry'.  The common theme is that Jesus had a significant emotional reaction to the request.  Was it compassion or anger, and if the latter, where was Jesus' anger directed? Interestingly, the 'anger/indignation' word is used in Mark 1:34 as well as in John 11:33,38 where Jesus was moved with anger at the grave of Lazarus.  Righteous anger is right: it is an expression of God's wrath (Psalm 95:11) .  There was much to move the Lord Jesus Christ in the leper's request: the fact of incurable disease is offensive to the creator of perfection; the attitude of those who represented God was offensive of Jesus; the assumption that Jesus might not be interested in the man was offensive to the Son of Man who had come to seek and save the lost (Luke 19:10).  This further evidence of the work of Satan in trapping people in helpless despair stirred the Creator to undo the work of the devil (1 John 3:8).  Jesus then touched the untouchable, declared His willingness to heal and then the man's skin became normal again.    God is more than willing to make the outcast clean and the penitent will never be turned away.   Indeed, our helplessness stirs His passional response.  Although the world may laugh, crying out for help is the essential weakness that God requires in us, before He will act in strength.  That is why the desperate have more of God's blessings: they know they have nowhere else to go.  The polite circle of self-sufficiency, with which the Western world has been plagued, says that our salvation is in our own hands.  In most businesses, a divine solution to a problem is scorned as a lack of character or resolve or creative imagination.  Begging Jesus for help would be thought of as being despicably weak.   But the time will come when others will see how powerfully Jesus responds to honest helplessness; and our testimony of God's mercy will encourage others to do the same.

Powerful God. Thank You for being passionate about breaking through wrong boundaries which separate me from Your mercy. Forgive me for allowing my unworthiness to stop me seeking Your righteous help. Help me to cast off my self-sufficiency, confessing my weakness and need so that I may receive the help I need from You today. In Jesus' Name. Amen.

TRUTH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

TRUTH FOR ITS OWN SAKE

As an old man who has been a lifelong Catholic, I am (I think understandably) depressed at the moment about the condition of the Catholic Church, especially in America.  The factors that most of all make me unhappy are these two:  (a) our many remarkably incompetent bishops, and (b) our many homosexual priests and their “lavender mafia.”  Based on my study of the history of the Catholic Church, however, I am relatively confident that the Church will eventually bounce back from this awful slump.  But the bounce-back probably won’t come for a long time, and, given my age, it almost certainly won’t happen while I’m on earth to see it.  I will die an unhappy man.

I look for consolations.  One of them is that the Notre Dame Football team – which is Catholicism’s official college football team (at least my father, a devoted Catholic who never himself went to college, so considered it when I was a boy) – is having a strong winning season.  This, I take it, is a sign that God has not abandoned his Church.  I don’t go so far as to think this means that God will allow Notre Dame to beat Alabama for the national championship, for to do so he would have to disappoint many good Evangelical Protestants in the state of Alabama; and as far as I can see the Evangelicals of Alabama, despite their doctrinal deficiencies, have been in recent times more faithful Christians than the Catholics of northern and western states.

I also console myself with the thought that the official teachings of the Church, despite the apparent wishes of some German bishops, remain true to the teachings of the Apostles, the Fathers of the Church, and the Doctors of the Church.  The Nicene Creed has not been openly repudiated.

And I especially console myself with the thought that the theology of the Church has for many centuries borne a strongly Aristotelian flavour.  This is of course particularly true of the theology of Thomas Aquinas (1225-74).

One of the great shortcomings of the modern era is that we (and by “we” I mean the modern world in general) have repudiated Aristotelianism, above all Aristotle’s concept of mind (or intellect or reason – whatever you want to call it).  We have replaced it with what I suppose may be called the utilitarian concept of intellect.

According to Aristotle (384–322 BC), the highest purpose or function of intellect is to know truth.  “All men by nature want to know,” he said in the opening sentence of his Metaphysics.  According to the modern or utilitarian concept, the intellect is a tool for doing or making.  Aristotle held that knowledge is an end-in-itself.  We moderns hold that knowledge is a means to a further end, an end that is more valuable than knowledge itself.

The modern view was perhaps best summed up by Karl Marx (1818-83) when he said in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”  In the United States, the thinker who did the most to explain and defend this modern view of intellect was John Dewey (1859-1952) in his philosophy of Instrumentalism.

For Aristotle, the mind and the universe were made for one another.  Mind is a faculty that has the potential for understanding the universe, and the universe is an entity (or a system of entities) that has the potential for being understood by mind. Mind reaches its fulfilment in understanding extra-mental reality, and the universe reaches its fulfilment in being understood by mind. The wedding of the two is the ultimate point of reality.

Not so for us moderns.  For us, the intellect is a useful tool.  And a marvellous tool it has been.  Not only did it enable us to survive as a species, as Charles Darwin (1809-82) pointed out; but in the last few centuries it has, in its function as tool, done amazing things, godlike things.  Our science-based technology has transformed the world in a million ways, most of them (but not all) genuinely beneficial.  These transformations have taken place not just directly in the obvious spheres (medicine, transportation, communications) but indirectly in social spheres (economics, politics, psychology, social equality, sexual relations).

This modern idea that knowledge should be pursued, not for its own sake but for the sake of good things beyond knowledge, has even benefited the pursuit of knowledge.  In the old pre-modern days, science was a plaything for super-smart people who didn’t have to work for a living, people like Aristotle, Aquinas, Galileo, and Newton.  Ordinary people didn’t mind if super-smart people liked having fun that way.  We were tolerant of harmless scientists. But once we figured out that scientists were making discoveries that allowed engineers to create useful and pleasant things, we decided to devote lots of money to science, private philanthropic money and public taxpayer money – so as to multiply the number of scientists and the number of useful discoveries.

But if I’m somebody who believes that truth is not a thing of value for its own sake, then it will be quite logical for me to conclude that lies are allowable provided these lies seem likely to produce beneficial results.  Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany have been the most striking examples of that kind of “utilitarian” lying.

We Americans have not been immune to this kind of thing.  Politics, of course, has always been replete with lies, but I have the impression that it’s getting worse.  Maybe I’m wrong; I hope so.  But wherever I turn to national politics, no matter which party I look at, I seem to see falsehood running wild.

That’s one of the reasons I hope Catholicism soon recovers from its present corruption – so that the world will once again be safe for at least a few Aristotelians, people who believe in truth for its own sake.

DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED VISIONS

Two Diametrically Opposed Visions

In a lyrical essay originally published in Crisis Magazine, Catholic philosopher and Senior Fellow of Human Life International, Donald DeMarco, Ph.D., poignantly paints the stark division between the pro-life worldview, and the worldview espoused by the Culture of Death. Invoking T.S. Eliot’s seminal poem The Waste Land, Dr. DeMarco suggests that Eliot captured the essential characteristics of the Culture of Death.

In such a culture, death is presumed to have the final say, and as such is the measure of all things: life leads to death, and then no more. Given this, life is suffused with a sense of bleak hopelessness, a “tale told by an idiot…etc.” Children – the most tangible sign of a society’s hope for and investment in the future – are a thing to be prevented through contraception, sexuality is reduced to the tawdry and transactional, suicide ever lurks on the peripheries, and beauty and fertility appear as things painful and threatening (“April is the cruellest month.”).

Against this bleak pessimism, Dr. DeMarco sets up the testimony of an array of poets who saw beneath even the worst of life’s struggles and sorrows a rich ore of beauty and meaning, and who celebrated life. Often inspired by the Christian gospel, they presumed that resurrection, and not death, is reality’s final word, and that the apparent tragedy of death is but a preparation for resurrection. Death’s finality is only an apparent finality. “Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not the goal,” exclaimed Longfellow.

“The label ‘pro-life’ hardly begins to do justice to the rich poetic expressions of life,” concluded Dr. DeMarco. “Yet ‘the fine art of Life,’ as the contemporary poet, Edwin Leibreed has said, ‘is to make another Soul vibrate with a song of joy.’ God is the author and paragon of life, which, in its pilgrim form, becomes a challenge, an adventure, a sublime and luminous possession, a great gift, an inexhaustible treasure, and the way to heaven. We should live out our lives with the full understanding of how infinitely valuable life is.”

The Richness of the Term “Pro-Life”

I admit that such speculations can seem somewhat far removed from the pragmatic political purpose that the label “pro-life” was designed to serve. I am sympathetic to the argument that we ought not excessively to broaden the meaning of the term “pro-life,” so that it no longer immediately testifies to our opposition to the deliberate slaughter of unborn children. There is a risk that by meaning everything, the term “pro-life” will come to mean nothing. And indeed, we have seen some in the “liberal” wing of the Church attempt to co-opt the term to serve their own questionable political purposes.

On the other hand, the pro-life movement and its founders and shapers selected the term “pro-life” in part precisely because they recognized that the battle against baby-killing is not just a battle against this one particular form of evil, but against a whole worldview – a worldview that, in some real way, favours and celebrates death. I am not one of those who necessarily gets offended if someone refers to me as an “anti-abortion activist.” I most certainly am someone who is against abortion, and there is nothing shameful about that. Indeed, it is a badge of honour. On the other hand, I do lay claim to the admittedly more imprecise “pro-life” label, precisely because my opposition to abortion is an expression of a more comprehensive worldview that not only precludes the killing of innocent unborn babies, but also rejects the spiritual and psychological root causes that would lead anyone to desire to kill innocent unborn babies in the first place!

More than anyone else, St. Pope John Paul II pointed towards the common thread uniting the abortion holocaust to other forms of evil in our modern world, including not just the direct attacks on life itself, but attacks against the moral truths and societal structures designed to protect life: above all the moral truths pertaining to sexuality, and the structure of the family. The abortion holocaust is only one manifestation of this Culture of Death. The Culture of Life, on the other hand, is one in which the absence of abortion is merely the natural outflowing of a radically life-affirming worldview.

If Dr. DeMarco’s description of the pro-life worldview seemed excessively poetic, consider this alternately gorgeous and chilling passage from St. Pope John Paul II’s homily on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1993:

This marvellous world – so loved by the Father that he sent his only Son for its salvation (Cfr. Io 3,17) – is the theatre of a never-ending battle being waged for our dignity and identity as free, spiritual beings. This struggle parallels the apocalyptic combat described in the First Reading of this Mass. Death battles against Life: a “culture of death” seeks to impose itself on our desire to live, and live to the full. There are those who reject the light of life, preferring “the fruitless works of darkness” (Eph 5,11). Their harvest is injustice, discrimination, exploitation, deceit, violence. In every age, a measure of their apparent success is the death of the Innocents. In our own century, as at no other time in history, the “culture of death” has assumed a social and institutional form of legality to justify the most horrible crimes against humanity: genocide, “final solutions”, “ethnic cleansings”, and the massive “taking of lives of human beings even before they are born, or before they reach the natural point of death.”

The sainted pope took the same approach in his deservedly famous pro-life encyclical Evangelium Vitae. That incisive exploration of the cultures of life and death is framed within an initial discussion of the profound value and dignity and destiny of human life. Compared with the subsequent ethical analyses of specific moral acts such as abortion, euthanasia, artificial reproductive techniques, etc., this discussion may seem excessively abstract. But St. Pope John Paul II knew that just as laws are downstream from culture, so is culture downstream from theology. A Culture of Life cannot and will not begin merely with the correct laws, as important as they are. It can only flow out from the correct theological and metaphysical principles: our concepts of God and man.

“Man is called to a fullness of life which far exceeds the dimensions of his earthly existence,” he writes at the beginning of Evangelium Vitae, “because it consists in sharing the very life of God.”

The loftiness of this supernatural vocation reveals the greatness and the inestimable value of human life even in its temporal phase. Life in time, in fact, is the fundamental condition, the initial stage and an integral part of the entire unified process of human existence. It is a process which, unexpectedly and undeservedly, is enlightened by the promise and renewed by the gift of divine life, which will reach its full realization in eternity (cf. 1 Jn 3:1-2). At the same time, it is precisely this supernatural calling which highlights the relative character of each individual’s earthly life. After all, life on earth is not an “ultimate” but a “penultimate” reality; even so, it remains a sacred reality entrusted to us, to be preserved with a sense of responsibility and brought to perfection in love and in the gift of ourselves to God and to our brothers and sisters.

The Bleak Culture of Death

How vastly different is this transcendent optimism from the bleak pessimism of various popular philosophies that have so enamoured and ensnared so many minds in the past century: the nihilism that proclaimed that God is dead and that life holds no meaning; the existentialism that proclaimed that meaning is something that humans futilely wrest from a fundamentally “absurd” universe; the communism that eschewed hope in a transcendental paradise and that murdered over a hundred million people in the name of creating an earthly one; the fascism that proclaimed the value of the master race and the worthlessness of all others; the eugenics that proclaimed the dominance of the “fit” and the worthlessness of the “unfit.” And on and on.

Our own age is still haunted by the spectres of each of these hopeless ideologies, and many others created since. Indeed, one is astonished, at times, at the extent to which simple, wholesome, fruitful, productive, happy normalcy is looked down upon and scorned as “old-fashioned” and unsophisticated, while all manner of hopelessness, sterility, deviancy, and bleakness are openly celebrated as the only “sophisticated” and praise-worthy things.

I think it safe to say that we saw this dynamic played out in the recent election. There are, no doubt, many things that one could criticize about the Republican Party as it exists today. And yet, it is difficult to wrap one’s head around the furious apostolic zeal with which the Democratic Party systematically advocates things destructive, evil, and hopeless. Whatever one thinks of the national spectacle that was the nomination hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, there is no doubt in my mind that a great deal of the irrational hysteria manifested in much of the media coverage and in public protests was directly traceable to one issue: abortion. The Democratic Party has openly and explicitly committed itself to defending the right to kill – murder – unborn babies in just about any imaginable circumstance and for just about any reason. With the nomination of Kavanaugh, Democrats were petrified that their fabricated Constitutional “right” to abortion would be taken from them, and no measures were too extreme to prevent that from happening.

Recently the Trump administration reported its intent to return to the scientific, text-book definition of “sex” – contrary to the Obama administration’s novel use of an entirely subjective definition – was greeted with outrageous claims that Trump was “erasing” the existence of transgender people. This was only the most recent indicating that the Democratic party has wholly allied itself with an extremist, tyrannical and tawdry conception of LGBT ideology and sexual ethics, in which objective scientific truth is subordinated to subjective feelings; in which no age is too young to introduce children to gross sexual immorality (i.e. drag queens reading to children at public libraries); in which the nuclear family is perceived as an oppressive and outmoded institution to be replaced with fluid “open” and “polyamorous” unions; in which vast public spectacles are devoted to celebrating anonymous, unnatural, sterile, promiscuous sex; in which the quiet pleasures of true romance and life-long commitment are subordinated to the unmitigated, hedonic search for pleasure; and in which even gentle expressions of conscientious opposition are to be subject to crushing retribution.

We are told that all these things are to be accepted in the name of “tolerance” and “love” and “freedom.” But in truth, one finds little of any of these among their advocates. On the other hand, when I attend pro-life events such as the “March for Life” in Washington, D.C., I always find a super-abundance of all three. Rather than the vulgar outrage that characterizes so many pro-abortion events, at the March for Life one finds a hopeful, joyful optimism. There are families. There are children. There is an abundance of common decency. And this is because most pro-life activists are not merely against abortion, but because their opposition to abortion is the natural outflowing of a wholly different worldview. Even if they do not realize it, they are giving voice to a fundamental metaphysical conviction that life is stronger than death, and not the other way around. Death is not the bleak conclusion of all things, but rather the prelude to resurrection.

To be pro-life then, most certainly involves conscientious, explicit activism targeted at ending abortion, and all other systematic attacks on human life in our society. However, it also involves witnessing to what St. Pope John Paul II called the Gospel of Life, without which our pro-life efforts are doomed to long-term failure. In addition to pro-life activism, the lay faithful are called to deeply culturally transformative activities such as building a community of loving families, providing an authentic Christian presence in the world rooted in prayer and contemplation, charitable service and evangelization, artistic and liturgical renewal, etc.

The laity’s life is called to integrate all activities into one meaningful whole – to give witness in the ordinary of one’s day in an extraordinary manner. The Culture of Death feeds off an anti-Gospel. The only truly long-lasting antidote to this anti-Gospel is the true Gospel, and the instantiation of that Gospel as a lived reality in our daily lives, by which the culture is transformed from a Culture of Death to a Culture of Life from the very roots up.

SAINTS AND PURGATORY

The Saints tell us what Purgatory is actually like

 

More painful than anything on earth, and yet more peaceful than anywhere but Heaven.

In her official teaching, the Church doesn’t say much about what Purgatory is actually like, but from the writings of saints and theologians, there’s much we can learn.

1- It’s a place of intense suffering and joy. St. Catherine of Genoa, who is said to have suffered the pain of purgatory on earth, claimed “there is in purgatory as much pain as in hell” (Treatise on Purgatory). Like the damned, souls there suffer hunger for the God they don’t yet see—like a man who could live without eating, hungering more and more for the bread he doesn’t have (to use St. Catherine’s image). And they suffer from fire that “will be more painful than anything man can suffer in the present life” (St. Augustine, On Psalm 37:3).

Once St. Catherine of Ricci is said to have suffered 40 days for a soul in Purgatory—when a novice touched her hand, she remarked, “Mother, you are burning!”

At the same time, St. Catherine of Genoa also taught, “Souls in purgatory unite great joy with great suffering … No peace is comparable to that of the souls in purgatory, except that of the saints in heaven.”

There’s a mysterious ebb and flow of pain and joy in Purgatory, says the Dominican Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, because the suffering is temporary and leads to heaven: The more the soul loves God, the more it suffers not seeing Him; the more if suffers, the more joy and love it has in drawing closer to God.

2- It’s a place of cleansing and mercy. Remember the parable about the man who came to the king’s marriage feast without a wedding garment? (Matthew 22:1-14) The wedding garment is the life of grace we need to enter the feast of heaven. Now imagine a twist: The man comes wearing his garment, but it’s all soiled. What would the king say? Maybe something like: “Nothing unclean shall enter” (Revelation 21:27).

In the Old Testament, Judas Maccabeus had his men pray for the deceased and requested that a sin offering be made for them: “Therefore he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.” (2 Maccabees 12:43) This presupposes a place of purification after death—Purgatory.

Many Church Fathers think St. Paul alluded to Purgatory when he wrote about building on the foundation of Jesus with gold or silver, wood or straw:  “The fire will test what sort of work each one has done … If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:13, 15). Wood and straw didn’t fare well for the three pigs—but God, in His mercy, doesn’t demand gold!  

That’s a good thing, because Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says, “Souls that completely escape all purgatory are probably rather rare. Among the good religious whom St. Teresa knew, only three had completed their purgatory on earth” (Life Everlasting., p. 194).  

3- It’s a place to avoid. Nevertheless, it can be avoided, and the saints have repeatedly encouraged us to make our Purgatory on earth.

Fr. Paul O’Sullivan gives the following advice for avoiding Purgatory (How to Avoid Purgatory):

• avoid sin
• do penance
• accept suffering
• frequent confession and Communion
• pray with faith and perseverance
• prepare for death: “Eternal Father, from this day forward, I accept with a joyful and resigned heart the death it will please You to send me, with all its pains and sufferings.”
• gain indulgences

It’s advice that makes saints … even in this life. As Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange reminds us: Attaining sanctity on earth is possible—and normal—for everyone.