20100517 Question: Celibate Priests

11: Celibate Priesthood... Why?

11. First, to define the word celibate: celibate means "unmarried." It does not simply mean "single;" rather it signifies that someone has chosen to give up the goods of marriage and all it entails in order to serve more devotedly a higher cause. When a man chooses to accept the gift of celibacy, he is choosing to love the Church as Christ loved the Church, with his whole life. There are arguments from Scripture and history that point to a married priesthood in the early centuries A.D., and they are correct. As one sees in the Eastern Churches (Orthodox and Catholic), a married priesthood has existed for centuries. What is sometimes forgotten is that, for the first several centuries A.D., if a married man were to become a priest or bishop, he and his wife would be expected to be continent, meaning abstaining from sexual relations. While this discipline lasted for a substantial period of time, the Churches saw that it was not going to be tenable in the long term. In the East, the Churches eased the practice of continence for parish priests except for Sundays and Holy Days, but transitioned to a rule of celibacy for bishops, after the pattern of monastics. In the West, the Church judged that it was best for the good of the faithful that their priests maintain that single-minded devotion; therefore, they chose to augment the rule of continence with a promise of celibacy in order to remove the obstacle of married life. Each of these paths has their own difficulties, but it should be noted that since the initial conflict over clerical celibacy, evangelization has flourished in the Latin rite (the West). In fact, the "Western" Church has now been in Russia, the Far East, India, Western and Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, Indochina, and the South Pacific in addition to Europe and all of the Americas. Some may posit other arguments, but I think the devotion to things above that a celibate must have has been a central principle in the spreading of the Gospel to nearly every known people of the world. If you want to discuss any particular Scripture passage, just reply or comment.

20100510 Question: Mary

10: Mary...

10. Concerns regarding the relationship between Catholics and Mary generally revolve around a few key issues: 1) Do Catholics worship Mary? 2) Why do Catholics believe that Mary never sinned? 3) Is it not better to give attention to Jesus rather than Mary?

These are all very good questions. With regards to the first question, the simple answer is "No."

1) Catholics do not worship Mary. All aspects of religion are not necessarily worship. Many Christians, for example, choose to abstain from work on Sunday in order to observe the Lord's command to keep the Sabbath holy. Also, studying Scripture and leading a moral life are aspects of Christian life that are not worship per se. For many Protestant communities, the meaning of worship has been distorted so as to be roughly equivalent to prayer, singing, or listening to a sermon. Catholics remember the history of our Salvation from the beginning of time and what Christ showed us upon the Cross: "worship" means "sacrifice." The word "prayer" bears the meaning "asking for a favor," which does not of itself entail worship, otherwise, we would be worshiping our neighbors whenever we are in need of a cup of sugar. Singing does not of itself entail worship; otherwise we would be worshiping every child to whom we ever sung "Happy Birthday." Study or listening to lectures certainly does not of itself entail worship; otherwise most of us would have spent a fair portion of our lives worshiping dinosaurs or ponies. We, as Catholic Christians, ask Mary to pray for us to God, to join us in worshiping Him, and to lead us into a deeper imitation of His Ways. We sing of the holiness and virtue of Mary because, as the first and most loyal disciple of Jesus, she provided for us such a great example. We study and seek to know more of Mary because, after all, it is from her that Our Lord drew His sacred humanity. For us Catholic Christians, no matter how much we may admire Mary, we offer spiritual sacrifice to one God alone--the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2) God the Son received His human nature from Mary. That nature needed to be without stain of sin, Original or personal. We know that the merits of Christ's sacrifice (i.e. forgiveness of sin) could be applied to points earlier in history because we saw just such a thing with the prophets Isaiah, who was purified from sin by a heavenly ember, and Elijah, who was assumed into Heaven. Given the angel's greeting to Mary in the Gospel according to Luke, "Hail, she-who-has-been-graced," which is absent her name and wholly unique in all of Biblical history, we are led to see that she must have been blessed in some way that separates her from the rest of humanity. What might this singular grace have been that she had even before conceiving the Lord? Once we recognize that Mary was uniquely blessed among all humanity and remember that she is the source of Jesus' sinless human nature, it becomes obvious that the two are related and that that singular blessing is that the forgiveness won by Christ on the Cross was applied to Mary at her conception that she might be forever without sin, a new Eve who can remain sinless next to the new Adam who would die for our sins rather than sin Himself.

3) Lastly, of course, worshiping Jesus the Christ is better than speaking about Mary. The real question is, "Why do you have to choose?" Worshiping God is better than hugging your Grandma, but that doesn't mean it's not good to do both. Like it or not, if Christ is the head of the Church and we are members of His Body, Mary is also our mother. While she can never replace Our Lord, not by a long shot, she does deserve a great deal of respect and love, and we would be doing wrong by her and by Jesus to ignore her or speak ill of her.

20100426 Question: Biblical Angels

4: If the Bible names four angels and there are millions, how do we know the names of more?

4. The Bible names a fair bit more than just four. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are all in there. And we can read Death as possibly being an angel. Lucifer (the devil, Satan, the adversary) is also named, as are many other demons, but we needn't go into all that. Names are given to angels in other non-Scriptural writings from both the Old Testament and New Testament periods (and later times as well). Again, these are not articles of faith but traditional tools in religious writings.