Oneness Word Games

 In his book All in the Name, Mark McNeil discusses a word game that his old Oneness Pentecostal pastor would play in an effort to "gotcha" Trinitarians over John 1:1:

My Oneness pastor would often explain this text by asking, "Who is your God?" If you answered, "The Trinity," he then read John 1:1, inserting the word "the Trinity" each time the word "God" appears... This reading is [apparently] problematic for Trinitarians since it suggests the Word is something other than or outside of the Trinity, yet at the same time, identical to the Trinity. If we say, on the other hand, that the Word (or Son) was with the Father thereby interpreting the first use of "God" as a reference to the Father, he then suggested [that the Word or Son was the Father]....The Oneness solution is that the Word is simply an aspect of God, the divine plan or thought, and therefore can be said, rather poetically, to be with God but, at the same time, is, as an aspect of God, God. {pp. 65-66}

There is a problem here. I should say that, before addressing my thought on this, Mr. McNeil does a fine job of answering this in his book. I would add this comment: what is sauce for the goose becomes sauce for the gander. That is to say, I notice some equivocation in the Oneness explanation which is not allowed for the Trinitarians. After all, I could simply substitute "Jesus" for "God", as the Oneness Pentecostals do in claiming that Jesus is the one true name of the one true God. Now the Word is with (outside of, per their reading of "The Trinity") Jesus, and the Word is Jesus. If we allow the "poetic" reading, that "The Word" is Jesus divine plan, and yet that this divine plan is in some sense Jesus (e.g. we pivot to, say, the Incarnation). This is a neat interpretation, but it requires use to ask, as a former US President asked, what the meaning of the word "is" is.

As C.S. Lewis notes, there are different uses of the word "is," and they are not all equivalent. To say that God is love is not the same as to same that love is God--and indeed, the latter interpretation can have some rather disastrous effects. I would agree with the Oneness statement that the Incarnation "is" God, in that in Jesus Christ we have two natures--one human, one divine--which are united. Thus, Jesus is God. However, it is an entirely different use of the word "is" to say that the Incarnation was with God from the beginning, or to say that God was ("is" past tense) incarnate with a body and human nature from the beginning* (and, we know that Jesus' body changed in time, as He was born, grew, was tormented, dies, was resurrected). If we mean instead that this plan "is" with (outside of) God from the beginning, but also "is" God in the second sense (that is, God is present in the Incarnation), we have to the ask why "The Word" (divine plan) took on flesh and dwelt among us, as opposed to simply saying that "God took on flesh and dwelt among us." In some sense, this latter interpretation is what the Arians and semi-Arians were claiming.

It follows that there is no reason to force an interpretation which says that "with" means outside of (the Trinity), or alternatively that the second use of God must be identified with the first. After all, the Oneness solution requires that we equivocate on the meaning of "is." We could as easily read this to mean, "The Word was with [the other Persons of] the Trinity, and the Word was [a Person of] the Trinity," or "The Word was with God [the Father], and the Word was God [the Son]."

____

*We would say here that God united his divine nature to human nature: rather than gaining or adding to His nature a human one, he instead added/united His divine nature to a human one so that a man has now also a divine nature.

Three Errors About the Trinity

 The stated belief of most Christians is that God is a Trinity: three distinct persons united as one God. Thus, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. The Father is not the Son, the Sone is not the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit is not the Father (nor vice-verse). Catholics would add that this is a mystery: we can know that this is true, it has been revealed to us as true through Tradition and the Church's teaching authority. Most other Christians--C.S. Lewis' "Mere Christians" (whether Protestant, Orthodox, Anglican, or other ecclesial communities) would agree with these ideas; they might say with Peter Kreeft that while we cannot fully understand the Trinity, it makes the most sense out of the data (truths about God revealed to us, e.g. in Scripture).

There are, nonetheless, several errors about the Trinity, a few of which have appeared in one form or another as being among the larger and more widespread or pernicious of heresies. I want to mention three such errors in this post.

The first error is that the Trinity is a belief in three different Gods. Thus, a form of polytheism. This error would make God less than all-powerful, all-good, and all-knowing, as the three Gods might strive against each other: a three-person version of the early Gnostic and Manichaen heresies. I don't think that this error is especially common in a formal sense (it quickly becomes untenable), but it may be materially present in the ways that many Christians (Catholic or otherwise) interact with God practically.

The second error is that there are not indeed three persons, but only three modalities, three ways in which God presents Himself to us (or, more insidiously--three ways in which God has presented Himself to us...so far!). This error is Modalism or Sabellianism (the latter named after the third-century bishop who taught this idea, largely in response to other errors of his day). Modern days "Oneness" Pentecostals embrace a version of this error, and it perhaps will be making its way through the "Holiness" Pentecostal ranks by contact osmosis. Pentecostalism is one of the fastest growing Christian sects, and Oneness Pentecostals are themselves growing rapidly as a sect. Among other things, they teach that Jesus is God's name, and that Father, Son, Holy Spirit are different offices of the one God named Jesus*; this is analogous to how most Mere Christians would consider God as Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. As a consequence, the Oneness Pentecostals do not baptize using a Trinitarian formula ("I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit"). 

The third error is related to the first: there are three divine persons, but they are not coequal. Hence, the Father might be greater than the Son and the Spirit. All three are divine and participate in being God, but not all three to an equal degree. The pagan Plotinus taught a version of this in conceiving of a divine trinity, and one of the great heresies--Arianism and its offshoots--likewise allowed for Christ to be divine yet lesser that the Father.

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*It seems odd to me that God's "true" name means "YHWH is Salvation" or "God is Deliverance," since this means that God's true name (and hence nature) is thus dependent on the existence of an other to save.

Corrective Thomism

Ten or fifteen years ago, had you asked me about what kind of philosopher I was, I might have replied "I'm a Thomist" or maybe (more modestly but also more accurately) "I'm an amateur Thomist." Today, if you asked me the same question and I was in a reflective enough state of mind to answer rightly, I might reply that I am a "corrective Thomist."

What I mean by this response is not that I am a particular type of Thomist, e.g. a neo-Thomist or a scholastic-Thomist or an Aristotelian-Thomist; rather, I look to St. Thomas* to help correct my philosophy when I become aware of disagreement or error between us. The same may be said of my theology, in some sense. Thus, I need not know everything that St. Thomas teaches as a philosopher or as a theologian; I need not even agree with everything I do know of what he teaches--but when I encounter a disagreement, I try to take it very seriously and to discover whether this means I have an error in either my reasoning or the principles, axioms, or evidence from which I reason. Saint Thomas was not infallible, of course, but when I encounter a disagreement between us, I may then suspect that my conclusions are on less stable ground than I might have previously supposed.

Thus, I do ask at times "What would St. Thomas conclude here?" as a means of approaching what is likely true in this case.

I suppose that in another sense, my theology might be said to be "corrective Catholic." I strive to think as the Church does, often miss the mark, but take the teachings of the Church to be corrective in such a way that if I am made aware that there is a disagreement between what I believe and what the Church teaches, then I need to stop and discover where I have gone astray. Is the disagreement in conclusion running afoul of an actual dogma, of a doctrine, or merely of a pious opinion? Even the lattermost of these should give me some pause.

There is, indeed, one more important question still: what does God say is true here? What might the Father reveal? What might Jesus, the Son, teach? To what conclusion may the Holy Spirit lead me**?

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*Primarily, St. Thomas, but there are other reliable guides of course. He draws on many of them, and other stand upon his shoulders in turn.

**As a faithful Catholic, I would note that the Holy Spirit primarily leads us through the Church, offering the most direct correctives through the Church's infallible dogmas.

Monsignor Pope on the Spiritual Works of Mercy

Monsignor Charles Pope has a nice reflection on his blog about the spiritual works of mercy. Excerpt:

We tend to reduce charity to caring for people’s bodies, forgetting the needs of their souls. Indeed this oversight often proves self-defeating, since many of the corporal works of mercy become necessary because of defects of the soul. Some (not all) are imprisoned, poor, hungry, thirsty, naked, and so forth as a result of deep spiritual issues in their lives or in the wider culture. Yet so easily we overlook these spiritual issues....

Sadly, we often consider that our care for the poor has been accomplished by having provided clothing, shelter, or food. It is astonishing that we almost never even ask them to come to church or to listen to a sermon. In the old days at the old gospel mission downtown, or the Salvation Army soup kitchen, or the Catholic cafeteria and shelter, the poor who filed in were often expected to listen to a sermon, receive some Christian instruction, and surely to pray before the distribution of the meal or before bed at the shelter. This is rarely true today and most Catholic outreaches to the poor are almost indistinguishable from those of the government or nonbelievers. I pray you know of exceptions and will inform me of them, but the general pattern is very secular and corporal in its focus....

We think we are done when we have handed out the Christmas baskets. But where will most of the poor, whom we have blessed with this food and these toys, be going to church for the Christmas feast? Most of them, I can tell you from experience, are not going anywhere; they don’t belong to any church. And this is often part of the problem. Quite simply, many of them are disconnected from the wider community including the Church.

One thing which the old Baltimore (or Penny) Catechism did nicely was emphasize the fact that we are creature possessed of both body and soul. It follows that we must care for both body and soul--but the more important of the two is the soul. Thus, the spiritual works of mercy are the more important set of works. Feeding a hungry man and quenching his thirst may help him to live another day in this life; but offering him correction and counsel can help to sustain his soul into the next life.

Obviously, both are needed--but if we only offer food and drink and clothing and shelter, without offering community or fraternal correction or the consolations of faith, then we are showing kindness but not really love.

Living Martyrs

"Many men and women in the history of our Church have been willing to die for their faith. The deaths of these martyrs inspired people to believe that there is more than this life. Giving their lives was a tremendous form of evangelization. They died for the sake of the kingdom to come. However, in this day and age, we need people who are willing to live for their faith."
John R Woods, Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Mission: 5 Steps to Winning the War Within.

Yesterday I posted that I had found a couple of insights from Dr. Wood's book, and shared one of them. This is another. I sometimes wonder if we live in a despairing age which at times makes the error of romanticizing martyrdom via death at the expense of other forms of martyrdom (the word basically means "witnessing," and so there are other forms of this than literally dying for one's faith). Martyrdom via death only has some effect because this life is worth living, and because while our hope is for something in the next life, it must be lived in this life.

Being eager to die in this life--welcoming death so that we can be rid of this life--is not martyrdom, but rather is spiritual suicide.

Redemptive Suffering

The men's group at my old parish has a tradition (if it can be called that--they've done it every year since their formation 3 or 4 years ago) of buying many copies of a book of spiritual and religious nature for the men of the parish. This year, the book is John R. Wood's Ordinary Lives, Extraordinary Mission: 5 Steps to Winning the War Within. I've nearly finished reading it--it's not the greatest book ever written, but it's not bad and it is generally sound and practical in approach--and I have gained at least a couple of interesting insights from it.

One of these is a nice "connection of the dots" concerning the Catholic practice and piety around "redemptive suffering." By this, I mean the pious belief that we can unite our suffering to Christ's and that, when so united, this suffering can have some redemptive effects. The idea is that we "offer it up," that is, offer up the suffering in our daily lives as a sacrifice to God, for the salvation of souls.

Here is the relevant passage from the book:

"In Colossians 1:24-26, Saint Paul writes, 'Now I rejoice in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, the church, of which I am a minister in accordance with God's stewardship given to me to complete for you the word of God, the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.' This almost sounds like heresy. Is Saint Paul saying that Christ's passion and death are missing something? Absolutely not. Christ redeemed the sins of generations past, present, and future. Saint Paul is telling us that we're the body of Christ. When we unite our suffering to Christ's suffering, we too can help save souls. This union is key. Here is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains it: 'Suffering, a consequence of original sin, acquires a new meaning; it becomes a participation in the saving work of Jesus.' (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1521)"

The concept of redemptive suffering is therefore rooted in the in the idea that we are Christ's body, and that therefore what we suffer as members of His body, He suffers (see also Matthew 25:31-46 and 1 Corinthians 12:12-27). Christ's suffering is completed, final, once-and-for-all, yet is is also being completed in our lives. Another way of looking at this is that suffering is a necessary consequence of Original Sin, not merely as punishment, but rather as redemption. Our suffering is not just an arbitrary punishment meted out by God, but instead it is Christ's suffering echoed in our lives* because we are members of His body. He suffered because we suffer, but on the other hand we are suffering because He has suffered.


*Or Christ's suffering anticipated by those who came before His Incarnation.

Annulment and Material Adultery

The news surrounding the upcoming "Synod on the Family" has generated a lot of discussion, and not only in the Catholic blogosphere. I will not even remotely attempt to link to all of it--from the seeming feud between Cardinals Burke and Kasper (and their respective supporters and detractors) over permitting divorced Catholics to remarry to questions about (and confusion concerning) the annulment process (and the various proposed changes to it), this synod does seem to be generating more than the usual amount of buzz.

Because they do more than just rehash the argument over what is and isn't in Canon Law (and what can or should be changed about it), the posts by the Zippy Catholic on the matter caught my attention. In particular, he mentions (and not for the first time) one of the inadvertant side-effects of annulment: that when an annulment is improperly determined, it then makes accidental adulterers of the spouses when they remarry:

Modern annulment practice is unique in the history of the Church, inasmuch as it treats a possible sacramental irregularity – based on purely subjective considerations – as a two way street. It doesn’t provide a way forward, it provides a way backward, in the name of a false ‘mercy’. This is terribly unfair in a way in which carrying out the death penalty without objective third-party evidence would be terribly unfair. Errors in death penalty cases result in killing the innocent; errors in ‘internal forum’ annulment cases turn various people (including innocent ‘spouses’, past and future) into material adulterers. This is just the very modern phenomenon of turning doubt or ignorance into an eighth sacrament: it pretends that mercy means letting people stew in objective evil with no real way out. 

This is further clarified in an earlier post of his (linked in the original text of the quote):

One of the reasons that the annulment process should be very rigorous, and should err very strongly on the side of declining to invalidate a marriage, is that if the tribunal makes a mistake – and as a juridical institution it is certainly liable to do so – the resulting annulment and ‘remarriage’ turns the parties into material adulterers. This is a gross injustice against everyone involved, and most especially against any “new” spouse not previously married.

Actually, it has long since occurred to me that there is a second effect of annulments, albeit one which cannot be avoided via reform. An annulment confirms that a particular given marriage was not sacramentally valid from its beginning. But this means that the couple which attempted to consummate their non-marriage would, in fact, be material fornicators in a sacramental (though not a civil) sense. This may not be so grievous as the material adulterors created under Zippy's scenario, fornication being less materially grave than adultery in any event, but it is nevertheless a side-effect of a null marriage.

The End of Man

Q. "Why did God make you?
A. "God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."

There was a time when we knew this from memory and had internalized it. It was a rote answer, yet for many people it nevertheless came form the heart.  Now it's been forgotten--or worse, pushed aside--with the result being that life has become fleeting yet endless.

Man was made to be happy, was made for love; and on the other hand, to seek truth, to know. Happiness is found in meaning, love is found in truth. In abandoning this simple wisdom, and in turning away from God, man loses not only truth and meaning, but also ultimately knowledge, happiness, love, and indeed his very identity, his very soul.

We cannot find any of these things ultimately in the world. We catch glimpses of them, in temporary, incomplete, and imperfect forms: so many reflections as in a glass. In turning away from God, we turn away from that which we are seeking, that which makes us happy, or wise, or really loving. We substitute purpose for meaning for end, and kindness for charity for love, with the result that even kindness seems bitter, and our purposes seem empty and contrived.

Bottuming Out

Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to return the the case of Joseph Bottum, and his surrender on the issue of "gay marriage." It's been about a week since I last wrote on this. I've tried to be fair to him in this space, though some would say I've failed. So be it.

And, to be really fair, he's caved to the secular culture in just one real (public) front of the culture war, and that a front which many consider lost. He himself considers it lost, though to read his long and rambling post on Commonweal, to say nothing of his briefer rebuttal to the early responses on facebook, one would come to the conclusion that it is a fight not worth winning. Others among his defenders have said so and in roughly so many words: and this is a large part of why we appear to be losing this particular fight.

Many people, including many Christians in general (who should probably know better) and many Catholic in particular (who should definitely know better) consider our efforts against legal recognition of "gay marriage" to be a waste. This is certain, and it's been stated. Less certain, by really not in much doubt in my mind, is that many consider the effort a waste because they want to see "gay marriage" become a reality, and not merely because they think the fight is using up political and moral capital which could be better spent elsewhere.

Elsewhere tends to be vague: it may be on the very important issues of fighting abortion, or the culture of death in general, or of poverty, or what-have-you. Anywhere else.

The thing is, the two reasons for giving up on this issue look too much alike. "Spend political and moral capital elsewhere" might be advice you'd give a friend because you want to see him succeed elsewhere, but it might as easily be a ruse to get him to stop fighting a fight which you don't want him to win. And reading through Mr Bottum's essay, I notice that while the words mostly say the former, the tone of the thing seems to say the latter. If this is reading too much into Mr Bottom's essay, it is certainly not overreading the sympathetic defenses of that essay, some of which have said in so many words that fighting against "gay marriage" is not a good fight (if a losing one):

"I just also happen to agree with Joseph Bottum, that the fight over gay civil marriage is not the good fight we should be fighting....Attempting to stop legalized gay civil marriage because of the “grave threat” it poses seems disingenuous, not just to gay people but to everyone. Even to me."

This reads a lot closer to "stop fighting, because I don't want to risk your winning" than to "stop fighting, you're wasting energy here that could be spent on a winnable battle." Many of these essays read like the "gay marriage" equivalent of "personally, pro-life, but politically pro-choice" which provided cover to Catholics who didn't want a pro-life victory (of any sort).

Perhaps they're meant to read this way, and perhaps not.

The fact that so many of them do does give us a clue as to why the reaction against Mr Bottum was so harsh. Some of the posts are downright vitriolic, and many comments look like they come from Two Minutes' Hate. Many more posts were (or attempted to be) charitable but blunt. Only a scant handful were the least bit tactful (I'll admit, I didn't particularly worry about tact here). Such is how the internet (and beyond) often reads, but this felt a little different.

I suspect that the reason is because those of us who still try to fight the good fight in a loosing battle feel more than a little betrayed by Mr Bottum. As mark Shea put it, he sold out, but only after explaining (as if to placate his own conscience) that he never really believed in this cause to begin with. But he didn't just leave the battlefield gracefully: he sold us out, he attempts to sabotage teh efforts of those who remain (or so it seems).

Intentional or otherwise, he became a traitor of sorts, every bit as much as Mr Doug Kmiec became a traitor who sold out prolifers during the 2008 elections. At the very least, he made us all feel betrayed by the way in which he exited the fight--a way which is opening the gates for a seeming exodus of other deserters. Worse still, many of the arguments involved have made it feel less like a desertion and more like a sudden switching of sides, like so many double-agents and turncoats. They aren't just wearily leaving the battlefield, but rather have retreated to the edge of the field and then turned to fire a parting volley into our flanks.

Is it any wonder, then, why there is so little sympathy for them from those who attempt to fight on? He (and they) may have largely been allowed to leave this front quietly to focus his energies elsewhere had he just been a little more gracious in departing and disengaging. Sloth might be forgiven; choosing to focus one's energies on another front would surely have been forgiven, as would choosing to fight on this front with different tactics. But treason, betrayal: this is quite possibly the hardest thing of all to forgive. There is a reason why the traitors occupied the lowest depth of Hell in Dante's Inferno, and it is not merely a matter of Dante's view of the role of kings in the cosmos. Betrayal is like the anti-salt, which makes any other offense taste that much more bitter to the offended.

Yet, in the end, forgive we must.

Vocations and Sanctity

As a follow-up to the post the other day about the possibility of Chesterton's being canonized, I should say this. Every person is called to a particular vocation (or set of vocations), and discerning that vocation is the primary job of every person until he knows what his vocation is. Thus, dating is a part of the discernment process for the vocation of marriage (which includes also family life as a mother or father), high school and college is a part of the discernment for vocations later in life (trade school and graduate or professional school ought to imply having already more-or-less discerned the vocation in question).

But this need to discern a vocation also implies that every true vocation [1] is a service to God and/or His Church. To quote from Saint Paul,

"But all these things one and the same Spirit worketh, dividing to every one according as he will. For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is Christ. For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free; and in one Spirit we have all been made to drink. For the body also is not one member, but many. If the foot should say, because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear should say, because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were the eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? But now God hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased him. And if they all were one member, where would be the body? But now there are many members indeed, yet one body. And the eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help; nor again the head to the feet: I have no need of you. Yea, much more those that seem to be the more feeble members of the body, are more necessary. And such as we think to be the less honourable members of the body, about these we put more abundant honour; and those that are our uncomely parts, have more abundant comeliness. But our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, giving to that which wanted the more abundant honour, That there might be no schism in the body; but the members might be mutually careful one for another" (1 Corinthians 12:11-25).

That is to say, there are many gifts and talents, and this is because there are many different vocations among the Church. Not everyone is called to be a priest, or a monk, or a nun.  And while those may seem to the positions of honor in the Church, the laity are every bit as important to the life of the Church.  To quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church,

"By reason of their special vocation it belongs to the laity to seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God's will. . . . It pertains to them in a special way so to illuminate and order all temporal things with which they are closely associated that these may always be effected and grow according to Christ and maybe to the glory of the Creator and Redeemer" and ""Love is the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being" (CCC 898 and 2392).

Which is to say that there are plenty of lay vocations which fit into the life of the Church, so long as they are performed out of love for both God and Man.

If every true vocation is really necessary for the Church, then that means that every person who enters his vocation and does a good job of it for the glory of God and for the aide of the Church and community is being sanctified through his vocation (by God's grace, of course). Every person who enters a vocation which is his true calling is in effect replying to God's will for his life, so he is also making a sort of prayer of his occupations. He is also therefore receptive of God's grace.

If the Church really does need all vocations, then all vocations come with the possibility of sanctity, provided they are done for God's glory.  This means that there must be grace available, not only to priests and religious--the "Fathers" and "Mothers" in the Church--but also to "ordinary" lay mothers and fathers, not to mention to a host of other true callings.  That also would imply that people in any of these vocations are called to be saints, not simply by giving up these vocations, but by working to be a saint within everyday life.  Thus, for example, in the case of Chesterton, his vocation was to be a husband, a journalist, and a "secular" theologian and "popular" philosopher.  In his day as in ours, the Church needed all of these things, and Chesterton embraced these vocations as his own.

That the way in which sanctity is displayed while following these particular callings is different from the way in which a Mother Teresa or a Francis of Assisi made manifest their own sanctity does not take anything away from either Chesterton's own holiness, nor from the Church's own treasury of sanctity.  That his life gave testimony in a different way from St Dominic's or Saint Augustine's or Saint Vincent De Paul's or Saint Therese of Lisiux'z does not in the least diminish the witness of any of these saints, but rather complements each and all of them, so that all these different types can bear testimony in his own unique way.

To use an analogy (if one which is a bit cliche), each of these different saints had a different way of giving witness to their faith in, to their hope for, to their love of God, much as a group of blind men might describe an elephant by touch.  We are, after all, all of us blind to some extent, seeing at best through a glass darkly (see 1 Corinthians 13:12).  That the blind men each describes the elephant differently does not mean they are seeing a different elephant; rather, the elephant's description should be a synthesis of the men's descriptions, though even this will (of course) fall a bit short.  The same is true of holiness and sanctity, of the virtues (especially faith, hope, and love), and ultimately of God Himself:  the best description we can have comes from a synthesis of the lives of the saints, with a great deal of assistance from revelation (even the blind men working together can't ascertain the elephant's color).

To throw away the blind man's description of the elephant's tail because it does not match the descriptions of the other blind men would be to lose real knowledge about the elephant:  the picture would be less complete.  Thus, to throw away Chesterton's witness as a saint merely because his life was not the same as a so-called "conventional saint's" is to throw away a little bit of the mystery of holiness [2], to lose a little information about sanctity and service to the Lord.  Indeed, it would be to throw away a little bit of genuine knowledge about God.  How tragic that would be.


---Footnotes---
[1] I can think of a handful of "false vocations," by which I mean occupations which are not needed by God or the Church: but every one of these vocations involves some form of sin as the primary occupation. Thus, pornographers, prostitutes, abortionists, terrorists, executioners, and other jobs whose purpose is to destroy public morality and/or freedom are false vocations: they do not help the person who chooses these paths to become holy, and put the person against both God and His Church. That is not to say that such people can't find forgiveness or become holy, but a part of this is to leave the sinful occupation behind. Another way of saying this, I suppose, is that no occupations which is sinful by its very nature is a person's true vocation, so a person who chooses such a way of life is therefore also acting against God's will, and therefore rejecting (some or all of) the grace which would otherwise have been made available to that person.

[2] Again, this general argument can't necessarily be stretched limitlessly.  There are a great many people who are not saints, and whose lives tell us little if anything which is true about God or the Faith.  That is why there is a long process in canonization, including the necessity for two confirmed miracles attributed to the saint in question. Moreover, not every aspect of even a saint's life is necessarily holy (the saints are, after all, sinners too, and fallible to boot).  Thus, for example, the canonization of Saint Francis does not mean by necessity that we all should wear brown sack-cloth robes everywhere we go.

Francis and Dominic

Pope Francis is a fairly popular pope today, and the saint after whom he took his name is similarly beloved even among the non-believers (save a few very angry atheists, of the sort who also hated Mother Teresa). Something about the simplicity of a man devoted to the poor draws the respect and even at times admiration of people, making him seem more lovable. Oh, there are of course some who don't love him--either the pope or the saint--because of this dedication to the poor. It certainly makes those who are not poor in spirit uncomfortable to see someone who exhibits this beatitude; but on the whole, St Francis is among our most popular saints, and Pope Francis may be one of our most popular popes.

The same cannot, alas, be said for St Francis' contemporary, nor for Pope Francis' predecessor. Both St Dominic and Pope Benedict XVI are in the popular imagination associated with things like the inquisition (which in some cases was dominated by Dominicans, and the successor to which was run by Ratzinger), or the defense of doctrines and dogmas. In particular, those doctrines and dogmas which are found most difficult in their day, and thus which need the greatest defense.

But the dogmas and the doctrines are important, and we ultimately need a Church with a creed and a code as well as a community food pantry. It is because the Church is a shelter against the spiritual storms that she would also provide shelter from physical storms. It is because she sees sacramentally that she also ministers to the poor. She sees that the man who is poor and rag-covered is still a man, and thus is worth more than any riches; that a man who asks for alms is really no worse off than a man who prays that God will grant him his daily bread. Both recognize that they have a need, and both know that they must turn elsewhere for sustenance. The poor man sees this on a merely physical level, but the man who is poor in spirit may see deeper still, that his very existence depends on God's continual act of creation.

The two saints, Dominic and Francis, are indeed complements to one another, just as the two popes. The one focused on the faith which saves, the other on the charity which sanctifies. But that faith does not save when absent from charity--nor do the simple acts of charity suffice to sanctify without the grace which comes through faith. In the time of Sts Francis and Dominic, the world forgot the dignity of man as an ensouled body, and so sound preaching was needed in conjunction with simple poverty to waken the world from its heresy. Today the world is forgotten the dignity of man as an ensouled body, but the remedy remains the same saintly simplicity as then. We need men who are poor in spirit, and who therefore are able to care for the poor; but also we need men who are preachers of the Truth, because only these can truly uplift the spiritual poverty of the age.

Often, if we look closely enough, we will see that the two, the man who enters a life poverty for the sake of the poor is also quietly teaching, and that the man who is preaching the doctrines of the Faith is also humbly embracing poverty. Both are, after all, seeking to serve the same Lord.

Does It Matter Who Has Better Sex?

My thoughts on that study which my co-blogger linked saying that Catholics have better sex are nicely summed up in this post by Dr Stacy Trasancos:

The information is based on a questionnaire, the National Health and Social Life Survey, conducted in 1992 by the Population Research Center. It’s not that the analysis or the conclusions are necessarily wrong; it’s that this approach could be lampoonable. 

Why? Well, if someone had used this data to convince me to consider Catholicism on the basis that Catholics have better sex because a scientific study says so, I’d have wondered why someone so sure of the conclusions needed to hide behind a study to back it up. Science is supposed to investigate what is unknown, not what is known. Then I’d point out how sketchy the data is.

Sketchy data and a lampoonable approach to evangelization is a good summary. The point of Catholicism or religion in general is not to improve one's sex life, nor to otherwise enhance one's pleasure. That's a mostly cynical look at religion, the same old "health and wealth gospel" modified for a culture which cares more about sex than money. The reason for choosing a particular religion (or other worldview) is first that it is true, and if that can't be decided then second that it is good (though goodness is so intrinsically linked to truth that there can scarcely be goodness without truth).

When a study like this is used to pitch conversion to Catholicism, it's somewhat akin to saying, "We can't know whether the Catholic Faith is true or not, we can't even know whether the Catholic Religion is good or not, but you should still join the Catholic Church because you'll likely have better sex. In other words, join the Church because it feels good!" "Because it feels good" is not sufficient grounds for making major moral decisions, and this is the very attitude against which Christianity in general (and Catholicism in particular) has to contend. This attitude is, in short, rather antithetical to a religion which claims to be followers of the Truth.

That point is complimented by the fact that this study itself is rather poorly constructed. Asking people if they feel loved during intercourse or whether they enjoy intercourse with their partner doesn't exactly provide a stable metric for determining who is having the best sex {1}.  The frequency and duration of sexual intercourse are more solidly measurable by "scientific" means, though this study only attempted to measure the former and not the latter). And who buys what kind of underwear how often is hardly an indicator of who is having the best sex, or even (for that matter) the most "kinky" sex--a different story entirely.

I submit that we don’t need to be talking about how loved someone feels during intercourse as a measure of “better sex”, and neither do we need to be talking about how often people have sex, whether people think it’s okay to have sex just for pleasure, or the specifics of their underwear buying habits as a measure of the quality of the Catholic experience. Frankly, that information is none of anyone’s business anyway. I would refuse to participate in such a survey on those grounds too.

What I’m trying to say is: Don’t rely on science to answer non-scientific questions.

There’s a better way.

This is the crux of the scientific analysis of this "study," and Dr Trasancos goes on to analyze some of these findings in a more theological manner by linking them to the Trinity. I also agree with her assessment. I want to go back to where I started by stating that this is not the kind of thing which is necessarily good for evangelization. To the extent that it will be taken by people who don't understand the science/methodology/problems underlying the study and then pitched as "food for thought" to people who do, it may actually become a roadblock. It's the kind of thing that looks like bad science on the surface, which then turns of people who understand the difference between good science and bad by convincing them that the best Catholicism has to offer in its defense is pseudoscience.

I will grant that no apologia alone can convert a person, and few can even get most people to stop and consider conversion, or even to consider simple fairness apart from conversion. But we live in an age where science is king (along with Sports and Sex), and where "Science" is invoked as a stick with which to beat the Church: namely, "The Church is against science and impedes scientific progress while supporting junk science." Therefore, when a study of dubious scientific quality is invoked as reason to convert to the Church, and when it is subsequently demolished by scientific-minded people from outside the Church, it reinforces in those peoples' minds their own chief (stated) objection to the Church.

My point, then, is that science can be an aide to (but not a cause of) evangelism, but only if done right. Studies like this might make a man stop to consider other claims of the Church--if the study is done well. But if the claim he is considering is that because more practicing Catholics express satisfaction with sex than other people, he's more than likely to brush the whole thing aside, or worse use it to reinforce his own prejudices if he sees that such a study is being touted by Catholics as "Science."

Such studies are good for a laugh, and can be entertaining as conversation-starters. In some ways, they may even be no-brainers {2}. They are not, however, a substitute for good apologetics or a joyful witness to one's Faith.


----Notes---
{1} I will note as an aside, though, that it does give an indication as to whom is most satisfied with their sex life: the Catholics maybe are having better sex, or it could be that they value what sex they are having more than anybody else.

{2} This is arguably an even better conversation-starter, and one which actually is helpful for helping to evangelize.