“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” -Mt 5:48
“A Joyful Truth
Purgatory Provides Consolation for Believers
Some Protestants criticize the doctrine of purgatory by saying it’s “bad news” in contrast to the “good news” of salvation revealed in the Bible. But nothing could be farther from the truth. The Catholic doctrine of purgatory is indeed good news.
Purgatory consoles believers who struggle with sin.
We’re all too familiar with our own weaknesses. Who in the world goes throughout the day without turning to a creaturely good in some inordinate way?
Perhaps it’s binging of Netflix, mindlessly scrolling through Facebook, texting when someone is trying to have a conversation with you, using clock hours on the job to browse the internet for non-work-related stuff, a snappy comment to your co-worker, friend, or spouse, a brief indulgence of an uncharitable thought, a failure to promptly meet the needs of your spouse or friend when able. The list goes on and on.
It would be pretty darn hard to go through a day without falling short of Christian perfection in some way, at least for us ordinary folks. Such a task would be heroic. Heroes are rare!
Now think about the fact that death can surprise us at any moment. Jesus says, “The Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect” (Matt. 24:44). Elsewhere, he says, “Remember then what you received and heard; keep that, and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you” (Rev. 3:3).
If death can come upon us so quickly, and we’re as spiritually ill adjusted as we are, it would seem there’s no hope for us entering into the glory of heaven. We might not die with our wills turned fully away from God as our life’s goal, but the guilt of venial sin and the effects of sin would impede us from entering such glory. Despair of final salvation would be inevitable—that is, if purgatory weren’t real.
Purgatory remedies that despair and infuses joy within the soul. It allows believers who love Jesus but continue to struggle with sin in their lives to know that their shortcomings against Christian perfection are not enough to guarantee keeping them from the glory of heaven. What’s so bad about that?
Consolation for us and our loved ones…
Purgatory consoles believers in knowing how much God loves them.
Purgatory also consoles us in that it manifests God’s love for us.
God loves us so much that he does everything he can to make it possible for us to be united with him, including providing us a postmortem opportunity to be freed from venial sin and any remnants of sin that impede us from entrance into heaven.
Isn’t God’s love for us part of the Gospel’s “good news”? Sure, it is!
Purgatory is a doctrine that manifests such love to us. Therefore, purgatory is good news.
Those who have gone before us in Faith…
Purgatory consoles believers concerning loved ones who die without the perfect holiness required for heaven.
Everything we said above with regard to our weaknesses and struggles with sin also applies to those we love. So purgatory consoles us not just with regard to our own entrance into heaven, but also with regard to our loved ones.
Purgatory gives us the assurance that even though our loved ones die without the perfect holiness required for heaven, we know they’re not forever excluded from there.
The late Marian scholar Fr. Martin Jugie puts it beautifully:
“They who mournfully follow the coffin, are consoled with thoughts of the mercy of God; of the expiation of venial sin and the cleansing of the wounds, left by mortal sin, after death; of extenuating circumstances which may have rendered certain sins venial for the dear deceased one. The anguished heart, torn with dread about the fate of the loved one, clings to this last hope, and there finds solace and some peace.”
Perhaps the most vivid image of an angel is that on the German postcard from 1900, the one with the larger-than-life guardian angel hovering over two barefoot children crossing a bridge with no rail and a missing plank. The boy looks ahead in terror; the girl clutches a basket with one arm and the boy’s shoulders with the other. They brave an impossibly grave storm. But the guardian angel looks on serenely, surrounding them with light and ensuring their safe passage. There is a tiny star above her head.
The existence of angels
It is comforting to think we have a guide through life’s broken bridges. But it’s more than merely a comforting thought: although the painting looks surreal, this is not folklore. The Church, following Scripture and Tradition, teaches that angels indeed exist (CCC 328). Furthermore, citing St. Basil the Great from the fourth century, the Catechism assures us, “Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life” (CCC 336).
Reason also compels us to accept the existence of angels. In his book Angels and Us, the self-described “pagan philosopher” Mortimer Adler says we have a philosophical obligation to ponder whether minds without bodies are possible. We can deny their existence only if materialism is true, but this requires us to deny our own minds. If nothing exists but the material realm, then we are nothing but matter, and we are left with no explanation for intellect and free will.
Likewise, St. Thomas Aquinas says in his Treatise on the Angels that there must be purely spiritual creatures. God produces creatures by his intellect and will. Therefore, “the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures” (I.50.1, I.14.8, I.19.4). Since God is not material, the soul, with the power of intellect and will, is not material. The Angelic Doctor makes the distinction between corporeal (material) and incorporeal (spiritual) creatures in the hierarchy of creation. Animals are wholly corporeal. Humans are composite—both corporeal and spiritual. Logically, there must also be purely spiritual creatures.
The imagination
St. Thomas also says that angelic minds are higher than human minds because intellect is above sensory perception. Imagination aids our thought processes. We need images that correspond to the world we see and touch, whereas angelic thought, unencumbered by bodies, needs no such props.
Their purely spiritual nature also means that angels are difficult for us to imagine. Art provides a model for us to appreciate angels, akin to the way chemists draw atoms as round spheres held together by sticks to show how chemical reactions proceed. But just as we know atoms do not actually look like balls, we know angels are not bright and flowing beautiful women who float in the air. Images can mislead, which brings me to the subject of light.
-please click on the image for greater detail
The light of the Word
Scripture refers to angels as light (2 Cor. 11:14). Art depicts them as glowing. It is, therefore, tempting to think of angels as pure energy. (Conversely, in quantum physics, photons and electrons with their mysterious wave-particle duality seem almost to transcend physics into a spiritual realm. But this is not so, and any scientist knows it.) But energy is a property transferred to objects to do work. Energy depends on matter; hence it belongs strictly to the physical realm.
When theologians refer to angels as light, then, they do not use the word in the same sense as it is used in physics. This kind of light is not energy.
In The City of God, St. Augustine interprets the first words in Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” to mean that two realms were created, two cities, first the one of heaven and then the one of the earth (XI, 7).
The first three days of creation when the “earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep” passed without sunlight. The light that kindled the sun, and separates day and night, originated from beyond our senses. This light was first made by God’s command in the holy and eternal city, the City of God.
Augustine calls this holy light the “unchangeable Wisdom of God,” by which all things are made, and whom we call the only-begotten Son of God. Augustine places the creation of the angels on the first day (XI, 9) because they had to be created before the earth was created, and they populated the City of God. The angels were illuminated by the true light that created them, the light that St. John speaks of in the beginning of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word,” the light that then created everything else, the same light that became man to redeem humanity.
And it all fits together
So, when God said, “Let there be light; and there was light,” there was a progression from the holy light of eternal wisdom that first shone upon the angels to the energy light in the universe. This is one of many areas where angelology gets exciting.
Modern cosmology does not contradict Augustine’s interpretation of Genesis, but the connection is more than that. The creation of angels integrates with modern science in general. Empirical investigation requires that the universe be understood as Christianity describes it, as an ordered creation. The scientific method depends on repeatable, systematic laws of physics. Scientific theories are established on the confidence that in the beginning was the Word of God.
The scientific method is also uniquely human. It relies on human intellect, the human person created in the image and likeness of God, an intelligent soul united with a sensory body. What is the first step of the scientific method? To observe. What do we do next? We design tests, analyze data, and form conclusions—all exercises that require us to take sensory input and process it abstractly in our minds.
This is why apes do not publish scientific journals. This is why angels, unlike Heisenberg and the rest of humanity, may have no uncertainty whatsoever about the whereabouts of photons and electrons. But I digress. Perhaps you understand my excitement, though. A guardian angel can be a most valuable friend to a scientist if God wills specific knowledge of nature to be gained.
For as surely as photons of light stream down from the beginning of time to provide the energy that sustains life on Earth, our guardian angels join us from all eternity to illuminate life’s journey with the light of Christ, past all danger to the City of God, if we but seek it.
Praise the Lord from the heavens,
praise Him in the heights.
Praise Him, all His angels;
praise Him, all His hosts.
Praise Him, sun and moon;
praise Him, all you stars of light.
-Sacro Cuore di Gesù in Prati (Italian for “Sacred Heart of Jesus in Prati”), also known as Sacro Cuore del Suffragio (Italian for “Sacred Heart of the Suffrage”), is a Catholic church in the center of Rome (Italy), rising in the rione Prati, hosting the parish with the same name, entrusted to the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. Please click on the image for greater detail. The church, designed by engineer Giuseppe Gualandi, is sometimes referred as the little Milan Cathedral, due to its rich neo-gothic style. Museum of the Souls of Purgatory in Rome, Lungotevere Prati, 18. Please click on the image for greater detail.
“Located on the bank of the River Tiber, not far from the Vatican, is a church that contains a tiny museum with a unique purpose: to convince people that Purgatory exists and that their departed loved ones need their prayers.
-Nightcap w/scorched fingerprint believed to have been left by soul in Purgatory. In 1875, Luisa Le Senechal, appeared before her husband Luigi Ducey, in France. Asking for his prayers and for Masses to be said in her name, she left the burnt marks of five finger on his nightcap. Please click on the image for greater detail.
-Burned hand mark on nightshirt of Joseph Leleux. In 1789, Joseph Leleux hear noises for eleven consecutive nights. Then, on June 21, 1789, his mother appeared and reminded him that he was under obligation to have Masses celebrated for her and Joseph’s late father. She hen placed her hand on his nightshirt, leaving an imprint. Leleux later converted and founded a congregation of pious lay people. Please click on the image for greater detail.
-Please click on the image for greater detail.
-Please click on the image for greater detail.
-Please click on the image for greater detail.
The Museum of the Souls of Purgatory is no ordinary museum. It was created not simply to edify and inspire, but to make a case, just as a prosecutor would make a case before a jury.
Its collection is made up not of sacred art, but of actual physical evidence purporting to prove the existence of Purgatory – namely the tangible marks souls in Purgatory left in order to convince their loved ones to pray for them.
The scorched papers and clothing displayed in the vestry of the Church of the Sacred Heart of Suffrage in Prati testify to the trials of those who managed to avoid going to hell, but sought escape from the purifying fires of Purgatory.
The story of how the church and its museum came about begins in 1897 when a fire broke out in the small chapel that once stood at the same spot. After the fire was put out and the smoke cleared, a Fr. Victor Jouët, who – not incidentally – had a devotion to the souls in Purgatory, noticed that the image of a sad, suffering face was left behind on the wall. Convinced that it was a soul crying out for help, he was from that moment inspired to build a church dedicated to the souls in Purgatory.
According to Fr. Domenico Santangini, the parish priest of the church for the last 14 years, Fr. Jouët accumulated the museum’s collection while traveling to raise funds to build the church.
That evidence includes relics that testify to the existence of souls in Purgatory. Besides the original scorched image on the wall of the suffering soul in Purgatory the collection includes:
The scorched imprint of a hand on a desk
A section of wood from the desk belonging to Ven. Mother Isabella Fornari, Abbess of the Poor Clares Monastery of St. Francis in Todi, bears the clear imprint of hand. The mark, which was burned into the desk, was said to be left by the deceased former Abbott, a Father Panzini, of the Benedictine Olivetan Order in Mantua on November 1, 1731, as a message to her that he was suffering in Purgatory.
At the same time, Mother Isabella reported to her confessor, Holy Cross Father Isidoro Gazata, the poor soul placed his hand on her sleeve, burning a hole through it. The desk and the scorched garment are in the museum’s collection.
Handprint on a nightshirt
In 1789, Joseph Leleux heard noises for 11 consecutive nights. Then on June 21, 1789, his mother appeared and reminded him that he was under obligation to have Masses celebrated for her and Joseph’s late father. She then placed her hand on his nightshirt, leaving an imprint. Leleux later converted and founded a congregation of pious lay people.
Handprint on a book
In 1815, Margherite Demmerlé of Metz, France, was visited by her mother-in-law who had died 30 years before. When the mother-in-law asked that she go on a pilgrimage and have two Masses said for her in order to clear her path to Heaven, Margherite asked for a sign that she was truly in Purgatory. An imprint of a hand on the book she was reading was left behind.
Burnt fingerprints on a nightcap
In 1875 Luisa Le Sénèchal, who had died two years earlier, appeared before her husband Luigi in Ducey, France. Asking for his prayers and for Masses to be said in her name, she left the burnt marks of five fingers on his nightcap.
Documents and photos of these and a number of other similar occurrences are displayed in the small museum.
“The charred images we have in the museum represent the fire that burns but purifies. Little by little it burns and purifies the souls who are in purgatory. We see a physical manifestation of this fire, but for the souls in purgatory it is interior,” said Fr. Santangini, curator of the museum.
Today, just as when the museum was first founded, the souls in Purgatory are in need of prayer, said Fr. Santangini.
“The relics in the museum are signs that tell us that we need to believe in Purgatory, that this place of suffering exists, that so many souls pass through it, and also that there are so many souls that are there and forgotten. We need to pray for them.”
“Once the money had run out, little by little as the church was being built, he would travel through Europe both to look for money and to look for testimonies that bore evidence of visits from souls in Purgatory, and he brought them all here to Rome. Those that we have in the museum now are authentic,” Fr. Santagini told Aleteia’s Diane Montagna.
“In a tiny little church on the banks of the Tiber, called the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Patri (also known as the Church of the Sacred Heart of Suffrage), there’s a most curious collection of artifacts from four different European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy) —sixteen pieces of cloth, paper, or wood, all of which are claimed to bear the signs of the scorched hands and fingerprints of souls in purgatory, a postmortem temporary state of existence where the souls of the elect imperfectly holy are purified of any remnants of sin.
For some, these tokens might be “exotic,” like remains from some ancient culture. Others might view them as belonging to folklore.
Regardless of what you make of these so-called “relics” of purgatory, it does raise the question: Is purgatory for real? And if it is real, what’s it like?
To the question, “Is purgatory real?,” many say no. Protestant reformer John Calvin, for example, said purgatory is “a deadly fiction of Satan.” An Anglican theologian claims that purgatory is “a medieval invention that brought a new sense of order and purpose to previously vague notions of what life after death held in store.”
The Catholic Church definitively teaches that purgatory is real and claims that it can be supported by biblical revelation and early Christian testimony.
So who’s right?
With regard to the nature of purgatory, questions abound: is it really just another chamber of hell that happens to be temporary? You might think it is, based on the not so few testimonies of saints and what has been emphasized in traditional catechism classes.
Other portraits of purgatory might not highlight the intense suffering but nevertheless suggest it’s gloomy. Perhaps it’s portrayed as an anteroom to heaven, where souls wander, like in (spoiler alert!) the TV series Lost. Or perhaps some catechist has taught you that purgatory is like a train you never get off, as one of my colleagues said he was taught.
Such depictions of purgatory make it sound as if purgatory were nothing but a realm of sorrow, where no joy whatsoever can be found. But such a state of existence is inconsistent with what the Bible promises the Christian as a citizen of Christ’s kingdom, which souls in purgatory are: “For the kingdom of God is . . . righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17).
As a reaction to such a dire portrait of purgatory, some end up on the other end of the spectrum, where suffering is eliminated entirely, and purgatory is said to be all joy and peace—nothing more than a clean-up job before entrance into heaven.
I’m here to tell you that purgatory is for real.
As to its nature, it does involve suffering. However, there is great joy to be found in purgatory that’s consistent with our life in Christ as Christians, and such joy gives proper context to the suffering involved. In fact, purgatory is a beautiful gift of God’s mercy for which we should be thankful, a joyful truth of God’s purifying love.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines purgatory as a postmortem “final purification” (1031) for “all who die in God’s grace and friendship [the elect], but still imperfectly purified” (1030) so that they may “achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.”
Throughout the centuries, the Church has identified three things that this postmortem purification accomplishes: the remission of the remaining guilt of venial sin, the purging of unhealthy attachments to created goods, and the discharge of remaining debt of temporal punishment due to past forgiven sins. This gives us a good working definition as to what we’re setting out to show is real.
The three joyful truths are:
• Purgatory is a doctrine of consolation for believers.
• Purgatory consists of joys that go beyond the joys of this world.
• Purgatory inspires the pursuit of holiness.
This should provide grounds to bring purgatory back onto the stage in the drama of the Last Things and present it as a truth that’s worth knowing and defending. There is no shame in professing the truth of purgatory.
My hope is that you will better appreciate the sweet reasonableness of purgatory and its truth as found in the biblical and early extra-biblical Christian sources. Also, my hope is that you come to see purgatory as a great gift that God in his mercy and love gives us. May we hear in the Church’s teaching on purgatory the words of Jesus: “I have said these things to you, so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11).”
“O GOD of the Spirits of all flesh, O Jesu, Lover of souls, we recommend unto Thee the souls of all those Thy servants, who have departed with the sign of faith and sleep the sleep of peace. We beseech Thee, O Lord and Savior, that, as in Thy mercy to them Thou became man, so now Thou would hasten the time, and admit them to Thy presence above. Remember, O Lord, that they are Thy creatures, not made by strange gods, but by Thee, the only Living and True God; for there is no other God but Thou, and none that can equal Thy works. Let their souls rejoice in Thy light, and impute not to them their former iniquities, which they committed through the violence of passion, or the corrupt habits of their fallen nature. For, although they have sinned, yet they always firmly believed in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and before they died, they reconciled themselves to Thee by true contrition and the Sacraments of Thy Church.
O Gracious Lord, we beseech Thee, remember not against them the sins of their youth and their ignorance; but according to Thy great mercy, be mindful of them in Thy heavenly glory. May the heavens be opened to them, and the Angels rejoice with them. May the Archangel St Michael conduct them to Thee. May Thy holy Angels come forth to meet them, and carry them to the city of the heavenly Jerusalem. May St Peter, to whom Thou gave the keys of the kingdom of heaven, receive them. May St Paul, the vessel of election, stand by them. May St John, the beloved disciple, who had the revelation of the secrets of heaven, intercede for them. May all the Holy Apostles, who received from Thee the power of binding and loosing, pray for them. May all the Saints and elect of God, who in this world suffered torments for Thy Name, befriend them; that, being freed from the prison beneath, they may be admitted into the glories of that kingdom, where with the Father and the Holy Ghost Thou lives and reigns one God, world without end.
Come to their assistance, all ye Saints of God; gain for them deliverance from their place of punishment; meet them, all ye Angels; receive these holy souls, and present them before the Lord. Eternal rest give to them, O Lord. And may perpetual light shine on them.
May they rest in peace. Amen.”
Love, and the joy of growing closer to the Lord, no matter the cost, no matter the cost. Consume me, Lord, in the fire of your holy love.
Matthew
“Purgatory is also found among many non-Catholic Christians. In fact, Christians who reject the doctrine of purgatory, in its consciously articulated form or at least the concepts that undergird it, are of the minority position.
As we’ll argue below, such a widespread belief among Christians outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church gives reason to think purgatory is for real and is so intertwined with the sources of Christian revelation that Christians can’t get away from it.
Belief in purgatory is also found among Protestant Christians old and new.
Martin Luther himself was among those who believed in purgatory, even after he began the Protestant movement, although he changed his view later, after the Reformation. For example, in his Ninety-Five Theses (1517), Luther wrote, “The pope does very well when he grants remission to souls in purgatory, not by the power of the keys, which he does not have, but by way of intercession for them.”
Just a few years later, in his Defense and Explanation of All the Articles (1521), Luther re-affirmed his belief in purgatory, saying, “The existence of a purgatory I have never denied. I still hold that it exists, as I have written and admitted many times, though I have found no way of proving it incontrovertibly from Scripture or reason.”
In one of his sermons, he says the following:
[The Holy Spirit] kindles a new flame or fire in us, namely, love and desire to do God’s commandments. In the kingdom of grace this should begin and ever grow until the Day of Judgment, when it shall no longer be called grace or forgiveness, but pure truth and perfect obedience. In the meantime He continues to give, forgive, to bear and forbear, until we are laid in our graves. Now if we thus continue in faith, that is, in what the Holy Spirit gives and forgives, in what he begins and ends, then the fire on the judgment day, by which the whole world is to be consumed, will cleanse and purify us, so that we will no longer need this giving and forgiving, as if there were something unclean and sinful in us, as there really is at present; we will certainly be as the brightness of the dear sun, without spot and defect, full of love, as Adam was at the beginning in paradise.
Luther also acknowledged the legitimacy of praying for the dead. In his Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528), he says:
As for the dead, since Scripture gives us no information on the subject, I regard it as no sin to pray with free devotion in this or some similar fashion: “Dear God, if this soul is in a condition accessible to mercy, be thou gracious to it.” And when this has been done once or twice, let it suffice.
Luther eventually would change his view about purgatory, rejecting it as a doctrine of the devil (1537):
Therefore purgatory, and every solemnity, rite, and commerce connected with it, is to be regarded as nothing but a specter of the devil. For it conflicts with the chief article [which teaches] that only Christ, and not the works of men, are to help [set free] souls. Not to mention the fact that nothing has been [divinely] commanded or enjoined upon us concerning the dead.
Other Protestants at the time of the Reformation also expressed openness to purgatory.
For example, Philipp Melanchthon, in his Apology to the Augsburg Confession (1531), wrote, “Our opponents quote the Fathers on offerings for the dead. We know that the ancients spoke of prayer for the dead. We do not forbid this.”
Another famous Protestant who affirmed purgatory was the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Although he denied purgatory as an article of faith, he believed that it is a reality: “I personally hold that a certain temporal punishment after this life is rather reasonable and probable.”
Leibniz elsewhere explains:
The remission of sins which delivers us from the pains of hell by virtue of the blood of Jesus Christ does not, however, prevent there from still being some punishment in this life or in the other, and the one which is in store for us in the other life serving to purge souls is called purgatory. Holy Scripture insinuates it, and reason endorses it on the grounds that according to the rules of perfect government, which is God’s government, there should be no sin left entirely unpunished.
What’s unique about Leibniz’s view of purgatory relative to others among Protestants is that he clearly affirms what some have come to call the satisfaction model of purgatory. The satisfaction model refers to purgatory’s punitive dimension, whereby a soul undergoes temporary suffering due to it for past forgiven sins (both venial and mortal) and thus discharges the debt of temporal punishment.
As we’ll see below, many modern Protestants deny this model of purgatory and adopt purely a sanctification model, which says purgatory is a postmortem intermediate state where the soul achieves its complete state of sanctification or holiness through the cleansing of any remaining guilt of venial sin (a sin that “allows charity to subsist, even though it offends and wounds it”—CCC 1855) and purging of unhealthy attachments to created goods.
The nineteenth-century German Protestant theologian and church historian Karl August von Hase also affirmed a postmortem intermediate state akin to purgatory. He stated:
Most people when they die are probably too good for Hell, yet surely too bad for Heaven. It must be frankly confessed that the Protestantism of the Reformers is unclear on this point, its justified denial not yet having advanced to the stage of affirmation.
Among modern Protestants who affirm purgatory, perhaps the most famous is the late C.S. Lewis. In his Letters to Malcolm, he writes:
Our souls demand purgatory, don’t they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, “It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy”? Should we not reply, “With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.” “It may hurt, you know”—”Even so, sir.”
“How can you believe that? Don’t you know the Bible says…”
It’s a challenge we have to meet. If we can’t reconcile apparent contradictions between Scripture and Catholic teaching, how can our own faith survive? And if we can’t help our Protestant brothers and sisters overcome their preconceptions about “unbiblical” Catholic doctrines and practices, how will they ever come to embrace the fullness of the Faith?
In these excerpts from Meeting the Protestant Challenge, Karlo Broussard gives an example of how to counteract the Protestant claims about Purgatory and the rapture
“At Home with the Lord” 2 Corinthians 5:8 and Purgatory
THE PROTESTANT CHALLENGE: How can the Catholic Church teach that there is an intermediate state after death, like purgatory, when the Bible says that the only place for a Christian to be (besides this life) is heaven?
Referring to a soul’s “entrance into the blessedness of heaven,” the Catechism teaches that it will enter either “through a purification or immediately” (CCC 1022). This presupposes that it’s possible for a soul to die in God’s friendship but yet not be present with the Lord in heaven.
Some Protestants view Paul’s teaching in 2 Corinthians 5:6-8 as contradicting this belief. Paul writes,
So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord…and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.
Since the Bible says that for a Christian to be “away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord,” there can’t be any intermediate state in the afterlife.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
1. Paul doesn’t say what the challenge assumes he says.
Protestants who appeal to this passage often fail to realize that Paul doesn’t say that “to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord.” Paul simply says, “While we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord” and that “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
Protestants may reply that although Paul doesn’t exactly say what the challenge claims, that’s what he means. Are they right? Does the logic follow? Does the statement, “We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” mean the same as, “To be absent from the body is to be at home with the Lord”?
Suppose I’m at work, and I’m wishing that I could instead be away from work, and at home. Can we conclude from this that if I’m away from work, I must automatically be at home?
Doesn’t seem like it. I could be away from work, eating lunch at McDonald’s. I could be away from work, on my way home, but sitting in traffic. So, it’s fallacious to conclude from this verse that, once away from the body, a Christian must immediately be present with the Lord.
2. Even if we concede the interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:8 that the challenge asserts, it still doesn’t rule out purgatory.
But let’s assume for argument’s sake that the interpretation this challenge offers of 2 Corinthians 5:8 is true, and that to be away from the body is to be immediately present with the Lord. That still wouldn’t pose a threat to purgatory.
First, because the challenge assumes that purgatory involves a period of time (during which we are “away from the body” but not “with the Lord”). But as we’ve seen, the Catholic Church has never defined the precise nature of the duration of purgatory. We simply don’t know what the experience of time is beyond this life. If purgatory did not involve a duration of time as we know it, it would be perfectly compatible with the challenge’s interpretation of this verse.
A second reason is that the challenge assumes purgatory is a state of existence away from the Lord. But, as we have also seen, purgatory could very well be that encounter with the Lord that we experience in our particular judgment, as we “appear before the judgment seat of Christ” (2 Cor. 5:10). This makes sense because Paul describes the soul’s judgment as being one of a purifying fire (1 Cor. 3:11-15). It makes sense for God’s presence, not His absence, to be part of our soul’s purification.
COUNTER-CHALLENGE: Shouldn’t you make sure that the Bible passage you use to challenge a Catholic belief actually says what you think it says?
AFTERTHOUGHT: The early Christian writer Tertullian (c. A.D. 160-220) affirms the existence of a state after death before entering heaven when he writes, “Inasmuch as we understand the prison pointed out in the Gospel to be Hades [Matt. 5:25], and as we also interpret the uttermost farthing to mean the very smallest offense which has to be recompensed there before the resurrection, no one will hesitate to believe that the soul undergoes in Hades some compensatory discipline, without prejudice to the full process of the resurrection.”
“Caught Up with the Lord in the Air”
1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 and the Rapture
THE PROTESTANT CHALLENGE: How can the Catholic Church teach that faithful Christians will experience the final trial when the Bible teaches that Christians will be raptured before such a time?
The Catechism says that that the Church “must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers,” and such a persecution will “unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.” And this religious deception will be “that of the Antichrist” (675).
But some Protestants believe that the Bible teaches otherwise: that Christians will not experience the persecution of the Antichrist but will be snatched up by the Lord prior to it. This is a doctrine known as the pre-tribulation Rapture.
The passage they often appeal to is 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, which reads,
For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.
Protestants argue that Paul can’t be talking about the Second Coming here, because Jesus only comes part-way down and then goes back up. Moreover, because no judgment of the nations is mentioned, like we see in Matthew 25:31-46 and Revelation 20, it must be referring to the “rapture.”
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
1. The challenge misreads the text as a partial coming-from and return back to heaven.
Verse 15 reads that the Lord will “descend from heaven with a cry of command.” But nowhere does Paul actually say that Jesus returns to heaven. If Jesus’ descent is definitive, it’s not a partial coming like the pre-tribulation rapture requires it to be.
But what are we to make of Paul’s description that the saints who are alive will be “caught up…to meet the Lord in the air”? A possible interpretation is that Paul is describing how Christians will meet the Lord in the air to escort him, in a way that is analogous to the ancient custom of citizens ushering in important visitors.
It was common for citizens to meet an illustrious person (such as dignitary or victorious military leader) and his entourage outside the walls of their city and accompany him back in. This was a way for people to honor the visitor and take part in the celebration of the visitor’s coming.
We see an example of this in Acts 28:14-15, where the brethren at Rome went out of the city to meet Paul as he approached: “And so we came to Rome. And the brethren there, when they heard of us, came as far as the Forum of Appius and Three Taverns to meet us.” This ancient custom also explains why the crowds go out to meet Jesus on Palm Sunday and usher him into Jerusalem (see Matt. 21:1-17).
So, for Paul, those who are alive at the Second Coming will do for our blessed Lord what the ancients did for their dignitaries: they will be caught up in the air to meet the approaching king Jesus and escort him as he “descend[s] from heaven with a cry of command” (1 Thess. 4:16).
2. The details of the passage reveal that Paul is talking about the final coming of Jesus at the end of time.
Notice that it’s not just the living who are caught up with the Lord, but also the dead in Christ: “And the dead in Christ will rise first” (v.16). That Paul speaks of the resurrection of the dead tells us that he’s referring to the end of time.
We know this for several reasons. First, Paul states in 1 Corinthians 15 that the end happens in tandem with the resurrection of the dead:
For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at His coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power (1 Cor. 15:22-24).
If Paul viewed the resurrection of the dead as occurring in tandem with the end of time, and if he speaks of the resurrection of the dead in tandem with Christ’s coming in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, it follows that Christ’s coming in those verses is His coming at the end of time and not the beginning of a pre-tribulation rapture.
A second reason why we know Paul is talking about the end of time is because when he speaks about the “coming of the Lord” in 2 Thessalonians, he says that the Antichrist and his reign of evil must precede it:
Now concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him him, we beg you, brethren, not to be quickly shaken in mind or excited, either by spirit or by word, or by letter purporting to be from us, to the effect that the day of the Lord has come. Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. Do you not remember that when I was still with you I told you this? And you know what is restraining him now so that he may be revealed in his time. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains it will do so until he is out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, and the Lord Jesus will slay him with the breath of His mouth and destroy him by His appearing and His coming (2 Thess. 2:1-8).
It’s clear that Paul is connecting the “coming of our Lord” here in 2 Thessalonians and the “coming of the Lord” in 1 Thessalonians 4:15, because he speaks of “our assembling to meet Him.”
So, if the “coming of the Lord” in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 must be preceded by the Antichrist and his reign of evil, those verses can’t be referring to a pre-tribulation rapture. Rather, they must refer to our Lord’s coming at the end of time, when he vanquishes all evil and condemns those “who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2 Thess. 2:12).
A final clue for this being the final day of judgment is the fact that the Lord will descend with “the sound of the trumpet of God” (v.16). Paul speaks of the same trumpet when he describes the resurrection of the dead at the end of time:
Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality (1 Cor. 15:51-53).
Since in Paul’s mind, the trumpet is associated with the resurrection of the dead at the end of time, and he speaks of it when describing the “coming of the Lord” in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, we can conclude that the “coming of the Lord” that Paul writes of in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17 is the final coming at the end of time.
COUNTER-CHALLENGE: How can a text be used to support an idea when the text never mentions that idea?
AFTERTHOUGHT: The rapture is often portrayed as a “secret coming” of Jesus. But in 1 Thessalonians 4:15-17, Paul describes Christ’s coming with “the sound of the trumpet of God.” There is nothing secret about descending with the sound of a trumpet!
“Discussions between Catholics and Protestants about the topic of salvation sometimes involve a reference to Philippians 2:12, a passage often quoted by Catholics in support of their view that good works play a role in achieving our final salvation and that it’s possible for a Christian to lose his salvation. Paul writes, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
“What else could Paul mean?” the Catholic asks.
Well, Protestant apologist Ron Rhodes has an answer. Rather than speaking of an individual’s salvation in the eternal sense, Rhodes asserts Paul is speaking of a corporate salvation that’s temporal and experiential. He writes,
This church as a unit was in need of “salvation” (that is, salvation in the temporal, experiential sense, not in the eternal sense). It is critical to recognize that salvation in this context is referring to the community of believers in Philippi and not to individual believers. Salvation is spoken of in a corporate sense in this verse. The Philippians were called by the apostle Paul to “keep on working out” (continuously) the “deliverance of the church into a state of Christian maturity” (emphasis in original).
Since Paul intends salvation to be taken in a temporal sense (a “deliverance of the church into a state of Christian maturity”), Rhodes believes, he can’t possibly mean salvation for believers in an eternal sense.
How can we respond?
The first thing to point out is that Rhodes is going against the grain in the New Testament by reading salvation in a temporal sense. Throughout the New Testament, including Paul’s writings, the Greek word translated here as “salvation,” sōtēria, is normally used in reference to eternal salvation. So, a natural reading of Philippians 2:12 would be to read it as such.
For Rhodes to interpret sōtēria in a temporal sense—an unusual interpretation, to say the least—he needs to shoulder the burden of proof. But he does not succeed in this attempt.
Rhodes argues that the exhortation to “work out your salvation” is a response to what he describes as “the particular situation of the church in Phillipi.” Rhodes describes the church’s situation as being
plagued by 1) rivalries and personal ambitions (Phil. 2:3,4; 4:2), 2) the teaching of Judaizers (who said that circumcision was necessary for salvation—3:1-3), 3) perfectionism (attain sinless perfection in this life—3:12-14), and 4) influence of “antinomian libertines” (people who took excessive liberty in how they lived their lives, ignoring or going against God’s law—3:18, 19).
The problem here is that each item listed above doesn’t prove what Rhodes wants it to prove.
Take rivalries and personal ambitions, for example. Here’s what Philippians 2:3-4 says: “Do nothing from selfishness or conceit, but in humility count others better than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
That Paul exhorts the Philippians to refrain from sinful behavior doesn’t mean they’re actually guilty of it. It’s simply a part of Paul’s general moral exhortation that begins in Philippians 1:27—“Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that . . . I may hear of you that you stand firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.” Any type of moral exhortation is going to involve an exhortation to avoid sin, regardless if a person is guilty of that sin or not.
Philippians 4:2 reads, “I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord.” This is as close as Rhodes gets to identifying problems in the Philippian church. But notice it’s only directed to two people. It’s not the whole church “as a unit,” to use the words of Rhodes.
Next, Rhodes appeals to the teaching of the Judaizers, whom Paul identifies as those “who mutilate the flesh” (Phil. 3:2). But he warns the Philippians in verse 2, “Look out . . . for those who mutilate the flesh,” implying they’re not numbered among the Judaizers. Then, in verse 3, he writes, “For we are the true circumcision, who worship God in spirit, and glory in Christ Jesus, and put not confidence in the flesh” (emphasis added). The Philippians are numbered with Paul among those of the true circumcision, not the Judaizers.
Rhodes then turns to Philippians 3:12-14, in which Paul acknowledges that he has not yet attained the resurrection of the dead and that he is not yet perfect, although he still presses on to make the resurrection of the dead and perfection his own, looking forward “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” That Rhodes sees perfectionism as an active problem in the Philippian community from Paul’s acknowledgement that he’s not perfect yet is a stretch, to say the least.
The purpose of Paul’s statements is to remind the Philippians that they too haven’t yet attained the resurrection of the dead or perfection, and that they too should be pressing forward to make it their own. This is an exhortation to be holy and a sober reminder that they could fail to acheive salvation, not an identification of church problems that they need to be saved from.
The last passage Rhodes cites is Philippians 3:18-19, “For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is the belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things.”
Rhodes thinks this refers to Christians in the Philippian community, but the next verse shows this is not so. Paul writes, “But our commonwealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (v.20; emphasis added). Christians in the Philippian community are not the ones identified as the “enemies of the cross of Christ,” they are clearly distinguished from them.
So, the evidence that Rhodes appeals to fails to support his temporal view of salvation for the Philippian church. But is there any positive evidence that Paul intended to speak of salvation in Philippians 2:12 in the eternal sense?
In both the preceding and subsequent context of Philippians 2:12 Paul speaks of eternal salvation.
Consider, for example, the preceding context in Philippians 1:27-28, where Paul contrasts the “salvation” that the Philippians receive from God and the “destruction” of their enemies:
Only let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ . . . not frightened in anything by your opponents. This is a clear omen [Greek, endeixis—demonstration, proof, or sign] to them of their destruction, but of your salvation [Greek, sōtērias], and that from God.
The destruction that Paul speaks of can’t refer to a temporal destruction that the Philippians might bring upon their enemies, since Paul is exhorting the Philippians to have no fear and remain faithful when their enemies persecute them. Therefore, the destruction of their enemies must refer to an eternal destruction—their damnation.
Also, Paul speaks of the Philippians’ salvation as coming “from God.” That would seem to indicate Paul is speaking of eternal salvation here.
Now, if Paul contrasts the Philippians’ salvation with their enemies’ destruction, and that destruction refers to eternal damnation, then it follows that Paul intends salvation to be understood in the eternal sense. And it’s that salvation that Paul speaks of in Philippians 2:12 when he says, “work out your salvation.”
We can also look to Philippians 2:14-16, where Paul identifies what “working out your own salvation” involves: “Do all things without grumbling or questioning, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation . . . holding fast the word of life.”
Paul then gives the reason why he exhorts the Philippians to do such things in verse 16: “So that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.” The implication is that if on the day of Christ, the Philippians are found to be blameworthy, not innocent, and with blemish, then he would have run in vain. In other words, his preaching would have been for nothing.
Paul is not exhorting the Philippians to be “blameless and innocent” and “without blemish” merely in the sight of men. Rather, he’s calling them to a state of holiness that is a condition to receive their salvation at the Final Judgment. If that’s not a reference to eternal salvation for believers, then nothing is.
So, not only does Rhodes’s evidence fail to support his temporal view of salvation in Philippians 2:12, we have contextual evidence that Paul did not intend salvation to be taken in a temporal sense. Paul was speaking of our final salvation to be received at the Final Judgment. And since Paul says we need to put effort into bringing about that salvation, and that we should do so with fear and trembling, Catholics are justified in appealing to this passage for support of their belief that good works do play a role in our final salvation and that it’s possible to lose it in the end.”
-“St John eating the book(scroll)”, 1498, Albrecht Dürer, 398 x 289 mm, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruheone of fifteen woodcuts done on pear wood blocks depicting scenes of the Apocalypse. British Museum, London, UK. Please click on the image for greater detail.
“Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from heaven say, “Seal up what the seven thunders have said and do not write it down.”
Then the angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven. And he swore by Him Who lives forever and ever, Who created the heavens and all that is in them, the earth and all that is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, “There will be no more delay! But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as He announced to his servants the prophets.”
Then the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more: “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel Who is standing on the sea and on the land.”
So I went to the angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, “Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but ‘in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’” I took the little scroll from the angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings.” -Revelation 10:1-9
“We who are children of the Father, we hunger for the glory of God and souls to share in that glory. This imagery is captured strikingly by both Saint Catherine of Siena and Our Lord.
First, St. Catherine has a few striking phrases in her Dialogue. While the Father is speaking to St. Catherine, He tells her: “When she [the soul] has attained the third stage of tears, she prepares the table of the most Holy Cross in her heart and spirit. When it is set, she finds there the food of the gentle loving Word—the sign of my honor and your salvation for which my only-begotten Son’s body was opened up to give you Himself as food. The soul then begins to feed on My honor and the salvation of souls….” Or again, “Find your delight with [Christ] on the cross by feeding on souls for the glory and praise of My name.” And even further, “Hungry as they were for My honor and the salvation of souls, [the Saints] fed on these at the table of the most Holy Cross.”
Reading these excerpts, it sounds almost as if God is recommending that Christians eat souls. This sounds quite strange. Is St. Catherine recommending that, perhaps, priests, while in the confessional, start eating souls from imaginary bowls?
In order to illuminate this idea, it is helpful to reference Christ’s hunger for souls and God’s glory. There are at least two instances in the Gospels in which we can see this idea of eating souls and feasting on God’s glory.
In the temptation in the desert, Satan attempts to seduce Christ into making bread out of stones. Christ’s response? “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God” (Matt 4:4). We can see here that Our Lord, while fasting and hungry, claims that we are nourished by God’s word. This nourishment is hearty enough to sustain us, even while in the desert fasting.
The second instance in which we see Christ “eating souls and the glory of God” is in the Gospel of Saint John. While the translation is slightly dated, the Douay-Rheims is evocative in this instance. Christ has just won the soul of a Samaritan woman, who has gone to tell the townspeople about her interaction with Christ. Meanwhile, sitting beside the well, Christ’s apostles come to him offering food. His response shows us just how nourishing winning souls for the Kingdom can be: “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, that I may perfect his work” (John 4:34). The use of the word “meat” in this passage communicates the heartiness of the nourishment.
Returning to St. Catherine, the hunger for souls and the glory of God does not mean that we are consuming other people in spiritual cannibalism. Rather, similar to Saint Paul, our love for God manifests itself in a compulsion to spread His name and to feast on His glory that can be thought of as a spiritual hunger (cf. 1 Cor 9:16). We are driven to seek the glory of God and the salvation of souls in the way a starving man seeks food—the desire consumes us.”
“When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine.” — Revelation 6:5–6 NASB
The third Horseman rides a black horse and is popularly understood to be Famine as the Horseman carries a pair of balances or weighing scales (Greek ζυγὸν, zygon), indicating the way that bread would have been weighed during a famine. In the passage, it is read that the indicated price of grain is about ten times normal (thus the famine interpretation popularity), with an entire day’s wages (a denarius) buying enough wheat for only one person (one choenix, about 1.1 litres), or enough of the less nutritious barley for three, so that workers would struggle to feed their families.
Love, and hungry for my own salvation and that of others. Pray for me.
Matthew
-St. Vincent de Paul Church. Huntington Beach, California
Often in an ecumenical chapel, the crucifix (the moment of our salvation) facing the congregation is turned around displaying a plain cross for Protestant services. The devil in me imagines Jesus turning his back on Protestants. 😉 Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
-by Michelle Arnold, Catholic Answers
“The new empress had converted to Christianity the year before and was eager to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Her son, the emperor, although not yet a Christian himself, gave his mother permission to use the imperial treasury to buy up whatever sacred relics she could find during her stay. With that, St. Helena headed off to see the sites of Christ’s earthly ministry, intent on locating what physical relics remained from his public life.
Helena’s most important discovery is reputed to have been the cross on which Christ was crucified. According to traditional accounts, after ordering the destruction of a pagan temple built near Calvary by a previous emperor, Helena had her men excavate the site. There they found three crosses. To determine which one was Christ’s, Helena had a mortally ill woman touch each of the crosses. When the woman was miraculously healed after touching one of them, Helena proclaimed that cross the True Cross.
In honor of his mother’s find, Emperor Constantine ordered a church to be built on the site. That church became known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (known by the Orthodox as the Church of the Resurrection). Most Christians believe it to house both Calvary and Christ’s tomb. The first day that the True Cross was brought outside the church for adoration by the faithful, September 14, 335, would become the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which we celebrate today.
Protestants often are deeply uncomfortable with Catholic devotion to the crucifix, a sacramental that depicts the corpus (body) of Christ on his cross. They want to know why Catholics don’t simply have empty crosses in their churches, as is the custom in many Protestant churches. After all, they claim, Christ has been raised from the dead. Doesn’t a bare cross better show that he is risen?
Despite their affinity for crosses, many Protestants are also skeptical of the Church’s claim to possess the True Cross and to make relics from that cross available for veneration by the faithful. Not only do they doubt the authenticity of the relics, but some anti-Catholics even scorn the value of the True Cross itself. As the late Bart Brewer wrote:
It is said that if all the pieces of the [true] cross [of Christ] displayed in Catholic churches were assembled together, it would take a ten-ton truck to carry them. It is clear that most “relics” are frauds. Furthermore, there is nothing in the Bible that supports the veneration of relics, even if they are genuine.
So, on the one hand, many Protestants object to crosses that display Christ’s body in favor of bare crosses—and, on the other, they often reject the value of the True Cross itself, even if pieces of it were real. How do we as Catholics answer these objections? The story of how Helena recovered the True Cross may be useful in answering both objections.
As we saw, when Helena and her men excavated the site where Calvary had been located, they found three crosses. Naturally, they assumed that two of the crosses belonged to the two criminals executed with Christ (Matt. 27:38). Not having any interest in the thieves’ crosses, they sought to determine which cross was Christ’s and accepted a miraculous healing as proof of the True Cross.
Bare crosses alone, such as the ones Helena found near Calvary, were of no interest unless she could prove which one of them was Christ’s. The other crosses might have been interesting archaeological finds, but had no lasting value to her.
But even without Christ’s body hanging upon it, the actual cross on which Christ died is sacred because of its relation to him. Think of a throne without a king, a bench without a judge, or the presider’s chair in a church without a priest. Even when not in use, thrones, judicial benches, and presider chairs do have inherent value as symbols of the authority of the one who uses them. In like manner, the True Cross is sacred and worthy of Christian devotion because the one who used it is God himself.
From its beginning, the Church has reverenced the image of Christ on his cross and has considered the manner in which Christ died to be an integral part of the gospel. St. Paul wrote:
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:21–24, emphasis added).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church notes that we do not merely preach Christ’s resurrection but the resurrection of the one who was crucified, which acts as a confirmation of the divinity of God the Son:
The truth of Jesus’ divinity is confirmed by his resurrection. He had said: “When you have lifted up the son of man, then you will know that I am he.” The resurrection of the crucified one shows that he was truly “I AM,” the Son of God and God himself (653, emphasis added).
When Protestants ask why Catholics use a crucifix instead of a bare cross, the answer then is twofold. We don’t separate Christ’s body from his cross because we value both his body and his cross. God the Son died as man to save the world, which means that his human body is sacred and worthy of our worship. And since he chose to die by crucifixion, the cross on which he died is worthy of our veneration because that was the means by which he saved the world. A bare cross has no value unless it is clearly his cross. As Paul said:
Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world (Gal. 6:14).
And not only does the cross attain value by its relation to Christ—we too can become distinguished by our connection to the cross. Have you ever seen an icon or holy card of Helena? In practically every image created of her, iconographers and artists render her as holding a cross. That’s because Helena is most readily identified by Christians not by her relationship to her son the emperor, but by her relationship to Christ and his cross.
Today’s feast commemorates not just the death of Christ (as does Good Friday) but invites us to venerate the Cross itself, by which He redeemed the world.”
(Saint Bonaventure (Brevil., III, ix) lists the same. The number seven was given by Saint Gregory the Great (Lib. mor. in Job.) XXXI, xvii), and held for most of the Middle Age theologists. Previous authors listed 8 Deadly Sins: Saint Cyprian (mort., iv); Cassian (instit caenob., v, coll. 5, de octo principalibus vitiis); Columbanus (“Instr. de octo vitiis princip.”in”library. Max. vet. Patr. “(, XII, 23);” Alcuin (virtut et vitiis, xxvii and ff.))
“See the souls over whom anger prevailed. In the warm bath of the sun they were hateful, down here in the black sludge of the river Styx do they wish they had never been born.” — Virgil
The river Styx is a toxic marsh that eternally drowned those who are overcome with rage while they are alive. Those who expressed anger (The wrathful) attacked each other on the swamp’s surface while those who repressed anger (The sullen) eternally drowned beneath the marsh.
We have seen a lot of wrath lately.
Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.
The vengeful will suffer the LORD’s vengeance,
for He remembers their sins in detail. -Sir 27:30-28:1
This song is from the Carmina Burana and the first stanzas in Latin are translated as follows:
Estuans interius ira vehementi in amaritudine loquor mee menti: factus de materia, cinis elementi similis sum folio, de quo ludunt venti.
Burning inside with violent anger, bitterly I speak to my heart: created from matter, of the ashes of the elements, I am like a leaf played with by the winds.
Dante described wrath as “love of justice perverted to revenge and spite”. St. John Chrysostom said this regarding anger: He who is not angry when he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is a hotbed of many vices (Homily 11). St. Thomas Aquinas said, “Consequently, lack of the passion of anger is also a vice, [for it is] a lack of movement in the will directed to punishment by the judgment of reason” (Summa Theologica II, IIae 158.8).
St. Thomas, following Pope St Gregory the Great, also lists the “daughters” of anger (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 158, A. 7) as quarreling, swelling of the mind, contumely (contempt or derision), clamor, indignation and blasphemy. For indeed, sometimes anger is directed at one who we deem unworthy, and this is called “indignation.” Sometimes wrathful anger manifests a pride where our anger is rooted in obstinate opinions and superiority. And anger surely gives birth to quarreling, derisiveness, and clamor. Anger directed at God often produces blasphemy.
Of the Virtues that are medicine for anger – Clearly meekness is the chief virtue to moderate anger. Meekness is the proper middle ground between too much anger and not enough anger. Cleary the virtues associated with Charity such as love and peace along with proper fraternal correction assist in both curbing anger and directing it to useful ends. Prudence too will help direct and moderate anger especially through the foresight, circumspection, caution, counsel and discrimination proper to it. Finally humility helps alleviate the swollen mind of anger.
The sin of anger is ultimately a hateful and hurtful thing. It tends to destruction and must be mastered by meekness and patience. Perhaps it is best to remember a scriptural admonition:
Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath! Fret not; it leads only to evil. For the evildoers shall be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.(Psalm 37:8-9)
Wrath, or hatred if you will, is an acid within the soul that eats away at the heart until there is almost nothing left – St. John Cassian himself refers to it as a “deadly poison.”1 It turns the Christian soul into a volcanic being, literally waiting to erupt and spill over its hate on to whatever it deems as its target and/or its oppressor. Wrath blocks the light of Christ from filling the soul – when one’s soul is filled to the brim with whipping torrents of blackened anger, clear judgment and humility of heart are not to be found, and if they are, they are buried beneath layers of ash and fire. In this, we see the truly suffocating effects of wrath.
“No matter what provokes it, anger blinds the soul’s eyes, preventing it from seeing the Sun of righteousness.”2 (St. John Cassian). It is a sin that places the soul within reach of the flames of Hell, “in danger of the judgment.” (Matt. 5:22) If left unchecked, wrath eventually produces the most evil fruits: desire for another’s harm or downfall, all-consuming hatred, violence, and many others. “If the passion of anger dominates your soul, those who live in the world will prove to be better than you and you will be put to shame…”3 (St. Theodoros the Great Ascetic)
So, how do we combat this sin and its effects? How are we able to calm a rage within us that seems to have consumed us? The cause of wrath needs to be uncovered beneath the piles of magma that surround the heart – in other words, get to the root of one’s rage. The Jesus Prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!”, has an incredible effect of calming the soul, taming it like a wild beast, and penetrating the heart to replace the fiery heat of rage with a gentle warmth. This prayer can often reveal what has been causing our anger.
“When anger tries to burn up my tabernacle, I will look to the goodness of God, Whom anger never touched… And when hatred tries to darken me, I will look to the mercy and the martyrdom of the Son of God…”4 (St. Hildegard of Bingen) When we find ourselves consumed by the sin of wrath, a sure antidote is found in gazing upon the crucified Savior, Who lifted not a finger against His persecutors, never once cried out against them, never once fought back. “Picture to yourself all the torments and indignities of His Passion, and amazed at His constancy, blush at your own weakness.”5 (Dom Lorenzo Scupoli)
Here, we see the virtue of humility come to our aid in the combat against wrath, for wrath is intimately linked with pride via self-justification of one’s seemingly “righteous” anger, an aspect of wrath which seems to me to speak to the inability to see clearly through one’s rage, as outlined above. As Evagrius notes, wrath “darkens the soul,”6 and this darkening causes the Christian to be lost in their own stormclouds within. Humility shines a light through these clouds, and allows us to see clearly once again.
With humility comes mercy and compassion towards others, a sure way of putting out the fires of wrath, for “the limpidity of mercy is known for patience in bearing injury, and the perfection of humility, when it rejoices in gratuitous slander”7 (St. Isaac the Syrian), and injury (either perceived or real), is the great spark that sets the sin of wrath into motion. “If you are truly merciful, when you are wrongfully and cruelly deprived of what is yours, you will not be angry within or without…”8 (St. Isaac the Syrian)
“When I’ve struggled with “anger” in the past, I’ve often thought, at the moment, that I was being reasonable. Nonetheless, more often than not, I’ve looked back on those moments of anger only to realize that this was only half-the-truth. Reason may have been operating, but there was likely a dimension within myself that wouldn’t entertain an alternative viewpoint. For this reason, St. Thomas Aquinas suggests, as the spiritual master he is, that to counterbalance the vice of Wrath (anger, when it isn’t righteous) we apply meekness.
What I often observe, however, which is where this gets tricky, is too quickly we jump to the assumption that our anger is righteous. In that moment, our fallen nature is no longer at play, we have become as immaculate as the Virgin Mary and her Son, at least in a passive manner, gazing outwardly with rage and discontent. If we have to justify our anger as “righteous” we may actually be too occupied with our own moral disposition than what we are meant to be focused on in a spirit of love for the good.
I’d like to suggest that a regular arrival at the passion “anger” can lead us down a path that is to cause us to become untrustworthy most especially to ourselves, and simply being open to this possibility is of itself a sign that perhaps our anger isn’t disordered. Or even admitting where it is imperfect, concretely. As the “Imitation for Christ” insists: the passionate man is untrustworthy.
Here one may condemn the errors of emotivism, but in practice, they cannot distinguish between their own interior battle with integrity and truth.
What are signs that our way of thinking, our inclination to be angry in a disproportionate (unreasonable manner) has taken over? One is “murmuring.” It is the habit of complaining, whereby we never delight in any improvement, but always “to on to the next thing.” In Catholic circles, this is often tagged as an ‘actively disengaged’ Christian. They are not part of the building up of the Kingdom, nor even the tearing down of structures, they simply only find fault and then consume rage like popcorn. Rather than looking towards the dysfunction with a sense of one’s own potential to have fallen into the same errors, they look at it as though lofty and self-sufficient. And it’s in this anger that often, years later, looking back through the lens of grace, one comes to the terms with their own hypocrisy. That is definitely an ongoing experience in my life – but maybe I’m alone in that.
Meekness in the face of disordered anger is really only possible by the power of the Holy Spirit that gives us “competence” or “self-control.” Both of these things mean to have a strong mind, whereby the flare-up of passion does not trump a discernment process, nor a process that is quick to factor in our own fallen-ness. The mind bends to possibilities that run contrary to the accusations that derive from our passions, and meekness is a habitual act within the soul to assess anger.
Meekness does not denounce anger, but it keeps it hinged to reason, whereby it excludes it when as a passion it is unreasonable, or it moderates it and channels it to something proactive, creative, and redeeming, when it is rooted in the right spirit of things. Without meekness man is lost to his passions, he lacks the Holy Spirit in his mind, and his own discernment cannot be trusted. In this sense we must admit that the sin of wrath is both an addiction and a sign of a weak, broken, mind that thinks itself strong, righteous, and intelligent.
I remember a number of years ago promoting the integration of meekness into our spiritual lives only to receive very livid Christians demanding that meekness was a vice. They were certain about this, and could not dare to quiet themselves before Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. For this reason, Scripture can be the cold water poured upon our passions.”
Love, pray for me,
Matthew
1 – Institutes, “On the Eight Vices”
2 – ibid.
3 – A Century of Spiritual Texts, 30
4 – Scivias, IV:7
5 – The Spiritual Combat, 52
6 – Praktikos, 23
7 – On Ascetical Life, VI:8
8 – ibid., VI:9
– “Sloth (Desidia), from the series The Seven Deadly Sins, Pieter van der Heyden (Netherlandish, ca. 1525–1569), after Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Netherlandish, Breda (?) ca. 1525–1569 Brussels), publisher: Hieronymus Cock (Netherlandish, Antwerp ca. 1510–1570 Antwerp), 1558, engraving, 8 15/16 x 11 5/8 in. (22.7 x 29.6 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, NY. Please click on the image for greater detail.
Representing the vice of sloth, this image belongs to a series of prints of the Seven Deadly Sins, engraved by Pieter van der Heyden after drawings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The personification of sloth, a shabbily dressed woman, demonstratively sleeps away the time in the central foreground, resting her weight on the back of an ass. The various examples of lazy or slothful behavior, in evidence in the surrounding landscape, colorfully demonstrate the message of the inscription below: “Sloth makes man powerless and dries out the nerves until man is good for nothing.” Each of the seven prints follows a similar compositional scheme, with the personification of the vice accompanied by a symbolic animal in the foreground. Bruegel also adopted a common setting and “look” for the series by depicting each scene in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, to whom Bruegel was often compared. Sloth features an assortment of fantastic creatures and a confused arrangement of hybrid structures reminiscent of Bosch’s work. This reminiscent style, employed consciously by Bruegel, contrasts sharply with the way he depicted The Seven Virtues, a series of prints executed in the following years—all of them set in an accurate version of Bruegel’s contemporary world.
The Deadly Sins are listed by St. Thomas (I-II: 84:4) as:
(Saint Bonaventure (Brevil., III, ix) lists the same. The number seven was given by Saint Gregory the Great (Lib. mor. in Job.) XXXI, xvii), and held for most of the Middle Age theologists. Previous authors listed 8 Deadly Sins: Saint Cyprian (mort., iv); Cassian (instit caenob., v, coll. 5, de octo principalibus vitiis); Columbanus (“Instr. de octo vitiis princip.”in”library. Max. vet. Patr. “(, XII, 23);” Alcuin (virtut et vitiis, xxvii and ff.))
“A sin of omission is committed when a person has a duty to do something but doesn’t do it. If a Catholic skips Sunday Mass out of laziness, that is a sin of omission (a serious one). If you saw a person drowning in a river and didn’t throw a rope to him, that too would be a serious sin of omission. Jesus was very clear about what awaits people who are guilty of serious omissions (see Matthew 25:41-46).
“Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from Me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave Me no food, I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink, a stranger and you gave Me no welcome, naked and you gave Me no clothing, ill and in prison, and you did not care for Me.’ Then they will answer and say, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or ill or in prison, and not minister to Your needs?’ He will answer them, ‘Amen, I say to you, what you did not do for one of these least ones, you did not do for Me.’ And these will go off to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
There are certain things we are morally required to do, either because of our state in life (we are baptized Catholics, for instance) or simply because we are human and we have an obligation to show basic charity and respect for the life and property of others.
Now, when you see something that is good but not obligatory, and you don’t follow through and do the good act, that is an imperfection. Fr. Jordan Aumann, OP, in his book Spiritual Theology defined imperfection as “the omission of a good act that is not of obligation or the remiss performance of an act, that is, with less perfection than that of which one is capable.”
Father Aumann goes on to note that “we should not demand perfection in each and every human action, but should take into account the weakness of our human condition. The most that can be demanded is that individuals do the best they can under the circumstances and then leave the rest to God.”
Two points are worth mentioning here. First, by all means, keep working to overcome imperfections in your life. “In the Church, everyone whether belonging to the hierarchy, or being cared for by it, is called to holiness” (Lumen Gentium, 39).
Second, don’t get discouraged if you continue to see imperfections in yourself. We are all human and therefore limited and imperfect. And being aware of our shortcomings can help motivate us to stay close to Our Lord in prayer, the sacraments and acts of charity.”
“When many of us think of sloth, we probably conjure up images of an ugly South American animal that eats shoots and actually hangs around. Or maybe we think of unshaven Joe Sixpack lying on the sofa all weekend, not lifting a finger except to open another cold one.
The latter is a fairly apt image of the vice of sloth or its synonyms such as boredom, acedia, and laziness. Boredom refers to a certain emptiness of soul or lack of passion; acedia refers to the sadness that comes from our unwillingness to tackle the difficulties involved in attaining something good; laziness more generally refers to the torpor and idleness of one who is not inclined to exert himself.
Sloth encompasses all these ideas and more. In his Pocket Catholic Dictionary, the late Jesuit Fr. John Hardon, SJ defined sloth as “sluggishness of soul or boredom because of the exertion necessary for the performance of a good work. The good work may be a corporal task, such as walking; or a mental exercise, such as writing; or a spiritual duty, such as prayer.”
One might have the impression that sloth is not a typically American sin. The virtues of diligence and industriousness are deeply ingrained in our nation’s Protestant work ethic. Our youth learn early on that the way to get ahead—at least for those who don’t win the lottery—is by working hard. The early bird catches the worm. Early to bed, early to rise. In a competitive, dog-eat-dog business world, everyone is looking for an “edge,” and that typically comes from outworking the competition.
And even apart from an employment context, when we want to communicate that our lives have been normal and healthy, we report that we’ve been “keeping busy.”
Surely the Church has always championed the intrinsic goodness of human work, through which we become “co-creators” with God and exercise legitimate stewardship over creation. In his 1981 encyclical letter on human work (Laborem Exercens), Pope John Paul II writes: “Work is a good thing for man—a good thing for his humanity—because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being’” (9).
Mightier than the Minotaur
Yet sloth is a sin against God, and not against the time clock or productivity. The fact is that it’s possible to work too much, in a way that’s not in keeping with our dignity and ultimate good. The essence of sloth is a failure to fulfill one’s basic duties. Surely one such duty is the human vocation to work. Yet another such duty is the enjoyment of leisure, to take time for worship. The gentleman lying on the sofa may be a more popular image of sloth, but the workaholic, who’s on the job 24-7 and in the process neglects God and family, is the more typical manifestation of sloth in our culture.
Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it this way:
In the United States the difficulties are not a Minotaur or dragon—not imprisonment, hard labor, death, government harassment, and censorship—but cupidity, boredom, sloppiness, indifference. Not the acts of a mighty, all-pervading, repressive government, but the failure of a listless public to make use of the freedom that is its birthright. (qtd. in William J. Bennett, “Redeeming Our Time,” Imprimis, November 1995)
Work and leisure are both products of human freedom, and both are intimately tied to our ultimate good. Most of us understand and periodically struggle with the natural aversion to work, but why do we find it so difficult to enjoy leisure? Why do we consign ourselves to joyless workaholism instead of striking a healthy balance in our lives? There are many reasons for this strange phenomenon, but I’d like to point out a few contributing factors that reflect the spiritual malaise of our time.
First, Pope John Paul II, in his 1995 encyclical on the Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae), identified “the heart of the tragedy being experienced by modern man: the eclipse of the sense of God and of man” (21). He noted that “when the sense of God is lost, there is also a tendency to lose the sense of man, of his dignity and his life” (21). The Holy Father was speaking to us: We in the west have largely lost the sense of God, leading to a loss of our own sense of purpose or mission. This has inexorably led to the societal emptiness and lack of passion that Solzhenitsyn saw so clearly decades ago. A striking correlation exists between the rise of secular atheism and boredom, as the reduction of human existence to the merely material divests it of its intended richness and meaning. This can only lead to the worldly sadness that leads to despair and ultimately death (cf. 2 Cor. 7:10).
Amusing Ourselves to Death
The most typical way of dealing with this tragedy is by not dealing with it, so as a society we tend to flock to entertainments. Certainly, these things are not bad in themselves, but excessive recourse to them reveals a flight from the depths of the human condition to the comfort of shallow pastimes. These pursuits are rightly called diversions, because they divert us from facing a life from which the living God has been excluded. For some, these diversions may be sports, television, or the Internet, among other possibilities. For others, work becomes a diversion, an escape. When it does, it ceases to be a manifestation of virtue and instead feeds the vice of sloth.
In addition, modern man tends to define himself by what he does and what he has. Yet, leisure isn’t about producing and owning, but about being—in other words, resting in God’s presence. We often fail to recognize the immense God-given dignity and value we have simply by being who we are, which is prior to anything we might accomplish in life. In Augustinian terms, without allowing for leisure, our hearts are forever restless, and our sense of worth gets tied to what we’re able to produce. This utilitarian mindset not only drives us to overwork but it also negatively affects how we value others. That’s one reason why our society has such a difficult time valuing the elderly and the infirm in our midst.
Further, as the pursuit of success, acclaim, or riches becomes the source of our personal worth, these human goods in essence take the place of God in our lives. Few of us probably set out to become idolaters, but that’s what we’ve become if our choices and work habits are ordered toward serving mammon, not God (Matt. 6:24; CCC 2113).
In response to all this, I offer a three-part plan for battling and overcoming the vice of sloth.
1: Remember to keep holy the Lord’s Day.
I recently had the occasion to reread Pope John Paul II’s magnificent 1998 apostolic letter Dies Domini, on keeping the Lord’s Day holy. It’s hard to single out “favorites” from among John Paul’s voluminous writings, but surely this meditation on the Lord’s Day will benefit Christians “with ears to hear” for many generations to come.
I heartily recommend this apostolic letter as spiritual reading. Perhaps we can even give up an hour or so of sports (.asp) this Sunday to soak in some of the Holy Father’s insights as to what Sunday is all about in the first place.
One passage of Dies Domini really struck me: “[The Sabbath is] rooted in the depths of God’s plan. This is why, unlike many other precepts, it is not set within the context of strictly cultic stipulations but within the Decalogue, the ‘ten words’ which represents the very pillars of the moral life inscribed on the human heart” (DD 13).
Sunday Mass is not simply another requirement imposed on us by a Church that’s obsessed with “rules.” Rather, the obligation to remember to keep the day holy is prefigured and rooted in the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy, which in turn is rooted in the very act of creation. And by creation I mean both God’s creation of the world, from which he took his rest on the seventh day, and God’s creation of us. This call to worship, to rest from servile labor, to take stock of all that God has given us, is inscribed in who we are, and we are acting against our own good when we fail to remember to keep Sunday holy. As our Lord noted, the Sabbath is made for man, and not the other way around.
On top of all that, we are commanded to “remember” to keep the day holy, which suggests that we might tend to “forget.”
When it comes to tithing our money, assuming that we even make an effort to support the Church financially, we look for the minimum we can get by with. Nobody ever says, “Is it okay to give more than 10 percent?” or tries to imitate the widow in the Gospel (Luke 21:1-4). Instead, we tend to give a mere pittance of what we’re able to give—certainly not enough to affect our overall spending habits. God asks for our first fruits and we give him our spare change.
In a similar sense, God asks us to tithe our time, to give him one day per week. We’ve reduced the Lord’s Day to Sunday Mass, and even then we squawk if it lasts more than 45 minutes. We can’t get out of Church fast enough once we’ve “done our time.”
But as long as we view the Sunday obligation minimally and as a burden, we’re missing the point. While Sunday Mass is the source and summit of our Christian life for the week, the entire Lord’s Day should be set aside for God and family—in other words, for leisure and for freedom from servile labor. Surely there must be some flexibility in application especially given our diverse, secular culture, but I daresay just as we can probably do a better job of tithing our money, we can do a better job of remembering to observe the Lord’s Day.
2: Take stock of our schedule.
Time is one of our most valued commodities, and we should spend it in a way that reflects our values and priorities. Getting the Lord’s Day right is the first and most important step, but we still have six other days to order correctly. Faith, family, work, and other pursuits are like ingredients that need to be added at the right time and in the right measure to make a tasty dish. If we don’t take the time to read and follow the recipe, the ingredients won’t come together in the way we’d like.
That’s why it’s so important for individuals, couples, families, and communities to take the time to identify their priorities and commitments and schedule their days and weeks accordingly. For those of us who tend to be lazy “underachievers,” a schedule will keep us on task to make sure we meet our obligations. For those of us who tend toward workaholism and to be driven by the tyranny of the urgent, a schedule will make sure that we make time for prayer, reading to the kids, or other priorities that might get shoved aside if we’re not vigilant.
3: Cultivate virtue.
If we’re not actively engaged in cultivating virtue, then our lives will start looking like my lawn. There are some patches of grass, but each day there are also more weeds. Overcoming vice and developing virtue go together, just as it’s not enough to pull weeds without also planting and fertilizing the new grass.
When it comes to sloth, the corresponding virtues are justice, charity, and magnanimity. Sloth is about fulfilling our obligations to God and neighbor, which brings into play the various manifestations of justice. However, the motivation for fulfilling these obligations should be supernatural charity, which moves us out of our small, self-serving world so that we might live for others.
When the spiritual laxity of sloth overtakes us, we are like a football team that has lost its momentum. We are set back on our spiritual heels and feel ill-prepared to do what is necessary to turn the tide. From this perspective, we can see how the “end game” of sloth is despair, as eventually the negative momentum snowballs, and we lose the will to compete. Magnanimity, however, literally means being “great-souled”; it is the virtue that gives us the confidence that we can do all things in him who strengthens us (Phil. 4:13), that we can truly run so as to win (1 Cor. 9:24).
Each time we act against our disinclination to pray, as well as work into our day habits of prayer (e.g., saying a Hail Mary when we’re stopped in traffic) and sacrifice, we are replacing sloth with virtues that will help us become saints. And it all starts with getting up off the couch and onto our knees.”
Love & virtue,
Matthew
Summa Catechetica, "Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam." – St Anselm, "“Si comprehendus, non est Deus.” -St Augustine, "Let your religion be less of a theory, and more of a love affair." -G.K. Chesterton, “When we pray we speak to God; but when we read, God speaks to us.” -St Jerome, "As the reading of bad books fills the mind with worldly and poisonous sentiments; so, on the other hand, the reading of pious works fills the soul with holy thoughts and good desires." -St. Alphonsus Liguori, "And above all, be on your guard not to want to get anything done by force, because God has given free will to everyone and wants to force no one, but only proposes, invites and counsels." –St. Angela Merici, “Yet such are the pity and compassion of this Lord of ours, so desirous is He that we should seek Him and enjoy His company, that in one way or another He never ceases calling us to Him . . . God here speaks to souls through words uttered by pious people, by sermons or good books, and in many other such ways.” —St. Teresa of Avila, "I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men and women who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, and who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity… I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism, and where lie the main inconsistencies and absurdities of the Protestant theory.” -St. John Henry Newman, “Duties of Catholics Towards the Protestant View,” Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, "We cannot always have access to a spiritual Father for counsel in our actions and in our doubts, but reading will abundantly supply his place by giving us directions to escape the illusions of the devil and of our own self-love, and at the same time to submit to the divine will.” —St. Alphonsus Ligouri, "The harm that comes to souls from the lack of reading holy books makes me shudder . . . What power spiritual reading has to lead to a change of course, and to make even worldly people enter into the way of perfection." –St. Padre Pio, "Screens may grab our attention, but books change our lives!" – Word on Fire, "Don't neglect your spiritual reading. Reading has made many saints!" -St Josemaría Escrivá, "Do you pray? You speak to the Bridegroom. Do you read? He speaks to you." —St. Jerome, from his Letter 22 to Eustochium, "Encounter, not confrontation; attraction, not promotion; dialogue, not debate." -cf Pope Francis, "God here speaks to souls through…good books“ – St Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, "You will not see anyone who is really striving after his advancement who is not given to spiritual reading. And as to him who neglects it, the fact will soon be observed by his progress.” -St Athanasius, "To convert someone, go and take them by the hand and guide them." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP. 1 saint ruins ALL the cynicism in Hell & on Earth. “When we pray we talk to God; when we read God talks to us…All spiritual growth comes from reading and reflection.” -St Isidore of Seville, “Also in some meditations today I earnestly asked our Lord to watch over my compositions that they might do me no harm through the enmity or imprudence of any man or my own; that He would have them as His own and employ or not employ them as He should see fit. And this I believe is heard.” -GM Hopkins, SJ, "Only God knows the good that can come about by reading one good Catholic book." — St. John Bosco, "Why don't you try explaining it to them?" – cf St Peter Canisius, SJ, Doctor of the Church, Doctor of the Catechism, "Already I was coming to appreciate that often apologetics consists of offering theological eye glasses of varying prescriptions to an inquirer. Only one prescription will give him clear sight; all the others will give him at best indistinct sight. What you want him to see—some particular truth of the Faith—will remain fuzzy to him until you come across theological eye glasses that precisely compensate for his particular defect of vision." -Karl Keating, "The more perfectly we know God, the more perfectly we love Him." -St Thomas Aquinas, OP, ST, I-II,67,6 ad 3, “But always when I was without a book, my soul would at once become disturbed, and my thoughts wandered." —St. Teresa of Avila, "Let those who think I have said too little and those who think I have said too much, forgive me; and let those who think I have said just enough thank God with me." –St. Augustine, "Without good books and spiritual reading, it will be morally impossible to save our souls." —St. Alphonsus Liguori "Never read books you aren't sure about. . . even supposing that these bad books are very well written from a literary point of view. Let me ask you this: Would you drink something you knew was poisoned just because it was offered to you in a golden cup?" -St. John Bosco " To teach in order to lead others to faith is the task of every preacher and of each believer." —St. Thomas Aquinas, OP. "Prayer purifies us, reading instructs us. Both are good when both are possible. Otherwise, prayer is better than reading." –St. Isidore of Seville “The aid of spiritual books is for you a necessity.… You, who are in the midst of battle, must protect yourself with the buckler of holy thoughts drawn from good books.” -St. John Chrysostom
