Catholic Replies
Editor’s Note: We have in the past tried to explain why a good and loving God would allow the existence of evil and suffering and would allow bad things to happen to good people. It is a mystery that we will not fully understand in this life.
However, some understanding of this mystery can be found in a book by Mark Giszczak entitled Light on the Dark Passages of Scripture, which is published by Our Sunday Visitor. We highly recommend this book for addressing many of the difficult-to-understand passages in the Bible and offer the following excerpt as an example of the book’s value:
“Of course, we could write a thousand books about suffering and evil, but the principles for understanding all the complex arguments that philosophers, theologians, and others make boil down to a few simple concepts. God is all-good and all-powerful. Evil is a privation of good. No one is righteous. All are born under sin and are therefore subject to death. God does bring justice, but we might have to wait until the end of time for all the loose ends to be tied together. In fact, God walks with us on the path of suffering, suffers on our behalf, and fights on our side against the evil in the world.
“Deep down we know the unjust and terrible sufferings so many people undergo are simply not right. There’s no way to stare a suffering person in the face and simply explain away his or her troubles. But we can trust that when he returns, God will judge everyone everywhere and undo the wrongs and injustices of this world. Someday, ‘he will wipe away every tear’ (Rev. 21:4), and our hearts will finally rest in the victory of God’s justice” (p. 110).
Q. My son, God willing, will be ordained to the priesthood in a year. As proud parents, we have been looking for a place to have his reception and deciding whom to invite. The problem begins with my husband’s sister, who has had a lesbian partner for over 25 years. We plan to invite the sister to the Ordination and reception. Is it proper to invite her significant other? We think that inviting her friend signifies that we agree to this union. What do you think? They are no longer Catholic but Protestant. — G.V.T., via e-mail.
A. If this “significant other” ran the local abortion chamber, would you invite her to the reception? Or would such an invitation be a cause for scandal for those at the reception? That is, would the presence of an abortionist lead others to think that abortion was okay or that it was no big deal to have such a person present at the celebration of priesthood? The answer to these questions is obvious, and you would not extend the invitation to her.
So why would you invite someone who is publicly living in a situation that is contrary to the teaching of God and the Church? When your son becomes a priest, he is going to have to preach about the sinfulness of the homosexual lifestyle if he wishes to defend the Church’s teaching on sexual morality. Will he feel inhibited from doing so because his aunt is in a lesbian relationship? Or if he does preach about this sin, what will he say when a parishioner asks, “But, Father, didn’t you have a lesbian couple at your reception following Ordination?”
We all have to do what is right, which means following the teachings of Jesus. It will not be easy and could mean estrangement from family and friends, but better to be estranged from those whose morality is based on feelings instead of truth than from Jesus.
Q. I know that LifeSiteNews.com is a pro-life Christian website, but how reputable is it? I have received articles so controversial about the Pope’s comments, that they seem unreliable, even ridiculous, and might do more harm to the Pope’s image. I was always taught to respect the Pope. — E.C., via e-mail.
A. LifeSiteNews.com is a very reliable and reputable source of pro-life news. Yes, it has published articles expressing concern about some comments made by Pope Francis (see, for example, “The Troubling Statements of Pope Francis” in the June 16, 2016 issue of The Wanderer), but the articles are not disrespectful of the Holy Father. Rather, they express dismay at statements that appear to confuse or even contradict long-held Catholic teachings. At the end of the article that appeared in this newspaper, author John-Henry Westen said:
“This small sampling gives enough reason why faithful Catholics who love the Church and the Holy Father are concerned. They are so concerned they are overcoming the natural reticence to criticize the actions of the Pope — the Vicar of Christ on Earth. With reverence and love, with prayer and prudence — as well as the pain of children questioning their father — they are beginning to speak with greater boldness, sensing that the result of remaining silent about the current trajectory implies acquiescence and even approval, which would only contribute to the spreading ambiguities about the meaning of morality, faith, and salvation.”
More recent examples of this ambiguity include statements by Pope Francis that “the great majority of our sacramental marriages are null,” and that “cohabiting couples are in a true marriage having the grace of marriage.”
Both of these statement are false, said canon lawyer Dr. Edward Peters, who served for many years as a judge on a diocesan tribunal and who has authored the book 100 Answers to Your Questions on Annulments. These papal statements on marriage, said Peters, “were not slips akin to getting the date of a meeting wrong, they are not hearsay shared by a prelate known for a flexible attitude toward accuracy or stories shared by relatives from Argentina, and they are not hints of his views left ambiguous by some obvious omission.
“Instead these latest assertions were calmly offered by the Pope before a large and sympathetic audience, with expert advisers readily at hand, in an extended manner, all of which factors point, I think, in a consistent if disturbing direction.”
That direction, said Peters, could be a “marriage crisis” that is “going to come down to whether Church teaching on marriage, which everyone professes to honor, will be concretely and effectively protected in Church law, or whether the canonical categories treating marriage doctrine become so distorted (or simply disregarded) as essentially to abandon marriage and married life to the realm of personal opinion and individual conscience.”
Q. How can anyone still believe in papal infallibility after Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation on marriage and the family? — G.P., via e-mail.
A. But Amoris Laetitia was not an infallible pronouncement; it was rather the Holy Father’s reflections on the conclusions of the Synod of Bishops that met in Rome in 2014 and 2015 to discuss marriage and the family.
“The complexity of the issues that arose revealed the need for continued open discussion of a number of doctrinal, moral, spiritual, and pastoral questions” (n. 2),” said Pope Francis.
He said that “not all discussions of doctrinal, moral, or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it. This will always be the case as the Spirit guides us toward the entire truth (cf. John 16:13), until He leads us fully into the mystery of Christ and enables us to see all things as He does. Each country or region, moreover, can seek solutions better suited to its culture and sensitive to its traditions and local needs” (n. 3).
In order to teach infallibly, the Pope must speak on a matter of faith and morals in his official capacity as the Successor of St. Peter and Supreme Shepherd of the Church on earth, clearly indicate that he is making a solemn, definitive, and final pronouncement on a doctrine at issue, and declare his intention to bind all Catholics to accept the new teaching. That was not the case with Amoris Laetitia, nor does it contain the kind of formal language used, for example, by Pope St. John Paul II in 1994, when he infallibly ruled out priestly ordination of women:
“Wherefore, in order that all doubts may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s divine institution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Luke 22:32), I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful” (Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, n. 4).
