Catholic Replies
Editor’s Note: Regarding the status of Venerable Mary of Agreda’s book The Mystical City of God, which was discussed in a recent column, B.L. of Pennsylvania sent along a photocopy of a 1998 letter from Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, then the secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome. In the letter dated February 7, 1998, Archbishop Bertone said:
“This Congregation writes in reply to your fax message of October 29, 1997, in which you asked if there are currently any restrictions on keeping or reading The Mystical City of God by Venerable Maria of Agreda. Please be assured that at the present time there is no condemnation or restriction issued by ecclesiastical authorities with regard to this book.”
Q. Do we know what happened to St. Joseph or when he died? — N.C., Massachusetts.
A. No, we don’t. The husband of Mary and guardian of Jesus is mentioned in the Bible shortly after the Annunciation, at the time of Jesus’ birth and the flight into and return from Egypt, and then when Jesus was lost in the Temple at the age of 12. There is no mention of Joseph after Jesus began His public life at the age of 30, so the presumption is that he died sometime during those 18 years of Jesus’ hidden life. He is considered the patron of a happy death since he presumably died in the holy presence of Jesus and Mary.
For some wonderful insights into this good and righteous man, see Pope St. John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation Guardian of the Redeemer. Here’s a prayer to St. Joseph that is worth saying every day:
“Glorious St. Joseph, spouse of the Immaculate Virgin, obtain for me and all the members of my family and loved ones a confident, sinless, generous, and patient heart, and perfect resignation to the Divine Will. Be our guide, father, and model throughout life, that we may merit a death like yours, in the arms of Jesus and Mary.
“Help us, St. Joseph, in our earthly strife to fulfill our responsibilities and ever to lead a pure and blameless life. All for the Sacred and Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, all through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, all in union with St. Joseph. Amen.”
Q. Don’t I remember when the Church would not have a funeral Mass for someone who committed suicide, but now such a Mass is allowed? Why the change? — A.C., via e-mail.
A. Once upon a time, the Church would not celebrate a funeral Mass for a suicide victim on the grounds that taking one’s life was such a grave sin that a Mass of Christian Burial would be of no value to the person. Today, however, the Church does offer Mass for the soul of the deceased, and for his or her family, on the grounds that we cannot know for certain the state of the person’s soul at the time of death.
Since killing oneself is so contrary to human nature, there is the presumption that the victim was not rational and was therefore incapable of the sufficient reflection and full consent of the will necessary to commit a mortal sin that would send one to Hell.
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide” (n. 2282).
Therefore, says the Catechism, “we should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives” (n. 2283).
While those who take their own lives because of the psychological factors just mentioned might lessen their personal culpability, and be eligible for Church funeral rites, canon lawyer Dr. Edward Peters contends that there are two types of suicides who should be denied a funeral Mass.
Writing in his blog In the Light of the Law, Peters said that “the first are those (usually) men whom science describes as ‘family annihilators,’ men who murder their families and then kill themselves. I have written about these kinds of cases before and hold today the views I expressed in 2008: murdering-suicides should be refused ecclesiastical burial.”
The second group, said Peters, “are those who commit suicide in accord with evil civil legislation and/or court rulings that provide a legal process for killing oneself while providing exculpatory protection to those who assist in such suicides. Self-murder committed in accord with civil law differs plainly and significantly from the isolated individual who kills himself.”
He said that “persons who kill themselves in accord with civil law perform a number of public, verifiable steps that — if the laws are being applied as they are written — all but eliminate any ‘pious presumption’ of diminished culpability for one’s self-murder. The ‘benefits of the doubt’ that we want to accord to ‘traditional suicides’ can hardly be offered to those who kill themselves under civilly approved circumstances.
“To accord to such persons ecclesiastical funeral rites indistinguishable from the liturgies the Church grants to the faithful who die natural (sometimes even heroic!) deaths cannot but give scandal to the faithful. Indeed, to use the sacred rites of the Church for such ends is, I suggest, to commit a grave liturgical abuse, one savoring of sacrilege (Catechism, n. 2120).”
Q. In a recent article, actor Martin Sheen was quoted as saying that he can be a good Catholic while supporting same-sex “marriage” because “my religion’s highest standard is conscience.” He said that the Church is not God and that “the Church has not condemned a single soul to Hell because it does not have the authority.” How would you respond? — E.M.D., via e-mail.
A. We would respond in several ways. First, Sheen is right that the Church has not condemned a single soul to Hell, but that is because persons condemn themselves to Hell by the evil choices they make during their lives and by their failure to repent of those choices. A person who rejects God all during his life, and wants nothing to do with God, will get his wish. He will wind up eternally separated from God in Hell.
Second, Sheen was wrong when he said that “nothing can get between your conscience and God, not even the Church,” because one’s conscience must be formed according to the teachings of the Church. Jesus founded the Church to proclaim His teachings to the world, said that He would be with His Church “until the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20), and promised that He would “bind in Heaven” whatever decisions His Church made on Earth (cf. Matt. 16:19). Sheen called the Church “an institution, primarily of men,” who are “flawed, obviously.”
Yes, the Church is led by flawed individuals, i.e., sinners, but they can never contradict the will of God, the God who invented marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Third, Sheen apparently never learned what Vatican II said, namely, that “in the formation of their consciences, the Christian faithful ought carefully to attend to the sacred and certain doctrine of the Church. The Church is, by the will of Christ, the teacher of the truth. It is her duty to give utterance to, and authoritatively to teach, the Truth which is Christ himself, and also to declare and confirm by her authority those principles of the moral order which have their origin in human nature itself” (Declaration on Religious Freedom, n. 14).
One of those principles is that marriage is the faithful and fruitful union of one man and one woman for life.
So Catholics are obliged to follow their conscience, but a rightly formed conscience will never deny the truth about marriage or attempt to redefine marriage as something contrary to the divine plan.
Perhaps Sheen is unaware of the warning issued by Pope St. John Paul II in his World Day of Peace Message in 1990. The Holy Father said that “to claim that one has a right to act according to conscience, but without at the same time acknowledging the duty to conform one’s conscience to the truth and to the law which God Himself has written on our hearts, in the end means nothing more than imposing one’s limited personal opinion.”
Similarly, the U.S. bishops, in their 1976 pastoral letter on the moral life (To Live in Christ Jesus), said that “we must have a rightly informed conscience and follow it. But our judgments are human and can be mistaken. We may be blinded by the power of sin in our lives or misled by the strength of our desires. . . . Common sense requires that conscientious people be open and humble, ready to learn from the experience and insight of others, willing to acknowledge prejudices and even change their judgments in light of better instruction.”
