Catholic Replies
Editor’s Note: In a recent reply about why Jesus would give “strict orders” not to reveal that He had brought the daughter of Jairus back to life, we said that Jesus was hoping to keep His Messiahship hidden until He was ready to make it known. J.G.B. of Alabama said that “your answer is good,” but that he would add the following comments:
“Jesus had in mind . . . that His identity should not be that of someone self-aggrandizing and seeking followers for worldly reasons, namely, that He is a miracle worker and that His mission is one of a temporal sort of salvation. To publicize that Jesus is a miracle worker is to understate the core of His identity and, therefore, though narrowly accurate, not truly wholly adequate and, in a way, a misstatement of His true identity.
“Jesus was not a ‘mere magician’ with a temporal mission. The purpose of Jesus’ mission was not, in fact, to rescue humanity from the inevitable cruelties of suffering and death that face all of us after the fall of Adam and Eve. Spreading His reputation in a manner that feeds such an expectation is, in fact, erroneous. Had Jesus explicitly allowed, or even encouraged, such a manner of spreading word of Him, He would have been giving a kind of implicit endorsement to a truncated and erroneous view of His identity and His mission.
“Truly, it was not until the Resurrection that the huge scope and breadth and depth of Jesus’ identity and mission became comprehensible, and that only with the miraculous descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
“It was inevitable that the crowds, and to a degree even His apostles and disciples, would misunderstand Jesus’ true nature — the suffering servant whose life on earth itself is God’s unbreakable covenant or bonding of Himself to humanity — and the Good News of God’s pledge that we, too, might become partakers of divinity (2 Peter 1:4). And that, by extension, Jesus as the paradigm of self-sacrificial love is the only path to eternal life. Not just the natural life to which the daughter of Jairus was restored.”
Q. Do the Pope, cardinals, bishops, and priests who are confusing the faithful about the teachings of Jesus commit a sacrilegious sin when they celebrate Holy Mass and partake in the Body and Blood of the Lamb of God? — A.S., Illinois.
A. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 2120), “sacrilege consists in profaning or treating unworthily the sacraments and other liturgical actions, as well as persons, things, or places consecrated to God. Sacrilege is a grave sin especially when committed against the Eucharist, for in this sacrament the true Body of Christ is made substantially present for us.”
This would mean, according to canon 1367 of Code of Canon Law, throwing away the consecrated Species with hate, anger, or contempt, or selling them for obscene, profane, or superstitious purposes, such as use at a satanic “Black Mass.”
So confusing the faithful about the teaching of Jesus, say, by stating or implying that those living in adultery can receive Holy Communion without committing a sin, is not a sacrilege. It is surely scandal though, since it may lead persons to receive the Body of Christ while in a state of mortal sin.
Those who celebrate Holy Mass after having misled the faithful about the teachings of Jesus on any topic are not committing sacrilege. They are not abusing the Holy Eucharist. And even if the celebrant were lacking in faith or sanctity, that would not invalidate the sacrament or prevent the graces from flowing to the participants in the liturgy. Remember, says the Catechism (n. 1127), that “Christ himself is at work: it is he who baptizes, he who acts in his sacraments in order to communicate the grace that each sacrament signifies.”
This is what the Church means when she says that “the sacraments act ex opere operato (literally: ‘by the very fact of the action’s being performed’), i.e., by virtue of the saving work of Christ, accomplished once for all. It follows that ‘the sacrament is not wrought by the righteousness of either the celebrant or the recipient, but by the power of God’ [St. Thomas Aquinas, STh III, 68, 8].” If a sacrament is celebrated in accordance with the intention of the Church, the Catechism says, “the power of Christ and his Spirit acts in it and through it, independently of the personal holiness of the minister” (n. 1128).
Q. The authority and power of transubstantiation into the true Presence of Jesus depends, in my understanding, on the priest being able to trace his Ordination back in an unbroken line to the apostles. But recent articles on licit and illicit bishops in China concern me that all Chinese Catholic priests, both in the underground church and in the government-controlled “Patriotic Association,” may not have the authority to consecrate properly. Your thoughts? — J.L., via e-mail.
A. You raise an important point. Bishops installed by the Chinese Communists are not true bishops, cannot legitimately ordain priests, and cannot confect the sacraments, including the Holy Eucharist. Since the Communists seized power in China in 1949, they have persecuted the Catholic Church, demolished many churches, and murdered or imprisoned many priests and bishops. According to a 2017 U.S. State Department report, religious freedom and public worship became even more severely restricted in Red China in the past year or so as the government has “physically abused, detained, arrested, tortured, sentenced to prison, or harassed adherents of both registered and unregistered religious groups.”
In spite of all this, the Vatican has asked legitimate Catholic bishops to step down and make way for the appointment of seven illegitimate bishops by the Communist regime. “We are simply negotiating the surrender of the underground Church, the delivery of underground Catholics into the hands of the Patriotic Association, which is beholden to the Communist Party of China and answers to it,” said China scholar Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute.
“It is obvious what the goal is. Why should the Catholic Church participate in its own dissolution and destruction?”
He said that the “new Red Emperor” Xi Jinping, who took power in 2012, “wants to be appointed the head of the Catholic Church in China. He does not wish it well. He wants to gradually eliminate it over time by appointing what anyone would reasonably construe as . . . fake bishops . . . and fake bishops they are.”
Another strong voice against this policy is 85-year-old Joseph Cardinal Zen, who was bishop of Hong Kong from 2002-2009 and spent many years battling the Communists in China. He has appealed to Pope Francis not to give his blessing to the “new schismatic church,” but he has been ignored by the Holy Father. “If the Holy Father gives up enough,” said Cardinal Zen, “they will take it, but the Communists will offer nothing of substance in return.”
The mindset of the Vatican was indicated last month by the unbelievable statement of Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academies for Sciences and Social Sciences, who said that China’s current Communist regime is the “best [at] implementing the social doctrine of the Church.” He praised the government for its “moral leadership” on climate change and said that “the economy does not dominate politics, as happens in the United States, something Americans themselves would say. You do not have shantytowns, you do not have drugs, young people do not take drugs.”
Only a “psychotic detachment from reality” could have prompted Sorondo’s statements, said John Paul II biographer George Weigel. “What air, one wonders, did the bishop breathe in China, one of the most heavily polluted countries in the world? And does His Excellency imagine that a totalitarian regime, bent on asserting itself as a global power and unaccountable to its populace, is going to seriously address its problems of massive air, water, and soil pollution because it signed a piece of paper in the City of Light?”
Weigel also mentioned as contrary to Catholic social doctrine Red China’s policy of forcing millions of women to have abortions and its concentration camps “where slave labor is the rule and political prisoners are frequently murdered, so their transplantable organs can be harvested to benefit the more politically reliable members of the population.” He said that Sorondo’s comments “inevitably implicate the Pope he serves and cast doubt not only on the prudence of the Vatican’s current attempts at demarche with China…but on the integrity of the Holy See.”
