Editor’s Note: Following up on a recent column about the threat of radical Islam to our fellow Christians and to our country, here are some perceptive comments from Fr. George Rutler of the Church of St. Michael in New York City:
“Back to Greek: I indulge apophasis, which means saying that I am not going to say what I am going to say, to remark that there is no need to mention, in this rose-colored time of Lent, that our brothers and sisters in the faith in Iraq and Syria are suffering terribly. The Pope and various national leaders have used the word that our chief executive will not pronounce: genocide. If a hapless youth is shot on one of our city streets, it is front-page news, but the beheading of Christian infants in the Middle East hardly gets a comment.
“Our current president has told the United Nations that the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam, and he makes a habit of saying that terror attacks have ‘nothing to do with Islam.’ Our government has purged any reference to Islam from military and intelligence training manuals, and immigration policies favor Islam to the extent that so far this year, 602 Muslim immigrants have been granted asylum, while only two Christians have. Meanwhile, Christianity is being eradicated in the Middle East, and churches and monasteries destroyed.
“The Knights of Columbus have received more than 25,000 names for a petition asking the secretary of state to designate the systematic mass murder of Christians by the Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) as genocide. Iraqi and Syrian Christians fear going to refugee camps because they may be killed by Muslim ‘hit squads.’
“This transcends all the issues that transfix political candidates now seeking to repair what is broken in our nation. We are in the predicament that some of our Founding Fathers faced as they tried to make sense of what was to them an obscure and exotic religion that was damaging American commerce and compromising the new nation’s sovereignty: The Barbary pirates were enslaving thousands of Americans.
“In a recent talk to the Islamic Society of Baltimore, which the FBI warned had radical allegiances, President Obama said that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had copies of the Koran. He neglected to say that they were not seeking spiritual edification: They were trying to anatomize what was to them a fount of cruelty and engine of hysteria. Our Lady knew that kind of mentality when she watched her Son dragged through the streets.”
Q. I have missed many Sunday Masses because I have a chronic illness. Do I have to confess this to my priest in the confessional? — T.M., Missouri.
A. No, illness excuses one from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. Here are the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 2181):
“The Sunday Eucharist is the foundation and confirmation of all Christian practice. For this reason the faithful are obliged to participate in the Eucharist on days of obligation, unless excused for a serious reason (for example, illness, the care of infants) or dispensed by their own pastor [cf. CIC, canon 1245]. Those who deliberately fail in this obligation commit a grave sin.”
You are to be commended for your devotion to the Eucharist. When you are unable to be physically present at Mass, you can make a spiritual communion and offer it up for those who deliberately miss Mass without any serious reason, thus depriving themselves of this unique source of grace and strength.
Q. If God never changes, and if doctrine never changes, why does Pope Francis continually say that the Holy Spirit is full of surprises? — G.P., Florida.
A. Perhaps because he considers his own elevation to the Chair of Peter to be a surprise. Or perhaps he is thinking that, while God and doctrine may never change, our understanding of both can be increased through the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Did you ever read a passage of Scripture for the tenth time and see something you had never noticed before? Perhaps each new insight is one of the surprises of the Holy Spirit.
Q. Should a bishop be considered a heretic if he says that “we should have a reasonable hope that all will attain Heaven”? Doesn’t this contradict what numerous saints, and Christ Himself, have said? — R.B.K., via e-mail.
A. No, it doesn’t. The bishop isn’t saying that all will attain Heaven, but rather that it is reasonable to hope that they do. He may have been thinking of St. Paul’s statement that God “wills everyone to be saved and to come to knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). If God wants everyone to get to Heaven, and we know that this loving and merciful God will provide all the graces necessary to attain salvation, then it is reasonable to hope that all persons will get there.
This doesn’t mean that the hope will come to fruition since there are persons who will still refuse to cooperate with God’s grace and, by so doing, will choose for themselves damnation in Hell. God doesn’t send anyone to Hell, but He allows persons to exercise their free will and reject Him. Consider the following thoughts from two recent Popes.
In his 1991 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, St. John Paul II said that salvation in Christ is offered to every person, “not only to those who explicitly believe in Christ and have entered the Church,” but also to those who never had “an opportunity to come to know or accept the Gospel Revelation or to enter the Church” because of the social, cultural, or religious conditions in which they were raised.
He said that “for such people salvation in Christ is accessible by virtue of a grace which, while having a mysterious relation to the Church, does not make them formally part of the Church but enlightens them in a way which is accommodated to their spiritual and material situation. This grace comes from Christ; it is the result of his sacrifice and is communicated by the Holy Spirit. It enables each person to attain salvation through his or her free cooperation” (n. 10).
In his 2007 encyclical on Christian hope (Spe Salvi), Pope Benedict XVI says that, while there are thoroughly evil people in the world whose destiny is Hell, and there are thoroughly holy people whose destiny is Heaven, “we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people — we may suppose — there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior opening to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil — much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul” (n. 46).
So what happens to these individuals on Judgment Day, he asks. He turns to Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, where the saint says that each person’s work “will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which a man has built on the foundation [of Jesus Christ] survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (3:12-15).
The encounter with Christ, says Benedict, “is the decisive act of judgment. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves. All that we build during our lives can prove to be mere straw, pure bluster, and it collapses.
“Yet in the pain of this encounter, when the impurity and sickness of our lives become evident to us, there lies salvation. His gaze, the touch of his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation ‘as through fire.’ But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears through us like flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God” (n. 47).
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress