Editor’s Note: For those who wonder about the value of praying the rosary daily, consider the following anecdote from Fr. Roger Landry about Fr. Sal Ferigle, an Opus Dei priest who passed away in 1997 and whom many described as “the holiest priest I ever knew.”
During a meditation once on the last things, said Fr. Landry, Fr. Sal “confessed why he was not afraid of death. With his quantitative mind, he said that since he was three he had been praying the rosary, saying at least 53 Hail Mary’s a day. When he got older, he learned to pray the Angelus, adding three more Hail Mary’s. When he joined Opus Dei, he began the practice of praying three Angelic Salutations before bed. And so, doing the math in front of us, he said that, when he would come to meet Christ face to face in judgment, he would turn to our Lady standing at her Son’s right and say with filial trust, ‘Blessed Mother, if I’ve asked you once, I have asked your more than 1.5 million times: “Pray for me at the hour of my death!”
Q. Pope Francis has declared that he will wait before judging Donald Trump. Shouldn’t he take a little time and reread the Good Book to see what his Boss upstairs has to say about judging others? D.H., Iowa.
A. In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Pope Francis was quoted as saying that “we must wait and see” what happens in the Trump presidency and resist the urge to “judge people prematurely.” The Holy Father said that “we will see how he acts, what he does, and then I will have an opinion. But being afraid or rejoicing beforehand because of something that might happen is, in my view, quite unwise. It would be like prophets predicting calamities.”
In the same interview, however, Pope Francis rather ominously mentioned the danger of following a “charismatic leader,” as the German people followed Hitler. “In times of crisis,” he said, “we lack judgment, and that is a constant reference for me. That is why I always try to say, talk among yourselves, talk to one another. But the case of Germany in 1933 is typical, a people who were immersed in a crisis, who were searching for their identity until this charismatic leader came and promised to give them their identity back, and he gave them a distorted identity, and we all know what happened.”
In connection with the inauguration, the Pope had sent a telegram offering good wishes and prayers to President Trump. The Pontiff said that “at a time when our human family is beset by grave humanitarian crises demanding far-sighted and united political responses, I pray that your decisions will be guided by the rich spiritual and ethical values that have shaped the history of the American people and your nation’s commitment to the advancement of human dignity and freedom worldwide.”
Regarding what the “Boss upstairs” has to say about judging others, we assume that you are referring to Jesus’ admonition not to judge others lest we be judged accordingly by Him. Sure, it’s judgmental to say that certain actions — murder, abortion, racism, adultery, fornication, missing Mass deliberately on Sunday — are wrong, but it is not wrong to judge the sin as long as we do not judge the sinner. We leave that up to God. That’s what Jesus was talking about.
We know that because on another occasion He invited us to criticize immoral behavior, saying in Matthew 18 that if a person sins, speak to him about his sin; if he won’t listen, get one or two others to talk to him; if he won’t listen to them, refer him to the Church; if he refuses to listen to the Church, then treat him as an outcast. That’s why we intervene with family members and friends in an effort to steer them away from behavior that could ruin their physical or spiritual lives, or both.
There is even a Spiritual Work of Mercy that instructs us to “admonish the sinner.” That’s right, leading a person away from sin is a work of mercy and love. Remember that the Lord told Ezekiel (chapter 3) that if he warned the wicked man about his sins and the man ignored the warning and died in his sins, Ezekiel would have saved his own life; but if he did not warn the wicked man and he died in his sins, Ezekiel would be held responsible for the man’s death.
St. James said a similar thing in his New Testament letter when he said that “whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his [own] soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins” (James 5:20).
Finally, Pope Benedict, in his Lenten message in 2012, said that “we must not remain silent before evil” or fail to warn our brothers and sisters “against ways of thinking and acting that are contrary to the truth and that do not follow the path of goodness.” He said that in correcting others, we must always be moved “by love and mercy” and a “genuine concern for the good” of others.
Q. It seems to me that a Catholic county clerk can in good conscience issue marriage licenses to divorced persons because he or she does not know whether the previous marriage(s) were valid. They are not in the position of conducting a marriage tribunal. — J.I., Minnesota.
A. We agree, and so does canon lawyer Dr. Edward Peters. In his blog In the Light of the Law, Dr. Peters said that “civil divorce is now deeply, deeply entrenched in Western law. Like weeds among the wheat (Matthew 13), routine divorce cannot, I think, be pulled from the American marriage scene without an upheaval whose costs would likely exceed the benefits. Adding that divorce per se is not always contrary to Christian doctrine [cf. the Pauline Privilege], and that some civil divorces actually enable subsequent marriages that Christians themselves should honor, I think issuing civil licenses to divorced persons — persons who might, upon careful examination, be found eligible for a subsequent marriage even by Christian standards, and in any case when refusal must come about, if at all, only after a widespread, legislatively authorized social reform — is defensible in the practical order. Reform of civil divorce law is, I think, necessary, but the routine practice of divorce itself, and sinful remarriage after divorce, is primarily a spiritual wrong to be addressed primarily by spiritual remedies.”
Refusing licenses to same-sex couples is different, said Peters, since “not one shred of doctrinal or juridical support for ‘same-sex marriage’ can be found in the multi-millennial Christian tradition or in the classics of natural law jurisprudence. Indeed, asserting marriage as being possible between two persons of the same sex is contrary to infallible Church teaching and is probably, strictly speaking, a heresy rendering Catholics liable to excommunication.
“Marriage pre-existed the Church and it even pre-existed the State. As the primordial human relational institution, it is beyond the power of any human authority to alter the fundamental definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. A State-imposed imposition of ‘same-sex marriage’ on a society is not simply an abuse of marriage (as, say, anti-miscegenation or pro-polygamy laws abused marriage), but is instead the imposition of a fundamental falsehood on society, a falsehood that damages the rule of law, the use of language, and the stability of the family.”
He said that while a state official does not know the divorced-or-not status of an opposite-sex couple seeking a marriage license, that official “need not know anything about the two people before him or her, beyond that they are of the same sex, to know that they cannot marry no matter what the Supreme Court, or the Obama administration, or nearly all of the mass media say and therefore refuses their request for, of all things, a marriage license. [Their] refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples is defensible in light of biblical teaching, ecclesiastical tradition, and natural law jurisprudence.”
In summary, said Peters, “from a Christian and from a natural law perspective,” a Catholic county clerk acts “defensibly both in issuing marriage licenses to divorced persons and in withholding them from same-sex couples. As such [he or she] should not be accused of acting hypocritically.”
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