Catholic Replies
Q. I have a rosary called a “miraculous icon” that was “touched to the gloves, scab of blood, dried blood, and blood serum, and to the statue of Padre Pio.” It was also “blessed by Pope St. John Paul II and by nearly 1,000 archbishops, bishops, and priests from 70 countries.” What do you know of this? The contact is the Worldwide Apostolate known as Mary’s Way. — L.S., via e-mail.
A. Mary’s Way describes itself as an online shopping network for “the most powerful sacramentals in the world,” and it offers a large array of rosaries, scapulars, medals, icons, candles, pictures, statues, and other sacramentals. Your rosary appears to have acquired an extraordinary number of blessings, but whatever its provenance, the way in which you pray with it is more important.
What are sacramentals? They are certain rites or objects or blessings which are used to win God’s help by reason of our own devotion, plus the prayers of the Church on our behalf. They resemble the sacraments in that both are external, visible, spiritual ceremonies, but while the sacraments confer grace directly, the sacramentals give grace by virtue of the devotion of the person using them, and also by virtue of the official prayers and intercession of the Church. They are not necessary for salvation, but they can help us get to Heaven.
There are three primary categories of sacramentals: blessings, objects of devotion, and exorcisms. A blessing is the invocation of God’s favor on people (mothers, children, the sick) and on objects (schools, homes, cars). Objects of devotion, in addition to the ones mentioned above, include holy water, crucifixes, palms on Palm Sunday, and ashes on Ash Wednesday. Exorcisms are prayers said in the name of the Church to banish evil spirits from persons or buildings.
Sacramentals are channels of God’s grace that can benefit us in a variety of spiritual and temporal ways. They have the power to obtain pardon for venial sins, to obtain health of body and material blessings, provided that they would be good for our soul, and to give special protection against the power of the Devil. For example, holy water and crucifixes are an essential part of the rite of exorcism.
Some have accused Catholics of superstition for using sacramental objects, such as rosaries or medals or scapulars. But there is a world of difference between the person who carries a rabbit’s foot and one who wears a medal or scapular. The rabbit’s foot has no power to bring a person good luck, but religious objects can produce that effect through the power of Christ by virtue of the official prayer of the Church and the devotion of the person involved.
Obviously, the mere presence of a sacramental will not obtain spiritual benefits if the person employing one is indifferent or even hostile to its religious significance. Just as hanging a St. Christopher medal from one’s rearview mirror will not protect a person from harm if that person drives 100 miles an hour. We must will the good effect of the sacramental if we hope to receive it.
Q. How are we to respond to those who say that the Catholic Church killed millions of innocent people, mainly Jews and Muslims, during the Inquisition? — C.O., Nebraska.
A. Much of what has been written about the so-called Inquisition is wildly exaggerated. For example, there was not one Inquisition, but several of them over a period of about six hundred years (1232-1834), including one in southern France and one in Spain that was mostly under the control of the government and not the Church. These tribunals were aimed only at Christians, not those of other religions, and they were formed to safeguard faith and morals and to combat heresy. All Europe was Catholic before the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and Church and state were so intertwined in those days that secret heretics who rose to positions of power in the Church were considered to be a threat not only to the Church, but also to the state.
Some Protestant sources claim that 60 million people were killed during these Inquisitions. That figure is ludicrous because there weren’t that many people living in all of Europe during the years when the Inquisitions operated, and we know that they operated only in a few countries and not across the entire continent. More reliable estimates place the number of victims at less than five thousand, most of them in Spain. Were torture and execution commonplace? “Yes, they did use torture,” says Gerard Verschuuren in his book Forty Anti-Catholic Lies, “but never execution.”
He says that “modern researchers have discovered that the Spanish Inquisition applied torture in 2 percent of its cases. Each instance of torture was limited to a maximum of fifteen minutes. In only 1 percent of the cases was torture applied twice, and never for a third time. If you have heard of gruesome lists of instruments of torture, be aware that they were an invention of the post-Reformation propaganda machine rather than the reality of the Catholic Inquisition” (p. 193).
It should be noted, however, that punishment of heresy by death was common at that time in history. The disciples of the Protestant reformers — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli — burned tens of thousands at the stake for witchcraft in England and Protestant Germany (cf. Henry Kamen’s book The Spanish Inquisition), and thousands of English and Irish Catholics were hanged, drawn, and quartered for refusing to renounce Catholicism. In summary, says Gerard Verschuuren:
“Catholics did not kill thousands during the Inquisition. The Inquisition was not one monolithic and papal-controlled enterprise. It did not target non-Catholics and Jews, but only Catholics or make-believe Catholics. It did not execute them, and torture was rarely used. It was an ecclesiastical court system that followed strict legal rules, often much better than those of civil courts. But it did have extremely partisan enemies in the Protestant camp, which controlled powerful printing presses, while having at the same time its own kind of inquisition” (p. 197).
Q. On the possibility of women deacons, were there “deaconesses” in the early Church and didn’t Pope Francis appoint a commission a few years ago to study the question? Has that commission completed its work, and what was its verdict? — J.C., North Carolina.
A. In his Letter to the Romans, St. Paul commended to the Romans “our sister Phoebe, a deaconess of the Church at Cenchreae” (16:1). However, Paul was referring to those holy women who without being ordained served the early Church by assisting the clergy in charitable works and in their sacramental ministry when appropriate, for example, in the Baptism of female catechumens. That these women were not ordained was confirmed in 325 by the Council of Nicaea, which said in canon 19 that “we have made mention of the deaconesses who have been enrolled in this position; although not having been in any way ordained, they are certainly to be numbered among the laity.”
Some 50 years later, Epiphanius wrote in his Panacea Against All Heresies:
“It is true that in the Church there is an order of deaconesses, but not for being a priestess nor for any kind of work of administration, but for the sake of the dignity of the female sex, either at the time of baptism or of examining the sick or suffering, so that the naked body of a female may not be seen by men administering sacred rites, but by the deaconess.”
This explanation was reiterated in The Apostolic Constitutions (AD 400), where it is written that “a deaconess does not bless, but neither does she perform anything else that is done by presbyters [priests] and deacons, but she guards the doors and greatly assists the presbyters, for the sake of decorum, when they are baptizing women.”
The group commissioned by Pope Francis has not issued an official report yet, but the Holy Father said at a news conference on May 8 that the commission is split on the matter and individual members are continuing to study the issue on their own. “What is fundamental,” he said, “is that there is no certainty that there was ordination with the same form and finality as male Ordination.”
