Archive for month: July, 2010

Q. Do we, as Catholics, still have to obey the Ten Commandments? After all, we’re not living in the Old Covenant age, but under the New Covenant of Jesus Christ. Even Saint Paul says, “you are not under law, but under grace” (Romans 6:14). And we know that Jesus will forgive us, even if we happen to break the commandments, right?

A. Whoa…hold on just a minute! You’ve made two assumptions in your question that are unwarranted. First, let me address your last point. Of course, it is possible for Jesus to forgive us – provided we repent. We must have true sorrow for our sins and a firm purpose of amendment to avoid sin in the future. It doesn’t mean that we have to live impeccable (i.e. sinless) lives from now on – our struggle against sin will continue for as long as we live.

I’d also like to rephrase something else you said. No one actually “breaks” any of God’s commandments – whether it be the Decalogue or any other divine command. You can’t break them – you can only break yourself against them. No one ever “gets away” with breaking God’s commandments. God created us and knows the best way for us to live. It’s like the owners manual for a car – you can “break” the owner’s manual by pouring beer in the gas tank – but the car won’t run like it should. In fact, it may even wind up irreparably damaged, depending on the severity of the action. One could be forgiven, of course, for doing such a thing, but the car in many ways will never be the same. And that danger exists for us, too, if we break the commandments of God.

This is the feast day of St Mary Magdalene, dubbed “Apostle to the Apostles” because of her witness to the doubting (at the time) disciples of the Resurrection of Jesus. Today’s Gospel reading from John 20 reminds us of the initial encounter the Magdalene had with the risen Lord. This very account (along with the other Gospel accounts of women discovering the empty tomb) is a huge point in favor of the historicity of the Resurrection – without which, as St Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15 – “our preaching is useless, and so is your faith”. The simple reason is that a woman’s testimony was considered unreliable – and hence, inadmissible – in a Jewish court of law in Jesus’ day (thankfully, things have changed).

Put it this way: if you’re authoring a Gospel, and your’re trying to convince Jews (and Gentiles) that Jesus is the Messiah, you would never write that women were the first to discover the empty tomb and encounter the resurrected Jesus.

Unless, that is, it actually happened that way.

Today’s Gospel reading gives rise to a common non-Catholic assumption (pardon the pun) about Mary:

While Jesus was speaking to the crowds,
his mother and his brothers appeared outside,
wishing to speak with him.
Someone told him, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside,
asking to speak with you.”
But he said in reply to the one who told him,
“Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?”
And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said,
“Here are my mother and my brothers.
For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father
is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Matt 12:46-50).

Some have understood Jesus as being very dismissive towards his mother with these words. Not so. First, Jesus always honored his mother, as any good Jewish son would (As God, he’s the very author of the fourth commandment, by the way). Plus, no one was actually more docile, more obedient to God’s will than Mary, who be came the first Christian disciple by her famous “Fiat”. In enfleshing his Word, she proved to be the doer of the Father’s will par excellence.

Yesterday was the feast day of St Bonaventure. Although much could be said about the Seraphic Doctor, I’d like to focus on this: he was a proponent of a fascinating apologetic, called the Kalam cosmological argument.

Now, cosmology has nothing to do with cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, or anything like that! Cosmology has to do with the cosmos -the universe, and its origins. The Kalam argument became popular among Islamic philosophers in the Middle Ages, but not so much among Catholics. One notable exception was St Bonaventure.

The argument goes like this:

1) The universe (obviously) exists. 2) The universe either had a beginning or no beginning. 3) If a beginning – the beginning was either caused or not caused. 4) If it was caused – the cause was either personally caused or not personally caused.

If accepted, the argument ends with the universe being caused by a personal God. Each part of the argument presents you with a dilemma. Once you answer one question, it presents you with another, until you come to an inescapable conclusion.

Let’s take a look at point 2: The universe either had a beginning or no beginning. There are many who claim that the universe need not have a beginning point, or a first cause. They advocate an infinite number of causes stretching back in time through the history of the universe. However, there is no such thing as an actual infinite number of causes. There is no such thing as as an actual infinite number of anything!

For example, imagine, if you will, a library where there is an infinite number of red books, and an infinite number of black books. If someone signs a red book out of the library, there would still be just as many red books as black books in the library, since there is an infinite number of each! But this is obviously not the case in actuality. Hence, there can not be an infinite number of causes stretching back through the history of the universe. There had to be a first cause, a beginning, to the universe.

In future posts I’ll take a look at the rest of the Kalam argument.