Lesser Evil

Evil causes suffering. In no way can it be condoned.

Among the many reactions to Pope Francis’ interview on the return flight from Mexico last week are the thoughtful reflections of two female theologians of note. Both Professor Janet Smith, who holds the Father Michael J. McGivney Chair of Life Ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, and Dr. Monica Miller, a Ph.D. in Theology from Marquette University and Director of Citizens for a Pro-Life Society, took up Pope Francis’ answer to a question about the Zika virus, contraception, and the “lesser of two evils.”

When asked about the ‘avoiding pregnancy’ in areas at risk of Zika virus transmission, Pope Francis spoke of the supposed permission given by Pope Paul VI to nuns in Africa to use “contraceptives in cases of rape.”  

“Don’t confuse the evil of avoiding pregnancy by itself, with abortion,” he said. “In certain cases, as in this one, or in the one I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear.” The Pope also suggested that the question of “avoiding pregnancy” in Zika zones could involve a “conflict between the fifth and sixth commandment.”

Responding to a request from LifeSiteNews Dr. Monica Miller said:

It is interesting to note that the reporter never used the term “contraception”—only whether "avoiding pregnancy" was the “lesser evil.”  First, of all it is not necessarily an evil at all to avoid a pregnancy—as couples can certainly abstain from sex, or use Natural Family Planning when there is a serious reason to avoid pregnancy. Thus if the pope simply meant to say that the Zika virus threat was such a serious reason for couples to avoid pregnancy - with recourse to methods that are morally licit - the pope did not teach that there are circumstances when the use of artificial contraceptives can be morally licit.

However, the pope’s response is confusing, unclear and certainly people can come away from it thinking that His Holiness did endorse exceptions to the Church’s ban on the use of artificial contraception. Why? Because, number one—the reporter characterized “avoiding pregnancy” as an “evil”—albeit a “lesser evil” and everyone knows that the Church considers contraceptive use as a moral evil, whether they agree with that position or not.

Then Pope Francis made the statement that there was or could be a conflict between the 5th and 6th commandment—thus giving the impression that there was some kind of a moral quandary or tension between moral goods that perhaps can only be resolved by compromising with recourse to a “lesser evil” in order to secure or protect the greater good—in this case the good of life. It was a rather odd statement, and Catholic moral theology does not speak in terms of commandments being in conflict with each other. Then—when the Pope used the situation of nuns in the Belgian Congo being permitted to use contraception to thwart the effects of rape—the Pope certainly gave more than the impression that in difficult, crisis situations persons may licitly use artificial contraception—when indeed the Church is quite clear that such use is never morally licit as contraception violates the meaning of the conjugal act.

The problem, as usual is the use of imprecise language, improper characterizations of moral issues that lead to serious confusion. One has to wonder why the Pope did not immediately launch into an endorsement of Natural Family Planning as soon as he heard the reporter ask about the licitness of “avoiding pregnancy.” A missed teaching moment descended into confusion. Hopefully Pope Francis prays that prayer to Mary, the un-doer of knots—as there are a lot of knots here that need to be undone.

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Sexual Sins

To achieve Heaven means not just avoiding obvious sin but also ridding the spirit of imperfection.

If we can't control our eating, if we are addicted to anything, if we are obsessed with anything or anyone -- if we still lust, if we have issues with temper and anger, have pride, haven't learned discipline -- if we still struggle with jealousy and envy -- if we are attached to money; if all or any of these things remain an attachment and, worse, an obsession, we may not get directly into Heaven until they are purged: washed out in that "great laundromat in the sky."

We purge in purgatory.

Is it not better to do that while we're on earth -- to at least strive to rid ourselves of lingering bad habits that might hold us back? Can you imagine someone in Heaven still yearning for a cigarette?

The Lord is not a lawyer or accountant, whereby He has a check list; He looks at the entirety of our cleanliness (in a way we can't fathom). Imperfections are blotches on a robe that must be pure crystal-white for entry into Heaven. We all have things to expel.

This is not to say that classic sins don't count: to the contrary. Lists can be useful to us humans. [For an examination of conscience, see the link at end of this commentary]. We do not leave purgatory until we have full control of our thoughts, emotions, and inclinations. Particularly important to purge, especially in this era of ours: the spirit of lust. Also: anger. And fear (phobias).

The more we lust, the less room there is in our hearts for love, and it's love and purity that get us into Heaven.

(Meditate in prayer on what forms lust takes and where it is found and what it has caused in your life history.)

Lust is not just sexual: There's lust for money, prestige, revenge. But wrong sexual feelings are a big deal when it comes to purification, and it's hard not to get dirty slogging through the muck of life.

But stay clean we must.

Recently there was the account, in the Christian Post, of a computer scientist-engineer, Randall Rathbun, who was working on the F-22 stealth fighter project in 2002 in Texas when he had a massive automobile crash in which he nearly died.

As his car flew through the air he lost consciousness, and God gave him a frightening vision of hell. He was not prepared for what happened next. "An extremely loud scream burst right beside my head." The scream was so loud, it almost deafened him. "It was a voice that was screaming like a jet engine... an angry defiant voice... And I recognized what it now was saying..."

"He's mine, he's mine," the voice intoned -- screamed. "His name is liar, liar, liar, and I am taking him to the Lake of Fire."

You see, Rathbun attended church regularly and was part of a worship team, notes the Post, but something was amiss. "I wish I could say I lived a pure, pristine life, but I wasn't and that's what got me in trouble," he recounted. "On Saturday evenings I was living a double life. I was going down to San Diego, visiting prostitutes, not realizing I was setting myself up for a very serious encounter with reality." He says his wayward sexual activity began on the Internet. "The Internet is just awash with it," Rathbun notes. "Proverbs says to watch your eyes. I wasn't watching my eyes; I was allowing them to wander. Plus I was a computer scientist and knew how to access more than most people."

"In his vision," said the news site, "his chained body hurtled downward toward the Lake of Fire and he heard awful screams and felt choking smoke and heat. He also saw three Scriptures that convicted him about his double life. As the roar of hell's fiery flames rose to meet him, suddenly everything went dark for a second and he found himself 3,000 miles above the earth."

Suddenly he saw three scriptural quotes in a vision:

"The wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23)

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever commits sin is the servant of sin." (John 8:34)

"Be not deceived, God is not mocked, whatsoever a man sows, that shall he reap" (Galatians 6:7)

Fortunately for Rathbun, it was not his time. God has mercy. The fellow was drawn up -- literally -- from the pit. The Lord spoke to Him in a Voice august and authoritative yet loving and gentle.

No doubt he is now not only avoiding prostitutes but working toward a purge of other imperfections.

If we ask, the Holy Spirit awakens us to deep, hidden impurities -- matters in our souls of which we are not even aware; impurities only He sees. It doesn't have to be the extreme of visiting prostitutes. It can be many other impurities. In our time, pornography is frighteningly rampant.

This must be purged. So must any wrong inclination.

Are you sure you're purged? We delve into this at retreats.

There is Confession, but also expiation. Imperfections? Ego? Imbalances? Lack of forgiveness? Selfishness?

Why settle -- destine oneself -- for purgatory?

It is a great time, Lent, to work at purification here on earth, praying every morning for direct entry at the end of life -- direct entry -- into Heaven.

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The Dragon

In The Hobbit, Thorin Oakenshield gives Bilbo Baggins a beginner’s lesson on the nature of dragons, a sort of dragons for dummies, telling the unschooled hobbit that dragons “carry away people, especially maidens, to eat.”

Dragons have a preference for the virgin flesh of maidens because they are not merely hungry but wicked. They desire the defilement of the pure and undefiled, the destruction of the virgin. Their devouring is a deflowering. Parallels with human “dragons” in our own world are not difficult to discern. The war against the dragon is not, therefore, a war against a physical monster, like a dinosaur, but a battle against the wickedness we see around us in our everyday lives. We all face our daily dragons and we must all defend ourselves from them and hopefully slay them, which is only possible with the assistance of God’s grace which serves as a sort of St. George in the heart of man. The sobering reality is that we must either fight the dragons that we encounter in life or become dragons ourselves. There is no middle-path. No neutrality in this fight to the death is possible. We either fight the dragon or we become the dragon.

An additional problem is that we live in a dragon-culture, a culture of death, which pours scorn on the very concept of virtue and which has banned the very concept of “sin” from its vocabulary. Purity is equated with puritanism and is shunned. Chastity is ridiculed. And true marriage, in which the sexual union is united with the self-sacrificial desire for children, is being ripped apart. To make matters worse, Pride, the wickedest of sins, which rules the heart of every dragon, is now unfurled as an infernal banner and held aloft as a sign of the dragon’s war on Christian humility.

It will come as no surprise to those who know something about dragons to learn that a dragon-culture will devour the innocent in a feeding frenzy of salacious wickedness. We know of the unholy holocaust of abortion, which devours the innocent flesh of babies, but we sometimes overlook the harmful effect on women that the unleashed dragons inflict. This was brought home to me by a recent article in the UK’s Telegraph which highlighted the fact that suicide had become a plague among British women, reaching record levels.

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The Apostles

The Apostles appointed by Jesus Christ were apostles of suffering.  Most were martyred.  The Church is built on suffering.  The apostles built a refuge for those who suffer.  They established local churches. 

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True Shepherds

“The very crisis of the Church in our days consists in the ever growing phenomenon that those who don’t fully believe and profess the integrity of the Catholic faith frequently occupy strategic positions in the life of the Church, such as professors of theology, educators in seminaries, religious superiors, parish priests and even bishops and cardinals.”

So said Kazakhstani Bishop Athanasius Schneider in a recent interview with the Catholic website Rorate Caeli. The 54-year-old auxiliary bishop of the diocese of Maria Santissima in Astana has been a world-wide champion of orthodoxy especially since the two Synods of Bishops on the Family.

“The height of confusion and absurdity,” added Bishop Schneider, “manifests itself when such semi-heretical clerics accuse those who defend the purity and integrity of the Catholic faith as being against the Pope – as being according to their opinion in some way schismatics.”

Bishop Schneider deplored the confusion this causes for “simple Catholics in the pews” for whom he recommends keeping the faith by holding to “the immutable Catholic truths, which were handed over by our fore-fathers, and which we find in in the Traditional catechisms and in the works of the Fathers and of the Doctors of the Church.”

The Kazakhstani prelate said excuses of "development of doctrine" and "pastoral compassion" used by some bishops and cardinals who wish to change the Church's doctrinal language and long-standing discipline, “are in fact usually a pretext to change the teaching of Christ.” Ultimately, he said, “those clerics want another Church, and even another religion: A naturalistic religion, which is adapted to the spirit of the time.”

“Such clerics are really wolves in sheep’s clothing, often flirting with the world,” he said. “Not courageous shepherds – but rather cowardly rabbits.”

He described the Church, “our mother,” as “being bound in cords not only by the enemies of Christ but also by some of their collaborators in the rank of the clergy, even sometimes of the high clergy.” Thus he advised, “All good children of Mother Church as courageous soldiers we have to try to free this mother – with the spiritual weapons of defending and proclaiming the truth, promoting the traditional liturgy, Eucharistic adoration, the crusade of the Holy Rosary, the battle against the sin in one’s private life and striving for holiness.”

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