2 November – All Souls, Indulgences, and YOU!

Posted on 29 October 2017 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Let’s have a review of the indulgences available for All Souls and the days that follow, so that you can plan your own action.  Don’t let these days slip by.

From the Handbook of Indulgences:

Visiting a Church or an Oratory on All Souls Day

A plenary (“full”) indulgence, which is applicable only to the souls in Purgatory is granted to the Christian faithful who devoutly visit a church or an oratory on (November 2nd,) All Souls Day.

Requirements for Obtaining a Plenary Indulgence on All Souls Day (2 Nov)

• Visit a church and pray for souls in Purgatory
• Say one “Our Father” and the “Apostles Creed” in the visit to the church
• Say one “Our Father” and one “Hail Mary” for the Holy Father’s intentions (that is, the intentions designated by the Holy Father each month)
• Worthily receive Holy Communion (ideally on the same day if you can get to Mass)
• Make a sacramental confession within 20 days of All Souls Day
• For a plenary indulgence be  free from all attachment to sin, even venial sin (otherwise, the indulgence is partial, not plenary, “full”).

You can acquire one plenary indulgence a day.

A partial indulgence can be obtained by visiting a cemetery and praying for the departed.  You can gain a plenary indulgence visiting a cemetery each day between 1 November and 8 November. These indulgences are applicable only to the Souls in Purgatory.

A plenary indulgence, applicable only the Souls in Purgatory, is also granted when you visit a church or a public oratory on 2 November. While visiting the church or oratory say one Our Father and the Apostles Creed.

A partial indulgence, applicable only to the Souls in Purgatory, can be obtained when saying the “Eternal rest … Requiem aeternam…” prayer.

Do you know this prayer?

Requiem aeternam dona ei [pl.eis], Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei [eis]. Requiescat [-ant] in pace Amen.

Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

It is customary to add the second half of the “Eternal Rest” prayer after the prayer recited at the conclusion of a meal.

Gratias agimus tibi, omnipotens Deus, pro universis beneficiis tuis, qui vivis et regnas in saecula saeculorum.

Fidelium animae, per misericordiam Dei, requiescant in pace. Amen.

We give Thee thanks, almighty God, for all Thy benefits, Who livest and reignest, world without end.

May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

My friend Fr. Finigan has a good explanation of being detached from sin and the disposition you need to gain indulgences.  HERE

Keep in mind that having high standards is a good thing.

Shouldn’t we be free from attachment to sin?  To what degree is being attached to sin okay?

In the final analysis, perhaps we have to admit that gaining plenary indulgences is rarer than we would like.

That said, it is not impossible to gain them.

I don’t think we have to be a hermit living on top of a tree beating his head with a rock to be free of attachment to sin so as to gain this plenary or “full” indulgence.

Also, we do not know the degree to which a “partial” indulgence is “partial”.  It could be a lot.  That in itself is something which should spur us on!

Generally, if someone is motivated to obtain an indulgence, he does so from true piety, desire to please God and to help oneself and others.

When it comes to complete detachment from sin, even venial, few of us live in that state all the time.

Nevertheless, there are times when we have been moved to sorrow for sin after examination of conscience, perhaps after an encounter with God as mystery in liturgical worship or in the presence of human suffering, that we come to a present horror and shame of sin that moves us to reject sin entirely.  That doesn’t mean that we, in some Pelagian sense, have chosen to remain perfect from that point on or that by force of will we can chosen never to sin again.  God is helping us with graces at that point, of course.  But we do remain frail and weak.

But God reads our hearts.

Holy Church offers us many opportunities for indulgences.  The presupposition is that Holy Church knows we can actually attain them.

They can be partial (and we don’t know to what extent that is) and full or plenary.  But they can be obtained by the faithful.

Holy Church is a good mother.  She wouldn’t dangle before our eyes something that is impossible for us to attain.

That doesn’t mean that a full indulgence is an easy thing.  It does mean that we can do it.  In fact, beatifications and canonizations have been more common in the last few decades and in previous centuries.  The Church is showing us that it is possible for ordinary people to live a life of heroic virtue.

Therefore, keep your eyes fixed on the prize of indulgences.   Never think that it is useless to try to get any indulgence, partial or full, just because

Perhaps you are not sure you can attain complete detachment from all sin, even venial.  Before you perform the indulgenced work, ask God explicitly to take away any affection for sin you might be treasuring.  Do this often and, over your lifetime, and you may find it easier and easier. Support your good project with good confessions and good communions.  You need those graces.

A person does not become expert in worldly pursuits overnight or without effort.  Why would not the same apply to spiritual pursuits? It takes time and practice to develop skills and virtues.  It takes time to develop habits of the spirit as well.

We can do this.  And when we fall short, we still have the joy of obtaining the partial indulgence and that’s not nothing.

So… take that, Luther!

http://wdtprs.com/blog/2017/10/2-november-all-souls-indulgences-and-you/

Islam: A Giant Step Backwards for Humanity

William Kilpatrick

One of the big mysteries of our day is how so many supposedly enlightened Catholics have managed to get it so wrong about Islam for so long. It’s understandable that in the 1960s, when the Islamic world was relatively quiescent, Catholics might entertain the high hopes for Islamic-Catholic relations expressed in Nostra Aetate. But this is 2017 and in the intervening half century a lot of water has passed under the bridge.

Given all that has transpired in the interim—9/11, daily terror attacks, the accelerating Islamization of Europe, and the development of nuclear weapons by Pakistan and Iran—it seems that Catholics deserve to know more about Islam than the brief treatment presented in Nostra Aetate or the even briefer treatment in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catechism’s forty-four words on the subject end with the reassurance that “together with us they [Muslims] adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day” (842). Unfortunately, that has been interpreted by a good many clergy and laymen to mean “go back to sleep and don’t worry about a thing.” To get an idea of how nonchalant the Church leadership has been about providing guidance on Islam, consider that the Catechism devotes about five times as much space to a discussion of man’s relationship with animals than it does to the Church’s relationship with Muslims.

It’s not just that many clergy and lay Catholic leaders fail to appreciate the deep differences in theology between Islam and Christianity, they fail to grasp the deep cultural and human differences that flow from the theological differences. To put the matter bluntly, Christianity is a humanizing religion and Islam is not. That statement needs some qualifying, of course; but there is enough difference between the Christian vision of the human person and the Islamic vision, that Catholic leaders should be extremely careful before declaring common cause with Islam. The many declarations of commonality and solidarity with Islam that now routinely issue from the lips of Church leaders only serve to confuse and mislead Catholics.

Theologically, the most significant fact about Islam is that it is an anti-Christian movement. That’s one of the main themes in Nonie Darwish’s book, Wholly Different. Darwish who grew up in an Islamic society and subsequently converted to Christianity, contends that Islam is a counter-revolutionary faith: a rejection of core Bible beliefs. As she puts it:

[Muhammad] didn’t just quietly reject the Bible. Instead, he launched a ferocious rebellion against it… Islam is a negative religion, consumed with subversion. It is a rebellion and counter-revolution against the Biblical revolution.

The Biblical revolution was not only a revolution in our thinking about God, but also a revolution in our thinking about man. The most revolutionary moment occurred when God took on our humanity and became one of us. As Pope St. John Paul II observed, the Incarnation not only reveals God to man, it reveals man to himself.

In rejecting the Incarnation, Muhammad also rejected the heightened status of humanity that flows from it. This is not to say that this was his intention from the start. Islam didn’t begin as an anti-Christian theology, but it was almost inevitable that it would develop that way. Muhammad considered himself to be a prophet, and he wanted very much to be recognized as such. The trouble is that a prophet has to have a prophetic message. And, after Jesus revealed himself as the Son of God and the fulfillment of all prophecy, there wasn’t much left to say in that line.

Realizing this, Muhammad set about to retell the story of Jesus, recasting him not as the Son of God but as another—and lesser—prophet. This demotion of Jesus thus cleared the way for Muhammad’s claim to prophethood. (Faced with a similar problem, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, came up with a similar solution. In his telling, Jesus failed in his assigned task of marrying and creating a perfect family, thus leaving it up to Moon to carry out the unfinished mission.)

Jesus is in the Koran, but he has, in effect, been neutralized. He is not divine, he was not crucified nor resurrected, and he plays no role in the redemption of the human race. In fact, there is no suggestion in the Koran that mankind needs to be redeemed. One has to believe in Allah and his messenger (Muhammad) and obey Allah and his Messenger, and Allah will probably (there is no certainty) admit him to paradise. But one does not have to be born again.

We talk about “radical” Islam, but, in a sense, there is nothing radical about Islam. It does not require a radical transformation of the self as does Christianity. In Islam, man is not made in the image of God. Consequently, there is no call to holiness, no requirement that “you … must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt. 5:48). The radical transformation in Christ which prepares one for communion with God is not necessary since man’s destiny is not union with God, but union with maidens in paradise. There is no need of spiritual transformation because heaven is simply a better version of earth.

That’s one way of looking at human destiny. But the Christian view is altogether different. Saint Paul wrote “we … are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18), and “though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed everyday … preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:16-17). Whatever one may think of the truth of the Christian message, the message is that humans have a very high calling. The difference between this vision of man and the rather low estimate of human potential contained in the Koran is profound. It’s a wonder that so many Catholics are willing to dilute that vision for the sake of creating an illusory moral parity with Islam.

Islam’s lack of interest in human transformation begins with the lack of human interest in the Koran. Although it was composed some 600 years after the Gospels, it contains none of the drama of the Gospels—no divine drama and no human drama. Instead, it is a collection of disconnected statements, warnings, and curses, interspersed with Muhammad’s own versions of stories borrowed from the Bible.

Even when he retells these stories, Muhammad seems largely incapable of infusing the prophets and heroes of the Bible with personality. Indeed, the only character in the Koran that Muhammad seems truly interested in is himself. In order to emphasize his humility, Islamic apologists like to say that Muhammad is only mentioned four times in the Koran. I haven’t counted but that seems about right. Nevertheless, Muhammad manages to mention himself on nearly every page—sometimes as the “Messenger,” sometimes as the “Apostle,” sometimes as the “Prophet,” and nearly always as the indispensable intermediary between Allah and men. This repeated emphasis on his role as a prophet is also found in the hadith collections. For example, “I have been sent to all mankind and the line of the prophets is closed with me” (Sahih Muslim, book 004, number 1062).

Other than Allah, Muhammad is the main person of interest in the Koran. Which brings us back to the place of Jesus in the Koran. The truth is, he plays only a minor role. He is mentioned as one of the prophets on several occasions, and on a few other occasions he is given some lines to speak. On one of these occasions he assures Allah that he did not ever claim to be God: “I could never have claimed what I have no right to” (5:116).

Jesus has a place in the Koran, but only because he knows his place. His role is to remove the main obstacle to Muhammad’s claim of prophethood. Who better than Jesus to renounce Jesus’ claim to Sonship and thereby clear the way for Muhammad to be the seal of the prophets?

But, in stripping Jesus of his divinity, Muhammad also managed to strip him of his humanity. The Jesus of the Koran is simply not an interesting person. Indeed he hardly qualifies as a person. He seems more like a disembodied voice. When Christians hear that Jesus is in the Koran, they assume that he must be someone like the Jesus of the Gospels. Thus they can reassure themselves that although Muslims don’t accept Christ’s divinity, they will at least become familiar with his life. Anyone who bothers to read the Koran, however, will be quickly disabused of that notion. There is no life of Jesus in the Koran. There is no slightly altered version of the gospel story. Indeed, there is no story at all—just a few brief appearances in order to make the point that Jesus is only a man, not the Son of God.

This abbreviated treatment of Jesus in the Koran is matched by a diminished view of the human person. In Islam, man is little more than a slave of Allah. He can achieve paradise, but paradise is essentially a heavenly harem. According to the Christian vision, man’s destiny is union with God. According to the Islamic vision, man’s destiny is to copulate.

In rejecting the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, Muhammad also rejected the Christian vision of a redeemed humanity. The fact of the Incarnation raised the status of man immeasurably—“no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir” (Gal. 4:7). That’s why Christmas carols are so full of joy. As one hymn reminds us, the night of our Savior’s birth becomes the moment at which “the soul felt its worth.” Thanks to Muhammad’s dismal vision, however, all this is missing in Islam—no “joy to the world,” no “hark the herald angels sing,” no “ding-dong merrily on high.”

In light of the comparative bleakness of the Islamic vision, it is difficult to understand why so many Catholic prelates and theologians insist on identifying Islam as a fellow faith with which we have much in common. Likewise, it’s not easy to comprehend why so many of them want to declare their solidarity with Islam.

Theologically and humanly, Islam represents a giant step backwards. It would take us back to a time when the idea of human dignity was considered laughable—to a time when slavery was unremarkable and women were valued less than men and sometimes less than animals.

In a sense, Muhammad’s rejection of the Incarnation is a replay of a primal story. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lucifer’s rebellion is brought on by God’s announcement that he had begotten a Son. Lucifer, who ranked very high among the angels, was nothing if not prideful. In modern terms we might say that he couldn’t stand the competition. Neither, it seems, could Muhammad—a man so obsessed with pride of place that he identifies himself as Allah’s close confidant on nearly every page of the Koran.

Like Lucifer, Muhammad rebelled against the Sonship of Christ. For if Christ is the Son of God, Muhammad is out of a job. Consequently, there are numerous passages in the Koran that deny the Trinity and the Sonship of Christ, and that curse those who do believe.

The price that the followers of Muhammad incurred was the loss of the heightened sense of humanity that the Incarnation brings. The central dramatic event in history is the birth of a baby boy who also happened to be the Author of life. He came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

But why did Muhammad come? He reveals nothing that hadn’t already been revealed in the Old Testament. In almost all respects, the Koran is simply old news. The only new element is the “revelation” that Muhammad is God’s final prophet. The good news of the Gospels is that God had become one of us; the big news of the Koran is that Muhammad has become a prophet.

Compared to the tremendous and wondrous revelations in the New Testament, that’s small potatoes. Again, one has to wonder why so many modern clerics are intent on drawing a moral equivalence between Christianity’s life-giving faith and Islam’s life-denying, rule-bound system. Perhaps they should read the Koran. Or, better yet, perhaps they should re-read the Gospels.

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2017/islam-step-backwards-humanity

St. Mary of Egypt: From a life of sin to sainthood

She attempted to follow the other people into the church but something strange and inexplicable happened.

In his “Essay on Man,” Alexander Pope penned three words that became immortalized: “Hope springs eternal.” Nowhere do these words fit better than in the Catholic Church. For the Church of Christ is the home of forgiveness, mercy, and, of course, redemption. Meet Mary of Egypt.

Mary was born somewhere in Egypt in 344, and, for unknown reasons, left home at the age of 12, settling in Alexandria. She quickly became adept at using her body to get what she wanted, though she never accepted money for her “services.”

Mary lived this way for 17 years. One day she saw a large group of people and discovered that they were headed to Jerusalem on a pilgrimage for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. She decided to join the pilgrims, with every intention of using her skills as a seducer during the pilgrimage; in fact, she started by seducing her way on to the boat for the journey.

On the actual feast day, she joined the crowd as it processed to the church to honor the relic of the True Cross. She attempted to follow the other people into the church but something strange and inexplicable happened. She could not enter. Something was holding her back. No matter how hard she tried she could not get past the entrance.  Mary walked to the side of the church, fell down on her knees and began to cry.

Mary looked to her side and saw a statue of the Blessed Virgin. As she looked at it the realization of her sinful life impacted her. Remorse overwhelmed her. She prayed to the Blessed Virgin to help her, pleading for forgiveness. When she tried to walk into the church again, she entered without a problem. She kissed the relic of the True Cross and begged the Virgin Mary to not forsake her.

As she left the church a stranger stopped her saying, “Please, take these,” and handed Mary three coins. Mary purchased three loaves of bread and headed for the desert. She did this because the Virgin Mary had told her that was where she would find peace. Along the way, she stopped at a church alongside the Jordan River.

The church was actually the Monastery of St. John the Baptist. It was here she was baptized into the faith and received the sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist. She then moved into the desert and was not seen by anyone for 47 years. This is when a priest by the name of Father Zosimas came into her life.

Father Zosimas was out in the desert because it was the custom for him and his brethren to spend the 40 days of Lent fasting and praying, returning home on Palm Sunday. He was stunned when he came across this dirty, unkempt, raggedy woman. Her hair was pure white, the years in the desert having taken their toll on her emaciated body. She begged him to give her a cloak to cover herself. Father Zosimas did as she asked and the woman hurriedly tired to garner some dignity.

The priest asked her if she would tell him why she was in the desert and share what had happened to her. Slowly but surely, Mary began to open up and before long had told Father about her life as a “prostitute” and how hard life had been for her, alone in the desert. Father Zosimas cried. He realized that the woman, who told him her name was Mary, had achieved a level of holiness all the greater after her previous sinful life.

Mary asked Father Zosimas if he would return the following Holy Thursday with Communion for her. He agreed and, one year later, came to meet her again. She asked him once more to come again the following year. He agreed.

A year later, when Zosimus returned again, he found Mary’s body. Next to it was a note stating that she had died in 421, on the same night she had received Holy Communion. Father buried her incorrupt body where he had found it. That was her wish. Upon returning to the monastery he shared his story with his brethren who preserved it through oral tradition until St. Sophronius wrote it down.

St. Mary of Egypt is honored in the Roman Catholic Church (April 1) and by the Orthodox. She is the patroness of chastity, temptations of the flesh, and skin diseases.

St. Mary of Egypt, pray for us all especially today as sins of the flesh are so prevalent.

https://aleteia.org/2017/10/31/st-mary-of-egypt-from-a-life-of-sin-to-sainthood/

http://www.courageouspriest.com/wrath-god-revealed

Breaking News, The Wrath of God is Being Revealed

The Revelation of the Wrath, Romans 1 – Is It a Prophetic Interpretation of Reality for Our Times?

By Msgr. Charles Pope, Community in Mission:

Scripture is a prophetic interpretation of reality. That is, it tells us what is really going on from the perspective of the Lord of History. An inspired text, it traces out not only the current time, but also the trajectory, the end to which things tend. It is of course important for us to read Scripture with the Church, and exercising care, to submit our understanding to the rule of faith and the context of Sacred Tradition.

With those parameters in mind, I would like to consider Romans 1, wherein St. Paul describes the grave condition of the Greco-Roman culture of his day. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he prophetically interpreted the times of the first century A.D. Although the text speaks specifically to those times, it is clear that our modern times are becoming nearly identical to what was described.

St. Paul saw a once-noble culture in grave crisis; it was in the process of being plowed under by God for its willful suppression of the truth.

Let’s take a look at the details of this prophetic interpretation of those days and apply it to our own. The text opens without any niceties and the words rain down on us almost like lead pellets.

I. The Root of the Ruin – The text says, The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness.

As the curtain draws back, we not eased into the scene at all. We are confronted at once with the glaring lights of judgment and the fearsome word “wrath.” Note that the wrath of God is called a revelation. That is to say, it is a word of truth that reveals and prophetically interprets reality for us. The wrath is the revelation!

It’s quite astonishing, really. It directly contradicts to our modern tendency to see God only as the “affirmer in chief,” whose love for us is understood only in sentimental terms, never in terms of a strong love that insists on what is right and true, on what we need rather than what we want.

What is the wrath of God? It is our experience of the total incompatibility of unrepented sin before the holiness of God. The unrepentant sinner cannot endure His presence, His holiness. For such a one, there is wailing and grinding of teeth, anger, and even rage when confronted by the existence of God and the demands of His justice and holiness. God’s wrath does not mean that He is in some simplistic sense angry, emotionally worked up. God is not moody or unstable. He is not subject to temper tantrums as we are. Rather, it is that God is holy and the unrepentant sinner cannot endure His holiness; the sinner experiences it as wrath.

To the degree that God’s wrath is in Him, it is His passion to set things right. God is patient and will wait and work to draw us to repentance, but his justice and truth cannot forever tarry. When judgment sets in on a person, culture, civilization, or epoch, His holiness and justice are revealed as wrath to the unrepentant.

What was the central sin of St. Paul’s (and our own) time? They suppress the truth by their wickedness (Romans 1:18). It is the sin that leads to every other problem.

Note this well: those who seek to remain in their wickedness suppress the truth. On account of wickedness and a desire to persist in sin, many suppress the truth. The catechism of the Catholic Church warns,

The human mind … is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful (Catechism of the Catholic Church # 37).

St. Paul wrote this to St. Timothy:

For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear (2 Tim 4:3).

Isaiah described this:

They say to the seers, “See no more visions”; to the prophets, “Give us no more visions of what is right; tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions” (Isaiah 30:10).

Yes, on account of a desire to cling to their sin and to justify themselves, people suppress the truth. While this human tendency has always existed, there is a widespread tendency for people of our own time in the decadent West to go on calling good, or “no big deal,” what God calls sinful.

When we do this, we suppress the truth. Now, as then, the wrath of God is being revealed. On account of the sin of repeated, collective, obstinate suppression of the truth, God’s wrath is being revealed on the culture of the decadent West.

II. The Revelation that is Refused – The text goes on to say, … and since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse (Romans 1:19-20).

Note that God the Holy Spirit and St. Paul attest that the suppression of the truth is willful; it is not merely ignorance. While the pagans of St. Paul’s day did not have the Scriptures, they are still “without excuse.” Why? Because they had the revelation of creation. Creation reveals God and speaks not only to His existence, but also to his attributes, to His justice and power, to His will and the good order He instills in us and thus expects of us.

All of this means that even those raised outside the context of faith, whether in the first century or today, are “without excuse.”

The Catechism also couches our responsibility to discover and live the truth in the existence of something called the conscience:

Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. … For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God. … His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths. … Moral conscience … bears witness to the authority of truth in reference to the supreme Good to which the human person is drawn, and it welcomes the commandments. …. [Conscience] is a messenger of him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ (CCC #1776-1778).

Because of the witness and revelation of the Created order, and on account of the conscience present and operative in all who have attained the use of reason, those who suppress the truth are without excuse. They are suppressing what they know to be true.

It has been my experience in my many years as a pastor working with sinners (and as a sinner myself) that those I must confront about sin know full well what they are doing. They may have suppressed the still, small voice of God; they may have sought to keep His voice at bay with layers of rationalization; they may have also collect false teachers to confirm them in their sin and permitted many deceivers to tickle their ears. Deep down, though, they know that what they do is wrong. At the end of the day they are without excuse.

Some lack of due discretion may ameliorate the severity of their culpability, but ultimately they are without excuse for suppressing the truth.

So there is also the revelation of creation, the Word of God (which has been heard by most people today), and the conscience. Many people today, as in St. Paul’s time, refuse revelation. They do so willfully in order to justify wickedness; they are without excuse.

III. The Result in the Ranks – The text says, For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but became vain in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles (Romans 1:21-23).

This should seem very familiar. In St. Paul’s day, and even more so in ours, a prideful culture has set aside God, whether through explicit atheism and militant secularism or through neglect and willful tepidity. Today, God has been pushed to the margins of our proud, anthropocentric culture. His wisdom has been forcibly removed from our schools and from the public square. His image and any reminders of Him are increasingly being removed by force of law. Many people even mock His Holy Name, mentioning His truth only to scorn it as a vestige of the “dark ages.”

Faith and the magnificent deposit of knowledge and culture that has come with it has been scoffed at as a relic from times less scientific than our own much more “enlightened” age.

Our disdainful culture has become a sort of iconoclastic “anti-culture,” which has systematically put into the shredder every bit of Godly wisdom it can. The traditional family, human sexuality, chastity, self-control, moderation, and nearly all other virtues have been scorned and willfully smashed by the iconoclasts of our time. To them, everything of this sort must go.

As a prophetic interpretation of reality, the Scripture from Romans describes the result of suppressing the truth and refusing to acknowledge and glorify God: … they became vain in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools (Romans 1:21).

Yes, there is a powerful darkening effect that comes from suppressing the truth and refusing the wisdom and revelation of God. While claiming to be so wise, smart, advanced, we have collectively speaking become foolish and vain; our intellects grow darker by the day. Our concern for vain, foolish, passing things knows little bounds today. Yet the things that really do matter: death, judgment, Heaven, and Hell, are almost never attended to. We run after foolish things but cannot seem to exercise the least bit of self-control. Our debts continue to grow but we cannot curb our spending. We cannot make or keep commitments. Addiction is increasingly widespread. All of the most basic indicators indicate that we have grave problems: graduation rates, SAT scores, teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, abortion rates, divorce rates, cohabitation rates. The numbers that should be going up are down and the numbers that should be going down are up.

Although we claim to be so wise and smart today, we have become collectively foolish. Even our ability to think of solutions and to have intelligent conversations has decreased, since we cannot seem to agree on even the most basic points. We simply talk past one other, living in our own smaller and increasingly self-defined worlds.

If you think that the line about idolatry doesn’t apply today, you’re kidding yourself.People are fascinated by stones and rocks, and by all sorts of syncretistic combinations of religions, including the occult. This is the age of the “designer God,” when people no longer tolerate the revealed God of the Scriptures, but believe instead in a reinvented one—who just so happens to agree with everything they think. Yes, idolatry is alive and well in this age of the personal sort of hand-carved idol that can be invoked over and against the true God of the Scriptures.

And people today congratulate themselves for being tolerant, open-minded, and non-judgmental! It is hard not see that our senseless minds have become dark, our thoughts vain, and our behavior foolish.

Our culture is in the very grave condition that this Scripture, this prophetic interpretation of reality, describes. There is much for which we should be rightfully concerned.

IV. The Revelation of the Wrath – The text says, Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error (Rom 1:24-27).

In this passage the “wrath” is revealed. The text simply says, God gave them over to their sinful desires. This is the wrath; this is the revelation of the total incompatibility of unrepented sin before the holiness of God and the holiness to which we are summoned.

In effect, God is saying, if you want sin and rebellion, you can have it. It’s all yours. You’ll experience the full consequences of your sinful rebellion, the full fury of your own sinful choices. Yes, God gave them over to their sinful desires.

It seems that God has also given us over in a similar way to our sinful desires today.

Note that the first and most prominent effect is sexual confusion. The text describes sexual impurity, the degradation of their bodies, shameful lusts, and the shameful acts of homosexual relations. The text also speaks of “due” penalty for such actions, probably disease and other deleterious effects that result from using the body for purposes for which it is not designed.

Welcome to the 21st century decaying West.

Many misunderstand what Romans 1 is saying. They point to this text as a warning that God will punish us for condoning and celebrating homosexual acts. But Romans 1 does not say that God will punish us for this; it says that the widespread condoning and celebrating of homosexual acts is God’s punishment; it is the revelation of wrath. It is the first and chief indication that God has given us over to our stubborn sinfulness and to our lusts.

Let us be careful to make a distinction here. The text does not say that homosexuals are being punished; some may mysteriously have this orientation but live chastely. Rather, it is saying that we are all being punished.

Why? For over 60 years now the decadent West has celebrated promiscuity,pornography, fornication, cohabitation, contraception, and even to some extent adultery. The resulting carnage of abortion, STDs, AIDs, single motherhood, absent fathers, poverty, and emotionally damaged children does not seem to have been enough to bring us to our senses. Our lusts have only become wilder and more debased.

Through the use of contraception, we severed the connection between sex, procreation, and marriage. Sex has been reduced to two adults doing what they please in order to have fun or share love (really, lust). This has opened the door to increasingly debased sexual expression and to irresponsibility.

Enter the homosexual community and its demands for acceptance. The wider culture, now debased, darkened, and deeply confused, cannot comprehend the obvious: that homosexual acts are contrary to nature. The very design of the body shouts against it. But the wider culture, already deeply immersed in its own confusion about sex and now an increasing diet of ever-baser pornography that celebrates both oral and anal sex among heterosexuals, has had no answer to the challenge.

We have gone out of our minds. Our senseless minds are darkened, confused, foolish, and debased. This is wrath. This is what it means to be given over to our sinful desires. This is what happens when God finally has to say to a culture, if you want sin you can have it—until it comes out of your ears!

How many tens of millions of babies have been aborted, sacrificed to our wild lusts?How deep has been the pain caused by rampant divorce, cohabitation, adultery, and STDs? Yet none of this has caused us to repent.

In all of this, The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness. Notice again, homosexuals are not being singled out; The wrath is against all the godlessness and wickedness of those who suppress the truth. When even the carnage has not been enough to bring us to our senses, God finally says, enough, and gives us over to our own sinful desires to feel their full effects. We have become so collectively foolish and vain in our thinking and darkened in our intellect that as a culture we now “celebrate” homosexual acts, which Scripture rightly calls disordered. (The word St. Paul uses in this passage to describe homosexual acts is paraphysin, meaning “contrary to nature.”) Elsewhere, Scripture speaks of these as acts of grave depravity that cry to Heaven for vengeance.

But as the text says, Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them (Romans 1:32). This is darkness; this is wrath.

This is the result of being given over to our sins: a deeply darkened mind. The celebration of homosexual acts is God’s punishment and it demonstrates that He has given us over.

V. The Revolution that Results – The text says, Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy (Romans 1:28-31).

The text states clearly and in very familiar terms the truth that when sex, marriage, and family go into the shredder, an enormous number of social ills are set loose.

This is because children are no longer properly formed. The word “bastard” in its common informal usage refers to a despicable person, but its more “technical” definition is an illegitimate child. Both senses are related. This text says, in effect, that when God gives us over to our sinful desires, we start to act like bastards.

Large numbers of children raised outside the best setting of a father and a mother in a stable traditional family is a recipe for the social disaster described in these verses. I will not comment on them any further; they speak for themselves.

VI. The Refusal to Repent – Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them (Romans 1:32).

Here, too, is the mystery of our iniquity, of our stubborn refusal to repent no matter how high the cost, how clear the evidence. Let us pray we will come to our senses. God has a record of allowing civilizations to come and go, nations to rise and fall. If we do not love life, we do not have to have it. If we want lies rather than truth, we can have them and we will feel their full effects.

Somewhere God is saying,

When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayers offered in this place (2 Chron 7:14-15).

Oremus!

The World’s Last Night: The Great American Sex Fantasy Peter Kreeft--1994

The World’s Last Night: The Great American Sex Fantasy

July 1, 1994    by Peter Kreeft

written 23 years ago!

I got the idea for this fantasy from a dear and respectable gentleman who is a college professor, like myself. He told me that he had conceived the idea of a satirical article for a professional journal of philosophy entitled, “F—ing as the Only Intrinsic Human Good.” But he decided against writing it because he thought most of his students and many of his colleagues would not understand that it was intended as a satire, but would adopt it as manifesto.

I thought that I would expand this idea some day into a fantasy novel — a story about a fantastic other world; and I shall tell you the plot of this novel now, rather than writing it (which would be much harder).

Perhaps the most mysterious aspect of my fantasy is its author. His identity will be revealed in the course of the story.

In this fantasy world, my friend’s article gets published and becomes a universal manifesto. He becomes famous. Soon, the whole world is converted to his simple idea, which most people believed and practiced anyway, but weren’t clear-headed or candid enough to say so. Of course, a few “Fundamentalists” fulminate and carp, but they are quickly laughed to scorn by the ubiquitous and omnipotent media.

Now, fantasy is not as easy to write as most people suppose. It has strict rules. Fantasy has to be very realistic and logical. One thing may be fantastic, but everything else has to be realistic. If you make Alice’s Wonderland fantastic, you must make Alice realistic. If you make creatures that are fantastic, like Hobbits, you must make a world that is very realistic, like our own “Middle-earth.”

In successful fantasy, everything else follows logically from the one fantastic assumption. If the reader can only practice a “willing suspension of disbelief” and accept, or pretend to accept, this one fantastic assumption, all the other things in the story will follow logically and become perfectly credible — things that would be quite incredible without that one assumption.

In my fantasy world, the one assumption is that the one intrinsic good, self-justifying end, self-evident value, meaning of life, and non-negotiable absolute is sex. The characters simply will have sex —  however they will, whenever they will, and with whomever or whatever they will: man or woman or child or animal or corpse or dildo or balloon or dead tree stump or computer-generated holograph.

Suppose we follow out my premise to some of its logical conclusions. (Remember, these must all be realistic.)

The characters who inhabit this fantasy world would be human, not mythical or extraterrestrial creatures. So their psychology would be not fantasy but fact.

Here are three relevant facts about the psychology of sex:

1. Sex can be addictive.

2. Addictions are demanding and imperious. Every addiction demands to be treated like God.

3. Addictions are blinding. They make you rationalize instead of reasoning. They dictate to your mind what to think, rather than learning from the mind what to do. Your addiction becomes your captain, and it tells your navigator what to say and when to shut up.

Now, how would the characters in such a fantasy world rationalize their sex addiction?

1. Their education would no longer be free. Illiberal education would replace liberal education. Therefore they would puff great platitudinous clouds of propaganda about “liberal” education and “liberalism” and “liberty.” When the essence dies, the word replaces it — like the photo of a deceased relative.

2. Their ethicists and moralists would abandon, with a sneer rather than a refutation, the idea of an objective, unyielding moral law, the idea that was believed by every society in history and is the very foundation of civilization itself. They might even call this abandonment of the common core belief of all cultures “multiculturalism” — if they were especially arrogant about how stupid people are and how easily The Big Lie can be believed.

The morality of such a society would not go beyond “compassion” — i.e., not doing what makes people unhappy, such as telling them to control their sex drives. Their morality might attain at its highest a Golden Rule, or Kantian Categorical Imperative, “Do unto others only what you want them to do to you.” This would forbid murder (except to those who no longer loved life, or who could dehumanize their victims, born or unborn), and theft (except to socialists) and lying (except to those who longed to be lied to for their own comfort); but it would allow seducing to anyone who liked to be seduced.

Such a society would begin its Sexual Revolution with silly slogans like “Make Love, Not War” — the opposite of the slogan on the medieval crusader’s chastity belt, “Make War, Not Love.”

Their ethics, in short, would be summarized in two propositions: Goodness is only love, and love is only sex. The implied conclusion is identical with our fundamental premise in our whole fantasy: if Goodness = Love, and Love = Sex, then Goodness = Sex, and Sex = Goodness. An entire culture would be based on a single fallacy of an ambiguous middle term.

3. Their history would have to become arrogant, and they would have to become chronological snobs. All previous societies, which believed that sex was sacred and should be surrounded with some sort of taboos, would have to be either (a) ignored by massive historical ignorance, or (b) dismissed with labels like “primitive” and “pre-scientific,” or (c) “reinterpreted” and “nuanced” — i.e., lied about, but in scholarly ways. Words that were reverence-words in all previous societies — words like “tradition” and “authority” — would become sneer-words or snicker-words in this one.

4. Their psychology would have to be based on ideology rather than experience. Having denied the wisdom of the collective experience of all past societies, it would have to deny also the wisdom of one of the most massively obvious facts of present experience: that in sex, as in everything else, control of our immediate instincts and desires makes for physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health and happiness, and that never resisting these desires makes for addiction and misery, both for the individual and for the whole society.

5. Their religion would have to de-claw God — the old God, the transcendent, perfect Person with a will and a moral law. It would substitute “a God I can feel comfortable with.” Its religious educators would have to strain every nerve to “liberate” their pupils from that nasty, dangerous old thing that the Bible repeatedly calls “the beginning of wisdom,” namely, the fear of the Lord. “Lord” and “Father” would be censored, and replaced by God as the Cosmic Chum, the Wonderful Wimp, or the Compassionate Compromiser.

They would have to deny the authority of the Bible, since that book so crudely contradicts their chosen lifestyle; and the infallibility and hence the divinity of Christ, Who unfortunately was not sexually liberated but forbade divorce, adultery, and even lust. They would have to deny His resurrection, for that is strong evidence for His divinity and hence His authority, and the simplest way to do that would be to deny miracles in general. Another Big Lie would help here: that “Science” has refuted miracles. (Of course, the one thing that could not possibly refute miracles is science, for science deals only with the visible universe, not with the supposed supernatural and invisible source of any events in that universe.)

They would also hate, fear, trash, or ignore any Church that dared to contradict their one absolute. They would concentrate, with monomaniacal obsession, only on sexual issues to trash the Church about: fornication, divorce, homosexuality, adultery, masturbation, contraception, abortion, feminism, priestesses, sexually inclusive language, and priestly celibacy and pedophilia (which they would eagerly identify). Then they would accuse the Church of monomaniacal obsession with sex!

(Please remember that however fantastic these features in my fantasy world may seem, they all follow logically from their one fantastic premise.)

6. Even their biological science would be pressed into the service of their god. Evolution would be declared a fact rather than a theory because it would imply that man is only an animal and therefore that it is unreasonable to expect him to act with more self-control than a rabbit.

The most famous evolutionist in this world, Sir Julian Huxley, might even say on public radio that the reason why all his scientific colleagues immediately and eagerly embraced Darwin’s Origin of Species as soon as it appeared, even before they had checked the evidence, is that “Natural Selection got rid of God, you see, and God was a great bother to our sex lives.”

7. The popular mind would even (mis)interpret Einstein’s Theory of Relativity as a justification of moral relativity, and see a tender, dreamy connection between Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics and moral uncertainty, thus giving pseudo-scientific backing for the moral relativism and skepticism that are needed to justify their sex lives.

8. In philosophy, “postmodernism” (irrationalism) would replace “modernism” (rationalism), Power would replace Truth as the end, and “Deconstructionism” would become a scholarly smoke-screen word for “any game you want to play as long as it debunks Reason and Morality.” Philosophers would re-execute Socrates just as religionists would re-crucify Christ.

9. Even their cosmology would have to reject the universally held past principle of hierarchy, obvious and common-sensical as it is. “Animal rights” would compete with human rights, and the dirt under our feet — the planet earth — would be worshipped as a goddess. For a real cosmic hierarchy is the worldview that justifies authority, and some authority just might tell us what to do with our sex organs.

10. In politics, the traditional notions of natural law and rightful authority would have to go, for the same reason they had to go in ethics. They would be replaced with notions like “compassion,” “consensus,” and “victim’s rights.” A hierarchical notion like “excellence” would have to be ruthlessly attacked as “elitist,” and this would be done effectively in practice by the government systematically rewarding the less excellent, the less successful, the less talented, the less hard-working, and the less moral. It would reward the lazy, the loud-mouthed, and the complainer, and punish the quiet, hard-working, loyal, honest small business-man or farmer. For economic independence might lead to independence of thought.

11. In economics, consumerism would treat sex like money and money like sex. Sex would be something to spend at will, and money would be something to make pregnant, not something to use to benefit people.

12. Of course, the family would have to go. This would take a few decades, but it could be begun by a vicious and ubiquitous media barrage against any obviously true common sense defense of it like Dan Quayle’s.

13. Their courts would defend the right to have and read Playboy magazine on a public job, say as a fireman, but deny the right of children to have and read Bibles in a public school.

A private religious organization would be forced to include Irish Gay Pride banners and marchers in their Saint Patrick’s Day parade, but pro-lifers would be banned from other parades.

Schools would forbid public prayers and distribute condoms, no matter what parents think or say.

Taxpayers would be forced to support federally funded blasphemous homoerotic “art,” but they would be forced to take down the Ten Commandments from public schools. This last decision would be made inside a Supreme Court building on the façade of which the Ten Commandments are inscribed.

If a government agency decided that a cult leader was a “fundamentalist,” they would go in with guns blazing, but there would be special legal protections for gays against “homophobic” speech, which would be labeled “hate crime.”

In short, religious piety and sexual sin would exactly change places. The protections formerly given to piety would migrate to sin, and the former sanctions against sin would migrate to piety.

Before I go any further with details, I should remind you that this whole scenario is, of course, an incredibly far-fetched fantasy. And now that I reflect on it, I see that I could not reasonably expect anyone to believe it. How could they? How could such a complete and diverse array of social ills and revolutions all emerge from one single, simple sexual source? It’s just not credible.

And since this is so, I have just come to realize that such a story is not really worth telling. Therefore, I shall stop telling this silly story very soon now, before it gets even sillier.

Perhaps tonight.

Sincerely yours,

The Creator

Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., is a professor of philosophy at Boston College and at the King's College (Empire State Building), in New York City. He is a regular contributor to several Christian publications, is in wide demand as a speaker at conferences, and is the author of over 63 books, including "Handbook of Christian Apologetics," "Christianity for Modern Pagans," and "Fundamentals of the Faith."