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subjective truths describe people’s feelings toward the world rather than facts about the world.
Objective truths cannot be true only for some people. They are true or false for everyone because they describe reality, and reality is something everyone has to accept, like it or not.
Even if you don’t believe in religion at all, that belief should be grounded in facts about reality and not just feelings toward religion. The bottom line is that we should choose a church or faith not because of how it makes us feel, but because it is objectively true and objectively good for us.
Science can’t show us what is good or evil because it is just a tool that can be used for either good or evil. We need other thought tools, like philosophy and personal experience, in order to understand truths about the world that science cannot discover—including
For Catholics, faith is “the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us.”11 If God does exist (the evidence for which we will examine shortly), then it is perfectly reasonable for people to trust, or have faith, in God, just as we would have faith or trust in other people.
Since the universe includes all of space and time, the cause of the universe would have to exist beyond space and time, because it created those things. This cause would have to be immaterial, that is, not made of matter, and eternal, not exist in time. Since science only studies forces and objects that exist in space and time, this means that the cause of the universe is not something science can ever locate or study.
Oneness: Since God has no limits, it follows that he lacks nothing.
God is present in the universe by sustaining and affecting every part of it. In short, there is no single place or time that contains God. Rather, all places and all times exist because God is existence itself. God perceives all of existence in one eternal “now,” and so he is present in it but not a literal part of it.
Omniscience: Since God sustains all of existence, he is all-knowing, meaning that he knows all real and potentially real things.
Omnipotence: Being omnipotent, or all-powerful, means that God has the power to do anything that is logically possible.
God has no limits because he’s infinite; therefore he lacks nothing. That doesn’t mean every good and evil thing is in God because, as we’ve seen, evil is just the absence of good. Because evil is a lack of good, and God lacks nothing, it follows that God must be all-good.
God doesn’t just have love, or beauty, or goodness: God is love, God is beauty, and God is goodness.
Evil is not a thing that God created but an absence of good that God tolerates. Evil is a parasite that can’t exist without the good just as rust can’t exist without the metal it corrupts.
The short answer is this: it’s okay to allow evil to exist if by doing so you bring about more good or prevent a greater evil.
God could get rid of moral evils like rape by getting rid of human beings or by taking away their free will, but the world would be a worse place if we were all robots. Our world wouldn’t have goods like heroism, compassion, or even love, and humans would become the moral equivalents of programmable appliances.
Evil is what we experience when things are not the way they are supposed to be.
If evil refers to the way things are not supposed to be, then good must refer to the way things are supposed to be. But if things are supposed to be a certain way, then that means there is both a cosmic plan and a cosmic planner—a planner that many people call God.
On the other hand, when we do something wrong, even if no one finds out about it, we feel guilty. We feel as if we’ve failed to live up to a standard of who we were meant to be. Most of us have told someone after we’ve hurt them, “I’m so sorry, that’s not who I am.” The reason we feel this way is because God gave us his moral law and wrote it on our hearts in the form of a conscience.
Accept whatever is brought upon you, and in changes that humble you be patient. For gold is tested in the fire, and acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation. Trust in him [God], and he will help you; make your ways straight, and hope in him (Sir. 2:4-6).
The problem of evil is not God’s problem—it’s ours. If there is a perfect, objective standard of goodness, then whenever we choose evil we fall short of that standard. But the moral standards are not like the impersonal rules of mathematics. Morality is about people choosing between good and evil, so the perfect standard of morality must come from a perfect person, or God. This means that whenever we choose evil we separate ourselves from God, who is the Good itself.
This process of coming to know God and responding to his revelation is the essence of religion.
A being is an existing entity, or “that something is”; a person is a rational individual or “who someone is”; and a nature refers to “what something is.” For example, you exist so you are a kind of being (in this case, an animal). You are also a person who has a human nature, that is, you have the capacity to act in distinctly human ways. So you are a being who is one person and possesses one human nature.
Instead, it is a “spiral argument,” in which the Bible is assumed to be a merely human document that records the creation of a divinely instituted Church.63 This Church then had the authority to pronounce which human writings also had God as their author. The great fourth-century theologian St. Augustine reached a similar conclusion when he said, “I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.”64
• Ecclesial tradition: The rules and customs taught by the Church that aid us in worshipping God. These include styles of worship or rules that can change when it is most helpful for the Body of Christ. • Sacred Tradition: The word of God in oral form that Jesus and the apostles entrusted to the Church and that do not change. These include basic doctrines of the Faith and ways of living out the Faith in every generation.
St. Vincent of Lerins made this point in the fifth century when he noticed that heretics could cite Scripture just as well as the faithful. This meant that another authority was necessary to settle disputes about what Christians should believe. This authority could be none other than the Church Christ founded, or, as Vincent wrote, “The rule for the right understanding of the prophets and apostles should be framed in accordance with the standard of ecclesiastical and Catholic interpretation.”
That answer didn’t satisfy me so I asked them, “Don’t you wonder if one of the churches that exists today can be traced back to the Church Jesus founded? Don’t you wonder which church Jesus wants us to join?”
But as we’ve seen, doctrines like the priesthood, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the sacrament of confession were believed long before the fourth century and can even be traced back to what Jesus and the apostles taught.
The doctrine of papal infallibility teaches that the pope has a special grace from God that protects him from leading Christ’s Church into error. Most Protestants would admit that St. Peter was at least infallible when he wrote his first and second letters, because they’re in the Bible. Catholics simply believe this kind of protection was given to Peter and each of his successors, none of whom led the Church into error.
Infallibility also doesn’t mean the pope will have the right answer to every problem facing the Church. The gift of infallibility only keeps the pope from officially leading the Church into heresy. Some Church Fathers, such as St. Cyprian of Carthage, criticized the pope’s decisions; but even Cyprian believed the pope could not lead the Church astray.
There are seven sacraments, each of which has a specific way they are to be performed (the form) and a specific material that must be used (the matter). The form of baptism includes saying, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The matter is the water that covers the person and is the physical means by which their sins are washed away (Acts 22:16).
The sacrament of confession includes several prayers in the form, but the matter is the priest himself. His physical presence and voice is the channel through which God’s grace enters the sinner’s heart and reconciles him to God. St. Paul even said, “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Cor. 5:18).
John the Baptist said that Jesus was “the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and St. Paul said, “Christ, our Paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed” (1 Cor. 5:7). The Passover lamb in the Old Testament had to be a male, without blemish, and his legs could not be broken (Exod. 12:5,46). Christ, our Passover lamb, is male, without sin (Heb. 4:15), and during the Crucifixion his legs were not broken (John 19:33). Finally, the Passover was not complete until the lamb was eaten, and so the “Passover” that Christians still celebrate must be completed in the same way.
The Church teaches that when they are consecrated at Mass, the substance of these things changes into the body and blood of Christ although the appearances of the bread and wine remain. A substance is the “metaphysical core” of an object that unites all of an object’s appearances into a single entity.
At Mass the bread and wine do not transform into the body and blood of Christ, because their form, or how the bread and wine look and taste to us, does not change. Rather, the substance of the bread and wine changes into the substance of the body and blood of Christ.
Unlike personal sin, original sin is not an evil thing we’ve done but an absence of God’s grace in our souls. Baptism “removes” original sin by filling our souls with the love and life of God, or grace. So, when I was baptized, not only did God forgive every sin I committed, but he filled my heart with his life and took away the stain of original sin. In that moment he gave me, as Paul says, “the spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! [literally, Daddy!] Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom. 8:15-16).
But as St. Augustine is reported to have said, “The Church is not a hotel for saints, it is a hospital for sinners.”
Instead of seeking riches and conquest, the Crusaders risked life and limb to rescue Christians whose land and homes had been overrun by Muslim invaders. Even Christian pilgrims who visited the region risked their lives to worship in the Holy Land. For example, thirty years before the First Crusade, a group of 7,000 peaceful German pilgrims were viciously massacred.125 This, among other events, prompted Pope Urban II to call the First Crusade. In a speech he gave in 1095 the pope said: Let those who for a long time have been robbers now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against
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The Bible teaches that salvation is a process that begins in the past through faith, continues throughout our lives in the present, and ends with our future eternal glory in heaven.
Fortunately for us, God has given his Church the “ministry of reconciliation.” Anyone who separates himself from Christ, no matter what he or she has done, can be restored to an intimate relationship with God through the sacrament of confession (John 20:23).
The Church refers to mortal sins as our freely chosen, gravely evil acts that destroy God’s love in our hearts. These sins forfeit our hope of eternal life with God unless we ask God to forgive them through the sacrament of reconciliation (confession).137 Unlike mortal sins, venial sins hurt the soul but do not kill God’s grace within it. These are sins that people commit in their day-to-day life that do not completely separate them from God but do hurt their relationship with him.
We might think discipline is the opposite of love, but if you’ve ever been around a spoiled child you see that the lack of discipline can make a person angry, frustrated, selfish, and just plain miserable. Since God is our loving father, he also graciously corrects us, or as the Bible says, “The Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives” (Heb. 12:6).
In Colossians 1:24 Paul said he made up in his suffering “what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions.” Since Christ’s sacrifice is perfect, what Paul means is what is lacking is our sacrifice. God wants all of our sacrifices in this life to be united to Christ so that, as a family, we can help one another be full of grace and free from the effects of sin. That’s why St. Paul says if we are children of God then we are both heirs of God, “and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him [emphasis added] in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17).
Purgatory doesn’t take away from Christ’s work, but rather it is Christ’s work. It is not something the Church created in order to force people to work their way into heaven. Purgatory is instead something God created so that the grace his Son obtained for us on the cross could make us “holy and blameless and irreproachable before him” (Col. 1:22), free from the pain and penalty of sin, and ready to enter into eternal glory with Christ our Lord.
Many non-Catholics struggle with the concept of praying to saints because they think prayer and worship are the same thing. Since the Bible says we should only worship God, then shouldn’t we only pray to God? But the word “worship” refers to giving someone “worth-ship,” or the honor that person is due.
“Prayer” comes from the Latin word precarius and refers to making a request for something. In Old English a person might have said to a friend, “I pray you will join us for dinner tomorrow night.” They aren’t worshipping their friend as a god, but simply making a request of them. Catholics do the same thing when they pray to saints; they don’t honor them as gods but ask them for their prayers.
Finally, just as Protestants don’t worship the wooden crosses they pray in front of but use them as reminders of Christ’s death and resurrection, Catholics don’t worship statues of saints they bow or kneel in front of. They instead use these figures as an aid to prayer, and their posture is done out of respect to the figure being represented; it is not an act of divine worship.
The Immaculate Conception does not refer to Jesus’ miraculous virginal conception in Mary’s womb. Instead, the term means that Mary herself was conceived without the stain of original sin.
Why We Believe: Mary • Of all of God’s creatures, Mary has the closest relationship with God because she gave birth to him. • As the Mother of God, Mary remained a virgin her whole life, was conceived without original sin, and was assumed into heaven. • Catholics honor Mary because she always leads us to her son, Jesus Christ.
