INTERESTING TOPICS

"The Virgin of Gaudalupe"
A fresco done in 1946-47 by Antonio Garcia,
showing Our Lady appearing
to the Amer-Indian Juan Diego.
.

SOME TOPICS THAT INTEREST ME

• One God in Three Persons. What does it mean when we say that we believe in a "personal" God or that we believe in One God "in Three Persons"? For example, is gender an essential attribute of being a person? Does, therefore, God have gender? Could God have gender? Or can only human persons, who have physical bodies, have gender? May any Catholic believe that each Person of the Trinity has gender (i.e., is either masculine or feminine)?
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• Creation. What really is the universe that we believe God created out of nothing?
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• Sin, Original and Actual. What are evil and sin? How did they enter the world? In what sense are all men guilty of sin? How are God's goodness and omnipotence compatible with man's responsibility for his own salvation or damnation?
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• Temptation. How could the Devil have ever "tempted" God the Son and why do we pray to God the Father that He "lead us not unto temptation"?
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• Redemption and Salvation. What does it mean to say someone has been redeemed or has been saved?
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• "Extra ecclesiam nullus omnino salvatur." The Catholic Church has always taught, and on several occasions even infallibly defined, the doctrine that "outside the Church no one at all is saved." This doctrine has a strict, as well as a moderate and a loose interpretation, depending on the meaning given the word "extra." All three interpretations are, for the time being, allowed to Catholics, pending a definitive resolution of the issue by the Magisterium. Each of these interpretations, however, would not allow acceptance of either of the other two. In 1949 the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the Vatican, in a letter that was approved by Pope Pius XII, rejected the strict interpretation advanced by Rev. Leonard Feeney, S.J. [a distant cousin of mine, by the way]. Fr. Feeney was later dismissed from the Jesuits and subsequently excommunicated. Years after, however, through the good offices of Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, Archbishop of Boston, Fr, Feeney and most of his followers were reconciled to the Vatican, which explicitly authorized their right to continue upholding their strict interpretation of the "extra ecclesiam..." doctrine. What are the issues in all this? Is there a solution?
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• The Church. How can the Roman Catholic Church be, at one and the same time, the Mystical Body of Christ and the cause of so much evil? The old excuse that just the "human element" is at fault whenever the (institutional) Church connives in sins of commission or omission, is simply not a satisfactory answer. Could the Mystical Body of Christ have its own kind of hypostatic union of divine and human natures? Is the divine Church leaven in the human Church?
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• The Pope. How much God-given authority over Catholic customs does the Pope have? If, for example, a Pope ever ordered Catholics to cease using crucifixes and instead insisted upon using only plain crosses, or, if he ever forbade all depictions of God the Father and/or of God the Holy Ghost in any human (particularly, masculine) form and instead insisted on employing simply abstract or symbolic depictions (e.g., a burning bush or a descending dove), would Catholics be obliged to obey him?
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• The Sacrament of Order. What are the meanings of, and the distinctions between, the "priesthood of all believers" [i.e., all who have received the Sacrament of Baptism] and the "ministerial priesthood" [i.e., those who have received the Sacrament of Order]? Surprisingly, our English Language does not have a distinct word for "one who offers a sacrifice," as the Hebrew, Greek and Latin Languages all do ("kahan," "hieros" and "sacerdos," respectively). But those three words are all quite different in meaning from the three words those languages have for an "elder of the community" ("zagen," "presbyteros," and "senior," respectively). For some strange reason, English (as also French and almost all the other European languages) uses but one word (e.g., "priest," a contraction of "presbyter," which simply means "elder") for both an "elder of the community" and for "one who offers a sacrifice." As a result, any discussion in English of the two Sacraments, Baptism and Order, and of those who are able to receive them, is made very difficult. After all, how can anyone understand the theology of these two sacraments when we have to employ one and the same word (priest) for two utterly different things?
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• The Lectionary and The Sacramentary. How should the Bible and the various sacramental rites of the Church be translated?
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• Can a Woman receive the Sacrament of Order? Why does the Church teach that only human males can be ordained?

 

 

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