I Have a Question - Fr. Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.

Can Christians Urn Their Way To Heaven?
Will faith alone save me? And other questions from our readers.

Q - I had a discussion with an Evangelical friend on the virginity of Our Blessed Mother. I pointed out that Protestant reformers Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli taught the historic Christian doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. He didn't care and said that our salvation doesn't depend on belief about Mary's virginity. All we have to do, he said, is believe that Jesus is our personal Lord and Savior and we will be saved. He also said Catholicism isn't "true" Christianity. What should I tell him?

The Reformers indeed taught the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity, but that usually doesn't impress modern-day Protestants like your friend. Protestants agree with the Catholic Church's teaching that faith in Christ is necessary for salvation. But faith in Christ includes faith in and assent to what He taught His commandments and doctrines. Your friend's minimalist attitude toward what is necessary to salvation risks turning Christianity into a mechanical ideology: "Say the sinner's prayer' and you're in, nothing else matters. Just don't become a Catholic."
Point out that if there are no conditions for salvation other than faith in Christ as one's Savior, then not being a Catholic cannot be a condition for salvation. If he says you can't be a Catholic and be saved, then he's added a condition and is being inconsistent. This may help him see that there's more to salvation than mere faith in Christ. Jesus reminded us that faith alone isn't sufficient: "Why do you say to me, Lord, Lord,' but do not do the things I command?" (Luke 6:46-47; cf. Matt, 7:21-23). This includes believing in all that He and the Apostles taught. And that includes the truth of Mary's perpetual virginity. You see, all of revelation is connected. One cannot say, for example, I'm willing to accept this doctrine but I won't accept that one. That's completely contrary to Christ's will. Your friend's point of view is common among Protestants, who have a tendency to reduce "faith in Christ" to simply the belief that He is our Savior. But let's remember what "Savior" means. It means that Christ is saving us from something, He is saving us for something, His salvation comes to us in a certain way and under certain conditions (eg. believe, repent, be baptized, etc.). This also tells us who He is: God Himself. You see what a wealth of doctrinal implications are contained in the word "savior": sin, death, and hell, the commandments, grace, heaven, sacrifice, merit, sacraments, the Church, the Trinity, the Incarnation, His death, Resurrection, and Second Coming. For those who know and love Christ, there is nothing about Him, His life, His friends, His teachings that is not of interest or help to them.
Christ came to "bear witness to the truth" (John 18:37) and to reveal many supernatural mysteries about God and the kingdom of God which we could never have known by the power of unaided human reason. Believing the truths about Christ contained in Sacred Scripture are part of having faith in Him. We can't separate faith in the person of Christ from faith in His life and message, in the prophets who preceded Him, and the Apostles and their successors who followed after Him. These Apostles the early Church magisterium proclaimed the truth with the teaching authority Christ gave them: "He who hears you, hears Me" (Luke 10:16; cf. Matt. 16:18, 18:18).
And remember what Christ command the magisterium of His Church to do: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations . . . teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Matt. 28:19-20). Christ wants Christians to assent to and profess all the doctrines contained in the Deposit of Faith, including the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity. He reminds us that, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of My Father in Heaven" (Matt. 7:21).

Q - Our parish liturgy committee plans to install a "columbarium" for the ashes of the dead in our church. I'm puzzled by this because I thought cremation was forbidden for Catholics. What do you say?

A - You're right to be puzzled, even though cremation is no longer strictly forbidden to Catholics. Let me explain. In the enormous city cemetery of Rome, the Campo Verano, where the Holy Father celebrates Holy Mass each year for All Souls, there are a number of temple-like structures housing the ashes of members of Masonic lodges. They're notable in this otherwise very Catholic cemetery because they lack any Christian symbols or expressions of faith in their inscriptions. These tombs were built in the last century by bitter enemies of the pope and the Church, deliberately in the middle of blessed ground, to express "triumph" over the papacy whose temporal possessions the Masons had managed to confiscate. These days they're ill-kept, and one can even see the ashes spilling out of some of the cracked urns lined up on the shelves within the structure (a fitting symbol of the hopeless death endured by those without faith in Christ). This kind of practice was the reason why the Church, for many years, forbade Catholics from being cremated. Cremation was a symbol in the popular mind of rejecting the Catholic Faith and its teaching on heaven and the Resurrection of Christ and, eventually, of all the dead. Freemasons were often required by their secret sect to be cremated to assure that a Catholic funeral could not be performed. In the new Code of Canon Law the Church of the Latin rite has changed the rule to allow cremation, "unless it has been chosen for reasons contrary to Christian teaching" (canon 1176 #3). Church burial must be denied those "who had chosen the cremation of their bodies for reasons opposed to the Christian faith" (canon 1184 #2).
The Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches has the same basic norm (cf. canon 876 #3). Both the law of the Latin and the Eastern Churches, however, express a clear preference for the traditional practice of burial.
The Church "earnestly recommends" it in the Latin code (1176 #3), and full burial is called "the preference of the Church" in the Eastern code (876 #3). And both the Latin and Eastern codes of canon law prohibit burial within churches (cf. 1242 and 874 #3 respectively). The laws regulating funerals of the poor are found in canon 1181 of the Latin code.
Even though the Church permits cremation, the practice is nonetheless discouraged. So for a parish to establish a columbarium for ashes is at least against the spirit of the Church's law, since such a project would have the effect of appearing to recommend or encourage cremation.

Q - I've read some amazing things about the penances performed by the saints. Sometimes they go beyond what seems reasonable; not just fasting or keeping silence, but flogging themselves, wearing hairshirts, spiked belts, and so on. How can such things be justified, especially in the light of St. Paul's teaching in 1 Cor 6:19 that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?

A - Further on in the same epistle St. Paul says, "I chastise my body and bring it into subjection, lest perhaps when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway" (1 Cor, 9:27). Our Lord Himself fasted and kept vigils, even though He was sinless. His penances merited for us the grace to do penance for our sins, as He reminds: "Those whom I love, I rebuke and chastise. Be zealous, therefore and do penance" (Rev. 3:19).
The saints longed for the coming of the kingdom, and by their sometimes severe penances they tried to hasten its appearance in themselves and in others. The trouble is not that some saints may have exaggerated this penitential spirit, but that we, with all our sins, do so little penance. We may not have to perform the hair-raising feats of some of the saints, but all of us can show that we share in a Christ-like love by chastising and mastering our bodies through penances compatible with our duties and station in life.
Christian penance is not an expression of a belief that the body or its pleasures are evil. Rather penance is a kind of "house cleaning" of the temple of the Holy Spirit. Sin, even when it has been forgiven, still has an effect on the soul, leaving a scar or residue, like the mess left behind after the storm is over and the sky has cleared. Theologians speak of a residue left by sins called "temporal punishment," the debt owed in justice to God who has been merciful in forgiving our sins and remitting (eliminating) the eternal punishment they deserve. Nothing we could do could repair for the debt of eternal punishment, so we can't do penance for that. Only Christ could do that. But being a wise Father, God wants His children to do what they can, and since we can perform penances for the remission of temporal punishment, He requires this of us. God is just as well as merciful. There is also the so-called "kindling" in our souls, left by past sins, that can easily ignite the passions and result in more sins. The Latin term for this used by theologians is the fomes peccati (think of the verb "to foment" something, and you'll have a feel for the force of the phrase). By practicing virtue, acts that go against our sinful inclinations, we can weaken sin's hold on us. If we're lazy, we can sleep a little less, if gluttonous, we can fast, if lustful, we can abstain for a time, with the consent of one's spouse. These actions are all types of fasting. It is precisely because our bodies are meant for God's service that we do penance, to make up for our abuse of the body which is really meant for His use and His dwelling. In doing penance we will also remind ourselves of the fact which Our Lord most often related to penance: We are not made for this world, but for the kingdom of heaven, as He said, "Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4:17).
After telling us that we are the temples of God in whom the Holy Spirit dwells in 1 Corinthians 6:19, St. Paul says, "You are not your own. For you are bought with a great price. Glorify and bear God in your body." Performing acts of penance reminds us that we are not our own property, but God's, members of Christ's Body and citizens of the kingdom.

Q - Is it true that some of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church taught that Jews should be persecuted and segregated? I have heard this about St. John Chrysostom and St. Thomas Aquinas. I was also told that the Nazi segregation of Jews and their requirement that Jews wear a badge were taken from Church laws set up in the Middle Ages.

A - There's no doubt that there are many passages about the Jews from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church which would cause consternation if they were published today. Similarly, devout Jews would be embarrassed at some of the comments in the different versions of the Talmud about Jesus, Mary, Christians, and Gentiles. One thing is certain, the charge of "anti-Semitism" is thrown around far too easily.
St. John Chrysostom wrote a series of sermons preached "against the Jews," but patristics scholars have shown that he, like St. Paul in Galatians, was directing his preaching to Christians who clung to Jewish observances as an expression of a false doctrine of grace and salvation. Both St. John Chrysostom and St. Paul used biting sarcasm in their attacks on false doctrine, but they were not "anti-Semitic," in the modern sense of the term. As for St. Thomas, his norms for the treatment of Jews stemmed from the fact that Jews had a special status in the economic and social structure of the Middle Ages. They came directly under the sovereign and were under his protection. Segregating Jews was often as much a matter of protection as of discrimination. The ghetto was a practical reality mainly because Jews had to live in close proximity to the synagogue, since they had to walk, not ride on the Sabbath. This meant they couldn't live too far from the synagogue. This can be observed in all the major cities of the United States on any Friday evening, just as it could be observed in 13th-century France.
The requirement that Jews wear some distinguishing mark must be seen in the light of medieval culture in which a person's sex, social and religious status, his level of education, and his ethnic origin were immediately apparent by his manner of dress and even his beard and hairstyle. Our modern culture, in which the main difference indicated by clothing is one of individual taste, understandably can't appreciate the majority of other human civilizations in which outward appearances are not a matter of the preferences of the individual, but were imposed by law or custom on society.
St. Thomas was clear on the essential point that Jews may not be forced to accept Christianity, nor may their children be educated as Christians against their parents' will. Rather, the sovereign must allow their religious observances, as long as they do not seek to undermine the faith of Christians.
There is no similarity whatsoever between the evil anti-Jewish laws imposed by Hitler and others and the norms of the Christian Middle Ages. The motivation is entirely different in each case. With the Nazis, the intention was to persecute and ultimately annihilate. In medieval Christian Europe, it was to protect, define, and contain a minority regarded as a foreign community within the larger, homogeneous majority. One can argue the merits of the medieval approach, even from a Christian standpoint, but it's obvious that attempting to equate the two is intellectually and historically dishonest and offensive.
Here's a point of significant historical importance. The territories of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Catholic Hapsburgs were where the majority of the concentration camps for Jews were located. The Hapsburg rule ceased after the First World War, on the insistence of the United States and other nations. In a world "made safe for democracy" a benign, free, centuries-old Catholic monarchy was not allowed to exist. Hitler hated the Catholic aristocracy and social order in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, and Krakow, which he regarded as pro-Jewish.
In recent years, upon the death of the last Hapsburg Empress, who lived in exile, her body was returned to Austria and buried with a full state funeral. The Chief Rabbi of Vienna went to the Catholic monastery of Klosterneuberg to pay his respects to the Catholic Empress. There, before the assembled international press, he publicly thanked the Hapsburgs for their centuries of kind treatment and friendship with the persecuted Jewish. (This writer was an eyewitness of the event.) It was the removal of the Hapsburg's Catholic leadership that led in large measure to the wholesale persecution of the Jews in modern Europe under Hitler.
Accusations about modern "Catholic" anti-Semitism usually only prove the historical ignorance and unreasoning anti-Catholicism of the accuser.

Send your questions to Fr. Hugh Barbour at: "I Have a Question," Envoy Magazine, St. Michael's Abbey, 19292 El Toro Road, Silverado, CA 92676.