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

Can It Be Illegal, Immoral, and Fattening?
Is there a connection between human law and natural law? Was Christ divine before the resurection? And other questions from Our readers.

Q My girlfriend is a kindergarten teacher in a parochial school. Recently her new principal, with the approval of her pastor, decided that her class was not to attend the two weekday Masses held there. He cited the Vatican's Directory for Masses with Children as justifying the decision. The children, she explained, are too young to attend Mass, since they do not yet understand it. What do you say?

A Well, it hardly seems possible that the school administrator has read the 1973 document to which you refer. The Directory for Masses with Children gives some very broad principles and norms for adapting the liturgy of the Mass to the needs of children from infancy to preadolescence. It definitely assumes that children will be attending Mass at least occasionally from their earliest years.
The frequency of the attendance of small children is left to their parents and teachers, since they are not strictly obliged to attend until the age of reason. The Directory, however, presupposes that participation in the Mass is part of the preparation for the reception of first Holy Communion.
Thus to have children of five or six years of age attending makes perfect sense. Your girlfriend's principal may judge that twice a week is too much for kindergarteners, but he is wrong to base his decision on the notion that they ought not attend due to their lack of understanding. That is precisely why they should attend: in order to learn to participate in the Mass, which is the whole point of the document he claims to cite. Let's read from the Directory for Masses with Children itself:
"The Church baptizes children and therefore, relying on the gifts conferred in this sacrament, it must be concerned that once baptized, they grow in communion with Christ and with each other. The sign and pledge of that communion is participation in the eucharistic table, for which children are being prepared or led to a deeper realization of its meaning. This liturgical and eucharistic formation may not be separated from their general education, both human and Christian, indeed it would be harmful if their liturgical formation lacked such a basis . . . If children prepared in this way even from their early years, take part in the Mass with their family . . . they will easily begin to sing and pray in the liturgical community, and indeed will already have some initial idea of the eucharistic mystery" (Directory for Masses with Children 8-10).

Q I have a Fundamentalist friend who insists our Lord was not divine until after His resurrection. I've tried to convince him that isn't sound doctrine, but he resists my reasoning. What can I tell him?

A In fairness to Fundamentalists, I don't think your friend's opinion is very common among them. In fact, I'm sure that most Fundamentalists would condemn his doctrine as unbiblical. The Gospels are so clear in showing that our Lord was God and was aware of His divinity and its powers throughout His earthly life before His resurrection.
Let's look at St. Luke's Gospel. As a child, He says to Mary and Joseph, "Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?" (Luke 2:49). The Father's voice gives testimony, "Thou art my beloved Son, with thee I am well pleased" (Luke 3:22). In Luke 5, our Lord claims the personal power to forgive sin, a power proper to God alone, and He proves His power by a miracle. In Luke 22, it is clear that our Lord is condemned by the Sanhedrin for claiming to be God's Son.
The Gospel according to St. John is even clearer on this point, indicating a full awareness on Christ's part of His divinity and His relation to the Father in the unity of the Blessed Trinity.
The Epistle to the Hebrews in the tenth chapter indicates the awareness of Christ of His mission and divinity from the first moment of His incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Mother.
The distinction between the pre- and post-resurrection Christ is more commonly a modernist, rather than a Fundamentalist, conception. It is a theological opinion imposed on the Sacred Scriptures which is used to minimize or mitigate those aspects of the mystery of Christ which are hard for minds formed in the categories and techniques of modern philosophy to accept. Thus Christ's awareness of His divinity is put off until after the resurrection when He pertains to another order of existence and experience, since the modern mind does not accept that this world can offer any certain knowledge, even merely natural and human, of spiritual, immaterial, metaphysical things, much less of divine ones.
The "hard sayings" about hell and judgement are said to be statements of the pre-resurrection Christ, and the firm assertion of His divinity in the high-priestly prayer in John's Gospel before His passion is said to be a theological reflection made afterwards in the light of the resurrection. These theories are so commonplace now, that to some even officially "orthodox" scholars, it seems downright rash to question them.
Given, however, that the Fathers and Doctors of the Church unanimously see the divinity, human lineage and mission of the Savior predicted and even known explicitly by some in the Old Testament, it does not seem rash at all to hold that the historical Jesus of Nazareth described in the Gospels had the same knowledge in the New Testament.
Modern biblical scholarship can be of great benefit, but one must distinguish between scientific conclusions, and ideas motivated by the intellectual fashions of a particular age.

Q I know there's a distinction between immoral and illegal behavior. At what point is it appropriate to make an immoral behavior also illegal? Is there some teaching of Catholic moral theology about this?

A The Holy Father's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its weighty and well-written declaration Quaestio de abortu published in 1974, gives us an example of the Catholic understanding of the relation between the moral order and the positive law:
"The law is not required to punish every wrong, but it may not itself go against a law which is more profound and more lofty than any human law: the natural law which is written by the Creator in the heart of Man as a norm which his reason discovers, seeks to formulate, and always must make the effort of understanding better, but which it is always evil to contradict. The human law can decide not to punish a particular wrong, but it cannot make morally right that which is contrary to the natural law, since such an opposition suffices to make a law no longer a law" (Quaestio de abortu, 21).
It's not at all Catholic to hold that everything which is wrong should be illegal. St. Thomas Aquinas points out that the human law should require and forbid only matters which fit the degree of virtue possessed by the general run of the citizens, and which serve the common good. Thus laws would not be formed which concern only individual goods, or degrees of virtue which exceed that which is ordinarily reached in a given society. This is because they would not be possible either to observe or enforce, and so law would not be taken seriously. In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas says:
"Human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those which are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which a human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft, and suchlike." (S.T. I-II, q. 96, a. 2)
In our culture, we have a mentality which determines the morality of a thing by its legality: if it's legal, it's morally okay; if it's illegal, it's morally wrong. Morality is thus strongly influenced by human law, much more than it should be. This attitude is called "legal positivism" in philosophy. This legalistic view of morals is the result of two things: the impact of the Protestant refusal to distinguish between mortal and venial sins, and the false conception of human freedom which was inherited from the so-called "Enlightenment" of the 18th century.
For the classical Protestant, there is no inner, theological or philosophical basis for determining the seriousness of a sin, because all sins are of equal malice in the eyes of God. Thus the civil law must serve as a practical guide. That is why Protestants are more likely to desire to outlaw various kinds of sins for the purpose of moral instruction than are Catholics generally. The lax Protestant cultural attitude is, "Well, it may be wrong, but at least it's not illegal." The lax Catholic, on the other hand, is more likely to say, "Even if it's illegal, it's no sin."
The "Age of Reason" made human freedom the most fundamental principle of society, and thus the attitude arose that anyone is free to do whatever he is not forbidden to do by law, which exists simply as a restraint on his individual liberty. Thus there's the tendency to legalize everything which an individual finds necessary for his personal "happiness," even if it's against the natural law.
The result of these tendencies is the type of relation between morality and law we see in America, where many states made practically unenforceable and surprisingly detailed laws against various unchaste actions committed in private, and now seek to show their approval of individual liberty by "legalizing" these same actions. The Catholic principle given above is more sensible: the law does not have to punish every vice, but it cannot make right those acts which are contrary to the natural law.
To sum up, it might be said that three principles govern the Catholic approach to human law: conformity to the natural law, possibility of observance, and enforceability. A law is no law if it does not conform to the natural law, and it is harmful to law generally if it cannot be observed or enforced. This is a view which strikes a modern American as both more "conservative" and more "liberal" than the Protestant and positivist approach he is used to.

Q I know the Church encourages daily Holy Communion for the faithful, but does the Church encourage priests to say Mass every day? One of the priests in my parish doesn't celebrate Mass on his "day off," and when I asked him why, he said it's forbidden for him to say Mass if it isn't a scheduled one that guarantees a congregation. That didn't sound right to me.

A Last June, I was happy to be present at the priestly ordination conferred by Cardinal Hickey in St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C. In his exhortation to the ordinands, he encouraged them to celebrate Holy Mass every day of their lives, "even on your day off and on vacation." This shows the Cardinal recognizes that there is a problem here. Many priests in our country only celebrate if they are scheduled to say a public Mass. The law of the Church does not oblige priests to celebrate every day, but it earnestly encourages them to do so. Here are the words of the Code of Canon Law:
"Remembering that the work of redemption is continually accomplished in the mystery of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, priests are to celebrate frequently; indeed daily celebration is strongly recommended, since even if the faithful cannot be present it is the act of Christ and the Church in which priests fulfill their principal function" (Canon 904, emphasis added).
The new Roman Missal published after Vatican II is the first in history which contains an "Order of Mass without a Congregation." It is true that canon 906 requires that at least one member of the faithful be present, but even this requirement may be waived "for a just and reasonable cause," among which canonists include the case when the priest wishes to follow the Church's strong recommendation to celebrate daily, but finds it genuinely inconvenient to arrange to have someone present. In the General Instruction to the Roman Missal, 211 even tells the priest what he is to do if no one at all is there. Of course, a priest could always concelebrate with another priest who has the scheduled Mass, or with another priest with whom he is spending his day off, but canon 902 makes it clear that he is always free to celebrate individually, based upon 57 of Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium.
If we look at the canon which encourages daily celebration, we can see that the motivation is a very lofty one: the work of redemption and the priest's "principal function." This term comes from Vatican II's decree Presbyterorum Ordinis 13, where the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice is said to be the priest's highest office. How many priests would do well to arrange their priestly lives, both on days of activity and leisure, around this principle? They would then be more like Christ, Who "desired with a great desire" to celebrate the Holy Mass with His apostles. Today's priests should not so overemphasize the importance of "the assembly" to the point where they lose sight of their own "principal function" as priests. The faithful, living and dead, always benefit from the celebration, whether they are present or not, as members of the mystical body whose Divine Head offers Himself in each Holy Mass.
On a personal note, I would like to add that if just one of my brother priests celebrates just one more Eucharist as a result of this question and answer, then all of the efforts (not just mine, but everyone's) which go into this magazine will have been amply repaid, for each Mass is an infinite act of praise and thanks, a bottomless treasury of graces, in comparison to which all our other efforts are very slight indeed.
Pray that priests may think with Christ and his Church on this point, and not with today's neo-Jansenist liturgical "experts," whose opinions and legal interpretations would restrict access to the means of grace for priest and people alike.

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