What form will that practical acknowledgment take?
It must be expressed in the duties of religion, which will imply reverence for God’s Person, and obedience to such instructions as He pleases to issue in our regard.
Moral Life
605 articles from the existing collection.
You are deceiving us. That is not what Catholics are taught. I have a Catholic Catechism which gives the first commandment as, “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have strange gods before me.” You cut out the reference to images.
In the first place, if we wished to deceive our people, we would be very foolish to give them the full wording of the commandment in the Douay Version of the Bible, where they could detect the deliberate distortion! In the second place, in the Catechism we give the full substantial sense of the words I have quoted, but in a brie…
I admit your tests of a Church founded by Christ, continuously existing, united, universal, and authoritative. But I cannot admit the machine made organization with its hard and fast rules, which you call the Catholic Church, to be that Church.
If the Catholic Church is not it, no other can be it. However, the Catholic Church is not a machine-made organization. It is just as established by Christ Were the Catholic Church a man-made system, it would have gone the way of all man-made kingdoms and empires which have come and gone, whereas it has serenely kept going with a…
Don’t Priests visit the bereaved and tell them that so many dollars are required per week for Masses?
No. Catholics are taught the truth from the pulpit in general. They are told that it is good to have Masses offered for the dead if possible; as indeed it is. Apart from that, the matter is left to the spontaneous desire of individuals. And they are never required to have such Masses offered.
But does not your allegiance to the Pope conflict with your duty as a British subject? Remember that your Church is controlled by a foreign temporal king.
To British Catholics the Church is not controlled by a foreigner. She is controlled by the Vicar of Christ. It would be just the same if St. Peter were still there to-day, and he was a Palestinian Jew. If a Frenchman or an Englishman were elected, no Italian Catholic would regard the Pope as Pope in the light of any foreign nati…
Does the Catholic Church make light of drunkenness. Isn’t it sin ful to cause blind misery and poverty in the home?
The Catholic Church does not make light of so grave a sin. It is an evil which leaves every one of us very miserable indeed. Man has obligations to God, to himself, and to his neighbor. Such drunkenness violates all three obligations. Few things so destroy God’s image and likeness in man as excessive drink. Other vices leave him…
The constitution was changed by that very Augustine. The Church in England before him was not in communion with Rome.
Your statement is erroneous, and in any case you cannot claim that the present Church of England has any connection with the Church which was in England prior to the coming of St. Augustine. Let us put it this way. There are two sets of Bishops in England to-day. There are the Bishops of the Church of England, and the Bishops of…
What do you mean by original sin?
Actual sin is a deliberate personal transgression of God’s law. But original sin, which is inherited, does not mean that I have personally and maliciously transgressed. We must notice the difference between nature and grace. Nature is our being and all that our condition demands as rational animals. Grace means a gift or quality…
How could the devil carry off God and set Him on a hill in Galilee from which he could see all the kingdoms of the earth?
God cannot be carried anywhere. He is a Spirit, and not subject to local transportation. Nor is it honest to attribute to God, making no mention of his incarnate human nature, that which happened to that human nature. The Son of God in His assumed human nature was subjected to this temptation. There is nothing repugnant in the d…
Does drink enter Catholic presbyteries?
All of them have to keep special supplies of altar wine. Over and above this altar wine, reserved for sacramental use, drink enters some presbyteries, but not others. It depends upon the needs of the individual Priest. If a Priest took drink to excess, he would be guilty of sin, and a worse sin than a layman would commit owing t…
It tempts one to give up the Church.
That is foolish, and will not better things. Will you neglect other obligations because you have failed in this, and give up religion on the principle that he who commits one sin might just as well commit a dozen sins? The only thing to do after failure is to repent as men do of other sins, and try again to be faithful.
Captalists eat bread in the sweat of the workers’ brows. What has your Church to say for the workers?
Most of those whom you would call capitalists have their own anxieties and labors. Do not make the mistake of measuring all labor in terms of muscular power. A man’s intelligence is capable of true work, and financial administration is not free from the sweat of anxiety. Meantime the Church declares that the worker must be adequ…
The Church means an assembly of men united in prayer, not a building.
The word Church has a twofold sense. Its proper meaning is a union or assembly of men united not only in prayer, but also in a definite creed, worship, and obedience. In that sense I speak of the Catholic Church. Or again, it can refer to a building erected for purposes of worship by members of the Catholic Church, and in that s…
Is it not likely that the worship of the sun-gods and earth-gods was replaced by the milder form of the sacrifice of Christ-god, and that Christianity will also yield place to a more ethical system?
It is absurd and quite unhistorical to maintain the derivation of the divinely revealed worship of the true and Infinite God, given precisely to correct the errors of men, from the humanly invented worship of sun-gods and earth-gods. Also human reason will never invent a more ethical system than that prescribed for all men by th…
Where does the Bible forbid mixed marriages?
It would not matter if the Bible did not forbid them. Not every detail of Christian practice is there. Christ gave the Church the power to make such legislation as she might think necessary at various times. However that God does not approve mixed marriages between people with the true religion and people without it is clear fro…
Still you are subject to Rome, yet content to remain under the protection of the British flag?
Catholics are subject to the Bishop of Rome on questions of religion. But they are not subject to him in national affairs. This distinction naturally flows from the doctrine that the religion of Christ is not an affair of the British Empire, but for all men. Britishers should be Christians, but Christianity is not necessarily Br…
Were not the Jesuits the very embodiment of the intolerant moral theology of the Catholic Church?
The Jesuits are members of a Religious Order whose members pledge themselves to love Jesus Christ as much as possible, to labor solely in His interests and in order to win as many souls as possible to His service.
But if everything is clean and upright, why not throw them open to the public?
If everything is clean and upright in your own home, why do you not throw it open to public inspection, instead of regarding it as private premises? Why not ask all passers-by, complete strangers, to walk in and inspect your private rooms? If I came to your house and told you that I suspected you of leading an evil life, and tha…
Do they stay because they love the life, or because they fear the anathemas of the Church?
Because they love their self-chosen life. Not one of the Nuns would have entered unless she had chosen to do so. Nor is any Nun allowed to take her final vows until after at least four years of experience of the life to see whether she is satisfied even after entering. You might as well suggest that no married woman remains fait…
Would a contractor fail in justice twoards his employees if he secretly induced them to accept less than award wages on the score that many unemployed would accept the job?
Yes. Award wages are the legal price of the work to be done, and when a legal award is given, it binds in conscience. The Pope has condemned absolutely and most rigorously the conduct of those employers who exploit the evil of unemployment by inducing men to accept work at less than just wages. The legal award must be accepted a…
All the same Catholicism keeps the people poor, for Father Martindale bewailed the fact that the Catholic religion is looked upon as the religion of the kitchen.
That does not mean that it is the religion of the kitchen. Nor was Father Martindale alluding to the qualities of the religion. He was rebuking the dispositions of those who so regarded Catholicism. He was blaming men who are so blind to the real facts that, because many of the lower classes do happen to be Catholics, they look …
So the Church, which says that “strikes are forbidden,” offers us only that slow and uncertain remedy.
The Church does not say that strikes are forbidden. If the wrongs to be righted are serious and urgent, and ordinary means fail, then workers can have recourse to extraordinary means. A general strike is forbidden as morally wrong, because the evils it causes are nearly always greater than those to be remedied. But the workers i…
Can the child of a mixed marriage outside the Church go to heaven?
If the child is brought up as a Protestant it has the same chance as any Protestant in similar circumstances from other points of view. If brought up as a Catholic, it has the additional helfs of the Catholic religion just as any other Catholic child, except that it has the bad example of a non-Catholic parent ignoring obligatio…
The dreadful vows have warped their minds and made them love darkness rather than light.
Who told you that the vows were dreadful? Have you tried them? I have taken exactly the same vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as the Nuns, and they are no more difl&cult for a Nun to keep than for myself. I do not find them dreadful. And the evidence of one who has experienced a thing is worth the assertions of ten milli…