Section One: Scripture

Scientists claim that humans started off as apes. How does this fit with the story of Adam and Eve?

The Bible is not trying to teach science. It uses poetic language to describe the relationship between God and man. But, then, poetic language is probably the most accurate way of doing it, since that relationship goes beyond anything physical.

It would be quite compatible with Scripture to believe that the body of man was prepared by a process of evolution before God ‘breathed’ into the first man a new kind of soul. The Book of Genesis says that ‘God formed man out of the slime of the earth’: that could be quite a good description of the process of evolution! The latest scientific view seems to be that all human beings probably WERE descended from a single mother, and so from a single couple. Pius XII reaffirmed this idea (‘monogenism’) against the Nazis’ version of Darwinism in 1939.

However, it is worth remembering that modern science does not ‘prove’ anything in a strict sense: it just makes lots of judgments of greater or lesser probability. Its conclusions are always in the form of a theory, which is open to revision if a better explanation of the evidence - or new evidence - comes along. (Of course, scientists - like anyone - can get very attached to a particular theory and not want to change it, for very unscientific reasons!) There are still many unanswered questions about evolution, and in fact there is more than one ‘theory’ of evolution, so clearly nothing in this field is as certain as non-scientists tend to believe.

The most important thing is that even if the body evolves gradually the soul does not, nor does it derive from the parents, but comes straight from God. (This does not mean that animals do not have consciousness, or that they do not have souls of any kind.) Science cannot say anything about our immediate relationship with God: how could it? The soul is the spiritual principle in our nature, which links us to God. Science can only investigate the bodily dimension of the person, since the tools it uses are physical objects.

See Catechism of the Catholic Church, paras 355-368.

If Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, and then Cain killed Abel, how did Cain populate the rest of the world?

The Bible also mentions a third son, Seth. (Read Genesis 5: 1-5 and after.) In a lifetime of 930 years Adam must have had many sons and daughters. As for whom they would marry: in the early days, marriage of brother to sister would have been necessary and permissible, for the sake of populating the earth.

How does the God of the Old Testament, the God of sacrifice, wars, etc., relate to the loving God of the New Testament? If God is perfect, why does he get angry at all?

It is not always a sin to be angry. ‘Righteous’ anger is justified as a reaction to some real evil, and may be a way of rectifying that evil.

If you really look at the Biblical texts, you will see the Old Testament also presents God as a loving God. There is great emphasis on his mercy and compassion.

Of course, God was trying to make himself understood to a barbaric people in barbaric times. When the Bible speaks of God being ‘angry’ or ‘jealous’, we have to understand that it is using a metaphor to describe the way God was experienced by the Chosen People whenever they betrayed the Covenant.

But also remember that for Jesus himself, the Old Testament was the Bible, and the Psalms were his own daily prayer book. He did not reject the image of God presented there: why should we?

Jesus even speaks of Hell. That hardly fits with his ‘lovey-dovey’ image, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t loving. It just means that truth has consequences.

Why didn’t Moses get to the promised land?

It seems he was told by God he would not enter the Promised Land because he had doubted the power of God’s word. This is referring to the time he was told to call forth water from the rock for the Israelites, and struck the rock with his staff (twice) as though to force the miracle, or perhaps in order to impress the people. This may look like a trivial fault to us, but in one who is as close to God as Moses is judged by a higher standard. (In the same way, a saint may feel like a great sinner for committing a sin that to any ordinary person would seem very slight.)

Of course, since Heaven is the true ‘Promised Land’, Moses will arrive there in the end. But it is Jesus who leads the people in. (The Jews were led over the Jordan by Joshua. Interestingly ‘Joshua’ is another version of the name ‘Jesus’. Names in the Bible often have important symbolic properties!)

Why does the Bible give two different ‘family trees’ for Jesus (Matthew 1:1-16 and Luke 3:23-38)?

Traditionally Luke was thought to have listed the genealogy through Mary (Jesus’ only physical parent) and Matthew through Joseph (his legal parent according to the Jewish Law). If both Mary and Joseph belonged to the ‘house of David’ the two lines would inevitably be intertwined in various ways. Certain anomalies were explained by variations in the names by which individuals are referred to in different traditions.

It is also possible to view at least one of the genealogies as largely symbolic, being designed to express the truth that Jesus summed up in himself the whole history of Israel, or even of the whole human race.

Why does Jesus say in Luke 12, 51-53: ‘I have come not to give peace but to bring division. Father against son, mother against daughter, etc’? I thought we were supposed to love our families?

He is not saying what he WANTS to happen, but predicted what WILL happen as a result of his coming. History shows that families are often divided by faith. St Clare, for example, had to run away in the middle of the night to join St Francis of Assisi in a life of radical poverty after she had been called by God, and when her family found out that she was gone her brothers rode after her to drag her back. The same pattern repeats itself in the life of many saints, and in our own lives we see how often faith causes division.

It is said in Acts 2:1-4 that: ‘When Pentecost day came around, they had all met together, when suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a violent wind, which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and there appeared to be tongues of fire...’ Why does this not happen today?

Some people say it still does: the Charismatics experience something like this - the Holy Spirit seems to descend on them and fill them with a fiery joy and inspiration.

Also, many saints have experienced a kind of physical illumination associated with the Holy Spirit: the Italian Saint Philip Neri, for example, and more recently Saint Seraphim in Russia. In Philip’s case, a ball of fire seemed to enter his chest when he was praying in the Roman catacombs, and for the rest of the life he never got cold; after he died they found his heart had expanded and had even bent his ribs aside to make room.

But dramatic physical manifestations seem to be rare these days. If true, that could mean that the faith of modern people is more feeble than in earlier times, and so less likely to evoke a miracle. Or it might be exactly what one would expect: it makes sense that the Spirit would appear dramatically at his first manifestation in the world, at Pentecost. But the energy and power of the same Spirit might be ‘spread out’ more quietly and thinly throughout the Church as it grows.

(That would also help to explain why we don’t get to speak other languages when we are confirmed. The gift of speaking other languages was given to the disciples as a symbol of the universality of the Church, and of their mission to go out and speak to everyone about Jesus. It wasn’t something that was intended to last, or to save them the trouble of learning to communicate with people the hard way.)

Is the evidence for the Resurrection really convincing? How do we reply to those who claim that Jesus was not really dead, but drugged with mandrake or something?

The Apostles and Disciples obviously thought it was convincing. If they had not become convinced that they had really seen him in the flesh they would have remained demoralized and miserable, as they clearly were after the Crucifixion.

Remember that crucifixion is not at all a pleasant process. Even if Jesus had not died, he would have been in bad shape a few days later, and unable to convince anyone that he had risen from the dead.

Obviously we can’t PROVE the Resurrection empirically - in the way Jesus did for Doubting Thomas, for example. We can’t prove the opposite either. In general, God seems not to want to prove things to us in a very crude way that no one could deny: he invites us to believe, so that it will be our heart that decides whether we WANT him to be true or not. It is our heart that he is after, first of all.

There is one other thing. Don’t you think the Resurrection stories have a ‘strangeness’ to them that rings true? Read them again, and consider whether this is really the way a bunch of first-century fishermen and ex-tax collectors would have told it if they were trying to make it up.

If Mary remained a virgin, why does the Gospel speak of the ‘brothers and sisters’ of Jesus?

The phrase that is translated ‘brothers and sisters’ is found elsewhere in Scripture, and commonly in the language of the time, to refer to an extended family group, including cousins. It means something like ‘brethren’.

If the serpent was really the Devil, why did God let him into the Garden of Eden?

Perhaps because he wanted to allow Adam and Eve to be tempted, and thus to have the possibility (by resisting temptation) of achieving a greater kind of perfection.

There are different kinds of ‘knowing’. I can often know something is wrong, even though I haven’t done it. On the other hand, if I do it, then I also ‘know’ it in a different way, from the inside, so to speak. I can know that something is wrong, or a sin, without having ever sinned, but once I have sinned, then I know what sinning is like. I may wish I didn’t!

That is not true. The experience of doing evil actually damages us, and damages the power of our will. It is like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in physics, where the act of observing a particle actually changes it. We can’t just sample both good and evil, in order to make a detached choice of one or the other. We may indeed learn something from doing evil (and William Blake rightly said that ‘The fool who persists in his folly will become wise’), but what we learn, in the end, is that it would have been better if we had done the good instead - better for us, and better for the world.

Also, accepting the advice of someone who loves us is very different from ‘following orders’: it doesn’t take away our own responsibility, because it is still our own decision to do the right thing, whereas in blind obedience we are in some way being forced to do it by the will of another person. When a loving God says, ‘Do not eat this!’ we should obey because we trust and love. In this case, the disobedience was the symptom of a wrong attitude: the real temptation, to which Eve and then Adam succumbed, was not simply to eat the fruit, but to regard God as possibly having deceived them and lied to them.

If there are three persons in One God, what is a ‘person’, and how is the Holy Spirit a person?

We don’t really know, because we don’t know God - except what he has revealed about himself to us. It is a bit like physics, where the scientist has certain data about energy and particles, and has to make sense of it by developing new words and theories. Light, for example, is both a wave and a particle, and space is curved: these things don’t seem obvious to us, but the scientists have concluded that they must be true in order to make sense of the phenomena.

The early Christians had evidence that Jesus was God, and they knew that his Father in heaven was God, and that the Holy Spirit was also God, but from the way that Jesus spoke about them and about his relationship with them it was clear that although each of these three was God, they were each distinct from the other two.

God did not do the theology for us: he left us to work it out. So in the first few centuries the Christians reflected on all of this and eventually chose the word ‘person’ (from the Latin word for a dramatic role or an actor’s mask in a play) to describe these relations within God.

What is confusing is that these days we use the word ‘person’ to refer to a human person, who is inevitably an individual, because human nature is divided up between all the people in the world. In God’s case, a divine Person is not an individual in the same way, because God’s nature is not ‘divided up’ between the Persons: that would make each Person only partially God, or else one God among three Gods – which would not make sense.

How is Mary the mother of God and not just the mother of Jesus? Is she the mother of the Blessed Trinity?

She is the ‘Mother of God’ because she is the Mother not just of the human nature of her Son but of his Person, and that Person is divine. Being a Mother is not just a biological fact, but a personal relationship. Also, the whole point about the Incarnation is that the divine and human natures of Jesus were completely united in his Person (that is to say, in ‘who he is’). You can’t just separate them again when you start to talk about Mary.

(Of course, none of this implies that Mary existed before the divine nature, or gave birth to the Trinity.)

If Our Lady was without Original Sin, therefore perfect, in what way is her perfection different from God’s?

She was perfect as a creature (that is, as made by God), whereas God is perfection itself. She is limited by her nature as a human being, whereas God is unlimited, infinite.

If Confirmation is a declaration of faith, isn’t it just like a second Baptism?

Baptism is much more than a declaration of faith, and so is Confirmation, actually. Baptism involves a process of rebirth, which is a real, interior process and therefore hidden, but it is made visible to some extent by the form of the ritual that brings it about. In Baptism the Spirit of God enters our souls in a new way. Of course, God as Creator and Sustainer of everything is always within everybody as the cause of our existence. But in Baptism there is a new connection established, which builds on the old one. A new life begins, a life that we say is ‘in Christ’ because the Holy Spirit that enters into us makes our life into a part or extension of his.

As for Confirmation, the theology of this sacrament is still being worked out, but it seems to involve an ‘unsealing’ or a releasing of some of the powers placed in us at our Baptism, particularly the power of bearing witness to our faith. The Holy Spirit is invoked upon us by the Bishop, and That which was already deep within us comes ‘down’ on our heads (symbolically speaking) like a kind of invisible flame, to rekindle that new life in a way that becomes a more visible service to the whole Church.

How old are people when they are confirmed, usually? Should we not be confirmed before we make our first Holy Communion?

These days in England the age is usually around 12 to 14, but it varies. There is no particular reason why we should receive it before Holy Communion (which is normally around 7 or 8). It is not a stage on the way to Communion, after all. We are members of the Body of Christ before we are confirmed - Confirmation only strengthens us for witnessing to those outside the Church.

It might be worth mentioning that while the Sacraments themselves go back to Christ, the exact timing and arrangements for them, as well as many of the details of the ritual, have developed over time. In fact they have developed differently in the Eastern Orthodox Church, where Confirmation (Chrismation) usually goes together with Baptism, and Communion is given much earlier than in the Catholic Church.

On the first Pentecost, God directly performed the Confirmation. Why do we need a bishop or a priest to confirm us today?

Just as God himself performed the first Ordination (at the Last Supper), and the men he ordained to the priesthood went on to ordain others, so (this time from heaven) he ‘confirmed’ the Christian community at Pentecost in order to send them out into the world, and the Sacrament is transmitted down through time by the successors of the Apostles. The Sacraments are all divine actions, but they are entrusted to the Church. That is what the Church is.

Can a really good non-baptised person go straight to heaven?

Maybe. That’s up to God’s judgment. He may count the person as having been baptized ‘invisibly’ by an act of repentance for sin and a desire for union with God. What we do know, however, is that visible Baptism implants the divine life within us, and opens up a new and eternal destiny that is greater than anything we could have a right to hope for without it. So we should do what we can to bring others to long for this Sacrament, for the sake of their salvation. It may not be the only way God can bring them to himself, but it is the only way we know about.

When we pray for Christian unity, aren’t we really asking the other churches to join the Catholic Church?

In a way, because the fullness of the Church subsists in the Catholic Church (Catechism, 816-19), but we are also repenting of our own sins, sins that have made that conversion seemingly impossible for so many. If we were all saints, others might not have such good reasons not to recognize the Church for what she really is. It is also worth reflecting that the Church herself grows with each new member - we are not asking people to cram themselves into a box, but to join a people. In other words, the Church turns towards them, and can expand to accommodate them. The more people join, the more room there is, and the more diversity within an underlying unity that is given by God.

Our Lord said ‘Leave everything and follow me’. Most Catholics lead ordinary lives with homes and possessions, etc. Are they lost?

Our Lord certainly called the Apostles to leave their previous lives behind - although even there we hear later in the Gospels about the visit to Peter’s mother-in-law, which suggests not only that he was married, but that the disciples did not have to cut themselves off from their families entirely. Not every follower of our Lord was asked for that radical a commitment, though. When he told the rich young man to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor, that has normally been interpreted as a ‘counsel of perfection’, which is directed at those who have a special calling to what later came to be called ‘the religious life’.

The same pattern repeated itself in St Francis’s time. He also called for his followers to make a radical break from their earlier life, but when married people approached him, especially if they had dependents, he asked them instead to live the spirit of his teachings within their own state of life, as best they could. That was the origin of the so-called ‘third order’ or ‘secular Franciscans’.

The early Christians sold their possessions and lived in communities. This seems to be impracticable to us today. How did they manage it?

It may not be as impossible as you imagine. Every so often that way of life is rediscovered by a group of people, inside or outside the Church. The early hermits and monks did it, and so did the Benedictines, and later the Franciscans. It is no more impractical today than it was then. Usually possessions are not done away with altogether, but held in common, so that it is the community that owns and manages them, rather than the individual.

In fact, the Church still teaches that the ‘consecrated life’ of complete dedication to God – usually associated with poverty, chastity, obedience, whether as a hermit or in community – is an essential element in the Church. It cannot be imposed on everyone, but many are called to commit themselves in this way, and thus to contribute to the holiness of the Church (Catechism, 914-33).

Can the Catholic Church teach things that are wrong?

It is important to make a distinction between what the Church does and teaches as a whole and in her own ‘person’, as it were, and what individuals (even very highly placed individuals) do in her name. Not everything the Pope does, for example, is an action of the Church. When he goes swimming, or chats with his friends, that is not the Church swimming or chatting. There have been Popes who made mistakes in their theology. The Pope is only acting in the person of the Church in his most solemn teaching, when he uses his authority to bind the consciences of the faithful. In those circumstances, God must protect him from error, if he is not to allow his people to be gravely deceived in a matter that concerns their salvation. Similarly, the teaching of an Ecumenical Council, when all the Bishops are gathered together, reflects the mind of the Church.

Many older people have claimed that their Catholic schools taught them things in the name of the Church that turned out later to be false or misleading: that non-baptized pagans will go to hell, for example, or that wives must always try to have as many children as physically possible. If so, this merely illustrates the difference between authoritative teaching and teaching which isn’t authoritative, but pretends to be.

Doesn’t the Church sometimes change its mind? For example we do not hear about ‘limbo’ any more. What about purgatory?

The Church has never changed her mind about the essentials of the faith, as a closer study of history will show. She does sometimes play down one thing and play up another, depending on the circumstances, and also certain doctrines do develop over time. Even the doctrine of the Trinity took a while for the early Church to work out, think through and then state in a Creed. That doesn’t mean that the Church ‘invented’ the Trinity, or ‘changed its mind’ about God. But it took time to think through all that Jesus had said and done, and to work out the implications of it – with the help of the Holy Spirit. The early Apostles were fishermen and tax collectors, not theologians! (In John 16:13 it is clear that Jesus intends this to happen, and he even implies it will be a gradual process: ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’.)

Purgatory is one of those teachings that went out of fashion for a while in some places, but the Church has always taught it and still does (see Catechism, 1030-32). ‘Limbo’, meaning a place where the children go who have died before committing any sins but who, being unbaptized, cannot attain to heaven, was only ever a theological opinion, not a dogmatic teaching of the Church, and these days most theologians would argue against it (because they have a more developed understanding of how God’s grace can reach people if the sacraments are not available). Sometimes theologians still talk about ‘the Limbo of the Fathers’, meaning the place – more a place of waiting than of punishment or even of purification – where the patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament right back to Adam and Eve must have been kept after death, until the Passion of Our Lord opened for them the gates of Heaven. Some have speculated that this ‘Limbo’ would have included also good pagans such as Socrates and Confucius. But all of this is also just a speculation.

Many people today cannot take the Church seriously because of all the bad things it has done throughout history (Inquisition, Crusades, etc.). Do we have to justify these things? Can we explain them?

It is true that members of the Church – even Bishops and Popes – have done many terrible things at various points in history. It would be strange if they had not, since Baptism and even Ordination or election to the papacy does not destroy free will. All Catholics remain free to do evil, and many have chosen to do so, despite the grace that is available to them in the sacraments of the Church.

Not all the evil deeds that we hear about were quite as evil as people suggest, however. Don’t believe all that you hear or read without checking it first! Also, many of these things are more understandable (though not necessarily excusable!) if one takes into account the social and historical context. The Crusades, for example, were in part a war of defence against a perceived threat, and an answer to the eastern Patriarch’s plea to the West for help. The Inquisition was an attempt to defend the Christian people against heretics who were viewed at the time a bit like terrorists are today: criminals attacking innocent people and undermining the fabric of civilized life. The worst and cruellest Inquisition was not the Roman one but the Spanish, which was run by the State, not the Church.

Many of the things we recognize today as abuses came about through a too-close identification between the Church and the State – but it was a connection that seemed natural and unavoidable in those times, and we only see things differently now because enough time and thought has gone on for certain lessons to be learned.

We do not have to justify all these things. If historians and social scientists help us to explain them, and understand how they came about, that is all to the good. But we need to remember, sometimes, that equally bad or worse things have been done outside the Church (by Stalin, Pol Pot and a whole host of tyrants). It is not being a Catholic that leads to these things being done: it is being human, being weak, or coming under the influence of evil. Against evil our surest defence is prayer, the sacraments, and the teaching of the Church.

The Pope is supposed to be infallible. Can there be bad popes?

Certainly – and there have been (see answer to question above). To be infallible is to be incapable of failing – in this case, of failing to preserve the ‘deposit of faith’. It is not the same as being ‘impeccable’ or sinless, as several wicked Popes have unfortunately demonstrated. (See Catechism, paras 889-91).

The Church - meaning that body of people who claim to be followers of Christ, and who receive the sacraments - is not sinless and doesn’t claim to be. In fact it is a Church of sinners. What it does claim is to have preserved true teachings (even if it doesn’t always live up to them) and valid sacraments that convey divine grace - for example the grace of forgiveness in the sacrament of Confession, that makes it possible to leave those sins behind and regain one’s innocence (even if many people then go back and sin again). Those claims alone are worth taking seriously. The thing to do is to look not at the sinners, who would be there even if the Church wasn’t, but at the saints, who wouldn’t be there without the access to grace that others squander.

No one is going to defend the burning of heretics. It took a long time for the Church to realize that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable, because that kind of cruelty was endemic and normal in the cultures of the time (like slavery). Heretics were regarded like terrorists are today - as the enemy of the free society - and were treated accordingly with the maximum punishment, partly to deter others. Even today the ‘civilized’ countries permit the use of torture and lying by their secret service agents to obtain information deemed vital to national security. In the Middle Ages, Catholic and non-Catholic countries did the same thing, but in point of fact the Church modified and softened the common practice - so that, for example, the Roman Inquisition was a relatively more civilized affair than the Spanish one, which was run by the State.

Does it matter whether we pray or not, as long as we are good?

It matters a great deal, and partly because we can’t even be good without God’s help. We may think we are being good; we may even look as if we are good; but if we are turned in upon ourselves, all our actions are done for a kind of secret self-glorification, or to benefit ourselves in some subtle way. It is only when we are turned outwards from ourselves that our good actions are truly good, and that turning outwards is done in prayer.

Of course, there are many types of prayer, and we may be praying without realizing it. Prayer does not have to be verbal. What is essential to all prayer is a kind of receptivity, or openness, towards that which transcends us. In Christian prayer this becomes a form of communion with the Holy Spirit living in the heart – so that, paradoxically, a turning outwards, if it is also a turning ‘upwards’, reveals to us our true centre.

Is there any point in being baptized, if you never go to church or behave like a Christian?

Baptism changes us. It marks our soul: in fact it gives birth to a new life. All of that grace can be covered over and hidden, especially if we lead a degenerate life, but one day the gulf between what we were called to be and what we have become will be revealed, to our shame. Alternatively, the grace of Baptism can be reawakened, can burst back into life and flower in us once more.

Many non-Christians, or Christians of other denominations, show more kindness and humanity in their lives than many Catholics. Does this mean that Catholic practices are not really effective?

Catholic practices are not magic: they don’t automatically bring about ‘kindness and humanity’. To the outward practice of our religion must be added the hard work of inner effort, together with the grace of God that comes in answer to prayer.

Many of us receive communion regularly without much effect. Why is this?

See above.

Can a good non-Christian be saved?

Of course. See Catechism paras 846-8: ‘Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience – those too may achieve eternal salvation.’ But they are saved by Christ, whether they know it or not, because ‘there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12). In fact no other great religious leader or founder even claims to ‘save’ in the same way Jesus does (see the article on Christianity and Other Religions).

Many prayers are very repetitive. Why do we say them over and over again (the Rosary, for example)?

Actually, in one sense all words in prayer are superfluous, because God knows what we are thinking and feeling. In another sense they are helpful, because they lead and focus our thoughts and feelings. When the words have actually been given to us by God in Holy Scripture and through the Church (the great prayers of the Our father, the Hail Mary and the Liturgy), then they have an added benefit, in that they deepen our communion with the mind and Spirit of the Church herself, praying in unity at the feet of the Father.

You can think of the set forms of prayer as like a mould or water channel, into which we can pour the whole of ourselves, flowing towards God and into the world, re-shaping us in the image of the Son, who is always in an attitude of prayer.

It is also worth reflecting that, while the words of these prayers are the same from day to day ‘it is impossible to step into the same river twice’. In fact, because we ourselves are different moment by moment, bringing new concerns and feelings and moods, new thoughts and memories, into the prayer that we offer, the prayer is also new and fresh.

What is the difference between praying to God and praying to the saints? Why do we need to pray to Our Lady and the saints if we have God to pray to?

Prayer is always directed to God, but it can be mediated by the saints. The saints, remember, are just friends that we know are in heaven with God. (Catechism, 954-9.) They are in God. To speak interiorly with them in prayer and even to ask their help is not to treat them as somehow separate from God and more useful to us than he is, but to recognize that God is with and in them, and that they may be closer to God than we are. Nor does that mean that they are ‘in the way’, getting between us and God, as sometimes Protestants have thought. A road is not ‘in the way’ if we want to get closer to the end of the road!

The point is that the saints, including all those good people who have gone to heaven but not been officially canonized (whom we celebrate on All Saints day), are alive in God, and yet they remain part of the Church and interested in us. In prayer, we can communicate with them, receive inspiration and encouragement from them, implore their own prayers on our behalf, and so on. It is a great comfort to think that, if we feel our own prayers to be weak and confused, we can ask someone else to pray for us, or to help us to pray.

What does Jesus dying on the Cross have to do with me? How can one man’s suffering free everyone from sin?

Jesus was God as well as man. The Church says that he ‘assumed us in the state of our waywardness’ (Catechism, 603). That is to say, he incorporated us within himself. He was not separate from us on the Cross, the way any other individual might have been. St Paul calls him the ‘second Adam’ because of this. The humanity of Adam had become divided up through time into millions of parts. Now Jesus gathers us all together again, not biologically but spiritually. Through the Holy Spirit, which he sent out into the hearts of all who do not reject him, he joined us to himself, in our humanity. This means in our suffering, which he also assimilated. It was not the suffering that saved us, but rather the love that took that suffering upon itself. (Catechism, paras 521, 616-18.)

Can one get to heaven without suffering?

Let’s put it this way: hardly anyone does. That doesn’t mean we have to go in search of suffering, but we should be prepared for it when it comes.

It is not just Christianity that talks about suffering, of course. Suffering (Dukkha) is the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. But whereas Buddhism teaches the extinction of suffering through the extinction of desire, the Way of Christianity is the sacramentalization of suffering. God has taken all human suffering into himself, in order to turn it into a way of revealing his love, and so suffering itself becomes a path to him. ‘I did not come to end suffering, but to fill it with my presence’ (Charles Péguy).

Of course, God does not want us to suffer! The existence of suffering is the result of evil, which is not God’s work. But since it does now exist, to the extent that we cannot avoid or relieve it, God can make use of it. When suffering comes, our first (human) reaction is to resent it, or be angry. We may become bitter and full of hatred. We may seek to blame the people who brought it upon us, and it will be difficult to forgive them even if it was a pure accident. St Mark the Ascetic, one of the early Christian hermits, says something very interesting about this. He says: It is impossible to forgive someone else’s offences whole-heartedly without true knowledge; for this knowledge shows to every man that what befalls him belongs to himself.

St Mark did not mean that we necessarily deserve the suffering that has come to us, but that it belongs to us. That is, it can be viewed as a gift. Either it will help us purify our own souls, or it can be accepted for the sake of purifying someone’s else’s, or it contains a buried lesson for us – something we can learn only through this. Nothing happens to us by chance, even the sufferings that are due to a mistake or a sin of someone else. God permits it to affect us, and he does so for a reason.

I often find Mass very boring. Does it matter? What can I do about it?

Whether we feel bored or not, the Mass will be feeding your soul with grace. If we find it entertaining, that is a bonus, but we don’t go to be entertained, or affirmed, or even challenged. We go because God is there, and this is the best and greatest prayer that there is or can be. It is the closest we can get to heaven on earth. We can’t see them, but the angels are there too. (Read Hebrews 12:18-24!)

So in a way it doesn’t matter, but in another way it is a shame. It doesn’t have to be boring. The key to making it interesting is to learn to pray the Mass. Prayer isn’t just a matter of going through the motions, and saying the words. If we pour ourselves into those words, they will come alive to us. Then although the Mass is very similar from day to day, it will be different for us, because we will be different. Coping with boredom in prayer is something we have to learn: it is a stage we go through at various times. Even great saints go through it. But just persisting in prayer is a valid form of prayer, whatever we are feeling at the time. Just put those feelings, such as feelings of boredom and frustration and resentment, into the prayer itself, and you may even find your feelings change.

How often does the Pope go to confession? How often should I go?

How often he goes is up to him. Some people have reported he goes once a week. Catholics are asked to go at least once a year, before Easter, to prepare themselves for the Resurrection, but these days they are encouraged to go much more frequently, and many people go once a month. Of course, they should go whenever they have a particular sin on their conscience, in order to become free of it, especially if it is a grave or ‘mortal’ sin that cuts them off from the life of God, but a habit of regular confession is a good thing because it sharpens us up and also gives more opportunities for divine grace to come into our lives.

What are ‘indulgences’?

Indulgences are best understood in the context of the Church’s teaching about forgiveness (Catechism, 1471-9). Every sin has two kinds of consequence: it damages our relationship with God, and it damages ourselves. (It also may have effects on our relationship with other people and the rest of creation.) The first kind of damage can be put right instantly by repentance and absolution (forgiveness); the second takes more time to heal. In order to help the healing process, which is called purification, the Church, through the priest in the sacrament of Reconciliation, can impose a ‘penance’ or good work to be done. (It might be a prayer, for example.) This compensates in some measure for the damage that that sin has done, or helps to wash it away. Earthly suffering in general can be regarded in a positive light as a way of loosening the grip of sin and undoing its effects: if I die before completely achieving this then I can carry on in Purgatory.

The point about indulgences is that one person can do much more than make up for their own sins. They can ‘offer’ their own good works for the sake of others, and because we are all bound together in one body by the Spirit of love, this ‘offer’ is be accepted. Thus one person can help another to be purified, can help compensate for the damage caused by another. The Church, who is made up of all the saints, is said to collect a great ‘treasury of merit’, which she can ‘apply’ in particular circumstances, to relieve people of the penances they would otherwise have to do on earth, on in Purgatory. All of this is only a metaphor, of course, but it expresses something very real – a power entrusted to the Church.

What things must I do to make sure I keep my faith into adulthood?

Pray, ask questions, seek answers, don’t give up, don’t be afraid. Go to the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and receive Communion. Pray. Let God guide you: in prayer, through other people, through the Church, through circumstances. God speaks to us and guides us through what happens to us in each new moment (see J.-P. de Caussade’s little book, The Sacrament of the Present Moment, sometimes called Abandonment to Divine Providence).

Is it morally right to kill someone who is about to, say, detonate a bomb that will kill thousands of people?

Am I permitted to do something wrong if it will bring about something good? What if my only choices are evil, and all I can do is choose the lesser evil in order to avoid a worse? These are the kinds of questions that come up all the time in the moral life.

In reality, when we are faced with a choice of two evils, there is nearly always a third option - we just haven’t thought of it yet. So the first thing is not to get trapped by the dilemma, but respond creatively.

But what if there seems to be no third way? A lot depends on the circumstances. Are you sure that the person isn’t bluffing, and really will do the deed – and also that it will have those results you fear? (If you act on the basis of a wrong judgment it will be you that is responsible for a death.) Are you a policeman, or a soldier, or are you acting on your own (again, an awesome responsibility)?

Martin Luther King once said: ‘the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.’ The Catholic Church also says that means and ends must cohere. The end does not justify the means (Catechism, para 1753). If we do a bad act, even if it is only to achieve something good, and even if the alternative is for something terrible to happen, then that bad act, while it may succeed in averting the thing we were trying to avoid, will engender something as bad or worse further down the line, because evil leads to evil. Doing something bad with a good intention does not make it good. (For the morality of human acts, see Catechism, paras 1749-56.)

Of course, things often don’t seem so clear-cut in reality. Should I tell a ‘white lie’ to the Nazis who are hunting down my children, in order to send them off in the wrong direction? Most people would say yes - if only a flat lie would suffice to mislead them. It would certainly be a small sin, and one that almost anyone would excuse or even condone. That is to say, the ‘subjective’ guilt involved is minimal, because of the intention and the circumstances. One could even argue that the Nazis had no right to the truth in this case. But the Church would say that the lie is still in itself a crime against truth, even if it was a tiny one; and that tiny lie will cause some damage to someone. It is something that has to be atoned for. (Jesus did a lot of that on the Cross.)

If someone who is a not a Christian asks why we think Wicca is a bad religion, how should we answer them?

First of all, a lot depends on who is asking and why. Sometimes people who ask a question are not really wanting to know the answer, but just trying to be provocative. An answer should always be pitched, as far as possible, at the person who is asking. The first principle of any serious dialogue is to respect the person you are speaking to. That doesn’t mean you need to respect his or her opinions, or agree with his or her beliefs. But you have to respect the other as someone who has a right to form opinions and hold beliefs.

Wicca is an attempt to revive a form of paganism that worships Nature, often as a Goddess. (This is not the same as ‘Satanism’, which involves a deliberate attempt to invert Christianity.) Wicca is wrong for all sorts of reasons. For one thing, nature is not all good, or loving. If you worship nature, you are usually worshipping Power, or Energy, or the Life-force (or Sex) – but not Love. But only Love is worthy of human worship. Secondly, it is just not TRUE. Nature is not God. Nature needs a Creator. That is the God we worship.

How do we know that the Devil and the other evil spirits won’t ever repent and become good again?

Our Lord speaks of an eternal fire that was prepared for the devil and his angels. The Church rejects the idea that evil will ever ‘wear out’ or get tired, and that the Devil will give up. Just as the decision of men for or against God becomes definitive in the moment of their death, so the decision of the Devil becomes definitive in the moment that he falls, because the relationship of the angels to time is different from ours. Our decisions and acts of will are all spread out, as it were, along a timeline. Those of an angel are concentrated into a point: or at least that is one way of understanding it. But more than that it isn’t possible to say. Scripture is not much help, because it concerns us and our fate more than it does that of the angels (or animals).

We know that God doesn’t want anyone to go to hell. Given that Jesus gave his life to save everyone, and that there are always holy people praying for sinners and making reparation for them, could hell turn out to be empty in the end?

See the separate article on this point: The Problem of Hell

Why don’t animals have souls? Will they be in heaven, or not?

According to St Thomas Aquinas, animals do have souls, as do plants. A soul is what animates or makes alive. But every type of creature has its own type of soul, so animals have animal souls, which – in all the animals we know, except the human – does not transcend the level of instinct and feeling. Human souls are immortal in a way that animal souls are not, simply because we have an ability (through our intelligence or reason) to ‘step back’ from the world as it appears to our senses, to reflect upon it and choose alternative courses of action, to judge what is true and false, and above all, to recognize and worship God. We are capable of a personal relationship with our Maker, and it is this which makes physical death to be not the end for us.

C.S. Lewis thought that animals could enter the immortal state and be found in heaven by virtue of their relationship with human beings, which in some way ‘personalizes’ them (in the case of pets, especially). So they come to heaven through us. His friend Charles Williams seemed to suggest (The Place of the Lion) that while individual animals may not be able to transcend the physical state, the species to which they belong are more ‘real’ than they are, and these are eternal archetypes which we will meet in heaven. So all individual lions, or all individual dogs, or mice, are fragments and glimpses of some great Lion-Angel, or Dog-Angel, or Mouse-Angel. Either way, we should not fear that animals we have loved and lost will not be found again in the place where ‘every tear is wiped away’ (Rev. 21:4).

The Bible is directed at human beings, and is mainly about them, so we cannot tell much about the fate of animals. We are free to speculate, as long as we do not lose the important distinction that makes human beings special: our direct relationship with God, not as a species, but as a unique person.

What if we discover dolphins can think, and what about life on other planets?

If dolphins could think in something like the way we do, they would be rational beings with immortal souls. The same goes for creatures (if there are any) on other planets.

What did God do at the end of the Bible?

According to St Augustine, he made a Hell for those who ask silly questions.

If you like Neoplatonism, you should know that its key insights were incorporated into Christian theology long ago by Origen, St Augustine, Boethius, Denys the Areopagite, St Thomas and many of the great medieval thinkers. (See www.xrefer.com/entry/552927 for a handy summary of the history of Neoplatonism.) Most of these Christian writers thought that ancient philosophers like Plato and Socrates would enter eternal life alongside the Old Testament prophets who also died before Christ was born.

The reason Neoplatonist philosophers like Plotinus and Proclus rejected Christianity was because they were not prepared to accept the existence of a new source of information, beyond what is revealed in nature and reason, namely the ‘knowledge of the heart’ that we call faith. St Paul knew that the Incarnation would seem like ‘folly’ to the Greeks. You can’t believe in the Gospel unless you are willing to accept the gift of faith.

But as to whether ‘Jesus is God’ makes sense, that is something that you have to look into some more: don’t dismiss it too quickly, without finding out what it really means (see www.emmanuel-info.com/en/dossiers/histo2.htm). The doctrine actually hinges on the meaning of ‘person’. Jesus is a human being but a divine Person. To go deeper into this question of the Trinity (which is just another way of saying that ‘God is love’) see Bruno Forte’s piece God the Trinity in our Archive section.

If we are wanting to get married to someone, what’s wrong with having sex with them, to make sure you are compatible with that person before you take the plunge?

Because it won’t actually give you the information you want. Having sex with someone before making a total commitment to them is totally different to having sex after making that commitment. The physical act may look the same, but there is a different relationship established by the vow, and you can’t try that out beforehand.

It is worth saving yourself - and your virginity - for the one you marry because it is a gift you can really only give once, and by giving it to one person in the context of a marriage vow you make a much deeper and more solid union with that person than you could do otherwise. If you really love him or her, you will want to make it that kind of union, and you will be sad if you have to settle for anything less. The more you ‘spread yourself around’, the less ‘whole’ is the self that you can give to someone you love.

Well, you can still give yourself, along with all your experiences and regrets, to the other person, but there will most likely be sadness involved. You can get through that, because love forgives and forgets, and God heals, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake in the first place to do those things. It is like what goes on in the rest of our lives: we repent of our sins, and we even learn from them, so that good can be brought from evil, but it doesn’t cease to be evil for all that: we never know what would have happened, and how much better life would have been like, if we had behaved differently.

Most of what people call ‘marriage’ is not what Christianity means by the word; it is more a kind of contractual arrangement between two people to live together for a period of time. What Christian marriage means (at least according to the Catholic Church) is not a contract but a covenant, by which two people become one. This is a very special kind of unity, which the Church believes all lovers deep down really want, but which is only possible to achieve by merging two lives into one through a binding promise that even the Church does not have the power to dissolve. Therefore it can only be done with one person, at least until that person dies.

Now you don’t have to accept the Christian doctrine if you are not a Catholic, but it is important to realize that the Church puts it forward not as a way of restricting and frustrating people, but for the very opposite reason: in order to make possible a kind of personal fulfillment in love – and, by the way, a kind of secure framework for having and bringing up children - that no other arrangement allows.

Not quite. If it were just that, then there would be nothing wrong with it, of course. And the Church does teach that the sinfulness of masturbation is much less than that of many other things, and may be reduced by emotional and physical factors, like the kind of pressure you mention (see Catechism section 2352). But the pressure is made greater and more obsessive by giving in instead of struggling against it. Also, human beings are not just machines, or even animals. There is an added spiritual dimension, so that what goes on invisibly is more important than the visible. In the case of sex, the images we generate in our imagination, or dwell upon in our memory, are highly charged and deeply embedded in our soul. The human imagination is actually an organ of perception, and sexual fantasies can clog and obscure that perception. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says that the ‘pure in heart’ are blessed because they will see God. We can’t ‘see’ God except by being pure, that is, focused, undistracted, ‘one-pointed’ (to use a Buddhist expression). Sexual fantasy is a powerful distractor. People used to say that masturbation ‘makes you go blind’: of course it doesn’t make you go blind physically, but maybe the origin of this expression was the knowledge that there is a kind of spiritual blindness that it helps to create.

In Star Wars the Jedi apprentice is told, ‘Your focus determines your reality’. There is a lot of truth in that. By focusing our attention and inner energies on the physical, or the sexual, aspect of ourselves we determine the level of reality that we are going to be living and operating on. On the other hand, we can raise that level through a struggle for purity. Energies that were going into sex are used in other ways.

No it isn’t. Sublimation is different from repression. The point is not to bottle them up, but channel them in a different way. Those energies and feelings, those desires and pleasures, are good. The Church defined as ‘heretics’ those people who said the opposite (Gnostics, Cathars, etc.). The Puritans got it wrong too, later on. But it is not easy to sublimate, and many people take the much easier path of repression, and that leads them into deep trouble later on.

Prayer is the key. If we learn how to pray, we learn how to open ourselves up to the guidance of God even inside our psyche, where grace can flow in and help us. But we block grace in so many ways. We think we are praying when we really aren’t. True prayer lets God in, but often we are afraid - or just shy - of being open to him, even though he made us. We try to keep him at a slight distance, or inside a little inner ‘box’ where he feels safe, and where we can open the lid and talk to him from time to time.

What the Church says is that if conception has occurred, then a new human life exists, which has to be taken into account even though (being still invisible and unknown) it may seem to us at the time much less important than the life of the woman who is pregnant. If there was a way, after being raped, of preventing conception occurring, then I don’t think the Church would object, but most methods don’t prevent conception, they prevent implantation, so that the problem is simply ‘flushed away’. You shouldn’t flush away a human life.

The life of the child is separate from that of the father. It is not just an extension of him, but a new creation of God (even though God uses material from the father as well as the mother to bring it about). The woman may well feel the pregnancy resulting from rape like a kind of invasion of her body, but the child is not the rape, and should not be held responsible for it. When a raped woman gives birth, she is often quite capable then of seeing the baby for itself, and loving it. While it is in the womb she is likely to project her feelings about the rape on to it, but once it is born the reality and value of the child is more obvious.

As for whether abortions can ever be justified to save the life of the mother, this is a complicated issue, and for all the really technical discussion of the Church’s position on abortion, stem cell research, cloning and suchlike, we would refer you to the Linacre Centre web-site (www.linacre.org). But one important principle to bear in mind is that you cannot (morally speaking) deliberately kill one person in order to save another, even if you may have to allow one person to die, or even sacrifice yourself so that another will live. These distinctions may seem trivial, but they are absolutely crucial for thinking rationally about situations where the life of one person is physically entangled with that of another, the way it is in the body of a mother.

In addition to the detailed list of questions above, we have included some specific notes on issues that have come up, and which call for a slightly longer treatment than we wanted to give in the main body of this section. Click on the link to go to the little article if it might interest you, and then come back to this page to read on.

The Existence of God

The Problem of Evil

The Problem of Hell

A New Approach to Sin

Christianity and Other Religions      

How can Catholicism be true when Catholics are so dead?