October 2019

“Even the saints are tainted by daily sins,” Augustine tells us. “The whole Church cries: ‘Forgive us our sins!’ She is, therefore, blemished and wrinkled (Eph 5:27). But through contrition these blemishes are removed, these wrinkles smoothed away. The Church’s unceasing prayer is one of contrition that she may be made pure. And so it will remain until the end of time.”

Catholic Christianity believes that the identity of Jesus Christ is similar to the nature of God in the sense that both are mysteries which are beyond full human understanding. Just as God is one and yet three persons, so Jesus is both divine and human at the same time. And not partly divine and partly human, but fully and truly God and fully and truly human.  

Becoming a full member of the Church does not, unfortunately, guarantee that a person will be free of the temptations and weaknesses that belong to our humanity, which remains wounded by that inevitable orientation to sin that is our fallen condition. Not even the spiritual nourishment of “living on” Christ’s Body and Blood can ensure complete immunity from the continuing effects of the diseased state in which we find ourselves.  

The original chosen people offered up two kinds of sacrifice: holocausts in which the entire animal was offered to God, and “peace offerings” in which only a choice part of the victim was offered to God, while the remainder provided a banquet for the offerer and his friends and family.

We live in a strange world today. Some people are beginning to call it a post-Christian world, in spite of the fact that Catholics are more numerous than any other single group on earth.  

But really it’s the intellectual world in the West that’s turning post-Christian.

“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick,” Jesus told the Pharisees (Matt 9:12). The obvious implication: when you’ve come down with a bad case of sin, it’s time to call Christ the Physician. In the generations after the apostles, Christian thinkers latched on to the idea of Christ the Physician who heals sick souls. 

The Church’s call to feast and the Church’s command to fast are, at least in my world, two of her greatest gifts. When done rightly and done well, feasting and fasting bring the whole person—body and soul—into the liturgical rhythms of the Church. They make the liturgical seasons incarnate in our homes and communities. They also help form communities, uniting rich and poor, young and old, married and single in a common practice: eating . . . or not eating as the case may be.

There is no single “official” way of understanding how contraception violates the natural law.  Indeed, there are different, sometimes conflicting, theories held by Catholic scholars on this question. Assessing their differences would bring us far afield, but the mere fact of variation in approach is not an argument against the natural law, for all orthodox writers agree on the basic content.