Sandro Magister has a fascinating article posted on his site about an exhibit being held in Italy on the Christian Apocrypha. These are Christian writings from the first centuries of the Church which, although written in the same general style as the New Testament writings, were NOT included in the Bible for one reason or another.

A lot of interest in these writings have been generated in recent years by those who wish to show that “orthodox” Christianity was just one (possibly minor) strain of Christianity in the first centuries after Christ. Usually the corollary to this theory is that it was only with Constantine’s conversion that the political powers then endorsed this strain and it became predominant. However, the historical reality is less favorable to such a simplistic theory. In truth, the process in which texts were selected for the canon was a long and rigorous one. Just because a document claimed to be a Gospel from an apostle did not mean that it was automatically accepted into the canon. It had to conform to the received faith of the Church. This was not a later political decision set by the Roman authorities, but one made as early as the 2nd century within individual churches throughout the empire. It was a true case of the “sense of the faithful” – each church could recognize if a writing was consistent with the faith they already accepted. And on a whole, the decisions made in a myriad of localities was remarkably consistent: you will find relatively few disputed books considering the number of writings being considered.

I have read a large number of these Apocrypha, and it always strikes me how different they are from the canonical texts. This is especially true of the Gospels. In the canonical Gospels, we have a very sober recounting of the facts, with little flair. However, in the apocryphal Gospels you see a large number of incredible and, frankly, unbelievable and at times inconsistent stories. Reading these non-canonical texts makes one appreciate our four Gospels even more.

But at the same time, there is much value to many of these documents. For example, the first written account of the Assumption of Mary is found in the Protoevangelium of James, a document dating to the 2nd century. But we have to read them within the context of the Church’s decision to reject them from the canon. While they might have interesting and even at times worthwhile stories to tell us, ultimately we are to look to the canonical Scriptures for an inspired account of the story of Jesus and his first followers.

I found an interesting article by a man who describes his process of conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy. It can be found in two parts:

Part 1

Part 2

I highlight this article for a couple of reasons. First, I always find it fascinating to see why people change religious traditions (something recent surveys have shown is very common in America). Second, I think this article explains well one of the strongest aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy: its respect for “mystery” in the Christian Faith. A danger many of us fall into at times is to intellectualize our faith to an extreme; we want to understand every aspect of what we believe to the exclusion of simply falling before the glory of God and adoring Him.

As a Roman Catholic, I greatly admire the “mystery” of Eastern Christianity. There is a vital place for intellectual study of the faith, but it must always be coupled with a humble acknowledgment of the mysterious grandeur of the Almighty.

In a previous incarnation of my website I had posted a list of all the infallible teachings of the Church. This list was compiled by a professor who went through Ludwig Ott’s “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma” and gleaned all the doctrines that were marked “de fide.” The reason I did this was because I had been in a debate with a Protestant who asked me “Is there an infallible list of infallible teachings?” His implication was that if there is not such a list, then you can’t really know what is infallibly taught and what is not.

The short answer to his question is: no, there is not actually such a list, at least not officially. Nowhere in the deep recesses of the Vatican archives is there a musty parchment which details exactly which doctrines are infallibly taught and which are not. The list from Ott’s book is useful, but it is actually Ott’s interpretation of what is de fide, and not binding on Catholics.

However, I don’t believe that this lack of an infallible list is a problem, because I believe the presuppositions behind the question itself are faulty.

First, the question betrays a materialistic mindset. With the advent of sola scriptura and the invention of the printing press, many Christians view the written word as the only infallible means of communicating God’s revelation. The spoken word, which was supreme in ancient cultures but has fallen out of favor in modern times, is not considered a reliable method of conveying information. If something cannot be seen and touched, it cannot be trusted. Thus, passing on a belief by oral tradition is considered messy and unreliable, but passing it on via the written word is safe and reliable. If there is no written list of infallible teachings, the thinking therefore goes, how can anyone know what is infallibly taught?

Second, this question reduces the Christian religion to a list of intellectual concepts to be accepted, not a faith to be lived. The primary means of passing on the Faith through the centuries has been the praying life of the Church, primarily the liturgy, not catechism classes or reading assignments. The Assumption of Mary, for example, was not infallibly declared until 1950, but it was liturgically celebrated since at least the 5th century. We know what the Church teaches by living it, not simply learning it.

Third, this question creates a false dichotomy between infallible doctrines and other authoritative teachings. Implicit in the question is the assumption that one must only believe the infallible teachings and is free to reject all other common teachings of the Church. However, this is a legalistic way of looking at our Mother the Church. What loving child calculates which minimum set of directives from his mother he must follow to be in her good graces? Rather, does he not want to embrace all that his mother teaches him? As he matures, he may come to different conclusions over smaller matters, but this is always done with great respect for his mother’s views.

Finally, the one who demands an infallible list doesn’t understand the purpose of having infallible teachings in the first place. The Church does not define beliefs infallibly so that Christians may be burdened with a checklist of things they must accept in order to be saved. The Church instead defines beliefs infallibly so that we might be enabled to know and love God more fully. Typically the Church will only define something infallibly if it finds that the rejection of such belief endangers the souls of those in its flock. It is usually a defensive measure. For example, when the Church defined the doctrine of the Trinity – that God is three persons in one nature – it did so because opposing beliefs, such as that of the Arians, were endangering countless souls. If the belief that Christ was but a creature prevailed, the consequences would have been staggering. The Church realized that this debate had to be settled definitively and therefore declared authoritatively the doctrine of the Trinity. Never again was the Church tempted to deny the divinity of Christ, because the teaching on the Trinity became an integral part of the life of the Church.

All the above is not to say that having knowledge of which teachings are infallible is unimportant. Quite the contrary; at times, especially when debating finer points of theology, it can be vital. And typically this is quite easy to determine. But in the day-to-day life of the average Catholic, having a list of infallible teachings readily available is unnecessary. As I stated earlier, the purpose of infallible teachings is to help souls draw closer to Christ. And it is by simply following the Church – through the teachings of her living magisterium and by the reception of her sacraments – that we are best able to do this. When we die, we will not be given an examination asking us to list official Church teaching, but will instead be given an examination of conscience: did we, through the grace given to us through faith in Christ, love God and love others?

Today is the feast of St. Catherine of Siena, one of the great mystical saints of the Church. This humble woman is:

1. A Doctor of the Church
2. Patron Saint of Italy (along with St. Francis)
3. Patron Saint of Europe (along with St. Benedict)

Not bad for someone who only lived to be 33 years old (although I know of someone else who accomplished more in that span).

Read more about her here.

“What’s that, Fr. Jenkins? You need someone to accept the Laetare Medal? I’d be happy to receive the regift award.”

I am currently reading N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God, which is a survey of the origins of Christianity, especially its growth out of 1st century Judaism. I recently was reading the section on the praxis of the early Church: how did they practice this new faith of theirs? The first item Wright mentions that distinguished early Christianity was their sense of mission:

Why then did early Christianity spread? Because early Christians believed that what they had found to be true was true for the whole world. The impetus to mission sprang from the very heart of early Christian conviction. If we know anything about early Christian praxis, at a non- or sub-literary level, it is that the early Christians engaged in mission, both to Jews and to Gentiles…This missionary activity was not an addendum to a faith that was basically ‘about’ something else (e.g. a new existential self-awareness). ‘Christianity was never more itself than in the launching of the world mission.’ (Emphasis added)

An early Christian would not conceive of being a Christian and not working to bring others into the Church. But do not think that most early Christians were St. Pauls, travelling the world preaching the Gospel to everyone they met. No, most of these Christians spread the faith through their regular daily contacts: their familes, their friends and their co-workers. The key is that they truly believed that the faith that changed their life for the better could do the same for others.

And always remember, they also knew that by sharing their faith with others they put themselves in a dangerous situation: the possibility of being denounced to the authorities and arrested for their Christian beliefs was always lurking in the background. What exactly is our excuse?

I’ve seen a lot of discussion about E-books recently, but I think that this article by Stephen Johnson in the Wall Street Journal is the best at summarizing the benefits and problems with E-books. In a nutshell, he lists the following ways that the E-book will change how we read:

1. We will be able to purchase books much more easily.
2. Searching the contents of a vast library of books will become incredibly easy.
3. It will become harder to read an entire book, for two reasons: (a) each book will be so annotated that one can jump from one book to another with little effort; and (b) because it is so easy to purchase another book you can jump from book to book as the mood hits you.
4. Books will become more interrelated, as it will become simple to link similar and cross-referenced books to each other.
5. Books will become more known by specific paragraphs and sentences, as these will be what comes up in Google searches.
6. Reading will become a much more social endeavor.

Regardless of the consequences, it seems clear that the E-book is where we are going. The day will come when the majority of people do all their reading on an electronic device, be it a computer, cell phone or reader such as Amazon’s Kindle.

(An aside: one of the things I admire about the Amish is that they consider the full-range of consequences before they embrace a technology. I don’t necessarily think they always make the right decisions, but one can’t help but think that this attitude would be helpful in today’s “if it’s new, it’s good” world.)

I will admit that I am a devoted bibliophile. My idea of a perfect gift is an Amazon gift certificate so I can buy (usually obscure) books. I love to sit on the couch and read a good book, and part of my enjoyment is holding the book and seeing how far I’ve read and far I have to go. I don’t get the same experience with an E-book.

But my biggest concern is the third consequence I listed above: the fact that it will become harder to read a book straight through due to the ease of being able to read something else. I can see the value in being able to view a referenced source, but I’m afraid that it will lead to fewer and fewer people being able to sit down and read through an entire book. Most (good) books are a complete whole – one must read the entire book to get the full value of it. Reading 20% of the book does not necessarily give you 20% of its value; only when the entire book is read is the overall point made.

All that being said, I’m not anti-E-book (in fact, I originally read that Wall Street Journal article on my cell phone). I am especially excited about the possiblities of easily building a “matrix” of similar books based on the books you have already read – this could give me a reading list a mile long. I just hope that the value that undoubtedly will come from putting all books in electronic format will not be offset by our society’s increasingly short attention-span.

God bless Mary Ann Glendon.

A friend sent me a link to an article with the following headline:

No such thing as virginity, author says

My first reaction was “boy, anyone can get published these days” (ironically, the same reaction I had when Our Sunday Visitor agreed to publish my book). Somehow the author, Jessica Valenti, lives in modern America and thinks our society emphasizes virginity too much. That’s what I often think as I’m walking through the mall looking at semi-pornographic pictures of whores pop tarts everywhere. In spite of the actual reality of our culture, Valenti is offended by the fact that a few souls have decided to resist the oversexualization of our girls (and I do mean “girls” – try to find modest clothing for a 12-year-old girl and see what happens) by promoting virginity.

Valenti especially criticizes “virginity pledges” – when someone makes a public commitment to save themselves for marriage. There has been a lot of publicity about these pledges over the years and some have questioned their usefulness. I do believe these pledges can be worthwhile (I took one before I was married and found it was helpful), but of course they are only one piece of the puzzle. Chastity is not just a commitment to avoid performing a single action – it is an entire way of life (and it doesn’t end at marriage). It involves how you dress, how you talk, who you interact with, what you watch, and countless other actions. If someone is unchaste in their clothing or their viewing habits, they are very unlikely to be chaste in their sexual life.

Unfortunately, almost every aspect of our culture puts tremendous pressure on our young people to be unchaste in word and thought – which will often lead to a lack of chastity in action as well in spite of the best efforts to fulfill a “pledge.” We need to teach our children from an early age about the dignity of the human person by word and action so that when they become teenagers they can see that being chaste is a fundamental way to show respect for that dignity, both of one’s own person and others.

St. Maria Goretti, pray for us!

A recent poll showed that only 52% of Americans believe that TV is a necessity. I say “only” because this is the lowest number since the question was first asked 35 years ago. I also say “only” because I don’t believe the number is accurate.

Watching TV is like taking a nap: most people love doing it, but few admit that fact publicly. (For the record: I LOVE taking naps). Most studies have shown that the average American watches hours of TV a day, but I’ve yet to meet the person who admits to watching more than about an hour in a day. I know that when I was a big TV viewer I usually didn’t realize how long I was camped out in front of the boob tube – that device has the ability to warp the space-time continuum, turning “a half hour” into 2 hours. When I got rid of our TV, I literally felt like I had more hours in my day.

(I also wonder how much the drop in the poll is due to other ways of accessing entertainment. I don’t own a TV, but I can watch just about all the latest shows on the Internet if I wanted – heck, you can even watch many of them on an iPhone! It might be that people – especially young people – have just transferred their viewing to another screen.)

I’ve posted my reflection for this Sunday’s readings, in which I note the Scripture’s insistence on the historicity of the resurrection.

One thing I’ve come to realize over the years is that the path into the Catholic Church is unique for each individual. We tend to emphasize the dramatic conversions, such as St. Paul or St. Augustine, but even more often people come into the Church after a long time connected with it. I know a man, for example, who had been married for over 40 years to a Catholic woman and who just last year decided to enter into communion with the Church. Each person is different and how God works with each person is different as well.

I thought of this when I read this interesting conversion story:

From Black Pentecostal to Word of Faith to Emergent Protestant to Orthodox to Catholic — The Journey of the Ragamuffin Diva

I’ve just uploaded a new article to my main website called “Jesus Christ: The New Adam – Adamic Typology in the New Testament.” It is based on a paper I wrote last fall for one of my classes. An excerpt:

In the second century, a bishop by the name of Irenaeus was fighting the greatest heresy the Church had faced up to that time: Gnosticism. This heresy denied the creation of the world by God, instead attributing the events of the first chapters of Genesis to a lower “demiurge”. In response, Irenaeus emphasized the unity of creation with redemption – the same God who saves humanity in Jesus Christ also created Adam in the Garden of Eden. Christ’s work was one of “recapitulation,” and one of Christ’s tasks was to undo the wrongs committed by Adam (cf. Danielou, “From Shadows to Reality” 30-47). Irenaeus’ argument thus compares and contrasts Jesus and Adam, primarily through typology, in which one person (or event or thing) is seen to represent a model or “type” for a future person (or event or thing). Adamic typology as applied to Christ became a fixture of Christology within the Church, being found in both the East and the West through the centuries. The origin of the Adam-Christ comparison, however, is not Irenaeus, but the New Testament itself, in which one may find many typological connections between Adam and Christ. This typology can be found throughout the canon, including the Synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John, the Apocalypse of John, and most especially the epistles of Paul. However, it has its foundations even earlier, as the connection between Adam and the coming Messiah presents itself in Jewish literature of the pre-Christian as well as the Christian era, including the Old Testament.

I wrote in a previous post that “Tradition includes, of course,…writings, but it is primarily the life of the Church, which is the womb of those writings (including the writings of Scripture).” Note carefully the last part: Scripture itself was written and promulgated within the life of the Church, i.e. as part of our living Tradition. In fact, one of the criteria for determining which books would be included in the New Testament canon was their use in the liturgy: if a writing was widely read during Mass during the first centuries of the Church, there is a good chance that it was included in the canon. The opposite was true as well: if a writing did not get proclaimed during the liturgy, it was not considered eligible for the canon.

We see in this the integral link between Scripture and Tradition. Due to the Reformation-era debates, we have separated these two means of revelation, but they are only distinct, not separate. Vatican II in Dei Verbum declared, “there exists a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end.” (DV 9). The Holy Spirit inspired the writers of Scripture and has led our Tradition; therefore, they cannot be divided and pitted against each other.

Pope Benedict took up this theme recently when he told biblical scholars that the Bible can only be understood with the Church:

Pope Benedict…said that a correct understanding of Scripture does not come from “the individualistic illusion that biblical texts can be better understood outside the community of believers” but rather rises from the Tradition of the Church.

Holy Father laid out the three criteria that the Second Vatican Council prescribed for correctly interpreting Scripture…

First, “Sacred Scripture is one by virtue of the unity of God’s plan, of which Jesus Christ is the center and the heart.”

Second, “Scripture must be read in the context of the living Tradition of the entire Church. … In her Tradition the Church carries the living memory of the Word of God, and it is the Holy Spirit Who provides her with the interpretation thereof in accordance with its spiritual meaning.

“The third criterion concerns the need to pay attention to the analogy of the faith; that is, to the cohesion of the individual truths of faith, both with one another and with the overall plan of Revelation and the fullness of the divine economy enclosed in that plan.”

Does this preclude individual Bible reading? Not at all. What it does is tell us that when we read the Bible individually (which we should do), we are reading it as part of a universal community that has read and interpreted and lived the Scriptural message for 2,000 years. We are not reading it in isolation, but in conjunction with great Scripture scholars and saints such as Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, and Teresa of Avila. This allows us to dig much deeper into the Bible than would occur with a solely personal reading.

The Colorado House recently voted to repeal the death penalty in that state, and Denver Archbishop Chaput was influential in getting the repeal passed. This follows the repeal of the death penalty in New Mexico which also was due to the influence of the Church on politicians (in that case, governor Bill Richardson, who was thanked by the Pope for his actions).

For years I supported the use of the death penalty, but about five years ago I changed my mind. I now do not think the death penalty should be legal in the United States. The teachings of Pope John Paul II were very influential to my “conversion,” along with discussions with my wife. The primary reason for changing my mind was being disturbed by the similarity in the arguments defending legalized abortion and defending the death penalty. In both cases, “practical” concerns are used to justify the killing of a human being.

But let me be clear: I am not saying that there is a moral equivalence between abortion and the death penalty. The Church has always condemned in no uncertain terms the killing of unborn children (contrary to what Nancy Pelosi might say), yet it has, consistent with Scripture, allowed governments the use of the death penalty if needed. I just don’t believe it is needed in our country today, and in fact I believe its use is detrimental.

In a society which devalues the sanctity of human life as much as ours, I believe the death penalty does far more harm than good. Yes, having the death penalty might prevent some future crime (but I’m not convinced that this is the case). But having the death penalty always promotes the idea that we can solve our problems by killing people – an idea that has been the justification of many evils in our world today. By striving to find other ways to punish (and hopefully reform) criminals we are witnessing to the dignity of each human being created in the image of God.

God bless Archbishop Chaput and all those working to end the death penalty in this country.