Traditional Thomistic Catholic

Tag: confession

  • The Path to Forgiveness: Sacraments and Salvation

    The Path to Forgiveness: Sacraments and Salvation

          When younger I though the best and most beneficent gift given to sentient creatures was free will.  But I found that the fact is the best most beneficent gift God gave them was the ability to become intelligent – to have well formed reasoning skills.  I am totally blown away by the fact that any of the angels decided not to remain with God.  Here on Earth if people decide to stray from God, they may have demonic based temptation, human based temptation and ignorance and pride to blame.  In my estimation angels only had half of these to contend with – ignorance and pride.  Theologians I have read postulate that the devil and his angels left due to pride and the only reason they could was they were ignorant of how much better (infinitely better) staying with God would be, because He gave them freewill and did not want them to stay if they did not want to stay, or had reservations about staying.  If they had reservations they should have erred on known good which I think a lot of them logically must have. There was no reason not to want to stay because He had just created them and in line with justice they should have wanted to stay to serve the one that had just made them out of nothing.  The angels, I assume, were aware of the fact that they couldn’t die so the warning God gave Adam and Eve, He could not give them and, short of losing existence they could think of no worst thing that could happen to them.  Unfortunately, their lack of foresight robbed them of the prospect of unimaginable happiness.

           But as in the case of several famous movie stars (Marilyn Monroe), politicians (Seward’s folly), singers (Kurt Colbain) and business men (Ted Turner’s father) a life of physical ease, power or fame does not make up for lack of love in a person’s life and what the angels lost was Love itself – God.  See the effects of Jesus Christs _ God’s Love on the first Christians, and their willingness to die horribly, even with the understanding of their own mortality, produced for them what would haunt them throughout the rest of eternity, not knowing the incredible bliss of the Love of God – the Beatific Vision.  The curiosity that doomed Adam and Eve to damnation before the promise of a savior, would be part of the punishment that would damn the fallen angels for the rest of eternity – the gnawing curiosity of what perfect love would feel like. Theologians also hypothesize they had not witnessed the Beatific Vision – seeing God as he really is, otherwise they would not have the free will to leave.  Only upon deciding to stay with God were angels granted the Beatific Vision. Man of course is granted the Beatific Vision for the same reason as angels, that is deciding to stay with God, no matter what. Wanting God without reservation.

          Why must we give our unconditional affirmation to whatever God wants of us?  Because to have the Beatific Vision we will be fundamentally changed in ways incomprehensible to human beings.  Mark 12:25 says: ”For when they shall rise again from the dead, they shall neither marry, nor be married, but are as the angels in heaven.” As the angels? We have nowhere close to the intellect of angels or the control since they are not affected by the ravages of concupiscence as emphasized here.  God is not going to ask us: is changing X okay, or is changing Y okay?  He will simply change it and if we have reservations on His goodness as with the angels, we really don’t want to be in His presence for all eternity.  This life is to learn to trust him without reservation and to want whatever he wants without reservation (remembering 1 Corinthians 2:9).  ”This is my body and this is my blood” (Luke 22:18-20) must be believed (John 6:26-71), not what we might think or what might be easier to think: “this is a symbol of my body and is a symbol of my blood.”  We must believe the almighty God who created the universe actually transforms, through the priest he sent by way of apostolic succession, who offers the sacrifice of the mass that he is truly the bread and wine, all there, body, blood, Soul and Divinity.

          Similarly in the case of the forgiveness of sins, we must believe only through baptism can original sin and any other sin be removed or having been baptized, if one commits a mortal sin only through the power of an ordained priest and performing the penance he prescribes can sins be forgiven.  Believing anything else, specifically that we can ask God – Jesus Christ, directly is simply lazy or the sin of presumption. Doing a Bing search yield this explanation of presumption: The Catholic Church does not consider presumption itself as a sin, but it is a violation of the virtue of hope. The sin of presumption occurs when a person assumes God’s mercy without genuine repentance or effort to follow His will. This sin can lead to a distorted relationship between human freedom and divine mercy, risking turning faith into a shallow convenience rather than a lived commitment. Salvation remains possible, but only through repentance and a return to God’s grace.

         You may ask why am I of the opinion that these are the only two ways? Well I base my opinion on at least 4 biblical references. First Acts 2:38 which states: But Peter said to them. “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins: and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For to you is the promise and to your children and to all who are far off, even to all whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”

         Second is Matthew 9:1-8: 2And behold they brought to him one sick of the palsy lying in a bed. And Jesus, seeing their faith, said to the man sick of the palsy: Be of good heart, son, thy sins are forgiven thee. 3And behold some of the scribes said within themselves: He blasphemeth. 4And Jesus seeing their thoughts, said: Why do you think evil in your hearts? 5Whether is easier, to say, Thy sins are forgiven thee: or to say, Arise, and walk? 6But that you may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then said he to the man sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go into thy house. 7And he arose, and went into his house. 8And the multitude seeing it, feared, and glorified God that gave such power to men.

          Now this passage shows how Jesus Christ made clear that only God can forgive sins and partially made the case that he was God with the many signs (miracles) He performed during his life.  In the resurrection, in that He raised himself from the dead, He completed the argument. Now if only God, Jesus Christ can forgive sins, how can saying you are asking Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins when he is not there, result in your sins being forgiven? “Christ” or God has to say your sins are forgiven.  But can we in any way get Christ in our midst? According to Matthew 18:19-20, yes.  It says:

    • 19: “Again I say to you, that if two of you shall consent upon earth, concerning anything whatsoever they shall ask, it shall be done to them by my Father who is in heaven.”
    • 20: “For where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

    So if two of Jesus followers are together, IF THEY AGREE, and ask the father it shall be done for them.

           The problem with this is you need a second person and they must agree.  Also, it is not clear if Jesus is referring to any of his followers or just his apostles, the first priests and bishops.

          As serious as sin is, and Christs reference on how much harder it is to forgive and offense against God than it is to heal a cripple, should there not be some New Testament Biblical verse referring specifically to the forgiveness of sins, and how to obtain forgiveness of sins?

           The fact is there is, John 20:21-24 reads as follows:

    • 21: Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.
    • 22: Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.
    • 23: Whose sins ye shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins ye shall retain, they are retained.
    • 24: But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.
    • 25: The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.

    In the verses just prior to this we find the apostles are gathered away together in a locked room for fear of the Jews coming after them.  My point is that only the 11 apostles were there.  This strongly suggests that Jesus Christ only gave the first priests/bishops and their chosen successors the power to forgive sins.  The fact that Jesus sent them and that they were to chose successors, should be evident in that it was in the first Chapter of Acts if the Apostles (Acts 1:15-26) those successors, chose the successors, who in turn chose their successors so on and so forth until we get the priests and bishops of the present day.

         The question is even if you can just get another person to agree your sins should be forgiven, if you believed that would be accomplished, knowing the specific way Jesus appeared to want us to be forgiven, would you rather ask another believer, who may gossip, or a priest, who is under the seal of the confessional to tell no one even if threatened with death, in the anonymity of the confessional?

         Now Adam and Eve had a similar problem to the angels and that was they lived in a paradise and needed nothing, and though they knew God created them, because they had the “benefit” of physical bodies and since they had more distractions than the angels who were pure intellect, they might have thought more knowledge might have contributed to making their physical life better. But a concept that, I think, God has needed to teach thinking beings is there is a happy medium in everything. In life you must pray, be brave, meditate on God’s word and follow where we feel his words are leading us.  If where God is leading us seems to hard or dangerous, we can be classified as “cowardly,” avoid doing it and miss opportunities to improve either our spiritual lives or our physical lives, or both. If we try and do things which seem great, without proper meditation on the consequences, prayer and caution, we may do something which could be classified as “foolhardy” or “stupid” and lose either our happiness, our lives or quite possibly out souls doing it.  

         Good parents must foster the creation of a “right conscience” and if they can accomplish this then relying on conscience as to what to do in certain cases as touted by modern day clerics can be an acceptable solution.  But if one’s conscience is not well formed it will lead to damnation. But part of the sacrament of confession is not only the psychological reinforcement it gives us from telling someone else (which beats $70/hour psychotherapy session), it gives us the additional reinforcement of a priest (God’s Judicial arbiter and representative as a district court judge represents the country he is a judge for) prescribing your punishment (your penance, what you need to do to have your sins forgiven which may include turning yourself in for a crime to saying the prayers the priest asks you to say) and saying your sins are forgiven.

    This training of the conscience and also the training of the will is an important part of raising a good Catholic child, one who will fulfill their ultimate destiny to make it to heaven and be eternally happy.

  • Salvations Climax Summarized

            The last 3 blogs spoke about the last supper, the passion and crucifixion at calvary and the Ascension. The last thing that should be mentioned is Pentecost. In the Old Testament, God the Father interacted with man directly, communicating with him, punishing him, rewarding him and giving prophets the information that He would be sending a messiah to save them from the punishment due to original sin, which they promptly transmitted to the people of Isreal. The information on the Messiah was detailed (see the book of the prophet Isaiah) so that Isreal would know when Salvation had come but unfortunately, they were a stiff-necked people (Exodus 32:9, Jeremiah 17:23 and Acts 7:51) and either refused to see the signs that Jesus Christ was the Messiah or ignored the signs through pride!

            Of all the people that had ever lived only one was clearly predicted to come over 600 years before he was born, and that person was Jesus Christ.  In the New Testament, Jesus Christ, God Himself, came to fulfill the law (Matthew 5:17-20) that priest of old had been transmitting to the Jewish people. The priests of the Old Jewish religion were selected by God the Father using the natural law, i.e. the sons of Levi for priests and the sons of Aaron for the high priest. In the New Testament the priest and bishops were selected by supernatural law, by decisions by bishops or Christ Himself in the case of St. Paul which had to be “ratified” by someone who was a disciple and had presumably through at least the sacrament of confirmation if not Holy Orders (on reception of the Spirit being a prerequisite to full service to God see Acts 8:15-17)  had received the Spirit (the first 13 being the 11 apostles who chose the 12th Matthias in Acts 1:15-26 – a decision by the bishops for a successor to Judas Iscariot, and St. Paul, selected supernaturally by the risen Christ from heaven but ratified by a disciple Ananias, see acts 9:10-18, presumably blessed by the apostles to be the equivalent of a priest in those days sometimes referred to a Presbyter in the Douey-Rhiems version of the bible the first English translation of the Vulgate bible, the first produced by the first printing press).

           The reason for the implementation of a supernatural law to select priest and, with the advent of New Testament times, senior priests was two-fold: 1) to enable God to select non-Jews or gentiles to be priests in his religion and 2) Since gentiles of everywhere, other than the place Isreal has always been, He wanted a religion that was “portable,” where a church or diocese could be anywhere even another planet.  This is why even the idea that dogma/doctrine that is solid can even change is so ridiculous.  If man travels to the other side of the galaxy or even universe, how do the get news of that dogma/doctrine has changed?  The same with the holy sacrifice of the mass (the Sunday ritual worship of the Roman Catholic religion), if it is always done and transmitted in Latin, it is a common language neither the rich nor poor can lay claim too and can keep the meaning of dogma constant and unconfused. No matter how language changes, if we assume the speed of light is the limiting factor for information transmission, changes in ritual or clarification of dogma will still insure the “old dogma” is not wrong.  Almighty God planned it this way and why everything in the Old and New Testament is infallibly transmitted and meaning is constant and unchanging.

             Many non-Catholic Christians, who follow Christ’s philosophy, appear to have problem’s with the fact that Christ might leave some visible authority who’s power is tracable back to God, specifically Jesus Christ.  They appear to think that to pick up a bible, learn it then preach it gives them the authority of a true representative of Christ which of course only a priest or bishop selected through apostolic succession/selection is. Hebrews 9:11,24-25 reads:

    “But Christ being come an high priest of the good things to come, by a greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hand, that is, not of this creation: . . . For Jesus is not entered into the holies made with hands, the patterns of the true: but into heaven itself, that He may appear now in the presence of God for us.

    Nor yet that he should offer himself often, as the high priest entereth into the holies, every year with the blood of others:”

    Because the bible talks exclusively of Christ as the high priest, people reading the Bible take this to mean he is the only priest, priests having to be consecrated by some authorities are not self-selecting.  The fact is that if  he is indeed the high priest, not the only priest, which is not something He said, then it is implied that He has other priests working for him as the “high priest.” Also, a priest’s function is to offer sacrifice but they hold that Christ sacrifice was all that was needed and made total restitution for our sins, which is true, but at the last the supper saying “do this in remembrance of me” meant to renew the power of Calvery through this union with the original sacrifice to continually draw power for the forgiveness of sins from that sacrifice. The Catholic Church is clear on this point, each mass is not a new sacrifice, it is the self-same sacrifice, to be pulled throughout time to renew the power of this sacrifice, through the remembrance that was asked for by Christ at the last supper.

            Many so called Christians as mentioned above question the churches authority and whether or not priests might still exist (in the bible New Testament presbyters and bishops, which are mentioned are the Catholic Churches names for those officiating at Christs remembrances as replacements for priest and the high priest, so instead of having one temple in one place, each dioceses can have a head official like the former high priest – of which there is still only one, Jesus Christ, who in turn has priests under him), as if God, ever in the Old Testament did not have priests. But Christ said I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it in Matthew 5:17. If this is so and if and entire book of the Old Testament Pentateuch, the most holy 5 books of the Jewish religion is dedicated to the ritual and priest – Leviticus, why would he abolish the priesthood, and the fact that they must be selected by some law God (in this case Jesus Christ through His apostles) put into place, in the New Testament? Plus, if Jesus Christ changed anything from the Old Testament he made it stricter and explicit such as the definition of the sin of adultery:  “I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:28-29)  Also, similarly his injunction on divorce and remarriage when the spouse is not dead is adultery (Matthew 19: 3-9). Everyone is always looking for loopholes for things that are not easy, so to go harder is always a better bet, and if allowed to interpret the bible any way they want, they may interpret it wrong to their everlasting regret! Unfortunately, they must interpret it all correctly to attain salvation!  But that is what the tradition of the Church and the fathers of the church (great Catholics in the first 400 years of the church) are for.

           This is why the keeping of tradition (“Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle.” – 2 Thessalonians 2:14) is so important. As complex a problem as keeping the Barque/ship of Peter (a popular symbolic representation of the Roman Catholic Religion within the Catholic Church) on the right course to heaven, tradition becomes very important.  Just like a nuclear submarine (if we use this to symbolically represent the Catholic Religion), when built, is accompanied by a manual (this being like the Bible).  The builders wrote the manual, (Jesus Christ – God) also trained the first crew.  This original crew (which is equivalent to the original apostles) learned tricks to run the submarine which became tradition, which one crew passed on to the next when they left through reassignment or retirement.  If It’s important to ensure that a machine that could do incredible damage to the entire world have experienced people pass on the secrets to its efficient operation, how much more important is it to put into place a cadre of professionals to pass on the hard learned secrets to salvation for each and every man’s immortal soul from generation to generation?

            Some things that come to mind when I think of people rebelling against Gods appointed authority in the Old Testament are the respect David had for the ruling king Saul as God’s anointed one in the first and second books of Samuel as well as the rebellion of Korah and 250 followers who said Moses and Aaron were not above the congregation in authority as high priest etc.  God opened up the earth and swallowed them to prove the authority of Moses and Aaron as we see in the of Numbers chapter 16. Others were not convinced (as seen in the same chapter) and as a result 14,700 Israelites died before the rest of the Israelites got the message loud and clear. Finally, Moses’ own sister Miriam challenged his authority in chapter 12 of the book of Numbers chapter 12 and as a punishment contracted leprosy.

           God always leads his people through people He selects, either by natural law or by supernatural law, which in our case is seen in the apostolic succession/selection (see Acts 1:15-26 that this was sanctioned that they should select successors).  Those who pick up a bible and start to preach, should remember this.  God chooses his representative, they are sent by Him, His representatives don’t select themselves.

           But how can people now be thought to represent God? Because as spoke of earlier they are lead by the Holy Ghost, the third Person of the blessed Trinity – that is God, sent first on the last event of salvations climax, Pentecost, to the apostles (as promised by Jesus Christ in John 14:16-17).  They in turned passed it to their successors, for the purpose of the priesthood/episcopate through the sacrament of Holy Orders.  Rank and file Catholics are passed the Holy Ghost in different a way, with out the power to consecrate the bread and wine in mass to make it the body and blood of Jesus Christ, or to forgive sins (God alone can forgive sins  as supported by Matthew 9:2-8 and Mark 2:7, but if the power is delegated to someone in cooperation with the Holy Ghost as in John 20:19-23, then sins can be forgive by God the Holy Ghost through his representative the priest or bishop).        In the climax to salvation the apostles are given the Eucharist to be able to increase grace in all men and the ability to forgive all sins, but most notably mortal sin (1 John 5:17), to be able to save their souls from eternal damnation should the devil’s wiles succeed in making a man or woman fall hard!