The challenge, then, was to defeat the contender to the throne and get into the city of Rome.

Meanwhile the Christians throughout the empire had to be wondering about the fate of their persecuted community now that Constantius had died.  He had been a protector of Christians, whose personal fortunes seemed to have been tied to the whims of a succession of fickle and even insane Emperors since the very beginning of the Church.

What our early Christian brothers and sisters wanted from their government was first of all the freedom to worship and to proclaim the gospel to their neighbors without fear of losing their livelihood — or their very lives. But optimally, they hoped for more.

They hoped for what we American Catholics hope: for the chance to bring to bear upon the decisions of government the values of our faith – the upholding of human dignity and the sanctity of human life.  We would like for our country to be the holy land that we pray for it to be:

America, America, God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.

And our early Christian friends were no different.  What they wanted was for the Roman Empire to be holy.  They wanted the emperor to acknowledge the sovereignty of God, to recognize as Lord the King of Kings, Jesus Christ.  For this very thing, generations of Christians had prayed while others, equally devout, concluded that such a thing was a sheer impossibility.

The night before he faced the army of Maxentius at Milvian Bridge, Constantine saw a vision of a Cross in the sky, inscribed with the words, “In this sign conquer.”  Trusting in the vision, he had his soldiers paint the sign of the Cross on their shields. The much greater force was defeated and Constantine became the first Roman emperor to embrace the Christian faith.

Directly after his victory Constantine granted tolerance to Christians and next year he issued at Milan the famous edict of tolerance granting Christians and all others freedom in the exercise of religion.

One of our dear Christian brothers of the time, Lactantius, expressed the feeling of emancipation and gratitude they all felt: “We should now give thanks to the Lord, Who has gathered together the flock that was devastated by ravening wolves, Who has exterminated the wild beasts which drove it from the pasture. Where is now the swarming multitude of our enemies, where the hangmen…?  [G]od has swept them from the earth; let us therefore celebrate His triumph with joy; let us observe the victory of the Lord with songs of praise, and honor Him with prayer day and night.”

Christians were released from the prisons and mines, and greeted with great shouts of joy by their brethren; the churches were overflowing; and those who had fallen away under the pressures of the persecutions sought forgiveness and were restored to communion.

But the Roman Empire would not last.  Constantine had been fighting Germanic barbarians before he became emperor and the struggle to defend the long borders of the empire would finally be lost about 150 years later.  And in contemplating this event, St. Augustine would pen The City of God, a monumental treatise on the relationship between worldly power and the Kingdom of Christ.

Ever since an emperor became Catholic, Christians have had to grapple with the proper balance between holding and exercising political authority and submission to the apostolic authority of Christ.  It has been a struggle, and from the beginning of it, Catholics have erred in sins of commission and sins of omission — both in using power illegitimately and in failing to use what power they had to do the good they could have done.

Since Constantine, we have conquered many times under the sign of the cross, but conquered best perhaps, as Our Lord did, not merely under, but on the cross.

To that salt-of-the-earth Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, there comes one day an amazing summons.  The call to participate in an adventure.  And thereby hangs a tale and indeed a trilogy.

In the course of his adventure, Bilbo will come into possession of the “One Ring” of power.  On September 22, 1401, his eleventy-first birthday, Bilbo will bequeath the ring to his nephew Frodo, who will bear the ring into places of forbidding evil in order to free the peoples of Middle Earth from its bondage.

Groaning under his burden, with the weight of the world on his small shoulders, Frodo cannot help but ask why such evil has come to his time.  Why did his uncle find the ring?  Why is he, conscious to the depths of his being of his inadequacy, the one who must bear the burden of it?  The one who must undertake the perilous mission to destroy it?  And the answer is given to him by Gandalf: “I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the ring…. In which case you were also meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”

Bilbo was meant to be born, meant to find the ring.  Frodo was meant to be and to be the ring-bearer.  They were meant to engage the challenges of their time.

But meant by whom?

We might glibly answer that it was all meant by the author of the story, J.R.R. Tolkien, but in the context of the story itself, there is certainly another answer.  There is a Providence, there is an unseen Benevolence.  To be sure there is an unseen malevolence too — for even the dark Lord Sauron is himself a mere servant.  But it is Goodness that is the source of all and hence the source of being and of meaning.

Tolkien considered himself to be a “sub-creator” and the act of myth-making to be sub-creation.  If telling a story is sub-creation, then Creation itself must be a kind of story.  And so it is.  It is a story with an Author, and it is a story with meaning.

When we wonder why such evils have come to our time and why we are the ones who must bear the particular burdens of our world.  When we feel keenly our inadequacy and smallness — then we should remember that we are meant to be.

And that is certainly an encouraging thought.

Thirty-three, 33.

Sometimes the Holy Trinity is very subtle.

This is not one of those times.

The entire world watches with interest, hoping. Because we know they are there.

We don’t know they are there because we can directly see them. No one can see through the 2,200 feet of rock that covers them.   But we know they are there because we can see and hear them through electronic instruments.

Other miners who have been trapped say that upon rescue the miners will feel “born again” and in a sense, if the rescue is successful, they will be born from “the depth of the earth” to begin the rest of their lives.  That is, anyway, what their loved ones and the whole watching world hope for.  That is what we pray, “[f]or the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also” (Psalm 95: 3-4).

With compassionate imagination we wonder how we would react to such an awesome predicament, to the impending horror they faced in those first few silent weeks, to the anticipation of rescue, still many weeks away.  Our hearts go out to them even though it is hard to fully comprehend what they are facing because we have not been there, under the rock.

Still, their humanity calls to us. We know they are there.

The same way we know the unborn are there. Even though we cannot see them except through electronic instruments — we know. We know their humanity, their just claim upon the resources of society, the urgency of their plight.

How strange that the world turns away from the impending horror so many of them face, will not enfold them in its compassionate imagination.  How can we ignore them? How can we deny them the rescue that would allow them to be born to begin the rest of their lives? How, when, after all, we were there?

“I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works! Thou knowest me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth” (Psalm 139: 14-15).

I read with great interest your posts of a year ago on the subject of deception and transsexualism.  In the interests of openness, I’ll share that I am transsexual, having undergone vaginoplasty in Oct 2009 under the care of a surgeon who is herself transsexual and not making much money off the practice.  The likely medical cause of my transsexuality was massive doses of estradiol and progesterone my Mom took, as prescribed by her physician because he didn’t believe she was really pregnant and he wanted to stimulate a period, when I was 5 weeks gestational.  I am Catholic by birth, growing up in the Church and meeting the woman I eventually married while serving together at the altar.  My wife and I, at least from the perspective of the rest of the world, may be the only single-sex Church wedded couple in the US.  That wedding, a glorious event cherished in our memory, took place 20 years ago come Sept 14 of this year.  It has resulted in two beautiful children, of whom a prouder father I could not be.

I am a study in complications and contradiction, I’ll freely admit.  I’m a Mom who is a father — my kids call me “Mum” when their Mom is around to differentiate, and Mom when she’s not.  I’m married as a husband, but the world sees me as a wife, and it is as a wife that I function with my wife.  Despite my changes, we’re a teenaged marriage that has lasted 20 years- against 90% odds.  There is no one in my life who does not know my unusual journey to womanhood, but likewise there is no one in my life who has not embraced me as a woman…often more readily than I feel as one.  Even as God gave me the most incredible “growing challenge” of making me transsexual, He also gave me a body well suited to the transition I know in my heart He knew I would take.  I am 5’6” and have finer features than my biologically female wife.  For example, I have smaller hands and feet than she.  After two years off testosterone and on estrogen, no one sees me as a man unless prompted.  Even when people are forewarned one of us is transsexual, upon meeting us some have to ask, “which one?”

My wife did not choose to marry a transsexual.  When we married, I wanted desperately to believe her love would cure me, and so I didn’t tell her.  It helped that I never cross-dressed — ever, unless you count how I have lived since I changed my name and transitioned at work after many months of hormone treatment, so she never had any caches of clothes to encounter.  I was disgusted at the thought of being a “man in a dress” — I wanted to be a woman in one and waited until the hormones allowed me to be.  My marriage helped…for a while…but in the end my nature could not be denied.  I told my wife my sense of self when she was pregnant with our second child, destined also to be our last as her delivery that time left her infertile.  She wasn’t exactly happy with me, as you can imagine, but it never occurred to her (or me) that she (or I) wouldn’t stay true to our irrevocable Catholic wedding vows.  We tried for 7 years to “beat” it.  We tried so hard.  We failed.  In the end, my body was tearing itself apart — I was running a blood pressure of 180/120, my blood chemistry was a wreck, and I was suffering cardiac arrhythmias which placed me in the ER too often for our comfort.  I was also miserable.  I made it clear to my wife that I was willing to die for her, but I couldn’t promise to live much longer even despite the fact I would not suicide.  I had tried that twice as a teen over this, but never since I married her and certainly not with the kids in the picture.  My body just wasn’t going to last much longer.  Since my transition and my hormones normalizing, I am running 110/70, my labs are great, and my heart is behaving itself just fine.  Nothing changed save my hormones, and eventually my perspective and my anatomy.

I say all this not to convince you to change your way of thinking.  You have a right to your opinion, and there are many ill-behaved people in the “trans” community who must certainly place an exclamation mark on your perspective.  Many of your concerns have merit.  That said, I have a few questions of you, to help me understand my status as I turn towards reintegrating myself in the Body of Christ, assuming said Body on Earth is even interested in me.

You have very absolute views on my status as still male.  I make a pretty pathetic one, but that’s fine.  I’ll accept you don’t see the need for special protections.  That said, you suggest I should not be able to get documents as a woman.  I’m curious, though, does this mean you believe I should be detained with “other men” in jail?  Keep in mind, I have a reasonably petite female figure, size C breasts (hormones are amazing), and a vagina (whatever you might think of it, it would function were a man to decide to use it as such).  If I am documented as a man, I would be incarcerated as one were such an unlikely event to happen- a thought which terrifies me given I have known violent rape once before, when I was anatomically male interestingly enough (occupational hazard of delivering Domino’s Pizza in an area with the wrong skin color), and have no desire to repeat the experience ever.  Assuming I travel, there are countries where I could be treated very poorly if identified as a transsexual.  Would you deny me the protection of anonymity under such circumstances?  About showering facilities — I am indistinguishable externally from a biological female — do you propose I shower with men before and after I go swimming?  As far as bathrooms, one of the reasons I transitioned when I did was because men who didn’t even know me were uncomfortable in the bathroom with me — they’d walk in and march right back out.  One outright challenged me on being in the men’s restroom despite my man’s shirt and slacks — my form said otherwise.  I have never been questioned, or identified as anything unusual, in the women’s room since I started using them.  I’ve been told I waited too long to start.

Please know, I respect your concerns about this whole process.  I don’t expect you to understand.  I’d hope you could accept, but you certainly don’t have to.  All I really ask is tolerance and respect, and even then not necessarily of my decision but simply of my existence.  Whether you consider me a mutilated man or an anhysteric, anoophoretic (i.e. post total hysterectomy) woman, would you truly consign me to men’s spaces and men’s treatment when doing so places me at risk, and the men around me at significant discomfort?  You make it clear how understandable the reaction is when men discover the deception during or after sex (something I’d never do both out of honor AND that I’m married), but imagine the discomfort of me in their locker room.  Is there room in this world-view for post-operative MtF’s to be documented as women if just from a purely pragmatic perspective?

And back to the Catholic body.  Is there room in the Church for such as me?  I certainly can’t be active as a man — no one would possibly take me seriously and my very existence in men’s spaces or roles would beg the question of just what I am and how I got to be this way.  I don’t want to be a lightening rod, I don’t want to tear the Church apart, I don’t want to teach kids that this is “perfectly normal” or something they’d want to do, I just want to go home again.  Is the Church’s heart big enough to embrace me as a woman, or do I, and by extension my family, simply no longer exist?

Thank you so much for writing such a heartfelt letter about these personal matters.  Let me start first by saying that I don’t think there is any condition so dire or messed up that a person cannot find a way to be in the Church.  In some cases people have created such situations for themselves that they are restricted to spiritual communion only.  They may have to live out some kind of penance.  Think about this: there are Catholics in prison for horrible crimes, some who will be locked up for life, but the Church still embraces them.  They are still part of the Body of Christ.  In some ways your situation has you “locked in” — but you are not beyond the reach of God’s love or the prayers of your fellow Catholics, fellow sinners all.

You say that you “don’t want to tear the Church apart” and I appreciate that.  We are all members of the Church as though we are parts of one body — injury to one of us hurts us all.  Every one of us “tears the Church apart” every time we commit a mortal sin, don’t we?  That is why we have to be reconciled to God and to the Church.  We have to recognize our sins.  That is the only way we can ever honestly say: “Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended you and I detest all my sins…”  Have you offended God? is really the question, because the door back into the Church is through reconciliation.

No fellow Catholic, not even a priest, can judge the state of your soul.  You cannot even do that. Saint Paul said:

I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me (1 Cor. 4:4).

We all must understand how easy it is for our hearts to excuse our own sins:

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it? “I the LORD search the mind and try the heart, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings” (Jer. 17: 10).

As Catholics, we have to keep in mind objective reality even when our subjective feelings are very strong — especially then.  All anyone else can do is try to help you see if there is objective wrongdoing and implore you to repent of it and make use of the open door of reconciliation — for that door is the way back to the Church.  I’m going to try to explore that with you while staying aware that I might be looking at a splinter in your eye and ignoring a telephone pole extruding from my own forehead.

Let’s talk about the issue of marriage from the standpoint of reality.  We have two options: Either you were really a man, therefore you really got married or you were really not a man – that was a mistaken identity — therefore you really did not get married (and you are not married now).  You seem to want to come down on the side of the first option.  I think you are correct in that.  Not just because you say so, but you fathered children with this woman.  That is pretty strong evidence that you were a man when you got married.  The Church does not accept that you have “become a woman” regardless of your ability to pass as one, either by demeanor, dress, physique, or external anatomy.  If you ever were really a man, then you still are, regardless of what you have done to yourself.  It is not my “absolute views on your status as a male” — it is the Church that says it.  Your wife cannot be married to a woman as there is no such thing as “same sex marriage.”  When you say you function as a wife to your wife, you are being incoherent.

I understand that you were not happy.  I understand that you were in distress even to the point of your health being wrecked and I’m not in any way making light of that.  But objectively speaking, what you proposed and carried out as a remedy to your distress was the breaking of God’s law that says that you may not mutilate your body.  I won’t deny that God foreknew you would do this — He knows all things.  But to say he gave you a particular kind of body purposely to facilitate your breaking of His law is as nonsensical as for a cat burglar to say that God gave him nimble fingers and sharp ears for picking locks.  God did not make you a transsexual.  If there was indeed some kind of interference with your development in the womb, that was caused by human agency, not by God.

Consider this — why do you want to be back in the Church?  Is it not because it is the minister of salvation, the very Body of Christ?  Either the Church really has the authority to forgive sins and confect the Sacrament, or not.  If it has that authority, doesn’t it have the authority to tell you what God’s law is?  It is not as much a matter of the Church accepting you as of you accepting the authority of the Church.  We have both heard the expression that a person wants to have his cake and eat it, too, right?  Well, reading your letter, I couldn’t help but think that you want to have your cake, eat it, share it with someone else, and then sell it!  Your real contradiction is that you have broken God’s law and now you are struggling to get out from under the consequences of it.  So join the club — this writer and every person reading this has done the same thing at one time or another.  Let’s see if we can mark out a path here.

To my knowledge your decision to undergo a so-called sex change is pretty much irrevocable at this point.  I can’t imagine from a medical standpoint how it would be anything but.  Still we need to take a look at the decision, because that is the crisis point you faced.  To put it in the starkest terms, you thought that your choice was to die prematurely or to break God’s law.  Now I happen to think that you, being as intelligent as you are, quite likely knew that the Church said this was a violation of God’s law.  You felt impelled to do it anyway.  Beside this, in order to preserve your life, in order for your wife to keep you, she acquiesced in the breaking of God’s law.  Wasn’t she in a similar position to that of Adam when approached by Eve with the forbidden fruit?  Some speculate that he ate the fruit she had already bitten, joining her in sin, because he did not want to be separated from her.  All through human history there have been cases of spouses enticing one another to put their mutual affection before the keeping of God’s commands.

Now I am going to say something that may seem harsh but remember I am talking to you about objective reality – where the rubber meets the road.  It is better to die than to offend God.  It would have been better for you to have given your life to stay in obedience to God, than to break His law and to drag along into sin your poor spouse.  At some point — along with those who denied Christ under persecution and later felt remorse, you will have to say, “It would have been better for me to have died instead.”  That is hard, but really everyone of us should feel that way about every serious sin we have committed.  We should prefer the death of our bodies to the death of our souls, shouldn’t we?

We just never know what fruit may come when we determine that no matter what we are not going to break God’s law.  For all you know, God may have given you peace and healed you.  We can’t know that, but we can see some of the fruit of the course of action you did pursue.

For one thing you have greater physical health — but at the cost of being an example to others that physical health is worth breaking God’s law.  Is that what you want your life to be a testimony to?  Is that the case you want to make  before the judgment seat of God?  Can you not see how that is just the same argument made by those who want to use embryonic stem cells to cure disease?

You have effectively robbed your children of their father — although I know you think you made the decision to stay in their lives, you didn’t stay on as a father.  You robbed them of the precious example of obedience to God, something that may have impacted them and the future of your family in positive ways for generations to come.  You may also have robbed them of potential siblings.

This is where your story was just a bit too pat and I suspected a fraud.  Really it seems like it was crafted to remove the objection that you were denying your wife more children by mutilating yourself, with the claim that she became infertile after the second child was born.  This is where I really had to ask myself, what are the odds that a woman just happens to become infertile after two children? – pretty low.  What are the odds of a woman marrying a man who decides he wants to be a woman? – pretty low.  Then what are the odds of this being the same woman? – vanishingly small, I would say.  But I decided to assume your honesty on that.  Still you robbed your children of the chance of siblings in that, if your wife died, you could not remarry and have more children.

You yourself recognize that you are a “lightening rod.”  You pretend to have what really does not exist — a “same sex marriage” — causing scandal and confusion.  You have effectively robbed your wife of conjugal relations.  If you engage in any sexual activity at all with her, and if she thinks you are a woman now, then you have led her into the sin of homosexual activity — at least according to her perception.

I’m not trying to beat you up with all this.  Nothing here cannot be redeemed — but how?  That is the question, isn’t it?  And unless you look objectively at the sin(s) involved, you can’t start to do that.

Confession would be in order and then some spiritual direction.  I would suggest that doing everything you can possibly do to avoid scandal would be needed and would be a deed worthy of your repentance (Acts 26: 20).  This might mean renouncing certain claims and opinions you have previously shared with others.  It very well might mean living apart from your wife.  Your spiritual director could examine other options with you to reduce scandal and make reparation.

No, the Church will not embrace you “as a woman,” but the Church will embrace you and weep with you and for you as a man — as a human person — who has wronged and damaged himself and those he loves by sin, just as we all have.  We’ve all done this to a greater or less degree, some more publicly and some in secret.  You are not alone, but you do have to face the reality of it.

I know this is all hard, but isn’t eternity and grace worth the struggle?  Don’t you see that by making this turn around, you can help set your own children on the straight path?  Repentance is a powerful example.  Wouldn’t it be worth everything to leave your children the legacy of having the conviction that nothing is worth disobeying God for?

Like I started off with yesterday, it all comes down to: Do you believe?  Does your horizon end at what you see, or feel, or how you are inclined, or is the invisible real?  Is God real?  Is heaven real?  If you will believe, then act on that.

Now a separate issue has to do with society.  I certainly don’t want to see any harm come to you – Goodness knows, what you have done to yourself is plenty! — but there is a saying that “hard cases make bad law.”  In law we have to look at the common good and the general welfare.  If I were you, I would do my best not to run afoul of the law!  Always a good policy anyway for everyone.  If you get into a situation where you come before a judge and you are going to be detained, you will need to throw yourself on the mercy of the court — ask for house arrest, or solitary quarters — these are reasonable requests and an attorney can likely hint at possible civil action to emphasize the necessity.  As for traveling and public showers etc., these things are not necessities of life.  I guess you will have to live under a few restrictions because of what you did to yourself.  You can just consider all that part of your penance.

We can neither remake society nor remake the Church to eliminate every consequence of sin.  No, probably you can’t ever be active as a man and you will necessarily be very limited in the female role as well.  You don’t have to advertise yourself.  Live quietly.  Live with restraint and without chafing under whatever constraints your own choices have made necessary.  Tell the painful truth to those you know and be a witness of Christ’s mercy.  Be sorry.  There is not a single one of us who does not live with some consequence of sin in our lives that we sorrow over.  In this we compassionately empathize with you.

I hope you see that there is more for you here than mere tolerance of your existence — there is love.  Please, come home.

My answer was that this question missed the incarnational aspect of the Catholic faith.  Everything does not remain on paper, or floating up in the rarefied air of theological theory. Every doctrine comes down to earth, becomes incarnated by an act: a ritual is performed; a Sacrament is received; a vow is made and kept for life; a prayer is made by human lips and ascends to God; an act of penance is performed. This is where the rubber meets the road. We act on, pray on, live, what we believe.

That we say we “believe” instead of that we “see,” as then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger explains in his Introduction to Christianity, asserts something. It asserts that the horizon of sight is not all that matters to us.  We convert; we inwardly turn our attention beyond what can be seen and we conduct ourselves as though the unseen were more important for living truly human lives than merely what we see. In this construction, the use of the phrase “see” really stands in for all of our natural senses, for everything we are able discern by our senses, by unaided human reason, even by our own inclinations, for we must admit that our human inclinations are bounded by the horizon of what we see, what we perceive. The act of conversion then is an acknowledgment that this is not enough, that we must — by belief, by a leap — go beyond that boundary.

I have said all that to introduce an email that I received a little over a month ago.

I read with great interest your posts of a year ago on the subject of deception and transsexualism.  In the interests of openness, I’ll share that I am transsexual, having undergone vaginoplasty in Oct 2009 under the care of a surgeon who is herself transsexual and not making much money off the practice.  The likely medical cause of my transsexuality was massive doses of estradiol and progesterone my Mom took, as prescribed by her physician because he didn’t believe she was really pregnant and he wanted to stimulate a period, when I was 5 weeks gestational.  I am Catholic by birth, growing up in the Church and meeting the woman I eventually married while serving together at the altar.  My wife and I, at least from the perspective of the rest of the world, may be the only single-sex Church wedded couple in the US.  That wedding, a glorious event cherished in our memory, took place 20 years ago come Sept 14 of this year.  It has resulted in two beautiful children, of whom a prouder father I could not be.

I am a study in complications and contradiction, I’ll freely admit.  I’m a Mom who is a father — my kids call me “Mum” when their Mom is around to differentiate, and Mom when she’s not.  I’m married as a husband, but the world sees me as a wife, and it is as a wife that I function with my wife.  Despite my changes, we’re a teenaged marriage that has lasted 20 years- against 90% odds.  There is no one in my life who does not know my unusual journey to womanhood, but likewise there is no one in my life who has not embraced me as a woman…often more readily than I feel as one.  Even as God gave me the most incredible “growing challenge” of making me transsexual, He also gave me a body well suited to the transition I know in my heart He knew I would take.  I am 5’6” and have finer features than my biologically female wife.  For example, I have smaller hands and feet than she.  After two years off testosterone and on estrogen, no one sees me as a man unless prompted.  Even when people are forewarned one of us is transsexual, upon meeting us some have to ask, “which one?”

My wife did not choose to marry a transsexual.  When we married, I wanted desperately to believe her love would cure me, and so I didn’t tell her.  It helped that I never cross-dressed — ever, unless you count how I have lived since I changed my name and transitioned at work after many months of hormone treatment, so she never had any caches of clothes to encounter.  I was disgusted at the thought of being a “man in a dress” — I wanted to be a woman in one and waited until the hormones allowed me to be.  My marriage helped…for a while…but in the end my nature could not be denied.  I told my wife my sense of self when she was pregnant with our second child, destined also to be our last as her delivery that time left her infertile.  She wasn’t exactly happy with me, as you can imagine, but it never occurred to her (or me) that she (or I) wouldn’t stay true to our irrevocable Catholic wedding vows.  We tried for 7 years to “beat” it.  We tried so hard.  We failed.  In the end, my body was tearing itself apart — I was running a blood pressure of 180/120, my blood chemistry was a wreck, and I was suffering cardiac arrhythmias which placed me in the ER too often for our comfort.  I was also miserable.  I made it clear to my wife that I was willing to die for her, but I couldn’t promise to live much longer even despite the fact I would not suicide.  I had tried that twice as a teen over this, but never since I married her and certainly not with the kids in the picture.  My body just wasn’t going to last much longer.  Since my transition and my hormones normalizing, I am running 110/70, my labs are great, and my heart is behaving itself just fine.  Nothing changed save my hormones, and eventually my perspective and my anatomy.

I say all this not to convince you to change your way of thinking.  You have a right to your opinion, and there are many ill-behaved people in the “trans” community who must certainly place an exclamation mark on your perspective.  Many of your concerns have merit.  That said, I have a few questions of you, to help me understand my status as I turn towards reintegrating myself in the Body of Christ, assuming said Body on Earth is even interested in me.

You have very absolute views on my status as still male.  I make a pretty pathetic one, but that’s fine.  I’ll accept you don’t see the need for special protections.  That said, you suggest I should not be able to get documents as a woman.  I’m curious, though, does this mean you believe I should be detained with “other men” in jail?  Keep in mind, I have a reasonably petite female figure, size C breasts (hormones are amazing), and a vagina (whatever you might think of it, it would function were a man to decide to use it as such).  If I am documented as a man, I would be incarcerated as one were such an unlikely event to happen — a thought which terrifies me given I have known violent rape once before, when I was anatomically male interestingly enough (occupational hazard of delivering Domino’s Pizza in an area with the wrong skin color), and have no desire to repeat the experience ever.  Assuming I travel, there are countries where I could be treated very poorly if identified as a transsexual.  Would you deny me the protection of anonymity under such circumstances?  About showering facilities — I am indistinguishable externally from a biological female — do you propose I shower with men before and after I go swimming?  As far as bathrooms, one of the reasons I transitioned when I did was because men who didn’t even know me were uncomfortable in the bathroom with me — they’d walk in and march right back out.  One outright challenged me on being in the men’s restroom despite my man’s shirt and slacks — my form said otherwise.  I have never been questioned, or identified as anything unusual, in the women’s room since I started using them.  I’ve been told I waited too long to start.

Please know, I respect your concerns about this whole process.  I don’t expect you to understand.  I’d hope you could accept, but you certainly don’t have to.  All I really ask is tolerance and respect, and even then not necessarily of my decision but simply of my existence.  Whether you consider me a mutilated man or an anhysteric, anoophoretic (i.e. post total hysterectomy) woman, would you truly consign me to men’s spaces and men’s treatment when doing so places me at risk, and the men around me at significant discomfort?  You make it clear how understandable the reaction is when men discover the deception during or after sex (something I’d never do both out of honor AND that I’m married), but imagine the discomfort of me in their locker room.  Is there room in this world-view for post-operative MtF’s to be documented as women if just from a purely pragmatic perspective?

And back to the Catholic body.  Is there room in the Church for such as me?  I certainly can’t be active as a man- no one would possibly take me seriously and my very existence in men’s spaces or roles would beg the question of just what I am and how I got to be this way.  I don’t want to be a lightening rod, I don’t want to tear the Church apart, I don’t want to teach kids that this is “perfectly normal” or something they’d want to do, I just want to go home again.  Is the Church’s heart big enough to embrace me as a woman, or do I, and by extension my family, simply no longer exist?

I am very moved at the plight of this person — whose name I will hold in confidence — and I communicated those sentiments in response along with a promise to provide an answer after some time of reflection. What follows will be that attempt.

But first I want to address something that immediately occurred to me and may be occurring to other readers: Is this letter for real? Am I being had here by some kind of prank? There is a reason to think so based on something internal to this communication and I will touch on that later.  But I have some other evidence that this letter is genuine and represents a real person’s life and experience — presented in good faith — and it is on that assumption I will proceed.

Let me begin with something that is biologically and medically true. The sex of all infants at birth and of all persons later in life is not unambiguous. There are conditions — deformities of genitalia, genetic anomalies, intrauterine interference with normal development, etc. — that can make what is usually a straightforward identification of someone as male or female problematic. While these are blessedly rare, they are real medical conditions and the persons afflicted with them deserve and should have access to medical care that performs two critical functions: 1. Determining to the best of scientific accuracy what the sex of the person really is 2. Providing the person with the medical and/or surgical and/or psychological intervention to promote physically, emotionally, and socially healthy adaptation to that sex.  Where an error has been made in documentation, due to the person having been misidentified at birth as one sex while actually being the other, simple justice demands that the records should be corrected.

Along with this justice, with this compassionate care for a medical problem, there devolves upon the persons so afflicted a certain responsibility not to make their condition a matter of the prurient interest of those who might be inclined to use them that way. In the past, people with ambiguous genitalia were exhibited as freaks. Exhibitionism, even pornographic, is still resorted to by some and is contrary to human dignity, harmful to the persons involved and to society.

The first question I asked myself about this letter was whether this person represented such a medical case. Based solely upon the information presented it does seem this could have been possible, although by no means did the letter make that claim. Instead, the writer identifies as a person who has gone from being male –  revealing no ambiguity, genetically or anatomically — to being female.  Leaving alone whether such a change is possible, I just note that the claim is that this person was, albeit uncomfortably, male — and is now — after a series of surgical and medical procedures asking to be recognized as a female by society and the Church.

One more basic point to get out of the way at the outset: where the rubber meets the road we all have a blowout. We all sin and fall short of the glory of God. We are all wretches saved by His amazing grace. When I think about my own besetting sins, I am sickened. That I go to confession with the same stupid black marks on my own soul week after week, is just pitiful. I must be boring Jesus to death with my petty selfishness.  Actually I am not just boring Jesus to death; I am really putting the nails in His sacred hands and feet. We all are. We are such a mess — everyone of us.

Tomorrow we will start there: In the mess of our shared humanity, through which we will seek a way to welcome this person home and lovingly answer the questions in this letter.

I am closing comments here, but they will be open under Part Two tomorrow.

Defense and the Rule of Law

It is a conservative principle that the roles and power of government must be limited and placed in proper hierarchal order to allow space for other social organizations to flourish.  The roles of government must not encroach upon the rights of persons, families, and the Church and not all roles are of equal priority. In spite of that, the situation is such that the several things needed to be done, regardless of their usual relative priority, have to be done together.

The first priority of government is found in St. Paul’s observation that the government “bears the sword” as God’s servant (Romans 13:4). The sword serves properly when used in just defense of the population and in upholding the rule of law.

Illegal immigrations, especially in the rampant numbers coming across the US southern border, have always been a security threat. Since the rise of Islamic terrorism, this threat has gone from severe to urgent and is now critical. Reports are increasing that Hezbollah is cooperating with Mexican drug cartels. It is public record that persons from Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen  have been among illegal entrants  captured and detained in Arizona.

Properly securing the borders of this country must be the first priority of any immigration policy and enforcing existing laws, especially as regards employing illegal aliens, runs a close second. Deborah Honeycutt, a candidate for US congress outlines the legal enforcement needed:

• Mandatory employer verification of worker eligibility to work in the United States.
• Stiff penalties for knowingly hiring illegal workers, not fines that are considered by businesses as simply “a cost of doing business.”
• Prohibit illegal aliens from any access to Social Security and other government benefits.
• Prohibit companies that hire illegals from receiving government contracts.
• End the current “Catch and Release” policy by making expedited removal of illegal aliens mandatory.

But for the sake of both security and justice, these things have to done in concert with offering a path to citizenship for those already here illegally.

To a large extent the food security and the viability of food production in the United States depends right now on “undocumented workers.”  This is another reason why all the pieces of immigration reform have to be done together — it has to be comprehensive.  Anything less will, at best, drive up food prices — especially to the detriment of America’s poor –  and, at worst, cause food shortages that negatively impact our national security.

Security and Families

The simple fact is that many of the people who are here illegally are members of families with mixed immigration/citizenship status.  Immigration hardliners who espouse the “round ‘em up and ship ‘em back” approach are failing to come to terms with the security implications (not to mention the moral and spiritual hazard) of doing this kind of massive damage to families.

Right now the incarceration rates among certain minorities is so high that police make special efforts in many large cities to reach out to youngsters whose parents are imprisoned.  They do this as a matter of (usually Christian-motivated) charity, but also as a prophylactic measure.  They understand that the basic civil loyalty of these children – their ability to see the law as a good thing, their assent to living a law-abiding life , their conception of law enforcement officers as “friends” – these things that so many of us take for granted as a normal part of civic life, has been damaged.  “The police,” for these children, are the “bad people who locked up my Daddy.”  Their hearts are wounded and the police know that preventing them from becoming criminals in turn requires some medicine to that wound.  This is not even a patch on what this country would be fostering if we did not provide a path to citizenship for those who are here.

If the US, as a nation, ends up being perceived as “the country that sent my Daddy away” or “the country that made my Mommy and baby brother go away” how will this country ever accomplish the assimilation and claim the loyalty of the next generation directly affected by these policies?  We will instead be clutching a viper to our bosom, creating the seeds of homegrown rebellion.  I do not even think that this country has the stomach to force the millions of family separations that hard line policies would  create and it is not a conservative position to advocate for such policies.  Both conservatism and Christianity recognize the prior membership of the citizen in the family and the obligation of the law to protect the family unit and keep it intact where possible.

The family is the original cell of social life. It is the natural society in which husband and wife are called to give themselves in love and in the gift of life. Authority, stability, and a life of relationships within the family constitute the foundations for freedom, security, and fraternity within society. …

…

The family must be helped and defended by appropriate social measures. …

The importance of the family for the life and well-being of society entails a particular responsibility for society to support and strengthen marriage and the family (CCC 2207-2210).

The Christian Role

The Christian imperative of charity cannot tolerate the status quo on immigration in this country and fortunately Christians are in a position to vigorously move the national dialogue forward.  Voter education on this issue falls naturally within the purview of churches. Among the Christian leaders to testify July 14^th before the House Committee on Immigration was Richard Land, President, Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Land outlined the core demands that we can rally around and the support of which we can communicate to those desiring our votes this November:

Fundamentally, Southern Baptists and other Evangelicals view immigration through the lens of their faith. As citizens of the United States, we—meaning Southern Baptists— have an obligation to support the government and the government’s laws for conscience’ sake (Romans 13:7). We also have a right to expect the government to fulfill its divinely ordained mandate to punish those who break the laws and reward those who do not (Romans 13:1-7). But, Southern Baptists also recognize a biblical mandate to care for “the least of these among us” (Matthew 25:34-40), to care for the “strangers” who reside in our land (Leviticus 19:34; Hebrews 13:2), and to act justly and mercifully (Micah 6:8).

Bearing this in mind, Southern Baptists pledged in the 2006 resolution to, among other things, “act redemptively and reach out to meet the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of all immigrants, to start English classes on a massive scale, and to encourage them toward a path of legal status and/or citizenship.”

Acts of mercy by the church have been and will remain insufficient to repair our broken immigration system. Nor is the church’s responsibility equivalent to the government’s. While Southern Baptists and other Evangelicals will do their part individually and collectively as churches to reach out to those here illegally, only a proper government response can resolve our immigration crisis.

Over the last four years, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission has repeatedly called for comprehensive immigration reform. In April 2006, two months prior to the Southern Baptist Convention’s formal action on the issue, I laid out the parameters of a plan to address our immigration problem in a comprehensive manner. My holistic approach, published in Baptist Press, rests on three broad pillars that expand upon the Convention’s resolution: a secure border, enforcement of internal immigration laws, and a path to legal status and expanded guest-worker program.

Land’s approach closely matched the testimony of Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of Tucson, Arizona, vice president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops as reported in the USCCB’s coverage of the event:

The testimony the bishop delivered made several points about what comprehensive immigration reform should include.

A new immigration law should “honor the rule of law and help restore it by requiring 11 million undocumented (immigrants) to pay a fine, pay back taxes, learn English and get in the back of the line,” the bishop said. “We believe this (is) a proportionate penalty.”

The bishop said federal law should be enforced and those who do not uphold the law should be held accountable.

Bishop Kicanas said immigration reform would help to make the nation more secure and focused on “those coming who intend to do us harm.”

Others who testified at the hearing included the Rev. Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention; Mathew Staver, dean of Liberty University’s School of Law; and James Edwards, fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

All of these men, from different religious and political viewpoints, came to a unanimous conclusion that the policy Congress should adopt for new immigrants must include an English competency requirement and a means to ensure them an earned pathway to legal status.

They disagreed, however, on the best solution for the 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country.

Bishop Kicanas said that at minimum one measure would be a temporary residence program for the undocumented immigrants living in the United States to “force them to come out of the shadows.”

The matter of immigrants’ family ties being broken by immigration policy was often debated.

Committee member Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif., asked the bishop his view on separating immigrant families, specifically those who take part in immigrant worker programs.

Bishop Kicanas said he was basing his answer on what the church teaches, that is families must be kept together.

As both Land’s and Bishop Kicanas’ testimony indicated, the accomplishment of legislation will be just the beginning. Churches already lead the way in many communities in providing services that help immigrants assimilate into the country. Offering education for immigrants on the path to citizenship can help form them as citizens even while encouraging their ties to faith communities helps to form them as Christians.

It means we have our work cut out for us.

CANON III. “If any one saith, that the sacrifice of the Mass is only a sacrifice of praise and of thanksgiving; or, that it is a bare commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross, but not a propitiatory sacrifice; or, that it profits him only who receives; and that it ought not to be offered for the living and the dead for sins, pains, satisfactions, and other necessities; let him be anathema.”

Ah, yes. Those Tridentine anathemas, five hundred years on, are still provoking Protestant outrage. This is because most Protestants read them to be saying: “If you believe in Protestant doctrine you are condemned to hell.” However, this is not the position of the Church, which has not, nor ever claimed, the authority to eternally condemn anyone.  Rather, this is the biblical, apostolic formula for identifying a teaching as contrary to the truth and for identifying the teacher thereof as separated from Catholic communion. St. Paul uses this word in Gal. 1:9 “If any one preach to you a gospel besides that which you have received, let him be anathema.” Since Protestants apparently desire to be separated from Catholic communion anyway, it shouldn’t bother them to have that status acknowledged by the Church.

My dear correspondent, for my edification, followed his quotation from Trent with a series of verses from Scripture and very helpfully tossed in the dictionary quotations defining propitiation and anathema in case I had been ignorant of their meaning. Here is a sampling (it went on and on for pages, so this is all that space allows) with his own emphasis intact:

1 John 2: ¹ My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may not sin.  And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous. ² And He Himself is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the whole world.

1 John 4: ¹ Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. ⁸ He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

Romans 3: ²¹ But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, ²² even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; ²³ for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵ whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, ²⁶ to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. ²⁷ Where is boasting then?   It is excluded.   By what law?   Of works?   No, but by the law of faith. ²⁸ Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from the deeds of the law.

Hebrews 10:10-25. 10 “…we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. 11 And every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12 But this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God, 13 from that time waiting till His enemies are made His footstool.  14 For by one offering He has perfected forever those who are being sanctified…18 Now where there is remission of these [sins], there is no longer an offering for sin…”

1 Peter 3:18. “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit…”

From my own time as a Protestant, I understand what my correspondent hopes at this point (or after the piling up of all the rest of the verses he included). He hopes that I would suddenly realize that the Catholic Church is misleading me and get out of “Babylon the Great” (which is what I called the Church in my Jehovah’s Witness days) as fast as my feet could carry me and hop on over to the local Baptist Church and get myself right with the Lord — not at all difficult since where I live where they are scattered like mushrooms.

At this point though, I know that my cradle Catholic readers are in a state of mystification. My Protestant friend has quoted Trent to the effect that no one is to say the Mass is not a propitiatory sacrifice and he has followed it up with verses clearly stating that Jesus sacrifice is a sin offering — where is the argument?

You see the missing piece is the one that just occurs almost automatically to a Catholic reader but our good separated brother hasn’t a clue about it. Let’s put it this way: IF, as he thinks, we Catholics taught that the Mass kills Jesus again, or is another sacrifice in addition to Calvary, he would be correct in saying that the scriptures he quoted contradicted Catholic doctrine. But the missing piece of Catholic doctrine is that of course, we don’t think that the Mass is anything other than the very sacrifice on Calvary.

So why do we think that? For very biblical reasons. Let me just deal with two.

First off, Mass is a communion sacrifice. In fact even many Protestants continue to call their version of the Last Supper “Communion” or even “Holy Communion.” Now what is a communion sacrifice? It is a sacrifice wherein the offering itself is partaken of by the priests and/or the worshipers. Unless the Mass is the same sacrifice, there would be no communion because what was being eaten would not be what is being sacrificed. But it is, as St. Paul makes clear in 1 Corinthians 10, drawing a correspondence with the Old Testament communion offerings:

16 The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? 17 Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread. 18 Consider the people of Israel; are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?

Let’s follow St. Paul’s admonition for a minute and consider these OT communion sacrifices. Imagine a family bringing a young ram to be offered as a communion sacrifice. The priest performs the ritual killing and lays the animal on the altar, roasting another part of it for them to eat. The priest offers them their portion of the sacrifice and they say, “Oh, no thanks, we don’t want to eat it.  We will just go home and eat something else and symbolically remember this sacrifice.” Unimaginable, isn’t it?

The other biblical reason is that we cannot take the statement that Jesus suffered “once” apart from the statement that he suffered “for all.” He suffered, Hebrews 10:10 says, “once for all,” but the “all”, unlike the God who suffered for them, are confined within the stream of time. The sacrifice is not. It cannot be, for it must be for all — including even those who lived before (in time) it took place. That this great sin offering that makes our peace with God is not confined by time was demonstrated by Jesus at the Last Supper, at which, St. Augustine says: “Christ was carried in His own hands, when, referring to His own Body, He said: `This is My Body.’ For He carried that Body in His hands.” The Apostles truly received at that meal what Jesus gave them to eat and drink, “my body” and “the blood of the covenant” — yet, there he was, existing with them as Man in time, wherein His sacrifice was yet future and yet also as God, outside of time, to give them in reality Communion in His Body and Blood.  A further indication that this sacrifice transcends time to be present on the altars of our churches is the imagery of Revelation 5:6 “And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth” and the description of Revelation 13:8 of the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

(Please see today’s articles in the Today and Edge sections for more thoughts on the Sacrifice of the Mass.)

The bottom line is that our Protestant friend has been able to concoct a disagreement between Catholic doctrine and Scripture only by leaving out a piece of Catholic teaching.

So now what?

First let me commend to you his zeal and boldness. He was making a serious and heartfelt effort to save another human soul from what he perceives to be mortal danger. If only more Catholics were this bold and went to this much effort on behalf of the faith. I remember how Bible Answer Man Hank Hanegraaff used to challenge his Christian listeners regarding the cults, asking if they were willing to do for the truth what cults do for a lie. Our feet should be shod with Good News and we should be always ready to give an answer.

Second, let me ask you please to pray for him. Right now, please offer a prayer for Chris G_____ that the Holy Spirit may fill in all the missing pieces of his understanding of the Catholic faith, for as Bishop Fulton Sheen said: “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing.”

Okay, just a quick review of your high school astronomy.  In summer and winter we have solstices — the summer solstice is the longest day of the year and the winter solstice is the shortest day of the year.  In the autumn and spring we have equinoxes, when the day and night are the same length.  So once this summer solstice passes, the days, which have been gradually lengthening since the spring equinox, will begin to shorten until the autumn equinox, after which the days will continue to become shorter and shorter and the nights longer, until the winter solstice, after which the days will begin to lengthen once again.

This is all very neat stuff.  We live in a way cool universe with all kinds of interesting things to observe and learn about.

So then, should we celebrate the summer solstice?

Let’s put it another way:  Is there anything wrong with a Catholic celebrating the summer solstice, or the winter solstice, or the equinoxes of spring and fall?  What about the new moon, or the full moon?  Would it be okay to celebrate those, to have a new moon party, for example?

The answer might surprise you.

You can celebrate anything.  Celebrate the leaves falling off the oak tree in your backyard, or the first crocus of spring, or the first snow fall of winter.  Celebrate sunspots or rainbows or the running of the salmon or the flowing of the sap.  Celebrate the swallows returning to Capistrano or the Monarchs flying to Mexico.  You are free and welcome to celebrate whatever you want.

Knock yourself out.  Throw a party, have a cookout, or stay out dancing all night — go ahead — have a great time.  Just don’t get confused — because no matter how much you celebrate any of these natural events, they won’t become supernatural.  They won’t become sacred.

Not objectively.  Objectively sacred means that something has been set apart for the worship of God; it has been hallowed.

This is why, when the Israelites entered the land of Canaan, God took the feasts of new moons and planting and harvesting and first fruits — all the things that every agrarian people on earth celebrated — and elevated them so that they became infused with sacred meaning.  They pointed beyond the natural order to the saving acts of God.

Modern day “pagans” like to boast that they are restoring the sense of sacred to these natural markers of time.  Wrong.  By celebrating them as merely the astronomical events they are, they remove their sacred meaning.  They remove the very thing that makes these natural phenomena point beyond themselves.  But celebrate them if you want to.

Or you could just celebrate the feasts of the Catholic Church — truly sacred events that commemorate the saving acts of God in the history of the Church and in the lives of the saints. I’d wager that would keep you busy enough.

Theology is hard – it is for those who went to college or who have degrees and speak Latin.

As an academic discipline, theology is not harder than many other subjects. Much of theology is very accessible and the rewards of theology are great. We are to love God with our minds as well as with our hearts. No matter what language you speak, someone is doing theology in that language.

Theology is a complication. (“The Gospel is simple, let’s just stick to that”.)

Just about anything can be appreciated on many levels. Eating a meal is simple, but the sciences of nutrition and of the chemistry of food are complex subjects that fascinate many good minds. Besides, what do you do after someone has received the Gospel? Eph. 3: 14-19, 4:14, 15; Heb 5: 12-14.

Theology is unnecessary. (“Christ is essential, that’s all we need.”) What is “essential” as Christian doctrine is not the same as what is “essential” for salvation. What is “essential” is not the same as what is “central”.

Theology causes arguments. (“Doctrine divides; Christ unites.” or “No creed but Christ.”)

Theology, like any other area of knowledge, progresses by the process of making propositions and offering refutation. This is biblical. See Mat. 16: 13-18; 1 Cor. 15:12-20. The spirit in which it is done matters: In essentials, unity; in opinions, liberty; in all things, charity. Theological arguments do not have to turn into religious wars; instead they can be the means by which honest-hearted persons grapple with the truth.

And while we are on the subject: Who is Christ and how does he unite? How can you answer that without doing theology?

Therefore, if we recognize theology as the study of God, coming to know God, then theology is something the Church has to do and something every Christian is doing. There is no question of doing it; the question is whether or not we are doing it well. Theology is neither esoteric nor optional. Theology is what the Church does and has always done.

Here are the names of some of the branches of theology –  that thing that you are doing as you get to know God better each day:

The study of religious beliefs is called “theology”. There are many sub-categories.

“Biblical theology” – doctrines of the Bible, rules of interpretation.

“Dogmatic theology” – body of doctrine received in the Church.

“Moral theology” – ethics, principles for conduct

“Soteriology” – study of salvation.

“Eschatology” – study of death, afterlife and endtimes.

“Anthropology” – study of the nature of man.

“Theology proper” (often just called “theology”) is the study of the nature of God.

“Christology” is the study of Christ.

I was impressed by the mention of mobile devices and our need to “be in that world” since I had just been discussing this very issue with Patti Armstrong.  I had specifically asked Patti to research and write about the topic of Catholic apologetics in the age of digital and mobile communication. The fruit of our conversation is in our lead article today — warning it talks about apps. If you are like me, you don’t even want to know about apps.

You see, I use my cell phone to make phone calls (where I actually talk to a person) apparently a form of communication on the endangered species list.  Once upon a time, I used a phone that plugged into the wall with a cord. It had a dial — a round thing on it that you turned to indicate a particular number. And if someone was not at home when you called them… guess what you did? You called them back (what a concept!).  You did not leave a message.  You shrugged, said, “I guess they aren’t home.” And then you called them back — at home, not on a cell phone that they took everywhere so they (and everyone else) were instantly available. I was already a mother when this amazing thing called a wireless phone was invented. I even had one of the first ones (that’s me, early adopter) in the whole apartment complex where I lived . You could actually take your phone and go outside with it! Even like a whole hundred feet away from the base unit! What freedom. By then it was routine to leave messages for people on their phone — the messages were recorded on little tape recorders with little tiny cassette tapes (ask your parents).

I said all that to say that I do not read my phone. Just ask my kids. I beg them not to send me text messages.  Reading a phone is just not in my genes.  My daughter wants me to learn how to get online on my phone — dummy me, I thought that was what MY COMPUTER was for.

But I am not your kids. You are not your kids.

The communication world of our kids is digital: online and mobile.  And like the Archbishop Schnurr said, ”The Church needs to be in that world.” Another way to say it might be to say that the souls of our kids’ and grandkids’ generation desperately needs for the Church to be there. Because the devil is there.  And the Church has lost her media edge.

For many centuries Christians led the way in advancements in communication. The switch from the scroll to the codex (bound pages) was largely due to the influence of the early Christians who wanted a convenient way to transport and read the Scriptures. Early advances in printing were spurred by the Christian desire to spread God’s word.  But during the 20^th century the Church went into catch-up mode and remains there. Whether the subject is block-buster movies or the latest social networking fad, Catholics seem to be behind the curve way to often – we’re so 2000 and late — forget early adoption; we seem to be just learning what the world has already discarded as obsolete.

Why?

Well it isn’t the whole reason, but it is part: To put it bluntly, Catholics do not seem to grasp the need to support Catholic media. Protestants seems to do a bit better at this — they aren’t necessarily innovators, but they do tend to try to be early adopters and to grasp quickly the need to be present in every diverse media and (this is so key) they are great consumers of Christian books, periodicals, movies, etc.  I don’t know what gives with Catholics. I look at a company like CE with tens of thousands of readers and really wonder why we have to beg the way we do for a paltry 100 people to give a monthly donation to this site.  And yet, the case could easily be made that it is more vital for Catholic lay apostolates to be present online and in various media venues than even for the various diocesan organs – because getting “in that world” is really the lay mission.  But if it is the lay mission, then the laity are going to have to step up to the plate and support Catholic media.

Sorry to be this blunt with you folks (you know how sweet and subtle my usual delivery is) but you need to stop taking the money that God gives you and stop giving it to media that destroys morals, undermines the faith, and coarsens society. (Uh, yeah, what you earn God gave you or were you starting to think you created yourself and gifted yourself with talents?) And you need to start supporting Catholic media. That means buying books by Catholic authors, subscribing to Catholic periodicals, and donating to non-profits like CE. Because the question of what gives really comes down to who gives.  And the answer needs to be, you give.