Having finished a full draft of this work, I began seeing other themes surfacing in the Book of Revelation—elements of war and weapon imagery, especially between the angelic armies and Satan’s. Then I looked through the Psalms and saw the same. Certainly one expects war elements in the Old Testament, as God’s people struggle to free themselves of pagan peoples who conquer and enslave them when they sin and disobey the Law. But what I was not expecting was to see worship associated with war. 

The elements of war appear right after the fall of worship, when God curses the serpent for beguiling Eve and then Adam: “I will put enmity [war&91; between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed” (Gen. 3:15). So for the woman and her seed, God establishes a war with Satan to recover God’s creation for his glory. 

Then God places before the Garden of Eden the cherubim and “a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:24).  

We see war as worship exemplified in how Pharaoh and his Egyptian armies try to prevent the people of Israel from leaving Egypt (a figure for slavery to sin) to go to a deserted place to offer sacrificial worship to God (Exod. 5:2, 14). This is part of God’s initial plan to “smite” those enslaving his people (3:20). God commands Moses first part the Red Sea and then to cause it to recede and drown Pharaoh’s army. The people worship God, chanting, 

The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him. The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is his name. Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea; and his picked officers are sunk in the Red Sea (Exod. 15:2-4). 

So, we praise worship of God, “a man of war,” who conquers the Antichrist (of Pharaoh and his army); this is true worship! 

Satan battles God’s people as they cross the Jordan to enter the promised land. They must battle Jericho; the commander of God’s army leads Joshua (“Jesus”) and the people of Israel to obliterate the city of Jericho by the blaring of trumpets (Josh. 5-6). Then Satan riles up the five nations and kings of Palestine against God’s people; Joshua leads the armies, yet God is the one who slays the soldiers with hailstones (10:5-27). And yet Joshua’s campaign under God’s command, too, is worship. 

God warns Cain after his unacceptable worship, “sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it” (Gen. 4:7). So an evil disposition in worship decays that worship, leading to more sin.  

Jesus warns the scribes and Pharisees that their wrongful dispositions led to the murder of prophets inside the sanctuary of worship: 

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! . . . I send you prophets and wise men and scribes [like Abel&91;, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar. Truly, I say to you, all this will come upon this generation.  

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! . . . Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down (Matt. 23:29-37, 24:2). 

The war over fallen worship calls for faithful soldiers. Jesus leads us with the heavenly army to the final victory. As the angel tells John toward the end of the Book of Revelation,  

“Worship God.” . . . Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself. He is clad in a robe dipped in blood, and the name by which he is called is The Word of God.  

And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses. From his mouth issues a sharp sword with which to smite the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron; he will tread the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, king of kings and Lord of lords. . . .  

And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him who sits upon the horse and against his army (Rev. 19:10-16,19). 

In his brand-new book, Bible Worship, Fr. John Waiss reveals what Scripture teaches about true worship and its power in our battle against evil. Get your copy today!

As St. John says, “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal” just as “there is sin which is mortal” (1 John 5:16-17). So what sin is mortal and what is not? 

A mortal sin is one that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible. Unrepented, it brings eternal death” (CCC 1874). That’s what makes it “mortal,” or deadly: it cuts us off from God forever, unless it is “redeemed by repentance and God’s forgiveness” (CCC 1861). 

Thanks be to God, not every evil action is mortally sinful. Just as there are three ingredients in evaluating a moral action (the object, intention, and circumstances), so there are three ingredients in a mortal sin: (1) grave matter, (2) full knowledge, and (3) deliberate consent. And the Catechism is clear that all “three conditions must together be met” for an act to be mortally sinful (1857).  

Short of this, “one commits venial sin when, in a less serious matter, he does not observe the standard prescribed by the moral law, or when he disobeys the moral law in a grave matter, but without full knowledge or without complete consent” (CCC 1862). Although venial sin does not “deprive the sinner of sanctifying grace, friendship with God, charity, and consequently eternal happiness,” it “weakens charity” and “impedes the soul’s progress in the exercise of the virtues and the practice of the moral good,” such that “deliberate and unrepented venial sin disposes us little by little to commit mortal sin” (CCC 1863). 

We’ll look at “full knowledge” and “deliberate consent” in the following questions, but what does “grave matter” mean? It means that the sin is serious. But how do we evaluate the seriousness of a sin? Coming back to the threefold distinction of object, intention, and consequences: the “matter” in question is the object of the act. Grave matter means that the objective character of the act performed is seriously disordered by its very nature. The Catechism is explicit about the grave nature of particular sins, including sacrilege (2120), blasphemy (2148), perjury (2152), deliberately avoiding Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation (2181), murder (2268), hatred of neighbor “when one deliberately desires him grave harm” (2303), prostitution (2355), sexual relations outside marriage (2390), and adulation that “makes one an accomplice in another’s vices or grave sins” (2480). St. Paul likewise lists in Galatians 5:19-21 and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 sins whose practitioners will not “inherit the kingdom of God.” But none of these lists is exhaustive. 

More broadly, the Catechism says that “grave matter is specified by the Ten Commandments” (1858), pointing to Jesus’ words to the rich young man. When the man asks him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus answers, “You know the commandments: ‘Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother’” (Mark 10:17,19). Jesus’ clear implication seems to be that those who commit adultery, steal, etc. shall not inherit eternal life. 

Even here, there are a few important caveats. First, the Ten Commandments lay out “the first principles” of the moral law; they’re not an exhaustive list of every serious sin.cli The right question in determining grave matter is this: Is this the kind of behavior that places something else above God or turns me away from God? If so, it’s grave matter. 

Second, not every violation of the Ten Commandments is a mortal sin. For instance, the person who steals a dollar is not necessarily damned. In considering whether or not a sin is mortal, circumstances matter. For instance, the Catechism points out that “one must also take into account who is wronged: violence against parents is in itself graver than violence against a stranger” (1858). Likewise, stealing from the excess wealth of a millionaire is less evil than stealing the food of a starving man. Taking the example of lying, the Catechism explains how to determine the gravity of a sin: “The gravity of a lie is measured against the nature of the truth it deforms, the circumstances, the intentions of the one who lies, and the harm suffered by its victims. If a lie in itself only constitutes a venial sin, it becomes mortal when it does grave injury to the virtues of justice and charity” (2484). 

Happily, with all these factors to take into consideration, the Lord does not require us to calculate exact gravity of our sin before turning to him for mercy. He alone probes “the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Heb. 4:12). He alone is “lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save” (James 4:12). 

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As we should expect, Mother Teresa’s idea of holiness was simple and direct. For her, sanctity begins with humility and ends with surrender to God’s will. 

“You know, I’m only a little pencil in the hand of God, a God who is about to write a love letter to the world,” she was fond of saying.cii Mother understood that the path to holiness lies in following St. John the Baptist’s advice: “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30). She learned that the more she emptied herself, the more her mystical spouse—Jesus Christ—could fill and empower her. She was to be Jesus’ hands, feet, voice, and smile. Mother Teresa then became God’s “love letter,” and that letter allowed us a peek at heaven. 

Mother Teresa’s daily encounter with the risen Lord Jesus began with Mass and a holy hour. She and her fellow Missionaries of Charity followed a rigorous schedule, rising at 4:40 a.m. They attended community prayer in the chapel at 5 a.m., followed by household chores and Mass. After breakfast, they went to work at their missionary assignments before returning for lunch, midday prayer, a thirty-minute nap, prayer in the chapel, and then afternoon tea. After that, more prayer and spiritual reading, then more missionary work, followed by an hour of prayer before dinner. Each day concluded with night prayers.

“We try to pray through our work by doing it with Jesus, for Jesus, to Jesus,” Mother said. “That helps us to put our whole heart and soul into doing it. The dying, the cripple, the [mentally ill&91;, the unwanted, the unloved—they are Jesus in disguise.”

Mother began her ministry to the sick and dying not by waiting for them to come to her but by seeking them out on the streets of Calcutta (and, before long, the world). Like Jesus searching for lost sinners or the shepherd looking for his lost sheep, Mother would walk the streets looking for men and women in distress. To seek out the forgotten and abandoned is to embrace the heart of God, who always takes the initiative to love and rescue His children. It is an expression of divine mercy, which refuses to remain indifferent when a single person is suffering or lost. For Mother, Jesus was first—and it was Jesus she found in those she cared for. She had an uncanny ability to see the destitute that her colleagues missed. 

Mother Teresa was in a car on her way to New Delhi in 1999 to meet with John Paul II during his three-day visit to India. Along the way, she noticed a person with leprosy at the side of the road. She ordered the driver to pull the car over. She got out and started to minister to the leper. 

When Mother returned to the car after conversing at length with the impoverished man, one of the Indian cardinals gently chided the nun for keeping the Vicar of Christ waiting. She calmly replied: “Yes, I know, but I met Christ on the road.”

“All for Jesus” was another of Mother Teresa’s mantras. When things were difficult, she bore her sufferings for her Savior by reminding herself and her companions that their toil and sufferings were for the Lord. She had a pure, childlike desire to please Jesus and his mother. She often left this inscription on her books: “Be all for Jesus through Mary.” Her fondest desire was to imitate Jesus’ first and most perfect disciple—his mother. “Let our gratitude be our strong resolution to be only all for Jesus through Mary,” she wrote in 1990. “Let us be pure and humble like Mary, and we are sure to be holy like Jesus.”cvi 

Reporters and friends often asked Mother to define prayer. Again, the answer was simple: “God speaks to me—and I speak to him. It’s that simple. That is prayer.” She continued, “If I pray to Jesus, then it’s from my heart to Jesus’ Heart. When I pray to the Mother of God, then it’s from my heart to Mary’s heart. When I pray to my guardian angel, then it’s also heart to heart.

Dive into the beautiful friendship between John Paul II and Mother Teresa in Icons of Mercy by Patrick Novecosky. Order your copy today!

Let’s lay down some groundwork by considering why we act as we do. Unlike irrational animals driven by instinct, we have the power to determine what goods we will seek and how we will go about obtaining them. We are masters of our own actions. Those goods we seek are goals or ends, the things we hope to achieve by our actions. “Although the end be the last in the order of execution, yet it is first in the order of the agent’s intention. And it is in this way that it is a cause.”

We are not so much pawns, pushed by the random events of our past or present circumstances, as masters of our fates who are pulled by future goals that we have chosen to pursue. An end acts as a final cause, a cause for the sake of which we do something. If you are surprised by your friend’s actions and ask, “Why did you do that?” you assume that his behavior was not reflexive like a sneeze, coerced at gunpoint, or in some other way involuntary. You’re asking what he hoped to achieve—the final cause of his action, the end he had in mind. Although each individual undeniably has his own personal likes and dislikes, we all act most of the time for the same final end. And what is that?

According to St. Augustine, “All men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness.” Why, then, do individuals act so differently and achieve such differing degrees of happiness? St. Thomas notes that “to desire happiness is nothing else than to desire that one’s will be satisfied. And this everyone desires.” And yet, “all do not know happiness; because they know not in what the general notion of happiness is found.” In other words, we all want to be happy, but not all of us know what really will make us happy.

In considering what will bring happiness, both Aristotle and Thomas starts by enumerating some common false contenders—which are as popular and alluring in our day as they were in the centuries in which they wrote.

Contrary to what the world would have us believe, happiness does not consist of wealth, power, honor, fame and glory, goods of the body, pleasure, even goods of the soul—or, for that matter, any created good—are only means to the end of happiness, and none of them ever completely satisfies. In fact, these goods often lead to their possessors’ and to others’ destruction. The ever-growing roster of rich and famous celebrities and sports superstars whose lives have ended in suicide or homicide bears witness to this fact. What, then, is true happiness?

The efforts of natural reason can only take us so far in responding to this question, pointing to certain goods that are desired for their own sake—such as friendship or contemplation of the truth—the possession of which gives the greatest happiness human persons can attain in this life. Christian revelation gives a more complete response, taking into consideration both our natural and supernatural vocation as persons created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27). In the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC), “By virtue of his soul and his spiritual powers of intellect and will, man is endowed with freedom, an ‘outstanding manifestation of the divine image’” (1705, citing Gaudium et Spes 17).

By conferring on each of us “the dignity of a person who can initiate and control his own actions ” (CCC 1730), God has made us responsible agents in pursuit of the ultimate good, a pursuit that promises us a twofold happiness: 1) an imperfect happiness while here on earth and 2) a perfect happiness consisting of the beatific vision of the Uncreated Good (God) in heaven.

God is the ultimate source of every good thing and nothing short of him can content our minds and hearts. Of course, we cannot obtain complete union with God unless and until we reach heaven. All our actions as free persons are meant to orient us to that final, perfect, eternal bliss with God.

And in the meantime? “According to the Philosopher (Ethics 1:9), happiness is the reward of works of virtue.” Not only is our ultimate happiness attained by actions aligning our will with the ultimate good, but happiness itself is found in these actions. Virtues (both natural and supernatural) perfect our ability both to know and to do the good. It is through them—as collaborators with God’s grace—that we can already rejoice to know, love, and serve God here on earth. They are our keys to unlocking earthly and heavenly happiness. As Jesus declared of the humble, virtuous actions he performed, “If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (John 13:17).

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Poverty and unjust working conditions are real problems, and sometimes their root lies in an unjust and dysfunctional economic system—socialism being the example par excellence. But usually, societal injustices are the result of deeper moral evils like greed, envy, indifference, and selfishness. Simply reordering society so people aren’t poor can’t eliminate these vices (and doesn’t solve poverty, either). That’s the error of liberation theology which, as we’ve seen, unsuccessfully tries to wed Marxism and Christianity. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith accordingly rebuked its central premise: that evil can be localized “principally or uniquely in bad social, political, or economic ‘structures’ as though all other evils came from them so that the creation of the ‘new man’ would depend on the establishment of different economic and socio-political structures.”

We believe that many people (including self-styled “Catholic socialists”) support socialism because they believe that whereas private citizens are mostly self-interested, governments are altruistic. “Government” becomes almost a magical entity whose vast resources could solve all our problems if it was just put to work in the right way.

But governments are really just groups of individuals who have been given weighty responsibilities. Those individuals are not immune to the effects of vice; in fact, the temptations that government officials face make them more susceptible to sin and the magnitude of the problems they face make them more prone to error. The Psalmist presciently warned us, “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help. When his breath departs he returns to his earth; on that very day his plans perish” (146:3–4).

Christians should strive toward making governments and societies more just, but it’s fruitless to try and build a heaven on earth as long as human beings are the ones running this “heaven.” Instead, the problem of poverty must be tackled at its root in the poverty of virtue that lies in people’s hearts. In other words, we’re not just dealing with honest mistakes about the economic and political order; we’re looking at sin in the human heart. This is why the complete response to the “problem of the workers” (as Rerum Novarum is sometimes called) is both the right principles (including a rejection of socialism in all its forms) and a deeper conversion to the truth—the life of grace and the sacraments lived in the bosom of the Church.

Pope Leo opened Rerum Novarum saying that the socialists look to exploit the “poor man’s envy of the rich”. Envy, which springs from the feeling of sorrow or sadness at another person’s good, seeks to diminish the good things of another. Thus, the socialists aren’t merely jealous that some people have more than others—they seek to harness state power to take property away from those who have it and to destroy the institutions related to the protection of property. It is counted as a capital sin because of the other vices that arise from it, including hatred and violence.

What is needed in response, then, is not merely a superior system but repentance and grace. And we must begin with ourselves, examining how to live a godly life through the economic decisions we make every day.

It’s important to remember . . .

• Even today there are movements among progressive and traditional Catholics alike to rehabilitate socialism as an economic system in line with—or even required by—the gospel.
• Collectivist solutions to poverty and economic injustice substitute political fiat for the free and virtuous living-out of human interdependence.
• Government-controlled wealth redistribution exploits “the poor man’s envy of the rich” to grow the power of the state at the expense of the Church, the family, and other institutions that we should trust and love more.

Can Catholics support socialism in good conscience? In Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?, Trent Horn and Catherine R. Pakaluk cut through the confusion, examining socialism through the lens of Catholic social teaching. Get your copy of Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? today!

Everett Ferguson, a Protestant elder, biblical scholar, and Church historian, has written what’s perhaps the definitive work on the subject, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries. Ferguson spends hundreds of pages carefully combing through the evidence to expose the first five hundred years’ worth of Christians thought about baptism.

His findings are neatly summarized on page 854:

Although in developing the doctrine of baptism different authors had their particular favorite descriptions, there is a remarkable agreement on the benefits received in baptism. And these are present already in the New Testament texts. Two fundamental blessings are often repeated: the person baptized received forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38). The two fundamental doctrinal interpretations of baptism are sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ, with the attendant benefits and responsibilities (Rom. 6:3-4), and regeneration from above (John 3:5), with its related ideas.

Recall that St. Paul seems to treat the theology of baptism as a basic doctrine upon which the early Church (which could otherwise be so divided) was one. Ferguson’s point is that throughout the first five hundred years of the Church, we find that same unity on baptism. But what the early Christians are united around is this idea of regenerative baptism. A modern time traveler, holding to a standard Baptist or Reformed vision of baptism, would find himself at odds with all Christians everywhere on this basic doctrine during these early years.

Can this really be true?

Let’s take a closer look, particularly at those living and teaching prior to the year 200. In fact, let’s start with a question: why was Jesus baptized (Matt. 3:13-17)? This is a difficult question to answer if baptism is merely a symbolic gesture of our turning away from sin.

Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Jonathan Pennington claims that it’s because “Jesus is fulfilling his role as the obedient Son of God by practicing the required righteousness of submitting to God’s will to repent.” But Pennington is aware that this view sounds obviously wrong (“how does a sinless man repent?”), so he explains: “Jesus repents not in the sense of turning from sin (our repentance necessarily includes this where his does not), but in the sense of dedicating himself to follow God’s will fully on earth.” 

But that’s not how the earliest Christians understood this event. Their understanding was that this was about not a change in Jesus (either a turning from sin or a dedication to follow God’s will), but a change in baptism.

But a change from what, and to what?

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Faced with such a dire time of tribulation, Christians have wondered whether they will have to live through it. The historic answer, for both Catholics and Protestants, is that we will. Jesus warned us we would have to face persecution (John 15:20). 

However, in the nineteenth century, dispensationalists began teaching that Christians will not have to face this trial. Instead, before the great tribulation begins, they will be caught up to heaven and spared the reign of the Antichrist and the horrors it contains. 

They referred to this event as the Rapture, based on the Latin word rapio (“to snatch, to carry away”). Catholics do not generally use this term, but Paul does describe an event when “we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:17).  

According to the scenario dispensationalists propose, the Rapture is the next prophetic event in God’s plan, so it will happen without warning, at any moment. Jesus will descend into the atmosphere and all true Christians will be caught up to be with him in the sky. This will include dead Christians, who will be raised back to life. Jesus will then take his followers back to heaven while the Antichrist reigns and all hell breaks loose on earth. Then, at the end of the great tribulation, Jesus will return to earth, slay the Antichrist, and begin his thousand-year earthly reign. 

There are multiple problems with this view. First, as we have seen, the Church rejects the idea of a future earthly millennium (see answer 12), so the overall scenario is based on a false premise. 

Furthermore, the dispensationalist view does not fit what St. Paul says. It splits the Second Coming in half, with Jesus first descending to claim his Church and then, years later, returning to deal with the Antichrist. Yet in the relevant passages, Paul speaks only of a single coming. He indicates that the event when believers will be caught up to be with Jesus occurs at “the coming [singular&91; of the Lord” (1 Thess. 4:16).  

And he doesn’t say that Jesus will then go back to heaven. Instead, he indicates that the final judgment will follow, for he goes on to tell the Thessalonians that they have no need to worry about the times or seasons of when this will happen, because “you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. When people say, ‘There is peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape” (5:2-3). 

The scenario Paul depicts is Jesus returning to earth, gathering his followers in the sky, and then proceeding to judge the wicked as part of “the day of the Lord.” 

This is confirmed when he takes up the same subject in his second letter to the Thessalonians, referring to the event as “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him” (2 Thess. 2:1). Both elements are thus present: the return of Christ and the gathering of his followers to him. 

Paul says this event “will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God” (vv. 3-4). 

Then, when the Lord returns and we are assembled to be with him, “the Lord Jesus will slay [the man of lawlessness&91; with the breath of his mouth and destroy him by his appearing and his coming” (v. 8). 

Paul also emphasizes that “when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven” (2 Thess. 1:7, emphasis added) the wicked “shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord . . . when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints” (2 Thess. 1:9-10). After discussing this event, Paul then identifies it as “the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our assembling to meet him” (2 Thess. 2:1). 

The sequence Paul lays out thus does not involve Christians being caught up to heaven during the Antichrist’s reign, or that reign coming over a thousand years before the final judgment. Instead, it involves the Antichrist reigning first, then Jesus returning and the faithful being caught up to be with him, following which the Antichrist will be killed and the final judgment will take place. 

Thus we shouldn’t expect a Rapture to take place at any moment now. We will be caught up to be with Jesus—after the reign of the man of lawlessness, not before.

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Finding the gospel of Jesus Christ reflected in Mary may help us pursue the unity of spirit and mind that Paul sought:

Let your manner of life be worthy of the gospel of Christ, so that . . . I may hear of you that you stand firm in one spirit, with one mind striving side by side for the faith of the gospel, and not frightened in anything by your opponents (Phil. 1:27-28).

Side by side, of one mind and spirit, let us fight for the Faith against all opposition, testing the spirit of Marian doctrines and beliefs, to discern their worthiness in Christ’s gospel:

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God. . . . Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God (1 John 4:1-3,15).

Some are surprised that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily assumption was not defined until 1950, using little biblical support. The pope decreed that all Catholics must hold and believe as divinely revealed “that the immaculate Mother of God, the Ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory” (Munificentissimus Deus 44).

Yet this doctrine was no twentieth-century innovation, as Tim Perry explains:

When seeking to understand the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven with any degree of sympathy (this is not to say agreement), two factors need to be kept constantly in mind. The first is the doctrine’s ancient roots.

The ancient Church found that it fit Scripture and that it was consistent with other Christian beliefs. By the fourth century, Christians celebrated the feast of Mary’s dormition, especially in Jerusalem. The dormition refers to Mary “falling asleep” before being assumed (taken up bodily) into heaven to be with our Lord. Finding no evidence of Mary’s death, Epiphanius (d. 403) suggests that this Marian teaching was true, as “nothing is impossible for God.” Several Church Fathers preached about it, such as Germain (d. 733), Andrew of Crete (d. 740), and John Damascene (d. 749). Gregory (d. 594), bishop of Tours, recorded part of a Latin translation of a lost fifth-century Greek book describing Mary’s assumption. John of Thessalonica (d. 630) detailed the popular belief regarding Mary’s dormition and assumption. Although some details may have been embellished over time, his exposition shows that some truth likely lies behind this commonly held belief.

So why would the Holy Spirit wait for the twentieth century to define this teaching? Perhaps it was to counteract the materialistic and mechanistic view of man propagated by some in the name of science. Mary’s assumption reaffirms the Christian hope in bodily resurrection—which science finds absurd—attesting to man having a spiritual dimension that endures unto eternity. Whereas sin naturally produces death and corruption, the teaching of Mary’s assumption reinforces the Christian belief in Christ’s resurrection (1 Cor. 15:12-19) and in the bodily resurrection of all Christians (CCC 974).

To understand the Assumption is to understand Christian belief about death and bodily resurrection. Paul wrote consolingly on death and our hope in bodily resurrection:

But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep [dormition&91;, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. . . .For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up [raptured&91; together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord (1 Thess. 4:13-18).

This description of rapture is familiar to most Christians, with many interpretations. One popular belief is that Christians living at Christ’s Second Coming will be taken or caught up, body and soul, into heaven without dying. So many Bible-believing Christians see Mary’s assumption—rapture—into heaven as quite compatible with Scripture.

Another passage from Paul suggests rapture:

Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep [dormition&91;, but we shall all be changed, in a moment. . . . For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality . . . then shall come to pass the saying that is written:“Death is swallowed up in victory.”“O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?”The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law (1 Cor. 15:51-56).

Not all shall die (sleep), but some shall put on immortality without dying, affirming Christ’s victory over sin and death (1 Thess. 4:18). As death is the result of sin, death has no power or sting over a person freed from sin.

Want to learn more about what Scripture reveals about Mary? Bible Mary by Fr. John Waiss explores the biblical foundations of Catholic teaching about the Blessed Virgin Mary.

My teens always looked forward to the homilies of a particular priest, because he made the truths of Catholicism exciting and substantial. He inspired us to think about our Faith, and one way he did that was through a simple piece of philosophy. He said, “If we want to know what is real and true, we must always ask, ‘What is the nature of a thing?’” Another way to put it would be, “What is this thing and what is it made for?”

These questions unlock the force of the natural law, guiding us to understand more deeply the truth, goodness, and beauty that is our Catholic faith.

The first time I heard the term “natural law” was when my friend Nikolas Nikas of the Bioethics Defense Fund gave a presentation at my parish. By that time I had already spent many years teaching my children, my RCIA students, and others about God’s universal moral law and how it can be known by the use of reason alone—but I had never heard it called by the name of natural law. Nik demonstrated how America’s Constitution and our system of laws were based on natural-law principles that transcend any merely human laws based on popular opinion or human will (what is called positive law).

Abraham Lincoln, for example, cited moral truths that could be known through reason when he worked to deliver our nation from the evil of slavery. In a debate with Stephen Douglas, Lincoln said that slavery wasn’t just a political issue but one that represented “the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong.”

A century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was told that racial segregation was the “law of the land” and must be obeyed. MLK replied that unjust laws may be disobeyed. As he sat in jail for disobeying those laws, he wrote:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

Natural law is another term for the universal moral law of God. Aquinas said that the natural law “is nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided.”

This law is universal because everyone—including people who have never received divine revelation—can know it. St. Paul proclaimed that even people who have never encountered something as basic as the Ten Commandments can still apprehend God’s important moral truths, because “what the law requires is written on their hearts” (Rom. 2:15).

Popes have used natural law to appeal to the world’s consciences. In recent memory, Pope Pius XII’s first encyclical was written to oppose humanity’s “drift toward chaos,” which he blamed on “the disregard, so common nowadays, and the forgetfulness of the natural law itself” (Summi Pontificatus 28). And Paul VI, writing in Humanae Vitae on the nature of human sexuality and the evils of contraception, stressed that “this teaching is in harmony with human reason.”

Some Catholics today argue against the use of natural law to instruct, calling it outdated or ineffective and suggesting pedagogical techniques that they consider more in line with modern sensibilities. But no less a thinker than Robert Cardinal Sarah has affirmed that “the Church’s social teaching argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being.”

It is because of the natural law that Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and even atheists and agnostics can hear their consciences tell them what they may do, what they must do, and what they must never do.

Natural law explains people’s deep-seated understanding that crimes like murder and theft are wrong, whereas charitable acts like feeding the hungry and clothing the naked are right. It helps us instinctively relate such actions to the way human beings have been made. When we ask, “What is human life for?” or “What is the nature of a human being?” we want to know our ultimate goal in life and how to reach that goal. Natural law shows us both, or as professor Charles Rice says, it’s “a set of manufacturer’s directions written into our nature so that we can discover through reason how we ought to act.”

Just as we would not harm our car’s mechanical nature by putting molasses in the tank—which is made for gas—we should not harm our human nature by acting immorally; that is, in ways that contradict its design.

But before discussing natural law any further we need to address some common misunderstandings about it.

Natural law is not the same as the “laws of nature.” Scientific laws explain how matter and energy behave in the physical world. These laws cannot be “disobeyed” because they describe what usually happens rather than what should happen. For example, the law of gravity (science) describes how a falling bomb accelerates toward the earth. Natural law (morality) tells us whether it is right or wrong to drop the bomb on a certain target.

Natural law is not “what happens with other mammals in nature.” When Christians say that certain human behaviors go against nature, they mean that those acts contradict how human beings ought to act, not merely what happens in the natural world. Humans are animals, but we are rational animals, and so we should not make the behavior of lower animals our standard of morality. Lots of behaviors are “natural” for other animals, like stealing, forced sex, or infanticide, but that doesn’t make those behaviors natural for rational human beings.

Natural law is not “what feels natural to me.” A person may have a strong inclination to eat a whole box of cookies or a persistent desire to cheat on a spouse, but the consequences of those decisions show that we shouldn’t always follow our “natural feelings.” This doesn’t mean we should never follow our instincts and feelings; it just means we should use our minds to tell us which of them we should follow.

C.S. Lewis used the analogy of a piano to explain the relationship between our animal instincts that tempt us to do evil and our rational minds that know the moral law.

He said that instincts are like the keys on the piano, and morality (the natural law) is like the sheet music that tells us when to play the keys at the right time. For example, the fight instinct is good for a young boy if a stranger is trying to pull his sister into a car and abduct her; it’s bad if he is frustrated with his sister during play and uses fists to settle the matter. Likewise, the flight instinct is good when running away from a tsunami; it’s cowardly when running away from an infant drowning in a play pool.

Unlike the lower animals, we human beings are created with an intellect and a will (made in God’s image), which means that we are the only ones with the ability to reason morally—to choose between right and wrong. According to St. Thomas Aquinas’s classic definition, natural law is man’s participation in God’s eternal law, an intersection between human reason and divine wisdom.

Want to help your children navigate today’s toughest moral issues? Made This Way by Leila Miller and Trent Horn gives parents practical, age-appropriate tools for teaching Catholic morality through reason and natural law.

“What you people do is child abuse! You should be ashamed of yourselves!” a woman screamed at me while I was engaged in evangelism at a college campus. 

I was genuinely confused so I asked her, “What exactly should I be ashamed of?” She fired back, “Hell! Telling little children they might go to hell traumatizes them!” 

I’ll admit this scares me! It’s almost too difficult to imagine the possibility of being in agony not just for a while, but forever, living in despair and pain without end. And yet we can’t reject hell just because we don’t like it. Just as it’s not child abuse to warn children about “stranger danger” or what will happen if they run into traffic, even if the truth is scary, it’s not child abuse to warn children (or adults) about the dangers of hell—provided that hell is real.  

In the New Testament, the word “hell” usually refers to the final, eternal dwelling place for the damned. According to the Catechism, “To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him forever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called ‘hell’” (CCC 1033).  

Scripture uses a variety of images to describe the awfulness of hell. Christ said it was a place of fire (Matt. 5:22), undying worms (Mark 9:48), gnashing of teeth (Matt. 13:42), and an outer darkness (Matt. 22:13). Matthew even compared it to Gehenna (Matt. 23:33), which was a place where children were offered as fire sacrifices to pagan gods. Since Jesus walked out of his own tomb, he is a reliable source about the afterlife, and so we should believe what he taught about hell. 

While Christ used earthly images to convey spiritual truths, we must remember that none of these images, including those of unending fire, are necessarily literal descriptions of hell. But even if hell is not a place of literal fire, it is still the worst thing we can imagine. Those who think hell is fun because all the “cool sinners” will be there should think again.  

The sins that make life miserable, like selfishness, greed, hatred, and the vindictive desire to hurt others because we’ve been hurt, are just some of the evils that make hell so “hellish.” In hell, sinners will eternally receive the one thing they cared the most about in life—themselves. Pope St. John Paul II said,  

The images of hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy.

The most terrifying aspect of hell is its permanence. According to the Catechism, “The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs” (CCC 1035). Jesus taught that hell is not temporary but lasts forever. He said that those who are damned “will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matt. 25:46).

Some argue that if God were fair, then hell would be temporary and someone could eventually “work themselves” out of it. But no one can ever work himself out of hell any more than he could work himself into heaven. Salvation is a gift from God that we “work out” in this life (Phil. 2:12) by persevering in faith that works through love (Gal. 5:6) until the end of our lives (Matt. 10:22). The only time we can accept this gift, or this free offer of grace from God, is during our earthly lives. Upon our death, our choices in this life forever seal what our destinies will be in the next life (Heb. 9:27).  

Moreover, if hell were temporary, it would be incredibly unjust. Since heaven includes eternal bliss and happiness with God, then no matter how long a person spends in hell it will seem like only a few seconds compared to the infinite happiness that awaits them in heaven. It would be like telling a child who purposefully breaks his sibling’s arm that they have to go to “time out” for thirty seconds before they can go to an amusement park for the rest of the day. 

Hell may also be eternal because the damned continue to sin and reject God after death. In this scenario, their punishment is everlasting because they make it that way and cannot do otherwise. If you’ve ever been around a self-centered person, you know they find it excruciating to be in the presence of a person everyone else admires more. The damned in hell may even love themselves and their sins so much that the selfless love of God may be unbearable to them. They may even choose to remain in hell, thinking it is better than heaven.