October 2006 Archives

Julie tagged me with a meme a while back, and I’ve only now noticed (ahem - I might have noticed if you'd called me Mark instead of Mike...said with a smile, of course). So, here is the Random Quotes Meme:

Go to this site and pick five random quotes that reflect either:

a) who you are, or
b) what you believe

These fall into category b, I think.

Nothing is worse than active ignorance.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 - 1902)

I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger

When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within, and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
Epictetus (55 AD - 135 AD), Discourses

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld (1613 - 1680)

I need to post something about the next couple of months. I promised to keep everyone apprised of my schedule at times when I'd need to be away from ye ole blog.

I've got a Perfect Storm of projects at work coming due in early December. Consequently, I'm going to be pulling extra hours starting in the early part of mid-November. I've got three major projects due, all with a go-live date of December 4th. The complication is that I'm responsible for them but I can't control two of them entirely. I have to take some of the operational items as other departments finish. Long story short, I'm going to be super busy in November. I'll likely take a couple of weeks away from the blog starting in mid-November.

I had also decided to avoid the papacy as a subject for quite some time. There's a reason for this. There's one particular book that I think is absolutely necessary when looking at a particular aspect of the papacy. That book has been out of print for many years. I saw a copy once (before I converted, when I wasn't really interested), but never since. I've also been unable to get it via inter-library loan. Amazon has occasionally had copies, but at too high a price (one guy was selling his on a z-shop for $80; average has been about $50). Well, this afternoon I found a copy of it on Alibris for $9. I should have it the second week of November at the absolute latest. The door to the papacy is now open for us, but to do it justice is a major work that will take time. At first flush, I suspect five hefty posts. Once I get the book, I'll read through it and set to work on the papacy. It will likely be December before the first post goes up, but don't be surprised if it's not till after the first of the year. It's all going to depend on time commitments that are largely beyond my control.

In the meantime, I'm going to try to get two posts on the Sacraments done; one on the Sacramental life in general, and one on Baptism in particular.

I'll post any changes in this rough outline of a schedule. Hope this is ok.

Someone turned up here with the search string "Vitam Impendere Vero English". It's from the header at the top of this page.

It means: To stake ones life on the Truth

Seamus and I are about to find out. If you’ve been reading the comments on the Purgatory threads, don’t be put off. This is a bit beyond what a new convert really needs to know. In fact, I’m tempted to move the discussion off-line so as not to confuse the issues at hand. The bottom line is that Purgatory is there to cleanse the soul before its trip to Heaven. The detailed minutiae are not quite so important at the early stages of looking at the Church.

Kevin, on the other hand, has a question that’s a bit more pertinent to the aim of this blog: what happens when you’re baptized. I’ll get to these, but it’s going to take me a little bit. This will probably be covered in a pair of posts I’m already working on.

Since this is a blog for potential converts, I don’t want to put anyone off with deep theological discussions that don’t really pertain to their examination of the Church. But what do YOU think? If they’re best left to Jimmy Akin or the Pontificator (who do more advanced work than I ever wanted to), then we can do that. If you want my lame excuse for an answer, we can do that too. However, be forewarned, there will come a point where I have to yield the more advanced questions to the more advanced experts.

“I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood...”
Hamlet Act I, Scene V

I had an e-mail exchange a couple of months ago with an interesting suggestion. Here’s the quote:

“Tony tells me that he’ll pray my way into heaven. Maybe someday you can explain that one to me.”

First off, if the person that sent me this is still reading here, I’m not trying to either pick a fight or pick on you. You asked, I’m simply offering the response (albeit belatedly). And to Tony – if I mischaracterize something from this exchange let me know. I wasn’t involved in this part of it directly, but only heard about it after the fact.

So, can a third party pray someone into heaven? The answer is yes, but…

It seems that power failures and internet servers don't mix well. Whodda thunk it?

Things seem to be back up and running now.

This comment was left in the Purgatory post below:
Every sin, even fully repented and forgiven sins where perfect contrition was present along with a rock solid purpose of amendment (in other words, one was "fully engaged in...forgiveness"), carry a temporal debt, and we still have to pay that debt either in this life, or in the next.

I looked all last weekend to see if I could find something that supports this idea – that all sin, even sins confessed with perfect contrition, bear some debt that must be paid. I could find nothing. I did find two quotes from St. Augustine that seemed to contradict it, but nothing that approached the issue directly.

On the way home this evening, I listened to EWTN radio. EWTN radio is new here in Dallas, so I haven't listened often. The Catholic Answers segment featured Bishop Morlino of Madison, Wisconsin. I thought I might give him a shot to get at the nature of Purgatory and the penal aspect of sins forgiven with perfect contrition.

I asked something like: “Hypothetically speaking, would a soul who confessed a sin with perfect contrition suffer for that sin in Purgatory after death?”

Bishop Morlino said that perfect contrition would be a very difficult thing to accomplish. It would involve a person being able turn away from all desire for sin. If a soul were able to confess sin to that extent, with complete contrition and a complete loss of desire for sin, then that soul would go directly to heaven without stopping in Purgatory.

Practically speaking, only the great saints could probably manage such a degree of contrition. But the reality is that the soul would then avoid Purgatory entirely. Purgatory is for cleansing unconfessed sins and sins imperfectly confessed during life. It seems to me that if you put forward the case that all sin bears purgatorial suffering, even if perfectly confessed, you are close to saying that Christ's redemption was not quite complete.

...on EWTN radio a little while ago, asking Bishop Morlino about Purgatory. More on this later - after the baby stops trying to type a blog post with her feet.

Some of you may have encountered Rod Dreher and his departure from the Catholic Church. It’s been all over the Catholic Blogosphere for a few days now. I, however, don’t get out much, so I didn’t see it until yesterday.

I’m not going to comment on Rod or his departure directly. I know Rod, though not well. Our sporatic correspondence goes back two or three years to around the time he moved to Dallas. I’m not going to comment directly here because I’ve already commented directly to Rod himself. Anything I say here may get painfully close to disclosure of private information, and I don’t really want to risk that.

But Rod’s well publicized departure brings up an interesting point on the submission of an individual to the Church. The Pontificator has an excellent post on the subject. There are plenty of others as well. But the important matter for a potential convert is this: properly understood, conversion to Catholicism is a one-way trip.

I distinctly remember the first time I tried to explain Purgatory to a pair of evangelicals that challenged me on the subject. We’d been discussing theology for more than two hours. They hit me with everything he had and I fielded most of their objections fairly well, though in a rudimentary way and rather unconvincing way. (This was shortly after I converted, at a point when I thought I knew what I was talking about, but really had only a hint of the depth of the faith.) I was tired and had to get on with other things – it was a slow work day, but getting busier. When they got to Purgatory, I thought for a few seconds before answering. I wanted to come up with a single sentence to sum it all up and be done. What I said was fast and simple, but it was also doctrinally in error. I screwed up.

It was one of those defining moments in my life as a hobby-apologist. I knew from their faces that it was over. They shut down entirely, closing me off as the heretic that I had just inadvertently proclaimed myself to be. I knew that I could never explain away what slipped past my lips. I could never recapture the truth. It was lost on them now, and would be forever – their minds were made up. All was done in the blink of a weary eye.

Purgatory is often one of the most divisive of issues between Catholics and Protestants – especially evangelical Protestants. In reality, it doesn’t have to be divisive at all. It just needs to be properly understood, both doctrinally and scripturally.

One of the interesting things about running a blog are the statistics you get about the blogs performance. For instance, I can see which post is the most read, which websites refer readers here and how often, and how many visits I get each day (even each hour of each day).

One of the more useful things on the stats page – well, sometimes it’s actually more amusing than anything else – are the search strings that people use to find this place. Search strings are the things you type into Google or Yahoo when you’re looking for something. When you run your search and click on the link, the stats counter records your arrival and I can see it the next day. The amusing things are the folks that come here looking for information on white water rafting, or advice on dealing with a condescending priest.

Every now and then a real gem appears in the search strings. Here’s one that I found recently:

“Is an indulgence earning your own salvation?”

That’s an excellent question, and the person that asked it must have gone away empty handed. After all, I haven’t written a word about indulgences, so how could they have found anything. Well, I can remedy that now.

So, what is an indulgence, and will it earn you a place in heaven?

This is a must read for parents these days. The manner of dress is particularly...well, just go read it. Nothing needs to be added. It's a scary world on a lot of different levels.

After a couple of weeks worth of discernment, and a particularly interesting couple of days, and the encouraging comments from the previous post, I've decided to keep the blog going. Now, there are going to be some difficulties, but I now have an idea of how to deal with them.

First off, the next three months will be quite challenging. I don't know that the first quarter of next year will be any better, but I do know that the fourth quarter of this year will be a bit rough. Because of this fact, I suspect the following...

Posts might be a bit scattered and irregularly timed. One way to keep track might be a Bloglines account. I put a subscribe button on the lower right sidebar to hook into a feed for this blog. That way, you'll be able to see each time I post something from Bloglines. If you don't want to mess with Bloglines, that's fine. The old fashioned stop-by-and-see-what's-up method will work just fine.

Another thing will be frequent hiatus's's' (Ok, what's the plural of hiatus? Hiatai?). For these times, I think I'll be able to give ample warning, rather than just vanishing for a couple of weeks.

That's it for now.