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With election season passions heating up, Catholics are more willing than ever to excommunicate each other online. But what, exactly, does it take to be put out of the Church? We asked the king of careful distinctions, Father Sebastian Walshe.
Cy Kellett:
Can we just get the bad people out of the Catholic Church? Father Sebastian Walsh joins us next.
Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending the Catholic faith. I’m Cy Kellett, your host. I don’t like to pick on Twitter too much. Lots of great stuff happens on social media and lots of people get a lot of positive things out of it, but one of the things you notice on Catholic Twitter is we tend to excommunicate each other a lot. There’s a lot of people who’ll be like throwing each other out, calling each other heretics, trying to drive one another out of the Church for various reasons.
It’s not to say that there aren’t heretics or there aren’t things that are really outrageous being said that need to be challenged on Twitter. But we thought with all of this kind of tendency to throw people out of the Church, to label people heretics, and sometimes it’s church leaders that we’re throwing out, well, why not ask somebody who really knows, a really top-notch philosopher and theologian, actually what does get you out of the Catholic Church? What gets you in? What do you need to have to be associated as a member of the Catholic Church, and what gets you out? Actually, I found myself surprised by his answers on both of those counts. Father Sebastian Walsh joins us in a second.
I want to remind you now to subscribe to Focus on Apple podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you listen. That way you’ll be notified when new episodes are available. While I’m asking you to do that, I’ll also ask you, please give us that five star review. Help us to grow the podcast by encouraging other people to listen to. It really makes a big difference. Otherwise, we’re going to have to throw you out of the Church. All right. You’re not Catholic. Well, no, I can’t do that. How do I get people out of the Church, or what do we do with people who are Catholic but don’t seem to really be Catholic? We’ll talk about that right now with Father Sebastian Walsh.
The spirit of kind of contention and also anxiety I think, people are worried about the fate of the Church at the moment has us in many instances kicking one another out of the Church. We wanted to talk to you about, okay, well, who’s a Catholic, who gets to say I’m a Catholic, and who’s abusing that term I suppose?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Absolutely.
Cy Kellett:
I thought what we would do, Father, is asking you about just kind of the bare minimum in the legal sense of what makes someone a Catholic and then ask you about … Like just for an example, someone will say, “Well, you can’t be Catholic and vote pro choice,” which we know is true, but that’s a moral judgment, not a judgment necessarily on your canonical standing so to speak.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, definitely.
Cy Kellett:
We want to distinguish those things.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Absolutely. Okay.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so let’s start with the basic minimum.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
The bare like bargain basement.
Cy Kellett:
What do I got to do? Yes.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
How do I qualify to be a member of the Catholic Church? Okay. The normal answer to that question is that you’ve been baptized by a Catholic priest, or you’ve been baptized into the Catholic Church. That’s the normal answer to that question, but I want to qualify that to some extent. There’s an interesting passage in I believe it’s Lumen Gentium. It’s one of the documents of Vatican II, and I think it’s Lumen Gentium that refers to catechumens as belonging to the Church.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Isn’t that interesting?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, yeah. That’s someone who’s preparing to enter the Church.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Someone who’s preparing who has not yet been baptized. If you’re talking about the bare minimum … You know where this came up? I’ll tell you, this is an interesting story. It’s a fascinating story. In Massachusetts, they’ve just recently started a new campus for Thomas Aquinas College, a new campus there. The state of Massachusetts of course decided that, well, you can live according to your Catholic principles, in other words you don’t have to pay for abortion and contraception, only if you serve only Catholics. Now, what’s fascinating about that legal requirement of Massachusetts is the state of Massachusetts has now put itself in the position of having to tell who’s Catholic and who’s not.
Cy Kellett:
Oh man.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Isn’t that amazing?
Cy Kellett:
It’s horrible actually.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
The state of Massachusetts has literally put themselves in a position, we judge now who counts as a Catholic and who doesn’t. If you don’t put in Catholics according to our judgment, now therefore you’re subject to these regulations where you have to now pay for contraception and abortion, right?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Striking, I mean, and shocking that that should be a requirement. This is what came up. A young man who was not baptized but who was interested in, was open to becoming a Catholic and even was interested in becoming a Catholic, asked if he could come to that campus. I got the text out of Lumen Gentium that says that the Church considers catechumens and those preparing for baptism as her own. I said, “I think that you would count as Catholic if you were in RCIA on your way,” meaning the Church would consider you as her own, right?
Now, I think they ended up, because of the possibility of that triggering problems in their first year on campus, they recommended that that young man go out to the West Coast campus, which I think he did, which doesn’t have the same requirements. But it’s shocking that literally the state of Massachusetts has now put itself in the position of having to judge who’s a Catholic and who’s not, okay?
Cy Kellett:
That’s horrible. I mean, the whole tradition of American law is not to do those kinds of things.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, good luck, right? Good luck with settling that legal issue.
Cy Kellett:
Right, yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
In any case, the reason I bring it up is because in some sense, even catechumens could call themselves Catholic in some sense. The really funny story is from the ancient church when Saint Ambrose was actually elected bishop before his baptism.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, right, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
The day he was baptized, they made him Bishop. They consecrated in Bishop and everything like that. Saint Jerome never could get over that. He used to call Saint Ambrose an old crow because he got to be bishop, elected Bishop even before he was baptized.
But anyway, now that goes back to a theological point. I want to talk about the theological basis of even saying that in some sense of catechumen is a Catholic. Saint Thomas Aquinas talks about degrees of membership in the mystical body of Christ, and what is the bare bones, basic thing that you need to be a member of the mystical body of Christ? The answer is faith. You need to have faith in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Even if it’s implicit faith, even if it’s faith in its very simplest form, faith is what you need to be a member of the body of Christ. Even catechumens have faith. Presuming that they’ve already accepted the fundamental principles of the creed, they have faith, and so that makes you a member of the mystical body of Christ.
Then you need to be sacramentally incorporated, right? Included in faith is some kind of at least implicit desire for baptism. Then once you’re actually baptized, you are now canonically a member of the Catholic faith. Once you’ve been baptized according to the Catholic rites and in union with the Catholic Church, you are from that point forward always a Catholic, and you can’t get out of it after that moment. Once you have been baptized Catholic-
Cy Kellett:
You can’t get out of it.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
There’s no turning back, right. Just like you can’t get out of your own family. Once your parents have begotten you, you’re their kid and there’s no turning back. You can’t get another father and mother, and you won’t have another mother other than the Catholic Church once you’ve been-
Cy Kellett:
This goes back to the Catholic true belief that the sacraments are effective.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yes.
Cy Kellett:
They actually accomplish what they say they accomplish, and you are a new creation when you’re baptized.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, yeah. Independent of your own particular devotion or something like that. Now, the only thing that could happen is if someone were baptized against their will, then the baptism would be invalid.
Cy Kellett:
Right, okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
But you don’t have to be morally perfect to be baptized. In fact, that’s a presupposition is you’re not morally perfect when you’re baptized. That’s the bare minimum canonically. You’re baptized within the Catholic Church. If you’re baptized by a Lutheran or someone else, then you wouldn’t be considered a Catholic, but the baptism in the Catholic Church would make you a Catholic, okay?
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Now, for those who have been baptized outside the Church, still that sacrament baptism really is somehow through the Church. Therefore, as soon as they make an act of faith in the Catholic faith, then they become members of the Catholic Church formerly at that point, if they make some kind of public declaration of faith at that point. That would be the canonical trigger so speak for those who are baptized in Lutheran, Methodist, some other Protestant denomination or something like that.
Cy Kellett:
I’ve wondered about this. If someone is say baptized Lutheran, makes an act of faith, comes into the Catholic Church, do they have all the rights of every other Catholic at that point, rights to the other sacraments and all that?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yep. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. Now-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay. They can go to confession right away?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Oh, yeah. In fact, this is an interesting thing. Very often when people are received into the Church, usually when someone’s received into the Church that’s already been baptized somewhere else, what happens is that reception includes confirmation and it includes their first holy communion. But to prepare for their first holy communion, they usually have to go to confession, and therefore they usually receive confession before they’re formally received into the Church. Isn’t that fascinating?
Cy Kellett:
Yes, yeah. That makes sense though.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
This is interesting. Even a non-Catholic who hasn’t expressed like a desire to enter the Church formally yet, if they were on their death bed and there was someone who was baptized and they said, “I believe in the sacrament of confession that you Catholics have,” and they express a correct faith in the sacrament of confession, they could receive confession even though they weren’t formally a member of the Catholic Church or even in RCIA or something like that.
Cy Kellett:
Right, okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Confession is something that you can do with anyone who’s baptized.
Cy Kellett:
This is a very important ground to kind of establish before we talk about these, us throwing each other out of the Church as we keep doing, especially on Twitter where people throw each other out of the Church. But that the basic ground is very, very solid and firm, that your baptism in the Catholic Church, reconfigures you and gives you characters that are beyond human power. This is divine, and it’s not that easy. You’re not going to get rid of that, that easily.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
That’s right.
Cy Kellett:
You can’t slip out, but you can get out. Canonically, you can get out of the Catholic Church.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
So how do you do that?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, so what would happen is that if someone formally renounced their Catholic faith and decided to join some other religious denomination for example or even just to become atheist but they made a formal public renunciation of their Catholic faith, canonically they would no longer be subject to the Catholic Church.
There was an interesting case. This is a few years ago under Pope Benedict. You know that if two people are baptized in the Catholic Church, regardless of whether or not they’re practicing, if their marriage is not blessed by the Catholic Church, in other words if it’s not before a witness approved by the Catholic Church, then that marriage is sacramentally invalid, right? Even if you had two baptized Catholics, neither of whom were practicing, but they went to get married somewhere before a justice of the peace or something, the Church would say that’s an invalid marriage.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
There was this one exception that was in the Canon law. It said if one or both, if whoever it is that was baptized Catholic formally renounces their Catholic faith, then the marriage would become valid. Isn’t that fascinating?
Cy Kellett:
That’s strange.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Because then they would be essentially like two Protestants getting married. Now, that loophole was closed. In other words, that was in the Canon law, and what was happening is that people wanted to get married sacramentally, validly, so they went and renounced their faith so that they could get a valid marriage. Isn’t that crazy?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Therefore, Pope Benedict, he closed that canonical loophole.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. You don’t want to have an incentive, a perverse incentive like that to renounce your faith. Yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, right.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so all right. Let’s take the example, because it’s helpful and instructive, of Adolf Hitler. Baptized as a Catholic.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yep.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so I don’t believe there’s ever any formal renunciation of the faith in the case of Adolf Hitler.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Not that I know of.
Cy Kellett:
But if you live as an anti-Christ essentially where you’re the head of an anti-Christian murderous ideology, are you still a Catholic or …
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, great question. Well, now that goes to … Okay. We’ve been talking about the bare bones minimum qualification for being a member of the Catholic Church, but now let’s talk about what’s most important and full membership in the Catholic Church.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Saint Thomas Aquinas says, “Okay, what you need bare bones is you need faith. You need faith.” Then Saint Thomas says, “But someone who has faith but not charity is like a dead limb, like a gangrenous limb who’s physically attached to the body, but not alive.” You’re like a dead limb. You’re a member of the mystical body of Christ, but you’re essentially dead.
Really for true and full membership in the Catholic Church, what you need is charity. Anyone who’s fallen from a state of grace is separated from the fullness of membership in the Catholic Church and the mystical body. That should give us pause before we immediately start pointing fingers like, “You’re outside the camp because you’re a bad person.”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, you’re out.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Well, guess what? I mean, that might’ve happened to you many times in your life if you’ve ever committed a mortal sin. That being so, someone like Adolf Hitler who gave all the evidence of, as you said, being an anti-Christ and having no charity in his heart, he could have been still formally a member-
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
At least from the standpoint of his outward baptism or whatever else, canonical status, but without charity, he’s not a member in the full sense and if he dies, then he’s forever separated. Whoever dies without charity will forever be separated from the Catholic Church, right? That’s what you really need at the moment of death.
Now, in the case of someone Adolf Hitler, and now I’ll also add to this list many of the people who today call themselves Catholic but stand outwardly for things against the teaching of the Catholic Church… Not to compare all of them to Adolf Hitler.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
I’m just saying that they have that in common. If you’re a pro-abortion politician, if you’re whatever, or even just an ordinary person who just says, “I’m in favor of abortion,” or, “I’m in favor of same-sex unions being acquainted to marriage,” or whatever, in a case like that, what you have there is a renunciation of the faith that hasn’t been necessarily made publicly and formally, but de facto.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
You’ve fallen into heresy.
Cy Kellett:
De facto renunciation, okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Usually what will happen is a church will declare, if someone’s a public figure and they’ve done that for a long enough and publicly rejected the teachings of the Church, the Church at that point has an obligation to declare this person has now ex-communicated themselves. Saint Thomas will say anyone who denies any fundamental dogma of the faith, teaching of the faith, excludes himself from membership of the Church at that point. Because remember, faith is the key thing. The absolute bare bones minimum you need is faith. If someone has rejected the faith, and that means rejecting any element of the faith. It means if I stand up here and I say, “I do not believe that Mary was conceived immaculately,” and I understand what that means, I have by that fact ex-communicated myself.
Cy Kellett:
Yes, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
The Church may not declare that excommunication, but in fact that’s what you’ve done. Anyone who rejects any article of the creed, anything defined in a formal way as Church teaching has excluded themselves from membership in the Catholic Church at that point.
Cy Kellett:
That includes not just doctrinal, but moral teachings of the Church.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Also moral things. For example, the Church teaches authoritatively that abortion is intrinsically evil. Anyone who stands up and says abortion is good sometimes has excluded themselves from membership in the Catholic Church.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, so I think some of the frustration then is that we do have politicians who will persist in this year after year after year, and no bishop ever formally says, “This person …” It would be maybe instructive to the faithful and helpful to the faithful if they would. I know a lot of people see this in political terms like, well, that would just cause division and upset, and maybe there are prudential judgments that have to be made in that regard. But in a practical sense, it would seem to me if you have a politician, for example, who’s just embracing the full spectrum of the sexual revolution in contradistinction to the obvious teaching of the Church, of Christ himself and of the Church, then at some point a bishop should say, “But that excludes you from communion with us until you straighten that out.”
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yes, absolutely. To be fair, there’s a whole canonical process because what you don’t want is just arbitrary just declarations, okay?
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
There is a whole canonical process for doing that. As you mentioned, there aren’t that many bishops that follow that process and actually take it to its logical conclusion. You could put someone on canonical trial for heresy for holding a position like abortion is not intrinsically evil, that sometimes abortion is good. You could put someone on trial for that.
Now, when that happens, what the bishop first needs to do is he needs to do a private correction of the person. He needs to either send a letter or meet with them in person, and preferably he would invite the person to meet with them personally privately and talk over their difficulties, because some people are actually in good faith and they actually think the Church allows for Catholics to believe these different things. They’ve just been badly formed or whatever.
Cy Kellett:
Right. Okay, yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Then you correct them and you say to them, “Look, here are the things that you think are true but are contrary to the teaching of the Church. Unless you recant these things publicly, then you can no longer count yourself a member of the Catholic Church, right? That’s usually the first step.
If the person then obstinately perseveres in rejecting some fundamental teaching of the faith, then the next step the bishop usually does is he doesn’t excommunicate the person, but rather he denies them the ability to receive communion, which sounds like excommunication and certainly the name excommunication comes from that. But he says, “You’re no longer able to receive communion in my diocese.” Often that happens in a private letter. Sometimes, and I think it ought to happen more often, publicly that the Bishop alerts everyone in the diocese, “Look, this person is not a Catholic in good standing. Therefore, they cannot receive communion.”
Cy Kellett:
That would make sense I would think, because I mean how else … Would he inform all of the priests privately? Like how would-
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah. He would probably send a letter to the priests or something like that so that the priests knew. But I think in cases of public scandal where someone’s a public figure, then they have to make public reparation and there has to be public acknowledgement of the fact that they’ve put themselves outside the Catholic Church.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
That would be the next step. That would be the fact that they are no longer able to receive communion. That’s not a judgment about the state of their soul. A lot of people are always saying like, “You’re playing God by saying that you can tell who’s worthy to receive communion or not.” It’s not a judgment about whether they’re subjectively worthy to receive communion.
Cy Kellett:
No.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
It’s a judgment about objectively whether or not you should give them communion, right? There’s two people’s conferences involved here. There’s a person who’s receiving, who may in their own conscience honestly believe that they’re worthy to receive communion, but then there’s a person who has to administer communion, and they have to make a judgment on their conscious whether they should communion to someone who has outwardly rejected the Catholic faith.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
If a man for example came to be baptized or ordained and they said, “Well, I accept everything in the creed except for this thing about Jesus being the son of God,” and maybe they’ve got complete misunderstandings. Try as you might, you’ve tried to explain to them what the Church’s teaching is about that. “What I don’t mean is that God didn’t come down like Zeus and then carnally reproduced or whatever,” but in their head, that’s all they can get. Subjectively they may not be actually rejecting the faith in their soul, and you can’t make a judgment about what’s going on in their conscience, only God can do that, but outwardly you can’t baptize them.
Cy Kellett:
No, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Like someone says, “Jesus is not the son of God.” “I’m sorry. You can’t be baptized.”
Cy Kellett:
No, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
“I’m sorry. You can’t become a priest.” That’s not a judgment about their soul. It’s a judge about their objective outward suitability to receive a sacrament. That’s what’s happening with regard to the sacrament of the Eucharist when a Bishop says, “You’re not eligible to receive communion in our diocese.”
Cy Kellett:
There’s a case, I think it was in Toronto back in the 1970s, where a bishop did this with some leaders of the mafia. Okay, and I don’t think that that upsets people so much, because no one goes, “Well, I’m a member of the mafia and that offends me.” But there is a real danger in these sexual revolution things, because so many lay Catholics have bought into the sexual revolution and don’t see how it contradicts the charity that Christ taught. I think bishops feel like, “Well, if I do this with this politician, maybe there’s 20,000 people who just will stop going to church.” In a certain sense, I want to be flippant about this, but you might see that as a positive that those 20,000 people would stop going to church, because that would mean that they would have a crisis of conscience that might actually allow them to correct their conscience.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
That’s exactly right. That’s the very reason why you make these kinds of corrections. To be honest, who needs to see that being a mafioso where you’re going around knocking people off for money reasons is outside the bounds of Catholic morality? But there are a lot of people who need to see whether or not trying to engage in a same-sex union, or same-sex behavior, or fornication or whatever, there are a lot of people who don’t see that as inconsistent with Church teaching. Therefore, it’s exactly the bishop’s job to say, “Look, I’m going to scream loud and clear with big neon lights, this is contrary to Catholic teaching. You can’t be a Catholic if you think this.”
Therefore, the bishop’s obligation is especially in those areas where the faithful have a lot of difficulty in seeing the truth about some matter of Catholic doctrine. That’s when the Bishop has his obligation to publicly make known that these figures who have denied aspects of Church teaching are no longer eligible to receive communion. It should produce exactly what you said, a crisis of conscience that will make them say to themselves, “Gosh, I wonder if I’m really a Catholic of good standing.”
Cy Kellett:
Right, right. I suppose there is also the other thing just about wanting to keep our good reputation, and the bishop who does that is immediately the enemy of everyone in the media, and he’ll be mocked, and he’ll be-
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah. There are a lot of good bishops out there, at least a few that do that, and they really become targets. I think of Bishop … Why am I blanking right now? The Bishop of Springfield, Illinois there, Bishop Paprocki, right?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
He’s been really wonderful about that and very clear, very charitable. He’s a Canon lawyer. He doesn’t make any off the cuff kind of statements. He’s very measured in his statements, perfectly in line with Church teaching and Canon law and everything like that. Yet, he’s crucified in the media over and over again, and even I suspect even by some of his own flock, and maybe even priests there have problems with that.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, sure. Right, yeah. Well, let me ask you this then, because it seems to me that you could … Also, there’s the other thing about the person who privately votes for a pro-life candidate and maybe does so because they are just not making clear moral distinctions.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
You mean a pro-abortion candidate.
Cy Kellett:
Did I say pro-life candidate?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, privately votes for a pro-abortion candidate.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. This is not a public act. There’s no scandal involved. The person did wrong, but may not subjectively know they’re wrong. I want to just throw two statements out at you that I think are true, and many people see them as contradictory, but you tell me if they’re not true. One is you cannot as a Catholic vote for a pro-choice candidate. If you vote for-
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Because they’re pro-choice.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, because they’re pro choice, right. But if you do that, you’re still a Catholic. You’ve committed a sin, but you still a Catholic. Do you see what I mean?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, yeah.
Cy Kellett:
Both things are true, even though I think many people really don’t like that second one.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah. Let me-
Cy Kellett:
There’s a lot of people want to say, “No, you’re not. You’re out.”
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Okay, let me make a distinction there.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Because remember what I said before. Saint Thomas said that anyone who denies some fundamental article of the faith, does it and who does it knowingly and obstinately, that person has excluded themselves from the Catholic Church, okay.
Let me bring about two different moral cases. Let’s say someone commits the sin of fornication, but they admit that it’s wrong. They’ve sinned, and therefore they’ve lost charity, but they haven’t lost faith. On the other hand, let’s say you have someone who commits fornication, but thinks it’s not wrong.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, okay.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Or even someone who doesn’t commit fornication, but thinks that it’s not wrong. You know, like the parent who says like, “Well, just make sure you use protection, and therefore you’ll be okay.”
Cy Kellett:
Right, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
That person has actually objectively rejected some teaching of the Church in their own mind, even if they haven’t publicly made that known to other people. Therefore, if they do it knowingly and obstinately, in other words they actually know that this is against the Church teaching and they obstinately persevere in that false opinion-
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, like, “I don’t care. I don’t agree.” Yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Then in God’s eyes, they’ve excluded themselves from the Catholic Church.
Cy Kellett:
Whoa.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
From the Church’s perspective, they will treat them as if they’re members of the Church. Canonically, there’s no issue.
Cy Kellett:
I see.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
It’s really just between them and God at that point. Therefore there’s some … You need to make that distinction there. We’re not the ones who outwardly are making those judgements, because it’s only with public outward manifest grave sin or renunciations of teachings of the Church that the Church then gets involved canonically and says, “You can’t receive communion. You can’t be a member of the Church.” Okay, so does that make sense?
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Does that? Okay.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense actually. Yeah. The distinction between losing charity and losing faith is a really important one.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, it is.
Cy Kellett:
Because you can choose uncharitable actions but know that they’re wrong. I mean, you hear confessions. That’s pretty much what we do all the time.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
I have personal experience of doing that. I mean, I don’t even need … We all do it.
Cy Kellett:
I guess so, yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
No one needs to hear confessions and know that we do that. It’s just like I did something wrong. I knew it was wrong. I did it.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Are you implying that I might have sinned?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
No, no, I’m not.
Cy Kellett:
I can’t believe it.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
I’m making it say that a fact on public television or publicly, I have sinned and I’m-
Cy Kellett:
Okay, fair enough.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
That’s me. That’s me.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, sure. Okay, so now, however, there’s this other thing that I think that we do where we complicate or maybe we go, “Well …” Like there’s people, I’ve actually heard people say this. I actually think the people who said this said this in good conscience. They weren’t trying to be evil saying this. They’re trying to reason this out. This person said, “Well, statistically, I read that when you have a pro-choice president, you actually have less abortion,” and then they explain it one way or another. I’m against abortion, so I voted for the pro-choice candidate.
I think that there’s a convolution there that you shouldn’t be participating in, but the person I don’t think has bad will in figuring that out. I mean, maybe there’s a little motivated reasoning there where I like this guy better than that guy, so I’m motivated in that way, but it doesn’t seem to me like there’s an outright denial. So what do you make of a situation like that?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah. It’s funny, because that’s a real instance. A friend of mine and his dad had exactly that disagreement where the dad was saying, “I want to vote for the pro-abortion guy because statistically that results in fewer abortions being committed,” or whatever else, okay.
Cy Kellett:
Right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Now, there’s two holes in that argument. The first one is there are all sorts of conditions that are outside of the control. In other words, the president’s view, for example, about whether abortion is right or wrong is not the single determining factor about how many abortions take place under his presidency.
Cy Kellett:
Sure, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
The fact of the matter is there’s so many other factors that might be involved there. Even if you were to somehow demonstratively link the fact that if the president is against abortion, then abortions rise and that happens every time and whatever, even if you could show that demonstrative link, what’s important here is this. We’re looking not at just the physical fact of abortion, of people dying. We’re looking at the moral fact of people in our community thinking it’s good.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right, right. Yes.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Let me give you two different examples. Let’s say a man is driving a car, he has a heart attack and he plows into a bunch of schoolchildren, and 18 children die from that accident. Then you have another guy who actually hates school children, and he’s driving in his car and he intentionally plows into a group of school children there, but because he just can’t help himself he only finds the first small group he can find and only eight kids die. What’s the worst case there?
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, murder is worse than an accident.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah, exactly. When you’re doing it on purpose.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
That’s a whole different moral reality. You can’t just say, “Well, I’m just about reducing the number of actual deaths.” No. What we’re about is changing hearts and the intent to kill innocent life. That’s what needs to be stopped in our culture more than anything, and there’s no way you’re going to help that by voting for someone who thinks it’s good to kill their children sometimes, that abortion is sometimes good.
Cy Kellett:
That makes perfect sense to me, Father. Just one last question before we go about us laity. I do think we’ve become … Maybe stay off Twitter if you-
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
I’m not on Twitter. I’m not on Facebook. I’m not on Instagram. I don’t even have a phone that has GPS. I’m very-
Cy Kellett:
But I mean, it seems to me that we should, especially in public discourse, be clear about which things are consistent with Catholic teaching, are consistent with the Lord’s will that he expressed and continues to express through the Church, and which things are inconsistent. But there’s another tendency to go a little beyond that and excommunicate each other, like you’re not a Catholic. I just want to … Where might the line be that’s healthy?
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
Yeah. I think Jesus gave us instruction. He talks about if your brother goes and sins against you, then he gives a whole layer of things you do.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah, that’s true. He did, yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
He says go first to him privately. If that doesn’t work, then go to him with two or three brothers and try and correct him there. If he doesn’t do that, then go to the church. If he doesn’t listen to the church, then treat him as a publican or a tax collector or Gentile. Jesus, at some point he says, yeah, at a certain point if the Church then makes a public declaration, then you say, “Okay, now we treat you as outside the Catholic Church.”
That can happen in two different levels. I mentioned the first one where a bishop says publicly, “You can’t receive communion,” and then there’s a more serious case where he says, “You’re actually excommunicated,” and that means you’re completely outside of the boundaries of the Catholic Church now. This is what Saint Paul says, handing his body over to Satan, that sort of excommunication in the fullest sense.
Really when it comes to the average ordinary Catholic, we don’t have the competence to make that judgment. The Church has a competence to make that judgment. We should just assume that everyone is considered by the Church to be Catholic who’s been baptized unless the Church has made a public statement to the contrary, and we shouldn’t yell and tell people, “You’re not Catholic.” It’s not our competency to make that judgment. But we do have the competency to make fraternal correction and to say, “By doing such a thing or by denying this truth, that would put you outside of the Catholic Church. You need to repent. You need to reject these false things.” That’s as far as an ordinary Catholic can do, always with the idea I want to help this person return to union with the Church.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, yeah.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
I mean honestly, if you had a limb that was suffering from a disease and the doctor came to you and said, “Well, what do you want to do? We can try and save it or we can just cut it off,” I bet you everyone’s going to say, “Is there any chance of saving it?”
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. That’s a-
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
They’re not going to cut it off. If you have real love for Jesus Christ and his members, including the ones that are dead, right, you’ll do everything in your power to get that person back and to heal them. Think of those Catholics that you think of as being far off and away from the Church, think of those Catholics the way you would think of your own arm. Then if you did that, you’d really have the spirit of Christ.
Cy Kellett:
Thank you, father. Thanks very much.
Fr. Sebastian Walshe
You’re welcome.
Cy Kellett:
I was actually surprised to hear Father say that the thing that gets you into the Church on the most basic level is faith. I shouldn’t be surprised at that, but you just get habituated to a certain way of thinking. That doesn’t eliminate the importance of baptism as the actual entry into the Church, but you become associated with the Church as soon as you begin to have faith. We should be maybe nourishing of people’s faith. That’s kind of a basic one.
When we see that person who is advocating something that is clearly, come on, that’s not Catholic, that’s your own innovation or maybe a trend that you’ve latched onto, we really should be building one another up in the faith, more than anything else. Instead of trying to get each other out, we should try to be drawing each other in. Faith is the way that we are connected to all the good gifts that God gives us in the Church.
Thanks for joining us. I want to remind you, you can email us focus@catholic.com. focus@catholic.com. Maybe you’ve got a future episode you’ve got in mind, like, “Why don’t they deal with this? This is important.” Actually, a lot of times the reason we’re not dealing with it, we didn’t think of it. So if you think of it, send us that email at focusatcatholic.com.
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I’m Cy Kellett, your host. This is Catholic Answers Focus. We’ll see you again right here, God willing, when we do this again.