In today’s open mailbag episode Trent answers a variety of questions from his patrons, including on the justice of hell, the nature of human cloning, how to convince someone to save sex for marriage, and how to resolve an apparent conflict between Rerum Novarum and Fratelli Tutti.
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Moving is hard. There’s no other way to put it. Graciously my father-in-law offered me a conference room at his work to be able to record my podcasts. We kind of packed up almost everything we own into a single pod storage unit. We actually couldn’t fit everything into the pod. We had a backup pod, but I didn’t want to spend $2,000 shipping a desk and a lamp. I mean, I love lamp, who doesn’t love lamp. Anyone catch the reference there? But I’m not going to spend $2,000 to ship it across the country. But I did take out of the pod… When you’re traveling across country, you put 98% of what you own in a storage, moving truck, a moving pod, and then two to 5% of it, you just pack into your cars.
I remember the day actually, when I was a young whippersnapper, when I was traveling across country to finish my studies at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, everything I owned I could fit into my Toyota Corolla. I remember everything I owned were just… It was closed. Basically, I just took my clothes, put them into the trunk of my car. I had a laundry basket with more clothes and a few books, put it in my car, drove across country. My, how things have changed. So I managed so to keep my podcast recording equipment to be able to record wonderful podcast episodes for you. And today is no exception. So today we’re going to do an open mailbag episode. So if you are a premium subscriber to trenthornpodcast.com, you have the ability to submit questions that I’ll answer here in the open mailbag episodes. And if you caught yesterday’s episode, you’ll know that I have another benefit for our patrons. If you go to trenthornpodcast.com and become a premium subscriber, you can even pay for all 12 months at once and you get a discount if you do so.
If you do that, you get access to my new catechism study series. Each episode is about a half hour long, they’re scheduled to debut Monday at 8:00 AM. I try to do the study series a long time ago, but it didn’t quite reach the takeoff speed on the tarmac. But now they’re done. We have all the first, the 35 episodes are complete because I teach these as part of my courses at Homeschool Connection. So if you want to understand the whole catechism become a premium subscriber every Monday check in at 8:00 AM, and you can watch these episodes, are about 30 minutes long. And also when you’re a premium subscriber, you can submit questions for open mailbag episodes like we have today.
So we’re going to start today’s episode with our gold level subscribers. So they kind of get first dibs when it comes to submitting the questions. Here’s the first one, “Do you ever try varying your approach to an apologetics topic? Sometimes it can seem like certain questions have go-to answers, which are great, and they’re go-to for a reason, but the success of the argument could depend on the listener, such that a new sort answer might be necessary.” I think that’s right, people are complicated. Jesus said in the gospels, “Where your treasure is there also your heart will be.” So we want to reach minds, but we also want to reach people’s hearts. I remember once I was talking with a young woman at the university campus about abortion, actually, and I gave her the standard pro-life arguments and none of them hit until I looked in her backpack and saw that she had a little Israeli flag pin.
And so I recognized that she was Jewish or at least Israeli and probably Jewish if she’s from Israel. And I told her half my family is Jewish and we started talking. And I talked about how I oppose the dehumanization of the unborn, because the same kind of dehumanizing tactics were levied against Jewish people, just like in the Holocaust, Jewish people were called parasites. People call the unborn parasites because they’re unwanted. And I made the parallels for her and it stuck for her because it had a personal connection to our ethnic and religious heritage. So the how it goes when you reach people, you got to see, okay, what is the thing they care a lot about and how can I connect to that, whether it’s an ethical issue, whether it is a religious issue, whatever it may be, I need to find out what will be effective for them. And also if they’re a person who is seeking out the truth, they may have heard the same kinds of apologetic arguments over and over again and not been moved by them.
So if you have a new argument or a new way of approaching things, it can really stop and make someone think. For example, in my recent interview with Austin Suggs, The Gospel Simplicity he mentioned in that interview, how in my rebuttal videos, I had made an argument related to the authority of Protestantism versus the authority of Catholicism he had not thought of before. And I’m not aware of many other apologists who have pressed this line of argument. And it basically goes like this, if you’re a Protestant who rejects Catholic arguments for authority, ask yourself this question are the Protestant arguments for authority stronger than the Catholic arguments? So the Protestant arguments for a particular 66 book candidate of scripture and Sola scriptura, are those arguments stronger than or weaker, I should say, are they weaker than the Catholic arguments for authority? Because if they are weaker and you accept them, you should accept the Catholic arguments as well. And Austin said he hadn’t really thought of it that way before.
So I think as apologists, and I’ve learned this a lot, especially from my colleagues like Jimmy Akin, always trying to approach a subject in a new and fresh way or giving it a different perspective to help it connect with people. All right. So here’s the next question, “Civil marriage versus Catholic marriage. My son has an evangelical girlfriend and asked why can’t we just marry in civil court?” Well, why do you have to get married in civil court at all? Why can’t you guys just have your best friend marry you in his backyard? You’d recognize that’s not a marriage if the state is not involved. You’re citizens of the state so you need to have the state involved, the representative of the state, whether it’s a duly authorized pastor, a justice of the peace, sea captain, whoever it may be, an agent of the state has to be involved for the wedding, the marriage, to be valid in the eyes of the state.
If you’re a citizen of the church, if you belong to the Catholic church, a representative of the church has to be present in order for your marriage to be valid in the eyes of the church. If you’re Catholic, you’re held to those standards as a member of the church. If it’s two Protestants getting married, that’s different. They’re not held to the same standards. We would just say, their marriage is valid and sacramental provided they’re both validly baptized and they entered into what we recognize as marriage. At the very least, it’s a monogamous lifelong union of one man and one woman. So just to summarize the argument, you hear people say all the time, why do I have to get married in the church? What does it matter where I get married? Well, just as the state won’t recognize your marriage done in somebody’s backyard that your friend is doing, the church cannot recognize marriages that are not done without a representative of the church present.
Here’s the next gold level question. “GK Chesterton said that original sin was the only Christian doctrine that’s been empirically validated by 2000 years of history. However, it seems our culture has grown very skeptical of original sin. Is empirical evidence sufficient to demonstrate original sin. How do we best respond to the challenge that we’re fast learners of doing evil?” Well, I would say, look, the concepts of good and evil only makes sense if you have free will, the ability to choose good or evil. We don’t talk about lions, or tigers, or monkeys, or dolphins being evil, I think dolphins are actually somewhat evil. The only animal that we know of that kill for fun. But still technically it’s not evil. So I think when you compare human behavior and animal behavior, we can see there is something wrong with human beings. We’re failing to rise above our animal natures.
Now, when it comes to original sin, it’s a doctrine. It’s a doctrine of the faith. It’s not something you can scientifically prove. What you can show from the empirical data is that human beings are broken. We’re not born good as certain enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau would have you think. We’re not born good. Look at children when they’re born, they’re born with selfish attitudes and only gets worse over time if they’re not corrected and conformed away from their originally sinful behavior. Now I think it’s important when you talk about original sin, original sin is not a black goopy thing that infected human beings, original sin is not a positive thing, it’s an absence, it’s a deficiency. In the East, they’re more apt to use the term ancestral sin rather than original sin.
The idea here is Adam and Eve sinned, lost the grace of God that gave them harmony with God, friendship with God, and they lost that grace and could not pass it on to their descendants. And so we are born in a state of spiritual death and it is through baptism we receive those graces, not the exact same ones that Adam and Eve had in relationship with God, but we receive back that relationship of being a son or daughter of God, we receive it back in baptism. Now we don’t have the exact same relationship because Adam and Eve would never have died if they had not sinned against God. Now in baptism, we become children of God, but we still have our fallen human nature, which means we can still suffer death. It’s only in the resurrection through Jesus Christ that we reach our final glorified nature that God intends for us.
All right. So those are the gold level questions that kind of get first dibs. Weren’t able to get through all of them. And there’s no I’m going to be able to get through all of the other patron questions that are submitted, but there are many good ones that were submitted. So I’ll try to get through the other ones that come from our other tiers. Remember, if you want to submit questions for episodes like this, go to trenthornpodcast.com. To become a premium subscriber, get access to the catechism study series, the ability to comment on episodes.
All right, so let’s start with the questions. “If Jesus can’t choose to sin because of his divine nature, then what good was it to allow himself to be tempted? Temptation only means something if a person can actually choose to do the thing he is being tempted by.” Well, this objection kind of thinks of Jesus like he’s some kind of unfeeling robot and that he’s always programmed to do good and so temptation doesn’t matter. Hebrews 4:15 makes very clear, we have one high priest, Jesus Christ, who identifies with us in every way, except for sin, that he felt hunger, he felt thirsty, he felt pain and he felt temptation. Not that he experienced sin, but he was enticed or he was tested to do evil, given the opportunity to do evil and he didn’t mindlessly or robotically choose to do good, Jesus is the good, he is divine. He is Yahweh. He is God incarnate. And so he exemplifies the good itself in choosing to do good and to not give into temptation.
And so he feels those same temptations, feels those same desires, but chooses to not act upon them because he has perfect goodness itself. And because when we are conformed to Christ image, we can do that in this life, at least in part, and then in the next life, when we were in heaven, we will fully share in this communicable or shareable attribute of God, which should be the attribute of not committing sins. We won’t be do everything like God, won’t be all powerful. Won’t be all knowing, but we will be imprecatory. Well, sorry, impeccable not imprecatory. Imprecatory is like making a curse upon someone. We will have impeccability in that we will not… God is impeccable. He does not commit any sins. We won’t commit any sins either when we enter into heaven, though, we can partially emulate that in this life by not giving into temptation, knowing that Jesus was tempted as well and being filled with the Holy spirit, filled with the spirit of Christ, we can do likewise.
“How do we make sense of divine immutability? Doesn’t the Holy Spirit change when he deifies us? Immutability confuses me regarding the third person of the Trinity.” So immutability is an attribute of God that says, God does not change. In the letter of James, it says, “All good gifts come from the father of lights in whom there is no shadow or variant due to change.” So if God is just pure goodness, existence or being itself, thinking about St. Thomas Aquinas, he said that everything around us has actual and potential in it. The only reason things change in this world is because there’s an unmoved mover, an ultimate source of change and existence. That’s God. So God himself does not undergo any kind of change, which is good because you don’t want God to be goodness itself and all Holy one minute and then become some kind of evil monster the next minute. God is constant. He is the unchanging foundation of all reality. So he does not change. We change.
So when God sends his spirit into our hearts, and of course we always are using this kind of anthropomorphically, it’s not like the Holy spirit has to travel. The Holy spirit doesn’t have to go down to TSA and check his bags and get on a plane and be sent physically into our hearts. The sending does not speak about what the spirit does per se, as an action involving change, rather just talking about something that changes in us. So when the Holy Spirit sanctifies us, or when God creates the world, when God creates the world, God doesn’t change, the world changes. It becomes real. When God sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts, the Holy Spirit as the divine person does not change, but we change. So it’s always important to remember when you talk about the actions of God in salvation history and God’s relationship to his creation, God being immutable does not change because he’s perfect goodness and existence itself, but God can affect the world, and in doing so, we change as a result.
All right, what else do we have here? The next two questions deal with hell, “How do you respond to an atheist who asks do I deserve eternal torture, referring to the doctrine of hell?” Another question says, “Hey, Trent, my friend fell away from the faith this year. Now he says, I don’t think God would send someone to hell for searching for the truth. I think it’s a reasonable thing to say, but I don’t think it’s absolutely true. How should I respond?” I think the problem with these questions or these objections, not that there’s a problem with asking them, but the problem is with the mindset behind them, that it sees hell is kind of an arbitrary punishment that’s foisted upon us. I think a lot of people, when they think of someone going to hell, they think about Jack Chick tracts. Have you ever read a Jack Chick tract? They’re very McCobb. They represent a very fundamentalist view of Protestant Christianity, even many Protestants that I know would not agree with the things that Jack Chick says, but you can find these comics everywhere.
My friend, and colleague Jimmy Akin, actually met Jack Chick once. He met him, wrote a whole article about it and he sketched a drawing of Chick, because Chick was this conspiracy theorist who thought the Jesuits were out to kill him. And so he always tried to hide his identity. No one even knew what Jack Chick really looked like and then Jimmy drew the sketch and put it as part of an article series so we could finally know, But in the Chick comics they would always have like someone leading a bad life, they die, they stand before the judgment seat of God, the judgment seat of Christ and Christ in the comics was always like this 50 foot tall faceless white Jesus. He was a Jesus in a robe, all white figure, but with no face, because Chick is a fundamentalist who thinks you’re not supposed to make graven images. So it’s like, okay, then how you draw God and a comic if you can draw graven images? So his way around, it was just not give Jesus a face basically.
And so in the comics, people would be sent to hell and say, “I’m a good person. I went to mass.” They said, “Well, you didn’t accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior, you’re going to hell.” And they’re like, “Please, no, no.” It’s the idea that they’re kind of dragged to hell, kicking and screaming. But I don’t think that’s going to be the case. As someone who dies separated from God they will lose the natural dispositions we have in this life that gives someone their kind of cheery an effect. I believe at the final judgment we’ll see people as they truly are, that if they are Holy, if they are in God’s friendship, whether they know it or not, there is a slight possibility someone could be in friendship with God and not know. I think about the person, someone born in the new world in the year 1000. So in the 10th century, after Christ, in North America had never heard of Jesus, it’s possible they could have friendship with God and God would judge them based on the revelation they had received.
My point is those who have friendship with God, you’ll see them in their actual holiness, even more so than in this life. And those who die apart from God, you’ll see the nastiness in the next life, but they may seem very pleasant in this life sustained by natural dispositions of goodness that God gives them. But it’s kind of like whenever you watch disaster movies or horror movies that when the poo hits the fan you see people’s true selves and it can be quite disturbing. If they’re a good person, you can see true heroism under fire. But if they’re not an actual good person, if they’re just a passable person, in many cases, their ugliness or evil results. I’ll tell you one movie that creeps me out to this day. It’s very disturbing, it’s Stephen King’s, The Mist, based on his novel. It’s about a group of people trapped in a supermarket in Maine, of course, it’s in Maine, i`t’s a Stephen King.
So they’re trapped in the supermarket and there’s these monsters outside hiding in a fog. And at first they all try to keep it together. But then the order starts to break down among people and you start to see people’s true character at work. And that happens a lot even in natural disasters that happen today with people, when you lose the ability to have civilized society, people start to reveal their true selves. So it’s not correct to think of these people as just being dragged off to hell against their wills. Honestly, I think if those who are damned were in heaven, heaven would feel hellish to them. They would hate it. They would march right back to hell giving God the one finger salute because they hate his goodness. I mean, God’s goodness it’s like bleach if you think about it, right? Bleach is stinging. It purifies. It makes things clean. Imagine God’s goodness and how it would feel to someone who is still in love with sin.
So I would take these questions to turn around when someone says, “Do I deserve eternal torture as if it was an arbitrary punishment?” I would say instead, well, do you deserve eternal life with God who is perfect goodness? What have you done to earn that? What if God just let you have your life as it is right now forever? I’ll tell you this, anything we do in this life, you read science fiction, when it comes to things like immortality, any unending life in this finite life would become hellish. Never, ever, ever, ever ask for immortality. Never asked for it. It never turns out well in a science fiction. Obviously immortality from God is good because God is infinite goodness itself. So we will never get tired of heaven because God’s goodness that we will delight in is unending has no upper limit to it. But in this world, in this finite world, if you live forever, it’s going to be an absolutely horrid state of affairs.
I’d say, look, what have you earned? You haven’t done anything to earn eternal life. It’s a gift from God. Would you even want it? Or to put it this way, should God give you the freedom to reject his perfect goodness to either reject it or to become conformed to his image? I’ll tell you this, if you have someone who’s struggling with hell, you know what’s a really good book on this subject? The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis. One of my favorite books on the last things and especially hell. The Great Divorce deals with a bus ride that takes you through heaven and hell. And hell is a crack in the sidewalk and heaven, a very gloomy place. And I love everything that Lewis says there. I mean, you can’t take everything literally. And Lewis makes the point, don’t take what I’m saying here literally, but the messages involved about the true nature of what hell is, I think it’s really helpful.
So if you’re with someone struggling with the nature of hell I would check out The Great Divorce. If they want better philosophical defenses of hell, of being able to be separated from God for all eternity, Jerry Walls, a Christian philosopher, I disagree with him on the papacy, if you’ve seen my rebuttal videos, but he has a great book on The Logic of Hell. You should definitely go and check out. Next, “Why couldn’t there have been a generation of immaculately conceived children to effectively eliminate the stain of original sin from humanity and give us a second chance? Why did Mary have to be the only person in human history to be immaculately conceived?” This is important with the doctrine of the immaculate conception. We just had the feast actually a few days ago, fitting but not necessary. This is a bad apologetic for the immaculate conception. If you say, “Well, Jesus would have been born with sin if Mary hadn’t been conceived without sin.” You can’t say that because then that means Saint Anne would have been conceived without sin, so Mary be conceived without sin and you’d have a unending chain going back.
So the immaculate conception was not necessary for the incarnation, but it was fitting. The church teaches that it’s fitting for God who chose to dwell within Mary. He didn’t have to do that. He could have just become… He could have created a human body for himself, ex nihilo, out of nothing. Or he could have created human body from the dust of the earth, just like Adam was created from the dust of the earth. God could have done that. But instead as Galatians 4:4 says, he chose to be born of a woman born under the law to be like us and everything except sin. To redeem us, not just on his death on the cross, but Christ’s entire life was a redemption, redeeming the human experience from conception until death. And so in that respect, which would make Mary then the Ark of the new covenant bearing God, the words, the Ark of the old covenant bore the word of God within it, the 10 commandments written on stone tablets from Mount Sinai, Mary, as the Ark of the new covenant would bear within her, the eternal word of God.
If you would like a great rundown of this Tim Staples, my colleague, my boss, my friend, director of apologetics at Catholic Answers, he has an article at catholic.com that deals with Mary as the Ark of the new covenant and shows the parallels are just unmistakable to me, that especially in the gospel of Luke, Mary is seen as the Ark of the new covenant, the Ark that was precious incorruptible. If you touch the Ark of the old covenant, Uzzah in the old Testament, touched the Ark when he was not supposed to, and he died, he was struck down. How much more veneration and awe should be given to the Ark of the new covenant.
All right, what else do we have? “Does the church say anything about how souls work for identical twins?” One zygote, so after the soul is breathed into him or her or them at conception that splits into two separate bodies, right? So this would be monozygotic twinning. So some twins are fraternal twins. You have two eggs that are released into the fallopian tubes, fertilized by different sperm. And so they’re very similar, but they’re not identical. That’d be fraternal. Identical twins occur when you have a single embryo that’s fertilized. And sometime within the first two weeks, which is the twinning period before something called the primitive streak develops, which is the precursor to the vertebra, the backbone, during those first two weeks that single embryo as it’s growing and dividing can divide into two separate organisms. So as the church have a teaching about when identical twins get souls, it doesn’t because the church does not have an official teaching about when anyone gets a soul.
So in the 1974 declaration on procured abortion, the church said that throughout church history, there have been a divergence of opinions about when the soul enters the body. And most of that divergence though is because of bad biology. People thought that you went from having a vegetative body in the womb to an animal body, to a rational body and get a different soul along the way. Now we know through DNA, you have one rational body throughout your whole existence. So I firmly believe if Augusta and Aquinas knew about DNA, they would have said that the soul enters the body when the rational body comes into existence, which would be at fertilization. So the church does not teach this is when you receive a soul because fertilization itself is a process. It takes 24 hours. So it’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment from when the sperm breaches the outer lining of the ovum, I think it’s called the corona. When it breaches it to when that first cell division takes place it’s hard to pick here is the moment when installment occurs.
So the church doesn’t have an official teaching on when that occurs, just that it does occur and human beings have souls. They have immortal souls made in the image of likeness of God and that the declaration on procured abortion makes it very clear, so you don’t have these Catholics for choice people trying to twist church teaching. Even if we don’t know when the soul enters the body, we know it’s a human body. We know it’s a human being, it deserves respect, and it should not be aborted. So in 74, the church was very clear on that and has been clear since. And now it’s important with identical twins because some people say every human life begins a conception. That may or may not be true because with identical twins, when the embryo splits into two there’s different things that could be happening here.
It could be the case, all human beings, their lives and this important for identical twins, because here’s why. Some people will say all human, every human life begins at conception, and that’s not true because it’s possible you could clone a human being it’s possible. You could take the genetic material from, let’s say my skin cell put it into a ovum, I don’t believe this has been done yet, maybe in some underground illegal laboratory because human cloning is generally illegal. But if it had happened, that would be a human being with an immortal soul, just wouldn’t have come about through a sperm egg union. So what would happen is you could say, not every human life has to begin to conception because you could take DNA from my skin cell, put it in an ovum, so this would not be a conception event of sperm and egg, it would not be 23 chromosomes and 23 chromosomes make 46, sperm and egg come together, it’d be 46 chromosomes from my skin cell, zero from an ovum with all the genetic material stripped away, and then you would have a human being.
So in that case, you’d have a human being coming about that was not a sperm egg union or not conception as it’s classically defined. But even let’s just setting that aside, when it comes to identical twins, it could be the case identical twins begin at conception. You have an embryo that is actually two persons, not one person. It’s two persons sharing a single body, much the same way that there are conjoined twins. There are girls in Minnesota who actually they’re conjoined twins. They have one body and they’re joined at the neck. So it’s two heads joined to a single body from that, but there are two separate individuals but they’re sharing the vast majority of their organs. So it could be the case at conception, identical twins exists from conception, they’re just sharing the same body until their bodies diverge later.
It could be the case that when the embryo splits, the one human being who existed at conception continues to exist and another branches off and comes into existence two weeks later and receives a soul at that time. Or it could be the case that upon twinning, let’s say two weeks later, the embryo twins and splits into two that individual who existed at conception and then twinned two weeks later dies, and when that person dies, two new people come into existence. So we have three options when it comes to twinning, either two people exist to conception, share a body then split, one person exists at conception, continues to exist after the twinning event and a new person comes into existence, or at the twinning event, the person who existed at conception dies, two new people come into existence. And we don’t know exactly. So the church has no official teaching on that or on installment in general. But if you hear this argument and people trying to twist it, support abortion, I have an essay at catholic.com called Why Catholics Can’t Be Pro Choice that you can check out that does deal with some of this.
All right. Let’s see. What else do we have here? Oh, here’s a good one. “What is the strongest non-religious argument for saving sex for marriage? In other words, what would I say to my atheist friend who is in love with his girlfriend and wants to come together with her? I know some people would claim they’re just using each other for love or pleasure, but that argument is hard to give succinctly and harder to comprehend its validity when applied to a loving relationship. Other than fear based tactics, what is the best persuasive argument for the situation?” First, I don’t think fear-based tactics are a bad thing. Think about what is the best argument against drinking and driving. If you were to tell someone here’s why you shouldn’t drink and drive. Well, the answer is, if you get in the car after you’ve been drinking, it’s very likely that you won’t be able to operate it well at high speeds, you’ll have a delayed response time. And that could cause you to get in an accident that could kill somebody. You could kill yourself.
Odds are though with drinking and driving, what’s most ironic about drunk driving fatalities it’s usually not the drunk driver. When they’ve been drinking and driving for some reason, maybe because they’re relaxed behind the wheel, I don’t know what it is, they usually end up surviving. It’s the other people that they run into that they end up killing. So you could kill someone contribute to someone’s death, do you really want that to be on your conscience? So it was interesting when we think about other things, thinking about drunk driving, even people who are critical of the church when people will say, “Why should I care about climate change?” Well, if the climate change there is going to be wildfires, there’s going to be famines. There’s going to be hurricanes. These are the same people who would say, “Don’t use your fear-based tactics on me to tell me to save sex for marriage.” Use fear-based tactics. There’s nothing wrong with pointing out the bad consequences of a decision that someone might make.
However, that’s not, of course the only reason we don’t want to reduce our faith, the teachings of our church to merely avoiding the bad consequences of our actions, there is a deeper underlying morality. So I think it’s important to point out, especially between a man and a woman engaging in the sexual act, it’s, “Look, you’re engaging in the act that is ordered towards making a little tiny human being who is helpless, who depends on you two for the rest of their life, or at least until they become an adult. For the next 18 years, they’re supposed to be able to rely on the two people who came together and brought them into existence. If they can’t rely on you, what are you good for?” See, I have little kiddos at home, so it gets me more emotional when I think about this. But it’s totally selfish. It’s totally and absolutely selfish. “Well, I took precautions.”
Now I’m getting into Dave Ramsey mode. Do you ever listen to Dave Ramsey when he does his radio shows and he always does this kind of Kermit the frog voice of people who make excuses to him, “Will I get a credit card, because I want airline miles.” “You want airline miles, what are you going to do? Fly to the fricking moon and back? Airline miles going to put you into debt.” I’ve listened to Dave Ramsey a little bit. But in any case, you’ll have people who will say, “Well, I took precautions. We’re using a condom, we’re using birth control pills.” So that’s like saying, “I’m going to drink and drive, but I turned the radio up and I rolled the windows down. So I took precautions.” It doesn’t matter you’re doing something, if you’re drinking and driving, it’s ordered towards a not good end. If you’re engaging in sex, that’s ordered towards a good end, a union and procreation, it’s just disordered and bad when you engage in the marital act when you’re not married.
Because here’s the thing, this child will come into existence. The reason we have marriage, the reason we have marriage is to that a man and a woman become irreplaceable to each other before they become irreplaceable to a child that proceeds from their one flesh union. That’s why we have it. And it is so sad to me to see children who come into existence and they’re the result of the careless actions of unmarried people who are chasing after pleasure or their own self-interest, whatever it may be. It may not just be base pleasure, they may have genuine affectations and feelings of love and commitment towards each other, but it is still selfish if they’re still putting their interests ahead of any child that might come from this union. So I think that’s total fair game to bring up.
But if you want a principled reason to get your friend to really think you should ask your atheist friend, “All right, you want to have sex with your girlfriend, you love her? What if she has sex with somebody else, would you care?” “Well, yeah.” “Well, hey, aren’t you being possessive? Who are you to tell her who she can and can’t have sex with?” Even an atheist will understand sex is special and that it’s really, really bad too, if you’re, especially if you’re married, but even now for like atheist people and they’ll see if you’re dating someone or whatever, if you’re you have sex with somebody else, if you’re unfaithful, that’s really wrong, that would ruin or wreck a relationship. Even non-religious people get that. But why?
I mean, it’s not going to wreck your relationship that you found out your boyfriend or girlfriend played Scrabble with somebody else instead of you, it’s Scrabble get over it. But if they’re playing twister the way they should not be playing the game, twister is a weird game. Actually, when the game twister came out and I think the ’60s or ’70s, there was a big panic behind it. They said it was a game of sex in a box. It’s going to ruin our society, twister. I mean, twister is fun when you’re five or six, but I couldn’t imagine playing as an adult. I’m like, “This is in appropriate.” But the point I’m making is that even non-religious people can see sex has a very serious meaning to it. It’s not just for pleasure. It’s not just for emotional connection. And the only thing that does make sense of the meaning of sex is as for a complete union between two people that can only be formed in a man and a woman in the bond of marriage, to have that complete gift of self including a full and complete bodily union.
For more on that, I would definitely recommend my course at the Catholic Answers School of Apologetics called Evidence For Catholic Moral Teaching. I also covered this a little with Layla Miller in our book Made This Way, if you want to be able to especially explain this to teenagers. And our last question, “I’ve heard flack from Protestants and Catholics have a Pope that is changing church teaching. For example, Pope Francis stated in Fratelli tutti or tutti that, “The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property is absolute or inviolable,” paragraph 120. A Republican of the 13th and Rerum Novarum 15 States, “The first and the most fundamental principle,” and then there’s ellipses here, “Must be the inviolability of private property. How do we square these two views?”
Now I do want to be upfront. There’s a lot I actually disagree with when it comes to prudential judgements that Pope Francis makes in Fratelli tutti. I don’t like his criticisms of market economics, and I’m fine with criticisms of capitalism, it’s not perfect. There’s ways to improve it and make it better. But I felt the criticisms are really not well thought out and there was nothing substantive offered in their place. So just because the Pope writes something and encyclical doesn’t mean everything in there requires the same kind of levels of ascent. If it’s a prudential judgment on certain matters, Catholics can disagree with it. If it’s something related to things beyond the realm of faith and morals like economic theory, that’s something where I think you can offer an opinion that’s just not well founded.
However, the church does have specific teaching on the right to private property. And I would say that Rerum Novarum and for Fratelli tutti are not in contradiction here. So Fratelli tutti says that the church has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable. And that’s true. So what does that mean? Consider this, let’s say the right to private property was absolute. You had an absolute right to your private property. It’s yours. No one can take it from you. If it were absolute, then that would mean if you committed a crime and the government said you have to pay a fine of $100, you could say, “No, I don’t.” “Okay, we’re taking the money.” “No you can’t. It’s my money.” Private property, inviolable, absolute.
So the government couldn’t find you because your money, well, you have an absolute right to it. Or to provide an example of St. Thomas Aquinas, if someone was starving to death and let’s say there’s a natural disaster. There’s a grocery store and they need food. Let’s say they need medicine in a disaster and the store is closed. You could break into the store to get food or medicine in a case of urgent necessity. Or if you’re strapped in a blizzard, you could break into someone’s cabin in the wilderness to seek shelter to not die. If the right to private property were absolute, a person could say, “No, that person can’t break into my cabin to flee from this blizzard. The person can’t break into my store to get medicine. The right to private property is absolute.” So the church has never said our possession of private property is something that is absolute. But the church has said that the concept of private property is something that is inviolable.
You can’t do away with the right to private property. That’s what Pope Leo, the 13th is talking about in Rerum Novarum. Because even in Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo, the 13th talks about how God created the earth for all people, the universal destination of goods. And he says just because the earth was created for everyone and not for particular groups of people, it’s not like this part of the earth was made for this group or this part of the earth has made for that group. The whole earth belongs to everyone. And Leo says that doesn’t contradict the right to private property, but he says, even in there the right to private property it’s not like it’s something that’s absolute without any limitations on it whatsoever.
To make an analogy, to show how Fratelli tutti and Rerum Novarum don’t contradict each other, think about freedom of speech. You could say freedom of speech in the United States is inviolable. It’s something that cannot be attacked, that you have freedom of speech. Just the same way as the church teaches, you have a right to private property. Pope Leo is saying, look to the socialists of his time, you cannot just get rid of the notion of private property and implement socialism. Private property is inviolable, but it’s not an absolute right? So think of freedom of speech. You can’t just say, “Oh, you don’t have freedom of speech.” No, it’s in the first amendment, but your freedom of speech is not absolute. Just because you have freedom of speech, doesn’t mean you can say anything. The classic example is you can’t go into a theater, a crowded theater and falsely yell fire. So you can’t use your freedom of speech to go on the internet and say, “I’m going to kill so-and-so or assassinate so-and-so.” You could be held criminally liable for making threats with your speech.
So while free speech is inviolable, you can’t just say, you don’t have it, it’s in the first amendment, your freedom of speech does not entail you can do anything you want with your words. And that carries over to the church’s teaching on private property. Private property is inviolable, you can’t say we don’t have a right to private property. You can’t just endorse full-fledged socialism. But the same time you can’t say you can do anything you want with your property and there’s no consequences to it and no repercussions. So there’s a balance because you could have a case where someone could acquire as private property, a community’s vital resources. What if somebody in a country was able to acquire all of the local water supplies and then cut them off from people are charged exorbitant prices and kept people from something water, for example? That would be a case where government could literally intervene to protect the common good.
You got to be careful because sometimes there’s a few rare cases where this intervention would make sense that suddenly people try to write a blank check and say, government should intervene and redistribute all private property. So you have to be careful in that regard. So I think that Fratelli tutti and Rerum Novarum don’t contradict each other on private property. To summarize it, like free speech, the right to private property is private property is inviolable. You can’t just throw away the right to private property. Okay? But you can’t do anything you want with your property. Even Aquinas said that you could steal, it’s not stealing. Aquinas said you could take what is not yours in a case of urgent necessity, like getting food from a closed pharmacy during a natural disaster or something. Breaking into a cabin during a blizzard because of the universal destination of goods. But that does not justify being Robin Hood and going out and stealing from wealthy people to give to poor people.
If you want more insight on the nature of socialism, I would highly recommend my book, coauthored with Catherine McCulloch, Can a Catholic Be a Socialist?: Subtitle, The Answer Is No – Here’s Why? I think you would definitely enjoy that. And then also be sure to check out trenthornpodcast.com, where you can go and get access to my catechism study series, new episode, debuts, video episode, Mondays at 8:00 AM. You want to enroll your high school students in it, go to homeschoolconnections.com. And then also you can submit questions for open mailbag episodes just like this one by becoming a premium subscriber at trenthornpodcast.com. You all have been awesome and I hope that you have a very blessed day.
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