Devin Rose answers a question about an apparent contradiction between taking Sacramental Oaths and the Gospel passage against swearing oaths.
Transcript:
Host: Let’s go to Donvagan in Tomvall, Texas listening on the EWTN app. Your question for Devin Rose.
Caller: Hi guys, hello Devin. I’m working with my dad right now, and he historically has had issues with taking oaths and such. When I came to the faith, there was the oath and all that, rejecting my former Protestantism, so on and so forth, I went to the Catholic Answers forum, additionally, to look for answers on this, and found a lot of debate, and no real consensus, except the Catechism, so would you be able to put into clearer terms what the Catholic take on the two verses in Scripture where we’re told not to take an oath, let our yes mean yes and our no mean no would be?
Devin: Yeah sure, so Jesus says, “Let your yes be yes, your no be no” and yeah, sure, Donvagan, that’s a very unique name, I feel like I’ve run across that name somewhere, so you must be in Tomvall, Texas, right?
Caller: Yeah, that’s me.
Devin: Ok, Tomvall’s near Houston, so….so that’s interesting. Your dad’s not the first Christian Protestant who’s had a problem with that. And the problem comes from taking those verses too literally, too literalistically. The context, of course, is when Jesus is condemning the Pharisees and their tricky way of getting around the Old Testament rules about oaths, and so they would swear on the gold of the temple, instead of the temple, and all of this, and so Jesus condemns this very false way that they were legalistically getting around those things and robbing people of their money.
So he’s not meaning that as in you should never tell the truth, of course, cause he even says “Let your yes mean yes,” so he wants you to tell the truth. And an oath is a way of telling the truth and saying “I will certainly tell the truth here,” and that’s why we get sworn in whenever we’re giving testimony in a court of law. And the early Protestants, some of the radical reformers, took this to the same extreme and refused to swear oaths, they refused to agree, and that caused a tremendous–they were called radical because of that–they then were a threat to civil society, both Protestant and Catholic, because they would refuse to take oaths before magistrates, and things that you have to do to function in a society. Does that help?
Caller: Yeah, that does, that’s a pretty clear explanation, so I guess it’s actually kind of interesting for me because I feel like I’m breaking out of certain things that are still hanging on from, like, six years ago. So it’s probably part of my lack of understanding in the first place. I think that’s good for me, thank you.