#michelle arnold

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A Wife Hostile to Religious Discussion

Full Question

        What should I do when my wife, a non-Catholic, says I am trying to force her to convert whenever I try and have even the most subtle discussions about faith?        

Answer

Perhaps it is time to reconsider attempting any discussions about faith. From your description of the situation, it sounds as if your wife believes, rightly or wrongly, that you are trying to convert her, and she is resisting that. She probably sees these discussions, however artful your rhetoric, as pressuring her to become a Catholic.

While discussions on faith are helpful when both parties are open to such discussions, they can become a hindrance when one party believes the other is engaging in unjust proselytism. For married couples, this can be even more serious if pursuing the discussions puts a strain on the marriage. This doesn't mean that you should stop praying for your wife or stop hoping for her conversion. It means only that it might not be a good idea to discuss issues of faith with her at this time. If she becomes open to them later, then you can resume discussion.

In the meantime, I recommend reading The Children of Many Tears, a blog post I wrote on how to work for the conversion of loved ones. I also recommend The Secret Diary of Elisabeth Leseur, written by a Catholic woman who prayed for many years for the conversion of her atheist husband. Only after her death did he revert to the Catholic Faith and eventually became a Dominican priest.

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Dealing with Offspring in Invalid Marriages

Full Question

        I am taking my grown children and their spouses on vacation. Some are not married to those with whom they want to share a room. Should I allow this?        

Answer

If I understand you correctly, your children are in legal marriages, but some of those marriages are not recognized to be valid by the Church. You may also mean some of your children are not married but will be bringing a partner of the opposite sex. Generally speaking, the Church requires that we must recognize an essential difference between valid and invalid marriages (CCC 2353). Valid marriages are a social good and a gift from God. Invalid marriages constitute grave matter and the possibility of public scandal. Moreover, the Church requires that the faithful should avoid direct cooperation in the sins of others (CCC 1868).

In matters where a legal marriage is not recognized by the Church to be valid, the Church does not give specifics of how to avoid direct cooperation in the sins of the partners. In any case, the Church trusts the faithful to use their best prudential judgment in handling the issues that arise within extended families in a way that upholds the Church's teaching on the sanctity of a valid marriage. In this particular circumstance, one solution might be to pay for your children's other travel expenses but not their hotel expenses. If you need assistance in how to implement this with your family or to find other acceptable solutions, make an appointment with your pastor, confessor, or spiritual director.

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Conversion Is Not for Convenience

I subscribe to email updates from a Jewish website, and one such update, advertising a recent article, caught my attention. The writer, a Jewish woman living in an area of the Midwest with few Jews and no synagogues, asked herself: “Wouldn’t it be easier to just accept Jesus as the son of God?”

This question occurred to the writer when she was working at a Catholic church as a musician during Holy Week. While playing the music for a Mass on Palm Sunday, she started reflecting on how difficult it could be to be a non-Christian in a small town filled with Christians:

All of my friends are Christian here. I have been handed countless books. I have been encouraged, and shamed, and excluded, and judged—and at that moment at the piano, I was damn tired of it all.

I wrestled with these thoughts privately, of course. I knew better than to share my confusion with my Evangelical friends. No fewer than three local Protestant pastors invited me to Good Friday services. I was relieved to be playing for the Catholics. The parish priest was kind and respectful, and I thought the music was beautiful.

She was strongly considering talking to the priest about conversion to Catholicism when a passage from the Gospel read that day at Mass stopped her cold. In Matthew’s account of the Passion, the crowd—incited by the chief priests and elders who wanted Jesus dead (Matt. 27:20)—demanded Jesus’ crucifixion and told Pontius Pilate, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matt. 27:25).

The writer shared her reaction:

I wanted to get up and run out of the church. My mind was alive with thoughts about blood libel, and the persecution of my people, and the fact that I was sitting in a church, listening to a justification said to come from the Jewish people, as if we deserved what has happened to us over the millennia.

We don’t have space here to address the question of whether this controversial passage in Matthew’s Gospel actually is anti-Semitic or in any way justifies anti-Semitic acts. The short answer is that it isn’t and it doesn’t.[1] Here instead I want to look at the question, “Wouldn’t it be easier to just accept Jesus as the son of God?”

Conversions happen for many reasons, and some of those reasons are better than others. My initial interest in Catholicism was sparked by a desire to rebel against my upbringing. My family was Seventh-day Adventist, although my branch of the family was mostly non-practicing, and Seventh-day Adventism is historically anti-Catholic. As this writer considered doing, I separated myself from my family’s religious tradition. In my case though, it wasn’t to assimilate into a larger society but to assert individuality.

I was under no illusion though that following through on that flawed spark of interest would be easy. Again, as happened to this writer, my spark of interest happened around Holy Week, in 1995. I had to call a local parish three times over a period of a couple of months before I finally got in to see the pastor. It turned out that Holy Week is a really bad time to try to pigeonhole a priest with questions about conversion!

The need for persistence turned out to be an occasion of grace. Having to work hard to get a priest’s attention made me all the more determined to become Catholic. It sparked my desire to learn the Faith, not just through the RCIA program but through personal study. When confronted with questions about Catholic beliefs and practices that rubbed against the grain of my culturally Protestant background, I took those questions to Catholics for answers. By that time, I was disposed to accept the answers I was given.

But the questions don’t magically stop the moment the chrism dries on the new convert’s forehead. Many converts experience periods of difficulty, of doubt, following conversion. Acclimation to the Catholic faith—as distinguished from assimilation—can take years. A few years ago I wrote:

I firmly believe that, sooner or later, each and every convert to the Catholic faith—whether that person chose to become Catholic as an adult or was brought into the faith as a baby by his parents—is going to have to face the scandal that the Church is not what he believed it to be when he signed up. The test will be whether he will persevere because he knows it to be the Church Christ founded, or whether he will fall away because he decides it is merely a human institution that has disappointed him.

The writer of the essay I read came to the conclusion that her experience at that Palm Sunday Mass had in fact been an epiphany that strengthened her identity as a Jew and her commitment to Judaism. Perhaps it was.

If that incident strengthened her to stand up to occasions on which she had been “shamed, and excluded, and judged” in her community because she was not Christian, if it kept her from becoming Christian for the wrong reasons (such as to make her life easier), then perhaps that was how God chose to act in her life at that moment. Perhaps it will be an important step on her journey to where God is leading her.

What we can say for sure, though, is that no one should become Christian to make his life easier. Those who want to follow Christ will be called upon to do exactly as Christ did in the Palm Sunday Gospel. They will be called to take up their cross and follow him, all the way to Calvary (Matt. 16:24). Or, as C.S. Lewis wryly noted:

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

[1] Those who are interested in the long answer are invited to read Are the Gospels Anti-Semitic? by David Currie and The New Testament and Anti-Semitism by Jimmy Akin. If non-Christian readers prefer a Jewish perspective, I recommend The Misunderstood Jew by Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament.

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St. Kateri Tekakwitha: Native Woman, Catholic Saint

A few years ago, a gentleman contacted Catholic Answers with a question about a candidate in the RCIA class he was teaching. According to our inquirer, the candidate was a Native American who was interested in becoming Catholic but wanted to know if she would have to give up certain Native American rituals to which she was attached. For her, giving up those rituals would be a “dealbreaker” to her conversion, and this gentleman wanted to know if he would have to turn her away from baptism.

Without knowing anything about the Native rituals this woman cherished, there was no way I could know whether or not practicing them posed an impediment to reception into the Church. All I could do was to explain to this gentleman that the Church never permanently turns away anyone interested in becoming Catholic. If individual circumstances warrant doing so, the Church may at times defer celebration of the sacraments, but no one should be permanently discouraged from becoming Catholic altogether (Code of Canon Law canon 868).

I also recommended to him that he contact the USCCB’s Subcommittee on Native American Affairs for assistance in determining if his candidate’s attachment to rituals that were part of her cultural heritage posed an impediment to baptism.

This situation did raise two important questions, though: to what extent do potential converts have to give up their former way of life to be received into the Church, and to what extent does the Church accommodate itself to new cultures where Christianity was previously unknown or unaccepted?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

By her very mission, “the Church . . . travels the same journey as all humanity and shares the same earthly lot with the world: she is to be a leaven and, as it were, the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into the family of God.” Missionary endeavor requires patience. It begins with the proclamation of the gospel to peoples and groups who do not yet believe in Christ, continues with the establishment of Christian communities that are “a sign of God’s presence in the world,” and leads to the foundation of local churches.

It must involve a process of inculturation if the gospel is to take flesh in each people's culture. There will be times of defeat. “With regard to individuals, groups, and peoples it is only by degrees that [the Church] touches and penetrates them and so receives them into a fullness which is Catholic” (CCC 854).

We can see the marriage of evangelization and inculturation at work in the life of St. Kateri Tekakwitha (1656–1680), the first Native of North America to be canonized a saint and whose feast we celebrate on July 14.

In the mid-seventeenth century, Jesuit missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the indigenous nations living in what would become the United States and Canada. A few years before St. Kateri was born, a group of Jesuits, including St. Isaac Jogues and St. Jean de Brébeuf, were killed by Natives, and would eventually become known as the North American Martyrs. These martyrs sowed the soil for the later conversions of Natives, not only with the blood they shed but also with the effort they made to make Christianity seem less foreign to potential Native converts.

The Jesuits learned the languages of the Natives so that they could catechize the Natives in their own tongue (which stands in stark contrast to later initiatives spearheaded by some Christians to force Natives to abandon their languages). They used Native concepts to symbolize Christian concepts. For example, when the Jesuits translated the Lord’s Prayer into Mohawk, they used the Mohawk word for “sky world” for the word “heaven.” St. Jean de Brébeuf is famous for including Native imagery in a Christmas carol he wrote in Huron. The carol’s lyrics include this verse:

Within a lodge of broken bark The tender Babe was found, A ragged robe of rabbit skin Enwrapp’d his beauty ’round; But as the hunter braves drew nigh, The angel song rang loud and high “Jesus your King is born, Jesus is born, In excelsis gloria.”

This was the world into which St. Kateri was born in 1656. Her parents were a non-Christian Mohawk and a captive Algonquin Christian woman who had been assimilated into the Mohawk tribe. When Tekakwitha, which means “she who bumps into things,” was around four years old, her parents and baby brother succumbed to a smallpox epidemic. She survived, but was left with facial scarring and poor eyesight (which probably explains the name she was given by her people).

Tekakwitha seems to have had a natural aversion to marrying, which would put her at odds with her family’s way of life but which would prove to be a fine foundation for the actual grace that led her to seek baptism from the Jesuit missionaries. She was baptized in 1676, and given the Christian name “Catherine” for St. Catherine of Siena. Tekakwitha became known though as “Kateri Tekakwitha,” which is the Mohawk version of “Catherine” and her own Native name.

During the handful of years she lived after her baptism, she pursued a penitential life, sometimes adapting Native customs into her penitential practices (such as piercing herself with thorns, which was done by some Natives either as a way of offering thanks for receiving some benefit or as a personal sacrifice to obtain a good). In fact, her penances were so severe that her spiritual director counseled her to be more moderate in her penances and insisted she ask permission before taking up her penances.

St. Kateri Tekakwitha has been named by the Church as a patron of Native Americans, of ecologists, and of people ridiculed for their piety. In addition to traditional Christian emblems such as a lily and the cross, Kateri is also depicted by artists with a turtle, in honor of the Mohawk clan that raised Kateri after the death of her parents.

As demonstrated by St. Kateri, Christianity does require personal sacrifice, and it does require converts to be open to a new way of life. But, as Kateri shows us, acceptance of Christianity does not mean a renunciation of those aspects of our lives that prepared us to be attracted to Christ in the first place. Rather, God’s grace builds upon nature, and all that is good and true and life-giving in our families and culture can be transformed, in a sense “baptized,” right along with us.

The Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate teaches:

The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [non-Christian] religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men (2).  

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Should We Celebrate Non-Christian Holidays?

The Catholic liturgical calendar is jam-packed with feast days honoring Christ, his Blessed Mother, the saints, and even famous Christian churches and Christian legends. A Catholic could party almost every day of the year if he wanted to, and that’s not even counting the celebration of secular holidays in his home country (such as Independence Day and Thanksgiving in the United States).

Why is it then that so many Catholics want to know if they can celebrate non-Christian religious holidays?

There are several reasons, I think. If he is a convert from a non-Christian religion, a Catholic may want to know if he can continue to celebrate holidays he grew up with that remain important to his non-Christian family. In some cases, Christianity overlaps with some aspects of a non-Christian religion—most notably, with Judaism—and the Catholic may believe that celebrating the non-Christian religious holiday honors his own Christian heritage.

Other times the Catholic is invited by non-Christians to celebrate their holidays with them, or there’s a public festival in honor of a non-Christian holiday in his community that he’d like to attend. And, of course, occasionally the Catholic is just curious and thinks celebrating a non-Christian holiday will be both educational and fun.

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to these questions. Whether a Catholic should take part in non-Christian religious holidays, and to what extent he should do so, depends in large part on his individual circumstances. There is one basic principle a Catholic should keep in mind, though: he is a Christian. To the extent that he involves himself in non-Christian religious celebrations, his commitment to his Christian faith must be paramount. With that in mind, let’s look at a couple of the scenarios in which Catholics may find themselves wanting to know if they can participate in non-Christian holidays.

The convert

Conversions can be hard on families, especially in cases where a conversion involves leaving a family’s heritage and culture. Conversions can also be hard on converts themselves. It is very difficult to give up special occasions that are part of one’s happiest childhood memories. Even when non-Christians are able to set aside religious beliefs that underpin non-Christian holidays, they may have difficulty giving up the desire to celebrate those special occasions that matter to their families. Christians who don't understand this need only think of what it would be like to give up celebrating Christmas.

In some cases, the Church does not have any theological issues with a particular non-Christian holiday. This is especially true with Judaism. From a Christian point of view, many Jewish holidays—notably Passover—prepared God’s people for the coming Messiah, and the holidays continue to have lasting value for the Jewish people, including for Jews who have converted to Christianity.

For the convert, the main issue is whether participating in the holiday will undermine his commitment to Christianity. If participation in the holiday involves activities that are opposed to Christian doctrine (such as praying to idols, as happens on the Hindu holiday Diwali), then a Christian cannot take part in those activities. Or, if participation in the holiday fosters hope for the convert’s family that he will eventually spurn Christianity, that is another reason to refrain from celebrating the holiday. But if the convert can join together with family and friends on a special occasion that is important to them without compromising his beliefs or commitment to Christianity, then he might do so in the hopes of maintaining family ties and a connection to his heritage.

The curious

There’s a lot of talk these days about cultural appropriation. In the West, minority groups of various types have raised concerns about members of a dominant cultural, religious, or racial group sifting through the minority group’s customs and picking out what appeals to them, as if a minority culture were an apple orchard outsiders are free to wander through, selecting the best apples from the trees with no regard to the rights and needs of the orchard owner.

Occasionally, claims of appropriation can seem, at least to members of a majority group, unreasonable. Nonetheless, it is important to be sensitive and respectful of the concerns of non-Christians with regard to their own holidays. No matter how appealing a cultural festival or religious holiday appears to you, if it is not an integral part of your cultural or religious patrimony, you ought to defer to those to whom it does belong how it should be celebrated.

Even Jewish holidays, which are part of Christian salvation history, must be acknowledged to belong first and foremost to Jews. Although the U.S. bishops have noted that Catholic celebration of the Passover seder in Catholic homes and churches “can have educational and spiritual value,” in the same document (God’s Mercy Endures Forever) it advises:

When Christians celebrate this sacred feast [Passover] among themselves, the rites of the haggadah for the seder should be respected in all their integrity. [A haggadah is the order of ritual for a seder, much like a missal is the order of ritual for the Mass.] The seder . . . should be celebrated in a dignified manner and with sensitivity to those to whom the seder truly belongs (28).

There are appropriate ways for Catholics to satisfy their curiosity about non-Christian religious holidays. For example, if Jewish friends invite you to their Passover seder, or if Muslim friends invite you to join them in the breaking of the fast at the end of Ramadan (Eid al-Fitr), ordinarily you may go. Generally speaking, Catholics would not take part in non-Christian religious prayers at these events, but they can observe a respectful silence while others are praying and take part in the feasting and fellowship.

The bottom line

Respectful engagement with non-Christians is a necessary part of life in secular society. Learning more about what non-Christians believe and how they practice their faith can be personally enriching and can have evangelical value as well. Christians need to understand non-Christian beliefs before they can hope to intelligently dialogue with non-Christians about the values we share and the differences that separate us.

Ultimately though, holidays are occasions on which we seek to foster our own relationship with the one true God. And that means that a Christian’s first priority ought to be to celebrate his own holidays and leave to non-Christians the celebration of their holidays.

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The Sisters from Bethany and Their Approaches to the Spiritual Life

One of Jesus’ strangest actions in the Gospels happens when he was leaving Bethany, which means both “house of figs” and “house of affliction,” on his way to Jerusalem one day. He cursed a fig tree for not having figs when it was not the season for figs. Immediately afterward, he went to the temple and drove out the moneychangers. In response, we are told that the chief priests and scribes begin to plot Jesus’ own suffering and death (Mark 11:12–18).

Bethany is best known though as the home of Jesus’ friends, the sisters Martha and Mary, and their brother Lazarus. We first meet Martha and Mary when Jesus visited them in Bethany immediately after telling his parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–42). In this chapter of Luke, Jesus commissioned his disciples to prepare the way for him by going ahead of him to towns he intended to visit. If the disciples were welcomed, they were to eat and drink there, and to wish peace upon the inhabitants. If they were not welcomed, the disciples were to shake the dust from their feet in rebuke of the inhabitants. Jesus told the disciples, “He who hears you hears me, and he who rejects you rejects me, and he who rejects me rejects him who sent me” (Luke 10:16).

With this as background, we can reasonably presume that the disciples found welcome in the town of Bethany, resulting in Jesus’ visit to the town and to the house of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus.

This home in Bethany might have had more than its fair share of affliction though. The family may have been poor, and Lazarus may have been ill, because later in Luke Jesus told a parable of a poor, sickly man named Lazarus who hoped for scraps from a rich man’s table (Luke 16:19–21). Nonetheless, this family from Bethany opened its home to Jesus and offered him what they had.

Rebuke, or reconcile?

Tensions rose when Martha shouldered the responsibility for serving, while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet listening to him teach. Martha, obviously annoyed, said to Jesus, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her then to help me.” Jesus responded, “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38–42).

Martha tends to get a lot of grief from those Christians who assume Jesus is telling Martha that her work is of secondary importance, at best, to Mary’s choice to sit at his feet and contemplate him. Spiritual writers have spilled a lot of ink on the differences between the active life and the contemplative life, as exemplified by Martha and Mary.

If we look closely at the passage though, we might see that Jesus wasn’t exactly rebuking Martha because she wanted Mary to help her. Had Martha actually asked Mary to help her, Jesus might not have objected. Martha, however, asked Jesus to rebuke Mary for her. Two chapters later in Luke, when a man asked Jesus to tell the man’s brother to divide an inheritance with him, Jesus said, “Man, who made me a judge or divider over you?” (Luke 12:13–14).

Perhaps one lesson we can learn from Martha and Mary is that God does not want us to use him as a hammer on other people. If we need assistance from someone, or are in the middle of a dispute with someone, we need to do the hard work of reconciliation for ourselves. God will give us graces along the way to help us in our task, such as when he counseled Martha to let go of her worries or when he counseled the brother deprived of an inheritance to let go of his desire for possessions (Luke 12:15), but he expects us to do our own work to the best of our ability.

Mary rises, Jesus weeps

John had his own story to tell about the sisters from Bethany. Jesus and his disciples received word from Martha and Mary that Lazarus was on the verge of death. Rather than set off immediately to Bethany, Jesus deliberately delayed going for two days. John said that Jesus waited until Lazarus was dead before going to Bethany so that Jesus could raise Lazarus from the dead as a sign for the disciples (John 11:1–15).

When the sisters heard that Jesus was on his way, Martha went out to meet him. Mary, on the other hand, stayed at their house (John 11:20). Why would she have stayed? In the Jewish tradition, after the death of a relative, the family stays in their home to receive support and condolences (John 11:19). Martha, the active sister, ran out to meet Jesus while Mary, the contemplative sister, stayed put even though she knew Jesus was coming. Mary did not go out to see Jesus until Martha returned and told her that Jesus was explicitly asking for Mary (John 11:28).

Both Martha and Mary told Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21, 11:32). The difference was that Mary broke down weeping, indulging her grief even though Jesus was present (John 11:33). Martha, on the other hand, told Jesus, “Even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you” (John 11:22), a not-so-subtle way of saying, “Give me back my brother, Lord! I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

Perhaps we can also learn from Martha and Mary that both the active and the contemplative approaches to the spiritual life have their virtues and their temptations. Those drawn to the active life tend to be bold in their approach to God, willing to trust freely that he knows their needs and will respond to their desires. They also can be prone to anxiety, to taking on too much, to neglecting to stay still long enough to listen to what God wants to tell them. The contemplatives, on the other hand, find it easy to “come away, and rest awhile” with the Lord (Mark 6:31). But sometimes they find it so easy to stay put that they might become stationary instead, unable to move when they need to do so. They might also fall more easily into despair in the face of catastrophe.

Luke’s final mention of Bethany in his Gospel is in his last chapter, when the resurrected Jesus was preparing to ascend into heaven. Jesus led the disciples out of Jerusalem, to Bethany. Then, in the town called “the house of affliction,” Jesus blessed his disciples and was “carried up into heaven” (Luke 24:50–53). The house of affliction was transformed into a site of great joy (Luke 24:52), and the disciples left Bethany strengthened and prepared for the task ahead.