What is a question about the faith you have never been able to answer?

General
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Hi everyone,

I want to ask something honest rather than clever.

Every Catholic I have met carries one question they cannot answer. Maybe it is about suffering, or something in the Old Testament, or a doctrine someone they love cannot get past. Most of us hold it quietly and hope nobody asks.

Mine is this. Why are we here at all, and if the answer is that we exist to give glory to God, then why did He make me specifically? Not humanity in general, not “mankind”, but this particular soul, at this particular time, in this particular family. If His glory is the end of the matter, then the question that stays with me is why the universe needed a me.

I have an answer I use when I do not want to sit with it. It is the one most of us learned: we were made to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him, and in doing that we give Him glory. St. Irenaeus has a line about the glory of God being a person fully alive, and I do like it.

But then I go back on it. God has no need of anything. He is complete without us, without witnesses, without a single creature to praise Him. So if a glory needs someone to receive it or recognize it, that sounds less like glory and more like need, and I do not believe God needs me. When I try to patch that over by saying the glory is for us rather than for Him, I get a nicer sentence and not a better answer.

Then I turn a third time and wonder if I am asking the wrong thing. Maybe “why me specifically” is not a puzzle with an answer waiting behind a door. Maybe being known and loved by name is closer to the point than being told the reason. I do not know. I only know that the question has never gone away, and that praying with it has done more for me than the argument has.

Which is why I want to hear yours. Not the one you can settle with a paragraph from the Catechism, but the one that stays open, and what you do with it. Keep reading it, keep praying it, set it down for a while, or take it to someone wiser than you?

I would rather hear how you live with an open question than watch another round of debate about it. I do not think any of us are less Catholic for having one.

God Bless

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Mine is the subject of killing. We are not meant to enact physical force with the end-point resulting in the target’s death, while I take severe issue with that particular assertion.

The reason the Catechism states this, is because God doesn’t wish for people to go to Hell and if you kill they could end up there, out of love for one’s neighbour, and because we are not God and so cannot know all things and therefore unable to determine what should be a life and death scenario.

However, discernment is for those who are “willing to put on the big boy panties and sail out to the deep water”.

There are certain truths which make killing absolutely necessary:

  1. They will come back and kill you if you don’t kill them.
  2. If you aim to injure, they might not be disabled in those moments and end up killing you.

Furthermore, it might not only be one’s own life which has to be defended but your family’s and also the wider community.

In support of those reasons, were law enforcement acting upon its duty at its very best and ‘social’ (urgh, I’ve come to despite that word) conditions within communities praiseworthy then it could be said that this occurrence wouldn’t be taking place and so the need to defend oneself.

And therefore this makes killing an act on behalf of the community and so too law enforcement, i.e. one is standing in the place of law enforcement. Plus, of course, law enforcement cannot be everywhere at once while the rest of us don’t live within a utopia.

While I would not normally argue over catechetical points, I am concerned that some additions in recent years may have been added by modern-day Jesuits and so could do with being removed; the other fact here, is that updates can be made - dogmas remain as they are, while branching doctrines can grow as can understanding.

We do have a natural right to defence and both logically and intellectually and defensibly, based on the above, one has a right to kill in certain instances.

I could be accused of a lack of trust, this being that after injuring someone and putting them out of harm’s way, should this be the eventuality and which as discussed is not a dead cert in itself, then, I could pray for the person. Yes, I could do that, while we are not meant to put God to the test. In every moment of each day, we are to make sure we exact that which is dutiful as a foundation (Psalm 14) and therefore if that is the case then in certain instances in life one may be obligated (certainly rare instances, or hopefully) in initiating a ‘take down’ for ourselves.

I believe the Jesuits as an Order require dissembling and this update be made in the Catechism. I am, however, guessing it will never be scripted in explicitly understood terms because if so people may exact that addition upon someone in instances where they shouldn’t have done. And as such, the wording would have to be scripted very, very carefully.

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How Cardinal Robert Sarah has not been elected Pope.

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Its the very reason why the Second Amendment was not to be infringed upon in any way.

A well armed neighbor, where every house has firearms and trained in firearms, is a safe neighbor and by far, better than three “cops” patrolling 1 square mile of a town.

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Robert Sarah, is not even a priest, he was “ordained” in the “New” false rite of Holy Orders. When you change the words of Ordination, or with any other sacrament, they no longer are what they were before, they are something new, which destroys the effects.

Pope Leo XIII, Apostolicae Curae - 1896 On the Nullity of Anglican Orders

  1. …All know that the Sacraments of the New Law, as sensible and efficient signs of invisible grace, ought both to signify the grace which they effect, and effect the grace which they signify.

Pope Eugene Council of Florence Sess. 8 - 1439

  1. All these sacraments are made up of three elements: namely, things as the matter, words as the form, and the person of the minister who confers the sacrament with the intention of doing what the church does. If any of these is lacking, the sacrament is not effected.

Pope Pius XII, Sacramentum Ordinis - 1947

  1. …the Church has no power over the ‘substance of the sacraments,’ that is, over those things which, with the sources of divine revelation as witnesses, Christ the Lord Himself decreed to be preserved in a sacramental sign… [28] Since “all” doesn’t mean the same thing as “many,” the sacrament is not confected in the New Mass.
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Oh brother. You are probably racist too. When were you born again? I don’t mean “born again,” but if you know when that was, that would suffice :joy: