Predestination, Grace, and Free Will: a Dialogue between a Catholic, a Calvinist, and a Helpful Third Party

In my experience, Catholics and Calvinists often talk past each other in conversations about issues surrounding predestination, grace, and free will.  I thought that perhaps presenting such a conversation in a dialogue format might be helpful.  The participants in this dialogue are Cyril, a Calvinist; Roger, a Catholic; and Ethel, a third party who helps eventually to get the conversation on track.

Cyril:  Hi Roger!  How have you been?

Roger:  Oh hi, Cyril!  Good to see you!  Things have been going well.  How about you?

Cyril:  Things have been good.  This is my friend, Ethel.

Roger:  Hello, Ethel.

Ethel:  Hello, Roger.  Good to meet you.  I've heard a lot about you from Cyril.

Roger:  Good things, I hope!  You know, Cyril, I was just thinking about you this afternoon.  We've never gotten a chance to have that discussion about predestination, grace, and free will we've talked about.

Cyril:  Well, have you got some time right now?  I'm free!

Roger:  Sure, that would be great.  You're welcome to join in as well, of course, Ethel.

Ethel:  Sounds interesting!

Roger:  I've always been fascinated by your Calvinist point of view.  To be honest, it just seems so strange and hard to believe.  For example, you believe that God decides not to save some people.  He chooses them to go to hell!  How could a loving God do that?!

Cyril:  Well, God doesn't owe anyone anything.  We all deserve hell from God, because we're sinners.  So it is not unjust of God to choose not to save some people.  It wouldn't be unjust of God if he decided to save nobody!  Salvation is a gift of unmerited grace!

Roger:  Well, of course grace and salvation are undeserved.  But I don't think that's the point.  It's still unfair and unloving of God to choose to send some people to hell.  It's unfair, because he doesn't give them any chance to be saved.  He doesn't give them an opportunity!  How can he punish them when he doesn't give them a chance?  That seems clearly unjust.  And it's unloving.  The Bible says that God wants everyone to be saved.  How could a loving God willingly send people to hell?  Wouldn't a loving God do everything he reasonably could to save everyone?  That's what we Catholics believe.  God desires all people to be saved, and he calls everyone.  Christ died for everyone, and he gives everyone the grace they need to be saved.  But he can't make them be saved, because they have free will.  That's why some people are lost.  They freely reject God's grace.

Cyril:  The Calvinist view is not unfair.  Remember, no one deserves God's grace.  No one deserves a chance to be saved.  So it's not unfair if God doesn't give some people that opportunity.  And it's not unloving.  Love is not supposed to be indiscriminate.  You don't love random strangers as much as you love your wife or your children.  You don't love rocks as much as you love people.  Well, God has a kind of love for all people, but a more special love for his elect.  He loves other people insomuch as they are his creatures, but he does not love them enough to grant them salvation and keep them from their deserved fate in hell.  This eternal, saving love he reserves for his elect.  Also, I have some serious problems with your Catholic view.  You say no one deserves God's grace and mercy, but you act as if people do.  You say God is unfair if he doesn't save everyone, which implies that he owes salvation to everyone.  You say it would be unloving for God not to save everyone, as if God owes his love to everyone.  And you say that God gives everyone a chance to be saved, and he wants everyone to be saved, but his desires and the opportunities he gives are thwarted by the free will of creatures--as if mere creatures could frustrate the eternal purposes of God!  And you say that everyone is given a chance and ability to be saved, and that the only reason some aren't is because they reject salvation by their free will.  But that implies that salvation is not really by grace.  Sure, grace is necessary, but sinners have to add something to God's grace--namely, their own free will cooperation--in order for it to have the effect God desires.  So we're not saved by grace alone.  The saved can forever boast that the only thing that made them different from those in hell was the contribution of their own free will.  It wasn't grace that made the difference, since that was given to everyone.  It was their own free will that made the difference.  So all their goodness ultimately came from themselves and not from God.

Roger:  In the Catholic view, we are saved by grace.  It's true that we have to cooperate with that grace, but that doesn't mean we aren't saved by grace.  If someone gives me a gift, I have to freely receive it, but I don't for that reason earn the gift or make it any less of a gift.

Cyril:  But that analogy oversimplifies the matter.  It's not just that you are receiving the gift of salvation.  You are contributing to it, because it is the contribution of your will that makes the difference between the saved and the unsaved.  Picture the unsaved in hell, raging and gnashing their teeth in hatred of God.  Picture the saved, morally clean and perfect, loving God with their whole hearts for all eternity.  And what, in your view, really makes the difference between these?  It's not what God does, for Christ died for them all and he gave grace to them all.  Really, the difference comes from what they have contributed.  The unsaved made themselves what they are by their own free will, and the saved made themselves what they are by their own free will.  So, really, God's grace is just the facilitator, the background, that allows the saved to take themselves out of hell and place themselves in heaven.

Roger:  Just because the saved chose to cooperate with grace and the unsaved didn't, it doesn't prove that they made the difference and not God's grace.  It was God's grace that made the difference; the saved only chose to cooperate with that grace.  We have to remember that all the good that we can do is a gift of God's grace.  Even when we cooperate with grace, that too is a gift of God's grace!  So it's still all grace, even though we must cooperate.

Cyril:  But it's not, though.  Let's make this concrete:  Sarah is among the saved and Suzie is among the unsaved.  Sarah cooperated with grace and Suzie didn't.  You say that Sarah's cooperation with grace was a gift to her from God.  But don't you say that God also gave to Suzie the same ability to cooperate with grace.  Didn't he give grace to them both?

Roger:  Yes.

Cyril:  Well then, if God gave both of them grace, then it was not the grace that made Sarah cooperate.  Sarah contributed that herself, and Suzie didn't, and that's how they ended up so different from each other.

Roger:  But even though God gave them both grace, and Sarah cooperated and Suzie didn't, it was still the grace that gave Sarah the ability and the desire to cooperate, and so her cooperation was a gift of grace.  But let's not gloss over the problems with your position.  You say that the reason Sarah is saved and Suzie is not is because God gave grace to one and not to the other, right?

Cyril:  Yes.

Roger:  So how can you escape saying that God is unfair?  Could Suzie be saved without grace?

Cyril:  No.

Roger:  So then how could it be fair for God to damn Suzie, when there was nothing she could do about her situation?  You can't condemn someone for rejecting a gift they were never given!  It isn't Suzie's fault that she's unsaved; it's God's fault.  Sarah just got the luck of the draw and Suzie didn't.  But how can it be fair and loving for God to randomly pick some people to save and other people to throw into hell, when neither the saved nor the damned could do anything about it?  What's become of all the exhortations in Scripture for us to choose what is right, to love God, to turn away from sin, etc.?  Nobody can do any of this!  God gives nobody a real choice.  Suzie is not given grace, so she can't choose or do anything right.  Sarah is given grace, but that grace forces her to be saved; it doesn't give her any ability to say no.

Cyril:  God's grace doesn't force Sarah to be saved.  It simply makes her willing to be saved.

Roger:  It makes her willing?  Don't you hear the absurdity in that language?  How can someone be made to be willing?  To have a truly free choice means that we are not made to choose one way or another.  We have to be able to choose either way.  As soon as we are made to choose a certain way and our option to choose otherwise is taken away from us, then our choice is no longer truly free.  You can chafe at the word force if you want to, but that's really what it comes down to.  If my mind is taken over by aliens and they control my thoughts and actions, I might look willing enough, but it's an illusion.  I was never given a real choice.

Cyril:  We can be willing without having the ability to choose otherwise.  We can never choose against our strongest motive.

Roger:  Sure we can!  We do it all the time.  It's called "resisting temptation".

Cyril:  But if you wanted to sin more than you wanted to do the right thing, you'd do it.  If you chose to do what is right, it must be because you wanted to do that more than you wanted to sin.

Roger:  Really?  That's not my experience!  My experience is that I often have to choose to do what is right even though I really want more to do what is wrong.  That's why resisting temptation is so praiseworthy.  If the righteous were only righteous because they just happened to feel like doing the right thing, that wouldn't be any more praiseworthy than just, say, making a sandwich because you feel hungry.  There's no virtue in just doing whatever you want.  The virtue lies especially in doing what is right in spite of not wanting to, in the face of wanting to do what is wrong.

Cyril:  Well, perhaps that's part of where we differ.  I don't think the good works of the saved are meritorious.  They are gifts of grace from God.  But I have another question:  How are you going to deal with the problem of God's sovereignty?  You say that God is not in charge of what people choose.  Free will is a rogue factor, independent of God, and it can even thwart his will!  He wants everyone to be saved, but his desires are thwarted by free will.  He wants everyone to do right, but he can't make it so because of free will.  Instead of looking at history as the plan of God being carried out, you look at it as a giant chaotic jumble, where God simply has to take what he can get much of the time.  And there's no use saying that God will make it all work out in the end, because he can't even do that.  People can go to hell, and there is nothing God can do about it (without taking away their free will, which would be, in your view, to take away their very humanity)!  God is like a Dr. Frankenstein, who has the best of intentions, but simply cannot control his creation.  It has a mind of its own, and he's just got to run with it.

Roger:  No, no, it's not like that at all.  True, God respects the free will of his creatures, but he is all-knowing and all-powerful.  He can fulfill his purposes even while respecting human (and angelic) freedom.

Cyril:  But, don't you see, he doesn't fulfill all his purposes.  God wants everyone to be saved, right?  But everyone won't be saved, right?  And even if God was lucky enough to have it be that everyone would end up choosing to be saved, it would still be just that: luck.  God is at the mercy of uncontrolled chaos.  It's not his plan that runs the show or that ultimately prevails; it's chance.  Sure, he's got a lot of input, but, like the rest of us, he's got to deal with a universe that, in many ways, is beyond his control, and he just can't get everything he wants.  You might say that he could have chosen not to give free will to his creatures, but then he wanted them to have free will, didn't he?  To not give them free will would be to fail to get the creation he wanted.  But if he does give them free will, he can't make them do what he wants, and so he still can't get everything he wants.  He can win some things, but, in no scenario, can he win everything he wants.  Chance ultimately determines how much he wins and how much he loses.

Roger:  Whew!  This is getting to be a tiring conversation.  I don't feel like we are really getting anywhere.  I just don't get your view, Cyril, and I don't see how you could see my view the way you do.

Cyril:  Well, that's exactly how I feel.  Your views just don't make any sense to me.  It's like we're coming from different planets.

Roger:  Ethel, you've been silent over there.  Do you have anything to add to the conversation?

Ethel:  Well, as a matter of fact, I have been developing some thoughts as I've listened to you both talking.  I happen to know something about both Catholic and Calvinist theology, and it seems to me like you two are mostly talking past each other.  I think that is the cause of much of your confusion.

Roger:  What do you mean?

Ethel:  Well, it seems to me like you two don't really disagree as much as you think you do.

Cyril:  Really?!  It seems to me we disagree over just about everything!  Our views are like polar opposites!

Ethel:  Yes, on the surface it does seem that way.  But I think that beneath the surface there is more agreement than there may seem to be.  Perhaps, as a third party, I can help bring that out.  Let's start with the sovereignty of God.  Roger, Cyril has asked you an important question.  You talk about God wanting Suzie to be saved, and yet she isn't.  How can you square that with God being sovereign over the whole creation?  Can you elaborate on that?  Because it seems to me that Cyril has a concern worth addressing further.

Roger:  Yes, of course.  Well, God wants everyone to be saved, but he does allow people to make their own choices.  He wants a world in which free will exists and is respected.  This is part of the larger question of why evil exists in the world.  We can't think of evil as a defeat of God, because he is indeed sovereign, being the Creator of all things.  God willingly chooses to allow evil things to happen in the world, because he intends to use them to produce a greater good.  He allows some evil into the creation because he knows that he can produce a better result making use of the evil than he could if he kept all evil out altogether.  So, while God wants all people to be saved, he would rather have it that people make their own choices, so, all things considered, he chooses to allow Sarah to choose what is right and Suzie to choose what is wrong.

Ethel:  So if Suzie chooses wrongly and goes to hell, this is not a defeat of God's purposes?

Roger:  No, because God willingly allowed it to happen, in pursuit of a greater good.  God is sovereign.  He does get the world he wants.  He weaves even the evil into the ultimate pattern, like a composer might weave discordant notes into a symphony, or a novelist might weave evil characters and events into a good story.

Cyril:  In some respects, that's really not all that different from what I would say.  God chooses not to save Suzie.  That is, he chooses to allow her to choose evil and end up in hell.  He doesn't force her to choose evil, but he allows her to do so.  And he doesn't do this because of any lack of love for Suzie as his creature, but in order to promote a greater good, where even evil is woven into a tapestry that is overall perfect, where God's perfections shine out in their full glory to the happiness of all beings who do not shut themselves off from the source of all happiness.  However, one thing still bothers me about your view in this area.  You say that God allows Sarah to choose right and Suzie to choose wrong.  But are you saying that God doesn't himself decide who chooses what?  Is it just a matter of chance, and he simply has to watch to see what is going to happen?  I have a problem with that, because it suggests that God is not the source of all reality, that some things happen by chance, and God has to find out about them by observing history, that not all things are a part of his eternal plan.  This seems contrary to God's absolute sovereignty over the universe.

Roger:  God is still sovereign, but he allows for free will.  So he doesn't micromanage everything.

Cyril:  I still have a problem with that.  It makes sense to say that some human CEO might choose not to micromanage employees in his company.  But with God, you've got a Being who is the source of all reality.  It seems to me that you have to say either that every detail of history that happens is planned by him, or some things happen ultimately by chance.  I mean, sure, Sarah chooses the right and Suzie chooses the wrong.  But why?  What caused Sarah to choose the right?  What caused Suzie to choose the wrong?  Did these events simply come about by chance, or, like all things, are there causes involved that explain why two different choices occurred?

Roger:  But free will, by definition, can't be controlled!  So no, God doesn't micromanage everything.  But that doesn't mean things are left to chance.

Cyril:  Well, I don't see how that can be.

Ethel:  Let me see if I can help here by putting this a different way.  Roger, why does Sarah choose what is right?  What are all the factors that go into explaining why she decided to make that choice?

Roger:  Well, as with all choices, there are lots of factors.  With Sarah's choice to go right, certainly the prime factor was the grace of God, which persuaded her to make that choice.  God didn't make her make that choice, but his grace did effectively persuade her to it.

Ethel:  What do you mean by "effective persuasion"?

Roger:  Well, God knows everything about Sarah.  He knows what will persuade her to choose what is right.  So, from all eternity, he planned to give her his grace in such a way that it would have the effect of leading her to choose what is right.  That is why her good will is a gift of God's grace.  Without that grace, she would never have chosen right.  But with that grace, she will certainly choose what is right.  In Catholic theology, such a gift of grace is called efficacious grace, because it is effective at leading a person to go right.

Cyril:  But that's exactly what we Calvinists mean by irresistible grace!

Roger:  No, efficacious grace is not the same as irresistible grace.  Irresistible grace can't be rejected or refused, and so it removes free choice.  efficacious grace can be refused.

Cyril:  But you just said that efficacious grace is always effective.

Roger:  It is.  It always persuades a person to do what is right.  But it doesn't make them do what is right.  They could reject it, but they never do, because God knows how to apply his grace in such a way as to effectively change people's minds, hearts, and wills to lead them to do what is right.  His grace has a supernatural power to penetrate into the fallen hearts of human beings and to lead them to see and love the truth.  And he knows how to apply his grace to each individual in the way best suited to each of them.

Ethel:  Cyril, you say that grace is irresistible.  Do you mean that Sarah is literally unable to reject God, that she has that option taken away from her?

Cyril:  No, certainly not.  Sarah could reject grace if she wanted to, but she will never want to, because irresistible grace causes her to not want to.  It's not that the option to refuse is removed; it's that God opens people's hearts to see the truth and to desire to follow it, shedding his supernatural light and love into their hearts.

Roger:  But that's the same as my view!

Cyril:  So it would seem.

Ethel:  But what about Suzie, Roger?  What is it that leads her to reject the right?

Roger:  Well, it isn't God!  God never tempts anyone to evil or makes them do evil.

Ethel:  But God was able to bring Sarah to accept his grace.  Couldn't he do the same for Suzie?

Roger:  He could, theoretically, but he chooses not to.  Again, it's the whole problem of evil.  God often allows evil things to happen because he is seeking a greater good.  From all eternity, God determined the path of history.  He decided what he would do, what he would prevent, what he would allow, etc.  He knew what would happen in all possible scenarios.  And he decided to actualize the world that accomplished his purposes.  In that world, some evil is prevented, but some is allowed.  With regard to Suzie, God saw that it was best, all things considered, not to put Suzie into a position in which she would be persuaded efficaciously by his grace.  This is a great mystery, and we have to be careful here!  God doesn't force Suzie to do anything.  He gives her every chance to choose to go right.  He wants her to go right.  But he does decide, in his eternal plan, to allow her to go wrong.  With Sarah, he decides to efficaciously lead her by his grace to choose right, while he allows Suzie to go wrong.  But this is totally unlike Cyril's view, where God actively chooses to damn Suzie because he wants her to be damned, and he gives her no choice.

Ethel:  Cyril, could Suzie choose to be saved if she wanted to?

Cyril:  Yes.  She has that option.  If she ends up damned, it is her own fault for refusing God and his grace of her own free will.

Ethel:  So God gives her everything she needs to choose and do what is right, if she will simply choose to avail herself of her opportunity?

Cyril:  Yes.  God does not force her to reject him or remove the freedom of her choice.  He simply refrains from efficaciously moving her will to accept him.  She has everything she needs to be saved if she would choose that.

Roger:  That's what we Catholics call sufficient grace--that God gives all of us everything we need to be saved if we would choose to accept it.  I thought you Calvinists denied that and say instead that only the elect have grace!

Cyril:  We say that God only effectively converts by his grace the elect and brings them to eternal salvation.  But he does give even the non-elect the objective opportunity to be saved if they would want to be--which they won't, unless God efficaciously leads them to that.

Ethel:  So would you say, Cyril, that God, in his grace, efficaciously leads Sarah to choose right, while he allows, in his eternal plan, for Suzie to choose to go wrong?

Cyril:  Yes, basically.  Since the Fall, we all choose to go wrong, but God leads his elect back to himself by his grace, while allowing the reprobate--the non-elect--to continue to go wrong.

Ethel:  Does he allow the repbrobate to go wrong because he hates them, because he likes to see them damned, because he has no love for them?

Cyril:  No, not at all!  God loves all his creatures, although he puts his special eternal love on those he's chosen to bring to eternal salvation.  He doesn't like anyone to be damned.  In itself, that is hateful to him.  But he does allow some to choose freely to turn away from him and end up damned in order to pursue the greater good.

Roger:  So would you say that God desires all men to be saved?

Cyril:  Well, it depends on what you mean.  God desires all men to be saved, in the sense that, in itself considered, he is pleased with the salvation of people and hates the damnation of people.  He never desires or loves the suffering of any being for its own sake, although he ordains suffering in his plan, not for its own sake, but for the greater good.  So, all things being equal, God desires both Sarah and Suzie to be saved.  But, all things considered, as they are in his eternal plan, he chooses to bring Sarah to salvation and not to bring Suzie to salvation, not out of any malice towards Suzie or any love of her suffering per se, but because he sees that it is for the greater good.

Roger:  Yes, I would say basically the same thing.  In Catholic theology, we talk about God's antecedent will and his consequent will.  The former is what God wills in itself considered, all things being equal, while the latter is what he wills all things considered.  So God antecedently wills all to be saved, but he does not consequently will all to be saved, inasmuch as he has chosen to allow some to be lost in his eternal plan.

Cyril:  Very interesting!  But, Roger, I have one further question on this point.  You talk about God's allowing people to make evil choices.  Is it possible for God to simply allow things to happen?  Doesn't he, being God, have to positively ordain all things, cause them to happen, good and bad?

Roger:  No, certainly not!  God is not the author of evil!  He allows it to happen, but he never causes it!

Cyril:  Well then, what causes it?

Roger:  Evil people making evil choices.

Cyril:  But isn't God behind those evil choices?

Roger:  No!

Ethel:  Roger, would you say that evil happens contrary to God's plan, that it thwarts his purposes in history?

Roger:  No, of course not.  Evil can only occur to the extent that God willingly, in his sovereign plan, allows it to happen.  Nothing happens outside of God's plan, not even the smallest things.  You see, goodness is a positive thing, while evil is a negative thing.  It's like light and darkness.  God creates light and goodness, but he only allows darkness and evil, because the latter are not positive beings or entities, but are simply absences of being.  Darkness is the absence of light, not a positive entity in itself.  And evil is simply the lack of goodness.  It is a weakness, a failure.  So God can't be the cause or source of evil, for that would imply that evil is a positive thing that has its roots in some evil in God himself.

Ethel:  Cyril, do you think evil is a positive entity that has its roots in God himself?

Cyril:  Certainly not!  God is not the author of evil.  God causes evil to happen, but he does this in a way different from his causation of good.  The same goes for light and darkness.  Light is a positive being created by God.  But darkness is caused by God only by his not creating or putting light in certain places.  Similarly, good is a positive thing that comes from God and that he gives as a gift.  But evil, or sin, is not a positive thing that comes from God.  It comes about simply from God refraining from causing good to exist in some place.  So, with Sarah and Suzie for example, God positively acts to infuse Sarah's heart with goodness, but he does not infuse Suzie's heart with evil.  He simply refrains from giving her the effectual grace that would infuse her heart with goodness, and so he allows her to continue in her sinful condition.

Roger:  Do you notice, Cyril, that you are using the word "allow" just about as much as I am?

Cyril:  Now that you mention it, I suppose I am.  I guess there's nothing objectionable about the word.  It just concerned me when I heard it coming from you, because I thought that lurking behind it might be some denial of God's sovereignty.  But I guess that's not the case.

Ethel:  OK, so if I'm understanding you both correctly so far, it seems that you both agree that God is sovereign over the whole universe, that he loves good and hates evil, but that he has allowed evil things to happen in the world in order to achieve the greatest good.  You both agree that good is a positive thing that comes from God, while evil is a negative thing that God allows by refraining from producing good in some ways, while both what God causes and what he allows are under the sovereign plan of God which accounts for all the details of history.  You agree that God gives people real free will--meaning the ability to make real choices--and that he respects that freedom, but that human freedom is also under the sovereignty of God and is never exercised apart from or in a way that thwarts God's eternal plan for history.  You agree that people, since the Fall, have turned away from God, and that no one can or will turn savingly to God without grace.  You agree that God has planned all of history from all eternity, and that in that plan, God has chosen some out of the mass of fallen humanity to bring to salvation by giving them grace in such a way as to efficaciously lead their minds, hearts, and wills to freely choose him, while he has chosen to refrain from efficaciously converting others, allowing them to freely reject him and end up damned.  He has not allowed some to be damned because he lacks love or because he enjoys seeing people damned or wants to see them damned, but because he is pursuing a greater good in which his glorious perfections will be fully displayed and the greatest happiness will be attained for all those beings who choose not to reject it.  You both agree that everyone has a chance to be saved.  Everyone has sufficient grace to be saved, meaning that they are given everything they need to have the objective possibility to be saved if they would choose to do so, that all obstacles are removed but their own free refusal to be saved, so that there is no one who might choose to be saved but be prevented from attaining salvation.  You both agree that if people are damned, it is their own fault, and that if people are saved, it is a gift from God.  The saved choose to cooperate with grace, but that cooperation is in itself a gift of grace, so that while the will is important in salvation, all saving good in its entirety is ultimately a gift of grace.  Am I right so far?

Roger and Cyril:  Yes, surprisingly, it would seem so!

Ethel:  Is there anything else we need to address?

Roger:  I'd like to ask about the Calvinist idea of Limited Atonement.  Don't you Calvinists say that Christ died only for the elect and not for everyone?

Cyril:  Yes.

Roger:  Well, doesn't that contradict everything we've agreed upon?  If Christ died only for the elect, then only the elect can be saved!  Everyone else is left out, with no possibility of being saved.  So their damnation is not their own fault!

Cyril:  But if Christ died for everyone, then why isn't everyone saved?  Is Christ's death a failure in some cases?  Is he not powerful enough to save?  If Christ died for everyone, then his death doesn't actually bring about anyone's salvation.  It simply makes everyone's salvation possible, without making anyone's salvation actual.

Ethel:  There is a saying in Christian theology: "Christ's death is sufficient for all men, but efficient only for the elect."  What do you two think about that?  Could you get behind that?

Cyril:  Yes, Calvinists usually accept this saying.  Christ's death is sufficient for all men in a few ways.  For one, it is of infinite value and power, so that it could actually save all men.  Also, it is freely offered to all men.  If any person, elect or not, should choose to receive that offer, Christ's death would save them.  There is no such thing as a person who would choose to receive Christ's death but would have it refused them.  It is available to all if they will choose it.  But Christ's death is efficient only for the elect, in that, in his eternal plan, God chose to effectively and actually bring about the eternal salvation of only the elect, and, in fact, he only actually brings about their eternal salvation.

Roger:  I would say basically the same thing.  Christ's death is infinite in value and power and so is sufficient to save all people.  It is truly offered and available to all.  It gives to everyone the possibility of being saved if they should choose to accept it.  But it doesn't actually bring about the eternal salvation of anyone but those who choose freely to receive it.  People can reject it.  As we've discussed, from all eternity, God chose to give grace in an efficacious way to some--the elect--and so bring them to accept his grace.  He did not intend to bring the non-elect efficaciously to the choice of eternal salvation.  So we can say that, in God's eternal plan, and in actuality, Christ's death does not actually bring about the eternal salvation of anyone but the elect (though, again, it is sufficient for all and is offered and available to all).

Ethel:  So, if I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like you two are in basic agreement about the various ways in which Christ's death and the application of that death are limited and unlimited.

Roger and Cyril:  Yes, I suppose we are!

Ethel:  Well, I've got to be going now.  But thanks for letting me be a part of such an interesting conversation!

Roger and Cyril:  You're welcome.  And thank you for helping to make that conversation much more enjoyable and productive!  We've covered a lot of ground, and I think we've both realized that we have much more in common in these areas than either of us previously thought.  Not that there isn't more we could talk about.  But we'll save that for another time.

For more, see here and here.

Reality is a Concept - Or, What's Wrong with Immanuel Kant

Kant's Theory

Immanuel Kant is one of the most important of the modern philosophers.  In my opinion, his importance lies more than anything else in his epistemology, whereby he attempted to take empiricism to its logical conclusions.  (For those who don't do a lot of philosophy, epistemology simply means "our ideas about how we can know things."  Empiricism is the epistemological view that says that all knowledge comes through the senses in some way or another.)  His formulation of how we know, what we can know, and what we can't know, has fundamentally shaped modern thought on these subjects ever since.  He provided a strong philosophical foundation for the empiricist Agnosticism that much of our culture tends to take for granted today.

Kant's basic theory goes like this:  Information about objective reality only comes through the senses.  But sense data is a big, unorganized mess.  Our minds give order to that data and so create the appearance of the ordered cosmos that we see.  Our minds impose categories--like space, time, number/quantity, and other logical categories--on the chaos of sense data, and the world we know is created out of that.  Sense data is like someone throwing at us a bunch of wires, bits of metal, glass, and other things, all piled in a heap.  But then someone comes along and puts the whole thing together and builds a car--that is like our mind, with its categories, organizing sense data into the world we know.  The end result of this is that we really know nothing at all about the objective world outside of our minds.  All the characteristics we can gather from what we experience (quantity, color, taste, sound, shape, spatial extension, temporal extension, etc.) have been imposed on that experience by our minds.  So what we are really experiencing is the creation of our own minds, not the true, objective world.  The latter we can never know, for we cannot get beyond or outside of our own mental categories.

Kant was very interested to distance his view from a view called idealism.  He was thinking of the theory of idealism put forward by another Enlightenment philosopher, George Berkeley.  Berkeley had proposed that, actually, everything that exists is either mind or the perceptions of mind.  In his view, there is no such thing as "external matter" conceived of as some reality that exists outside of the experience of minds.  He based this conclusion on many of the same arguments Kant would later use.  He pointed out that all our concepts--color, texture, sound, taste, smell, shape, distance, extension, and therefore space and time--only make sense when understood as perceptions of minds.  The color red, for example, is meaningless apart from the idea of someone seeing red.  Taste is meaningless without the idea of someone tasting something.  Even something like shape, which seems objective, implies a perceiving mind, for shape depends on extension (this part of object A is at some distance from that part of object A), which implies a perceiver in relation to whose viewpoint things can be in different places.  Without some viewpoint connected to someone viewing, there would be no meaning in talking about point A being in a different place from point B, for the viewpoint of the viewer provides the grid on which different places can exist.  There is no characteristic of matter whatsoever that is intelligible without, for its context, the idea of a perceiver perceiving it.

Berkeley concluded from all of this that the idea of "matter" as some entity existing apart from the experience of minds is meaningless gibberish, and so is non-existent.  Berkeley's critics accused him of denying the existence of the external world.  Berkeley replied that he was not denying the existence of the external world, but merely describing more accurately what the external world is--not an entity existing apart from the experience of perceivers, but an entity existing by means of such perception.  "To be is to be perceived."  But Kant was not convinced.  He didn't like the idea that there is no world external to the experience of minds.  He wanted to maintain the idea of such a world.  But he also agreed with Berkeley that all our perceptions and experiences are of things created by our own minds.  Therefore, he concluded, a mentally external world exists, but we can know nothing at all about it.  Here is Kant describing all of this in his own words, from his classic work, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (First Part, Section 13, Remark 2, from the public domain translation by Paul Carus, provided by Wikisource under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, found here):

Whatever is given us as object, must be given us in intuition. All our intuition however takes place by means of the senses only; the understanding intuits nothing, but only reflects. And as we have just shown that the senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, which are mere representations of the sensibility, we conclude that "all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts." Now, is not this manifest idealism? 

Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i. e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. 

Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)---no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible. As little as the man who admits colors not to be properties of the object in itself, but only as modifications of the sense of sight, should on that account be called an idealist, so little can my system be named idealistic, merely because I find that more, nay, all the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance. The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself. 

I should be glad to know what my assertions must be in order to avoid all idealism. Undoubtedly, I should say, that the representation of space is not only perfectly conformable to the relation which our sensibility has to objects---that I have said--- but that it is quite similar to the object,---an assertion in which I can find as little meaning as if I said that the sensation of red has a similarity to the property of vermilion, which excites this sensation in me.

So here is where Kant has become very influential.  Most people today, at least those immersed in Western culture and Western thought, take it for granted that all our knowledge comes through the senses.  They would claim that we cannot know anything in any other way.  But what about logic?  Can we gain knowledge through an application of logic to our concepts?  For example, consider the idea that the past is infinite--that is, that there was no beginning to the universe, but that it has always been going on, that no matter how far back you went in a time machine, you would never run into a beginning of time because there is no such beginning.  I submit that the concept of an "infinite past" is logically absurd.  It is absurd because it contains a contradiction--the concept of "infinite" contradicts the concept of "past".  The "past" is that part of the timeline that we have already got through.  But an "infinite", in terms of number or quantity, is by definition something that can never be got through.  If you try to count to infinity, for example, you will never arrive.  So an infinite past would be a length of time that could never be gotten through, it could never be completed, and yet the "past", by definition, is a length of time that has already been gotten through, it is already completed.  Yes, we are adding to the past as we move into the future, but that part of time which is already the "past" is already through.  So an "infinite past" would be a length of time that both cannot be gotten through and also has already been gotten through--a manifest contradiction.  But contradictions cannot exist, for, by definition, being excludes non-being, and all beings exclude their opposites.  Whatever is, by definition it is what it is and isn't what it isn't.  So the conclusion of logic is that an infinite past cannot exist, and therefore the past must be finite--that is, it must be limited.

Now the Kantian empiricist responds in this way:  "OK, I'll grant that the concept of an 'infinite past' is contradictory and therefore illogical.  But that doesn't tell us at all about the real world.  It only tells us about our concepts.  We're just playing around with ideas inside our own heads.  Such logical games can tell us nothing about objective reality, which exists outside our heads and our concepts.  So such logical analyses provide us with no knowledge.  Knowledge can only come through the senses, not through logic."

My First Objection to Kant

Now here's where I want to provide a fundamental critique of the Kantian view.  I want to make two objections, the second more important than the first.

My first objection is that, if the Kantian is right, then he is indeed right that our logical analyses provide no actual knowledge of the objective world.  But it also follows that our senses provide no knowledge of the objective world.  Kant himself admitted as much, and my experience suggests that the more perceptive among the modern empiricist Agnostics will also admit as much when pressed.  But I think they often fail to live up to the full implications of this admission.  So I think this conclusion needs to be pressed.  If this Kantian empiricist view is right, then nothing at all, neither logic nor our senses nor anything else, gives us any knowledge of reality.  Logic gives us no knowledge of reality because it only provides an analysis of the concepts in our heads and doesn't touch the real, external world.  And our senses provide us with no knowledge of reality because they never actually give us any access to the external world.  Kant appears to say at first that they do grant such access, but then he takes it all back by affirming that it is the categories of our minds ordering the sense data that really is the source of everything we actually know and experience.  Space, time, extension, quantity, shape, taste, color--in short, everything at all in our experience and knowledge--is a creation of our minds.  It is not what the external world is really like.  We know nothing at all about the external world.  You can be sure that Kant did not reach this conclusion because he wanted to.  He would have liked to have shown us how we can have actual knowledge of reality.  But he rightly recognized that his way of thinking about how we gain knowledge made that impossible.  Empirical sense data, without adding anything else, even logic, to it, can tell us absolutely nothing about reality.  I look across the room and see an apple on the table.  How do I know that there really is an apple on the table?  Perhaps it is an illusion.  How do I know that if there is an apple on the table, it isn't also true at the same time that there is NOT an apple on the table?  Only logic could make that inference.  But if I cannot even deduce that from my experience, if I cannot even, by my experience, exclude the opposite, then my experience tells me nothing, for there is nothing there that can be translated into any concept that could possibly have any meaning to me.  If all I've got, literally, is empirical sense data to go on ultimately, then all I can know, literally, is nothing at all.  And if all the characteristics that make up our idea of what a physical object is--color, shape, size, etc.--only exist as experiences of our minds, as Kant says, and cannot be attributed to objects in the external world, then we can really have no idea at all of what a "physical object" is or is like.  The very phrase, "physical object", becomes simply a meaningless collection of sounds.

I think it is worth bringing this out because I think it is missed by a lot of people who like to think like empiricist Agnostics and deny that logic can tell us about reality.  Even those more acute thinkers who will grant this in principle seem to forget it in the practice of their lives.  They keep going on as if they know something about the world, while denying in theory that they do.  They seek to gratify their curiosity, they argue with people, they hold opinions, they act on their opinions and seem to feel they are doing something meaningful in some way, they do science--all of which must be ultimately meaningless if their epistemology is correct.

My Second Objection to Kant

But this is not, I think, the most important objection to the Kantian theory.  The most important objection is that it is plainly wrong.  Its error consists in a simple forgetfulness with regard to the definition of words.  The Kantians--and George Berkeley before them--are quite right in pointing out that all our concepts--color, shape, texture, distance, extension, divisibility, quantity, etc.--are, well, concepts.  That is, they are ideas that exist in the minds of thinking and perceiving beings.  But then the Kantians make their fallacious move--they draw a distinction between our concepts about reality and reality itself, asserting that since all we know is the former, we can never know the latter.  Do you see the fallacy in drawing this distinction?  Think about it for a moment before reading on, and see if you can figure it out before I tell you what it is.

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OK, did you figure it out?  The fallacy, of course, is that reality itself is also a concept, just like all the other concepts.  It is just as much an idea in our minds as any other concept.  So the distinction between our concepts and reality itself is a false distinction.  There is no reality outside our concepts, by definition, since reality is itself one of those concepts.  The whole Kantian skeptical conclusion rests on the assumption that because we can never get beyond our concepts, we can never get to that which is outside those concepts, namely reality itself.  So our concepts block us off from reality, leading to the conclusion that we can know nothing at all.  But if reality itself is a concept, then just the opposite is true.  Experience of (and analysis of) our concepts does give us true knowledge of reality, because these concepts are nothing else than reality itself.  It turns out that George Berkeley had already given us the answer to Kant's skepticism decades before Kant ever wrote, when he pointed out that it is a fallacy to worry about idealism leaving out the external world.  Idealism is only leaving out the external world if we assume an idea about what the "external world" is contrary to what the idealist view thinks it is--that is, if we assume that the "external world" is something that exists outside of our concepts, outside of the experiences of minds.  But since reality itself is a concept, it is contradictory gibberish to talk about a reality that exists outside of our concepts.  So even though we can know nothing beyond our concepts, we have lost nothing of reality, for concepts are reality.  They are simply one and the same thing.  The "reality" that Kant thought lies forever beyond our knowledge turns out to be itself unreal, nothing but a phantom born of confusion in how we are using our words.

It is easy to be confused by such phantoms of language, because language can be used in ways that create illusions or impressions that don't correspond to reality.  I think of comic literature like Alice in Wonderland, where much of the humor is carried on by playing around with the illusions of language.  Or we can think of the example with the cats that is often used in philosophy classes:  "I can prove to you that a cat has nine tails.  No cat has eight tails.  One cat has one more tail than no cat.  Therefore, since 8+1=9, one cat has nine tails."  Of course, the problem here is a trick in the use of language.  Some classic arguments against the existence of God are based in such fallacious use of language.  For example, some Atheists argue that there cannot be an all-powerful being, because such a being could not make a rock so big that he couldn't lift it.  "If he can lift the rock, then it's not a rock so big that he can't lift it, so he can't create such a rock.  But if he can't lift it, then he can't lift it, so there is something he can't do.  Either way, there has to be something he can't do, so he cannot be all-powerful."  The problem with this argument is simply that the arguer is assuming that the word can't always implies a lack of power.  But this is not the case.  Sometimes something is impossible to someone because of a lack of power, but other times the impossibility lies not in a lack of power but in the absurdity of the concept.  The reason why God can't make a rock so big he can't lift it is not because he lacks power, but, on the contrary, it is because he has all power.  Being all-powerful, he can't make a rock more powerful than himself, which would be a contradiction.  Similarly, God cannot make a square circle, not because he lacks power, but because the concept of a square circle is meaningless gibberish.  But because the word "can't" often implies a lack of power, we neglect to consider whether the present argument is such a case, we just assume it is, and so we fall into the fallacy.

It seems like we must be out of touch with external reality if all we can know are our own concepts.  But this seeming is just an illusion.  It comes from having a false impression of what a concept is and what the external world is.  We vaguely imagine someone's head, and concepts floating around in that head, and then we imagine a world outside of that head.  But the idealists don't deny the existence of objects outside of people's heads; they deny the existence of objects outside of people's perceptions and concepts.  The very concept of outside is itself a concept.  So, by definition, there is nothing outside concepts.  Therefore, a logical analysis of concepts can give us true knowledge of actual reality.  We are not limited to the empiricist way of knowing things.  If logic excludes an "infinite past" because the concept involves a contradiction, then we know that an "infinite past" does not and cannot exist.  We know something true (and very important) about the real world.

So recognizing Kant's fallacy here can help us get beyond the false empiricist epistemology that has cut off from modern culture and much of modern philosophy a very important source of knowledge about the real world.  By adopting this false epistemology, we have blinded ourselves and doomed ourselves to an unresolvable skepticism.  But it is all unnecessary, for our epistemology is based in nothing other than a simple fallacy.  Once we realize this, we can get back to exploring the real world using all of the resources at our disposal.

For more, see here, here, and here.  It is evident that recognizing the inextricability of reality from the concepts and experiences of minds points to a view of reality in which mind is fundamental, as opposed to a view where mind is somehow an eventual by-product produced by non-mind.  To see how all of this relates to arguments for the existence of God, see chapter three of my book, Why Christianity is True, including the section on "Deeper Philosophical Issues".

Pope Francis, Scandalon

Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? . . . And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.  (Matthew 21:42, 44)

Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed. (1 Peter 2:6-8)

Jesus often warned people that his person and his message could be a scandalon--a "rock of offense"--to many.  We humans are not as wise as we like to think.  We're often on the wrong track, and when God comes to tell us that, his message is not always welcome (to put it mildly).  Think of the prophets and how they were received.  Think of the apostles.  And Jesus himself, the Truth Incarnate, was hung on a cross to die for confronting people with God's truth.

Jesus appointed the apostles to succeed him as the leaders of his Church.  The apostles, in turn, appointed bishops to continue the succession of leaders to the end of time.  St. Peter, the chief of the apostles, died in Rome and left his apostolic authority to the bishops of Rome.  Since that time, as Catholics know, the Bishop of Rome has had a special role in leading the people of God.  The First Vatican Council articulates this thoroughly:

And since by the divine right of Apostolic primacy, the Roman Pontiff is placed over the Universal Church, we further teach and declare that he is the supreme judge of the faithful, and that in all causes, the decision of which belongs to the Church, recourse may be had to his tribunal, and that none may re-open the judgment of the Apostolic See, than whose authority there is no greater, nor can any lawfully review its judgment.  Wherefore they err from the right course who assert that it is lawful to appeal from the judgments of the Roman Pontiffs to an Ecumenical Council, as to an authority higher than that of the Roman Pontiff.  (Vatican I, Session 4, Chapter 3, as found in The Vatican Council and Its Definitions: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy, Second Edition, by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster [New York: D & J Sadlier, 1871], 234-240, edited and footnotes removed by Mark Hausam, found here) 

. . . [T]he Holy Roman Church enjoys supreme and full Primacy and preeminence over the whole Catholic Church, which it truly and humbly acknowledges that it has received with the plenitude of power from our Lord Himself in the person of blessed Peter, Prince or Head of the Apostles, whose successor the Roman Pontiff is; and as the Apostolic See is bound before all others to defend the truth of faith, so also if any questions regarding faith shall arise, they must be defined by its judgment. . . .  

Therefore the Bishops of the whole world, now singly, now assembled in synod, following the long-established custom of Churches, and the form of the ancient rule, sent word to this Apostolic See of those dangers especially which sprang up in matters of faith, that there the losses of faith might be most effectually repaired where the faith cannot fail. . . .

And indeed all the venerable Fathers have embraced and the holy orthodox Doctors have venerated and followed their Apostolic doctrine; knowing most fully that this See of holy Peter remains ever free from all blemish of error according to the divine promise of the Lord our Saviour made to the Prince of His disciples: I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not, and, when thou art converted, confirm thy brethren.

This gift, then, of truth and never-failing faith was conferred by heaven upon Peter and his successors in this Chair, that they might perform their high office for the salvation of all; that the whole flock of Christ kept away by them from the poisonous food of error, might be nourished with the pasture of heavenly doctrine; that the occasion of schism being removed the whole Church might be kept one, and, resting on its foundation, might stand firm against the gates of hell. (Chapter 4)

So we see that the Apostolic See of Rome, in the person of the Roman bishop--the Pope--has always had the unique task of keeping the people of God on the right track.  It has been St. Peter's task to strengthen his brethren (Luke 22:32).  God preserves the Apostolic See from error, so that it will always lead the people of God aright.  It is a sure beacon of truth in a world of confusion, lit by the light of the Holy Spirit.  In light of what we know about how God's messengers are typically received, then, we might expect that what the Popes of Rome have to say to us will not always be something everyone wants to hear.

Our current Pope, Pope Francis, presents a very interesting, and even ironic, example of this.  He has said many things in his six years as pope that have scandalized many.  But some conservative-leaning Catholics have been concerned that Pope Francis has, to some degree, betrayed his calling and has set aside his duty to speak the truth even when it is unpopular.  They feel that this is the time for the Pope to be confronting the liberal point of view that has been seeking to dominate our culture--to stand up against contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and all those other things in which modern culture contradicts Catholic teaching.  To be sure, the Pope has spoken against these things, but some conservatives feel he has not done enough.  Instead of making these sorts of things the central focus of his message to the culture, he has instead spent most of his time harping on liberal themes like climate change and protecting the environment, the plight of migrants, the injustice of the death penalty, concern for the poor, atheists going to heaven, etc.  He has muddied Catholic teaching regarding marriage by compromising with the culture, allowing "nuances" in pastoral discipline regarding people in "irregular unions"--that is, objectively adulterous relationships.  He's muddied Catholic teaching on the death penalty by worrying about things like the "dignity of criminals."  He doesn't speak out enough against homosexuality, instead confusing people by saying things like, "Who am I to judge?"  The Pope is supposed to be a scandalon--a rock of offense, aggressively speaking truth against the evils of our day--but Pope Francis has put that aside, instead seeking to "build bridges," "engage in dialogue," "seek common ground," "emphasize mercy," etc.  Far from combatting liberalism, his theology seems rather to be a constant stream of liberal themes and concerns.  Where's the scandalon?  Instead of being a rock of offense, Pope Francis seems to have capitulated to modern culture, sucking up to the liberals and therefore receiving their respect and praise.  Or so these conservative Catholics tell us.

Sometimes it is hard for us to see something because we are looking in the wrong direction.  Pope Francis appears to have abandoned his duty to be the scandalon.  But has he?  Has he put aside and neglected the truths that we need to hear today, the truths that cause those on the wrong path to stumble?  In fact, his teaching has been very controversial, and it has caused a lot of stumbling.  But it's not been primarily the liberals who have done the stumbling.  It's been the conservatives.  For years, some conservatives in the Church have built up an idea in their minds of what Catholic teaching is all about.  They have watched American and western culture move further and further away from orthodox Christianity.  They've watched the rise of the sexual revolution, with all the immorality, corruption, and heartbreak it has brought.  They've watched acts of homosexual sexual relations go from being shunned to being celebrated and paraded.  They've watched our society embrace the "culture of death" in so many ways--with euthanasia, contraception, abortion, etc.  And they've watched the Church take a bold stand against all of these things.  In many of these areas, they've seen the Church take up a common cause with political conservativism, with the enemies being the liberals.  In watching all of this, some of them have fallen into the difficult-to-detect, subtle shift from recognizing that Catholic teaching has common cause in some areas with political conservativism to nearly identifying Catholic teaching with political conservativism.  They have learned to think of the conservatives as the "good guys" and the liberals as the "bad guys".  They've promoted the Republican Party and despised the Democratic Party.

But Catholic teaching transcends the political divides of our culture.  It may sometimes agree with the conservatives, but it is not conservativism..  It may sometimes oppose the liberals, but it is not anti-liberalism.  This subtle near-identification of Catholic teaching with conservativism has led to a blind spot in the vision of some conservative Catholics.  They've praised the Apostolic See when it has stood up against the errors of the liberals.  They've attacked liberal Catholics who have refused to accept Church teaching about things like contraception, women priests, and homosexuality as "cafeteria Catholics"--that is, as Catholics who only follow the Church when the Church happens to agree with what they already think, but who are ready, when conflict arises between Church teaching and their own ideals and values, to rebel against the Church in order to cling to their own ideologies.  And they have been right to point out the inconsistencies of these liberal Catholics.  But--and here is the irony--at the same time they've been attacking the liberals, they've fallen into the very same trap themselves.  Pope Francis has provided the scandalon that has brought their own "cafeteria Catholicism" to light.  When liberals attacked Pope St. Paul VI's great encyclical Humanae Vitae, with its stand against modern liberal errors in the areas of family and sexual ethics, they criticized them and accused them of refusing to trust God's leading of his Church and the Pope to shine the light of truth into the world.  But Pope Francis's main focus has been not on the errors of the liberals--though he has attacked these quite clearly and not infrequently--but on errors more often committed by modern political conservatives.  According to him, the liberals have in fact been right about some things.  They've been right to emphasize injustices against the poor, migrants, and other oppressed classes.  They've been right about the need to focus attention on protecting the earth and its environment.  They've been right in emphasizing the virtues of compassion and mercy.  Pope Francis believes that what our culture especially needs more of is mercy and compassion.  He also believes that this is something the Church badly needs.

There are plenty of Catholics who have wound up, for all sorts of reasons, in objectively disordered family and sexual relationships.  The conservative critics say that what is most needed is firm and swift punishment.  "Tell them to stop sinning, and if they don't, throw them out!  Who cares what they've gone through, how they've got into this mess, what their motivations have been, and why they are still stuck!  Enforce the discipline.  That's all that matters."  When Pope Francis, in Amoris Laetitia, asserted that what is especially needed in many of these cases is a kind of nuanced pastoral care that pays attention to all of the complexities of these people's situations and tries to find ways to help them grow in their relationship with God as they struggle forward with getting their lives straightened out, the conservative critics accused him of compromising with evil, abandoning traditional Catholic morality, etc.  "What relationship with God?" they've said.  "These people can't have any real relationship with God!  They're refusing to follow the Church's moral teaching!  They need to do the right thing immediately and fully or we should write them off as nothing but sinful rebels and tell them to come back when they are willing to repent!"

When Pope Francis put out his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si, as soon as the conservative critics saw that it dealt with subjects like "climate change," they immediately decided the whole thing was pretty much just a liberal manifesto, and they reacted accordingly, trying to justify why they could write off what the Pope was saying as worthless rubbish they could safely ignore and reject.

When Pope Francis, last summer, stated that the Church has been following a path of doctrinal development that has led to the conclusion that, in the current day, the death penalty is to be regarded as inadmissible because its attitude and practice is inconsistent with the human dignity of criminals, the conservative critics immediately rejected this as a betrayal of Catholic tradition.  They asserted that they would continue to teach the admissibility of the death penalty as the real Catholic teaching, whatever the Pope and the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church said.  I mean, who does the Pope think he is anyway, to tell Catholics what to believe?!  Some of the critics have even published articles and books defending the admissibility of the death penalty as the true Catholic position.

As we mentioned earlier, when God speaks truth into the world, it often produces a negative reaction, for we all like to think we know better.  And that negative reaction has not always come from the obvious and notorious "sinners."  It has not infrequently come from the ones who have considered themselves the guardians of the pure tradition.  The most obvious example of this is the reaction of the Pharisees and the Sadducees to Jesus's teaching.  Instead of allowing themselves to be enlightened by what Jesus was saying and doing in light of the promises of the prophets, they opposed and rejected him because he did not fit into the schemes they had adopted as to how things should be.  Instead of changing their schemes to accommodate God, they rejected God to preserve their schemes.  And they accused Jesus of being the one to abandon the tradition of God.  They accused him of being too merciful to the sinners, who, in their view, needed not mercy so much as a good dose of cold, hard moral discipline.

In fact, interestingly, some of the most famous rejections of papal teaching throughout Church history have come from people who have believed that the Pope was being too merciful and not hard enough on sinners.  In the middle of the second century, St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, and Firmilian, bishop of Caesaria, led a movement of opposition to Pope St. Stephen because he decreed that all the churches should accept baptism even when it was administered by the hands of heretics so long as the baptism was performed validly.  Cyprian and Firmilian accused Pope Stephen of compromising the truth and being lax on heretics.  Instead of insisting on the black-and-white truth, they said, Pope Stephen was muddying the waters by bringing confusing nuances into the practice of the Church.  Here's a sample of what Firmilian said in his own words, from a letter he wrote to Cyprian:

17. And in this respect I am justly indignant at this so open and manifest folly of Stephen, that he who so boasts of the place of his episcopate, and contends that he holds the succession from Peter, [2946] on whom the foundations of the Church were laid, should introduce many other rocks and establish new buildings of many churches; maintaining that there is baptism in them by his authority. For they who are baptized, doubtless, fill up the number of the Church. But he who approves their baptism maintains, of those baptized, that the Church is also with them. Nor does he understand that the truth of the Christian Rock is overshadowed, and in some measure abolished, by him when he thus betrays and deserts unity. [2947] The apostle acknowledges that the Jews, although blinded by ignorance, and bound by the grossest wickedness, have yet a zeal for God. Stephen, who announces that he holds by succession the throne of Peter, is stirred with no zeal against heretics, when he concedes to them, not a moderate, but the very greatest power of grace: so far as to say and assert that, by the sacrament of baptism, the filth of the old man is washed away by them, that they pardon the former mortal sins, that they make sons of God by heavenly regeneration, and renew to eternal life by the sanctification of the divine laver. He who concedes and gives up to heretics in this way the great and heavenly gifts of the Church, what else does he do but communicate with them for whom he maintains and claims so much grace? And now he hesitates in vain to consent to them, and to be a partaker with them in other matters also, to meet together with them, and equally with them to mingle their prayers, and appoint a common altar and sacrifice. . . . 

23. What, then, is to be made of what is written, "Abstain from strange water, and drink not from a strange fountain," [2955] if, leaving the sealed fountain of the Church, you take up strange water for your own, and pollute the Church with unhallowed fountains? For when you communicate with the baptism of heretics, what else do you do than drink from their slough and mud; and while you yourself are purged with the Church's sanctification, you become befouled with the contact of the filth of others? And do you not fear the judgment of God when you are giving testimony to heretics in opposition to the Church, although it is written, "A false witness shall not be unpunished?" [2956] But indeed you are worse than all heretics. For when many, as soon as their error is known, come over to you from them that they may receive the true light of the Church, you assist the errors of those who come, and, obscuring the light of ecclesiastical truth, you heap up the darkness of the heretical night; and although they confess that they are in sins, and have no grace, and therefore come to the Church, you take away from them remission of sins, which is given in baptism, by saying that they are already baptized and have obtained the grace of the Church outside the Church, and you do not perceive that their souls will be required at your hands when the day of judgment shall come, for having denied to the thirsting the drink of the Church, and having been the occasion of death to those that were desirious of living. And, after all this, you are indignant! 

24. Consider with what want of judgment you dare to blame those who strive for the truth against falsehood.  For who ought more justly to be indignant against the other?--whether he who supports God's enemies, or he who, in opposition to him who supports God's enemies, unites with us on behalf of the truth of the Church?  (Firmilian, Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, to Cyprian, Against the Letter of Stephen, AD 256, text taken from the plain text version found here at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.  Also found, more accessibly, here.)

Eventually Pope Stephen's position won out universally, and all Catholics accepted his practice as the correct one.  (When you go against the teaching of the Pope, you're always, by definition, ultimately on the wrong side of history.)  Read some of the conservative critics of Pope Francis today, and you will be reminded of the truth of the saying, "There is nothing new under the sun."

The conservative critics of Pope Francis have accused him of abandoning his duty to be the scandalon in the midst of an evil world.  But these are Catholics, and so they should remember that Christ appointed St. Peter and his successors to be a beacon of light to lead the Church through the mazes of confusion we encounter in this fallen world.  If the Apostolic See speaks out and warns us of errors, should not our first response be to look inside ourselves, to examine our own ideas, to see if we've perhaps become too one-sided, to see if even in our zeal to get things right, we might have missed something?  Maybe our construction of what "Catholic teaching" is needs to be adjusted.  Would it be so surprising if we all need adjustment now and then by the very power appointed by Christ for his Church to help us make such adjustments?

Therefore the Bishops of the whole world, now singly, now assembled in synod, following the long-established custom of Churches, and the form of the ancient rule, sent word to this Apostolic See of those dangers especially which sprang up in matters of faith, that there the losses of faith might be most effectually repaired where the faith cannot fail. 

It would be nice if error always came up on just one side at a time, if we could neatly package it according to just one specific ideology so that we could always fight on just one front.  But, unfortunately, things are seldom so simple.  When we're fighting against one error or evil, another error or evil comes up to bite us from another direction.  We have to be vigilant to watch in all directions so that we don't become like pendulums, always swinging to one extreme or another, and never able to achieve balance.  We need justice, but we also need mercy.  Those who have gone astray need moral discipline, but they also need compassion and understanding.  Our world is full of so much confusion and heartache today.  We are so lost, perhaps more than at any other time in human history.  At least the pagan pre-Christian culture was, in a sense, young, ready to be confronted with the fresh new gospel.  But, in a sense, we are old.  Our culture has arisen out of the wreck of a corrupted and abandoned Christendom.  We've come to the end of our rope in many ways.  We need to be confronted with the clear light of truth, including, and especially, in areas where we don't want to hear it.  But we also need that message to be given to us with the compassion of a parent seeking a wayward child, who understands and empathizes with where we have been and the confusion and pain we have fallen into, and who is able to comfort us and be with us as we try, slowly but surely, to make progress little by little in our moral lives.  In our age perhaps more than in any other, we need to hear the "truth spoken in love."  Perhaps one of the main tasks of the Apostolic See in the present time is to remind us of this, to keep us from trying to choose truth over love or vice versa.  Will we listen to what God is saying through his chosen vessel?  "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24).

Some Provisional Thoughts on Transgenderism

So this whole transgenderism movement has been going on for some time now.  It kind of came up out of nowhere a few years ago, or so it seems, and has, in a short time, completely taken over.  A few years ago, hardly anyone would have dreamed of talking about "men" and "women" in any way other than as references to biological conditions.  Then came a rapid, dramatic, paradigm shift so that, now, people regularly use "men" and "women" to refer to people's subjective sense of personal identity independent of, and sometimes contrary to, their biological condition.  I've been astonished at how rapidly this shift in thinking has occurred.

I am still thinking about all of this.  And the Church has yet to weigh in on this specifically in a greatly substantial way.  So I don't want to make any conclusive comments.  But I do want to put something out there--an account of the thoughts that are currently swirling about in my head.  This will help me to better organize those thoughts, and hopefully it will also help other people in their own journey in thinking through these things.  And dialogue, comments, questions, or criticism are most welcome (as always)!

It seems to me that this paradigm shift is not really owing to any new discovery or any change in our objective knowledge of the world--such as some new scientific discovery.  This is rather, fundamentally, a change in how we want to define things.  Sometimes there are claims that "science" is behind this change.  I have not done a thorough study of what is claimed scientifically.  It seems to have something to do with discoveries about differences in the brains of transgendered people as opposed to non-transgendered people.  But I don't think this is the real issue.  Let's say, for example, that it turns out that the brains of biological males who want to be females or who "feel like" females seem actually to be different in some ways from the brains of males who don't.  Perhaps there is some mental or psychological disposition to feel this way in some people, perhaps even rooted at least partly in the physiology of the brain.  What would this mean?  What it would mean would not be determined by the science itself.  In all of human history, pretty much, until recently, a "man" has been defined in terms of biological anatomy--and specifically in terms of possessing the overall physiological characteristics associated with "maleness" and especially the orientation of the body towards being able to mate with females to produce offspring.  There are all sorts of differences between specific males and females.  They come in lots of different shapes, sizes, personalities, etc.  But in the way we've looked at it in the past, no matter how different they are, if two individuals have male reproductive organs, or at least the internal programming toward the production of those organs, we've defined both individuals as "male".  Why?  Simply because that is what we have meant by the word "male".  "Male" hasn't been defined in terms of how strong an individual is, how tall an individual is, how brawny an individual is, how much an individual likes trucks or fast cars or war or football or grunting or whatever else human males are supposed to like (by the way, I have no interest myself in anything in that list); it's been defined simply by whether or not the individual has a body biologically adapted towards playing the male role in the reproductive design of the human race.  So whatever science has discovered about the different brains of different male individuals--that some are more interested in sex with women than others, that some are more affectionate than others, that some are less aggressive than others, that some like to play with dolls more than others, or whatever--even if these are at least partly rooted in the physiology of the brain, it wouldn't have made any difference to whether or not we would, in the past, have been inclined to label the individuals as "men".  It is not the science that has produced this paradigm shift.  It is a change in the way we have chosen to define "men" and "women".  It is not a scientific change, but a cultural, ideological, and sociological change.  (It also, by the way, seems odd to me how we are now using things like "he likes to play with dolls, he's more emotional, likes to hang out with women," etc., as evidence that a man is really a woman--whereas just a few years ago, anyone who suggested that real men don't play with dolls would have been called a gender bigot for stereotyping men.  What before were considered foolish and prejudiced stereotypes seem now to be considered valid indicators that a biological man might actually be best classified, at least if he wants to be, as in actuality a woman.)

This means that neither method of labeling gender can be called right or wrong from a purely "scientific" point of view.  How we judge these methods of labeling will depend rather on other aspects of our culture and our worldview.  So I think the attempt by the new paradigm to portray this as a matter of scientific advance is misleading.

Our culture is increasingly Agnostic.  Many of the battles of the "culture wars"--abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, etc.--are, to a great degree, fights between two worldviews about whose viewpoint will dominate the expressions, attitudes, beliefs, values, actions, and laws of our culture and our society.  The two worldviews are Christianity--which has been dominant for a long time but which has been losing ground for some time, and losing ground very rapidly in recent times--and Agnosticism, which has been attempting to control American culture since the founding but has increased in success rapidly in recent times.  It is impossible to consider transgenderism without considering which worldview-perspective we are coming from.  As in many other areas, so in this area, the Agnostic point of view likes to try to pass itself off as the "neutral" side.  (Just let that phrase, the "neutral side," sink in for a moment, and hopefully you will see the problem there.  If you don't, you might check out some of these articles which show the impossibility of having any substantive ethics or laws without abandoning neutrality and embracing controverted points of view.)

Let's first look at transgenderism from an Agnostic point of view.  In an Agnostic view, we only know facts in the sphere of the natural world that can be studied by science.  We do not have objective knowledge about things beyond that, including answers to fundamental questions about the meaning of the universe.  In these higher areas, we have beliefs but not facts.  In this view, which is often allied with an Atheistic point of view (particularly when matters of science are involved), there is no "divine mandate" in terms of "male" and "female", or at least we do not know of any.  Therefore, the way we define these kinds of things is ultimately up to us.  In the past, we've used biological characteristics related to reproduction as the basis for our use of words like "male", "female", "man", "woman", etc., but now, for various reasons, lots of us have decided we'd rather connect these terms to more subjective aspects of how we think about ourselves--our choices of "personal identity".  These latter, subjective considerations have become more important to us than the biological, reproductive aspects of ourselves in terms of how we want to use this kind of terminology.  Is there anything wrong with that?  Well, I suppose (assuming, again, for now, an Agnostic point of view) we can define things however we want.  We made up language, after all, so we can use it as it best suits us.  I do think, however, that even from this Agnostic point of view there is some confusion in this movement.  I think a lot of people think that we've discovered something new, something scientific--as if people in the past were somehow objectively wrong in connecting "male" and "female" to biology and reproduction, and new discoveries have led us to realize--all of us except those backward, ignorant, bigoted fundamentalists anyway--that we ought to connect these terms instead to subjective aspects of our "personal identity".  But, as I discussed earlier, this doesn't seem to be the case.  It's not that we've discovered something new so much as that we have decided to alter how we use our words.  In terms of scientific facts, it is all the same whether we say "Frank is a male who is kind of emotional and effeminate in some ways and likes to play with dolls and hang out with women" and "Francine produces sperm but is really a woman because she likes dolls, etc.".  The difference here is not in how much "science" is taken into consideration but simply in how we've chosen to use words like "male".  So I think that, from an Agnostic point of view, it would make sense to recognize more accurately what is really going on here and to admit that this is really a difference in how we've chosen to categorize things rather than a change of opinion rooted in some advance in scientific knowledge.  (Though we could, of course, say with at least some plausibility that our decision to change our terminology and categorization has been influenced by advances in science which have helped us to better recognize the diversity that exists between even individuals of the same "biological sex", as well as to take more seriously the "outlier" cases, such as hermaphrodites and other people who have variations from the norm in terms of biological and anatomical sexual characteristics.  Perhaps we didn't take this diversity as seriously in the past, and doing so now has led us to want to use our terms differently.)

But once we've clarified what is going here, that this is a change in categorization and definition fundamentally, is there anything wrong with Frank deciding to think of himself as Francine because she identifies more with "female" culture and viewpoint than with "male" culture and viewpoint?  I suppose not.  If it makes him/her happy, why not go with it?  But, if we do switch our terminology here, we must recognize that we will still have to deal with the fact that the human race exists in a biologically binary way--that some people produce sperm and other people produce eggs and these are obviously designed to come together and reproduce.  (Some may object to my saying the human race is "binary" this way.  "What about asexual people, or hermaphrodites, etc.?"  Well, of course, such cases exist, but it is obvious that none of these sorts of cases constitute any sort of third fundamental form of human existence.  Human biology is "designed" to be biologically, anatomically and reproductively male and female.  These other cases are, in relation to this "design", instances of persons exhibiting a "defect" in this area, just as people who are born without an arm are experiencing a "defect" from the ordinary, genetic "design" of human individuals.  To say these are "defective" conditions is of course not to pass judgment on them or the persons in them, but simply to point out the obvious fact that there is such a thing as "normal" biological development in humans and variations from that norm.  So these kinds of variations from the sexual norm do not alter the basic, objective binary nature of human sexuality.)  So what are we going to do with this obvious, objective fact about human beings?  We deal with aspects of our reality by labeling them.  In the past, we've used terms like "male" and "female" to account for the binary sexual nature of humanity.  A transgender vocabulary will have to come up with new terms to talk about this.  A question that occurs to me at this point is this:  Why go through all the bother of redefining our terms here?  Why doesn't Frank just say that he's a male who likes dolls, likes to hang out with women, etc., instead of trying to redefine substantial aspects of the received English language (and other languages)?  Is this really an advantage, or does it simply create confusion?  "Well, if Frank gets to call himself/herself Francine, then he/she can go to the 'girls'' restroom, and he/she feels more comfortable there."  OK, well, if this is really such a great concern for a lot of people, then why not simply change the requirements for who can go into which restrooms rather than changing the entire English language?  Why not just allow men and women to go into the same restroom?  "But then people who think like men might go into a restroom for people who think like women!"  Well, how are you going to prevent that by allowing people to define themselves "male" or "female" on their own terms?  You have the same risk either way.  I see nothing substantial gained, except more confusion.  But, hey, whatever, we're Agnostics, right?  We can do whatever we want, right?  There's no objective moral law that we can know about, right?  So if enough of us think this is all worth fundamentally altering our language for, then why not do it, right?  Well, sure, I guess.  I look forward to seeing what we come up with to refer to what used to be categorized under "male" and "female".  Perhaps we can adopt completely new words.  We can call what used to be called "males" "gazorks" and we can call what used to be called "females" "zagorks".  So long as we don't start making restrooms labeled "gazorks" and "zagorks" . . .

OK, so that's the Agnostic view.  But what about a Christian point of view?  What about a Catholic point of view (which I care about, since I'm Catholic)?  Here, I think, we have all the previous considerations with some added ones.  Particularly, we have to deal with the fact that the distinction between "male" and "female" is something created by God as a central component of human nature and that it has implications for how we are to live.  God designed human beings male and female, with the intention that they would come together in marriages and reproduce.  And Catholic doctrine uses "male" and "female" in the old, classic way, referring not to subjective psychological characteristics but to biological and anatomical characteristics related to reproduction.  Catholic doctrine says that God made humans "male" and "female".  He designed these to be complementary to each other.  He designed males and females to marry each other--that is, to join together into formal unions in which there will be a special relationship of love and care which will form the basis for a family unit often involving children produced through the biological act of sex.  Catholic doctrine affirms that "marriage" must be between a "man" and a "woman", not arbitrarily but because this is fundamental to what marriage is all about.  It is essentially oriented towards not just friendship, closeness, or bodily pleasure, but towards a special male-female relationship and biological reproduction.  Those things aren't just things some married couples just happen to do; they are essential to the purpose and nature of marriage.  (This is not to say that infertile couples don't have a real marriage, but simply that infertility in such cases constitutes a deviation from the standard ideal, just as not having an arm constitutes a deviation from the standard ideal of human form which involves two arms.  This is not to say there is something shameful or immoral about being infertile or not having an arm; it is simply to recognize these things as deviations from a recognized norm.  Deviations happen, it's not a problem, but it would be wrong to refuse to acknowledge them for what they are and pretend that they are not deviations.)  So Catholic doctrine condemns homosexual sexual activity as well as "same-sex marriage".  Homosexual sexual activity is a misuse of sexuality, which is supposed to occur in a relationship oriented naturally towards reproduction (and then a stable family structure in which the children are raised).  The thing that is wrong with "same-sex marriage" is simply that it isn't marriage, because it is a deliberate attempt to redefine its essence (as opposed to something like involuntary infertility, where there is no intention to redefine marriage but simply the presence of an involuntary non-ideal circumstance).  There are other ways in which men and women complement each other as well.  One often-observed feature of Catholic sacramentality, of course, is that women can't be priests.  Whatever else this shows, it shows that God takes seriously male-female complementarity and intends for such complementarity to have a practical bearing in various aspects of human life.

So Catholic theology is going to have to insist on refusing to blur the distinction between male and female, or a redefining of the substance of God-ordained aspects of human existence such as "male", "female", and "marriage".  So what if Frank wants to identify himself/herself as Francine?  Well, it would seem that Catholic theology will have to say that Frank is still Frank in terms of Catholic ontological, moral, and theological definitions.  In Catholic language, he is still "male".  If he gets married (in a version of "marriage" recognized by the Church), he will have to marry what would in Catholic language be called a "woman".  And he will, in terms of his gender at least, be in principle eligible for the priesthood.  (Perhaps I'm wrong here, and the Church will be able to accommodate looking at "male" and "female" in a way more compatible with transgender philosophy.  But if this is so, I don't yet see how, nor do I see any basis for affirming it.)  All of this would appear to put Catholics on a collision course with transgender culture.  Are there any ways Catholics and transgenderists could accommodate each other?  Perhaps.  Consider same-sex marriage.  In the US at this time, "same-sex marriage" is legal.  But what is "marriage" as defined by the US government?  Is this really the same institution that the Church calls "marriage"?  Could part of the controversy here be avoided if the US government and the Church were to agree that they are talking about two different things?  We could talk about "civil marriage" as a thing essentially distinct from "Catholic marriage".  Then the US government could define "civil marriage" however they want and their definition wouldn't come into conflict with the Catholic definition of marriage because they would not intend to be addressing that.  Now, I'm not saying this would solve all controversy.  After all, in Catholic thinking, all human societies have an obligation to think and act and govern in ways consistent with "the truth about God and man," so a society that chooses to think and act as if Catholicism is not true is going to be on a fundamentally wrong course from a Catholic point of view (and the Agnostics would have to say the same about us).  But at least a more Agnostic state and the Catholic Church could define terms in such a way as to avoid entangling themselves more than necessary in each others' domains.  So Catholics could say that marriage is between a man and a woman, while "civil marriage" (an institution fundamentally different from marriage, invented by the US government) isn't necessarily.  Could something like this help when Catholics try to relate to individuals like Frank/Francine?  Could a Catholic agree to use the name Francine instead of Frank, and to acknowledge that Francine is a girl and not a boy using those terms in a "transgenderist" definition, while he is a boy and not a girl in a Catholic definition?  Then he could say that Francine is both a girl and a boy in different senses.  This might get confusing.  There might be situations in public discourse and interaction where problems will still arise.  But it's at least worth thinking about as one way of trying to figure out how different sorts of people might try to live side by side in the same society.  I think it would suggest a pretty encouraging level of interpersonal respect if people in the "transgenderist" camp would even consider being careful to define their own use of terms in such a way as to try to avoid giving the impression that they are imposing their terminology and meanings on Catholics and Catholic culture, and vice versa, if George the Catholic and Francine the "transgender girl" were to say to each other, "OK, we both recognize that, using 'transgenderist' terminology and categorizations, Francine is a girl, while, using Catholic terminology and categorizations, Francine is a boy."  George can go on and point out that he thinks that Francine really ought to think like a Catholic, since Catholicism is actually true, and Francine might argue that his/her own viewpoint is actually true and should therefore be adopted, and all of this might be done in a way of civil discourse and dialogue.  Could Francine actually be a Catholic?  Well, if Francine is actually a boy in terms of reproductive biology and anatomy, then it is hard for me to see how, as a Catholic, he could be or feel justified in using the "transgenderist" language in reference to himself as a matter of his own personal choice, for how could he do this without contradicting his self-identification as a Catholic, which, if consistent, must involve viewing the world according to Catholic doctrine and so looking at gender, marriage, etc., the way the Church does?  And how could one do that and also look at things in a "transgenderist" sort of way?  But perhaps there are further nuances here that could be considered.

Of course, we still have the cases of people who are of mixed or questionable sexual biology.  What do we do with these?  Well, this will have to be determined as I presume it always has been--on a case-by-case basis.  Could there be people in the world who really aren't either male or female, looking at things from a Catholic point of view?  Or perhaps we should look at it first from a biological point of view.  Are there people who are absolutely sexless, or so sexually out of the ordinary that a biological sex could not be objectively assigned?  If so, what do we do with such people?  I don't know.  Perhaps in some cases this would be a matter of judgment that would have to be decided by various parties concerned in the affair.  But these will always remain outlier cases.  These do not constitute the vast majority of the human race, nor are they really the focus of what the transgender movement is all about.  Whatever we say with regard to such outlier cases, we can follow the principles laid out above when thinking about the vast majority of human individuals who are in a clear way biologically and anatomically male or female in the classic sense.

I should add a couple more comments before I close about some other concerns I have with the transgender movement.  One of them is the extremely intense, close-minded, intolerant way in which it seems to me advocates of "transgenderism" have tended to discuss and promote their ideas.  Rather than presenting these ideas as possibilities worth considering, or even as positions held to be discussed in civil dialogue with others, the proponents of these ideas seem mostly to have taken a route of insisting that everyone immediately agree with them or be labeled an ignorant, intolerant bigot.  They've tried to get the law to agree with them from day one, insisting basically on zero tolerance for anyone who would dare to disagree.  They've created a climate of--dare I say it?--hate towards people who disagree with them or would even dare to express the slightest bit of skepticism or questioning of their position or even just ask questions about it to consider it further.  They've claimed that their position is supported by science so clearly that the only possible motive for even wondering about aspects of their position--instead of immediately wholeheartedly and enthusiastically embracing them--must be hatred and prejudice.  They've created a cultural climate in which all honest and careful discussion and dialogue is shut down and nothing is acceptable except loud, wholehearted cries of "Amen!"  I think this is a terrible attitude with which to approach a new, controversial idea like this one, and it shows a terrible lack of respect for the humanity of those who aren't gung-ho for everything they want everyone to think.  Our whole culture lately seems to be more and more polarized around ideological groups who have no interest in serious, respectful dialogue with each other, but only in insisting they are right and only evil bigots would disagree with them and limiting conversation to demands for immediate and total submission from everyone to their whole platform.  The intolerance of the transgenderism movement is just one example of this general cultural trend.  I find this tendency towards dehumanizing polarization to be a great danger to our society, as it can only lead to hatred, division, and conflict where there is a desperate need for compassion, dialogue, and self-reflection across all ideological boundaries.  In this increasingly pluralistic culture, there is a desperate need for all of us to learn how to listen to each other and take each other seriously as fellow human beings, and I think we are doing in general a terrible job of this right now.  Now, I'm not saying that the opponents of the transgender movement have evidenced a better tendency towards listening and taking seriously the opposing point of view or its proponents. I haven't noticed much of this on either side.  In general in our culture, the tendency towards bigoted intolerance of other people and their points of view seems to be rather evenly spread among all the ideological camps.  I think there is a serious need for this to change.

The other concern I want to mention is the tendency of the promoters of transgenderism to insist that their ideas be put into practice in frightening ways, particularly with regard to children.  I've heard people insisting that young children and teenagers ought to be allowed to undergo physical surgeries to bring their anatomy as much as possible into conformity with their "self-identified" genders.  I've even heard of threats made that parents who would refuse to allow their children to undergo such operations might be judged to be bad parents under the law and forced to comply, maybe even have their children taken away, etc.  I hope this kind of absurdity and, I want to say, barbarity is only coming from a minority of people.  From what I understand, we don't know nearly enough about this or have enough evidence that this has any objective basis in reality to allow children to undergo such drastic surgeries that will alter the rest of their lives.  Nor is any respect shown to parents who might see things differently (considering that much of this comes down not to any objective science but to redefinitions of things based to a great degree on particular ideologies), or any deference shown to the respect owed to parents as those immediately and chiefly in charge of the raising of their children.  It just seems like our whole culture has gone crazy--jumping so quickly from a view that has been pretty much the only view held in all of human history to another new idea that has come nearly out of nowhere, and then immediately insisting that everyone has to agree with it OR ELSE and making dramatic and fundamentally life-altering decisions about children and surgery on the basis of it and even contemplating forcing parents who disagree to go along with such decisions.  In light of things like this, I'm finding it increasingly frightening to live in our society.  Where is all this going to end?  Of all times in human history, especially now we need some serious self-reflection, compassion, and dialogue among all of us.

Well, that's enough for now.  As I said, these are just some thoughts, not intended to be conclusive.  Perhaps they can help further discussion of the complexity of these issues.

ADDENDUM 6/28/19:  I've just written up a dialogue on the subject of sexuality and gender which you can find here.  Last week (or two weeks ago--time goes by so quickly these days!), the Congregation for Catholic Education, a department of the Vatican curia, put out a statement about transgenderism, which you can find here.  And Dr. Bryan Cross, a Catholic philosopher, just put out a very helpful article on this subject here.

ADDENDUM 1/19/22:  Here is a very helpful piece from the USCCB (the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) where they have put together quotations which express the Church's teaching on these issues.

ADDENDUM 7/15/24:  Last April, the Church published a document which includes within it a brief summary of the Church's current teaching on transgender-related issues (it's a small part of a larger, broader document on human dignity).  You can find it here.