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“Ask a Priest: Does Christianity Aim for a Utopia?”

August 20, 2024 / Ask a Priest, General

Q: Hello, I am a Jew living in Israel. Lately, I have been thinking about Christianity and Utopia, and how the two might be connected. Becoming a Christian is relatively easy (in comparison to Judaism), and an essential part of Christianity is convincing other people to be Christians as well (to save them and make sure that they arrive in heaven). Due to that fact, one might argue from a materialistic point of view, i.e., a point of view of a nonbeliever, that the purpose of Christianity as a religion is to create a utopia. Because the more people have in common, the less likely they are to fight or participate in warfare. If the entire world were Christian, fewer people would fight and there would be more peace, a thing that resembles a utopia. Please let me know your thoughts. Thank you very much. — Gilad

Answered by Fr. Edward McIlmail, LC

A: Shalom! It’s good to hear of your interest in Christianity. Christians believe that Jesus fulfilled all the hopes expressed in the Hebrew Scriptures. He is the long-awaited Messiah.

The Catholic Church doesn’t aim for a utopia in this world. The word utopia comes from Greek and means “no place” (a tip-off!). The only perfect place is in heaven, with God.

Catholics do aim, however, to improve the world, for a healthy culture helps people more easily lead upright lives. But we don’t believe in the perfectibility of the world, per se.

Man is damaged by original sin. Adam’s fall in the Garden of Eden had an impact on all his descendants.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says:

402 All men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as St. Paul affirms: “By one man’s disobedience many (that is, all men) were made sinners”: “sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.” The Apostle contrasts the universality of sin and death with the universality of salvation in Christ. “Then as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to acquittal and life for all men.”

403 Following St. Paul, the Church has always taught that the overwhelming misery which oppresses men and their inclination towards evil and death cannot be understood apart from their connection with Adam’s sin and the fact that he has transmitted to us a sin with which we are all born afflicted, a sin which is the “death of the soul.” […]

404 How did the sin of Adam become the sin of all his descendants? The whole human race is in Adam “as one body of one man.” By this “unity of the human race” all men are implicated in Adam’s sin, as all are implicated in Christ’s justice. Still, the transmission of original sin is a mystery that we cannot fully understand. […] [end quoted material]

In effect, we inherit a damaged human nature (another name for original sin). We can improve with the grace of God, but life is a battle — and one that we fight till the end.

Unfortunately, Christians haven’t always been the witnesses of Christ’s love that they should be.

History is full of accounts of Christians who did evil and even fought one another. And their treatment of the Jews in the past hasn’t been without fault, either.

If you want to learn more about Catholicism, you might check out the Youth Catechism and the Catechism (a heavy read) or its leaner Compendium.

The Catholic Answers site has lots of helpful resources. And the document Gaudium et Spes gives an overview of the Church’s relation to the modern world.

Above all, the Catholic faith is centered around the person of Jesus Christ. So read the Gospels to get to know him.

I hope some of this helps. Count on my prayers.

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“Ask a Priest: How Does a Priest Know What He Believes Is True?”

August 14, 2015 / Ask a Priest, Mass, the Eucharist and Priests

Q: How do you know that what you believe is right? The devil confuses people and tells them all kind of lies. So as a priest, how do you know that what you believe is correct and not just another lie? I mean no disrespect. -D.W.

Answered by Fr. Edward McIlmail, LC

A: Thanks for your note. Yours is one of the great questions that everyone has to grapple with in his own life. How can we be sure of what we believe? Scripture warns us, “Do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God” (1 John 4:1).

So how do I know that what I believe is correct? The short answer is: I see what the Church says.

God is truth. He “can neither deceive nor be deceived” (Catechism, No. 156). In other words, God won’t contradict himself. So he won’t reveal one thing to the Church and then reveal to me something that contradicts what he revealed to the Church. That would be confusion — a telltale sign of the devil’s presence.

What my reliance on the Church means in practice is this: When I tentatively embrace a belief or opinion, I can try to check its validity by looking at what the Church says on the topic. If my tentative view matches what the Church says, or at least doesn’t contradict what the Church teaches, then I can be reasonably sure that I’m heading in the right direction.

But this, in turn, raises an obvious question. How do I know what the Church teaches is true?

Here I could research and discover that Church teaching does not contradict Scripture. I could also look at Church documents over the centuries to see if there is continuity in the teaching. Church documents have lots of footnotes referring to earlier ecclesial documents. Ultimately, though, I trust the Church because I trust Christ; he founded it, and the Holy Spirit guides it.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the Church has an easy answer for everything. Life isn’t that simple. In fact, the Church admits its limitations. Vatican II’s pastoral constitution, Gaudium et Spes, says, “The Church guards the heritage of God’s word and draws from it moral and religious principles without always having at hand the solution to particular problems” (No. 33).

That was written in 1965. The world has gotten a lot more complicated since then. So grappling with modern-day problems takes prudence, prayer, and research.

A practical criterion that helps is this: Whatever is true is reasonable. Faith and reason go together; God invented both, so they won’t contradict each other. Some points of the faith go beyond what reason can discover (such as the Trinity), but they are not unreasonable. That is a fine distinction.

The truth is like a path through a forest. It takes two feet to walk the path – in this case, the foot of faith and the foot of reason. By alternating between faith and reason, we find that we can go deeper into the forest and experience it better.

I could go on, but perhaps this reply would answer your question in a sufficient way. Feel free to send further questions if you have them. (For more reading on God’s revelation of truth, and how the Church discerns it, see the Vatican II dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum). I hope this helps.

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“Ask a Priest: In a Big Universe, What Makes Us So Special?”

December 19, 2014 / Ask a Priest

Q: My faith in Christianity began to waver after my first year of college — I took an astronomy class which changed my way of thinking and made me insatiably curious as to the nature of the universe we live in. I was enthralled with the immense scope of the universe. The Milky Way Galaxy, on which our solar system revolves, contains over 200 billion to 400 billion stars (our sun being one of them). The Kepler space program has already proven the existence of 962 alien worlds orbiting our neighbor stars in the Milky Way. On another note, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. The universe has existed for over 13 billion years, and life has existed on Earth for over 4.5 billion years. Now, why would God create all of creation for a single species “in his own form” (which has only inhabited Earth in our current form for 100,000 years)? What makes humanity so much more special than the rest of life that has inhabited Earth for 4.5 billion years and the life which likely inhabits the rest of the universe? I can’t help think that religion was created in prehistory to explain life (and death) on Earth, but with all of this evidence of our world and the universe at our fingertips, it almost seems arrogant think we are the “chosen ones.” I understand that a large part of Christianity relies on faith, and I guess my faith has wavered due to my scientific mind. I want to believe, but I have difficulty overcoming these issues. I’m not sure if the person reading this would be the best person to talk to, but if you could help me get in contact with a scientifically minded priest, I would greatly appreciate it. -J.B.

Answered by Fr. Edward McIlmail, LC

A: Yours is a big question which could easily take a book to answer. If you are looking for scientifically minded priests, I suggest checking out the website of Jesuit Father Robert J. Spitzer or the works of the late Benedictine Father Stanley Jaki.

For now, permit me a few observations that might help in the short term.

First, I agree, the immensity of the universe is mind-boggling. Yet it all seems to fit together remarkably well – a sign that there is an Intelligence behind it.

Why would God create such an immense universe for us? For the first part of this question, two things come to mind.

One, the sheer size and complexity of the universe reflect something of the infinite power and beauty of God himself.

Second, and this is related to the first point, this display of power and beauty is meant for our benefit, precisely so that we have some idea of who God is and how wonderful he is. “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made” (Romans 1:20).

This dovetails with your point about our thinking of ourselves as “the chosen ones.” Here, we could recall that God’s creating us in his image and likeness (see Genesis 1:26) was his idea, not ours. God in his infinite goodness wanted to share his love with beings created in his image. That isn’t a reason for arrogance on our part but rather a cause for gratitude and awe.

On further reflection, we can detect a paradox in all this, one dealing with the difference between matter and spirit. Yes, the immensity of the material universe is awe-inspiring, and yet, it had a beginning and will have an end. A human person, on the other hand, has a soul that will exist forever. And we have intellects that can comprehend the physical universe. We can think about distant galaxies, but they can’t think about us. So God has given us something that he didn’t give to the rest of the physical realm.

Moreover, a sign that we are special in the universe — a greater sign than even the size of the universe itself — is the fact that God took on human nature and became one of us.

“[B]y His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man,” says the Second Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes. “He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin.”

While Christianity indeed rests a lot on faith, it also esteems reason. This is why the Church over the centuries has supported education and scientific research. One example of this is the Vatican Observatory. I hope this helps.

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“Ask a Priest: Does Christianity Aim for a Utopia?”

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“Ask a Priest: How Does a Priest Know What He Believes Is True?”

“Ask a Priest: In a Big Universe, What Makes Us So Special?”

Alex Kucera

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