Tag Archives: Identity

St. Catherine of Siena: Even Demons Are Repulsed By Sins Against Nature

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Jesus Expelling the Devil by Duccio

Jesus Expelling the Devil by Duccio

This is a reprint of an article first published on my main blog on December 1, 2012.

I happened across this enlightening quote by St. Catherine of Siena, a Dominican saint and mystic, from The Catholic Church and Homosexuality. I thought it would benefit you to read it. This makes perfect sense to those of us who know about natural law, but is utter foolishness to those who are perishing. I believe that as the Church understands mental disorder more, it will become more clear how weak Satan is in his attacks against the mind, whether in regard to same-sex attraction or something like Bipolar Disorder. Satan fools us into believing that we should be focused on the brain rather than on the heart, but even he is repulsed by an actual sin against nature, because his own angelic nature is, as in human nature, naturally repelled from such a thing, as Jesus explains.

St. Catherine of Siena is here relaying the words of Jesus Christ to all of us, and she was particularly addressing those clergymen of her time who were engaging in sins against nature. As you can see, it is natural for us to be nauseated. It is also because of the sort of sin this is that often the “light of understanding” has gone out of those who commit this sin, particularly if they sin repeatedly. St Paul speaks of God eventually turning them over to sin in the Letter to the Romans.

Again, these are the words of Jesus, according to St. Catherine of Siena.

“They not only fail from resisting this frailty [of fallen human nature] . . . but do even worse as they commit the cursed sin against nature. Like the blind and stupid, having dimmed the light of their understanding, they do not recognize the disease and misery in which they find themselves. For this not only causes Me nausea, but displeases even the demons themselves, whom these miserable creatures have chosen as their lords. For Me, this sin against nature is so abominable that, for it alone, five cities were submersed, by virtue of the judgment of My Divine Justice, which could no longer bear them. . . . It is disagreeable to the demons, not because evil displeases them and they find pleasure in good, but because their nature is angelic and thus is repulsed upon seeing such an enormous sin being committed. It is true that it is the demon who hits the sinner with the poisoned arrow of lust, but when a man carries out such a sinful act, the demon leaves.”

Certainly, we who have not turned ourselves over to darkness have much to suffer, particularly if even the demons are repulsed. This is why I want you so much to know about St. Gemma, one of our Passionist saints, as she can help you understand the truth of the love of Jesus in the Cross. THE ONE TRUE REALITY is JESUS’ LOVE, and His love is found in the CROSS.

All of the saints understood this, including St. Catherine of Siena.

“Very pleasing to Me, dearest daughter, is the willing desire to bear every pain and fatigue, even unto death, for the salvation of souls, for the more the soul endures, the more she shows that she loves Me; loving Me she comes to know more of My truth, and the more she knows, the more pain and intolerable grief she feels at the offenses committed against Me.

“You asked Me to sustain you, and to punish the faults of others in you, and you did not remark that you were really asking for love, light, and knowledge of the truth, since I have already told you that, by the increase of love, grows grief and pain, wherefore he that grows in love grows in grief.

“Therefore, I say to you all, that you should ask, and it will be given you, for I deny nothing to him who asks of Me in truth. Consider that the love of divine charity is so closely joined in the soul with perfect patience, that neither can leave the soul without the other. For this reason (if the soul elect to love Me) she should elect to endure pains for Me in whatever mode or circumstance I may send them to her. Patience cannot be proved in any other way than by suffering, and patience is united with love as has been said.

“Therefore bear yourselves with manly courage, for, unless you do so, you will not prove yourselves to be spouses of My Truth, and faithful children, nor of the company of those who relish the taste of My honor, and the salvation of souls.”

May the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ Be Ever in Our Hearts

Related: Archbishop Fulton Sheen on Reparation.

 

Study Up On Redemptive Suffering – It Will Change Your Life

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Passion Sign
Regular readers know that I am a Passionist. What is that exactly? The article on the Passionists at Wikipedia is brief but generally accurate. You can find out more at the website and blog of the Passionist Nuns of St. Joseph Monastery, to which I am attached as an oblate associate. Essentially, my relationship with them is that I love them and they love me. There really isn’t any more to it than that. I am not under any obedience to them. I just love them…but…it is true love, not because it is my love, but because it is my love with the love of Jesus poured out to us. This is the love which is found when we offer ourselves for others. My relationship with the Passionist Nuns is one of redemptive suffering. I offer all of my sufferings for their intentions, whatever they may be. In return, they pray for me and for my family.

There is no greater gift than love, and there is no greater love than the love of Christ in His Cross. Jesus said:

Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. — John 15:13

My first duty is to my family, especially to my children, but my truest friends are the Passionist Nuns even though they are cloistered and I never speak to them unless it is absolutely necessary. (Unfortunately, due to Bipolar Disorder, my brain sometimes tells me it’s absolutely necessary when it really is not.) We are friends to each other only much as we are Christ to each other, and in my relationship with the Passionist Nuns, which is quite different from that of other friends, Christ is there in fullness.

Since I converted to Catholicism, one of the greatest agonies for me, apart from my physical and mental disorders, has been finding out that so many people do not really know the depth of what happened on the Cross. Even among those who are Catholic, there is very little understanding of redemptive suffering, that our sufferings have value when they are offered in union with the sufferings of our Lord on the Cross. All Christians know that redemption is through the Cross and that the Cross is the source of all graces. All Christians know, even protestants who believe in Sola Fide, that if you truly love Jesus, you will do God’s will. All Christians know, too, that we all fail at this every day, but that Jesus is still there for us in His Cross of redemption. How this becomes manifest to us is where we disagree, but that is because of human error, not God’s error.

How sad it is that even though we all believe these things, we are divided, Catholic and protestant. What separates us, I think, has to do mostly with a lack of understanding about the Incarnation….that we are all PHYSICALLY connected to each other, because the world (including our flesh) was created through Jesus. Our flesh exists because of His Flesh. We are created in His image. We all belong to Him completely. This is why it was possible for Him to save us when He Himself suffered death on the Cross. Because God is not bound by time (only we are), we all were hanging with Him on the Cross. His Sacrifice was the Gift of Himself, and the only way we will not be saved is if we deny this gift of salvation by rejecting the will of God in our lives. We do this when we refuse to take up the cross in our own lives and follow Him.

Jesus said:

Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple. — Luke 14:27

Bearing your cross is doing the will of the Father, as Jesus did in His Agony in the Garden, but it is also understanding that we are not God. We are His creation, made to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him. We do not have His power. As Mother Teresa said, we are to be as pencils in His hand. Grace comes from His Sacrifice. We Catholics seek to be like our Blessed Mother, sitting patiently at the Foot of the Cross.

Because my flesh (and yours) was hanging with Jesus on the Cross, my sufferings (and yours) endured in doing the will of God are, thanks to His Sacrifice, redemptive. (Click here for Scripture readings on redemptive suffering.) Graces flow from the Cross of Jesus when we offer our sufferings with Him and in accordance with the will of the Father. When we do God’s will, even though it hurts to do so, graces flow and help us to become the people He has created every human being to be – saints. The more we do this, the more we understand how great is His love for us, and the more we see the Cross as joy…as St. Gemma did.

Personally, I have a major problem with free will, due to my Bipolar Disorder. (I am also on the autism spectrum.) In Proverbs, we read that “a righteous man falls seven times,” and Jesus says to forgive “seventy times seven.” That’s 490 times. I mess up way more than that every day. Thankfully, I don’t have to be concerned about whether the things that I am offering my sufferings for are good things, because I have the Passionist Nuns. I offer my sufferings for their intentions, because mine can be so screwy, in the context of my brain. In this way, the intention of my heart is good, even if my brain might not have all the pistons running well. Sometimes, I do ask things of God — most usually when people ask me for prayers. Because my brain is messed up, my prayers for others are almost always the same, that they may come to a greater understanding of God’s will, and that God’s will, whatever it may be, will be manifest in their lives. In this way, I know that I’m not asking for something pointless or wrong. In the end, no matter what we may face in life, God’s will is all that matters.

I am grateful to Leila Miller, my former spiritual director, for being the first person to tell me about redemptive suffering. I had been catechized upon my conversion by a very faithful (and thorough) priest, but even so, I had already been a Catholic for six years before I heard the term “redemptive suffering” from her. What a shame it is to have gone so long without this understanding, but now, I have my life’s calling, to suffer for the Passionists, which brings graces to them, and to be grateful for the graces I receive through their prayers for me.

I realize that this makes my life much different from the lives of most people these days. I am offering everything for whatever some nuns in a monastery, whom I rarely speak to, think is best…but it is the Gospel, to understand what Jesus has done for all of us on the Cross, and to understand our role in the words “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” Jesus desires our love, not just for Himself, but for each other. The love He returns to us is indescribably beautiful.

Please learn about redemptive suffering. It will change your life.

Note: I am just a sheep, and a broken one, at that. Please don’t take my word for any of this. Study, and find out for yourself if it is true.
St. Gemma, Pray for Us.

Jeff Cavins Speaks About Redemptive Suffering

Disorder is Never Intrinsic

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I have an important update to my post from yesterday in regard to the subject of “Intrinsic Disorder.” Many thanks to Marie Dean who pointed out to me via email, and who pledges to write a related post soon on her blog, that disorder is never intrinsic. This is the point I was (clumsily) making in my post, but I failed to point out that the use of the term “intrinsic disorder” is itself erroneous. I’m guessing I was subconsciously remembering how I have been treated in the past when I took issue with a term (“gay”) when writing on this topic. There is no such thing as an “intrinsic disorder” in Catholic spirituality. That man is intrinsically disordered, in spiritual language, is a protestant belief. We can attribute the error’s popularity to Martin Luther, primarily.

It is my understanding that “intrinsic disorder” is a medical term. Perhaps this is where Elizabeth Scalia has heard the term used before. In Catholic spirituality, we refer to same-sex attraction as “objective disorder.” This means, as I stated in my post, that it is something not inherently a part of our own being. Marie pointed this out to me via email (and rightly so):

Objective means outside one’s being but real, such as an objective perception or objective view; we sin objectively against God’s commands, and a disorder which is objective can be changed, (I can objectively become more holy, for example) wherein an intrinsic one cannot be, by definition.

Spot on. Mind you, I don’t expect the average person who is not well-studied in Catholic teaching and/or apologetics to understand why something that initially seems so trivial can be such a huge deal, but it really is the difference between understanding that you can become a saint and the false belief that one cannot possibly become a saint, in the sense that Catholics understand sainthood.

Protestants after the tradition of Martin Luther believe that human beings are intrinsically disordered. Luther referred to “saved” people as snow-covered piles of dung. Fr. William Saunders writes:

Luther believed that original sin had completely destroyed our likeness to God, so that a person lost his free will and all his works were sinful. He taught that after baptism, original sin remained. (While Catholics distinguish original sin from concupiscence, Lutherans essentially do not.) Even after baptism, man’s nature remains depraved; there is no re-creation. However, through baptism and the graces merited by our Lord’s passion and death, a man is clothed in grace and thereby appears just in the eyes of God. Martin Luther described a justified man as a snow-covered pile of dung, clean on the outside but not on the inside. (Please note, this is literally Luther’s imagery.) He explained further, “I understand grace in the sense of a favor of God, but not in the notion of a quality in the soul. It is any exterior good, that is, the favor of God as opposed to His anger.” For Luther, grace then remained extrinsic to the person, and did not produce a new creation. So the classic Lutheran phrase, simul justus et peccator — at the same time righteous and a sinner — captures the state of the person even after baptism.Following this reasoning, since man is depraved and sinful, so are his actions. Therefore, good works are meaningless for Luther, and have no part in justification, thereby ignoring the teaching of St. James. For Luther, salvation comes through “faith alone.”

Protestants of this erroneous tradition also believe that they can subjectively determine what the truth is without the aid of the Church. They see fides ecclesiastica as a false doctrine, hence their belief in Sola Scriptura. Anyone who has spent time debating protestants on the topic of subjective belief and objective truth should have no trouble understanding the topic of objective disorder. This is why I think that anyone who writes about Catholic theology and spirituality would do well to spend at least a month or two engaged in apologetics debate with protestants. The use or misuse of one term may seem trivial to you, but it is often the difference between understanding the truth about God and not understanding the truth about Him. As I have notedrepeatedly, it is the difference between life and death for me, personally.

I have been called a “drama queen” by Catholics who disagree with me on this because I ended up in the crisis unit when a former spiritual director got this wrong. I assure you that every time I write on this topic, I think of this. Please pay attention. Lives are at stake. If I said that “hives” are at stake, you’d have reason to ignore me and call me a loon who is just seeking attention and worldly glory because I’m “jealous” of some other blogger, but lives are at stake. Sometimes even one letter being wrong can change everything. My aim is to lead souls to Christ, not to generate traffic to my blog. If just one person comes to Christ because of what I have written here, it will be worth everything to me.

What is ‘Intrinsic Disorder’?

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In an article today, Elizabeth Scalia appears to be evolving somewhat in her thinking about same-sex attraction and that it is intrinsically disordered. That’s a good thing. Unfortunately, she still misses the mark.

She writes:

In identifying my disorder as “intrinsic”—that it resides within me as naturally as the marrow in my bones—I understand that there is no point in attempting to further fool myself or run away from myself; I am released from self-hate, shame, or defensiveness. At the same time, I am now and forever obliged to acknowledge—with every temptation—that I am disordered, and within that acknowledgement to then choose whether I will serve the disorder, at the cost of Heaven, or serve God.

Scalia speaks of “intrinsic disorder” — in her case, dealing with the passion of appetite for food — as being what she “is,” and therein lies the confusion.”I,” as a person with Bipolar Disorder, am not disordered. Neither is she “disordered” in dealing with overeating. It is the thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, spoken of by St. Paul. We all have one, but the thorn is not “intrinsically” part of us, nor is it part of who we are.

My spiritual director, a very wise monsignor, has corrected me on this confusion before as it felt to me that Satan had control over my brain while Jesus had control over the rest of me, including my heart. He very firmly told me, and rightly so, that I belong to Jesus, and because I belong to Jesus, then Satan can have no part of me, even if it feels that he does. Satan is very tricky, causing us sometimes to believe things about ourselves that are simply not true. “The thorn in the flesh” is not a part of the flesh. The thorn is intrinsically disordered, not me.

This is so important to understand because so many young people who deal with same-sex attraction are committing suicide. Having been in the crisis unit multiple times with suicidal ideation, due to Bipolar Disorder, I can attest that where you find your identity is the key to understanding this matter. I am not “intrinsically disordered.” I am a child of God, created in His image, who deals with an intrinsic disorder that is stuck into my flesh. That intrinsic disorder is a messenger of Satan. It is a foreign object, no part of me because I belong to Christ. It exists. It is truly there. But it is not me. It is not who I am.

‘Homoheresy’ and What You Can Do About It

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LifeSite News has been covering the so-called “homoheresy” in the Church. See here and here. There is advice on what can be done about this. I have given my own advice on this already: You Either Believe Our Identity is in Christ…Or You Don’t.

I agree with the Holy Father that the “filth” must be cleaned out of the Church, and also agree with the measures he has taken to facilitate this. On the other hand, I disagree with those who are using this term “homoheresy” to describe the problem. People are not “homos” and that is entirely the point.

What you can do about the “homoheresy” is stop thinking of people as “homos” or “gay” or any other thing that is decidely not what we are all called to be. Both sides of this debate err in believing that homosexuality is something that can be used to define someone. God defines us. If we define ourselves or others in accordance with anything that is not of God, we fail in our duty to become what God has called us to be: saints.

There is a “homoheresy” in the Church only in the sense of people accepting homosexuality as a gift, as morally neutral, or as reason to reject people altogether. We are all sinners. All of us. Homosexuality is not a gift, it is not morally neutral, and it is also no reason to reject people as if they themselves are “filth.”

It takes a deep understanding of the Cross, redemptive suffering and mercy to understand these things. You either get that our identity is in Christ, or you don’t. You either live in God’s reality, or you don’t understand or refuse to accept God’s reality. In the end, the only true reality is God’s reality, and identity is at the core of it. As it says in today’s readings:

Moses said to God, “But when I go to the Israelites
and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’
if they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?”
God replied, “I am who am.”
Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites:
I AM sent me to you.”

God is “I AM.” He is the one true reality.

There is a story from St. Faustina’s diary (.pdf) about a boy with diseased eyes. We should approach disorders from this perspective.

401, Notebook One, Divine Mercy in My Soul, St. Faustina’s Diary:

 

What also cost me a lot was that I had to kiss the children. The women I knew came with their children and asked me to take them in my arms, at least for a moment, and kiss them. They regarded this as a great favor, and for me it was a chance to practice virtue, since many of the children were quite dirty. But in order to overcome my feelings and show no repugnance, I would kiss such a dirty child twice. One of these friends came with a child whose eyes were diseased and filled with pus, and she said to me, “Sister, take it in your arms for a moment, please.” My nature recoiled, but not paying attention to anything, I took the child and kissed it twice, right on the infection, asking God to heal it.

We are all naturally averse to disorder, but we should all seek to heal disorder, not recoil from those who have disorders, especially if healing can only come through the grace of God. When St. Faustina kissed the diseased eyes of a child, she was expressing compassion which is seeing the gift of the child as God sees him, and desiring the healing that comes from God.

So, what can you do about the “homoheresy?” Do as Pope Benedict did. Recognize that our identity is in Christ, above all, not in titles or labels that we, or others, attach to us, whether related to order or disorder. Where we find our identity, and how we see others’ identity, is the most important message of God Who is “I AM.” He is all there is with value to know. All things that are placed in importance over His will can only lead us to destruction.