Dear Father,

Recently, I’ve been inspired by conversations with a dear and precious friend, who asked me a seemingly simple question: what is my morality?

My answer was that I’m guided by the desire not to harm people, not to cause them harm.

He pointed out that my answer doesn’t make much sense: by what criterion do I know what is good for another person?

The truth (he tells me) is that there is a higher good that guides me, that shows me what is right and what is wrong. This good is God.

I was raised Catholic, but over the years, I’ve lost part of my faith. I’ve often asked myself the reason recently, and I haven’t found a concrete and sensible answer. I’ve come to define myself as an agnostic, since I can neither support nor disprove the existence of God. But does faith really need proof? Aren’t my life and my son’s life proof enough? Does God really have a plan for me?

I have many questions and only one certainty: that I have made many mistakes, including the end of a marriage (for which I take responsibility).

I’m in a relationship with a Catholic man, who has true faith, who asks me questions I can’t answer, who feels like a sinner because I have sinned…

I don’t know if it’s possible for me to rediscover my faith; I wouldn’t even know where to start, but I know I would because I’ve been pushed to ask myself questions that no one (who doesn’t have faith) can answer.

And then I could truly come to believe that there is a plan for me too, that, as my dear friend and partner says, “everything works together for good (for those who love God).”

Even the actions of a woman who has sinned, who acknowledges it, who deals with it every day, who has the hope of being forgiven.

Father, I leave you, hoping I haven’t filled a page with nonsense, but above all hoping that even just one word of yours can help me understand.

Simona

Priest’s answer

Dear Simona,

1. The answer you gave to your friend who asked about your morality is not incorrect.

The most immediate criterion for understanding what is good and what is evil can be gleaned primarily from our personal experience.

Moreover, this criterion is also present in Sacred Scripture.

Already in the Old Testament, the wise man Tobit tells his son Tobias: “Do to no one what you yourself dislike” (Tobit 4:15).

2. In the New Testament, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets” (Mt 7:12).

The Jerusalem Bible notes that “this maxim of conduct was well known in antiquity, especially in Judaism, but in a negative form: ‘Do not do to others what you would not want done to you.'” Jesus, and after him the Christian writers, give this maxim a positive meaning, which is much more demanding.” T-N

3. However, this first criterion, especially when expressed negatively, while good, is still not sufficient. It is not free from a subjectivism that prevents a common criterion acceptable to all, because everyone makes up their own moral code.

To know what is good and what is bad, we must first understand our life’s purpose.

It is the purpose that sheds light on the correctness of what we are doing.

In our concrete lives, we are guided by our goals, our aims. For example, if our goal is to go to school, we cannot take a path that leads elsewhere.

4. At this point, your friend is right to tell you that you must ask this goal of the One who made you, namely, God.

You must ask God why He created the world, because evidently the world did not create itself with such perfect and wondrous laws.

Likewise, you must ask God why He created you. At this point, you must listen to what He tells you through your conscience, within which He already discovered such a perfect law: do not harm others.

You do not invent this law, but you discover it imperiously within your conscience.

This is how it happens in everyone.

From this alone, you can conclude that if there is a law as universal, as imperious, and as eternal as the one you and any man discovers in his own conscience, it means there is a lawgiver.

This is why Holy Scripture says that those who do not acknowledge God by the things He has made are without excuse (cf. Rom 1:20).

5. Why do some fail to recognize this and, like you, at best, say that they cannot say whether God exists or not?

Jesus’ answer is clear: “The light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light” (John 3:19-21).

Evil, what is called sin, clouds the conscience.

Do we not say of certain people that they are no longer able to reason because they are blinded by passions that have lost their minds?

Sometimes, even forgetting the unspeakable suffering they cause their children, they justify their own behavior by ruining the family.

6. Now among the sins that cloud and even blind the conscience, lust, the impurity of the flesh, stands out. St. Thomas says: “Because of the sin of lust, we see that man is most alienated from God” (Commentary on Job, Lesson 31, beginning).T-N

Before St. Thomas, Sacred Scripture says that “the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh” (Gal 5:16-17).

“Flesh” and “spirit” are not synonymous with body and soul. By “flesh,” St. Paul means man enslaved by sin. This includes, in addition to sins of the body, also those of a spiritual nature (idolatry, discord, etc.). By spirit, then, he means man who allows himself to be guided by the spirit of Jesus Christ.

However, among the sins of the flesh, “fornication, impurity, licentiousness” predominate. These too, therefore, desire things contrary to the spirit and therefore take away the taste for the things of God.

In fact, insensitivity to heavenly realities does not generally arise from a deliberate opposition to God, but from the fact that such disorders little by little direct all of man’s intentionality towards their service.

7. St. Thomas also says that “Wherefore lust gives rise to blindness of mind, which excludes almost entirely the knowledge of spiritual things, while dulness of sense arises from gluttony, which makes a man weak in regard to the same intelligible things. On the other hand, the contrary virtues, viz. abstinence and chastity, dispose man very much to the perfection of intellectual operation. Hence it is written (Daniel 1:17) that “to these children” on account of their abstinence and continency, “God gave knowledge and understanding in every book, and wisdom” (Dan 1:17)” (Summa Theologiae, II-II, 15, 3). 

Commenting on Isaiah 6:8, he says that “the impure cannot enter the temple of God, much less see it.” T-N

8. St. Augustine, now a bishop, was not ashamed to recount the slavery to which he had fallen when he pursued lust: “in that sixteenth year of my age, I resided with my parents, having holiday from school for a time (this idleness being imposed upon me by my parents’ necessitous circumstances), the thorns of lust grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to pluck them out” (Confessions, 2, 3, 6). “For she (my mother) desired, and I remember privately warned me, with great solicitude, not to commit fornication; but above all things never to defile another man’s wife. These appeared to me but womanish counsels, which I should blush to obey” (Ibid., 2, 3, 7).

9. In conclusion, what should we do? What Jesus said: “But whoever lives the truth comes to the light” (Jn 3:19-21).

If we live according to the commandments, we come to Jesus Christ.

The clarity of our lives, free from serious sin, allows us to see Jesus Christ in the same way that the clarity of a lake allows us to see its bottom.

I wish you all the best, I bless you, and I remember you in prayer.

Father Angelo

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