Jesus on Capital Punishment and the Fate of Those Who Scandalize Little Ones

It seems that Jesus wasn't against capital punishment. Didn't He say in Matthew 18: 6 "But he that shall scandalize one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone should be hanged about his neck, and that he should be drowned in the depth of the sea"?

A millstone was a large disk of rock which was used to grind grain into flour. Execution by tying a millstone around a criminal's neck and throwing him into water to drown was practiced by the Greeks, Syrians, and Romans. I just ran across a post where a geology professor calculated that an abandoned millstone he found in the Hudson Valley weighed 3/4 of a ton. The millstone image at the top of this page is from that post. 

Imagine that hanging around your neck pulling you down after you were thrown into water! 

On reading Matthew 18:6 closely, it's clear Jesus wasn't actually recommending capital punishment. Jesus was actually saying that a worse fate was awaiting those who caused a young Christian to sin. (But He didn't say capital punishment was "inadmissible" either. Ahem.)

He prophesied that a worse kind of punishment is in store for unrepentant predators like Cardinal McCarrick and others, priests, monsignors, bishops, cardinals, and heads of religious orders and seminaries, any cleric who seduced children and young adults who were serving Mass or attending Catholic schools or going to a seminary or were living in vulnerable positions in orphanages or single parent homes. From what the victims said, the abusers often blasphemously told their victims that the sick acts they coerced them to share were holy.

Knowledge of these abuses is almost too much for a Catholic who loves the Church to bear. And the coverups, how in the world can a Catholic deal with the coverups? Along with sorrow for those who were molested by clerics who are supposed to be acting in Christ's name and those who allowed them to continue to abuse is another sadness, that those heinous acts by those wolves in clerical clothing are casting shame on true beliefs and true believers and causing revulsion against the Church in many who do not believe.

There is much more to be said on how to keep your faith when those you trusted have misused your trust and cast shame on the Faith.  And more will follow.

But in the meantime, it is of eternal importance not to let these scandals kill your faith and separate you from Christ's Church. Remember this quote from St. Francis de Sales: "While those who give scandal are guilty of the spiritual equivalent of murder, those who take scandal--who allow scandals to destroy their faith--are guilty of spiritual suicide."

Not the St. Paul I Know and Love: About Paul the Apostle of Christ Movie

Did you ever watch a move made from a  book you loved and feel let down because the filmmakers left out all the things you liked about the story and fecklessly changed many other things? That’s what I felt after going to see "Paul the Apostle of Christ."  They left out all my favorite parts of some of my favorite books.

As a summary, they show early Christians as loving, but avoid showing the sacramental life they must have practiced. Faith is almost reduced to social work. To me the story banalizes St. Paul, St. Luke, and the early Christians.

The Scriptural story about how St. Paul was converted from a persecutor of Christians to a lover of Christ to his martyrdom is riveting. So is the story of how he walked thousands of miles and suffered beatings and deprivations to bring the good news of Christ to the ancient world, and of how he ended up in Rome by shrewdly claiming his rights as a Roman citizen when brought to trial in Israel. 

But the movie--not so riveting. If I could have left without disturbing the person to my right in her recliner seat, I would have walked out soon after the movie started. So I settled for cat naps through the rest of the movie. Those new recliner seats are great.

I was looking for the saints Paul and Luke who I love and couldn't find them in the movie. There is so much real drama in the New Testament, the filmmaker didn't need to concoct what to me is an uninteresting, unbelievable story. Some say you won’t be able to follow the story unless you know the Acts of the Apostles, which isn’t going to be a good thing for most viewers. But then, I know the Acts account well,  and I couldn’t follow their story anyway. 

They didn't quote the Scriptures in any coherent way, even though they claim in interviews to have started with the Scriptures. Part of a sentence of dialogue from Paul will be an authentic quote, and the rest will be made up. The next sentence doesn’t follow from the first, so the true doctrine of Christ doesn’t ever get spoken. 

The tag line was "Love is the only Way.” That is not the message of Christ.  He told us He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to the Father except through Him. And even more importantly He said, to show that you belong to Me, keep My commandments. 

There is a lot of complexity to the the Catholic faith, with mysteries such as Baptism, the ordained priesthood, the papacy, and the Eucharist, but our minds are only opened to understanding it all when we realize who Christ is and respond with love to what He did for us. It is trivializing to boil it all down to one simplistic slogan.

Based on one verse in one of St. Paul's letters saying "only Luke is with me,” in the movie Luke comes to Rome to find Paul, who is imprisoned. By a prearrangement, Luke connects with a group of Catholics led by Priscilla and Aquila. 

In the New Testament account, Paul met the couple Priscilla and Aquila in Corinth and lived with them and made tents with them AFTER they had been expelled by Claudius from Rome because Aquila was a Jew and  BEFORE the time Paul was taken to Rome by the authorities.

On Luke's way to meet up with the Catholics, we get to see Christians "burning like candles" to light the streets by Nero's order. It seemed as though the filmmakers had to throw in some shocking violence.

The scriptwriters have Luke writing the Acts of the Apostles while visiting Paul in prison.  Luke is allowed to freely visit Paul after he is found sneaking into the prison and brought to the prison commander, although the script doesn't believably indicate the commander's motivation. 

The central dramatic point seems to be that the Catholics are undecided about whether to flee Rome to avoid the fate of many others who are sent to die in the Coliseum. Priscilla wants to stay because she is helping people. 

The movie reduces Christianity to be kindness and social work. The sacramental Catholicism of the early Church is not shown. The Christians who are hiding out together resemble a group of well-meaning hippies. To my mind, they would have gathered to worship Christ and pray. They would have taken care of each other but wouldn’t have had that as their main focus.  But the movie doesn’t show them worshiping together or remembering Christ’s death in the Mass.

To me St. Paul is a powerfully attractive person because the Lord revealed Himself and all His truth to him at a single stroke.  He became the Apostle to the Gentiles.  In the movie, he is an old man in prison, without enough context. He could have had such great lines, if they used the New Testament, such as the ones he wrote that without the Resurrection our faith is vain. 

Spoiler alerts follow.

Luke is a doctor, so he is called to help the dying daughter of the prison commander. Luke says her lungs are filling up with blood, then he dramatically punctures a hole in her rib cage--with her father’s sword--to allow blood to drain. And then Luke sends the commander to the hideout to get some healing drugs, exposing the Catholics to possible arrest. Then everyone is shown praying for the little girl. She recovers immediately.  Maybe it was the medicine? Her mother and father embrace her with no attempt to avoid the area which Luke had recently opened in the back of chest, so the hole might have healed miraculously. It’s as though the filmmakers are afraid to portray a miracle.  The commander doesn't arrest the hiding Catholics. That's nice.

This would have been a good opportunity to have portrayed a conversion by the father, who had been tediously offering sacrifices to multiple Roman gods to ask for his daughter’s healing.  It would make sense that he would credit her cure to the one God worshiped by Luke, the courageous man who helped him at great risk to the Christians, But no. 

The commander and Paul have a chuckle together in a garden where Paul is now allowed to stroll with Luke before getting his head chopped off. They chuckle because even though the commander had prayed unsuccessfully to the Roman gods to no avail, he tells Paul, I still don't believe in your Nazarene. 

That's okay, it's implied. All you need is love. 

Maybe John Lennon and Yoko Ono were channeling St. Paul? But really, applying simplistic motives to the heroes of our Faith is just not good enough.

Love and Not-Love At the Movies

I hardly dare to watch modern movies any more. With a few exceptions, such as the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings/Hobbit movies, almost all of them portray something about the relationship between men and women that revolts me. My biggest objection is that the intimacy that should be reserved for faithful, sacramental, marriage is something that men and women jump into in most movies, as if the act of intimacy doesn’t create any real connection with the other person. The one-fleshment spoken of in Scripture is ignored. In movies these days, when a man and woman come together in that provisional manner, that's supposed to be a happy ending.

As it goes in most romantic movies, even after a big buildup, after two people are attracted to each other, obstacles are overcome, and they realize they really like each other, boom, they go to bed. In most cases, consummating the attraction comes far too soon in the modern movie (or real life, from what I hear tell) for the couple to say I love you. Or if the three little words are said, they imply no real commitment.

The much-awaited consummation only means “we want to be with each other with no strings, and after an undetermindedly long time of trying each other out, we may decide to marry. In the meantime, we’d better hope we beat the significant chance of conceiving a child we ‘aren’t ready for’ even if we use birth control religiously, because then we'd have to make the 'hard-choice.'”

This is not to mention the other unspoken risks, the possibility that the desired person may be carrying a venereal disease from a previous partner. As most of us are aware, when you are intimate with another, you sleep with every one that person has ever slept with and every person every one of those persons has ever slept with, an exponentially mounting number of partners that could reach 100 or more.

Then there is the real possible loss of "some of the best months and years" of their life and their fertility (for the woman) to a lover who may not turn out to really love them after all.

Conditional not-love or love, it’s all depressing to me. I grew up in a time when happily-ever-after  at the movies usually meant love and marriage and a series of baby carriages. And I lived through the years when morality was turned upside down, and what had been seen as hurtful, shameful, and sinful became normal and expected. Nobody has written much about the casualties of the sexual revolution, but the casualties are many, and the count is mounting higher every day.

In reality, having to put up barriers between yourself and your so-called lover, to prevent a pregnancy, to protect yourself against a devastating disease, or to keep your emotions in check to fend off a broken heart almost guarantees there is no real giving, no real union. And no real contentment. How can there be when you are not sure the person will be there with you a year from now, or even for breakfast the next day?

I’ll be watching a movie, greatly interested in the story as it’s going along, and suddenly comes a seduction scene. I don't watch porn or R rated movies, so I  don’t see any genitals, but I do glimpse people being passionate with each other until they fall into bed, and maybe even after they fall into bed you see some things. And then there is the waking up in bed together part.

When they start kissing passionately and shedding clothes, I try to find the remote and fast forward. But even though I try to avert my gaze it takes a long, long time to get the scenes out of my mind. And it takes an even longer time to for me to stop being troubled about how the two protagonists who I have come to identify with as I watched them fall for each other can take those risks of breaking their hearts, scarring their emotions, infecting their bodies, and pretty much ruining their lives.