Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite any readers to submit their own questions.

CC in Brief

Q.        While sanctifying the Sunday at home, I recently read these words in a sermon on hell:

In hell, the damned exclaim with tears: “Oh!  That an hour were given to us”.  They would pay any price for an hour or for a minute, in which they might repair their eternal ruin.  But this hour or minute they never shall have. 

My question is: Do the damned in hell really long for a chance to repent?

A.        No.  The damned do not long for a chance to repent and to begin pleasing

God.  They could never use that chance of repentance, even if it were somehow given to them.[1]

Hell is not really full of repentant sinners.  In hell, the wills of the damned are fixed forever in rejecting God and hating Him.  The damned hate being in hell but would never have a change of heart and begin to love God, with sorrow for their sins, although the damned regret that they are being punished.

The damned hate God and don’t want to be with Him.  They hate being in hell but do not want to be with God in heaven.  They hate reality and would like to be in a (supposed) “paradise” without God (if that could be possible) and would like to be in a place of comfort and pleasure where they could continue to hate God and live a disorderly life.  But the damned do not repent of their sins and do not want to repent.

With man’s fallen human nature, it is so common for sinners to delay repentance and to delay amending their lives.  Throughout the ages, good priests have used various techniques to move sinners to cease delay and begin leading the Catholic life they know they should lead.

One method is to move sinners to repentance by raising the prospect of having waited too long and losing the chance to repent.  In this sermon, these sinners – who tell themselves they will repent later – are presented with the prospect of having waited “too long”.  Right now, in this present life, these sinners would regret having waited too long and being damned in hell forever. 

So, this sermon is, in effect, placing before the listener the prospect of that delay and the regret they would feel now, if they knew their continued delay would eventually cause their damnation.  That seems to be the intent of the sermon you quote.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives a short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite any reader to submit his own question.

CC in brief

Strategy for Obtaining a “Conscience Exemption”

When Confronted with a COVID Vaccine Mandate

Q.  To get a “conscience exemption” from a COVID vaccine mandate, should we use this Vatican teaching (quote below)?

The Vatican has instructed the faithful that: “As regards the diseases against which there are no alternative vaccines which are available and ethically acceptable, it is right to abstain from using these vaccines if it can be done without causing children, and indirectly the population as a whole, to undergo significant risks to their health.”[1]

A.        We, at Catholic Candle, would never accept the COVID vaccine under any conditions!  Further, we would never use the above, dangerous, conciliar Vatican teaching to justify our refusing the vaccine.

First, to use this Vatican teaching plays the game on the conciliar playing field, i.e., it accepts the conciliar principle for making the decision.  In contrast to the Vatican’s teaching (above), we hold the Traditional Catholic principle that no one may use abortion-related vaccines even if, hypothetically, many people would die (including us) if that vaccine were not used.  The end does not justify the means, even when our life is at stake.

Second, if we were to rely on the Vatican’s principle (quoted above), this would suggest that we consider the conciliar popes to be worthy authorities on matters of Faith and morals.  Although they are our valid popes[2] – one after the other – they are unworthy, bad fathers.  Despite those popes holding the office of pope, we would never quote them as authorities for true Catholic Faith or morals.[3]

When we refuse the vaccine, we would rely on the argument that we are Traditional Catholic and that fact means that we reject the modern conciliar teachings.  We hold fast to the Tradition of the Church on all matters of Faith and morals, including the Traditional teaching that such abortion-connected vaccines are always evil and never permissible for any reason.[4]

Not only do we reject that Vatican’s principle (above) because it is wrong and sinful, but we also think it sets the person up for failure to obtain a “conscience exemption” from the vaccine. 

When one of the Catholic Candle Team was at Notre Dame, that university ordered him to get a rubella (abortion-developed) vaccine.  The school used against him the Vatican language quoted above (about weighing the consequences of great danger to public health if he did not get the vaccine).  The school told him that, under this Vatican language, those public health consequences required him to get the vaccine. 

We think that a vaccine-objector cannot win this argument (based on the Vatican’s conciliar teaching quoted above) because it sets up both sides to weigh whether the end justifies the means in the particular case, and predictably, the pro-vaccine group (requiring the vaccine) will always say that the consequences are huge and that the end (public health) does justify the means (getting the vaccine).

The Catholic Candle Team member replied to the school, saying what any faithful and informed Catholic should reply:

You don’t understand.  I reject that post-Vatican II teaching.  I am Traditional Catholic and I follow the pre-Vatican II teaching that it is never permissible to get an abortion-connected vaccine. 

Notre Dame kept insisting that he get the vaccine as the deadline approached, to see if he would back down.  But when he did not back down, they granted him a waiver at the last minute.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives a short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

Why No One should play Dungeons and Dragons

Q.  My son has gotten into the game Dungeons and Dragons at his school and from the stories he’s told me about the game, it sounds pretty bad.  I want to give him some definitive reasons he shouldn’t play it, but I don’t know enough about it to tell him not to.  Any help is appreciated.

A.  The virtuous life is the happy life on earth and, more importantly, is the road to heaven.  We should not engage in entertainments which work against virtue and our progress toward heaven.

One such entertainment is the role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons, which especially attracts high school boys and less-mature young men.

Here are our five biggest reasons this game is bad and everyone should avoid it.

1.    Dungeons and Dragons presents a false moral framework for life.  This is done explicitly and implicitly.  Players are allowed to explicitly choose to make their characters evil or morally “neutral” (i.e., “amoral”, “chaotic”) and players are free to live according to whatever moral standards they choose.  Thus, they are allowed to choose, imagine, and cause their characters to sin without limitation or contrition.  This is licentiousness, not true liberty, and it is not the conduct of a friend of God! The evil of that licentiousness is evident if someone puts himself in God’s “shoes”: Suppose a person learned that his family members and best friends spent considerable time enjoying the daydream of torturing and murdering him.  Their pleasurable fantasy would prove that they do not love him and are not his friends.  Similarly, a person would obviously offend God and not be God’s friend, if he spent his recreation time enjoying the daydream of offending God by committing sins.

2.    Besides the sin of willfully taking pleasure in imagining committing sins, such daydreams can also be sins for a second reason: they can lead to committing those sins we are imagining, and could make it easier for us to commit those sins through breaking down any reluctance we might have to committing such sins.  So, e.g., if a young man were to spend a lot of time taking pleasure by imagining shoplifting and how he could do it without getting caught, it would tend to break down his inhibitions and could make him more likely to actually commit that sin.  Thus, such imaginings can be deliberate (and unnecessary) occasions of sin.

3.    Besides this false moral framework (discussed above), Dungeons and Dragons promotes and glorifies killing for personal gain and advantage.  Catholics (and all men seeking virtue) should be peaceable and should be builders, not destroyers, as much as possible.  Dungeons and Dragons encourages the opposite: “let’s go kill and be violent”.

4.    Dungeons and Dragons presents to the players the false, central goal of living to amass material goods and power, whereas the truth is that those goods play only a small part in the good and happy life.  The truly important parts of life are missing and are “written out” of the game.

5.    Dungeons and Dragons promotes interest in (and entrance into) the occult, to learn about, use, and seek spells and magic.

The above reasons leave aside many other reasons not to play Dungeons and Dragons, such as:

§  Dangers to purity built into the game;

§  The wasting of time involved in the game;

§  The inherent, additional unwholesomeness of this game as played as a computer game, i.e., when the game is played on that medium.  (Board games are generally better than electronic games.)

§  The superiority of “real” activities, such as sports, hiking, rafting, writing and reading activities, art and kraft projects, fishing, long bike rides, swimming, gardening, raising animals, model rockets, taking on extra side jobs to save money for college, etc.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

CC in brief

Q.  Why does the N-SSPX now lean liberal with its followers?

A.  If a traditional Catholic or a Society doesn’t fight against liberalism every day, gradualism will take over and they will become liberal after a time.  The New SSPX no longer fights against liberalism daily as Archbishop Lefebvre did.  They may merely mention the problem of liberalism, but are not fighting against it. 

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

CC in brief

Q.  I’m so confused.  Is there a mass that I can attend, i.e. SSPX or SSPV?  Should I simply stay home and pray the traditional Rosary?

A. We are in the same position you are, with no Mass to attend, since there are no uncompromising priests, at least in most places in the world.  We strongly encourage you to do what we do: we stay home and sanctify the Sunday there, reading the Mass prayers, a good sermon, etc.  We use the program set out here: https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/faith/sanctifying-sunday-no-mass.html

Even if we don’t “feel” content in our feelings or emotions, nonetheless with our will and intellect (the important faculties) we should be perfectly content without the Mass and Sacraments when they are not available without compromise.  Read this morale-boosting explanation here:  https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/faith/complete-contentment-without-the-mass-when-it-is-not-available-without-compromise.html

 We urge you not to attend compromise groups to get the Sacraments, even where they are valid Sacraments.  The Sacraments of compromise groups do not please God.  https://catholiccandle.org/2020/04/02/a-compromise-groups-masses-and-sacraments-do-not-give-grace-because-the-end-does-not-justify-the-means/

The SSPX is a compromise group and is liberal (as is Bp. Williamson’s group). To see concrete evidence of the “new” SSPX’s increasing liberalism, click on the “Society of St. Pius X” tab at this link: https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/#gsc.tab=0

Most of the SSPV have doubtful ordinations and all of them are in schism.  Read more about the schism of sedevacantism in a book available here: https://catholiccandle.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/sedevacantism-material-or-formal-schism.pdf  If you prefer, you can buy this book (which is sold at cost) here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08FP5NQR6?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860#reader_B08FP5NQR6

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

CC in brief

Q. My husband says it was wrong for the Southern States of the U.S. to attempt to secede – that is, to revolt – from the Federal, national government, in the civil war of the 1860s.  Is my husband correct?

A. There are many things to consider in assessing whether the Southern States were permitted to secede from the Union.  For example, was it prudent to secede based on the chances of success?  However, in this short CC in Brief, we leave such other considerations aside.  Although it is true that revolution is always evil,[1] nonetheless, the question arises whether the Southern States’ secession was revolution or was it the exercise of a right given by the Union’s founding agreement.  

The U.S. Constitution is the agreement between the states which governed their mutual relationship.  That agreement is silent on this issue, unlike, e.g., the European Union’s charter which explicitly allowed for a country to exit the EU as Britain did.[2]

One could suppose that the fact that the original 13 American colonies revolted against Britain implies that the U.S. Constitution might implicitly allow secession of any states which chose to sever ties with the U.S. federal government, just as those colonies severed ties with England.  Further, it certainly seems that there could be an element of hypocrisy in the successors of the American revolutionaries refusing to allow secession from their own Union, although they demanded this secession from England.  Nonetheless, the Southern States’ right to secede (or not) would “boil down” to whether secession was implicitly allowed (or implicitly forbidden) under the U.S. Constitution.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

CC in brief

Q.  Why does the SSPX now lean liberal with its followers?

A.  If traditional Catholic individuals or groups don’t fight against liberalism every day, gradualism will take over and they will become liberal over time.  The “new” SSPX no longer fights against liberalism daily as Archbishop Lefebvre did.  They might merely mention the problem of liberalism, but they do not fight against it. 

Catholic Candle note: Here are some articles cataloging some of the liberalism of the “new” SSPX:

➢  https://catholiccandle.org/category/resources-for-priests/society-of-st-pius-x/

➢  https://catholiccandle.neocities.org/#gsc.tab=0  (from this page on our old website, click on the folder labeled “Society of St. Pius X”).

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

CC in brief

Q:        A Catholic friend (who considers herself conservative) told me that “we should not do penance during Advent because it is a time for rejoicing”.  Is she correct? 

A:        There is a grain of truth in what your friend says, but she is “more wrong than right”.  Advent is a time of anticipation (and preparation) for the joyful time of Christmas.  We see this in the Church’s hymns: Advent is the time of Oh Come, oh Come Emmanuel, not the time of Joy to the World.

So, there is an element of spiritual longing and a spiritual joy prominent on Gaudete Sunday.  However, Advent is a time of penance to prepare for the coming of Our Infant King.  Purple, the color of penance, is the liturgical color.   In Her liturgy, the Church emphasizes St. John the Baptist, with his calls for penance and preparing our hearts.

Like the secular world, the conciliar church seeks feasting with no fasting.  All of us, Traditional Catholics included, do much less penance than we should.  So, although Lent is a more penitential time than Advent, we should generously embrace Advent’s penitential spirit.

Lastly, we note that it is unfitting to have our Christmas parties during Advent instead of Christmastide, or to put our Christmas decorations up well before the Christ Child comes.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

CC in brief

Q.  There are various groups, e.g., PETA (which stands for “People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals”) that seem to condemn as wrong the killing of animals.  Can we sin by being cruel to animals?

A.  We can only sin against a person, not directly against property.  Animals (i.e., brute beasts) are property, usually belonging to a particular person.  We can no more sin against an animal than we could sin against other kinds of property, viz., a plant or a non-living body.  However, if we mistreat any kind of property this can be a sin against its owner.  For example, if we cut down the tree in our neighbor’s yard, this can be a sin against him. 

Further, any harm we do to any kind of property can be a sin against God, the Creator, in two ways:

1.    It can be a sin of wasting the good gifts of God, if we unreasonably destroy them. 

2.    If we needlessly cause an animal (even a pest) to suffer, not for the purpose of killing it, but purely for the sake of causing that animal to suffer, e.g., to torture a housefly simply because we want it to suffer, that is a sin of showing contempt for their Creator and is a sin against God.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

Q:  In the Our Father, it says “lead us not into temptation”.  Why would God lead us into temptation?  (And if these words do not actually mean “lead us”, why does the Our Father say “lead us”?)

A: Sacred Scripture sometimes speaks of God doing what He permits to be done.  For example, in the Book of Exodus, God says He will harden Pharao’s heart, whereas God permitted Pharao to harden his own heart.  Exodus, 4:21.  In these words of the Our Father, we are asking God to not permit us to be conquered by temptation and so to commit sin.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  By contrast, our feature CC in brief, gives an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

Q.  We call Our Lady the “Mother of God”.  But God is eternal and has no beginning.  Why don’t we call her the “Mother of Jesus” instead?

A.  Although it is correct to call Our Lady the “Mother of Jesus”, she is also truly the Mother of God.  Our Lord is a Divine Person, not a human person.  Mary is the mother of a Person – and that Person is God.

Catholic Candle note: Catholic Candle normally examines particular issues thoroughly, at length, especially using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and the other Doctors of the Church.  At the urging of one of our readers, we are trying new feature: CC in brief, giving an extremely short answer to a reader’s question.  We invite readers to submit their own questions.

Q. In the Apostles Creed, it says Christ "descended into hell."  What exactly does that mean?  And if it doesn’t actually mean hell, why does it say “hell”?

A. “Hell” refers to those places where the souls of the decease are detained, that have not been admitted to heaven.  “Hell” includes the place of eternal punishment suffered by the damned, but also includes Purgatory, the Limbo of the Babies and the Limbo of the Fathers.  Our Lord descended into hell to free the souls of the just, who were waiting for Him in the Limbo of the Fathers.