1. The Compatibility of Creationism and Evolution.

Catholic thinkers, including a number of recent pontiffs have expressed the opinion that the Theory of Evolution and Catholicism are not incompatible. So, this compatibility must be explained to Catholics, if we want their understanding of the principles of our religion to become operative and serve them in their dealings with the intellectual challenges that will surely rise during the adult phase of their life.

One of the major reasons for Catholics abandoning their religious practices and losing the religious beliefs they had acquired as youngsters while attending religion classes in preparation for their first post-baptismal sacraments is the fact that, as they reach the threshold of those sacraments) their religious education stops, and the religious faith acquired during their adolescent years is no longer sufficient once they reach maturity. Only the intellectual enrichment of a high school and college education would produce such results in the absence of an equal intellectual enrichment of their religious faith. Within a few years these youngsters grow physically and mentally into mature adults, enter the world of work and professions, and undertake marriage and family life. However, their religious education has stopped at the level of early teenagers who went, often unwillingly, to religion classes to prepare for confirmation. Religious principles formulated in a way twelve or thirteen-year-old minds could grasp will surely not meet the needs of mature adults for a reasoned understanding of the fundamental principles of their religion.

While it would not have been appropriate to engage such young people in discussions unsuited to their age and culture, unfortunately for most people there is no follow-up and no further study of the principles of their faith after the catechism of the twelve or thirteen-year old. The Sunday sermons may sometimes shed light on particular issues but rarely nurture any further development because of their pastoral bent and lack of intellectual and theological depth.

Young adults in high school science classes, especially public school in the United States, are studying the nature of the universe, confronting the theory of evolution, a set of concepts foreign to the creationism basic to the beliefs proposed by the scriptural studies presented in catechism classes. No wonder that by the end of high school their faith is in crisis, that a college education is most likely going to deliver a mortal blow to it, and that their religious practices are often abandoned during this period, especially if for the first time in their life they are away from home.

Is it any surprise then that the capitalist system engaged in by such adults is so exploitative, the practice of law so contentious, the medical profession so influenced by greed, political careers so open to corruption? Wars, ethnic cleansing, holocausts and genocides have plagued the history of every century, but especially the last one, and have taken place in Christian, indeed Catholic countries, instigated and carried out by people who received only such an inchoate religious education. The Hitlers, and many other Christian and Catholic dictators, of our world have obviously never progressed in their religious beliefs beyond adolescence.

We can never expect to completely understand rationally or scientifically all the truths of our religion. If they were entirely accessible to human rationality they would cease to be of divine origin or be the object of divine revelation. We could never understand, for example, certain attributes of the Divinity: its eternity, its Trinitarian nature, its ability to create through the power of its mind and will. These "mysteries" are not opposed to human reason, as absurdities are, but superior to it. So, it is with many of God's other attributes.

It is necessary to gradually prepare oneself to be able to understand, and explain to others, the reasonableness of one's religion. The principles that we draw from the truths of revelation must satisfy our rationality; they cannot contradict the truths that we learn, for instance, through scientific study, when these are definitive truths (even seemingly definitive truths such as Newtonian physics have ceased to be considered so after their acceptance for two centuries, and quantum theorists are now questioning certain aspects of the big bang theory). Sometimes it was the state of human knowledge and of language at the time of revelation that created an apparent contradiction, a disagreement with the knowledge of reality that we possess today. It is up to us to compensate for that gap and make the proper adjustments.

There is no reason why evolution and creationism, when properly and reasonably formulated, should not be compatible. A God who creates a world that will evolve through millions of years is undoubtedly more godlike in power and intellect than one who creates a world that would never change. Motion and development are basic to the essence of our universe.

An evolutionary universe calls for a creator just as much as a non-evolutionary one. A world does not come into being by itself, just as any elaborate construction does, it takes the mind and the creative power of an omnipotent God. Meaningful is the episode in the life of the polymath Jesuit Athanasius Kircher who had a scientist friend who was an atheist and did not believe in the existence of a Creator. In order to demonstrate to him the absurdity of his position Kircher had a rather complicated model of the moving solar system built in his office and invited his agnostic friend to see it, who was insisting in wanting to know who was the maker of such an ingenious device. And Kircher insisting on answering that it had built itself during the previous night. But his friend was equally insisting in wanting to know who was the maker of such an ingenious construction. So Kircher thought that that was where he had intended to get his friend, and told him: "So you cannot believe that this little toy has made itself during the night but you believe that that orderly and immense universe out there has made itself without the intervention of a divine power. The friend admitted the foolishness of his intellectual stance and changed his mind.

Not only evolution and creationism are not contradictory, but an evolutionary universe calls for the existence of a powerful and intelligent creator just as much as the pre-Darwinian universe of Galileo and Newton.

2. Phases of Revelation. Only very few Truths were to be revealed by Christ, but they are Fundamental to Christianity.

First of all, we must understand that the phase of revelation that consisted in the manifestation of the Divinity in the person of Christ was not intended to explain to humankind all the truths about our created universe: only some basic truths that would help guide humanity in its effort to rise from a state of sinfulness and selfishness to a state of redeeming peace and brotherhood, and of dedication of all human resources to the alleviation of human suffering. Christ spent his entire public life teaching this: it is the establishment and the achievement of "the kingdom of God" that He so often talked about.

The basic truths of his revelation are that God, his Father and sender, is the creator of all our universe. He created all out of love, for He is love (1 John 4:8, 16); His goodness made Him create things He had no need of and directs them all to their end according to their different nature; and out of that love He gave us the gift of freedom of choice. No other creature enjoys this freedom, perhaps not even the angels, and with it, human beings can choose to live forever in the bosom of his Love or to die deprived of that opportunity. The choice is to love God by loving one's fellow humans like oneself ("For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Gal. 5:14. "You are under no obligation to anybody, except to love each other; those who love their neighbors have fulfilled the law. For 'Thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, thou shalt not covet,' and any other commandment that be, is all included in the phrase: love thy neighbor as thyself. Love of neighbor does no ill. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law," Rom 13:8-10; or to love only oneself as animals do. A very simple message.

Just as God the creator, by having man emerge with his intelligence and reason in the midst of a wondrous universe, expected him by means of that reason and intellect to recognize Him as the creator of that wondrous beauty, Christ, by giving us just a few glimpses of his being and his ideas, clearly intended the Christian community, the Church, to gradually come to understand through the centuries what his being and his doctrine really are. Otherwise He, who at the tender age of twelve was in the Jerusalem's temple astounding the doctors of the law with his wisdom and knowledge of divine things, would (like the prophets and better than any prophet or other founders of religions, Moses, Confucius, Buddha, Mohammed), have written a clear and splendid book containing the principles of Christianity, a masterpiece of theology, a summa theologica. Instead, we do not have even one line written by Him. His witnessing was very brief and completely oral, often delivered in parables, in storytelling and maxims. These were entrusted to a small band of unschooled men to preach to a totally pagan world. Eventually his deeds and words were recorded in four gospels written in an extremely simple style. Clearly, He wanted his witnessing to be only a seed which the Christian community would develop through the centuries -- not so much into a doctrine, but perhaps more into a way of being, the Christian behavior that He, the "new man," as St Paul calls Him, exemplified: the behavior of the people of that "kingdom of God" he had announced as near.

This phase of revelation was not intended to reveal to human beings all the truths of our created universe. If Christ had revealed to his contemporaries the theory of evolution, for instance, or even just the fact that the earth was revolving around the sun and not vice versa, He would have been laughed at; and He would have been wasting his effort. Just as we do not try to teach a child the laws of physics only an adult can comprehend, so God's revelation had to keep pace with the ability of human beings to perceive theological truths. The mission of revealing the truths about the universe around us was not Christ's, but that of human science and speculation. It is a phase of revelation that God entrusted to our intelligence and eagerness for knowledge, the intelligence whose potential development He had encoded in his creation. In Christ's time, only very few scientists had arrived at the understanding of the sphericity of the earth and the heavenly bodies and at some rudimentary measurements of our planet.

3. The Emergence of Man in an Evolutionary Universe.

By now we think we have progressed much farther and that we know with sufficient probability that the universe has evolved from an original chaotic mass through billions of years and will continue to evolve through billions more. Our faith would then suggest that in the instant of creation the development of all matter through the billions of years to come must have been potentially encoded in that original chaotic mass by a creator able to foresee it all ("He who sees the end from the beginning," for "God sees and knows the future because the future is present to Him who includes all times in His sight"). Newspapers report that "Calculations made by physicist Alan Gruth of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center suggest that the universe was created literally from nothing in an extremely short space of time, a second divided by a billion billions" [Washington Post, June 3, 1984]). A God who creates a universe that takes billions of years to evolve what the first creative act willed and foresaw, is certainly more godlike, intelligence-wise, than the artisan envisioned by the writers of Genesis who works for a day, stops to look around to make sure that "everything is good" (Gen. 1:10, 18, 27, 31), and gets up the next morning with new ideas on how to improve the previous day's work; who, after six days of such labor, will rest on the seventh day; and eventually will repent having done certain things, whose developments he had evidently failed to foresee, like creating men, and decides to destroy some part of his creation by fire or flood.

Likewise, we think we now know with sufficient probability that humans derived from an ancestral animal through the evolutionary process common to all living things. The ape that was eventually going to evolve into a human was living, like all animals, in the immense forest of the earth (Genesis 2:8's "Garden in Eden" or Vico's "ingens sylva";) pursuing the satisfaction of the needs for, and the pleasures of, food and sex, developed in view of the survival of the individual and the species, in complete innocence, as everywhere in the animal world, where there is no good or evil, and where behavior is dictated exclusively by the instincts for survival.

As the evolutionary process progressed, with the progressive expansion of the brain, increasing intellectual awareness developed, and with it, moral awareness was born, the increasing capacity to distinguish between good and evil. As long as the instinctual drives of animal nature were prevalent, as in animals, during the earlier evolutionary stages, there was no possibility of distinguishing between good and evil, there was in fact no good and evil, no sin. As the intellect emerged sufficiently to make the awareness of good and evil possible, moral awareness was born and with it the capacity and necessity to choose, that is, free will. With greater intellectual and moral awareness came greater ability to overcome the dominance of animal instincts.

Once human beings had achieved that intellectual and moral awareness, the innocence of the animal world was lost to them. They had eaten the fruit "of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:9, 17). They had left the earthly paradise forever and the struggle between their evolving moral awareness and their instinctual drives had begun, for instinctual drives did not disappear. Human nature is dual: it encompasses both animal-physical and intellectual and spiritual forces.

Our animal and physical nature is mortal, and therefore subject to the pain of sickness and death and to the drives of animals developed in view of the survival of the individual and the species. The animal driven by pleasure, greed and violence on the instinctual level is not committing a sinful act. These actions became sinful when those animals became human beings and evolved their intellectual and spiritual capacity. Their moral awareness tries to moderate and redeem those instinctual drives and to direct them to higher ends.

Intellectual and moral awareness are, then, the expression of the spiritual component of the dual creatures that we are. Supposedly we share the intellectual-moral awareness with the higher creatures: the angels; the instinctual drives we have in common with the lower creatures: the animals. The angels have no animal component, no body, are not engaged in the struggle with instinctual drives. They cannot do evil, the kind of evil that can result from the victory of instincts in that struggle. The animals have no spiritual-moral component, therefore are not engaged in the struggle between good and evil. They cannot do evil either.

4. The Essence of Man.

So, while our intellectual-moral awareness may also exist in the angels, who will always choose good, since their will is not hindered by instinctual animal drives, and our instinctual drives are also there in animals, the play of free will is present only in human beings because of their dual nature, which engages them in the struggle between good and evil and compels them to choose between the two. Free will, then, is what characterizes us as human beings. That is, we became human when in the evolutionary process we achieved intellectual-moral awareness, became engaged in the struggle with our instinctual animal drives and were able to choose between good and evil. Deprived of this ability to choose, that is, the exercise of free will, we would not be human, but either angels or apes. Endowed with intellectual-moral awareness and free will, yet giving into our instinctual drives, we would be acting like very primitive men, or even worse, like fiends, the very incarnation of evil.

So if the evolution of all matter from the original chaos through billions of years, and the emergence of human beings, was potentially encoded in the original chaos by the Creator in the instant of creation, thus making the evolution of the human being from the ancestral ape into a being with intellectual-moral consciousness part of His creative plan, then the eating of the fruit "of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2:9, 17) as the writers of Genesis allegorized aetiologically the entering of death and evil into God's creation, a wise interpretation for people utterly unaware of the theories of evolution, was not against the will of God. Instead it was a capital step of His divine plan; and therefore, no original sin was committed by the first human beings that tainted all human beings to come.

5. Original Sin.

As we said, there always has been an original condition of potential sinfulness to which all human beings are subject, for all retain the instinctual drives proper to the animal component of their dual nature; drives which were needed for survival in the animal world but now need to be subjected to the moderating influence of the spiritual component of their dual nature, intellectual-moral awareness, and need to be redeemed, so to speak, by being directed to higher aims.

If there was no original sin but only an original condition of potential and actual sinfulness, then the erasing of that non-existent original sin could not have been one of the objectives of Christ's mission. One of the objectives of his mission, instead, was surely that of teaching human beings, not only with words, but above all by the example of his entire public life, how to rise above that condition of sinfulness, how to seek that elevation of instinctual drives, how to subject them to the ways of the spirit, how to achieve that freedom from the slavery of instinctual drives by practicing His single commandment of love of one's neighbor, following his example who spent all his public life alleviating human suffering and died on the cross in an act of solidarity, with human suffering, another one of the vital objectives of his mission.

6. The Commandment of Love.

Christ, as St. Paul repeats over and over to Jews and Gentiles alike, freed Christians from all the endless complicated rules and intricate minutiae of the old Law and proposed one extremely simple message: to love God by loving one's neighbor like oneself. God, who obviously has no need for our love, wants us to love Him by loving our neighbor, in imitation of Christ's love for humanity. The evangelical precept and example of love is the great moderating force against our animal lust and greed against all our selfish drives.

Of course, the invitation by Christ to follow his example, refers only to the substance of his message, the love of neighbor that he preached and practiced in a life totally dedicated to alleviating human suffering. It does not refer to the specific circumstances of his life.

7. Human Suffering and Human Nobility.

There is a suffering due to the mortal nature of our body: the sickness and death due to the fact that our human bodies were not given immortality. It is a suffering that cannot be eliminated, but can certainly be alleviated. There is a suffering due to our ability to do evil; a price worth paying, in God's eyes, for the great gift of free will. It is a suffering that can most certainly be alleviated, and, at least theoretically, totally eliminated. Both kinds of suffering can be alleviated by following Christ's example and command of brotherly love, which would also be a means of redemption from the sinful condition humanity has been immersed in, and a means to the realization of God's kingdom.

Christ spent his public life alleviating human suffering and teaching people how to do likewise through the exercise of brotherly love. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that he does not want us to suffer needlessly or to seek suffering exclusively for solidarity with his own, as some saints have done, or to inflict needless suffering on ourselves for any reason, except for whatever suffering might be necessary to endure in order to alleviate other people's suffering. What Christ teaches us to do in regard to human suffering is to do our best to alleviate the suffering of others, and to bear patiently the suffering that we must unavoidably encounter due to the conditions proper to our nature: our physical mortality and our vulnerability to evil done by those who choose to thus employ the divine gift of free will. This is the meaning of Christ's summons to take up our cross and follow Him.

While one of the objectives of Christ's mission was to teach humanity how to rise from the slavery to instinctual drives through the practice of brotherly love, the other main objective was to give suffering humanity, by voluntarily partaking of its suffering, an assurance that this suffering was not the result of a decision of a capricious and insensitive Creator, and that it is a price worth paying for the great gift of free will. Human suffering is ultimately due to God's decision at the moment of creation to have man eventually emerge as an intelligent being, subject to the pain of sickness and death, but also in possession of intelligence and free will.

Intelligence and free will, however, while on the one hand making it possible to do evil and cause human suffering, on the other hand also make it possible to alleviate human suffering, both the inevitable suffering due to our mortality and the suffering caused by man's evil use of his free will, thus redeeming and ennobling our human condition.

Unfortunately, those who use their free will to attain that nobility are few: we call them saints, the beings closest to the divinity, equal to or superior to the angels. The majority of Christians are more like the souls of the proud whom Dante, meeting a group of them in Purgatory X, reminds that while they are worms, they are meant to evolve into 'an angelic butterfly,' and not deteriorate into underdeveloped maggots.

This gift of free will, given uniquely to human beings, with the power it entails of alleviating human suffering, is then an extraordinarily great gift. A gift so great that God thought it was worth the suffering it also made possible– the suffering that men could cause by their evil use of the gift.

By coming to earth as an utterly innocent human being and subjecting Himself to the worst evil man could inflict on Him, death on the cross, God intended to tell human beings that in His eyes the gift of free will is so great that it is worth the suffering it can cause. He chose to subject Himself to the worst kind of human suffering in an act of solidarity with that suffering, to show humanity that the extraordinary gift of free will is not the gift of a capricious, thoughtless, insensitive Creator.

8. Evolutionary Universe and Religious Impulse.

If we accept an evolutionary view of our universe, we presume that the present one has evolved from an original shapeless mass through a series of so called big bangs. From these cosmic explosions, various stars and planets were born, on some of which no life has yet become possible, while on others single cell organisms became possible first, vegetable life came next and later, animal life, from its most elementary and cellular forms to the most complex organisms, eventually to the near-human primates, and finally to human beings themselves. This evolutionary process took possibly billion years to work itself out from that original shapeless mass. If it is an evolutionary process, it must obviously be continuing. Astronomers assure us of this continuing process in regard to the still expanding universe, as do biologists studying mutations occurring at the microbial and molecular level.

So we finally evolved as human beings within the animal world when the brain of our ancestral apes developed sufficiently to be capable of human intelligence. The signs that intelligence has reached human level are the ability to reason, and with it the ability to distinguish between good and evil, and to choose between one and the other.

In practically every culture, even at the most primitive phase of its existence, a religion is established, from the most simple form, like the simple recognition of a creator, to the most complex mythological constructs. Primitive man, facing both the immensity, the beautiful and the terrifying wonders of the world, reasoned that such wonders must have had a creator, a powerful being or beings capable of conceiving and realizing such a magnificent universe. For, as it was repeated in the Old Testament "Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei, et opera manuum eius annuntiat firmamentum," The heavens proclaim the glory of God and the starry sky displays the works of His hands (Ps 18 [19 in King James version, see also Wisdom 13: 1-9, in which the writer berates those who, seeing the beauty and greatness of the celestial bodies worshiped them instead of their creator]. Primitive man therefore assumes a religious attitude toward a creator, just as any reasonable person today, when seeing a marvelously crafted object, for example an old-fashioned watch, would assume the existence of the watchmaker. Even the Creator must have assumed or foreseen this would happen and that man would be the first being to pay Him due recognition. The Renaissance humanist, Pico della Mirandola, opined that this must have been the intent of the Creator: "the Highest Father, God the Architect, the supreme Artisan," in creating man, "longed for someone to reflect on the plan of so great a creation, to love its beauty, and to admire its magnitude" (On the Dignity of Man).

So, when scientists today (like J. Andersen Thomson & Clare Aukofer, Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith), proclaim that God "didn't make man" but that "man-made god(s)" they are not saying anything new. Primitive man, using his newly acquired reason to imagine a creator behind creation, the visible universe, and including all living beings, had nothing to go on to arrive at the creator and imagine his attributes except his own intelligence and capacity to reason, and the magnificent universe he found himself in. When, admiring a beautiful watch, we assume the existence of a watchmaker, our assumption is right, though we might never know who the watchmaker was and what he might have looked like. So, saying that man-made god is true not in the sense that man "made" god but only in the sense that man supposed that a God existed who had made everything including man, the way many texts like Genesis envisioned the creation, if we are envisioning Him now within the evolutionary process He willed and started. The scientists who claim that God did not make man have no proof whatsoever to support their statement.

9. Religions and Genesis Texts.

The same reasonable assumption, joined by a degree of justifiable curiosity and an innate inclination for storytelling prompted almost every culture, from the most primitive to advanced, to tell the story of how our world came about. The Chaldeans as well as the Mesopotamians and the Hindus did so, long before the Jews recorded their version in Genesis from a long oral tradition. Numerous versions were also elaborated by the poets of Greek and Roman literature, from Esiod to Lucretius, to Ovid, from the mythological fantasies of their cultures. Often the narrations were invented for aetiological reasons, that is, to explain or justify the origins of local festivities or rituals or customs.

Those primitive narrations were, of course, all products of the human imagination, since no one was present at the birth of our universe. This is also the case with the various contemporary hypotheses of how it all began put forth by scientists, who are certainly better equipped than the ancient mythologists at hypothesizing, due to their knowledge of physics and astronomy. But they are still only hypothesizing; some aspects of the big bang theory, for instance, based on the hypothesis of enormous implosions and explosions of matter due to atomic expansion, seem to be today challenged by quantum theorists.

The writers of Genesis, lacking the knowledge of physics of a modem scientist, had to imagine a great deal in their description of events. They must have been profound visionaries, however, for they imagined many things that fall within the realm of both reason and wisdom, and often bent on aetiologically explaining the origins and causes of present human conditions.

For instance, they envisioned an all-powerful creator who created it all out of nothing, which is still the most reasonable idea of God-as-creator today, with all the refinements provided by all forms of later revelation. If we today accept at face value the idea of evolution, we think of a creator who launched a shapeless mass into the universe which would take billions of years to evolve, possibly through many big bangs, into the present still expanding universe, a shapeless mass into which all potential future developments were encoded, in the direction of life, and eventually animal life all the way to human life, which begins when an animal species, possibly the primates, develop a brain capable of human intelligence.

The writers of Genesis knew that matter had to come first, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But the earth was shapeless and empty," living creatures and intelligent humans came into being last, out of pre-existing matter, and pre-existing life.

Again, the writers of Genesis knew that intelligent human beings, while sharing some of the traits of the animal world, share some traits with the divinity, so that the creator of man proposes to "make him in our own image and resemblance." Ironically, reasoning that if man is supposed to be made in the image and likeness of God, then God must be in the image and likeness of man. So, throughout the centuries artists aware of this biblical passage have depicted Him in reverse, giving Him whom through later developments of the concept of God we have come to think of as an invisible pure spirit, the appearance of a powerful human being, while obviously, the text was not referring to physical appearance but to a number of qualities humans share with the divinity: the gift of life which He gave also to the vegetable and animal world, the gift of intelligence, which in Genesis is given also to the angels, and with intelligence comes, in the mind of the writers of Genesis, the understanding of moral values, of good and evil, hence moral responsibility, and the inevitability of choice between right and wrong, the exercise of Free will.

The writers know that the gift of intelligence and the consequent exercise of moral responsibility are a peculiar endowment of human beings. It is what makes them human as distinguished from the lower animals with which they share life. So they put the new intelligent and morally responsible creature to the test, before "the tree of knowledge of good and evil," a test which both Adam and Eve fail miserably. The writers wanted to explore the idea of how evil had entered the world, and, without implicating the Creator, assign the cause to the gift of intelligence and free will, wrongly exercised by the first man, and because it was traditional in early Jewish thinking that the sins of the fathers would taint all their descendants and that both the offenders and their descendants were condemned to repent and atone for them, as if the descendants were responsible for their ancestors' failures, Adam's failure became the "original sin."

Of course, the authors of Genesis knew that when God says that He intends to create man in his own image and likeness, He obviously does not intend to give him certain divine powers, like the ability to create out of nothingness, only out of existing matter, an ability God himself was apparently exercising in creating man out of "the clay of the soil" (2:7) and Eve out of man's rib. Yet the writers of Genesis seem to think that God intended to share his immortality with his new creature, and that the latter lost it by failing to obey the Lord's warning to refrain from eating "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil," which caused his ejection from the earthly paradise, "the garden of delight."

10. God's Evolutionary Plan.

In God's evolutionary plan the achievement of the stage of intelligence on the part of the ancestral ape, and therefore the emergence of man, is a momentous step foreseen by the Creator and therefore not an original sin for which man deserves punishment. Man's achievement of intelligence and moral consciousness and the ability to distinguish between good and evil is figured in the biblical eating of "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" in the sense that it meant the exit from the Eden of the animal world, the animal world of innocence, where there is no good or evil, no sin. If a biblical "original sin" did not happen, however, what did exist was an original condition of potential sinfulness. With the acquisition of intelligence, the new beings did not lose any of their animal instincts, but retained intact and undiminished all their instinctual drives, proper to the animal component of their new dual nature. These drives for the pleasures of food and sex, were developed in the animal stage for the survival of both the individual and the species, the exercise of which was not sinful in that evolutionary stage, but would drive him to pleasure, greed, violence, sinful behavior that his newly acquired moral consciousness tells him must be subjected to the moderating influence of his new moral awareness, and directed to higher aims.

The Creator who foresaw and fore-willed all the evolutionary stages of His creation, expected that with the achievement of intelligence on the part of the first human beings, they would be the first products of his creation whom reason would lead to recognize Him as the all-powerful Creator of the wondrous universe they found themselves in. All primitive cultures developed such ideas, inventing their creation stories, from the simplest to the most complex, hypothesizing how probably things went, starting from their basic knowledge of the physical world they lived in. Just as physicists, armed with better knowledge of physics and astronomy, do today, but still just hypothesizing about possible and probable big bangs, or even the possible implosion that will end it all. Different premises, but the same process, still only statements of probability: how things probably happened: first inert matter, then all living matter, the vegetable world, then the animal, finally the intelligent creatures.

Now intelligence and its concomitant moral awareness, the ability to distinguish between good and evil, implies the fundamental freedom to choose one or the other, freedom which is vital to defining the new human being as much as intelligence and moral awareness. It is certainly another attribute of the divinity now extended to man, like life and intelligence. While life is also shared by all living things, intelligence and its concomitant moral awareness and free will is shared by no other living creature, except perhaps by the angels, if they are believed to be created beings as the authors of the Bible thought. This is the source of the Renaissance humanists' wonder contemplating this creature just below the level of the angels. Dante had earlier said that "the greatest gift that God in his generosity / made when creating, and most like his goodness, / and which He values most, / was the freedom of your will" (Paradise V, 19-22).

11. The Onset of Evil.

However, it is because man was gifted with the great defining attribute of intelligence and consequent free will that evil, and the suffering the abuse of free will engenders, entered God's creation. So how much share of the blame pertains to God in this evil that has entered the world? Who is the ultimate cause of it? Free will is the highest of God's gifts, more valuable than life and intelligence, and God absolutely ought not to be blamed for bestowing it on man. Free will is responsible for the evil and suffering in the world, it is due to man's abuse of such a supreme gift. Perhaps the main goal of Christ's death on the cross, which God chose freely and not out of necessity, was to show mankind that free will was worth all the pain it can cause, not the gift of a capricious and sadistic donor; that He was willing to subject himself to all the pain it can cause to demonstrate that it is worth it, and that, properly exercised, free will is the means for man to redeem, ennoble himself, to achieve the sublime height of heroic sainthood.

So, if the emergence of man from the animal world through the evolutionary process was, like every other product of evolution, a step encoded into the original shapeless mass by its creator, then the emergence of man was a great achievement of God's plan; the acquisition of intelligence and moral awareness, the knowledge of good and evil, therefore could not be considered an "original sin," the forbidden eating of "the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil," the punishable sin that occurs in Genesis, but one of the great momentous stages in the course of evolution.

However, the emergence of man from the animal world through the acquisition of intelligence and its consequent moral consciousness and free will did not abolish man's animal instincts that had enabled him to survive in his pre-human stage, especially the survival instincts, individual and of the species, the hunting for food and the pursuit of sex, the preying of the stronger on the weaker. While in the animal world all this was perfectly natural and perfectly innocent, now, with the acquisition of moral consciousness, it can potentially be sinful. So even in the absence of a Biblical original sin, early human beings are prone to sin, for they must find it difficult to restrain instincts that have served them for millions of years. Now having acquired with intelligence the ability to recognize good and evil, and the freedom to choose either, they are not compelled to choose one over the other but they are compelled to choose.

12. Overcoming Evil.

God himself, the creator of the whole, at a certain point decides to help man to achieve control over those instincts by entering the historical process through the inspiration of the patriarchs, the judges, the prophets, and ultimately more directly by entering history Himself in the person of Christ. whose mission therefore probably was not to atone for an inexistent original sin, but to teach man how to keep surviving animal instincts in check and how to rise above and eliminate that potential sinfulness of his existence. The mission of Christ completes the mission and teachings of the prophets, elimination of evil from the world and, the achievement of salvation. Every line of the four Gospels and especially His pronouncements tell us that that was his real mission.

He did not have to be crucified to achieve this mission. His martyrdom was chosen by Him not to atone for Adam's nonexistent sin, but rather to atone for all the sins of the world, "so that sins may be forgiven," (as is said in the liturgy of the mass and in St. John's first Letter [2:2], "He is the propitiation for our sins, not for our sins only, but also for those of the whole world") and especially, by submitting himself to its consequences, to show that free will is not the malicious gift of a capricious God but the greatest of all gifts, even if it causes evil and suffering in the world. God himself becomes a human being in the person of Christ, teaching and healing and dying the most painful and infamous death that was inflicted on the worst criminals at the time to show us that free will, the cause of evil in the world, is not the gift of a capricious God, but a unique gift of one of God's very own attributes, shared exclusively with man and therefore a defining attribute of man as man within creation.

So, if there was no original sin, where did the idea arise that Christ must have offered Himself up for the atonement of Adam's sin? It was the literal way people like the fathers of the Church and most Cristian theologians read the first chapters of Genesis. Paul has only a couple of not so clearly interpretable hints at this concept, that death entered the world because of the sin of one man and it was defeated by the innocent death of the Son of Man (Romans 5:11-20). Genesis imagined that Adam's was the original sin that banned man from paradise and caused death to come into the world. Christ's death, therefore, they reasoned, was necessary to reopen the gates of paradise and give man back an originally intended immortality. Paradise was closed even to the saintly prophets of the Old Testament, who had to be freed from the underworld by Christ, who is said even in our Apostolic "Credo" (though not in the Nicaean-Constantinopolitan "Credo" that is proclaimed in the Mass) to have gone to the underworld ("descendit ad inferos") for that purpose between his death and his resurrection.

13. Atonement for Sins.

Widespread in the New Testament, instead, is the more understandable and acceptable idea that Christ's death was to atone for the sins of all humanity rather than for Adam's original sin. Even the words attributed to Christ in the last supper say that in that cup was his "blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins" (Matthew 26:28; Mark 14:24 has: "This is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many"; Luke 22:20 has: "This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you"; Paul's I Cor. 11:25 has: "This cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me" without any reference to any atonement for sins).

Even the idea that Christ must offer Himself up as a ransom-victim for the atonement of human sins might be an idea that survived and was expressed more than once in the New Testament because of a long and deeply ingrained Old Testament belief that:

1) An actual sin was committed against God by the first man -- as Genesis has it -- that tainted all his descendants;

2) The sins of the fathers not only taint their descendants but must also be atoned for by their descendants as if they too were responsible for them;

3) Sacrifices were needed to atone for sins against God. Moses prescribed that a daily sacrifice of a lamb or goat (cf. Leviticus, ch.16) be offered to God to atone for the sins of the people of Israel. In Christ's time, it was actually done daily in the courtyard of the temple;

4) The ever-reaching hand of God actually squeezes out of us in this life, the payment for our and our fathers' sins;

5) God sends troubles of all sorts even to the just and faithful to put their faith and trust to the test and strengthen them.

Instead, as to point 1),

if there was no original sin, there was no original sin to atone for by Christ; and the object of Christ's mission must be something else. There was a suffering and sinful humanity, instead, whose suffering and sinfulness could be alleviated, indeed redeemed, by the practice of brotherly love Christ came to teach. Christ showed humanity what form of atonement alone makes sense and is pleasing to God who is love and made us out of love and for love: the alleviation of human suffering.

As to point 2),

while children might bear the consequences of the sins of their fathers (dereliction, poverty, transmitted diseases, etc.), a just God cannot hold one responsible for the sins of one's fathers, or for anything done outside the moral choices made by each individual in the exercise of his or her free will. However, very few voices proclaimed this idea in the Old Testament: e.g. Ezekiel 18:17 in a chapter in which he sets down who shall die in punishment for a sinful existence or live as a reward for a sinless one: "He shall not die for the iniquities of his father, he shall surely live."

As to point 3),

the only form of atonement that makes sense and which both the prophets and Christ kept repeating was pleasing to God is "the change of heart" and charitable behavior, while both the prophets and Christ repeatedly warned that God hated the smoke from the altars of the hypocrites. As the psalms had put it many times: "Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened: burnt offering and sin offering hast thou not desired. Then said I, do I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me: I delight to do thy will, o my God: yea, thy law is within my heart," (Psalms 40:6-8); "For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offerings. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, o God, thou wilt not despise" (Psalms 51: 16-17).

As for point 4)

a) Jesus reproached the Jews of his time for believing that their God was an exactor of sacrifices: Matthew 12:7 [Jesus citing Hosea's words: Hosea 6:6] "I will have mercy and not sacrifice."

b) While the Jews believed that either the blind man or his parents had sinned in order for him to deserve to be blinded and asked Jesus which one it was, Jesus answered that it was neither (John 9:2). While Job's friends insisted that he must have sinned badly to deserve so much punishment, Job kept assuring them that he had done nothing wrong.

c) Jesus said that his Father does not go after evildoers like a zealous sheriff to punish them, but makes the sun rise and the rain fall over the evil doers as he does on the just (Matthew 5:45); and that his Father will mete out punishment and rewards as each deserves only after death: then he will order the weeds to be separated for burning and the good wheat gathered in his barns, not before as the workers of the parable had suggested that they be allowed to do. Explaining the parable to his disciples when they were alone at the end of the day, Jesus said: the field is the world, the wheat the children of the kingdom, the weeds the children of evil, the harvest the end of the world (Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43). When a Samaritan town refused to receive Jesus because he was on his way to Jerusalem, an enemy city, James and John asked: "Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he turned and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:54-56). Thus, God has promised to stay out of our lives with his punishments. If he gave us freedom to do good or evil, what kind of freedom would it be if every time we exercise it and do something that displeases Him, He were to pounce on us with a punishment? When it comes to the great gift of free will God neither gives half-way nor asks us to return his gift. He's not an 'Indian giver'.

As for point 5),

if, in spite of the above promise, God were to intervene in our lives sending us evils in order to put our faithfulness to the test, he would go not just against his promise not to intervene, he would be immersed in human history totally, present in everybody's life to mete out the proper dose of punishment according to the proper dose of religious strength of each individual (those who believe in such intervention claim to be empowered, as God's own interpreters, to assure us that God will never test us beyond our individual strength!?) in a type of intervention that is absolutely unneeded. For the vicissitudes of life, the fickle nature of human events, provide more than sufficient occasions for our faithfulness to be tested without God having to intervene.

14. Predestination.

Another bad idea carried over from the Old Testament mentality undermines the fundamental concept of free will and individual responsibility. This is the concept of predestination. John, talking about Judas, has Christ say: "him who was destined to be lost in fulfillment of the scriptures" (John 17:12). Luke has Peter and the other apostles pray during the election of Matthias to replace "Judas who deserted the cause and went the way he was destined to go" (Acts 1:25).

If Judas was destined to betray Christ, then he was deprived of his God-given gift of free will and was not responsible for his betrayal. God does not give the gift of free will and then take it away. Finally, to say, as some do, that Judas' sin was not so much to betray Christ as to despair of Christ's mercy afterwards and not repent as Peter did after his denial of Christ, does nothing to solve the problem. If Judas was not responsible for his betrayal because he had been predestined to do it, then he had nothing to repent and to be pardoned for. If he was not predestined to betray Christ, and it was only foreseen that he would, then he was responsible for he had chosen to do so of his own free will, just as Peter did, whose denial was foreseen and predicted by Christ ("before the cock crows twice, thou shalt deny me thrice" Mark 14:30); Peter out of fear chose to deny Christ and then repented "bitterly." Judas, who also repented bitterly, hanged himself also of his own free choice.

There is a mention of predestination also in Romans 8:28-29, where Jerome's vulgate clearly uses the verb predestinare and most English translations use predestine in a passage that may mean something different: "We know that for those who love God everything turns to good, for those who according to [his] design are called saints. For those he foresaw he also predestined to be similar to the image of his Son, so that He be the first born of many brothers. For those he predestined he also called; and those he called he also justified, and those he justified he also glorified." Probably the best meaning of the Pauline text here would be "choose," so that "those he foresaw he also chose, and those he chose he also called." Thus, the text of "Today's English Version" of the American Bible Society, accepted by most denominations, translating from the Greek and bypassing Jerome, says: "We know that in all things God works for good with those who love Him, these He has called according to his purpose. Those whom God had already chosen he had also set apart to become like his Son, so that the Son would be the first among many brothers. And so, God called those that He had set apart; and those that He called He also put right with Himself, and with those that he put right with himself he also shared his glory." God foresees our actions, he does not predetermine them. One is reminded of a beautiful exhortation in the funeral oration for Abraham Lincoln's son, to have "Confidence in Him who sees the end from the beginning." God's prophets, like the Creator they speak for, predict, not predetermine.

15. God's Supreme Gift of Free Will.

Even on such a momentous occasion as when He is to enter directly into human history in the person of Christ, God sends a messenger to ask for permission of the person involved, to allow her to exercise her free will:

The angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth,

To a virgin espoused to a man named Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary.

And the angel came unto her, and said, Hail, thou are highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed are thou among women.

And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.

And the angel said unto her, Fear not Mary: for thou art found favor with God.

And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shall call his name Jesus.

He shall he great, and shall be called the son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David:

And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end.

Then said Mary unto the Angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore, also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.

And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren.

For with God nothing shall he impossible.

And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her. (Luke 1:26-38).

Although the Angel speaks in the future indicative as if talking about things that are going to happen to Mary, for God knows the future and therefore knows that Mary will say yes and those things will actually take place, Gabriel does not go to Mary and say: "Thou hast found favor with God. Thou shalt conceive in thy womb and bring forth a son, there is little you can do about it, this is His decision, can you dare say no to Him? and even if you did His mission is first to announce to Mary what is God's design and explain to her the sequence of events, how difficulties will be surmounted "for with God nothing shall be impossible," and then, and perhaps more importantly, to obtain her consent. When he obtains her consent ("Behold the handmaid of the Lord: be it onto me according to thy word") the angel departs without another word ("And the angel departed from her"), his mission evidently accomplished. The story of human redemption could proceed only after Mary's consent; so dearly respectful is God of our free will.

God foresees the outcome of his creation, for He willed it and encoded it into the original shapeless mass; God also foresees the outcome of human actions, He does not predestine any. He gave man free will and He does not interfere with his gift. He is patient, He has time on his side, for He is eternal, and has set aside billion years for the evolving of our world. Although bad behavior can bring about its own punishment, and this may be interpreted as divine punishment, God does not intervene with punishment and rewards to regulate human life (let us remember the parable of the good wheat and the weeds: only at the end of the world there will be the separation of the two). During our lifetime, our freedom is respected; it is subject only to the negative results of our morality. Predestination in human life cannot be an attribute of God's plan, because it would be an infringement of human freedom, predestination would contradict God's most precious gift to mankind, freedom of choice.

16. Natural Disasters, the so-called Acts of God.

What is God's responsibility for natural disasters, which are sometimes referred to as "acts of God"? It is the same indirect responsibility of the evil done by people's misuse of God's gift of free will. Man's intelligence, power, and resources should be directed to protecting people from natural disasters, like earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, droughts, as well as from diseases due to our mortality, as Christ did throughout his public life. Instead human greed has drastically limited the application of human resources to human protection, to medical or scientific research for human health; or engineering and mechanical progress for building safe housing, away from flood plains, from earthquake zones, etc. Instead enormous resources are continuously poured into destruction and wars. God gave us intelligence and resources and the free will to use them to protect human beings.

God should never be called into question as He often is for permitting human genocides and holocausts. These events are exclusively the responsibility of human decisions, of human free choices, no matter how enormous and horrific the results of such decisions might be. Our frequent exclamation when confronted with such human failure: "How can God allow this to happen?" is thoughtless and senseless. God gave us intelligence and free will, it is for us to put them to good use. Lincoln used to say that "God's job is not to fix our world, it is our job to fix our world."

17. God's Involvement in His Handiwork and Our Relationship with Him.

These are all ideas we can believe in as they are in accord with the teaching of Christ on the one hand and the present scientific knowledge we possess on the other. They allow us to understand the complexity of God's relationship to his creation, and particularly to us within his creation. As we said at the beginning, God and his handiwork are very probably not entirely accessible to human rationality. Perhaps it would be reasonable on our part to take a somewhat humble stance and say that this is how far we can reach testing our faith and our reason, but that only God really knows how deep his intervention in human history really reaches, how actually involved he is in his own handiwork, or in our daily life. Certainly, He is capable of surprising us, when we come face to face with Him, and showing us how wrong or just limited our human understanding of Him has been. We would do well to keep in mind the words of Gabriel as a warning as well as a promise: "With God nothing shall be impossible." And the reproach to doubting Thomas as well: "Because thou hast seen, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed" (John 20:29); Christ almost surely was referring not just to our not having seen Him with the eyes of our body, but also to our continuing to believe even when our religious beliefs become incomprehensible to, or cease to satisfy, the eyes of our rational mind.

One might, for instance, ask oneself why among the million worlds of the universe would this little planet, the earth, be chosen in God's plan to be the place where such portentous outcome in its evolutionary process would take place, the emergence of this creature endowed with intelligence and moral awareness, whose descendant race would be the object of God's major interest, to the point of wanting it to become central for its history, to the point of wanting to enter its history himself in the person of his Son and to want the chosen of that race to join him for eternity and share in his immortal life. We do not know everything God does and why, and whether life has evolved on other planets. "Astronomers have calculated that there are 11 billion possibly inhabitable planets in our galaxy; providing compelling new ground to believe that we are not alone in the universe," says University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, "with tens of billions of water-laden Earth-size planets, surely some of them have all the necessary ingredients for life." The computation was made using four years of data from NASA's now retired Kepler space telescope, and keeping in mind that only "a corner of the Milky Way was used" and our galaxy is only one of the thousands known ("The Galaxy Is Full of Earth-like Planets" The Week, Nov. 22, 2013, vol. 13, issue 644, p 20, see also Katie Peek. "The Search For Other Earths" Popular Science February 2014, pp. 42-45). But let us remember that God created everything out of love, for He is love, and He seems to always favor the humble and the small. See how in an age of great empires, He chooses a man of faith like Abraham from remote Hur, and his descendants to be the religious "light for the nations" (Isaiah 42:6); how in an age of great empires he chooses tiny Palestine, not Rome or Jerusalem, but Bethlehem and Nazareth, and a young woman called Mary. To communicate his doctrine and carry on his mission he does not choose the doctors of the law, but semi-illiterate fishermen, as if He were willfully and knowingly seeking failure rather than the success of his plan to convert the world. But "nothing shall be impossible to God" and all the Roman emperors with their bloody persecutions will not be able to stop the work of the fishermen from Galilee from changing the course of history and the face of the Roman empire and making Christianity a powerful force in the history of the centuries to follow. God will always surprise us with his choices. Let us humbly believe that his choices are always right and made out of love, for He is love.

Another reasonable, humble attitude toward the truths we are aware of and understand as well as those we do not easily understand is to never stop being grateful for the marvelous gifts we have received from God: not only life, intelligence, and free will, but also our Christian faith, which is as important as the others and probably, almost certainly, the key to our happiness here and beyond.

18. What Prayer Is.

And that is what prayer mainly is: prayer is, first of all, thanking Him for the gifts of life, intelligence, freedom, and faith – and for the gifts he has waiting for us in the hereafter (of which we know only what we can imagine from the extremely few hints Christ gave us regarding it). Prayer is also asking for His forgiveness for the bad use we have made of those marvelous gifts. It is also a strengthening of our resolve and capacity to use them better in the future. Prayer is not asking God to intervene in our daily transactions: he has given us life, intelligence, freedom, faith, all that is necessary to our effectiveness in the affairs of this life.

Failing as adults to go to church on Sunday, for instance, is begrudging God, who has given us so much, an hour a week in which to honor and thank Him for so many gifts. Justly, from those to whom more has been given, more shall be required. Let us consider how much in material and spiritual things we have been given. Children are born by the millions in poor countries and live short stunted existences plagued by hunger, ignorance, oppression. We were provided with life, freedom, loving parents, the best education, health, intelligence, and above all Christian faith. When we are seized by doubts about our faith, we should not stop the religious practices we have been accustomed to. It would be a bad mistake, the end of our faith and the beginning of final unhappiness. Instead we should persevere in them and examine our doubts until a resolution of the difficulties is achieved: "Seek and ye shall be given, knock and it will be opened" (Matthew 7:7). No knocking, no opening. The destiny of each of us depends on the answers we are able to give to our religious doubts and the reaffirmation of our beliefs.

19. The Most Sublime Form of Prayer.

And as for holding on to the practice of attendance to the Sunday mass, Christ has given us the most sublime and perfect form of prayer in the Eucharist, the Sunday mass, his crowning miracle. We remember that at a certain point Christ started telling his incredulous disciples that his life with them was coming to an end, that the time had come for him to go up to Jerusalem to die: "From that time forth began Jesus to shew into his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day" (Matthew 6:21). He chose to spend the night before his death with his disciples, the ones on whose missionary effort the carrying on of his work and the spreading of his doctrine depended. Knowing that He had only a few hours to be with them before the three years of their discipleship would be over; and also knowing that He had not made great progress in penetrating their minds and perhaps only a little more in penetrating their hearts, He spent those few hours He had left preaching to them in the cenacle the commandment of humility and service with the washing of their feet, and the supreme commandment of love, and beseeching help for them from the Father, that they remain united and steadfast in their faith. When the supper was over and it was time for Him to leave them on their own forever, He did something only the divine mind of a God could devise and God's power accomplish, both there and then and for all ages to come ("usque ad consummationem saeculi" -- till the end of time). He gave them the gift of himself in the form of bread and wine, and the power and command to do the same in his memory and make it the center of Christian worship. He intended the miracle he had just performed to be not only a one-time event but a repeated miracle He has willed to recur throughout the ages every time his disciples would do it in obedience to his command.

No other founder of a religion has ever devised such a way of remaining with their faithful after they left the earth; none had the divine mind and power of a God as Christ did. The divinity of such a humanly unimaginable device can be seen even in its simplicity: just bread and wine, "my body and the blood of the new and everlasting covenant," an incredibly simple and marvelously everlasting way for Christ to remain as spiritual nourishment with his faithful forever.

It was certainly a new covenant. The Jews had been ordered by Moses to offer a lamb in the temple yard daily in atonement for the sins of the people of Israel. This is why when John saw Jesus walking by, he told his audience that that was the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. At Christ's baptism and transfiguration God proclaimed that this was his Son in whom He was well pleased. Christ must have pleased the Father immensely by the way he was performing his earthly mission, but particularly, at the supreme moment of obedience to his will when He offered himself on the cross invoking forgiveness for humanity, a form of atonement infinitely more meaningful than the lamb offered daily by the Jews in the temple yard.

But how is the covenant everlasting? A covenant involves the commitment of two parties, of God's and of the faithful. While we know that God's love is everlasting, and his faithfulness endures forever, the fidelity of the faithful is always faltering and lacking in constancy. But Christ's is not, and as He offers himself daily to the faithful in the Eucharist, He is also offering himself to the Father on their behalf as He did on Calvary by doing his Father's will, the perfect sacrifice and the perfect form of prayer.

And that is what the Mass also is. It is not just a person like us offering any ordinary form of prayer. In it the faithful unites with Christ himself in the offer, who renews the offer to the Father of his own sacrifice on the cross, repeating each time the offer he made on Calvary. Christ is offered anew to the Father in the supreme act of obedience and love that was his death on the cross, obedience to the will of the Father and love for the human family to whom he had come to teach the way of salvation, the way of love for one another, the way for humanity to free itself from the grip of selfishness and sin, and redeem itself by collaborating with Christ and his followers in establishing the kingdom of God. "Your kingdom come, your will be done," His will, that is, that we love each other as we love ourselves - or more so.

20. God's Gifts and Our Response.

Regarding the gift of faith, as well as all the gifts of God – life, intelligence, and freedom – a few more things are worth remembering.

First, that all God's gifts are meant to be nourished by our careful cooperation in order for them to bear fruit. If the gift of life is not nourished, one dies in infancy. If intelligence is not developed one runs the risk of becoming a moron. The notion that God's grace is all that counts and our efforts are worth nothing is nonsense in the light of Christ's teaching, like praying the Lord of the harvest to send workers into the harvest for the harvest is great and the harvesters few. If our efforts were not needed and only God's grace mattered, why would there be such a bad need of harvesters? The master who gives various amounts of talents to his servants before going on a journey (Matthew 25:14-30; Luke 19:11-27) expects them to put them to work to bear fruit by the time of his return and gets angry at the one who buried his talent and had nothing more to give back to his master. In the parable of the farmer who goes out to sow (Matthew 13:3-9; Mark 4:1-9; Luke 8:4-8), some seeds fall on the road and are eaten by the birds, some fall among the stones and germinate but are soon dried up by the sun, the soil being too thin, some fall among thorny bushes and when they grow are suffocated; some fall on good soil and it produces thirty, sixty, a hundred times what was sown. Asked to explain the parable, Jesus says (Matthew 13: 18-23; Mark 4: 13-20; Luke 8:11-15) that the seed is the news of the kingdom. The seed fallen on the road is the word heard and not understood; it is immediately taken from the heart of the listeners. The seed among the stones is the word accepted with joy, but it has no roots, no constancy and is given up as soon as difficulties or tribulations occur. The seed in the thorny bushes is the word suffocated by worldly preoccupations and the attraction of wealth. The seed on the good soil is the word heard by those who really understand it and bears fruit thirty, sixty, one hundred times. Clearly then the same good seed can produce nothing or a great deal according to the efforts and cooperation and good will of those who receive it. The destiny of each of us depends on our answer to the Word. That is ultimately the meaning of divine grace. Divine grace is our response to the Word.

There is also the question of where the sower casts those seeds. The parable seems to suggest that every piece of land will receive it, though the response of each may be different. While we must be thankful for so many gifts, and especially for the gift of faith, not everybody in the world has been given the same chance to receive it, to develop it, to respond to it. After his resurrection, for forty days before his ascension, Jesus Christ appeared many times to his twelve apostles in order to confirm them in their faith in his divinity (as if fearing that the numerous miracles they had witnessed during the previous three years had not been enough). Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (15, 4-8) assures them that Christ "appeared to Cephas and then to the twelve. After which He showed Himself in one appearance to more than five hundred brothers, of whom some have died, but the bulk of them is still alive, later He appeared to James, then to all the Apostles and finally ... to me." But He did not present Himself to the authorities, to Pilate, to Herod, to Caiaphas and his entire gathered Sanhedrin who had seen him crucified and would now see him alive. He could tell them what he told Thomas: "Come, put your hand in the wound in my chest, your finger in the holes in my hands." How many of them would have become believers? What a much larger Church would have been born right there! Imagine the whole Sanhedrin becoming followers of Jesus and influencing their followers in that direction. And all without the need for the many miracles employed a short time later to convert one Saul of Tarsus on his way to Damascus. Imagine Pilate and his wife, and the entire cohort of his legionnaires who had flogged Christ, crowned Him with thorns, hammered nails into his hands and feet, thrust a lance into his chest, finding Him there in front of them alive and smiling and showing them that they had killed the Son of God, and if you kill the Son of God he will rise again. Christ did not do for all of them what He did for his twelve and the five hundred believers Paul mentions. Perhaps he did not want to give such a chance to all those who were directly involved in bringing about his death. Perhaps, with the exception of the twelve and a few others like Mary Magdalene at the tomb, he wanted his future believers to belong to the blessed faithful he described so clearly to Thomas: you believed because you have seen and touched, blessed are those who will believe without having seen and touched the risen Christ. But He did tell us the reason why He did not appear after his resurrection to all the people who had witnessed his miracles for three long years and yet wanted Him dead: He had said, while walking to Gethsemane, in John 15:24-25, "They would not have been guilty of sin if I had not done the works among them that no one else ever did; as it is, they have seen what I did and they hate both me and my Father. This must be, however, so that what is written in their Law may come true, 'They hated me for no reason at all'" (Psalm xxxiv, 19; lxviii, 5). When given a choice, they chose Barabbas, and when asked: "And what do you want me to do with the king of the Jews? [Mark], with Jesus called the Christ? [Matthew]"; they did not hesitate a moment; they shouted repeatedly: "Crucify him, crucify him." God is loving and generous, but we cannot think He would want to be taken for granted, He wants a positive response to his generous gifts.

21 God's Gifts through Us.

Another vital thing to remember is that to impart his gifts in this world God has chosen to use us as intermediaries, both for his gifts of material things, like life which is given us through our parents, as well as for his spiritual and intellectual gifts, through all those from whom we learn. Faith itself, considered a gift eminently from God, comes through our parents and religious instructors. God does not give us faith, grace, final salvation, directly, by direct intervention, by predestination. He has delegated us as channels of his gifts. He sent his Son for a short time, his Son sent his disciples, his disciples their disciples, and so on, down to us, today's Christians. Why else would Christ have asked his disciples to pray that the Lord of the harvest send workers into the harvest? If those gifts were given by God as a direct gift, what need would there be for the harvesters? Instead we are his intermediaries. He has delegated that mission to us. If we do not act as such there are no gifts. If we do not carry out the spirit of Christ, the world is deprived of the presence of the Holy Spirit and of his gifts. It is we who are asked to keep the spirit of his message alive in the world. The calling of the Christian is to live the Christian message, not to hide it under a bushel. It is a call to action, to love one's neighbor with actions, not words. There is no salvation of the individual without an individual's active response to that message. There is no salvation for one's neighbors without the individual caring for his neighbors. The good news of the kingdom would have fallen dead without the active response of the apostles, their disciples, the carriers of the Word through the centuries down to us.

22. The Gift of God's Pardon.

Yet another thing to remember about God's gifts is that God's pardon for our misuse of his gifts is also one of his gifts. It too is not given without our effort and cooperation, though we have been assured by both Scripture and Christ that, loving Father as He is, He is quick to forgiveness, much more than we are. All the prodigal son had to do was to ask for forgiveness and he got it, although to his brother that paternal readiness seemed excessive. Our efforts should be to do better afterwards. Our repentance, however, must come first. Not even so loving a God can pardon us if we do not take that initiative. John the Baptist "came into all the country about Jordan, preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins" (Luke 3:3). His words were "Baptism of repentance" not baptism of water. The water of the Jordan was only a metaphor of cleansing. The "repentance" not the water produced the cleansing. Then, as the baptized "asked him to say, What shall we do then? He answered and said unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. Then came also publicans [tax collectors] to be baptized, and said unto him, Master, what shall we do? And he said unto them, Exact no more than that which is appointed you. And the soldiers likewise demanded of him saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages" (Luke 3:10-14). This is the "repentance for the remission of sins" (Luke 3:3): doing the right thing instead of the wrong. Even the tax collectors are not sinners as long as they exact the "right amount". Even the soldiers, if they use no violence and do not extort. Then "all flesh shall see the salvation of God" (Luke 3:6, quoting Isaiah 40:5).

23. God's Love and Ours.

In spite of all dogmatic complications, faith, in its basic elements, is a very simple thing. Faith is the belief that "God is love" (I John 4:8, 16) and that out of his love He created the universe and us in it. Love is sharing what we most value, and with us He shared his three most precious possessions: life, intelligence, and freedom.

And out of love, He sent Christ to teach us the way of salvation, that is, of achieving eternal life in Him, through faith and charity. According to St. Paul (I Cor. 13:1-13) and St. James (1:22 ff.) faith and charity are one: faith without the works of faith is a dead faith, they both say; and St. John (I John 2-4) says that those who say they believe but do not put Christ's teaching into practice are liars. Only the following of Christ's example of dedication to helping one's fellow human beings authenticates any profession of faith; otherwise faith remains only empty words. Matthew (7:21-29) reminds us that those who say "Lord, Lord" will not enter the kingdom, though they might have exercised the gift of prophecy, ejected demons, performed miracles in his name, but those who do what he taught us will enter the kingdom of heaven.

This "practicing" of Christian love is possible in every situation we find ourselves in, in any profession or job we have chosen in our life. Whether we are farmers, doctors, teachers, engineers, dentists, carpenters, chimney sweeps or mail deliverers, we must conceive of our job as a service to other human beings, to all the people who are touched by our activity. There are no jobs specifically directed to the service of one's fellow human beings while others are not. Every job is a service if we perform it as a service. John did not tell even the tax collectors and the soldiers to give up their jobs, only to exercise them in a different spirit. Christ asked only twelve people to give up their jobs and follow Him. To "follow" Him one need not give up one's job but only perform it in the spirit of Christ; in service to the welfare of our "neighbors."

If we live our adult and working lives this way, we will not experience in later years the feeling of emptiness, of dissatisfaction with ourselves, of our lives having been wasted, of having had no purpose or direction.