Transcript

In our last session, we looked at the virtue of charity or of love, above all as love of God.

By the infusion of this supernatural, theological virtue of charity, we are elevated and empowered to love God above all things by a participation in God's own love of Himself.

And in fact, this love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who is given to us, as Saint Paul teaches us in Romans 5. And so, we are made like the Holy Spirit, who is love in person, by this gift of supernatural love.

This spirit of love is given to us by Jesus Himself, who breathes it forth after His resurrection from the dead.

So the Holy Spirit configures us to Jesus Christ, and specifically to the pattern of His life, death, and resurrection.

And this is the key to understanding how Christians are called to love our neighbors.

In other words, this is not some duty imposed on us as a kind of burden or task.

Rather, it's precisely how we live out life in the Holy Spirit.

We are made like Christ by the Holy Spirit, who, out of love for sinners, was willing even to lay down His life and to accept the suffering of the cross.

So when we receive the virtue of charity through the Holy Spirit, we not only are empowered to love God in the way that God loves Himself and in the way Jesus loves the Father, we are also empowered to love our neighbor the way God loves him and the way Jesus was willing to suffer and die for him.

Here, someone might raise an objection.

Listen, Father, Jesus was perfect.

God can love everyone perfectly and infinitely, but I am very limited.

I can't possibly love everyone in the same way.

And here, actually, it's very helpful to recall the traditional Catholic teaching about the order of charity, which helps us, in a way, prioritize or clarify in the concrete how we go about loving others, especially since we are, in fact, finite and limited.

The first principle, what always has to come first in our order of charity, is God.

That is, we love God first and above all things.

And this has a wonderful effect in us, because when you truly love God above all things, when you always put God first, it tends to arrange underneath the love of God every other love that we have.

That is, when you have the right first priority, you can figure out what the other priorities are in your life.

You can put them in the right place underneath the love of God, which is always first.

But secondly, or as a part of this, when you love God above all things, it naturally erupts into a love of those whom God also loves.

So you can see already that loving God first will help us love our neighbor for God's sake.

So, the first in the order of charity is always the love of God.

What comes second?

Now, this might surprise you, but in the traditional teaching, in second place is the good of our own souls.

That is, our own spiritual good, or the good that we be in a right relationship with God.

This is, in fact, the foundation for our love of our neighbor, and even though it might sound like it at first, when you think about it, this prioritization is not selfish, because unless we love ourselves enough to want friendship with God as the first and supreme good for us, we will never be able to do any real good for other people.

And this is, by the way, why you can never justify committing a sin for the sake of helping another person, even though on some level it might seem, uh, maybe, uh, like a temptation to do that.

The first and highest thing is always to love God and to never do anything to lose your friendship with Him.

It's always a mistake to think that you might be able to forsake God and thereby help another person attain some good.

In fact, that is not true.

As Jesus says, Apart from me, you can do nothing.

So the love of God and your relationship with God always have to be at the top of the list.

Now, after loving God in the first place, and after loving the good of your soul or your spiritual good, then you love your neighbor as yourself.

This is, in fact, what Jesus teaches us when he tells us what are the two greatest commandments.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength .

and love your neighbor as yourself.

And only after this do we love our bodily goods.

That is, worldly goods for ourselves, not the good of our soul, the good that we would be in right relationship with God.

Only after we give to our neighbor what he needs should we prioritize the goods for our own lives, our material comforts, you might say.

Now, we love our neighbors in a definite order, too.

Aquinas asks whether we must love everyone equally, and he answers that question, maybe rather surprisingly.

He says no.

In fact, you naturally love those who are closer to you more.

And it's precisely here that we can bring to bear the fourth commandment, honor thy father and thy mother.

In fact, we owe this love or this honor to our parents more than to anyone else because, in fact, your parents are the source of your very being.

And so, we should always love them more because you can never adequately repay them for what they have given you.

So in a certain sense, you should love your parents above the love of other neighbors, and likewise our other blood relatives like brothers and sisters, husbands and wives even, children and grandchildren.

And how does this happen in the concrete?

It means, if you're a child, obeying your parents, listening to their counsel, honoring them, including supporting them, especially as they begin to age and need your help more and more.

Now, it doesn't mean, by the way, that you always have to do whatever they say.

For example, very importantly, matters that touch on the worship of God or of your vocation, like whether you have a vocation to the priesthood or to the religious life or to marry a particular person, these kinds of questions really do belong to you and you don't simply have to follow your parents' wishes in them.

After our family, of course, we are bound to love those who are close to us, especially those with which we have some special tie or real relationship.

So for example, literally your neighbors, the people who live in your neighborhood, the people you work with, those in your political community, in your city, in your state.

What does this kind of love mean?

It doesn't mean that we have the same kind of emotional affection for them that we have for our parents or for our spouse or for a child.

But it does mean that we will their good, and that's what Jesus is talking about when he commands us to love our neighbors.

It may actually happen that there are neighbors that you don't really like and that you find a hard time coming to feel emotionally close to them.

But that doesn't mean that you don't have to love them.

You don't necessarily have to like them, but you do have to love them, and that means to will their good.

And in general, this will translate into concrete acts.

It's not just something that remains within you, but turns into real actions of love.

And here, we could talk about the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, which are listed in your study guide.

The corporal works of mercy deal with the needs of the body, of our neighbor's bodily life, and obviously fulfilling these needs is the foundation for everyone being able to attain to any kind of higher spiritual goods since without food and clothing and shelter, we can't survive.

And yet these bodily goods or what the corporal works of mercy aim to give people, they are not the crowning goods of human life.

They're rather its basic foundation.

And therefore, in addition to the corporal works of mercy, there's another classic set of works of mercy called the spiritual works of mercy, and these aim at giving to our neighbor the much more valuable and higher spiritual goods that give life to the soul.

What about loving people on the other side of the globe?

Is that even possible?

Aquinas actually addresses this, too.

He says that we have to be ready to love them if the occasion arises, but that we naturally and normally love first and more intensely the people who are close to us.

And in fact, there's nothing wrong with this.

We should also speak briefly now about sins against the love of neighbor, and here a great deal could be said, but much of this will be covered in later sessions.

For example, our next session on the virtue of justice.

So for the moment, let's move simply to the fifth commandment, which is a kind of baseline for the love of neighbor.

Thou shalt not kill, the fifth commandment reads.

The fundamental point here is obvious.

It's always and everywhere wrong to kill directly an innocent person.

Now, in our contemporary world, the place where most of us are mo- most likely to encounter this issue as private individuals, you might say, is at the beginning of life and at its end.

So what is the Church's teaching here?

At the beginning of life, it's uncontroversial even among biologists that human life begins at conception.

That is, at the moment that a sperm from a male fertilizes an egg from a female .

at that moment, a new organism, with its own distinct lifespan and developmental trajectory, exists.

This is a fundamental criterion used by contemporary biologists when they're trying to determine when you have a new individual of a particular species.

So from the moment of conception, you now have a new individual with a separate lifespan.

Think about it.

An egg cell has a lifespan of itself, if it remains unfertilized, of a very brief period of time.

But after conception, after that egg cell is joined with the sperm from a male, that new individual has a lifespan that could be 85 years.

Here's another very interesting fact.

Every animal in the animal kingdom, except for the sponge, we'll set the sponge off to the side, every animal has two axes on the body, top and bottom, left and right.

Now, did you know that these axes, the axes of your own body, are fixed at the moment your mother's egg was fertilized by your father's sperm?

And that point was right on the top of your head.

In other words, at the moment of conception, you have a new human life, and this new life is innocent.

Now, perhaps we would say tainted by the effects of original sin, and that's true, but certainly in view of our relation with each other, that new life has a right to live.

And that is why it is always gravely wrong to kill by a direct act, such as abortion or taking an abortion pill, or even a morning-after pill that will either cause the new life conceived in the mother's womb to die or will cause her body to reject the implantation of that newly fertilized egg, that new human life.

Now, at this point, of course, it's also important to speak about God's mercy.

Why?

Because abortion has touched many lives, perhaps even the lives of people watching this video.

And we should remember that God will always offer his mercy to anyone who has been touched in any way by abortion.

There is no sin too great for God to forgive.

In fact, God can bring even great good out of the evils that we do.

But with that said, we also must acknowledge the truth of what abortion is, the direct killing of an innocent human life.

And every human being has dignity as created in the image of God and is loved by God and willed by him to exist.

If we claim for ourselves the right to kill an innocent human life, we commit what is objectively a very grave sin.

And this is also why in vitro fertilization, some illicit means of trying to arrive at a pregnancy, this is why this means is seriously problematic from the Catholic perspective, because it involves the intentional creation of new human lives outside of the conjugal union of a husband and wife, outside of the embrace of two loving parents.

And very often, these, these technological methods result in the death or the indefinite freezing of the new children, the new lives conceived by its technical means.

If we're going to talk about the Fifth Commandment in a complete way, we should also talk about how it affects us at the end of life.

And here, often in our culture, people will bring up the issue of euthanasia.

That is, mercy killing, something like that.

The key point here is that human life, every human life, has an intrinsic value that comes from God.

It comes from being created in the image of God.

That value, or that dignity, is not the result of our capacity to engage in certain kinds of behavior or actions, that is being able to engage in certain higher brain functions, for example.

Rather, we have dignity not from what we do, but from what we are.

It comes from the type of creature we are.

We are made in the image and likeness of God.

So as long as a human being is alive, as long as the soul is animating the body, as long as the heart is beating and so forth, there is an intrinsic dignity present in every person, and that person can never be directly killed by a direct act.

Now, here it's important to draw some distinctions.

A direct act of killing is not the same as withdrawing treatment when someone is experiencing a grave illness at the end of life.

In general here, we can distinguish between care one must always continue to provide care to the sick and even to the dying.

That means giving them food and water, bathing and assisting them, making them comfortable, treating them as a true human being.

And then there is the issue of providing treatment.

This is not simply the same as providing care, because in some cases it can be legitimate to stop providing treatment for someone when, for example, a disease is very seriously advanced and death is inevitable and near.

Consequently, we could say it's never permitted to stop feeding someone or to stop providing basic and ordinary care for them, but it can sometimes be permitted when there is, for example, no reasonable hope of recovery.

It can be permitted to cease providing treatment and other extraordinary means of keeping a person alive by medical intervention.

So, for example, if someone after a massive stroke can only be kept alive by a respirator and has no realistic possibility of recovery, it may be morally legitimate to disconnect the respirator, that is, withdraw that treatment, even when we know or we anticipate that the person will die as a result.

Morally speaking, this is a very different act than, for example, giving a fatal dose of drugs to a person in order to hasten death.

In contrast with withdrawing that treatment, this dose of deadly drugs is an act of direct killing and that is never morally permitted.

Now, when we're talking about cases like this, the object of the act matters a great deal.

Is this a direct act to bring about or hasten death?

If the answer is yes, then that act is not morally permitted.

Now, there are many difficult questions here and we can't go into them all.

If you should find yourself ever confronting any of them, you should not hesitate to discuss this with your priest.

But the guiding principle, of course, is that one must always respect the great gift of life, which is a gift of God, and we should respect it at every stage.

One last word of advice: Don't forget to call a priest if a family member is dying.

The Lord gives us wonderful aids at the end of life in the sacraments and every Catholic should benefit from them.

If you yourself think that you might face this circumstance, make sure that your loved ones know that you want them to call a priest to come and visit you in the hospital, and don't wait until it's too late.

In our next session, we'll talk about the virtue of justice and its importance for the Christian life.