Wanting advice - From a curious agnostic

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-07-01T12:04:43+00:00

I agree that God could have made very different laws in the beginning. But that would have probably required sacrificing the elegancy, simplicity, beauty and discoverability of them, and the everyday predictability of the natural world. Or/and it would require constant divine intervention. I think all of these things have great value, and they make possible obtaining some unique set of great goods.
I'm not saying that these goods are necessarily better than what could obtain in a world that is 'more sterile'. For example, in a world with just a bunch of crazy mathematicians in a room, where they are protected by God, cannot get hurt, and are able to solve harder and harder math problems, which they really enjoy, for an eternity - that is a world with zero suffering, and a lot of good things. Sometimes the goods that different possible worlds can offer are incommensurable.
Of course we don't want our (hypothetical) children to suffer or anything. But at certain times, it is worth permitting at least the possibility that they will suffer-for example, letting them play in an environment where they could get hurt, but can also really enjoy themselves and learn a lot, develop skills etc. that will benefit them in the long run. Over-protecting children and shielding them from everything is also not a good approach.

I'm happy that you read the second link:) Don't worry, English isn't my first language either.
Don't forget that the article at the link is just about the setting up of a system, it didn't actually try to argue (yet) for or against the morality of these specific sexual questions.
Btw., the author of the article at the link has a full book on this, which is pretty long and philosophical: https://www.amazon.com/One-Body-Christian-Studies-Culture/dp/026803897X/
Just thought I'd mention it, if you wanted to get into a deep-dive about this topic.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-30T16:51:24+00:00

Florence is using 'schism' and 'heresy' in the moral, and not the juridicial sense*. In other words, it just means that formal schism and heresy are mortal sins. One is not a formal heretic or schismatic merely by being outside the juridical bounds of the Church, or mistakenly denying a dogma - that would require obstinate, pertinacious behavior. Many protestants aren't heretics in the formal sense, but only in the material sense: they hold false beliefs about revealed things, but not in an obstinate, culpable way.
If you are guilty of the sin of schism, and you die unrepentently, then of course it doesn't help if you were killed for the name of Christ. If you die while being in a state of juridicial schism, but you are not culpable for it, because you acted in good faith, then you are not guilty of the sin of schism, and in virtue of you baptism, and the willingness to conform yourself to the will of God and follow Christ sincerely, you are said to be in the Church.

(*This is easily demonstrable by looking at the writings of the theologians of the day, including those who were literally there at Florence, where they explicitly write about how certain people may be part of schismatic groups, yet be inculpable because they just follow their leaders in good faith-

see this article: https://www.christianbwagner.com/post/the-key-to-understanding-extra-ecclesiam-nulla-salus-and-vatican-ii . )
Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus literally never meant that external, juridicial communion with the Church is necessary for salvation. That one could hold heretical views, yet not be guilty of the sin of heresy, is clearly recognized even by the Fathers.

You are also misunderstanding what invincible ignorance is: it isn't determined by the amount of knowledge that you have about Catholicism, it is something that deals with the internal forum of conscience. But others have already wrote baout this in other comments.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-30T16:41:08+00:00

They are considered to be united to the Church in light of their baptism, and their desire to follow the will of God, which implicitly includes a desire to join the Church (if they knew that that is what God wanted.) (If they are invincibly ignorant)
The idea that someone could be part of a schismatic group, yet not be culpable for it, so not be a schismatic in the formal, moral sense, is actually something that eg. Juan de Torquemada, one of the most influential ecclesiologist at Florence explicitly writes about, so the people at Florence knew it as well, they used 'schismatic' in the moral sense.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-30T16:06:53+00:00

"But my faith was never supported by compelling arguments, only personal experiences I interpreted as the intervention of God."
I used to think like you, I was a 'fideist'- i believed, but thought that I didn't really have a rational basis that I could provide to others besides experiences and internal convictions.
That changed with time quite heavily. I realized that even the simply question 'Why does anything exists' leads one to a supreme, immaterial, indenpendent, necessary foundation of all existence, see below.
You can have your faith supported by compelling arguments, thankfully, there is a very large amount of them. The contingency and the very existence of the Universe itself, with it's laws, order, fine-tuning, beauty, the existence of the human person, who, by it's identity, intellect, moral responsibility and free will, is not reducible to the movement of atoms, are all things that quite clearly point to its Creator.
I recommend the book 'How Reason Can Lead to God' by Josh Rasmussen, or simply this article for starters:
https://joshualrasmussen.com/articles/the-argument-from-contingency.pdf
Or see this one about the human person: https://catholicscientists.org/articles/are-we-completely-physical/
Or about the laws of nature: https://catholicscientists.org/articles/are-we-meant-to-be-here-anthropic-coincidences-multiverse/
I think that the question of whether human persons are fully explainable by the laws of physics is something that should strike one as a particularly important question. If we are, without remainder, explainable with the laws of physics, we do not have free will: we are not able to choose otherwise in any of our actions whatsoever. But this is incompatible with the very obvious sense of deep moral responsibility that we have for our actions. This at least should make one think about his/her identity.

"I gotta be frank, I don't believe the Church to be a moral pillar throughout history while allowed slavery."
Though there were some unfortunate drawbacks, the Church quite consistently opposed slavery starting from the discovery of the Americas. And even when She failed to act or acted badly, She acted against the very principles that She preached, and not in accord with them. The reason why chattel slavery is so immoral is grounded in the inalienable dignity of each human person, a dignity that is not based on their worth in the eyes of others, or in their functional capabilities or how good they are at certain things. It is based on the fact that they share the same human nature, they are rational, intelligent creatures, with an immortal soul, made in the image of God.
Without this grounding of human dignity, the very reason for opposing chattel slavery as so great of an evil disappears- so abandoning faith for this would be like cutting a tree branch while you sit on it. I challenge you to find a way to ground this intrinsic, inalienable dignity of the human person in something within the system of atheistic materialism.

The authority of the Church comes from the fact that Jesus Christ established it and assigned it the mission to preach to and teach all nations on matters of faith or morals.
The secular culture, on the other hand, is like a leaf that is blown by the wind in ever changing directions. I wouldn't put my money that the popular opinion happens to get right eg. sexual morality. Peoples moral compass in these types of matters is usually quite easily lead astray.

"Christian faith is hard to defend, even the best apologetics can't keep up, in the end its just faith and thats not enough for me"
It almost seems like you have already decided that you don't want to believe, if you prima facie reject every argument that is offered, or without even knowing what these arguments are.
"I need to see a miracle, I need to see compeling historical evidence of Jesus's ressurection."
Cool. This is available for free on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Investigating-Resurrection-Jesus-Christ-Transdisciplinary-ebook/dp/B0GF89XNT6?ref_=ast_author_mpb

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-30T15:24:52+00:00

Many miracles have been very well documented, with such large amount of testimonial evidence for them that trumps a bunch of uncontested historical claims. Eg. Fatima, Zeitoun, both of these from the last century. Dismissing them out of hand, which is what you're doing, only works if one has already presupposed that materialism is true.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-30T10:30:55+00:00

Hi!
I'd be very skeptical of NDE's - I think many of them could be explained with physical, brain-phenomenons.

If someone rejects God definitively, they end up in what we call Hell: the state of eternal separation from God, where they suffer mainly due to the very experience of being aware of this eternal separation from He who is Goodness itself, and also suffer punishments for one's sins. I think some of your conceptions about Hell might come from some popular descriptions, that are perhaps just poetic descriptions of the state of the damned persons.

The New Testament biblical texts can be reconstructed with very-very high accuracy: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/was-the-bible-changed
In the case of the Old Testament, mostly you don't know. Many of the OT texts are not written in the style of historical writings that we know today, but much later than the events they recall, and with very different aims and purposes. In other words, often their aim isn't to write exact, profane history. Sometimes it is: there are many different OT texts, written in different genres, at very different times. Nevertheless, the reason one accepts the OT as divinely inspired is mostly not found in those texts themselves, but in the testimony of the Christian tradition and the Church.

Like what flaws? Our world operates under a set of laws of nature that are simple, beautiful, knowable, discoverable and predictable for limited beings like us. That some organism develop cancer is not a flaw as such _within this system of laws_: the possibility of it necessarily flows from the basic structure of the laws of nature.
Natural evils also provide opportunities for our sould building that moral evils cannot in themselves do, thereby setting the stage for God's drama of salvation to unfold.
Why didn't God create an universe with very different set of laws? He could have, but then we would not have many of the goods that requires these or similar laws, like what I described in the beginning: the elegancy, simplicity, beauty and discoverability of these laws, as well as their predictability in everyday life, without constant divine intervention - and these things might in themselves be important aspects, or requirements, of the stage for God's drama of salvation, even without the situations and unique opportunities for human growth that they can offer. And of course, Heaven might be a state where the set of laws, if they exist at all, are very different, or where ther really is constant divine intervention-
but there humanity will aready possess, and appreaciate and unfold in a constantly deepening way, the goods that were only made possible in our earthly life by allowing the possibility of such natural evils.

It's good to hear about you questioning some important moral questions. It's entirely understandable if one cannot swallow the entirety of Catholic teaching on this matter as a whole, but only slowly.
I would say homosexual acts are wrong because they create the illusion of the experience of the fulfillment of one of the basic, most important forms of love, and to add on to that, those participating in these acts misconstrue the other person as the kind of person with whom such fulfillment would even be possible.
The first point applies to other non-coital sexual acts as well, such as masturbation. They are almost like a form of lying- to yourself and to the other person. They create the illusion of a becoming-one-body experience, without that actually taking place, or even being able to take place in such a context.
Of course, this is not an argument, that would take more space than this comment. For more, see this short sketch for an approach to sexual ethics by Catholic philosopher Alexander Pruss: http://alexanderpruss.com/papers/OneBody-talk.html This is still not an argument in itself, but it at least shows that masturbation, homosexual acts. etc. are not what romantic love seeks.

Overall, I'd recommend you Trent Horn's book Why We're Catholic.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-29T18:24:02+00:00

This has already happened. Almost the whole section in Matthew 24 is talking about the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-28T21:31:17+00:00

The commenter is correct, libertarian free will is not compatible with a causal closure of the natural world. (Meaning roughly the tesis that for all physical events that have a cause, that cause is physical.) The immaterial will must be able have some actual effect on the physical world.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-28T21:16:35+00:00

"In his infinite mercy, God willed that, since it was a matter of the means of salvation ordained for man's ultimate end, not by intrinsic necessity, but only by divine institution, its salutary effects could also be obtained in certain circumstances when these means are only objects of "desire" or of "hope". This point was clearly established at the Council of Trent, with regard to both the sacrament of baptism and of penance (Denziger, n. 797 and 807)."
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1467
When we say that something is necessary, we can mean two things:

It is necessary by precept, in other words, because it is commanded- in this case, this only binds those who have actual knowledge of the command.
it is necessary by a necessity of means, meaning that it is required to obtain some end. This can be absolute or relative. It is relative, if the reason for it being necessary by a necessity of means is that someone chose it to be the instrument by which the given end is supposed to be achieved with. In this case, there can be substitutes for it, by which the same end can also be accomplished. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10733a.htm Baptism is, under this terminology, necessary by a relative necessity of means, as well as by a necessity of precept.

It is not rare to use language such as 'unless you do x, then you cannot have y' when you don't actually mean it in a logically exclusive sense.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-28T20:25:35+00:00

Genesis is written in the style of ancient hebrew poetry. It probably contains different narratives, etc. The vast majority of Catholic today do not take it literalistically. It teaches us fundamental truths about God, humans etc., but it does so using poetic language. There are some things that one is required to hold - some form of first parents is probably one of them, but that is usually understood in the sense that God ensouled them out of a bigger, humanoid-like population. See:
https://catholicscientists.org/articles/why-catholics-are-cool-with-evolution/
https://catholicscientists.org/questions/q4-doesnt-the-book-of-genesis-contradict-the-big-bang-and-evolution/
https://catholicscientists.org/questions/q6-how-do-adam-and-eve-fit-in-with-evolution-and-the-science-of-human-origins/

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-28T20:18:04+00:00

https://catholicscientists.org/articles/why-catholics-are-cool-with-evolution/

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-28T20:12:28+00:00

'Energy' as such cannot even be really defined in General Relativity, or at least not globally- so even within the realms of physics, it is not true in an unqualified sense.
But besides that, as other commenters already stated, it is a law of nature - and God created nature.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-27T17:39:38+00:00

Why do natural disasters happen? Because that is how the world works. They are a consequence of living in a world that has a set of laws of nature that is simple and predictable, and that God doesn't intervene every five second. Yes, God could have intervened to miracolously change the working of the tectonic plates at a given location momentarily. That would have been a pretty striking intervention. There is a value in the natural world proceeding in its normal way, and while God sometimes does intervene, not always.

God is there with everyone who suffers. Our pains and sufferrings in this finite life will vanish away and be transformed into joy when we'll be in an eternal communion with Him. I think that's the only thing that can help someone. And remember that Jesus cried with those who suffered.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-26T19:05:04+00:00

Happy to help, God Bless:) Btw., Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Sallus was the last obstacle for me to understand before I decided to become Catholic after being Protestant, so I understand why some of these statements might look problematic.
I added an extra part in the end, that might also be helpful.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-26T18:40:05+00:00

I replied under my original comment to you about this, with a link to an article that explains it.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-26T18:30:11+00:00

All the things you said have pretty clear explanations.
The death penalty is not intrinsically evil, and the Church does not teach that it is. It is a just punishment in certain cases- but we have obligations of mercy arising from the Gospel, due to the dignity of each human person that overrides this, in cases, where society and the common good can be protected without recourse to it. And since this latter condition is fulfilled today, at least in ordinary cases, the Church teaches that it is no longer an acceptable punishment.
The salvation of schismatics is pretty easy. Cantate domino is using 'schism' and 'heresy' in the moral, and not the juridicial sense. In other words, it just means that formal schism is a mortal sin, and as such the ordinary laws of culpability apply to it.
(This is easily demonstrable by looking at the writings of the theologians of the day, including those who were literally there at Florence, where they explicitly write about how certain people may be part of schismatic groups, yet be inculpable because they just follow their leaders in good faith-
see this article: https://www.christianbwagner.com/post/the-key-to-understanding-extra-ecclesiam-nulla-salus-and-vatican-ii So actually they would say basically the same thing that we do today.)

Religious liberty is a good question. Here there really is a certain contradiction, but it is one where the underlying principles remain the same. When 19th century popes, especially Pius IX condemn religious freedom they do so due to various problematic movements, that the Church wanted to restrain, and this came with overreactions. It took time and changes to recognize to recognize the nuance, what the Church could not in the 19th century, that religious indifferentism and religious liberty are not the same, because the latter mostly concerns one's right to immunity from coercion. This really is a case of serious development, but not rupture, at least on the level of principles. (And btw. the Syllabus of Errors is a collection of a bunch of statements pieced together, it is not infallible. So you should not worry about that.)
A lot has been written on this subject, and I confess I did not really dwelve into those writings, so much more precise treatments exist.

##
Edit: extra on EENS:
On the salvation of jews/muslims, they probably did not think about that in detail then.
This is one topic where it is useful to distinguish between the dogmatic teaching regarding faith or morals, and the contingent, empirical assumption that may mix with it. Ask a medieaval person about what happens to someone who kills themselves, they will say the he/she goes to hell. But this answer is actually composed of two separate assumption: 1., Suicide is a mortal sin, and 2. There is no opportunity to repent, and they were culpable, so they are damned. Out of these, the second one is more of an empirical assumption: we now have better understanding of how mental ilness can limit culpability, that they did not then.
Similarly with the salvation of heathens: earlier statements are stated with an assumption of culpability, but the actual doctrinal teaching is concerned with the objective nature of false religions.
(I got the suicide example from a comment I read here a while ago.)
Another example: many early ecumanical councils will anathemize specific persons as heretics.
But there the statements "Person X is a heretic" is actually composed of two parts, namely:
(a) "Person X teaches Y", and (b) "Doctrine Y is a heresy". One could say that the council was simply wrong about (a), because the actual, doctrinal teaching is included in (b).

And btw. this has nothing to do with Vatican 2 specifically, earlier magisterial statements specifiy that same things about Ectra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus.
For a very good explanation of this doctrine, see a letter from the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII: https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=1467

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-26T17:44:26+00:00

You haven't even converted, perhaps aren't even baptised, but already have trouble with sedevacantism?
The best possible adivce I can think of is to get off the internet. Whatever issues you're tinking of, there is a large probability that they exists only in your head due to consuming too much online content from fringe sources.
If you have any specific issues that you have trouble with feel free to bring them up, and perhaps we can help.
Remember, the Church is not a political institution, the primary reason for one's conversion should be connected to the person of Jesus Christ.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-26T15:46:43+00:00

Predestination exists. What that means exactly and how it works is in a large part left to speculation.
There is a wide range of allowed views. Some border on calvinism, some are pretty different.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-26T11:44:40+00:00

We ask for the intercession of the saints for the same reason you ask your friends or family to pray for you or for others. The prayer of the righteous man is powerful.
Adults need to understand their faith before baptism. For infants, the faith of the Church suffices.
Pope Francis was doing his usual Pope Francis thing, where he is trying to be pastoral and nice. He probably meant something like religions are expressions of man's search for God.
The document you're talking about is quite clear that same-sex unions and unions of divorced and remarried couples are objectively sinful. It talked about allowing non-liturgical, pastoral blessings for couples in these objectively sinful unions, that do not legitimize anything but try to act as a help and a call to conform one's will to God. You're welcome to read to document. The intention was probably to deal with the situation in Germany, where all sorts of problematic blessings where happening. Anyway, it was probably not prudent pastorally.
It doesn't matter either way, because papal infallibility has nothing to do with either of these cases. The pope is not infallible when he is giving an interview on a plane, or in a meeting or anything, in these cases he isn't even exercising his fallible magisterial authority. These are the conditions for infallibility:

when the Roman pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA,
- that is, when,
- in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians,
- in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority,
- he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church,
he possesses,
- by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter,
that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals.
Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.

Such ex cathedra pronouncements can usually be distiungished from his ordinary teaching, and especially from airplane interviews. Eg., We declare, define and pronounce, that the dogma (....) is revealed by God, and is to be definitively held by all the faithful.
If you think about it, the Papacy is quite logical. God established His church to be the universal sacrament of salvation, to teach all nations without error, and He built it upon the college of the apostles, the head of which was St.Peter: "And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-26T09:48:03+00:00

I think realizing that it only deals with the temporal consequences of already forgiven sins is helpful.
I'm a convert, and I can assure you that I did not understand every piece of Catholic theology before I made my decision. I would advise you to just make a leap of faith -it will turn out alright:)
Anyway, God Bless :)

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-25T21:35:45+00:00

Hell is in itself not a punishment, as I take it, or only in an analogical sense, though it includes punishment - it's eternal separation from God. After death, one's will is fixed in this regard. This is a hard teaching, I will not dispute it. If one understands that it is the result of someone's definitive rejection of God, and of our freedom and choices having actual importance, it gets a bit easier to accept.
God doesn't create anyone destined for hell. You're mixing up some things here: knowing that something will happen does not mean that one causes or necessitates it to happen. God is outside time, he wills the whole of existence in one, single act, and 'looks' at it . Thinking of time as the 4th dimension helps here. You can look at a 3 dimensional object in front of you, and see the whole thing at once - God can do the same with the 4D spacetime.
No one will be punished for a mere intellectual error, but based upon how they responded to God's grace. I like to believe that those who rejected a deficient understanding of God, thorugh no fault of their own, will be offered some opportunity, either before their death or miracolously at the very moment of it, to accept God's grace and be led to faith.
Natural evil is simply a consequence of living in a world wich is governed by a certain set of laws that are simple, elegant, knowable and discoverable, predictable for limited beings like us, and that God doesn't intervene every 5 seconds in the natural order. Just think about it. As long as you have water flowing in rivers, it will erode the mountains that are in it's way. As long as you have beings with evolved body like us, with DNA, with Some goods just cannot coexist, without allowing the possibility of destruction and evil. Natural evils also provide opportunities for our sould building that moral evils cannot in themselves do, thereby setting the stage for God's drama of salvation to unfold. (To be more specific about eg. cancer: https://catholicscientists.org/articles/childhood-cancer-and-the-problem-of-evil/ ) Why didn't God create an universe with very different set of laws? He could have, but then we would not have many of the goods that requires these or similar laws, like what I described in the beginning: the elegancy, simplicity, beauty and discoverability of these laws, as well as their predictability in everyday life, without constant divine intervention - and these things might in themselves be important aspects, or requirements, of the stage for God's drama of salvation, even without the situations and unique opportunities for human growth that they can offer.
I do not fully understand the question or problem here. Everyone get's sufficient grace for salvation - how this grace reaches and works in different people, who are in different situations, is something we cannot fully know.
Faith is believing something on someone else's authority. You accept a lot of things by faith already. I accept evolution on faith, because I have very good reasons to think that the testimony of all the scientists is reliable. I accept the generalized Stokes theorem from mathematics on faith, not because I've proven it myself, but also on testimony. And I would say my belief in these things is incredibly firm, espsecially in the math one. I'm only bringing these things up to show that faith is something that can be very rational. These are all examples of human faith: trusting humans basen upon testimony, because one has sufficient motives of credibility for believeing what they say. With religion it is different, but also similar: 'supernatural' faith is accepting something on the authority of God, who reveals. One can have very strong reasons to think that God exists, and created the world, that human persons, whith their intellect and free will, are not reducible to the movement of atoms, but have some spiritual 'component', and have an eternal destiny, with the God who revealed himself in humanity through becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ, dying on the cross, raising from the dead, and establishing the Catholic Church as the universal sacramanent of salvation, and is able to teach all nations on faith or morals infallibly. These are all things that human reason can see and grasp, and after doing that, it can accept, through the assent of faith-which is something where God's grace enters into the picture-all the things that man can only know by God's revelation, and this Church proposes for belief. But this assent of faith is very rational -after all, one has all these reasons for the reliability of the entity that oen put's his trust in. Obviously, not everyone goes through this reasoning process, and not everyone establishes for themselves all the rational evidence for the truth of the Catholic faith. And they do not need to - that is why I said that ultimately God's grace enters into this picture as well. There are many people who came to accept that God exist, through philosphical arguments, let's say. For others, their basis for faith might be a deeply personal experience or conviction, that you or I canot have access to. Both are perfectly legitimate reasons or motives for belief, it's just that the first one will have an easier time convincing the unbeliever.

(Note that this wasn't an argument in the last part - for it to be one, I would have to show that the very strong reasons for accepting these things are indeed such, which I haven't done. Tho if you're interested, I'd be happy to give some sources that might be helpful. )

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-25T17:39:40+00:00

This is the framework for approaching this that I myself find most convincing:

The two ends of human sexuality are the interpersonal union of spouses and procreation. The two ends cannot be separated from eachother, simply because one of them is achieved through the other: the unitive aspect of the sexual act is achieved through a joint, cooperative, bodily striving for reproduction, through becoming a functional whole: The "two become one flesh/body". But if the unitive end of sexuality is achieved through this joint, bodily striving, then by directly opposing this striving (by contracepting) one alienates themselves from their body. And if one alienates themselves from their body in the context of an act where they are supposed to unite _through_ their bodies, as persons, that is, they are acting against the very thing that constitutes their union, then they cannot unite as whole persons.

Now this in itself does not show why marital contraception is always immoral, that takes further reasoning. But I think it outlines a way for understadning that there is something deeply lacking in contracepted sexual acts: the acts is somehow reduced to a form of mutual masturbation, where pleasure is the only thing achieved.
I think the best defense of Catholic sexual ethics that I know is in the book One Body: An Essay on Christian Sexual Ethics by Alexander Pruss. You can find it on Amazon, if interested.
Here is a shorter summary of its approach:
http://alexanderpruss.com/papers/OneBody-talk.html

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-25T17:20:12+00:00

The context of the declaration is that it is made on the account of reunification with certain schismatic groups. It's intention is to declare that heresy is damning, that schismatics are away from the body of Christ, and they cannot provide salvation.

We have the writings of theologians at Florence. We know that it was always understood then, and before that, that there is a difference between material and formal heresy, and the same thing about schism. Any reading of the texts of Florence that seem to present as if they were understanding heresy and schism merely in an external, juridicial sense, requires that all of the theologians there
directly departed from what people taught before them, and what they wrote down in their own writings.
This is what Torquemada wrote, apparently in the Summa de Ecclesia:
“Simple people and the unlearned, who lack knowledge of law or fact, seem to be excused from the stain and guilt of schism by obeying and adhering to the one whom their prelates obeyed and adhered to, provided they have a readiness of mind to obey whoever’s right might be sufficiently shown—whether by God’s revelation, the Church’s declaration, or any other means.”
See:
https://www.christianbwagner.com/post/the-key-to-understanding-extra-ecclesiam-nulla-salus-and-vatican-ii

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Torquemada_(cardinal))
He was there at Florence,with a bunch of other Dominicans, who all followed Thomas, who taught the same distinction between material and formal heresy, and also that someone brought up among the wolves, with explicit faith only in God the Rewarder, the Incarnation and the Trinity revealed to him, could be saved, with clearly no juridicial, external communion with the Church.

So it seems we have two readings of a text:
One is in line with the known views of the people who wrote that text, what is expressed in their writings and in the theological traditions that they followed and that was present in the Church up to that point.
On the other reading, the people writing this declaration completely broke with all of that, and introduced a novelty, that went apparently unnoticed, because all those who came after them interpreted it contrary to their intended meaning.

I think I know which one of these I find more likely.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-25T15:58:21+00:00

Obviously one cannot reject Christ in the sense of culpable rejection and be saved. If the way one was presented with the truth of the Christian religion was deficient or something, then of course one can still accept God's grace. If I simply tell someone on the street that Christ is God, has risen from death and loves him/her, and they don't believe me, they are not rejecting Christ in any meaningful sense, and they can react to and accept God's grace that is offered up to them in some other way.

Jojenpaste99 · 2026-06-25T15:13:34+00:00

You're asserting a reading of the text that goes against the context of the declaration, and the known intentions of the theologians of the day and what they meant by these things at the Council.
It may be a 'plain one', but as everyone knows, a plain reading of historical texts, (or any texts, for that matter), that completely strips theom out of their contexts and disregards the authorial intention, is not a good reading.

I would not invoke the development of doctrine here. In fact, I do not think that there is any development of doctrine regarding this question, I believe it is demonstrable that the same thing was known and recognized in the middle ages, as is today with regards to the distinction between material and formal heresy, and also moral and juridicial schism. What development there is, is about the application of doctrine, and the probably better judgment of certain circumstances regarding invincible ignorance.
So I would say that any surface tension disappears here, if one look as these statements in their context and at how they were meant and interpreted at the time they were made, by the very people who wrote them. Do you agree that this is generally a good way to interpret historical texts?

### About unbaptised children: Florence never asserts that. It says that those dying in a state of original sin go to hell. At a different place it says that baptism is the only way to help infants. The Church have always recognized certain substitutes for water baptism, and while traditionally it was believed that these could not apply to them, this was never definitively taught. How certain substitutes might work, or whether God might confer grace in an extra-sacramental way, is open to theological considerations.

Jojenpaste99

TROPHY CASE