Three hundred years later, they were the official religion of the Roman state.

Numbers can be misleading. They’re never the best way to measure the health of the Christian faith. The Church in Rome’s catacombs was small. But she was stronger than any of her critics or persecutors. And that’s as true today as it was in the time of Tacitus.

A century ago, sub-Saharan Africa had fewer than 2 million Christians. Today it has more than 130 million. That’s a growth rate of nearly 7,000 percent. We live in a supposedly “post-Christian” age. But Christianity is alive and growing rapidly across the entire Southern Hemisphere – arguably faster than any other religion in the world, including Islam.

That’s the good news. Of course, there’s another side to history.

In A.D. 600, the Mediterranean world had hundreds of thriving Christian communities. Around that time, two Greek monks, John Moschos and Sophronius, began a pilgrimage. They went to Egypt, Jerusalem and around the great Middle East heartland of Christianity. They wrote a journal called The Spiritual Meadow. A best seller in its day, and still a Christian classic, it was a kind of spiritual travelogue — a record of the wisdom, visions and stories from the historic center of the Christian faith.

John Moschos died in the year 619, unaware of an obscure Arab holy man named Mohammed. Within a hundred years, Muslim armies had overrun all of the Middle East, North Africa and most of Spain. Today, St. Augustine’s diocese of Hippo is a Muslim town in Algeria. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit was once a center of Christian scholarship. In the birthplace of Christianity, after centuries under Islam, Christian minorities face discrimination and frequent violence. They barely manage to survive.

Here’s my point. Jesus said the gates of hell would never prevail against his Church, and his word is good. But he didn’t promise anything about our local real estate and institutions. The Canadian scholar Douglas Farrow once wrote that “St. Peter will have his successors until the Lord comes, but his successors may not always have St. Peter’s.”

In other words, God is faithful — but he makes no guarantees about infrastructure or the status quo or even our next breath.

Human beings make history, not the other way around. This is why each of our lives matters. God is love; a God of life and deliverance and joy. He made us to be happy with him; to be loved by him; and to bring others to know his love. That’s the glory of being alive. That’s the grandeur of being a disciple of Jesus Christ.

The task of preaching and teaching, growing and living the Catholic faith in our time, in this country, belongs to you and me. No one else can do it. The future depends on God, but he builds it with the living stones we give him by the example of our lives.

So today, tomorrow, and in the coming Year of Faith — which begins in just a few weeks — we need to remember the words of the Epistle of James: “Be doers of [God’s] word and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (Jas. 1:22).

We live for the glory of God, and we prove it in the love we show to each other.

A priest of my acquaintance makes that point abundantly clear…

The feast was originally celebrated in the East, where it is known as the Feast of the Dormition, a word which means “the falling asleep.” The earliest printed reference to the belief that Mary’s body was assumed into Heaven dates from the fourth century, in a document entitled “The Falling Asleep of the Holy Mother of God.” The document recounts, in the words of the Apostle John, to whom Christ on the Cross had entrusted the care of His mother, the death, laying in the tomb, and assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Tradition places Mary’s death at Jerusalem or at Ephesus, where John was living.

St. John of Damascus, (P.G., I, 96) recounts the tradition of the Church of Jerusalem:

St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened, upon the request of St. Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven.

Fr. William G. Most, in ”Our Lady in Devotion and Doctrine”, gives us some insight as to how this teaching came to be proclaimed as dogma.

“Pius XII …  asked the opinions of all the Bishops of the world on the Assumption. Their response was almost unanimous in the affirmative. The universal teaching of the authorities of the Church by itself, he tells us, gives us a proof (Cf. Lumen gentium ## 25 and 12).

He next reviewed some of the outstanding statements of Tradition throughout all the centuries. This teaching is found at a very early date in the liturgical books. After the patristic age, the same doctrine was studied in detail by scholastic theologians. For example, the Pope quotes the words of St. Bernardine of Siena who “… gathered up and carefully treated everything that medieval theologians had said and discussed on this matter. He was not satisfied to repeat the chief considerations which doctors of previous times had already proposed, but added others of his own. For the likeness of the Mother of God and the Divine Son in regard to nobility of soul and body–a likeness which forbids the very thought that the heavenly Queen should be separated from the heavenly King–absolutely demands that Mary ‘must not be anywhere but where Christ is.’ And furthermore, it is reasonable and fitting that not only the soul and body of a man, but also the soul and body of a woman should have already attained heavenly glory. Finally, since the Church has never sought for bodily relics of the Blessed Virgin, nor exposed them for the veneration of the faithful, we have an argument which can be considered as ‘practically a proof by sensory experience’” (AAS 42. 765-66).

Blessed Virgin Mary

First of all, you have to know that I was – for almost 14 years – a Lutheran pastor. It was a combination of the “push” of the theological meltdown in my denomination, and the “pull” of the consistency and clarity and depth of the doctrine and devotion of the Catholic Faith, that caused me to leave behind my ministry and livelihood as a Protestant pastor and to come into “full communion” in the Catholic Church. And one of the first steps I took toward the Church, (tho’ I didn’t realize the “danger” at the time), was coming to the conviction that a Lutheran pastor could, with good conscience, use the ancient discipline of “praying the mysteries”, (aka, “the Rosary”).

In this manner I began the daily discipline of “meditating on the mysteries”, and was probably one of the few Lutheran pastors in the country who was doing so on behalf of Pope John Paul during the vigil kept in St. Peter’s square in the hours before his death, and in the days which followed. Before the year was out, I had resigned from my Lutheran congregation for reasons of conscience, and knew that I was on a journey I never intended to take, headed somewhere I never intended to go.

So, if you are a Protestant, especially a Protestant clergy, and you DON’T EVER want to end up becoming “Roman Catholic”, then DON’T PRAY THE ROSARY!! ( They don’t call it “Our Mother’s lasso” for nothing! )

But assume you already are Catholic… would I still say, “DON’T ‘pray the Rosary’”?

What I mean is, don’t simply recite the prayers! MEDITATE ON THE MYSTERIES OF THE GOSPEL!!

For example… When you annouce the First Luminous Mystery, read a brief passage from one of the Gospels that records the account of Jesus’ being baptized in the Jordan. (Or, assuming you know the Sacred Scriptures well enough, recall it to mind). Close your eyes, vizualize the scene… see Jesus kneeling in the Jordan, John the Baptist cupping his hands and pouring water over His head… see the Holy Spirit descending like a dove, hear the Father’s voice: “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

NOW, pray the “Our Father”… slowly, prayerfully. Then pray the “Hail Mary”, but when you get to the word “Jesus”… add a phrase which reflects your meditation on the mystery: “… of Whom the Father spoke, ‘This is My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” Use this for each of the Hail Mary’s in that decade.

Move on to the Second Luminous Mystery, the wedding at Cana. Read – or recall – the story from the Gospel according to St. John’s Gospel, chapter two. Briefly meditate on the actions of Mary, of the servants, of Jesus, of the steward. Then pray, slowly, the “Our Father.” As you pray each “Hail Mary”, pause at the word “Jesus”, … add a phrase that recalls the mystery… “Who turned water into wine”, (or, better yet, emphasize His continued grace and power in our lives… “Who TURNS water into wine.”)

When I served as Asst. Headmaster of St. Thomas More Academy, and as Head of Campion House, we would use this method as we prayed a decade of the Rosary each day during morning prayers “in house.” I would gather four students, we would each chose some meditation/reflection to offer in the middle of the Hail Maryl, and then — kneeling in a line at the front of the class — lead the rest of the students in the Rosary, each one leading a decade and adding our reflection at the word “Jesus”, starting over at the beginning of the line for decades 6-10. It was powerful.

If “praying the Rosary” seems meaningless, maybe you’re only “reciting”. So, stop “praying” the Rosary, and start “meditating on the mysteries”!

Divine Mercy

There are many truths of the Faith which we BELIEVE, and yet do not comprehend. Some of them are abstract and intangible: the mystery of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the incomprehensible reality of the Incarnation, in which — at a moment in human history — the Eternal Word of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, subsumed human flesh and is now, forever, the God-Man. These are deep mysteries, heavy theological subjects, which are rightly referred to as “mysteries.”

As we proceeded to work through the grades, we ultimately came to the youngest group in the room, the second graders. (Kindergarten and First Grade had their own chapel, as I recall). And one young man, who was obviously taking all of this very much to heart, after I marked him with the ash cross, and proclaimed to him, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return”, looked at me with very big eyes and a very sad face and said, “But, I don’t want to be dust.”

Wow. Talk about “out of the mouth of babes.” I put my hand on his head, looked him in the eye and shook my head and said, “Neither do I, son… neither do I.”

Being dust and returning to dust is not something we often contemplate… nor do we really want to. And yet, unless we are willing to face that fact head-on, unless and until we are willing to face the reality of DEATH, we will never be able to see the purpose of our lives, nor be able to live them fully and rightly.

For Christians, that purpose has been been made clear in Baptism, specifically in the Sign of the Cross made upon us in our baptism – the same Cross marked upon our foreheads with ashes as we begin Lent. The Cross that marks us gives us our IDENTITY – telling us who we are, because it tells us WHOSE we are. The Cross gives us our FAMILY, telling us where we belong, bringing us into relationship with the Trinity of Holy Love: Father, Son, Spirit – and into the community of all those likewise adopted. The Cross also tells us our PURPOSE, answering that deep “Why am I here” question, by giving us a mission to bear the Cross and the message of the Cross into the world for the sake of the world. But that baptism also meant DEATH… “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death? We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death…” (St. Paul, Letter to the Romans, 6:3,4) Again we read, in St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me…” (2:20)

“But I don’t want to be dust”…  we all hear that voice crying in our hearts, for dying to self is scary and painful. Letting go of sin, putting to death the desires of the flesh, takes a strength of will that we do not have — and so we pray, “Lord, have mercy. Give me the grace I need to have sincere sorrow for sin, give me the strength of the Spirit of Holiness to turn from sin with my whole heart. Put to death in me all that keeps me from living in and for You.”

In order to have the LIFE that He desires to give us, we must first face DEATH, and — in fact — die. “If anyone would be My disciple, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me.” (St. Luke 9:23). May the Cross of ashes mark not just our foreheads for one day, but our hearts everyday.

The timing of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Lourdes beginning on February 11, 1858 was not only providential in the sense of God’s loving kindness to us sinners but was absolutely exquisite in terms of what was going on in European intellectual circles at that time.

The sex scandals involving priests and bishops, the very low rate of acceptance of Humanae Vitae, the continuing liturgical abuses, the surveys purporting to show the unbelief of Catholics, and other negative indicators lead many of us to dream of living in more faith-filled times. The times in which Bernadette Soubirous lived in Lourdes were not such times.

For 70 years there had been a steady attack on orthodox Christian faith. In 1778 a work of Hermann Samuel Reimarus was published posthumously by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples, Reimarus expressed a bad dream in which Jesus was only an unsuccessful politician and his disciples remade his image and invented the resurrection.¹ Such claims make it more evident than ever why Jesus chose simple fishermen instead of Jewish intellectuals to be his disciples, but even lying intellectuals wouldn’t go to their death just for their wishful thinking.

Next came the French Revolution with its reign of terror and widespread destruction of the Church, but physical damage is easier to repair than widespread loss of faith. To restore faith in the clergy and the Church, God raised up the most humble priest imaginable, Jean Marie Vianney, whom some believe almost single-handedly restored faith in the Church-but that’s another story.

In 1828 Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus, a professor of theology at Heidelberg from 1811 to 185, wrote a completely rationalistic hypothesis about Jesus. He completely denied the possibility of any and all supernatural elements both in general and in the life of Jesus.

In 1835-36, David Friedrich Strauss wrote a two volume Life of Jesus in which he claimed that the gospels were a compilation of myths. By “myth” he meant that the gospel writers invented persons and events to express religious ideas. Certainly most readers have heard either firsthand or secondhand about the interpretation of the feeding of the 5,000 as being this sort of myth, or that the real miracle was not physical but was the moral miracle of the opening of the hearts of the audience to share their hidden loaves. If you have wondered where some modernist preachers get this sort of skepticism, it goes back to this period of time.

Very close to the events at Lourdes, Bruno Bauer in 1850-52 went the furthest in his denial of the faith. In his Criticism of the Gospels and History of their Origin, he postulated that the evangelists had simply created the image of Jesus who never existed. Why they would want to engage in such an effort that brought them martyrdom instead of honors and riches is beyond my imagination.

A Holy Rebuke

Two years after Bauer’s low point in skepticism, the Church completed some 18 centuries of doctrinal development, and on December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX formally proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in Ineffabilis Deus. I haven’t checked the newspaper accounts of the time, but I doubt that the proclamation had any beneficial effect on the skeptics. After all, if they didn’t believe even in the historicity of the humanity of Jesus, of what interest could it be to them that his mother was conceived without any stain of original sin? Can you imagine what at least some informed Catholics must have been thinking at the time? “Well, God, I believe this, and it’s all very nice, but when are you going to raise up some great theologians to rebuke the skeptics?”

Three years, two months, and three days later, on February 11, 1858, God gave his answer. If the skeptics didn’t believe in supernatural events and denied every miracle in the Bible because they didn’t see miracles happening in front of their own eyes, He would give them something that they could deny only by becoming liars. A peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, was visited by a beautiful lady who later identified herself with these words: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” To answer the skeptics, the Lady told Bernadette to start digging where there was no spring. She did as she was told. Water started to flow, and the miracles started to happen.

Did the miracles convert the skeptics? It may have converted some, but others would not open their minds to the possibility of the miraculous. Emile Zola, a prominent late 19th-century writer, visited Lourdes in 1892 and actually heard testimony from one woman who had been cured a year earlier and from a second who had been cured the very day of his visit. Instead of undergoing conversion, Zola wrote a novel that completely distorted the realities he had witnessed. Challenged by the doctor who had also witnessed these events and called Zola a liar, the novelist claimed that as a novelist he could create any characters he wished. The doctor agreed but pointed out that no one has a right to falsify actual history, which is what Zola had done.²

The miracles at Lourdes demonstrated for the whole world to see that skepticism toward the supernatural events in the Bible is not based on any sort of scientific evidence. Rather, such skepticism flows from strong negative presuppositions, so much so that a famous skeptic was reduced to lying when confronted with the miraculous cures of people whom he saw and with whom he actually talked.

Timing is Everything

The second incident that illustrates the exquisite timing of the apparitions at Lourdes was the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species in 1859. This publishing event reinforced the idea that everything can be explained by natural causes. It undermined belief in the Bible as historical for those who made no distinction between the first 11 chapters of Genesis and the Gospels; it produced theories of polygenesis, and it led to completely atheistic theories of the origins of life and the universe.

Informed Catholics of the day could reaffirm their faith with the traditional act of faith, but even the best of them may have wondered as the skeptics grew bolder and noisier. But God gave them a tangible support. They could not explain how God could make water flow out of a rock in Exodus, nor could they explain the miracles of Jesus, but they could say, “Come to Lourdes. Bring your most important scientific instruments, your own eyes and ears. Come and see the same thing happening today.”

Miraculous Intervention

One hundred and fifty years after the apparitions to Bernadette, Lourdes is still with us as a constant sign of God’s mercy, love, and providence, and a never-ending sign of God’s miraculous intervention in history. A hundred and fifty years after Lourdes, the skeptics are still with us, boring and unrealistic, but they are getting more interesting. They have, of course, tried to find alternative visions of man and creation, but they keep running into reality. The “beauty” of Communism with its denial of God simply hasn’t worked. Parents know that every hypothesis that denies the reality of original sin is false as they experience not only their own weaknesses but see their own sweet little children sometimes doing their best to prove that they, too, are affected by the lasting effects of the Fall.

At the level of contemporary intellectual theory, some anti-religious philosophers continue to demonstrate the unreality of their Darwinian or materialistic biases.

On this February 11, as we celebrate the anniversary of the apparitions at Lourdes, we have good reason to be thrice thankful. First, we should be consciously grateful for the reality of the creation of Mary without the stain of original sin. Second, we need to be consciously grateful for the formal proclamation of that reality by Pius XI in 1854 both for its truth and for the bulwark it provided against the onslaughts of Darwinism. Lastly, we should be grateful for the events of Lourdes that provide a never-ending statement about the reality of God’s intervention in human history, both directly and through the mediation of the Virgin Mary and other saints. I suggest that we can also thank God for the exquisite timing of these events as his concrete answer to the unbelievers of every age and to the skepticism that sometimes distracts even the most religious of souls.

Copyright © 2004-2008 by John F. Kippley

1.  cf. John H. Elliott, “The Historical Jesus, the Kerygmatic Christ, and the Eschatological Community,” Concordia Theological Monthly (September 1966), 470 ff.

2.  Edward O’Brien, “Zola and Lourdes,” Homiletic and Pastoral Review (August-September 2004): 71.

3.  Stephen M. Barr, “The Devil’s Chaplain Confounded,” First Things (August-September 2004): 25.

Most Catholics, and most Protestants, are familiar with the passage from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapter 16, where Jesus addresses “Simon Bar-Jona” and says: “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it; and to thee I will give the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven…”  Most Catholics know that this passage teaches that Peter was thereby designated the head of the Apostles, and would ultimately — as the first Bishop of the church in Rome — become the first “pope”, (tho’ that title would not be used for centuries).

Most Protestants know it doesn’t teach that at all. Of course not. Peter isn’t the rock… that can’t be what Jesus means…

A brief review of the entire story may help.

The disciples have been with Jesus a long time, they’ve had to absorb a great dealing of teaching, an entire Sermon on the Mount, dozens of parables… and so — in order to assure that they’ve been paying attention — Jesus provides them a “mid-term exam.”

“Who do men say the Son of Man is?” Well, the disciples have been hearing the buzz on the streets, they’ve overheard the comments of the crowds, and so they eagerly put forward some of the “conventional wisdom.”

“Some say ‘John the Baptist!’ ”

“Others say Elijah!”

“Others say jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”  … all the disciples, chiming in with what other people were saying. Then Jesus turns the tables, and asks the BIG question.

“But who do YOU say that I am?”

Suddenly the noisy disciples go strangely quiet… that awkward silence when no one in the class is really certain of the answer, and is praying that the teacher won’t call on them…

Then, a voice rings out: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” It is Simon, son of John… the fisherman from Cana, coarse and uneducated, but with a heart open to the Spirit of God.

Jesus answers him: “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church…”

Immediately something is lost in the translation from Greek, (the language in which the New Testament was written), into English, because “Peter” and “rock” do not look or sound the same. Protestants will say “Peter” cannot be equated verbally to “rock” because even in the Greek, (where the words DO look and sound the same), the “Petros” translated “Peter”, and the “petra” translated ”rock” have two different genders. (In the Greek, the word for “rock” is feminine; “petra.” In order to make the word “rock” a masculine name, one would have to change the ending; “petra” => “petros”) The Protestant argument is that “petra” means “solid rock” — and Jesus is pointing to Himself, of course – and that “petros” means “a small stone.” Jesus is not equating them, but is instead contrasting them. But Greek scholars — even non-Catholic ones — admit that the words ”petros” and “petra” were synonymous in first century Greek. Karl Keating writes, in “The Essential Catholic Survival Guide”: The difference in meaning can be found only in Attic Greek, but the New Testament was written in Koine Greek — an entirely different dialect. In Koine Greek, both “petros” and “petra” simply mean rock. The distinction that some Protestants attempt to make between “petros” and “petra” simply doesn’t exist!

But beyond that, when one considers that Jesus and the disciples most likely spoke Aramaic, and not Greek, (at least, not among themselves), the Protestant argument becomes even less defensible – the word for ”rock” in Aramaic is “kepha” , and because there are no distinctions between masculine and feminine, what Jesus would have said to Peter is: “You are ‘Kepha’, and upon this kepha I will build My Church.” The early Church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, records that the Gospel according to St. Matthew was originally written in Aramaic, and was translated into Koine Greek early on, (possibly by St. Matthew himself.) Therefore, the earliest inspired record of this conversation would have clearly shown the verbal connection between “Cephas”, (as St. Paul refers to him in several places), and the ROCK upon which Christ promised to build His Church.

Unfortunately, a lot often gets lost in translation. Fortunately, we don’t have to search far to find what has been lost.

The Feast of All Saints, which we observed this Sunday, is just such a monument for the Church. From the early centuries of the Church, a day was set aside in which all those who had died in the Faith — most of them martyrs, having been put to death for their confession of Jesus as Lord, and most of those unknown by the Church, but known by God –  a day in which these saints would also be honored by the Church. In the Church of the East, the day was observed on the Sunday after Pentecost. There is a certain logic to that — the thought being that Pentecost is the “birth” of the Church, and the Church grows, in spite of persecution, because of the faithful witness of many who will suffer death before they deny the Lord who died for them, redeemed them by His blood, and rose again. As one early Church Father wrote: “The blood of the martyers is the seed of the Church.”

In the West, the Feast of All Saints is traced to the foundation, by Pope Gregory III (731-741), of an oratory in St. Peter’s for the relics “of the holy apostles and of all saints, martyrs and confessors, of all the just made perfect who are at rest throughout the world,” with the day set for November 1st. While “All Saints” is meant to honor those who have passed from this life, it would be a mistake for us to misunderstand or mis-interpret the word. When we speak of saints, we automatically think — almost unconsciously — “really holy” and “dead.” But one of these ideas needs to be re-examined.

One day, not long after Jesus had entered Jerusalem for the Passover — His “Passover” — He was teaching in the Temple. On that day the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to Him with a question. “Teacher,” they said, “Moses told us that if a man dies without having children, his brother must marry the widow and have children for him. Now there were seven brothers among us, the first one married and died, and since he had no children, he left his wife to his brother. The same thing happened to the second and third brother right on down to the seventh. Finally, the woman died. Now then, whose wife will she be in the resurrection, since all of them were married to her?”

Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like angels in heaven. But about the resurrection of the dead — have you not read what God said to you, ‘I AM the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, BUT OF THE LIVING.”

St. Matthew tells us that when the crowds heard this, they were astonished at his teaching. And it is pretty astonishing — the declaration that God is no a God of the dead, but of the living; that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob — the holy patriarchs, having long passed from the earth, are NOT dead, but alive!

So what’s the connection to “All Saints”? Simply this: the saints who have gone before us, who have passed from this life, are not dead — they LIVE. They live IN CHRIST, who is LIFE. The saints LIVE, the ones known to the Church, and the ones known only to God. But unlike the honor guard keeping watch at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the saints — known and unknown — keep over us, a never-sleeping, ever-present, always watchful, honor guard.

“… since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, … let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…”

Think of it this way: Psychologists who have attempted to care for people’s mental health without regard to the reality of sin end up leaving people at the mercy of the worst psychological disasters. A medical community that rejects the sacredness of human life ends up killing more people — embryos and the elderly — than they save.

And economists who reduce people to economic entities — ignoring human love and the truth about the human person — find that they just make problems worse.

Health care is a perfect example. Charity and truth are why we have health care in the first place. The modern health-care system started with Christ’s command to “heal the sick.” Dedicated religious invented hospitals. Catholic nuns and brothers staffed them and allowed them to proliferate. Health care was affordable to all who needed it because, at its heart, it was a service of charity that responded to the dignity of the human person.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Catholic organizations provided education and health care that were practically free. At the beginning of the 21st century, the atheistic movements that worked so hard to unshackle society from the chains of the Church are faced with a society searching for, and not finding, lifelines to replace the ones the Church once provided.

Of course, there are plenty of other factors in the health-care situation America faces.

In order to head off labor unions, employers in the early 20th century started to add benefits, among them medical plans. Today, it is an expectation that employers will provide health-care benefits. That, in turn, means that health-care costs have been hidden from consumers for years: The money for the insurance comes out of their paycheck (and their employer’s account) before they see it.

The litigation explosion in the past 50 years in America has also caused a new dynamic in health care: Providers have to pay huge malpractice insurance rates, a cost they pass on to the medical insurers, who pass it on to you and me and our employers — or to prospective employers if we lose our job.

Yet health care remains a right. “The political community has a duty to honor the family, to assist it, and to ensure especially,” says the Catechism (No. 2211), “in keeping with the country’s institutions, the right to medical care, assistance for the aged, and family benefits.”

That doesn’t mean that all health care must be government-provided. After all, the Catechism is careful to use that phrase “in keeping with the country’s institutions” and also stresses the right to private ownership, housing and emigration — none of which are expected to be provided at government expense.

What, then, does it mean? How can we ensure the right to medical care in the face of our gargantuan, overpriced mess of a health-care system?

Pope Benedict’s encyclical gives his fundamental answer. “Love — caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace. … Development, social well-being, the search for a satisfactory solution to the grave socioeconomic problems besetting humanity, all need this truth.”

In particular, Catholic social thought has translated this love and truth into the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.

The principle of solidarity means we ought to love our neighbor, feed the poor, clothe the naked, and care for the sick.

On the one hand, the market alone will not achieve solidarity. “In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well,” writes the Holy Father (No. 38). He emphasizes: “Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfill its proper economic function.”

On the other hand, “Solidarity is first and foremost a sense of responsibility on the part of everyone with regard to everyone,” he writes, “and it cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State.”

The principle of subsidiarity, on the other hand, is the Catholic belief that the person closest to a need has the strongest ability — and clearest duty — to provide care.

These two principles are at the heart of the health-care question: We are meant to help each other, and the person closest to the problem is responsible for assistance.

Pope Benedict XVI is careful not to place this responsibility solely on the shoulders of the marketplace or the state.

He nicely distinguishes between an over-reaching state on the one hand, and a laissez-faire approach on the other, when he writes (No. 58), “The principle of subsidiarity must remain closely linked to the principle of solidarity and vice versa, since the former without the latter gives way to social privatism, while the latter without the former gives way to paternalist social assistance that is demeaning to those in need.”

These two principles are helpful when assessing the health-care legislation being proposed in Washington.

Questions to ask: Does the proposal help us expand health care? In other words, does it allow us to cut the true factors that drive health-care costs — or does it kowtow to those who are responsible for those costs, for instance trial lawyers and pharmaceutical companies?

Also: Does the proposal put decisions about assistance in the hands of those closest to the need? Or does it move those decisions to Washington?

Of course, all of those questions are moot if a health-care proposal fails to protect the right to life. Health care that pays for abortion or pressures older patients to forgo necessary treatment isn’t a health-care system at all, but a death machine.

No matter how it is structured or how many benefits it provides to people, Catholics must oppose any legislator who proposes or supports a death machine.

Love and truth demand that.

by Jason Reed, Reuters News Service, July 20, 2009