Ask a Franciscan

By Pat McCloskey, OFM

Pat McCloskey, OFM

Father Pat welcomes your questions!

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Material is grouped thematically under headings such as forgiveness, Jesus, moral issues, prayer, saints, redemption, sacraments, Scripture—and many more!

Living Our Faith Boldly

Over the past years, I have noticed a steady decline of the younger folks in the Catholic Church. I recently saw the results of a Pew Research Center study, which indicated that approximately 20 percent of all Americans and 33 percent of all Americans under the age of 30 have left the traditional Churches.

Do you have any explanation for this exodus? Could it be that they have had plenty of dogma and doctrine, but no personal spiritual experience? How can the Catholic Church mitigate this trend? Do you see this trend continuing?

Yes, the trend is worrying and may continue. To be fair, many people in this age group were raised in families where religious practice was more social than reflective of any deep personal commitment. Many younger people are asking themselves, “Who needs that kind of religion?”

I think the answer is for all of us to live our faith in such a dynamic way that women and men in this age group will ask themselves, “What do they have that I don’t?” That seemed to attract people immediately after Pentecost.

Help Needed

Are there some resources you can suggest for the struggle I find myself surprised to be experiencing: believing that my mom, who died several months ago, is indeed in heaven with God?

These two Scriptures may provide some consolation for you: Wisdom 3:1–9 (read at many funerals and one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible) and 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 (Paul’s advice to Christians who worried that deceased relatives and friends who died before Christ’s Second Coming would be at some disadvantage compared to believers still alive then).

The second passage is part of the oldest book in the New Testament. The first passage may have been written only 100 years earlier.

Stifling the Holy Spirit’s Work?

St. Paul told believers in Corinth, “To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit” (1 Cor 12:7). He then identified gifts that the Spirit gives each believer, such as the ability to give wise advice, studying and teaching the word of God, special faith, the power to heal the sick, the power to perform miracles, the power to prophesy, the power of discernment, the ability to speak in

tongues, and the power of interpretation (12:8–10).

In the next verse, Paul states, “But one and the same Spirit produces all of these, distributing them individually to each person as he wishes.”

If these gifts are intended to build up the Church, why are they not utilized in the traditional Church? Are we stifling the work of the Holy Spirit within the Church today?

Unfortunately, some people do not connect passages such as the ones you cite with St. Paul’s affirmation that all the gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to build up the Church, the body of Christ (1 Cor 12:27 and Eph 4:11–12).

Because of today’s very anti-institutional bias, some Christians are tempted to believe that their every idea comes straight from the Holy Spirit and is being ignored by a hopelessly institutional Church. Would those people say the same if they used the term incarnational Church? I doubt it.

Genuine gifts become obvious when they are tested. No true gift of the Holy Spirit can be ignored forever.

Quick Questions and Answers

What is Catholic teaching about Darwinian evolution by natural selection?

The Catholic Church makes no wholesale rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution. It has two qualifications: 1) Everything starts with God; 2) Souls do not evolve (for example, chimpanzee “souls” cannot evolve into human souls).

In my RCIA group, someone asked if the Catholic Church can instruct you how to vote. As I recall, the answer was no. An individual Catholic needs to vote her/his conscience even if it might differ from what other parishioners favor. Is that true?

Yes, it is. The Church helps an individual believer form his/her conscience, but the Church cannot replace a well-formed conscience (what a person knows before God that he or she must do or avoid here and now). This is more clear in voting for a particular candidate than in voting on a specific ballot issue such as, “Should physician-assisted suicide be legalized?”

A recent TV show about UFOs and life on other planets got me thinking: If there are other beings somewhere out there, did Jesus visit them also and die again on the cross to free them from sin? What should we believe about UFOs and life on other planets?

God is in charge of the entire cosmos (everything created). The Bible describes salvation only for humans on planet Earth. We are free to speculate on various scenarios—as long as such speculation does not cause us to neglect our present responsibilities.

What is an archangel, and is it real?

An archangel is simply an angel individually named in Scripture. Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are the most famous archangels. The New American Bible uses this term only twice: once in the singular (Jude 1:9) and then as a possessive (1 Thes 4:16). Popular piety has set their number at seven, a perfect number according to the Bible.

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